Life in a Fishbowl

by Len Vlahos

  ***

  Jared kept the news of his brain tumor to himself for four days, spending most of that time lying on his office floor, trying to think. He came out just often enough to make sure his family wouldn’t suspect anything was amiss, going right back in once he was convinced they were thrown off the scent of trouble.

  Jared tried hard to think of a way out of what he saw as his financial predicament. There was college to pay for soon. And cars and spring break vacations and whatever else kids needed money for. But mostly he was just trying to think. When he was bored with lying in the dark, he would turn on his computer and click from one cancer website to the next. The grim news he read about high-grade glioblastoma multiformes made his head hurt, and he found himself linking instead to news and entertainment sites.

  That was how he happened on a strange article from a few months earlier:

  Divorced Man Auctions His Life Online

  March 14—Worldwide News Now

  When Jens Schmidt realized he needed a fresh start, he auctioned his material possessions online. From an unused tube of toothpaste to a 2002 Toyota Camry, Schmidt put his entire life up for sale to the highest bidder.

  The thirty-four-year-old Dutchman, a successful attorney who likes to hang glide and ski, seemed to have it all. But then his wife of seven years, an Italian woman named Anna Mazzucchi, filed for divorce, and Schmidt decided it was time to move on.

  “I just didn’t want any reminder of my life before,” he said.

  Schmidt’s listing includes his house, his hot tub, his clothes, his television, his cat, and his car. He also notes: “My friends are included in the package. If you win the auction, they promise they’ll be nice to you.”

  Jared looked up from the article on his computer screen, and the world froze for a moment.

  An idea started to percolate in Jared’s brain. A crazy idea. An idea only a man with a high-grade glioblastoma multiforme could possibly have. He would auction his life—not his things, but his actual life—on eBay. The euthanasia lobby was pressuring him to take a position on a proposed expansion to Oregon’s right-to-die laws; he would become their poster boy. Jared Stone, for sale to the highest bidder—do with him as you please.

  PART ONE

  Meet the Bidders

  Tuesday, September 15

  9d 9h 14m

  Hazel Huck liked games. She liked them a lot.

  She liked games of skill (chess and crossword puzzles), she liked games of chance (Yahtzee and Risk), but the games she liked best of all were role-playing games. From the off- line worlds of Dungeons & Dragons to the online universes of EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and World of Warcraft, Hazel liked nothing better than to lose herself in someone else’s skin. To be a giant elf warrior with 150 hit points was to be invincible; she spent every free moment she was allowed living in those worlds. It was how she fought against the ebb and flow of her daily grind.

  Hazel was a square peg in a round hole. From a well-to-do family in Huntsville, Alabama, she should have, at seventeen years old, been preparing for her debutante ball. Her classmates at the Florence Nightingale School for Young Women seemed obsessed with their coming-out parties. But not Hazel. To her, the notion of officially entering society seemed anachronistic at best and embarrassing at least. Her parents, attorneys with a practice focusing on maritime law, were disappointed but respected their daughter’s independence.

  Other than schoolwork and family obligations—chores, visits with aunts and uncles, mandatory attendance at church on Sundays—Hazel lived in a virtual world. Her closest friends were members of her Warcraft guild. And why not? They were interesting. She’d never met them, but she knew more about them than she did any of the girls at school. One was a middle-aged businessman from New York; another a high school girl from Bolivia; another claimed to be a published science fiction author, though he (she?) would never reveal the names of his (her?) books, stories, or publishers. It didn’t matter. You could be who or what you wanted in that world, not only in the characters you played but in the stories you told.

  In her first foray into online gaming, Hazel was nervous about her own story—or what she thought was her own lack of story—so she made one up. She claimed to be in graduate school studying English literature at a university “somewhere in Europe.” Other people seemed impressed, and before she knew it, there was no escape from her lie. To make her online persona seem plausible, she conducted exhaustive research into the most important English lit doctoral programs in the UK and France. She was always ready with some new tidbit of information to support her tale. Over time, she came to believe that this character—whom she publicly called Tess—really did exist. It was too late to tell people she was a high school student—a freshman when she first spun this particular yarn and now a senior—from Alabama. She embraced the fiction and let the lie stand.

  Hazel was casting a Circle of Healing spell when an instant message from a Warcraft friend popped on the screen. The IM said:

  Can you believe this? ROTFL!

  and included a link to Jared’s eBay listing.

  But Hazel wasn’t laughing.

  ***

  Ethan Overbee liked his executive assistant, Monique. He liked her a lot.

  He liked the way she would anticipate his need to reschedule a meeting. He liked how she knew which of his underlings were allowed access to him, on which days, and how long they were to be left waiting in his anteroom. And he liked how she always seemed able to deflect calls from his girlfriend, or his mother, or his sister. But most of all, Ethan Overbee liked the things Monique would do for him when he closed the door to his Santa Monica office.

  It never occurred to Ethan that he made Monique feel like a high-priced prostitute, and that her sense of self-worth was so permanently destroyed she couldn’t even look in the mirror without wanting to throw up. It never occurred to him because it couldn’t. Unlike Jared Stone, Ethan Overbee was a man completely and utterly devoid of empathy.

  In later years a team of geneticists would discover a particular DNA marker (on chromosome 15q) that was responsible for human empathy. A subsequent study would determine that successful heads of state, corporate CEOs, and avid weekend cyclists were missing this particular marker in a much higher proportion than the rest of society. Ethan, it would turn out, could be counted among their ranks.

  So it was no surprise then that Ethan was not only obsessed with his bicycle but, at thirty-two years old, was the youngest man to ever hold the position of deputy executive in charge of programming for the American Television Network. ATN was the crown jewel of a media empire—comprised of television, radio, and newspaper outlets around the world—that managed to offend just about everyone, but also managed to draw record numbers of viewers, readers, and listeners year after year. A New York Times op-ed referred to ATN as a “mirror reflecting the darkest parts of the American soul.” If Ethan had bothered to think about it (he didn’t), his pragmatic side might have agreed.

  What he lacked in empathy Ethan made up for in appreciation, lavishing luxurious gifts on those people who treated him well. He was feeling especially appreciative of Monique—who was, unbeknownst to Ethan, still in the bathroom crying—as he browsed eBay listings in search of the perfect gift.

  He knew that Monique “simply adored” the actor Heath Ledger. Normally, he would just make a few phone calls and Ledger would appear in his office ready to take Monique out to lunch. But the guy had overdosed on drugs, so Ethan was reduced to actual shopping. Talent, he thought. They’re all the same.

  There were nearly two thousand items listed on eBay, but none of them seemed right. Ethan felt that a signed photo or a piece of a movie costume that Ledger had worn was too mundane. A thought occurred to him: perhaps there was some piece of memorabilia connected to Ledger’s death. He wondered if that was too morbid but couldn’t see how it would be.

  The press said Ledger’s death was an accident, but Ethan didn’t believe it; he searched for “Ledger
suicide.” As he was perusing the few macabre items that the search results returned, he saw a “People who viewed this item also viewed” link. One of them had the curious tagline, “Human Life for Sale.” He clicked it.

  And that was how Ethan Overbee came to see Jared’s listing.

  ***

  Sister Benedict Joan liked the Internet. She liked it a lot.

  She liked the way it helped her spread the Word of God through her blog, christscadets.blogspot.com. She liked how it allowed her to stay connected with the other warriors in Christ’s army from around the world. And, most of all, she liked how the Internet allowed her to see and fight against the never-ending stream of smut, irreverence, and blasphemy that was determined to destroy decent society. A less optimistic woman would have been overwhelmed by the pornography and violence that seemed to fuel the pulse of the World Wide Web. Not Sister Benedict; it gave her purpose.

  As prioress of the Sisters of the Perpetual Adoration, she was a leader in her community, and she felt a personal responsibility to protect the nuns and novices under her care. This meant much more than providing food and shelter; it meant doing everything in her power, small though that was, to help fashion a world informed and infused by the teachings and love of Jesus Christ. You could say that the only thing Sister Benedict Joan liked more than the Internet was Christ himself.

  The Sister was a throwback. Since Vatican II, most nuns had kept their given names, becoming Sister Ella, or Sister Casey, or Sister Jordyn. To Angela Marie Taggart, keeping her own name seemed anathema to true Catholicism. The nuns she idolized as a little girl—with their piety, their obedience, their almost martial beauty—had taken the names of male saints, a tradition she felt bound, at least in part, to uphold. She saw her name as both a stern and a reassuring presence for the young women of the convent, not to mention the students at Annunciation Catholic School, where she taught third grade. You just didn’t question someone named Sister Benedict.

  Her earliest childhood memory was of a Catholic Mass, and she knew from that moment, as a four-year-old, she would devote herself to Christ. What she didn’t understand then, and still didn’t understand now, was why she was the only one. Week after week parishioners would line the pews of St. Mary’s Church and sit reverently beneath the high stained-glass windows, standing, sitting, and kneeling when told, and opening their wallets and hearts when asked. They would smile with visceral sincerity as they said, “Peace be with you; and also with you,” to one another. If they all believed in the Lord and in his teachings, that what was in the Bible was true, that it was God, the King of Kings, the Creator of All Creation, the Master of their collective fate they were there to celebrate, how is it that they could only be bothered to worship once a week? Shouldn’t this be a full-time job?

  This is what Sister Benedict Joan was thinking about as she powered up her laptop. Like always, she had no answer. She shook her head and sipped her Earl Grey tea.

  The Sister liked to watch the computer go through its electronic ablutions: loading Windows, loading the antivirus software, checking for updates, and checking e-mail. She imagined it was guided by the hand of God, though she knew it was the minds of the men who created such technological wonders, and not the wonders themselves, that were the real evidence of divine grace.

  She opened her browser and checked her blog. She never liked the name Christ’s Cadets, but all the good names—Christ’s Warriors, Christ’s Knights, and Christ’s Soldiers—were already taken. There was one new comment, which was a bit unusual. While Sister Benedict felt certain that people read her blog, they rarely left comments. When they did, they usually took the form of “Get a life, you f***ing joke,” only the “uck” wasn’t blocked out.

  This new post, like the few others, was anonymous, and it simply said, “This must not be allowed to happen.” Beneath that plea was a link to Jared Stone’s eBay listing.

  ***

  Sherman Kingsborough liked life. He liked it a lot.

  At twenty-three years old, Sherman was already stinking rich. He was the happy recipient of a trust fund bequeathed to him by a father who’d made millions war profiteering during Vietnam, and who had died on Sherman’s eighteenth birthday.

  Sherman’s mother had returned to her native Korea when he was a little boy (his father had more or less dispatched her like she was an unwanted employee), and he never had contact with her again. Sherman was, incorrectly, led to believe that his mother had abandoned him. With no siblings and no parents, and having grown up in a world of excess and extravagance, Sherman’s moral compass was left to drift unchecked. It spun round and round, never quite finding north.

  It wasn’t surprising, then, that Sherman used his newfound millions to indulge every whim and fetish imaginable. From sexual encounters too deviant to name or number to keeping the most exotic endangered animals as pets, only to eat them for dinner, Sherman had denied himself nothing. If his brain thought it, he did it.

  It wasn’t all depravity and debauchery, though. Each time Sherman found himself plumbing the depths of his darkest impulses, he would follow it with a noble gesture. When he fired his father’s entire household staff because of a spot on a wineglass, Sherman spent two months working at an ashram in India. A week after he told a fifteen-year-old high school girl he loved her just to get her into bed, ditching her in a seedy hotel room the next morning, he flew to the Bering Strait to clean oil-soaked gulls that had been caught in the wake of a tanker spill. And after evicting a poor family from one of his father’s many real estate investments—a dilapidated apartment building in Queens, New York—Sherman climbed to the top of Mount Everest as part of an expedition that was raising money for Habitat for Humanity. Each gallant act a counterbalance to atone for one of his sins.

  It was an unbreakable cycle that seemed to be (like Sherman actually was) on methamphetamines. He never stopped to catch his breath, never took stock of who he had become; he was afraid of what he might find.

  After six years of living such a high-octane life, Sherman Kingsborough was bored out of his freaking mind. For the man who had everything, or at least had access to anything, there seemed to be nothing left.

  But Sherman had felt this way before. After he summited Everest, he was sure he had peaked, a pun he repeated to himself through the entire descent, but found traveling with opium smugglers in Pakistan to be a whole new high (the latter pun unintended). It seemed that whenever he was out of new things to try, a previously unknown path presented itself. It’s better to be lucky, he liked to say, than good. It was the guiding principle of Sherman Kingsborough’s life.

  It was also the first thought that came to his mind when he saw Jared Stone’s eBay listing.

  ***

  Jackie was lying on her bed staring at her new iPhone, scrolling through Neil Gaiman’s Twitter feed. In the few weeks she had owned the phone—she and Megan had each received phones as gifts for the new school year—it had become an extra appendage for Jackie, never more than a few feet away, almost always in her hand. She was already plugged into every social network she could find—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—but almost never participated. She was a lurker, a voyeur.

  That’s just how she was wired. Jackie was not the kind of student who raised her hand in class, she was (usually) not the kind of daughter who questioned her parents, and she was not the kind of Internet user to voice her opinion. Jackie was perfectly satisfied to troll without ever reeling in the net, though she wondered if her failure to participate made her a troll of a different kind. The only person with whom she interacted online was Max, and he lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

  She and Max were participating in a social media exchange program through their respective schools. Jackie didn’t want a friend in another country—she had enough trouble with friends in the good ol’ U. S. of A.—but the teacher made it a required assignment. When she found out that her randomly assigned partner was a boy, she had a bit of a meltdown.

  But Max turned ou
t to be nice. He was fascinated by American culture and would pepper Jackie with questions when they were online together, which was usually during her morning free period in the computer lab. He was most interested in American movies and seemed obsessed with American directors like Martin Scorsese, Cameron Crowe, and Steven Spielberg.

  So far they hadn’t talked about anything really serious, mostly just music and movies and what kids wore to school. Max had already dated three different girls, which made Jackie embarrassed about her own nonexistent love life, but luckily, Max never asked. He also played the guitar, which she thought was pretty cool.

  Maybe it’s because she knew they would never meet, but somehow talking to Max felt safe. Jackie found herself stepping out of her comfort zone with him, and she liked it. Plus, she couldn’t help thinking that, maybe, he had a little crush on her.

  She was just starting to get lost in a daydream about Max when the doorbell rang, pulling her back to the moment. Jackie being Jackie figured someone else would answer it.

  ***

  Jared Stone read his listing for the fourth time. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d forgotten something:

  *HUMAN LIFE FOR SALE*

  Forty-five-year-old man with four months to live is selling his life to the highest bidder. You may do with him as you please—slavery, murder, torture, or just pleasant conversation. A human life, yours to control, yours to own. Buyers must live in a state or country with a law allowing assisted suicides, and the buyer bears the cost of transportation and tax. There is a reserve for this auction.

  If there was something missing, he couldn’t put his finger on it. He’d worked on the listing in a moment of true lucidity, so maybe the feeling tugging at the corner of his consciousness was just the tumor. But still …