Life in a Fishbowl

by Len Vlahos

“Jackie and her family are being held in a prison of the network’s making. It’s up to you to free them. Stop watching the show. Stop supporting the sponsors. Free Jackie Stone.”

  The screen faded to black.

  Jackie leaned back in her chair trying to take it all in. She looked down and saw that the view count on YouTube was 1,340,006.

  “When did this go live?” she asked without looking up.

  Jason smiled. “Forty-five minutes ago.”

  PART SIX

  Resolution

  Thursday, October 29

  Glio was ready to go for gold. Replete with almost all of Jared’s memories, and emboldened by his experience manipulating the conduits to the outside world, it was time for the tumor to become the host.

  The plan was to stretch his mass to each of Jared’s sensory centers simultaneously, to use the sum total of the knowledge he had collected, and to interact with the outside world in the first person. And Glio had his target. He wanted to talk to that nun.

  Everything in Jared’s memories had taught Glio to fear and respect nuns, in that order. He knew that they had devoted their lives to God, eschewing mortal pleasures, but he couldn’t understand why. Glio had learned a lot about mortal pleasures in a relatively short time. To reject them, he believed, was to commit a kind of suicide of the soul. Not that Glio really understood what a soul was. But that was the word Jared would have used.

  There was one memory in particular from Jared’s teenage years that formed the basis of his feeling toward nuns. Jared’s first semester in high school was spent at the all-boys St. Leonard’s Catholic Academy. (The irony that Leonard was the patron saint of prisoners was not lost on the students. Their sports teams, officially called the Scarlet Knights, were more commonly known as the Convicts.) Jared hated every minute of it. He hated the uniforms. He hated the religious instruction. He hated the complete and total lack of girls. But most of all, he hated Sister Louisa.

  Most of the nuns in the school were caring and well-educated, if a bit dowdy, teachers. Sister Louisa was another story and, like Sister Benedict, a throwback to another era. It wasn’t uncommon for the faculty at St. Leonard’s to use harsh tactics to ensure discipline, the punishment usually taking the form of a yardstick applied with medium force to the transgressing student’s knuckles. But Sister Louisa took it a step farther and a step too far.

  Beyond the usual litany of high school crimes—talking or chewing gum in class, failure to do your homework, tardiness—Sister Louisa punished independent thought; she did not like students to ask questions. This was an approach that most schools would consider anathema to teaching history.

  When one of Jared’s classmates asked why the Founding Fathers didn’t abolish slavery at the time of the Revolution, Sister Louisa’s answer confounded the entire class.

  “Because,” she said, “slavery wasn’t a sin until much later.”

  There was a momentary pause, which the Sister quickly filled by going on to the next point in the lesson plan.

  “But, Sister Louisa,” another boy interrupted, “how can that be true? How can something be okay one day and a sin the next? Didn’t they know it was wrong?”

  When the boy saw the rage in Sister Louisa’s eyes, he pleaded for mercy, but it was too late. She advanced on him with violence and relish, like Hannibal Lecter. Her yardstick missed the boy’s knuckles and caught the side of his face. She would later claim it was an accident, but every student in fourth-period American Studies knew better.

  Even though Sister Louisa was summarily dismissed from her post over the incident, Jared begged his parents to let him transfer to public school after Christmas. They complied.

  It was this memory that Glio was examining and reexamining as he prepared for his trip to the outside world.

  He started slowly, moving down the nerve endings in Jared’s extremities, thinking he would start by wiggling Jared’s toes and tapping Jared’s fingers. He stretched himself to the full limit of his being, found the contact points, and … and …

  Nothing happened.

  He tried again.

  Nothing.

  Something was wrong.

  Glio tried the same with Jared’s other senses. There was no taste. There was no smell. There was no sound. He tried the eyes, but they were shut, and no manner of poking or prodding of Jared’s oculomotor nerve would make his eyelids open.

  Glio retreated to the center of the temporal lobe to ponder his predicament. Jared’s brain was still functioning, but barely. As he examined the situation more closely, Glio saw that the medulla oblongata was having trouble communicating with Jared’s lungs, which meant less oxygen was getting to Jared’s blood, which meant less useful blood was getting to Jared’s brain. It was, he knew, the beginning of an irrevocable downward spiral.

  Desperate to complete his journey and become Jared, Glio tried to seize total control of Jared’s brain, to force his host back to a state of corporeal animation. He used every weapon in his arsenal, massaging, pounding, electrifying neurons, but it was no use. Though not yet technically dead, Jared Stone was gone.

  Glio knew from Jared’s memories what people thought of cancer, what they thought of tumors, what they thought of him. He knew that they couldn’t comprehend the reason for his existence, and he knew that he and those like him were among the most reviled things on Earth. But until that moment, Glio believed with all his metaphorical heart that he existed as a caterpillar, waiting to emerge from his cocoon as something beautiful and new, as Jared. Only now, at the end, did Glio see the tragedy of his life, of all life.

  And for the first time, Glio felt sorry. Truly, and horribly, sorry. Maybe if he had become Jared it would have all been okay, but now that he was confronted with the truth, he understood what every tumor comes to understand:

  Life—his life, Jared’s life—has no meaning intrinsic to the life itself. It just is. Life, he now saw, is only what you make of it. And even though he knew it was through no fault of his own, Glio had spent his life as a thief and a murderer. The realization was overwhelming.

  Glio howled in agony as he retreated into himself.

  ***

  “Mr. Stone?” Sister Benedict gently shook Jared’s shoulder. There was no response. “Mr. Stone?” she said again, shaking a little harder. “Time to wake up. Time for breakfast.” Again, there was no response.

  One of the Sister’s young novices, Sister Nadine, was attending to Jared with Sister Benedict. “Go, child,” Sister Benedict said to her, “find the doctor.”

  After the young girl left the room, Sister Benedict got down on her knees and prayed.

  “Please, Father, bless this man’s soul and give him the strength to carry on. Please ease his suffering and help him to recover, to be there for his family.”

  The Sister, despite her best efforts, could not stop thinking about the cameras watching her as she prayed. All around the room, from every angle, tiny cameras were trained on her and Jared Stone. Later that night, she knew, she would be on television. More people would be watching her prayer in one night than watched The Duke Hamblin Show in a month.

  Maybe, she thought, he’ll have me on as a guest.

  She pushed the thought away and continued her conversation with the Lord.

  A moment later, the doctor entered, looked at the bank of machines monitoring Jared’s vital signs, and sprang into action.

  “Sister, code blue,” he said matter-of-factly but with enough edge to make his point.

  The Sister got off her knees and went to the phone. She had practiced this many times. She dialed the number, said “code blue” when the person on the other end answered, and hung up.

  Exactly forty-five seconds later, the doors of an ambulance flew open—the network paid to have it staffed and parked in the driveway—and a team of doctors and medical experts poured out.

  Exactly forty-five seconds after that, Jared Stone was connected to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, a dialysis machine, and an
anesthetic machine. He was alive, but only in the clinical sense.

  There but for the grace of the machines went he.

  ***

  When bad things happened to Ethan Overbee, which wasn’t very often, they tended to come in twos.

  In the second grade, Ethan was scolded by his parents for tying one end of a string around Taffy, the family cat, and the other to his father’s car. His parents saw what Ethan had done in time to save the cat from any harm, but they took away his television privileges for two days. It was one of the few times in his entire childhood that Ethan—a boy both coddled and adored by his parents—had been punished, and the memory stuck with him. To make matters worse, later that same day, when he was playing an aggressive version of “doctor” with Rita Fitzsimmons, the little girl who lived next door, her parents heard her crying and reprimanded Ethan, banishing him from their house and calling his mother. (Having already punished Ethan for the feline felony, his parents elected not to hold him accountable for what was tantamount to grade school molestation.)

  On Ethan’s seventeenth birthday, he failed the road test for his driver’s license, only to have his girlfriend break up with him that same night. She threw a lot of SAT words at Ethan—narcissist, pedagogue, vapid—which made him think she was too much of an egghead for him anyway, but it stung.

  During his first semester in college, on the same day he learned he hadn’t won a part in the school’s production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, his parents called to tell him that Taffy the cat had died. He never really liked that cat, but still, he was starting to see a pattern develop. When one bad thing happened to Ethan, another shoe was sure to drop soon after.

  When Ethan learned that Jared Stone, the star of his television show, had slipped into a coma, he was not surprised to see Roger Stern’s name on his cell phone. The other shoe. He let it go to voice mail.

  As far as Ethan was concerned, Jared’s condition was a mixed blessing. He had eight hours to flood the world with Life and Death promos—sizzles they were called in the industry—letting viewers know that what they had been waiting for, what they had been ghoulishly hoping for, was finally coming to pass. And, of course, he had those doctors and that nun, the latter of which was turning out to be a better ally than he could have hoped for, to make sure Jared stayed clinically alive as long as possible. From what they told him, he could continue to ride this for weeks.

  On the other hand, with Jared—whose moments of confusion, whose physical decline, had made for such compelling television—no longer an active participant in the drama, and with his family causing problems, the ratings would suffer. Ethan knew he would need to get creative, to schedule more celebrity drop-ins, make the show more interactive. He had already sketched much of this out. Now he just needed to put it into action.

  Ethan was in his office at the ATN headquarters when he got the news. He conferred briefly with Andersona to make sure that the medical team was in place and that they had what they needed. His next call was to the advertising and marketing apparatus that fueled viewership for the show. From what Andersona told him, they had incredible footage of Sister Benedict praying by Jared’s bedside as the doctors rushed in. They would flood the airwaves with that clip.

  Satisfied that the situation was in hand, he listened to Roger’s message. It consisted of only two short, clipped words: “Call. Me.”

  Before Ethan could tap the “call back” icon on his voice-mail screen, a text message popped up. It was from Thad St. Claire, and it had a link to the fourth episode of The Real Family Stone of Portland, Oregon.

  ***

  When Jackie got back to her house, the world had turned upside down. That in itself was astounding as it had been upside down for weeks. Does that mean the world is right-side up again? she wondered. No, it was more like the world was a Möbius strip, something she had learned about in math class. “Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?” her teacher had asked. “To get to the same side,” he said, answering his own joke. Jackie, along with the rest of the class, groaned, but for some reason, walking into the madness that was her home, it finally seemed funny.

  Medical personnel were everywhere. They were drinking coffee in her kitchen, talking on cell phones in her living room, even smoking cigarettes in her backyard. (Seeing doctors smoke made Jackie wonder if maybe it wasn’t so bad for you after all.) And, of course, they were squeezed into the room that used to be her father’s office and was now an extension of the Saint Ignatius Hospital.

  As soon as Deirdre learned about Jared’s condition, she left to pick her daughters up from school and bring them home. When Jackie saw her mother in the principal’s office, she knew the news was bad. She thought maybe the network had seen The Real Family Stone of Portland, Oregon, and they were all going to jail. Or maybe her father had died.

  Somehow, the coma was worse.

  If her father had died, this would be over. His suffering would end, and Jackie’s life could get back to something closer to normal. When her dad first got sick, she was certain that the hole created by his absence would devour her. But if she could survive Ethan Overbee and the American Television Network, she was pretty sure she could survive anything.

  No one spoke on the ride home. Megan started to say something, but Jackie shushed her. “Remember, they’re listening here, too.”

  All three of them did their best to ignore the strangers and equipment and noise as they walked through the house. Jackie looked up once or twice at the cameras on the ceiling, knowing they were watching her every move. She put them out of her mind, and, trailing behind her mother and sister, made her way to her father’s office.

  When they entered the room, everything seemed to stop. The air was heavy with the toil and sweat of the medical workers, television crew, and clergy, and dripping with the feeling of death. Jackie felt like she was trying to swim through some sort of foul-tasting milk shake.

  The lead doctor gave Deirdre an update while Jackie and Megan listened. Jared had fallen into a coma, and there was little prospect he would come out of it. They were keeping his lungs breathing and his blood circulating, and they were giving him morphine to keep him comfortable, but they had entered the endgame.

  “How much longer?” Deirdre asked without emotion.

  The doctor looked at Sister Benedict, who seemed to be watching his every move.

  “It’s hard to say, Mrs. Stone. We’re doing all we can to preserve his life for as long as possible.” Again the doctor’s eyes found the Sister, who smiled in response. Jackie fixed her own gaze on Sister Benedict. She imagined using a World of Warcraft spell to immobilize the nun in creeping vines, and a second spell to blow her head clean off her body.

  “All right, everyone,” the doctor said, “let’s give the family some space.” One by one everyone left. Even Sister Benedict moved to go, giving a long look over her shoulder at the tattered mess that was the family Stone.

  Megan reached for and found her mother’s hand. Deirdre took it, but with no emotion, like she was on autopilot. Jackie saw this and could tell that her mother was distracted. At first, Jackie thought she was grieving for her husband, for the father of her children. But there was something else; Deirdre looked like a prisoner plotting an escape.

  Jackie turned her attention to her dad. He looked so small, so breakable. His skin was the color of the Portland sky: gray, hazy, foreboding. His nose, mouth, and chest were covered with tubes and wires. The flight deck of machinery by his bed whirred with an electric hum that made Jackie’s hair stand on end.

  “Mom?” Jackie started to ask. But her mother shook her head no, raising her eyes to the ceiling.

  “Right,” Jackie answered, understanding right away.

  “But what do we do now?” Megan asked. It was basically the same thing on Jackie’s mind.

  Deirdre paused a moment before answering. “Girls,” she said, “let’s go out to lunch.”

  ***

  Ethan had to wat
ch The Real Family Stone of Portland, Oregon three times to believe what he was seeing. Jackie Stone wasn’t working alone. He knew he shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. Smart little bitch, he thought.

  He listened to the final plea, to “free Jackie Stone,” over and over again, and he wondered if he’d been playing this all wrong. He had unwittingly turned a high school kid into a martyr, and if the world had learned one thing over the years, people loved martyrs. From Jesus to Gandhi, martyrs were the shit. Maybe it was time to back off.

  That thought rolled around Ethan’s mind, but it couldn’t find purchase. It was too late for him and Jackie to find some accommodation. Besides, his tactic was working. Ethan knew that the two million people who had watched the YouTube video paled in comparison to the tens of millions watching the TV show. The numbers bore that out: the network focus testing showed that Jackie’s approval rating had dropped a full ten points after the last episode. He needed to stay the course.

  By the time he picked up the phone to call Roger Stern back, he had the confidence he needed to convince his boss that everything was in hand. Roger’s phone rang five times before going to voice mail. Ethan was just opening his mouth to leave a message when the door to his office flew open with a bang, rattling the framed photographs of Ethan posed with an array of the network’s most important stars. He jumped.

  Roger walked deliberately into the room with an unlit cigar clenched in his teeth. His massive frame cast a shadow over Ethan like the flaming Hindenburg on the panicked rescue workers on the ground. He stopped at the edge of Ethan’s desk and looked directly into his eyes. Ethan was inexplicably immobilized.

  “Overbee,” Roger began, “I just got off the phone with the CEOs of McDonald’s and Apple.” Ethan worked hard to keep the panic off his face as he waited for Roger to continue. “Do you know what they told me?”

  “Listen, Roger,” Ethan began. “I know about that video. The kid has been working with other people. But she wasn’t even in it. She really has been neutrali—”