Life in a Fishbowl Page 5

  When she came to in the middle of the night, there were no more tears. She felt hollowed out, like there was a big, gaping, sucking hole at the center of her being. The only thing left to fill it was anger. Deirdre didn’t cry anymore because she was too mad to cry. She stomped up the stairs and practically kicked in the door to her husband’s office.

  “I just have to know, what the fuck were you thinking,” she barked into the room. She stopped short in the doorway. Every other time she opened this door, Jared was either sitting cross-legged in the desk chair in front of his computer or napping on the futon that doubled as their guest bed. He wasn’t there now, and for a minute Deirdre thought he wasn’t in the room. That’s when she noticed him lying on the floor.

  “Oh my god!” she cried and dropped to her knees. “Jare?” She shook him, and his eyes flicked open.

  “Oh, hey, D.” He smiled up at her. “I must’ve dozed off again.”

  “What are you doing on the floor?”

  “Reducing external stimuli. Helps me focus. I think.”

  Deirdre lay down on her back next to Jared and stared at the ceiling. It was hard to see any detail in the low light.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked after a long minute of painful silence.

  “Does what hurt?”

  “Your tumor.”

  “Oh, right, of course. Sometimes. Yes. Headaches. Mostly, I just feel confused. And I’m starting to forget things.”

  “Like what?”

  Jared propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her. He pursed his lips and tried hard to concentrate on Deirdre’s question. “I’m not sure,” he answered.

  “Oh, sweetie,” she said, tearing up. “I was just making a joke.”

  Jared paused for a second and then smiled. “Oh, I see. That is pretty funny.” He put his head back down.

  They lay there for a while, like two kids in a summer field looking up at the stars.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, keeping her eyes focused on the ceiling.

  “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said I forgot.”

  “Is that true?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I suppose it’s not. I guess I wanted to figure out how to make everything okay first.”

  “And selling yourself to some psychopath on eBay was your answer?”

  “Like I said, I’m confused. I’m not even really sure what I’m saying to you right now. Am I making sense?”

  Deirdre rolled over to look at her husband to see if he was serious; she didn’t see a hint of irony or mischief on his face.

  “Don’t you think the girls and I can take care of ourselves?”

  “I guess I didn’t think,” he said. They were both quiet for a while before Jared added, “Although, you know, I did get a bid for a million dollars. I think it’s from a hooker or something. The name is SisterBJ143.”

  Deirdre rolled onto her side, facing away from Jared.

  “What?” he asked, taking her hand. “I won’t do anything you wouldn’t want me to do.”

  “Then don’t die.” She said it so softly she wasn’t sure Jared had heard her. When Deirdre rolled back over, she saw serpentine streaks of tears carving rivers on her husband’s cheek.

  “Oh, Jare,” she said and took his hand.

  They both cried and hugged and hugged and cried.

  Then their lips met, and they began to kiss.

  ***

  Jackie was sitting in the back of the class, her usual spot, slumped down in her seat, trying to evade the notice of her chemistry teacher. Maybe if she had been more nonchalant about it, the teacher wouldn’t have noticed, wouldn’t have zeroed in.

  Esther Markowitz stood five feet two inches tall but still managed to tower over every one of the students in her class, including Jackie, who was a good three inches taller. Patches of pink scalp showed through the teacher’s short, frizzy hair, and she had some kind of monstrosity—a mole, a wart, a boil—at the corner of her right eyebrow. Her demeanor matched her appearance to a T.

  “Miss Stone,” she boomed, walking toward Jackie. “Perhaps you can tell us how many joules are in a mole.” She arrived at Jackie’s desk, standing ramrod straight and perfectly still.

  Jackie kept her head down.

  “Look at me, Miss Stone.”

  Jackie looked up, but she couldn’t make eye contact with Mrs. Markowitz. She wondered how the woman had managed to become a “Mrs.” Who would marry such a witch?

  “Well?” the teacher asked.

  Jackie had no idea; she never had any idea.

  “Jackie?” Mrs. Markowitz said.

  Jackie didn’t answer.

  “Jackie?” she said again, this time louder.

  Jackie just stared at the front of the class, her eyes searching for some clue to the answer to the question, searching for some way out.

  “Jackie!” Mrs. Markowitz yelled, grabbing Jackie by the shoulder and shaking it with more force than such a diminutive person should have been able to muster.

  “JACKIE!”

  Jackie opened her eyes and saw her sister. Megan was gently shaking Jackie’s shoulder and whispering her name, trying to wake her from a dream.

  It took a minute for Jackie’s head to clear and to remember where she was and what was going on.

  “Huh? What time is it?”

  “It’s like two in the morning,” Megan whispered, “but listen!”

  Jackie went still and listened. She heard laughing. No, crying. No, something else. “What is that?”

  “I think it must be Dad. I’m scared.”

  “C’mon,” Jackie said, taking her sister by the hand. They slunk out of the bedroom into the pitch-black hallway. They edged along the wall, moving closer to the sound until they were outside their father’s study. As soon as they got there, Jackie recognized the noise for what it was. Her parents were making love.

  Jackie wasn’t sure how she knew, since she had never even kissed a boy, but there was no mistaking it. She looked at Megan and saw that her sister had figured it out, too.

  “Gross!” Megan said.

  “Sssh,” Jackie told her, and led them both back to Jackie’s room. They crawled back into bed together, and in a matter of moments Megan had fallen back asleep. Jackie lay awake for a while longer and smiled for the first time in that long, miserable day. If her parents were still able to make love, maybe her father’s illness wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Maybe everything would be okay.

  ***

  Glio—the name by which the high-grade glioblastoma tumor now thought of itself—didn’t know what was happening, but it was lighting up Jared’s brain like a football stadium at night.Glio really, really, really liked it. He stopped to watch.

  It was the first time Glio thought of itself in the masculine. “I am he,” it said, or he said, to no one in particular. Or would have said had he been able to form words or even make sounds.

  The show ended in one ginormous explosion of color and light, then faded like the evening sky on the most perfect night. Glio sat in wonder for a moment before returning to the work at hand, picking off his host’s memories one by one—the sheriff’s badge Jared got for his third birthday, a big dog biting him on the cheek when he was six, running away from his family at an amusement park when he was ten because his cousin was teasing him about his fear of roller coasters. Buoyed by the light show, Glio’s hunger intensified. It was a feast to end all feasts.

  The pièce de résistance was Jared’s first real kiss. He was thirteen years old, on vacation with his parents at some long-forgotten resort in the Berkshires. The girl’s lips were covered in a fruity gloss that surprised Glio, just as it had surprised Jared. He expected them to be moist with saliva, not sticky with raspberry. He could feel the gloss adhere to his own lips, or Glio’s idea of lips, holding him in place, making the kiss last. The girl’s name was lost to Jared in the ebb of time, but Glio found it. Gail.

  He could see her face: a wide mouth, eyes so rich in col
or they were almost lavender, and a button nose. Glio had no way of knowing that the memory had been enhanced by Jared’s brain. But it didn’t matter. It was like manna from heaven.

  After the kiss was over, the memory consumed, Glio drifted off into the hypothalamus and, like his host, fell asleep.

  ***

  Hazel Huck’s shoulders sagged as she stared at her computer screen.

  “A million dollars,” she said aloud to her empty bedroom.

  From the very beginning, Hazel’s plan had been to raise money to purchase Jared on eBay and then return him to his family, to allow him to die with dignity, comfort, and cash. She had succeeded in getting pledges totaling $15,000 from her online gaming friends. She had called in every favor—sold every piece of handcrafted virtual jewelry, hired her level sixty-five druid out for future quests, and sold every ingot of gold in her war chest for pennies on the dollar. It was a remarkable feat for a seventeen-year-old girl.

  And then it went viral.

  All of a sudden, Warcraft characters Hazel had never met were wearing “Save Jared” T-shirts over their chain mail and leather armor. There were player vs. player melees in which the losing party would agree to donate X dollars to the cause.

  Blizzard Entertainment, the über gaming company behind World of Warcraft, caught wind of what was happening in Azeroth and pledged to match whatever funds were raised. The money was collected in an account set up by one of Hazel’s guild brothers who, in real life, was a banker. Hazel’s $15,000 swelled to $150,000 almost overnight, and then doubled with the Blizzard match. But it was still many, many leagues from the million-dollar reserve and opening bid. The effort, spectacular though it was, failed.

  Hazel couldn’t explain why Jared’s cause had become so important to her. Yes, it started with Boots, but now it was something more. Her life needed meaning. Jared Stone’s plight made her realize that fighting imaginary monsters to get to virtual treasure was a pleasant diversion, but not something to aspire to. Here was a chance to help a real human being.

  In the end, though, it turned out to be moot.

  “A million dollars,” she said again.

  Hazel turned off the screen, flopped on her bed, grabbed her weathered copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, and fell asleep reading.

  ***

  Sherman Kingsborough saw the $1,000,000 bid and panicked. He hadn’t yet received an answer to his query about the seller’s physical and mental state, but he had so worked himself up about the chance to kill another human being that he had to get in the game. His bid was $1.2 million.

  It was a worthwhile gamble. Besides, to Sherman, it was really just pocket change.

  He had settled on a Hunger Games–like test of skills in which he and Jared would be turned loose in an enclosed wooded reserve. They would be given scant supplies, minimal survival gear, and neither would be allowed to leave until the other was dead. He had already begun scouting locations and hiring staff to make it all happen.

  But without Jared, it would all be academic. Sherman needed to win that auction.

  ***

  Sister Benedict couldn’t tear herself away from the computer. She had been sitting there for ten hours, only getting up once to use the bathroom.

  She refreshed the page every two or three minutes, a solemn promise to herself that each click of the mouse would be the last, that she would turn the computer off and tend to her duties, returning to the auction later, closer to its scheduled end time. But, despite her best efforts, Sister Benedict was human, and she simply could not look away.

  Since the auction began, three different young nuns in training had entered the Sister’s office seeking guidance in resolving personal disputes. With each interruption, Sister Benedict looked up from her computer and said, “God gave us brains and hearts to figure out how to fix our own problems. Don’t come back until you can tell me what path the Lord has shown you to solve this crisis,” the word “crisis” dripping with the sarcasm of absolute authority. The Sister was so lost in the world of the Internet that she had no idea what any of the novices had said to her. For all she knew, one of them was pregnant. (None were.) But still, she couldn’t stop clicking that mouse.

  The Sister was aware that her bid was a canard, a red herring, and that she and the Church had no intention of paying the money. Cardinal Trippe’s plan was for the Sisters of the Perpetual Adoration to make sure that they won the bid. When the auction ended and it was time to pay, they would simply renege. In this way, they would block Jared Stone from going through with his plan.

  “But aren’t we committing a kind of sin?” the Sister had asked the Cardinal, confusion etched on her thick brow. “If we do not intend to complete the auction, then bidding on the auction is a kind of lie, is it not?”

  “Do you know the story of Rosa Parks?” Cardinal Trippe asked.

  “Of course, Your Grace.”

  “Then you know that Ms. Parks broke the law by sitting where she sat on that bus. Yet what she did was still right.” While Sister Benedict grudgingly acknowledged that the law restricting where black people could and could not sit was wrong, she still thought that Rosa Parks should have followed the rules. Though she, the Sister, was politic enough to know to keep that to herself. She also had to bite her cheek to stop herself from correcting the Cardinal from using “Ms.” when he should have been saying “Miss,” something she did with her students at the Annunciation school.

  “It was a form of civil disobedience,” the Cardinal said. “What we’re doing is the twenty-first-century version of the same. Call it social disobedience. It is wrong that this man can sell his life on eBay, so we will block him from doing so, peacefully, passively.”

  Dear Lord, the Sister thought, give me the strength to deal with this fool. Next he’ll be talking to me about that Indian martyr in the diaper.

  When Sherman Kingsborough’s bid came through at $1.2 million, the Sister immediately bid it up to $1.5 million. Even though the bid wasn’t real, she couldn’t help but revel in the appropriation of such a large sum of money. Perhaps, she thought, I can still convince the Cardinal that when we win the auction, we should pay the price and bring this man under our care. The Sister had, unknowingly, become intoxicated with a feeling of power.

  ***

  Ethan Overbee watched the bidding war heat up. He watched, and he waited.

  ***

  Sherman Kingsborough had barely finished submitting his bid when his offer was trumped. The original bidder had upped the ante to $1.5 million.

  “Son of a bitch!” he said to an empty room. Or not so much empty, as filled with garish trinkets designed to flaunt his wealth, including a life-size replica of Michelangelo’s David. The truth was Sherman hated art. But an older woman he had lusted after a year earlier convinced him that all men of wealth and power covet great works of art. “It’s a measure of one’s place in the world,” she had said with an air of certainty. Sherman never really got it but indulged the woman’s passion for sculpture and painting. She seemed worldly and wise, and for a brief time he thought he was falling in love. He wasn’t.

  Not to be outdone on eBay, Sherman immediately raised the going price for Jared Stone’s life to $2 million. “Take that, bi-otch,” he said to an original member of the Terracotta Army, smuggled, or so he was told, out of China on a rickshaw. (If his paramour—with whom Sherman had grown bored and dumped—had done her homework, she would have known the clay soldier was a fake by the decidedly angled features on its face, and the “Made in Taiwan” scrawl etched on the sole of the soldier’s left boot.) Sherman didn’t know that his competing bidder was a woman, and he definitely didn’t know she was a nun. He just called everyone “bi-otch.” It had become his thing.

  He, too, watched, and he, too, waited.

  ***

  Sister Benedict Joan said five Hail Marys and crossed herself twice as she increased her bid on Jared’s life to $2.5 million. The Sister had deluded herself into believing that she would prevail wit
h the Cardinal and that Jared Stone would be hers. The irony of it was lost on her completely.

  “Ha!” she cackled when she saw that she was once again the auction’s new top dog, immediately covering her mouth and giggling, looking around to make sure no one was there to witness this act of hubris.

  ***

  When Jared woke up, he was lying on the floor of his office, covered with a blanket. Sunlight bent around the edge of the curtain, leaving two long, white stripes on the carpet.

  “The White Stripes,” Jared said aloud. Seethe with trips. He looked around the room. “Deirdre’s gone, if she was ever here.” He couldn’t be sure. Trebuchet was gone, too, and he realized he was alone and talking to himself.

  Jared had been dreaming about something, but he couldn’t remember what. It might have had something to do with his first kiss, but as he sat on the floor and racked his brain, or what he feared was left of his brain, he couldn’t remember any details. At that moment, he wasn’t entirely sure he’d ever been kissed. But then the memory of the previous night came flooding back. That, at least, was still intact.

  Stretching his back and neck, Jared eased himself up and over to his computer. The high bid was now $2.5 million, still from SisterBJ143. “Are there really one hundred forty-two other SisterBJs?” he asked the computer screen.

  When he looked at the bidding history, Jared saw that one other bidder—the man who had submitted the unsettling questions about his physical and mental acuity—had come in at $2 million.

  A bidding war was exactly what Jared hoped would materialize. He hadn’t answered the man’s letter, and now thought it wise that he had not. To Jared’s way of thinking, this was an “as is” purchase. He didn’t need to give anyone a leg up.

  Then a strange thing happened.

  Jared refreshed the page, hoping to see the two bidders egging each other on, but when he did, his auction disappeared. At the same time, he saw a flag on the page indicating that he had a new e-mail message in his account. Figuring there was a connection, he opened his in-box. This is what he found:

  Dear Seller—We regret to inform you that your auction, “Human Life for Sale,” violates eBay’s usage policies against listing humans or human remains as sale items, and as such, the listing has been removed. All bidders have been released from their obligation, and you are hereby prohibited from listing this or similar auctions in the future. Should you have any questions, please address them to Customercare. Any subsequent violations of our usage policies could lead to your immediate suspension from eBay. Thank you for your time.