The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (8 page)

But I didn’t. I was young and didn’t know any better. So instead I asked him about the thing on my mind: “Did you kill anyone in Vietnam?” I said.

“Did I kill anyone in Vietnam?” said Gary.

“Did you?”

“Did I kill anyone in Vietnam,” said Gary. “Did I kill anyone in Vietnam.”

And again he began to cry silently, in a way I hadn’t figured on at all.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really.”

But he went on crying. He cried with no shame. He cried
in a way I didn’t think was possible. He didn’t rub his eyes or try to stop it. He just cried.

Later we took down our sleeping bags from where they’d been airing over the branch of an arctic pine, and laid them out on the flat ground we’d cleared the night before. The two of us lay buried in our bags, only our faces showing, the drawstrings pulled around our heads so that the spilling of the snowmelt over the pebbles in the streambed was like a muted roar, a streaming music beginning and ending in our ears. We lay there side by side staring up at the stars, and talked about how unfathomable was the phrase
light years
, the possibility of life on Saturn’s seventh moon, the years that would have to pass before NASA put a man on Mars. We talked about a theory Gary read about in a book—that time and space didn’t really exist, that everything was in reality something else we didn’t know about.

After a while we gave up on the useless things and watched for the points of light that were satellites among the forever-fixed stars. We watched them hurtling slowly to the horizon, gravity tugging them always toward the earth so that they moved in a relentless straight line out of vision. Gary said that, if need be, a satellite could take a close-up photograph of us in our sleeping bags, as soon as the sky became light enough.

“But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s beautiful up here. I’m glad we came. I’m glad we’re here.”

I heard him, minutes later, moving toward sleep, and I began to feel alone among all those mountains. And then I couldn’t fall asleep that night; I felt ashamed of myself. But
later on I found that Gary was awake too, and then we passed the dark hours talking.

“Two insomniacs,” he said after a while. “Crazy, Bud. Insane.”

“At least we’ve got someone to talk to,” I said.

“At least we’ve got that,” said Gary.

Piranhas

T
he door of Paul’s bedroom opened one evening and his parents and their dinner guests came in.

“Paul’s room,” his mother announced. “And Paul.”

“And is this connected to the intercom system?”

“Certainly it is. The whole house is.”

“So you can call him for dinner. How convenient.”

“If there were such a thing as dinner,” said Paul’s mother. “If dinner existed, yes.”

She laughed, airily, at her own words.

The guests fanned out, looking at things with calm detachment, absorbed by the walls, the floor. Paul, his hands in his lap, sat on the edge of his bed and watched them silently.

“He has his own television,” someone pointed out.

“He has his own television, yes,” said Paul’s mother.

“Strictly regulated,” added his father. “The homework has to get done right before the television comes on at night.”

The guests eyed Paul with curiosity now. He thought he
knew what they were thinking, though—was he the sort of boy who had trouble at school? Was his homework a family problem?

“What grade are you in, Paul?” somebody asked.

“Seventh,” his mother said. “We started him early.”

“Look at this,” one of the guests insisted. “The dial on this intercom’s turned all the way down. How can he hear anything?”

“He can’t,” said Paul’s mother. “We never use that, really. It’s just there.”

“I’ve always thought that about intercoms. You can’t justify the expense.”

“Oh, come on,” answered Paul’s mother. “Let me tell you something. It came in handy when Paul was a baby. We could monitor his crying from upstairs.”

“Well how much is an intercom system? Let’s hear some figures on this.”

“I don’t remember,” Paul’s mother answered.

“It came with the house,” said Paul’s father.

“Well, what good is it if you don’t use it?” said the guest. “It’s just a lot of useless wires running through the walls.”

“That’s it,” said Paul’s mother. “Useless wires.”

For some reason everybody laughed at these words. Then, as if by some unspoken agreement, it was time for the house tour to move on.

“Hey, Paul,” somebody said. “You’re one lucky guy living in a place like this. And I bet you don’t even appreciate it.”

Once again, everybody stared at Paul. They stood together in a group near the doorway, drinks in their hands, bored.

“He’s the silent type,” explained Paul’s mother. “Say goodbye to everybody, Paul.”

“Good-bye,” Paul said. “See you.”

They went out. He could hear them in the hall. “Let me show you my new hot tub,” his mother was saying. “It’s
wonderful.”

Walking home in the rain on Monday afternoon, Paul slipped into the pet shop on Sixty-fifth Street.

“Wet out,” the man at the counter said in greeting. “You know what I’m saying?
Wet.”

The man wore a square mustache and black plastic glasses. He stood at the cash register with a pencil behind his ear eating popcorn from a brown paper bag, and looking, to Paul, a little sinister for some reason. His shop had the vaguely menacing aura of a laboratory set up in a cave. Four rows of aquariums stretched away into the darkness. Only they were lit—nothing else. The fish hovered as if in a dream, secure in their lit glass houses. The place smelled of jungle; vapor fogged all its windows. In another room caged birds sang.

“Wow,” Paul said. “It’s neat in here.”

“Look around,” the man advised. “Go ahead. Dry off. Put your books down and look some.”

“Okay,” Paul said. “Thanks.”

He wandered between the rows, peering into each tank with his hands on his knees, feeling immense suddenly. The man had hung a placard over each aquarium:
PARADISEFISH—FROM TAIWAN; CHOCOLATE GOURAMI—THE MALAY PENINSULA; BANDED CLIMBING PERCH—THE ZAIRE BASIN
. The imprisoned fish appeared to lead effortless and aimless lives. They hung suspended in corners, one eye to the glass, or tipped themselves
toward the membrane of the surface. Some swam diligently, but most seemed to understand there was no point to that. They went wherever the water took them as it bubbled up from the filters.

Paul watched them for some time. He decided—though he had no words for it—that they lived in a private and trivial universe, subject to currents of thought so removed from their lives that their identities as individual fish had been submerged. Perhaps they had known all the miseries of capture; perhaps in transport from some exotic home the unassailable loneliness of the world had been revealed to them. Now they swung about in watery cages, forgetting or remembering, uncertain if what occurred in the course of their hours constituted an actual existence. Paul, with a conscious exertion of the imagination, thought of them as they might have been in their other lives—free, inhabiting a warm and boundless ocean, darting joyfully, their hearts light, feeding, in conquest, at liberty to live. He thought of them as cultivating a preordained singularity, nurtured by forces that were rightfully in effect, according to the universe’s grand plan.

When he looked up the man at the counter was watching him suspiciously. He still stood behind his cash register stuffing his mouth with popcorn.

“You’re interested,” he said to Paul. “I can tell.”

Paul nodded.

“Start small,” the man advised. “Ten gallons, max. Decide if you like it, then move up gradual. You’ve got all kinds of time.”

“I already know I like it,” Paul said.

The man crammed more popcorn between his lips. “Oh, yeah?” he said. “How can you tell?”

“I just can,” Paul said. “I’m like that.”

“Well,” said the man. “Fine then. If you know yourself that well,
fine.”

Paul came upstairs at six-thirty. His parents were in their living room now—he’d heard them turn the lock fifteen minutes before, he’d given them time to get settled. The television was on: news. His father sat in the wing chair with his feet across an ottoman, listening through headphones to the CD player, pieces of the mail scattered on the floor beside him. His mother—her feet pulled up beneath her on the sofa—leafed through a mail-order catalog.

“Hello,” Paul said to them. “You’re home.”

His father pried off the headphones. “Hello,” he said. “Did you use the VCR after school, Paul? I noticed someone left the power on.”

“No,” Paul said. “I didn’t.”

“You’re wasting electricity,” his mother said.

“I didn’t use it,” Paul repeated.

They stopped talking in order to watch a television advertisement. A car rose up from the surface of the road and flew off into the glitter of deep space. Then it returned, a woman got into it. A man in jeans, leaning jauntily against the side of a barn, watched her flash by. She went around a corner, got out in front of a nightclub. A man played a saxophone beside a water fountain, sweating. The woman was driving again, her lavender fingernails trailing across the upholstery. A man sitting in front of a gas station, the sun setting in the mountains behind him, scratched his head as she blew past.

“Boring,” announced Paul’s mother, and turned a page in her mail-order catalog.

Paul wandered into the kitchen. For a while he opened cabinets, looking at things—noodles, canned olives, bottled salad dressing. His father came in and went to the refrigerator, pulled out a beer, snapped it open and drank leaning against the counter.

“We can microwave,” he said, loosening his tie. “Sound okay to you, Paul?”

Paul nodded.

His father opened the freezer door. “Beef stroganoff,” he announced. “Halibut in cream sauce, pasta marinara, shrimp gumbo—what’ll it be?”

“Beef stroganoff,” Paul said.

“I’m for halibut,” said his father.

His father opened the microwave oven. “Can I get an aquarium?” Paul asked.

“What?”

“I want to buy an aquarium,” said Paul.

“An aquarium?” said his father. “What for?”

“I just want one, that’s all. Can I?”

“I don’t know,” said his father. “You’d better ask your mother, Paul.”

They went into the living room together.

“An aquarium,” said his mother. “Where do you want to keep it?”

“In my room,” Paul answered. “Please?”

“Is it messy?”

“No.”

“Who’s going to clean it when it needs to be cleaned?”

“I will. I promise, Mom.”

“I don’t know,” said his mother.

She turned the pages of her catalog.

“It’s not like a dog or a cat,” said his father. “Personally, I’m for it, Kim.”

“Why do you want fish?” said his mother.

“I don’t know,” answered Paul.

“All you can do is
look
at them,” said his mother.

“I know that,” said Paul.

“How much money are we talking about?”

“I don’t know,” Paul told her. “I could use my Christmas money, though.”

His mother tossed her catalog on the coffee table. She stood, tossed her bangs from her eyes, brushed a wrinkle from the front of her skirt and—stretching toward the ceiling, only her toes still touching the carpet, her hands balled into fists above her head—she yawned.

“No,” she said. “You leave your Christmas money in the bank, all right?
I’ll
pay for the aquarium.”

“
I
want to pay for it,” Paul said.

“You can’t,” said his mother. “
I
want to.”

Ken, a friend from school, a boy who wore a ski parka and who put gel in his blond hair, came to look at the new aquarium one afternoon.

“Weird,” he said. “That one with the thing on his nose.”

“That’s an elephant fish,” Paul said.

“What’s with this one?”

“That’s a severum. He got his tail chewed. That guy there—the Jack Dempsey?—he does it. He’s
rude.”

“Cool,” said Ken. “Do they fight?”

“No.”

“You ever see a Siamese fighting fish?”

“No.”

“I saw it on television,” Ken explained. “It’s so cool. They kill each other. You throw them in a tank together and watch them
brawl.”

“Really?”

“People bet on them, I think in China.”

“Really?”

“It’s so cool,” Ken said.

“You ever see two cats wrestle?” Paul asked. “It’s so cool. They—”

“They’re
screwing
,” Ken said. “That’s different.”

Paul fell silent.

“What’re the ones with the stripes?” Ken asked.

“Those are tiger barbs.”

“They’re kind of small.”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“Maybe the Jack Dempsey fish could eat those guys. How come they’re not all chewed up?”

“They’re fast,” Paul said. “They get away.”

“Well, what about the blue ones? They don’t look so fast.”

“I don’t know,” Paul said. “Those are gouramis. The Dempsey leaves those guys alone.”

“What’s this?” Ken said, tapping the glass of the tank. “This one? Right over here?”

“That’s a red-tailed shark.”

“Cool,” said Ken. “What does he eat?”

“They all eat the same stuff,” Paul explained. “This.” He held up the can of Tetramin. “It’s like leaves and stuff,” he said to Ken.

“Maybe you ought to throw in some
meat
,” Ken advised. “So they can get bigger—they’re pretty dinky looking.”

“They don’t get big,” explained Paul. “You want them to get big, you put them in a bigger tank.”

“You ever see that movie?” Ken asked. “This girl goes down to South America with her dad. He’s a scientist or something. She takes her clothes off to go swimming and these
piranhas
eat her. It’s so cool,” he added.

“I saw that,” Paul said. “Gross.”

“It grossed my friend out,” Ken said. “I didn’t get grossed out, though. You remember when that scientist guy gets it?”

“That
was gross. That was
really
gross.”