If you go back to the same pet store every week, month after month, to buy a single goldfish, the clerks will start to get suspicious. They will think that you have a piranha with a finicky appetite at home, or toxic tap water, or that you are part of some continuous frat-boy hazing ritual. They will eye you suspiciously while they chase yet another ninety-nine cent goldfish around the tank with a tiny green net. Their guesses are wrong, of course.
The real reason is much more sentimental.
One week seems to be the maximum lifespan for the goldfish that share my home. After two or three days, their fins begin to pale. Four or five, and they are gasping limply from the pebbles at the bottom of the bowl. In a week, they turn their blanching opal bellies toward the ceiling, joining the tiny souls of a hundred other goldfish that I have owned, named, and thrown into the river. I keep going back to the pet store, I suppose, because an apartment with nothing alive in it seems so empty.
Once I had a cat; a small, dingy-white cat. She found me in an alley, followed me home, and glided into my living room as though I had opened the door just for her. We napped together in the daytime, Nina in the patch of sunlight that fell on the armchair, me in the shady spot on the couch. I was careful never to touch her, never to get too close. I bought tiny cans of tuna especially for her, and gave her milk in a blue china dish. But it wasn’t long before the strain started to show. Her fur thinned and matted on her increasingly scrawny body. When I drove her across the city to leave her in a welcoming little park, she found her way back to me, with bones rippling through her hide and her yellow eyes sunken, like leaf fires in deep pits.
Nina’s grave is under a white stone in my otherwise drab backyard, with a patch of wild violets growing around it. I’ve sworn I’ll never take in another cat. I have no roommates; I have no close friends. But I allow myself the goldfish. I can barely feel it when they die.
I work the night shift at St. Mary’s Hospital. I disinfect emptied beds and chairs, mop the hallways, polish the floors. Generally I’m assigned to unoccupied rooms, preparing for or cleaning up after patients, but I am left alone enough that I can easily slip in and out of rooms that are occupied. In the midst of all that trauma and fear, nobody notices a custodian.
On a good night, there are a handful of car crashes, a few victims of domestic violence, someone who has injured himself with a power tool, and an unlucky athlete or two, besides the usual slew of cancer patients and people recovering from surgery. I can move quietly in and out of the rooms, emptying wastebaskets, replacing boxes of tissue, with the pain swirling around me as thick and sleek as oil paint. It soaks through me, fast and warm, filling me. I have noticed that after especially busy nights at work, my goldfish live a day or two longer.
I begin, when I can, in the emergency room. The pain there is sharp, piquant; it whets the appetite. In the wake of rushing gurneys, I mop trails of blood and dirt while pain spatters me with its bright needles.
Pain in the ob-gyn ward is syrupy and slow, muted with drugs; dessert pain. Too often, a crowd of snuffling family members fills the room right up to the doorway. I can catch just a hint of it, like the scent of burnt sugar, as I move down the hall.
The cancer ward is my main course, as dependable and solid as a grocery store. I move down the halls with my mop, stopping when something catches my fancy. Some nights it is a post-op patient, aching beneath the numbness of analgesics, unconsciously aware that part of his or her body is gone. Some nights it is a patient undergoing chemotherapy, nauseated and exhausted. Some nights it is the patients who lie still, waiting, not even able to stop the flood of rising pain with their dreams.
In another time, I could have been a torturer, an executioner. But I am not a killer by nature. I don’t need to be. The first hunters knew that when a creature dies so that another creature may live, nothing should be wasted. They found uses for tongues, hooves, fat, skin, sinew, teeth. They honored life’s end, salvaging every scrap.
I am the same. I feed at the edges, taking what no one will miss. I make sure that nothing is wasted.
Tonight, I stop in the hallway of the ICU. A door is open on my right. It is dark inside, but I can feel the pain drifting through the gap, sweet and fresh, and I know the room is occupied.
I give the door a gentle push with my shoulder. It swings open without a creak. My own shadow falls across the floor, silhouetted with the dim gold light of the hallway, and touches the metal bars of the elevated bed.
There is a girl in the bed. Her matted hair lays in dark streaks on the pillow’s papery cover. Machines attached to her body beep and huff quietly. One arm is in a cast; so is most of one leg. Her face is bruised, swollen, dotted with a line of stitches. The pain that rises from her is so rich, so sweet, I have to take a step back.
I glance at the chart hanging from the foot of the bed. Car accident. I could have made the same diagnosis. I have seen enough to recognize the signs of blunt trauma and wounds from broken glass.
The girl’s eyes are closed, shielded by thick, down-slanted eyelashes. Her lips are purple and lopsided, glossy as melted wax. I stand at the end of the bed, watching the gold light temper the hues of fresh bruises. She reminds me of ripe fruit, plums, figs, pomegranates; malleable, soft-skinned things.
She stirs as I watch her. One hand trailing with tubes drifts across her blanket. I take another step away and push my mop in a meaningless circle.
“Is somebody there?” the girl whispers.
“Just the custodian,” I say. “Sorry if I woke you.”
“I wasn’t really asleep.” Her voice is ragged. I can tell that she has been intubated; the inside of her throat is rubbed raw. It hurts her to speak. “At least, I don’t think I was asleep. It’s hard to tell.”
“Do you need me to call a nurse?”
“No. No, thank you.”
I push the mop into the corners, although the room is too dimly lit for me to see if I’m making any difference. The smell of her, the taste of her floats in the air. My mouth waters even as I drink it in.
“Turn into the light again,” the girl whispers. I obey her.
“I thought I recognized you,” she says. “But I guess I was thinking of someone else.”
She smiles. Only one side of her mouth moves. The other corner is blocked by her swollen cheek, the trail of stitches running beneath her eye. “Come here,” she says.
I move closer to the bed. The pain is so thick I have to close my eyes. My hunger is pulling at her, and she pulls back. We are ripping something between us.
She reaches out and grasps my hand. Her palm is cool and smooth. I can feel her body aching, the stitches itching, the tingling numbness in her fractured bones as if it was passing through her hand into me. I can feel her weakening, slowing; it is a thousand times more powerful than the tiny blips of the goldfish turning up their bellies in the bowl. I could live on this for weeks. For months.
I should back off, I know. This is too close. But I can’t pull myself away.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she says softly. “I just need to touch somebody. I hate being alone in here.”
She looks up at me. In the dim light, I can see that her eyes are beautiful, the irises large and dark.
“I’ll stay with you,” I say. “I’ll stay here as long as you want me to.”
The girl smiles at me again, a broken, half-formed smile that reveals two chipped teeth.
The machine beeping softly beside the bed begins to slow. I feel her lungs pressing painfully against a broken rib with each inhalation, until her breathing grows shallow, then almost imperceptible. I will have to hurry away before the nurses come rushing in, alerted to the flashing alarms. But there will be time for that. One more minute of this. One more taste.
She falls asleep still holding my hand.