Sleeping with the Fishes

She awoke from dreams of fish because he was calling about the rain. Not that she wouldn't have figured it out quickly enough, what with the sound and everything being wet outside. The drops must be big; the plants looked beaten. Her tongue craved the taste of coffee, as it rarely did (more ritual than any other word she could think of meaning essentially desire but starting with the letter R).

Later she sat down to write him a letter, hoping that her pen would run dry so she wouldn't have to. But there was ink. And then coffee. She took a sip. Where are you? she wrote. Where are we? The latter of course more figurative than literal. The former, too, really. More coffee. He had phoned, after all, to talk about her personal weather, not his, which was different—ten degrees cooler and turning leaves and brief fresh winds that promised soon snow. She stared at the pen, saw the ink within, feeble drops clustered in slaggy drizzles down the inside of the barrel. Soon, she wrote. Soon we will have to come up with something.

It was true. Zygotes aside, they had no plan, no trajectory—just humming madly in place, highly kinetic but standing still. Newton, for one, wouldn't have liked it. The rain on the concrete sounded like fire. Their narrative was breaking down—they could both tell, but neither knew what they would—or should, really—do about it. She pondered cats and sunflowers, feeling remiss that it wasn't governments and how societies affected one another in ways both large and small, that took up her thoughts. Americans, she had been told, think about things like the former, Europeans about the latter. On better days she shrugged it off. On worse ones she read The Economist and nodded seriously as if reciting Hail Marys and promising never to transgress again.

She wasn't a good penitent. Either, she thought, everything she did was wrong, or nothing. She couldn't decide in any final-feeling way (couldn't, in fact, decide much of anything in a final-feeling way), so she mostly stayed unshriven.

She ached somewhere inside. She wished she'd sold the air conditioner when it meant something, but she hadn't been able to decide that either. Sweater colors were simpler. What kind of pie to make. The sunflowers winked and nodded in their vase on the table. She worried that she had nothing more to say. She threw away the empty pen and got another, it having become too hard to scratch out lines with such thin dribblings of ink, like invalid old people's drool. Surely now this would be easier, the thick lines running away along across the page. But she was too fast, (still!) too undecided. Like inexpert typing on a manual machine, several letters always seemed to want to come out at once—the word before meshing with the word ahead: all blots. But who would know? Who would see? She could fix it so no one ever would. All she'd have to do is tell him. It's not you, she could write. It's not me. It's it. It's this thing ... this singular us-ness that's the problem. Then she could be alone—no one seeing the black blots on the page, no one knowing how afraid she was of everything. No one would know her funny habits, her insomnia, her days of waking up at noon, staring at dirty dishes. She wasn't always this way. In fact, not often at all. But still. "To know as we are fully known." She didn't want that. Rather, she did, but the prospect terrified her. The second-guessing. The mistrust of another's "I love you," even of "Your hair looks great." Always searching for the motive, always waiting for what comes after: What does he want? Why is he telling me this?

She has talked about these things. It was expensive, and the conclusions she paid for told her very little she didn't already know: It was a problem (check); it was something she'd have to grapple with (check); it was something she'd have to overcome (well). That was the thing she most wanted to know: How does one overcome it? Is it just a matter of waking up one shining, epiphanous morning and being free? Not being suspicious when complimented? When kissed? Maybe, but of course not. It's a process, they told her, holding out their empty hands.

And so it hits her: a process; it's never done. And so (once again) center-punched by the freight train of frustration and hand-wringing, while all the time she was waiting in her car on the tracks for the engine to suddenly gun to life and get her out of the way. The train didn't even slow down. It never did.

So the message? That instead of sitting in the car waiting to magically discern why it's stalled, one should just walk away, standing clear of the path of shrapnel? Not very uplifting, is it? Of course this could be the wrong metaphor entirely, but right now (she also moonlights as a conductor on that train) it seems alarmingly apropos.

So too what? Too damaged for this most basic of human groups? He cringes—she knows he does—at this craziness. Her nails are dirty. She will clean them; then they will get dirty again. This is the way of things. This does not bother most people. She is taking a ride today on the roller coaster of self-loathing. The coffee is now lukewarm, which is the perfect drink to take with her on the ride. This roller coaster doesn't go upside-down, it just grinds to the top of impossibly steep drops, then—just as one begins to worry about one's bowels—lurches away from the precipice, goes down some gradual, yet jerky and twisty slope, then comes up again. One can do this all day, if one likes. It's possible to get off the ride, once the fare is paid, but it's hard to get the attention of the operator (who invariably looks disconcertingly like oneself), to be heard over the groans of one's fellow passengers. Funny, one can never remember what they look like. This is fine, because they can't remember either. Everyone is wearing helmets, the insides of which are covered (paved, paneled) with mirrors. That does not explain everything, but it explains a lot.

So when is this exercise over with? she wonders. She fingers a small boil on her neck and feels a twinge two inches away. She often dislikes the interconnectedness of things, would like—figuratively speaking, anyway—to be able to step on a butterfly in South America and not cause a monsoon off the Subcontinent. Would like to come together and apart like orbiting moons, like subatomic particles, like oil on water waiting to boil. She wants a way out of her queasy thoughts that doesn't involve words.

She has almost always preferred physics to biology. She can tell you exactly when the switch happened, if you ask the right way, if you sit quietly and don't look at her (not just not looking her in the eye, but actually looking away—preferably at the floor, although off to the side will work, too), if it seems to her you really want to know—not just for titillation, but to understand the skin rashes, the nervousness, the one admission of fear. She has not been broken, is not reconditioned parts. She is just how she is: slightly crooked and off-kilter, but able to stay some sort of course, she is sure, provided the road is reasonably clear and well-marked.