Don't Clean the Aquarium!

by Osier, Jeffrey

  Yes . . . it won't take more than two or three days to re-landscape the aquarium, restock it, overload it with fish, cheap fish, fat and worthless fish—chordata be damned!—and then . . . and then . . . little fella, you'll hatch, you'll infuse the water with your wriggling rust-colored friends and I swear to whatever god will still have me that I'll feed you anything you want, I'll feed you Dorothy and every dog and cat and worthless derelict I can find . . .

  Just don't leave me little fella, I can love you and feed you and talk to you and teach you to talk to me and let you live in my bathtub or whatever it takes to hold you because I've had it with the human race and anything even remotely related to it. I can grow you from almost nothing, a soft, dry, crinkled patch inside a rock, into a magnificent animal! You'll thrive. You can survive—flourish because of everything within me that's killed or driven away anything or anyone that's ever come close to me, you see? You need me because of what I am that all those poor fools out there—oh, I'll bring them to you soon enough—could never be. I'm a meager, vicious animal, little fella, I'm nothing, a coward, but I'll be brave for you, little fella, for your love, for your fidelity, little fella, so that you'll never leave me, little fella, so I'll love you, little fella . . .

  And you'll be mine.

  THE SHABBIE PEOPLE

  I

  Their skin was smooth and colorless, so translucent that it looked like a liquid held in place by a thin glutinous membrane. The long, loose threads along the edges of their shapeless garments seemed to wave in synchronized patterns, like cilia or some delicate reef-dwelling invertebrate. Even now I believe the Shabbies were human beings, although it seems that as time goes on that I base this conviction more and more on a desperate hope that has less to do with them—or even her—than it does with the way I cling to the notion of my own humanity.

  I had a job in those days. Five days a week I rode the "L" train downtown, where I immediately took a narrow set of stairs down to Lower Wacker Drive, a bleak, dust-blanketed stretch of road that ran directly beneath Wacker Drive proper and alongside the Chicago River. It was not a short cut—in fact, it added a good five minutes to my walk—and the only excuse I had for preferring it to a shorter, street level route was that it was cooler in summer and warmer (because of the heating vents from the buildings) in winter. But I walked Lower Wacker for the darkness, for the solitude. At street level I would have been no better than the rest of the office workers and clerks: in a hurry to get to work or to their trains, all milling and colliding and seething beneath the screeching elevated trains.

  On Lower Wacker I'd see transients scattered along the catwalk, many asleep between scraps of newspaper and cardboard in the early morning. Otherwise there were only those few commuters who parked their cars in the designated spaces between the catwalk and the street itself. Occasionally a car would slow and the driver—hoping to claim a parking space—would ask if I was going to my car. I would cast the driver an accusing, condescending glare and simply say, "I don't drive."

  I would look up at the concrete ceiling and listen for the sounds of heavier traffic flowing above, but I never heard it. Sometimes that ceiling seemed to be a mile or more thick, and the blackest, sootiest patches on it the entrances to vast, inaccessible caves.

  On the morning I first encountered them I was going down the steps when I saw a haggard old man with worried eyes waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. Before I even made it to the bottom he was talking to me. I averted my eyes and attempted to pass him by, but he held out a shaking hand to block my path.

  It was then that he said the word, not as part of a sentence, but just as a single, exhausted exclamation: "Shabbie."

  As I attempted to sidestep him, I lost my balance and nearly fell onto the dusty, glass and ratshit-laden sidewalk. I cursed the old man and continued on my way.

  I knew what he'd been talking about as soon as I saw them. There were about twenty on that first day: men and women—none of them standing any closer than ten feet from each other—on the catwalk, among the parked cars at the foot of the catwalk, even along the edges of the road. They didn't look at anything except each other, with vacant, expressionless faces, hands deep in their pockets, hugging shapeless garments around themselves. There were a few more street people hovering along the edge of this strange, scattered group. They whispered to each other, laughed, complained, but refused to pass beyond a certain point, into that arena where the brown-ragged strangers stood so silently, so oblivious to anything but each other.

  Another old man called to me as I walked past the huddled transients and onto that stretch of blacktop where the strangers stood. Almost immediately I could hear a ringing, feel the pressure of an invisible fluid closing around me. I looked into their incredible eyes. If they knew I was walking among them, they made no sign; and when I finally passed the last of them I felt a tremendous release in pressure, as though I'd just surfaced from a deep dive into a swimming pool.

  All the rest of that day I felt as though there was a wet gloss clinging to me, but whenever I ran my fingers over my skin, they came away dry and clean.

  ~ * ~

  I didn't see them again for several days, but in the meantime I saw a piece of graffiti on one of the cement pillars that lined Lower Wacker:

  "BEWARE OF THE SHABBIE PEOPLE"

  It was an unseasonably cold evening in early October. For some reason I can no longer remember and probably couldn't have pinpointed at the time, my usual depression had been boiling into a vicious rage against everyone around me, against inanimate objects that got in my way, against my pathetic little room and, of course, against myself and everything about me: my thick, hopeless face, my job, my loneliness. I pushed my way through the Wabash Avenue crowds and made for the nearest stairway down to Lower Wacker Drive.

  An obese rat waddled across my path. I had to stop in my tracks to keep from kicking the beast. I suddenly focused all my rage on this foul creature that had the audacity to block my way for even a split second. My fist clenched and I searched the shadows, wishing I had kicked it.

  When I first heard her voice, I could swear she was laughing. It was only when I heard the telltale impact of flesh smacking flesh that I was sure she was crying—no, screaming. Then I heard the man's voice: loud, cruel, wet with lustful anger, and I realized what was going on.

  They were on the catwalk, near a stairway that led to street level. I jumped onto the walk and grabbed the man before I had any idea who or what they were. With a downward straight-arm, I loosened his grip on her clothes as I grabbed his collar and swung him around to face me.

  He was a Shabbie. They were both Shabbies. He was about my height, very thin, but there was an animal hunger across that emaciated face that would have scared me off had I not already been so wound up in my own furies. He screamed, a high pitched flurry of incomprehensible sounds, and his face seemed to stretch forward into a toothy snout.

  I was standing too close to take a swing at him, so I brought up my elbow and struck his nose. The glancing blow stunned him long enough to allow me to step back and punch him as hard as I could with my good arm. He stumbled off the edge of the catwalk, bounced onto the hood of a car and melted into the deep shadows, moaning and whimpering.

  When I turned to her she was looking at me in horror, as though I had been the sole aggressor. I opened my mouth to say something in my own defense, but she ran up the nearest set of stairs. I took one last look at the Shabbie man lying between two cars and then followed her.

  She was on the top step, looking out at the city lights as though she had never seen anything like them in her life. "Are you all right? Miss? Did he hurt you?"

  The sound of my voice sent a brief tremor across her face. She reluctantly turned from the skyline and looked me in the eyes.

  "I didn't mean to scare you like that,” I said. “Down there, I mean." Once her eyes locked into mine, she would not let go. She looked at me as though I was something disgusting she had been ordered to eat
. She nodded toward the buildings, trying to draw my attention to them.

  "It's a pretty skyline, isn't it?”

  But she wasn't listening. I looked at her closely then, because she seemed to have lost all interest in me. Her hair was thin and medium brown, laced with sliver streaks and hanging limp and careless to her shoulders. From this vantage point, only a couple of feet away, it was almost impossible to resist trying to make out the skull beneath that clear skin and those delicate blue veins just beneath the surface. But her face was too wide—or her head was too narrow; at any rate, the effect was to jut her nose and the center of her lips forward and pull her eyes and the edges of her mouth around to the side.

  I could make out her delicate slenderness even beneath the shapeless brown rags she wore. Her feet were big and her breasts were small, like a young girl's, but she was clearly more than a girl. There were traces of age and pain in her face. In spite of her plainness, her strange face and her ragged clothes, I found her unusually attractive and appealing. The fact that she was one of the Shabbie People who had been haunting Lower Wacker Drive only made the attraction stronger.

  "Miss, could I . . . buy you something to eat? A cup of coffee or something?"

  She made no response, so I turned away, humiliated, and headed for the train. I did not bother going back down to Lower Wacker; I was only two blocks from the train anyway and the crowds were beginning to thin out. As I walked I tried not to think of the capstone humiliation of this wretched day; I had saved a pretty girl from an attacker only to have my respectful advances ignored afterward. The incident seemed to have neutralized me. I no longer felt any anger, only that creeping numbness that was my biggest enemy but probably also the one thing that had kept me from taking my own useless life years before.

  I went downstairs to the ticket window and showed my monthly pass. As I pushed through the turnstile I turned and saw her standing there, looking at me, looking at the turnstile and the glass booth, confused and afraid, the skin of her brows furling over her eyes.

  "What?" I asked her, sounding impatient and exasperated. I was not so numb that I wasn't willing to strike out just a little at the woman who'd rebuffed me only minutes before. "What is it? Do you need money? Is that what you want? You could say something to me, you know."

  I turned away and headed for the stairs, but as I reached them I heard that cry again. But this time it was not a cry of fear over a man who was beating her and probably about to rape her, but the cry of a young child, alone and lost with absolutely no idea what to do. When I turned back she was looking at the lady in the pay booth with a terrified expression.

  So I did what I had to: I paid her fare. She followed me down the stairs and when the first train came and I did not get on it, she gazed thoughtfully back and forth from me to the train and then let out a sigh and relaxed at my side, no more than six inches away from me.

  When my train came, we got on. There were no seats, so I had to stand, clutching a vertical bar; and when the train lurched for the first time, she grabbed the shoulder of my jacket and did not let go until we stopped at my station.

  She followed me down the street, into the foyer of my building, up the steps and finally, while a quaking mixture of excitement and suspicion surged through my every limb, up to my door.

  "Do you need a place to stay? Is that it?" I opened the door and she followed me in, passing by me and moving through my apartment with a timid, quiet grace, her face stretched with the same wonderment with which she'd looked at the skyline.

  She was the first woman who had ever stepped into my apartment. She did not react when I shut the door and locked it, and didn't even bother to turn and look me in the face for another hour.

  II

  What was I to think as she moved silently through my cheap, unkempt room? She wouldn’t respond to my questions, and though she seemed interested when I finally got the nerve to step into my kitchenette and fry myself a cheese sandwich, she seemed not even to understand when I offered the sandwich to her. As soon as the sizzling in the pan died, she turned away and returned to the window, where she looked out with rapt fascination upon a brick wall, a neon sign, an alley and a sliver of street.

  I considered throwing her out, but of course I couldn't. This strange, but otherwise very plain young woman seemed graced by a kind of dangerous beauty when seen in the context of my lonely little apartment. I tried ignoring her as the evening progressed, drinking a beer or thumbing through a book, but I literally could not take my eyes off her, so finally I just watched her until I caught myself nodding off to sleep in my chair.

  I offered her my bed, indicating with hopelessly loud and well-articulated words and awkward arm gestures that I would sleep on the couch. I lay on the couch then, a blanket pulled up to my eyes, watching her in the semi-darkness. She continued to move from one end of the apartment to the other, occasionally stopping at the window before moving on again, examining books, wall prints, the dirty plates in the sink.

  The last thing I remember is her going into the bathroom and using the toilet with the door open. I could see nothing—would not even look—yet I ended up with a furious erection that followed me into sleep and writhed its way to climax in some forgotten dream.

  I tried to convince her to leave the next morning. At least I told her she should. In truth, I didn't want her to leave at all. She had slept on the floor at the foot of the bed and was still there when I left. I wondered whether she would be there when I got back as I locked the bottom lock but not the top, giving her the final option—but only after debating for a full minute whether I should just lock her in.

  ~ * ~

  I was thirty-four years old at the time and still a virgin. Only my hands—and even those with awkward, infrequent rendezvous—stood between me and a lifetime of abstinence. Perhaps it was because I was ugly or had difficulty speaking to people, or because of some kind of physical or social flaw to which I was simply blind. Whatever the cause, I had never slept in such close proximity to a woman, and all day I reeled with the myriad implications of that event. I fantasized that on my return home she would be communicative, thanking me for saving her virtue or maybe even her life the day before and for offering her refuge and, of course—inadvertently though it might have been—for having been a gentleman through it all.

  When I returned home she was watching television. She stared at the screen as though hypnotized not by the images themselves but by the thousands of flickering signals that made up the images. I tried talking to her, I offered her food, I offered her the bed; but nothing worked. Once again she slept on the floor.

  It went on this way for a week. I was growing more and more dependent on the idea that when I opened the door at night, I would find this warm, living, increasingly attractive creature placidly sharing my apartment.

  Finally I gave up offering her the bed. The couch was starting to bother my back anyway, so on the seventh night I decided to sleep in the bed myself.

  In a gesture of had-it-up-to-here defiance, I threw back the sheets, undressed and crawled into my bed, leaving only the hood light on in the kitchen. She stood by the refrigerator, eating pickles out of the jar and watching me with a puzzled expression. I shut my eyes as I nested in my bed for the first time in a week, sure that I'd be asleep in a minute.

  I could hear her, feel her breath as she suddenly stood over me, watching me as she'd never done on the nights I'd slept on the couch. Was it our "familiarity" or was it the fact that it was such a sudden shift in routine? I was never able to figure out which of the two might have prompted her actions as I opened a single eye while she pulled the shapeless dress over her head and dropped it to the floor. The naked body underneath was sleek and had a sweet, pleasant aroma. When she pulled back the sheets and crawled in next to me, immediately folding her arms around me, I opened both eyes and gazed deep into a face that suddenly looked equally tender and eager. I leaned over to kiss her, realizing that I had never kissed a woman in my life and wasn't
even close to being sure exactly how it was done.

  She forced her mouth against mine in a brief, awkward struggle and after that, I just followed. My hands wandered the contours of her body in absolute disbelief while she finished undressing me. I climaxed the moment her hand glided between my legs, but she did not laugh or grow angry, and instead seemed to understand everything about me at that point. For a week she had been living on the periphery of my world, and she must have realized that beneath these sheets together we had passed beyond the edges of that world and into hers.

  At least it seemed to be wholly her world. My clumsy gestures grew smoother and more acute under her guidance and as her kisses and caresses grew more passionate, I began to mimic them. My next erection followed soon after and she guided it gently into the soft, wet darkness between her thighs. We remained very still for a while after that—neither our hands nor our hips moved more than a slight quiver as she looked deep into my eyes and smiled her first real and perfect smile. By the time we began our slow rhythmic movements I knew, from the feel of our interlocked bodies and from that sweet, understanding face, that both our lives had been irrevocably changed.

  When I finally slept, I dreamed of her. We were standing at the gravelly edge of a body of water at night, with only the light of a distant suspension bridge delineating us in the darkness. She looked at me and began to speak. The things she said were shocking and horrifying, but they made perfect sense to my dream-self. I remembered the entire dream in vivid detail the next morning—all except the words she had spoken.

  ~ * ~

  She grew more at ease within the grimy, chaotic confines of my apartment and widened her palate to include an increasing variety of foods in my cupboards and refrigerator. If anything, she paid less attention to me than she had before we'd first made love. As soon as I turned off the lights and crawled into bed each night, she would crawl in with me and we would make love for half the night, so that I found it almost impossible to get up in the morning for work. I finally had to start going to bed two hours earlier than usual. During sex or holding each other afterward, I seemed to be the absolute center of her life. But the next morning or the next evening, I was merely a more active, more transitory piece of furniture in a tiny room in which she seemed to be hiding from something . . . out there.