Don't Clean the Aquarium!

by Osier, Jeffrey

  The final story in this volume, “Horizon Line,” was written in November and December 1993. I was losing focus as a horror writer now, having abandoned a highly marked up second draft of my second horror novel in frustration and disgust. I had no market in mind for this story. Rather, I wrote it for a live reading at the Red Lion Pub in Lincoln Park that December. As a result, I began reading it out loud while it was still in first draft, and by the time I read it publicly, I'd already read it out loud more than a dozen times. The lone character on the atoll was something I'd been carrying with me for years and had been part of several earlier, much less successful stories. A lot of Ballard and Conrad went into the long gestation of this idea, but when I finally sat down to write it, the book that most influenced me was a short work about the Aztecs, This Tree Grows In Hell by Ptolemy Tompkins. I was unhinged and alone and lonely and that twisted little goblin of a book, which seemed to obsess more horrifically on its subject than anything I'd ever read on the Aztecs, cast a gloom over me that ate through all the blue skies and ocean vistas my character saw on that atoll. I was going through a lot of changes during this time, and these changes would continue, and even accelerate, over the next year. What I didn't realize at this time was that I was finally starting to come out of a funk that had dogged me most of my life. But at the time, this transitional life I was living seemed bleak and hopeless. I felt so doomed, and I spent so much time alone, letting all the rot of my past bubble to the surface in my many hours alone in my dark and dingy garden apartment. I didn't intend for “Horizon Line” to be such a stark confessional, and it's odd to read it now and realize that the character's confession bore no relation at all to my own life. But the fear, humiliation, bitterness, and crushing loneliness he feels were my own, and the rebirth he hopes to experience was what I too was banking on. Of course nothing I tried to trigger that rebirth helped, and when it finally did happen it was at a most unexpected moment and not at all what I had pictured.

  More than any other story in this volume, "Horizon Line" is about the conditions and circumstances under which I wrote it. And in that final scene, it's obvious (to me anyway) that the narrator is much more anxious to move on than the main character is. He's pushing the main character towards the exit door because that's where he himself is headed.

  Jeff Osier, April 10, 2011

  DON'T CLEAN THE AQUARIUM!

  As I write this, I can't help but imagine you—my readers, going through my narrative, shaking your heads in disgust and saying, whenever I reach a moment of crisis, "Well, this guy had it coming to him." I can hear you mumbling away through my tribulations with the smug assurance that you don't and obviously couldn't have my problems, and that, well, I should probably have never kept pets, anyway. Not that I could keep them.

  And it's not that I'm purposely setting out to evoke sympathy. I really couldn't care less. By the time anyone reads this it will be too late for it to make any real difference. Even as I write this it seems too late to change anything. You probably already know how this will end, or at least you think you do. That's because you've been watching the news. I just want to record for posterity the small role I played in this monstrous, monstrous chain of events. Whether I acted hastily or refused to act at all, whether I came off like a shrill, hysterical little asshole (as I occasionally—erroneously do) or whether I am actually seen in the proper light amid all the incredible events of the past few months, especially considering the personal problems I was having at the time, whether I can put all this across or not . . . the important thing is that I did the best I could. I'm sure you would have done better.

  My parents, my friends, everyone I have ever known have said to me, at one time or another, "You shouldn't be allowed to keep pets." Dorothy, my unlamented ex-girlfriend, who used to live here with her late, unlamented cat, Mrs. Brisbee, told me I shouldn't be allowed near animals of any kind. She claimed that fish could take just one look at me and die, and that even though they were allegedly my fish, she was always the one who had to feed them.

  "Oh, yeah, Dorothy, that must be why they starved to death!"

  For some reason, she seemed to find that remark hilarious.

  The particular setup to which she was referring was, in fact, my most successful aquarium ever. It was in the old twenty-gallon. It was a community tank, and out of the original twenty fish, the last one survived for almost four months. I must have spent nearly a hundred dollars trying to keep the population up for the next year, but it seemed worth it, even with the frequent deaths and replacements.

  And meanwhile, Dorothy was growing tired of me. She took to threatening to throw furniture at me. She made a crack about my virility in front of her mother, insulted my personal hygiene in front of my mother, stalked the apartment all stony faced, making noises with everything but her mouth in front of my friends, itemized everything she'd ever bought for me and all the money I owed her over the eight years we went out, and then, after all that, gave me the boldest slap of all.

  She asked me to marry her. And she made a big scene of it, explaining how everything she had done had only been a distress signal, and that this was our last big chance together . . .

  It would be pointless and painful to detail the complex series of events that followed her proposal. I don't clearly understand them myself, but I'm sure some of them were my fault. Say, thirty percent. But two months after her so-called proposal she moved out, took half of the furniture, half of my record collection, books, tools, dishware. All she really left me was Mrs. Brisbee. Which, in light of everything else, should give you a pretty good idea of how much Dorothy thought of Mrs. Brisbee.

  But forget all that. The important point is that while all this was going on, all the fish died.

  Which is to say, I stopped buying them. There no longer seemed to be a point. The water looked as though it could kill a fish instantly.

  On the day Dorothy moved out, I asked her how she'd like me to hold her head under that water and she told me she thought it would taste better than a goodbye kiss from me. So I asked her if she thought it was so important for peoples' kisses to taste good and wondered aloud how ancient couples resolved problems like mouth and body odors and whether they'd broken up on account of them.

  "I think not!" I declared, slipping in front of her to block the door.

  Eventually she got out. Her final insult was, believe it or not, a remark about the aquarium.

  Once she got out I fell into another of my depressions, thinking of the eight years I'd wasted trying to cultivate and refine that bitch. Then I . . . acted out.

  Which might have worked out all right, except that I momentarily forgot that even a paperback book—if thick enough—if thrown hard enough—and at the proper angle, can break the glass on a twenty-gallon aquarium.

  So, in spite, or because of everything, I cleaned up the aquarium. With a carpet shampooer. It was during this debacle that Mrs. Brisbee, watching me from atop a speaker cabinet, realized at last just how much she hated me. She just sat there while I cursed and fumed and beyond all else—got the job done—and she stared at me with her eyes half-shut in contempt. I wished I had something to feed her to.

  Kitty litter, like most things, only more so, becomes more economical when bought in greater quantities. So I buy fifty-pound bags at the pet store. It was there, while trying to haggle for a discount on two fifty-pound bags, that I saw the aquarium sale.

  It had only been two weeks since that day . . . and already I yearned to set up a whole new aquarium. And there, directly before me, was my ideal tank, a fifty-five-gallon aquarium, hood, light wood grain stand and filter, all for only a hundred and eighty-nine bucks.

  Maybe it was a stupid idea, but at the time it seemed like an inspiration. I acted so impulsively and it seemed to take so damn long to find any reason to regret it, that I just reveled in the experience. It brought me back to life and had the immediate effect of getting me the much haggled discount on my hundred pounds of kitty litter.

/>   I spent more money landscaping that aquarium than on probably all the other setups I'd ever had, and I spent almost a week setting it up, going back and forth to the pet store, selecting each rock, plant, background, with studious deliberation and care. My prize catch was a large, porous, hideously-shaped piece of black rock. There was a whole barrel full of the things. I ended up buying a second, smaller piece which I ended up not even having room for. When I asked the pet shop guy why he didn't use any of them in his store displays, he pretended he didn't know where the barrel came from, looking at it as though for the first time. Looking back on it, I realize he may not have been pretending after all . . .

  But anyway, I threw myself into this project with almost hysterical dedication. I should add, at this juncture, that Mrs. Brisbee actually showed considerable interest in the project. She was drawn in so wholeheartedly to the festive atmosphere that she forgot to eat for several days, which is just as well, because for those several days, I forgot to feed her.

  Then came the final decision. With what should I stock my aquarium? Of course, saltwater fish were out of the question. Too much money, too much work, too many garish colors. And of course, they'd all be dead in a week. Live-bearers—swordtails, platys, black mollies, and guppies didn't warrant anything as big as a fifty-five-gallon aquarium. I didn't want another community tank for sixty-odd tetras, rasboras, danios, gouramis, barbs, and catfish.

  It had to be a unique population. A single piranha would be a waste of space, and any more would have made me a nervous wreck. There are plenty of large and unconventional aquarium fish: arowana, elephant noses, knife fish, plecostomes . . . But in the end, I went with cichlids, the most intelligent and dramatic of all fish. I looked at Oscars, angelfish, discus, convicts, firemouths, severums, and a half-dozen varieties of African mouthbreeders. I ended up with a dozen small Jack Dempseys, Cichlosoma biocellatum. They were no more than two inches long now, but—if they lived—they'd grow to be seven or eight inches long. They were beautiful, shimmering with scatterings of yellow and aqua blue scales, raising their dorsal crests and opening out their gills to double the apparent size of their heads as they squared off in plastic traveling bags.

  It was amazing how quickly those twelve little fish filled out that fifty-five-gallon tank. They performed constantly. You could watch their faces as they swam their threatening patterns and almost feel an intelligence at work.

  They seemed to double their size in the first two weeks. Their colors brightened, their dorsal fins grew long and threatening, they brawled, danced, followed my and Mrs. Brisbee's movements constantly. Far from starving them, I fed them three times a day, three different kinds of food, with live brine shrimp and tubifex worm feasts all weekend.

  As my so-called friends had sold out to Dorothy, I found plenty of time to spend with my fish. I admired my landscaping, the fish, the constant flow of bubbles—all the things I'd never noticed or appreciated before. I didn't watch television, listen to music, read or take a shower. I did remember to feed Mrs. Brisbee, whose name unaccountably seemed to be turning to Dorothy. But most of the two consecutive weekends were spent staring at the growing fish, drinking beer and humming pathetically along with the almost inaudible hum of the pump.

  It was on the second Sunday evening that I first noticed the reddish-brown cloud rising from the largest hole in the porous black rock.

  But before I get into that, I should mention something about the fish dreams I was beginning to have around this time. During that brief period when everything in the aquarium seemed fine and healthy, I had two or three of them every night:

  I'm a fish . . . Dorothy's a fish . . . Dorothy the cat is a fish . . . I'm on a subway train and I turn into a fish, slowly, one piece of me at a time, as I look frantically for water while dust rises from every surface . . . I open the bottom drawer of my dresser, and thousands of flopping, talking fish begin to gush out onto the floor . . . every wall of my apartment is a gigantic aquarium and I'm imprisoned in an exitless maze of glass walls behind which huge, impossibly exotic fish talk to me and each other over a crackling intercom system.

  Stuff like that.

  I was beginning to grow phylum-conscious. That expression, I might add, was introduced to me by a twenty-foot scorpion fish in one of these dreams. Phylum conscious. It took me way too long to figure out what the fish meant by that.

  And meanwhile, there was the cloud. It was brown and red and held what appeared to be tiny, wriggling specks. I figured the brine shrimp were trying to spawn inside the rock. So it wasn't the compact little cloud rising slowly from the hole in the rock that alerted me. It was my Jack Dempseys' reaction to the cloud. They looked frightened half to death.

  Occasionally one would dart out towards the patch of brown and snap threateningly along its edges, trying to swallow up some of the tiny, wriggling creatures. But in an instant it darted away again. The fish hovered no closer than a foot but no further than fifteen inches from the hole in the rock, their eyes on it all the time. They could be distracted by food . . . but only momentarily.

  So it was the fish that drew me to it. I had to see what they saw.

  I was annoyed. I laughed at myself and thought, "Aww, Christ . . . HERE IT COMES!" and just about decided then and there that there was only one thing to do: go buy some tablets that would clear up the problem.

  At the pet shop I talked to the guy and he told me it must just be a few brine shrimp breeding in the rock. He didn't seem to understand that I was positive they weren't brine shrimp. I barely got the chance to tell him, because he was talking about how more and more it seemed as though brine shrimp were tolerating fresh water, and what a cool thing that was. I told him that had nothing to do with me and demanded that he give me something to clear up the water. I ended up getting algaecide pills and cloudy water pills. I paid six bucks for it and knew all along it wouldn't work.

  "You know, maybe you just didn't clean out the rock very well. Sometimes you gotta soak 'em for a while, you know?"

  I had one in my hand now, standing over the barrel. There didn't seem to be as many of them now. This one was about half the size of mine but still had the same twisted black angles, shot full of yawning holes. I noticed an aquarium display, minus the water, at the front of the store.

  "Hey, what the hell are you doin'?"

  "This is one of them."

  "This is what?"

  "Like the rock in my tank. The one that's clouding."

  "Damn. This is one might fine looking rock here. Ugly as shit . . . but cool."

  Things didn't improve. Within a week it spread throughout the water. I took the rock out of the tank and washed it under hot water for ten minutes, but it didn't even discolor the water.

  And the fish . . . well, they were pale and they always seemed to be curled up in the corner, or hiding in the plastic plants. They barely ate. And they stayed as far away from the rock as possible. So I took it out again. I washed it. I examined it. And then noticed that the rock made no difference. The fish still cowered as far from the source as possible, but now the source could move. They would slink along the glass or dart from plant to plant, all as a unit, and cluster again in a different corner. I would wait for such an occasion and watch them, watch their eyes, trying to see the movement of whatever was frightening them away. I couldn't see anything.

  And so the rock went back in.

  And then there were eleven. It was easy to count them. They never moved anymore except as a group. I counted and re-counted them, but there was no point in it. There were only eleven fish. And no trace of the twelfth.

  So, they were cannibals. I thought, good! Let them eat each other! I could use a good laugh! But then I looked at them, yellowing, curling their heads towards their tail fins, all fins flattened against the body and undulating in quick, weak strokes.

  No . . . maybe it just . . . jumped out . . . and DOROTHY GOT IT! Dorothy the cat, I mean.

  You may be asking yourself what is the point in elaborat
ing on all this insignificant detail. Get on with it, you say. But you see, it's the apparent insignificance that you have to understand! You have to see how it was, and understand, and say, "Naah, I wouldn't have done anything, either."

  The second fish died a week after the first, the third died five days after that, and the fourth died four days after that. Each time I'd fumble through the aquarium with my hands, with a net, searching for the corpse. And then I'd kick Dorothy the cat in case she had something to do with it.

  By the time the fifth fish had disappeared the water was so cloudy I really couldn't trust my eyes, and so based my suspicion on the fact that a fish was by now scheduled to disappear, and that if I therefore couldn't see it, it was missing. I could see the other pale and bent Jack Dempseys drifting listlessly on one side of the aquarium, gradually becoming lost in the brown cloud that wriggled with tiny life.

  After that, I gave up. I didn't bother to feed them, didn't bother to turn on the hood light. For about a week I couldn't bring myself to even look in the aquarium. And yet, it was such a big thing, that it was considerable effort not to look at it.

  And meanwhile, there was the rest of my life, which, believe it or not, still seemed a bit more important at the time. There were my so-called friends, of course, who had written me off, evidently, even though they continued hanging out with me three or four nights a week, if only for the extra opportunities it would give them to remind them of that fact.

  The women in our little group couldn't stop talking about Dorothy, although in fact their talk never came around to anything along the lines of Dorothy and I getting back together, or, oh, what cute couple we had been, but seemed to run something along the lines of: oh, guess what what well I talked to the Dot today no kidding well how is she oh you know Dottie she's just having the time of her life oh that's so nice to hear have you seen her new place no oh god it’s so nice and well you know . . . so clean!