Upsie-Daisy

by Jane Lebak

  Chapter Three

  The best pairing since vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce

  Dr. Myron wants to meet at a restaurant with a generic name, but come on, we’re in Manhattan. Why would you eat a hamburger when you could walk twenty feet down the block and consume a replica meal of the festival from when Nebuchadnezzar was named King of Babylon, complete with gardens hanging over your head?*

  There is, therefore, only one solution.

  Thirty minutes before scheduled arrival time, I arrive at the restaurant and struggle not to die of boredom while reading the menu. Hooray, you can get sautéed mushrooms on your steak.

  Twenty-nine minutes before scheduled arrival time, I head back out the door and walk five blocks up Fifth Avenue, then cross over to Fourth and walk ten blocks back down. Then I return to Fifth and turn back toward the restaurant.

  Ten minutes before arrival time. I plant myself at the door because the guy’s a scientist, and he’s either going to be on-time or early. My toes tell me they're frozen. My breath frosts away from me, but my hands are warm where they hide in my pockets. I've got the purse strap cross-wise from my left shoulder to under my right arm, tucked down: the native New Yorker stance.

  From Bucky: Incoming.

  And with that, Dr. Myron arrives. “Lee!” He smiles. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.”

  He takes my arm to guide me inside, but instead I tug him back toward the center of the sidewalk. “Wait! You have no idea of this cool place I found on the way here!”

  Bucky in my head huffs at the lie, but it’s more polite in this case than, “Really, you want to spend twenty bucks on something you’ve already eaten a thousand times?”

  Variety, my friends. Variety. That’s why I stop him at the front door of a place that says it makes Shojin, the food of Ancient Buddhist monks who had vowed to do no harm to the world and therefore subsisted on a diet of vegetables, grains, and flowers. I’m not the kind of gal who wants a guy to bring flowers, but if you deep-fry me a rose, I promise to take a bite.

  Myron looks less than thrilled. “This is...I’ve never tried food like this before.”

  I brighten. “Excellent! So it will be new to both of us.”

  He’s got no readable expression on his face whatsoever, and that’s not a good sign. Usually guys will give me a hint as to why they think whatever I’ve suggested is out of their comfort zone, sometimes subtle things like, “You’re insane. Only bunnies eat flowers.” But Dr. Scientist is just kind of...studious.

  Finally he says, “I don’t think I’d like this.”

  I have a plan B. “There’s an Australian restaurant two blocks from here. We could eat kangaroo steak.”

  Myron shakes his head. “Let’s just head back to the bistro.”

  Oh well. Maybe they’ll have awesome desserts, like a chalice full of frozen hot chocolate drizzled with a spicy cherry sauce.

  And the view is nice enough. Not out the window – I mean the view across the table. At first there's that ominous early-date silence where neither of us knows what to say yet because we don't know enough even to ask questions. Myron breaks the silence by pointing me toward a couple of things he thinks I’d like in the more adventurous part of the menu. I end up with some kind of fish baked in a sauce, some steamed seasoned broccoli, and a mountain of cheddar biscuits that are surprisingly tasty. I had no idea you could do that with bread and cheese.

  And Myron? It’s a good thing I love his voice because he talks. A lot. Don’t get me wrong: it’s interesting, but he’s a monologuer. Having gotten on-track with a conversation topic, he's going to drive it into the ground. Everything you ever wanted to know about the Mac operating system, and more!

  One good thing, though: no matter how quickly he talks, he doesn't repeat himself. You have to stay on your toes to keep pace. It’s fun to listen, especially because he has an unusual cadence, and I ask a few questions, but there's no room in this conversation for me.

  Two strikes against him so far, but being with him beats watching TV, so I’ll at least enjoy tonight. Before dessert, I’m already brainstorming something exciting to cap off the date, and finally I just ask. “Where’s the most interesting place around here?”

  This man who’s spent his life classifying the world takes his time studying me: I perplex him. Am I a thrill-seeker? An overprotective aunt? A flirt?

  I press him. “If you were alone in Manhattan for an hour with a hundred bucks in your pocket, where would you go? That’s where I want to go right now.”

  He chuckles. “No, you don’t.”

  “Try me.” I lean forward, smiling. This could be a disaster, of course. He could take me to a computer store and start telling me about terabytes. For that matter, he could take me to the kind of toy stores that don’t let you in unless you’re over twenty-one. But I’ve got a cell phone and my own train fare home, and Bucky would probably warn me if Myron were about to conk me over the head and carry me off to a dungeon.

  “It’s not really on the beaten path,” he says.

  “Now that’s a good thing,” I tell him, and I flag down the waiter for the check.

  Myron is completely off balance now, and I’m finally enjoying myself. I don’t want him to drop any hints about what’s to come, so he asks if I mind walking a mile or so. Please, this is Manhattan. Of course I don’t mind walking a mile.

  “You’re quite the mystery,” I say, getting close enough that he puts his arm over my shoulder. “I knew there had to be more to you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” He gives this nervous laugh. “I don’t normally...I mean, this is a bit weird. You’re going to run screaming.”

  And that’s the most reassuring thing he could have told me right then, because if I’ve learned anything about techy-types (and I’ve gone on dates with a dozen) it’s that they always say this about the most normal interests. It’s just that they get passionate about their little niche fascination, and they learn about it, and in Myron’s case he probably talks about it exhaustively, but they figure no one else is going to “get it.” Kind of like how I feel about cars, except of course no one would get that.

  But when techy-types do show that part of themselves, it’s a kind of victory. They trust you. And it’s always interesting.

  He stops and says, “Well, if you want to save yourself, now is the time.”

  I shrug. “I’ve come this far.”

  The light changes. We cross the street and he leads me right into a fish store.

  Not like fish you eat. Fish that swim. There are fish tanks everywhere, and the air has a smell that’s earthy but not at all fishy. The place is noisy, too, with gurgles from the water, bubbling sounds, and the whine of machinery that must be driving the bubbles.

  It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, and then I exclaim, “It’s like a rainbow in here!”

  The tanks are alive. Each is a tiny country filled with its own citizens, and they’re all different sizes, different colors. The tanks themselves are uniform, but off to one side there are display models of tanks you can buy for yourself, starting with glass boxes the size of a loaf of bread and going all the way up to “My relatives can bury me in this when Jesus calls me home.”

  The tanks are stacked on racks all the way to the ceiling. I look up at one point to find fifty blue fish the size of silver dollars all clustered in front of my face, staring at me with a barely perceivable hint that all fifty desire to be fed.

  I take Myron’s arm. “Show me around.”

  I used to know people who had fish, but mostly in a “Yeah, I have a fish tank” kind of way. It never occurred to me that fish could be someone’s passion—but looking at the prices, um, you’d kind of have to be passionate. Now to find out why.

  And Myron tells me! (You knew he would tell me.) He starts by pointing out some of the fish he has in his own apartment, and at some point we launch way out beyond “this is a yellow tang” to “Now this is a salt-water tank, and in order to maintain the correc
t salinization...”

  I’ll just give you a rundown: with a fish tank, you are a god. You are creating your own ecosystem, and then after you’ve done this, you need to maintain it and test it and protect it and feed it. You need to take care of it constantly, and the fish won’t really know who you are, but eventually they’ll figure out that at certain times of the day, when the Tall One comes over to the tank, the shameless begging must commence.

  Actually, that probably describes my relationship to the real God too well, so we’ll drop that line of thought and just say, it’s more like maintaining a really fussy car engine. You need to monitor the water parameters. You’ve got to know the nitrogen cycle, something important enough to fish that I probably should have learned it in biology class rather than passing notes to Eric just because he was so cute when he blushed. You need to monitor water hardness, pH, temperature, and aeration. Myron shows me little kits you can use for testing your nitrates, nitrites, and ammonia.

  And then there are the filters. The motors on those things must be little marvels. There are airstones. There are pumps.

  “I’ve got four tanks in my apartment,” he says. “A twenty-gallon quarantine tank, a seventy-five-gallon salt-water tank, a hundred-gallon freshwater tank, and one two-twenty-five.”

  Two hundred twenty-five gallons of water has got to weigh a ton: a literal ton. Isn’t a gallon of water ten pounds? How is his apartment building still standing? Or every so often is it just the case that he puts his key in the lock only to discover one giant step, and now he lives one floor lower than he used to?

  Fortunately, there are tiny tanks too. I pick up a three-gallon. Myron says, “That’s perfect for a betta. They’re great starter fish.”

  I could own fish too! We need one of these, I tell Bucky.

  Ask him how long a fish can survive without food, Bucky replies.

  I flinch because that’s a really good point. I barely remember to feed myself.

  You’d keep me from killing a fish, I pout at Bucky.

  What do you think I’m doing right now?

  Sighing, I say to Myron, “Maybe someday. It’s all so complicated.”

  “It’s not complicated at all,” he says, then proceeds to show me a python thing you use to vacuum the gravel, and little fish heaters, and by the time he’s done, I too love fish. I want to apologize to all these beautiful creatures because at that boring restaurant, I just consumed one of their kin.

  “Is this why you work with underwater subs?” I say.

  Myron nods. “I’ve always had fish, so in college it was marine biology all the way, and then robotics, and here I am.”

  “That’s so cool.” I sigh. “When you’re working with the robot, is it just like being with the fish?”

  He says, “My office isn’t too far from here. Do you want to see the robot?”

  Do I want to see a robotic sub? Do I want to continue breathing? Are Mustangs a fun ride? “Yes!”

  I’m practically skipping. A robot. A submarine. A robot and a submarine together – that’s the best pairing since vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce.

  Myron, on the other hand, is a bit preoccupied, and it’s not hard to figure out why. As we walk, I say, “You’re trying to figure out how to let me down gently.”

  He looks startled, and my usually-flawless speaker comes up with a variation of “Um” and “What?”

  I snicker. “It’s hard to tell me you don’t want a second date because I’m not your type.”

  He looks a little relieved. I shrug. “It’s fine. I figured that out for myself, and I’m not going to give you a howling sobfest. You’re showing me a robot, and I brought Avery’s foam head, and that’s all we agreed to.”

  Now he looks a lot relieved. I wink at him. “You still can give me a handshake before I go home, but that’s totally up to your discretion.” And then I stop cold because we’ve reached the water on the west side.

  Office? Yeah, no thank you.

  The buildings are all warehouses. It’s the kind of place where Myron could murder me, Cuisinart my body into tiny bits, and then spend long evenings feeding me to his carnivorous salt-water shrimp in peaceful solitude.

  He notices my hesitation, just like a mass-murderer would. “Oh, don’t worry. There’s a security guard over by the parking lot entrance.”

  I say, “And once we’re past that?”

  Myron shrugs. “Then we’ll go inside.”

  Behind me, Bucky says, “I asked his guardian. Good call, but he’s not planning to kill you.”

  What about tie me up and keep me suspended in the rafters?

  “As far as his guardian knows, he intends to show you his robotic submarine.”

  My New Yorker senses are screaming at me to thank Dr. Myron for his dissertation on aquatics, hand him the bag with the decorated foam head, and skedaddle for the subway.

  Myron says, “Come on. You’ll like it.”

  I send to Bucky, If he kills me, I swear, I’ll haunt you forever.

  Bucky replies, “I just asked God. You’re going to love that robot. Go with him.”

  I kind of have to take God’s word on it, so Myron and I cross the street, say hi to a security guard named Victor, and then head into a warehouse bordering on the water.

  The science institute hired an interior decorator with a mania for stainless steel, aluminum, and any other silver thing he could get his hands on. There’s no other way to describe it: the walls and ceiling shine, and there are air ducts overhead gleaming in their metal glory. Except for the lack of an oil smell, I’m right at home here. “Wow, feels familiar.”

  Myron laughs. “Yeah, I’ve always thought it’s kind of like working in an elevator.”

  Oh, right, he still thinks I check out elevators for a living. I guess it feels like one of those too. I beam at him. “Except for the elevator music.”

  He says, “Can’t you do something about that?”

  My eyes flare. “I already did. Have you heard the Starland Vocal Band in an elevator recently?”

  Myron’s breath catches. “Gosh, no. Thank you.”

  Myron uses his key card to let me into a huge workspace, then escorts me down a flight of steps to a cavernous work area. He flips on the lights, and now it’s my turn to gasp. At the center is a work of art: in glorious yellow, it’s a cluster of horizontal cylinders and metal arms, lights, and sensors.

  “She’s gorgeous,” I whisper.

  He chuckles. “We weren’t trying for beauty when we built it.”

  I cross the room in three strides and put my hand on the metal exterior, then crouch to look underneath. No, this isn’t going to win any awards in the aesthetic department, but you can see how every bit of the design is coordinated to maximize functionality. I circle it on the platform, taking note of the propellers big enough to pulverize a human into fish kibble. I touch a cap on the skin, and Myron says, “That’s where the filament emerges when we run it tethered.” He steps forward. “And this is the hydraulic manipulator arm.”

  I touch the edge of it. “Pleased to meet you, Madame Robot.”

  Myron says, “It’s a she? We usually think it’s a he.”

  “Trust me. I know machines.” The thing is wider than I am tall and probably three times my length. What’s that, six feet by fifteen feet? “How much does she weigh?”

  “You’re not supposed to ask a lady’s weight,” he responds mildly, “but about three tons.”

  I lean in and whisper, “Don’t listen to him. You don’t look much more than two.”

  He shows me the inner compartment where the decorated heads will get stashed, so I undo my backpack and hand him Avery’s painted head. He tucks it in, assuring me there will be others. “We’ve actually got a bunch already done for a test run early next week. The rest will wait until the actual dive.”

  I follow him away from that work of art over to a shelf where the remaining twenty-three heads stand at attention, some decorated and some awaiting their makeovers. �
��Which ones did you do?”

  He’s pointing out a couple when I notice the corkboard behind the desk. Three of the pages are job postings.

  I lean in. The first two have requirements I couldn’t meet in ten years, but the third...they want someone with mechanical skills. And who can swim. I’m a certified mechanic. I can swim, too! And to be honest, I’ve never been entirely qualified before I’ve started a job. I always talk my way into employment and then learn everything I need to know within the first week, if not the first three hours.

  Myron notices where I’m looking. “Thinking of a job change?”

  I put my finger on the mechanic position. “That one. It’s for me.”

  The commute would stink. But the work...this will be the most fascinating thing I’ve ever done in my life. Can you imagine? And that whole swimming thing means they’ll send me out on the ship when this baby deploys, and I can climb down onto the shell to adjust gears on a hydraulic arm, two miles of salt water beneath me and waves rocking all around. Bucky will lose his mind, but how amazing is that?

  Work? Heck, I’d do that for free.

  “That position’s been open for a while. I’d recommend you to my boss,” Myron says, “but I don’t think you’re qualified.”

  Everything goes cold. My stomach tightens, and I can’t move.

  Inside me, Bucky sends, Tell him.

  All I have to say is, “Myron, you dork, I’m an auto mechanic. Elevator inspectors don’t check out car lifts.” Or even, “I’m very qualified. I rebuilt my own Mustang.” But my throat closes up, and my ears ring. The paralysis goes all through me because I can imagine myself climbing down a chain and sitting on a three-ton robot in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but I can’t imagine handing Myron my resume.

  I gaze back at the robot, so glorious in its little whirring bits and that clever, clever arm designed to pick up bits from the bottom of the ocean. I’m a mechanic. But I can’t talk, and then Myron says, “I’ll walk you back to the train station,” and I just follow him out the door.

  Tell him. I need to tell him. This is the perfect opportunity to tell him. We’re not looking at each other. I have nothing to lose. We’ve already decided there’s no pair-bonding in our future, so if I tell him, it’s fine. It’ll be fine and I can sail on the high seas and shake hands with a robotic arm every day.