Chapter 10 Lundy
Thompson did it in the book club chat, which is where Thompson does everything.
He dropped it between a question about the assigned novel and a fight with Berger about whether the main character was a coward.
If someone really wanted to woo a person, he wrote, they'd bring them special fish food.
Berger said that only works if the person likes seafood.
Thompson said fish food is always a strong option for people who like fish.
Nobody tagged anybody. Nobody had to. I read it twice and said nothing in the chat.
I was standing in the saltwater aisle of a specialty shop clear across town before I'd decided to drive there.
So now I'm at Soucy's door on an off day with a paper bag. He opens it in sweatpants with his hair wet from a shower. He looks at the bag before he looks at me.
"What's that."
"Frozen mysis. The good stuff, not the freezer-burned cubes the chain places carry. And the coral supplement, the amino one. The forums said a reef setup your size runs through it faster than people expect."
He doesn't take the bag. He stands there with the door half open and reads the label through the plastic. Something in his face moves. The smallest tectonic shift. The kind I've spent a season learning to catch.
"You researched my setup."
"I researched your setup."
"My setup is not on a forum. There is no forum with my setup on it. The specialist told me that to my face."
"Then I researched the closest thing to your setup and rounded up." I shrug. "Figured you round up on everything anyway."
That gets me the door the rest of the way. He turns and walks back into the apartment and leaves it open behind him, which from Soucy is a held door, an invitation with no words attached so neither of us has to hold the words.
The place is the way it always is, surfaces clear, nothing out without a reason, a man's whole life sorted and put away.
Except for the tank. The tank takes up the long wall and it's the opposite of the rest of the apartment, a hundred gallons of motion and color throwing blue light across the clean floor.
Coral in shapes that don't look real. Fish I don't have names for moving through it like the room has its own weather.
"Okay," I say, because I have to say something. "That's not a fish tank. That's a cathedral."
"It's a reef system." But he says it pleased, crossing to it, popping the mysis into a little freezer beside it I'd have bet money was full of more clean nothing. "Watch the back left. Give it a second."
I watch the back left. Something slides out from under a ledge of coral. Unhurried. Prehistoric. Banded in brown. It cruises the length of the glass.
"Is that a shark."
"Bamboo shark. Juvenile. He'll outgrow this tank in about two years and then I'll build him a bigger one.
" He says it the way other men say they're thinking about a second kid.
"The specialist comes monthly and looks at the tank like it's a problem he's not paid enough to solve.
First time, he said he'd never seen half these species in a personal setup. He meant it as a warning."
"And you took it as a goal?"
"I took it as a goal." He glances over. The small surprise again, that I got there without him laying the track.
"What's the blue one. The one that looks plugged in."
"Cleaner wrasse. He works for a living, eats parasites off the bigger fish. The whole thing's a system. Everybody's got a job. The shrimp turn the sand, the snails clean the glass, the wrasse cleans the fish, the coral runs the chemistry. I keep the numbers right and they run the city."
"You built a city."
"I built an ecosystem. The city runs itself, that's the entire point.
I can't control any of it, not really. I keep the conditions right and let them do what they do.
" He nudges a dial on the controller without looking, the way I'd straighten a picture.
"Salinity, pH, alkalinity, the light cycle, the flow.
All of that's mine, all of it's numbers, I could recite you a year of it from memory.
And then there's them, doing whatever they want inside the thing I built, and not one of them does what I'd predict, and that's the best part. That's the whole reason."
"How long did it take? To build it?"
"Three years. I started with a ten-gallon and one clownfish like everybody does, read a book, then read forty, and now I've got a hundred gallons and a guy who ships me coral frags from three states over." No apology in it. "I don't do anything halfway. You may have noticed."
"I noticed. You watched one goal forty times."
"That's different." Fast. Flat. A door closing and reopening in the same second. "That's not the same engine."
"What's the difference."
He watches the wrasse work a clownfish over, patient.
"This one feels good. It's never finished and that's fine, there's always more, and the more is the joy.
That one I can't stop, and the not stopping isn't joy, it's a thing I press because it hurts.
From across the room they look identical.
A guy at a screen. In here," he taps his temple, "they're not even the same language. "
He keeps his eyes on the tank. "Same thing with wanting somebody.
People hear demisexual and they slot it next to the counting, like it's another condition on the list. It's not.
It's orientation. The count is a lock I can't stop picking.
Wanting someone because I know them first, because the knowing is what builds it, that's just which direction I face. Different drawer entirely."
He runs a finger along the tank's rim, tracing the waterline.
"And the cataloguing, the way I walk into a room and the whole grid of it's already there, every exit and every surface and where you'd put a bag so it wouldn't get bumped.
That's not the disorder either. That's just how I see.
The disorder is the thing that won't let me stop checking what I've already seen. The seeing itself is mine."
He says it plainly. All of it. A thing he learned in a quiet office over years and can recite even when he can't always feel the line in the moment. Three different drawers, and he can label every one. Then he feeds the fish.
I watch him do it. I watch the fish ignore every pattern he's built, the timed lights and the calibrated water, going where they go. And his hands, which never stop, which run their quiet count against his thigh in every room I've ever stood in with him, go still on the glass.
I've seen Soucy's hands go still in two places. The crease, where his whole brain goes somewhere clean. And a cat, once, in Tikh's living room. Now three. He doesn't know he's doing it. He never knows. That's how I know it's the real thing and not the managed thing.
"People bring me stuff all the time," he says, after a while, still watching the shark.
"Noise-cancelling headphones. A weighted blanket somebody read an article about.
Marchetti got me a little desk sand garden with a tiny rake.
I appreciated it, I did, but it's a thing for managing a person.
Helpful. Everybody on that team is so helpful it could break your heart.
" The shark turns. "Nobody's ever brought me something for them.
" He tips his chin at the tank. "For the part that isn't a problem to solve. "
And that's the thing I can't put down, standing in his blue-lit apartment with my hands finally empty.
I know how to show up. I move the bag before it gets bumped.
I take the rattling stall. I tone the cayenne out of a recipe without being asked.
I did it for a Seattle room, right up until the morning they decided a younger model could do the infrastructure job I'd welded myself into.
I learned the lesson the wound already knew. Useful isn't the same as wanted.
The food was for the fish. I drove across town and aimed it at the one part of him nobody else thinks to feed. That's a different country than the corner seat and the moved bag.
I just can't tell yet whether I crossed the border because I care about him. Or because caring and being needed have always been the same address for me and I've never had to find out if I'd know the difference.
"You're staying for dinner," he says. Not a question. "I have actual food. I'm not feeding you mysis."
"I can cook if you've got anything in there besides clean nothing."
"I have eggs and four condiments and a frozen thing. Make it work or we order."
"That's a dare."
"It's a fridge. You're the one who toned down a whole recipe for me and thought I didn't clock it." He says it to the tank, not to me, which is the only way he'd ever say it. "I clock everything. The jambalaya was a war crime against your own taste buds and you did it anyway."
"You ate the whole bowl."
"I'm getting more adventurous. There's a cat coming.
I'm practicing being a person who can handle a little mess in the apartment.
" He nods at a corner where a covered litter box already sits, brand new, waiting, the most un-Soucy object in a room full of clean lines.
"Saturday. After the home game. I drove past the shelter four times and then I went in. "
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." The smallest thing at the corner of his mouth. "You can come. He bit a volunteer. I have a type."
"You're doing it again," I say, because two can read a room.
"Doing what."
"Letting me in and pretending it's logistics."
He doesn't answer that. He reaches over without looking and bumps the back of his hand against mine. Knuckles to knuckles. The smallest possible amount of contact. He leaves it there. "Thank you. For the mysis. It's the right one. Nobody ever gets the right one."
"I round up," I say. We stand there in the weather of his strange beautiful tank. His hand against my hand. The shark making its slow circuit of a world he built and can't control and loves precisely because he can't. I let the question I can't answer keep swimming, and I don't reach for the net.
?