When the bell rings for outdoor rec time, I sprint to the dirt patch beside the basketball court where I find Twelve at work. She squats real low and stacks miniature bricks to make miniature walls, a big magnifying glass in her left hand and chopsticks in her right. Her consistency in this habit rivals the sunrise.
I slow down on my approach so as not to betray eagerness, and lie down on my back beside her. She hates to talk while she’s working, but doesn’t mind listening. She says it helps her focus, like how some people need a tv on to sleep. The topic doesn’t matter to her, so I just let my mouth wander.
By my guess, she is twenty-five years old, five years my junior. She is a hard worker. Blisters bleed through little bandages all over her hands. I’m not sure what she is in for.
As for what I’m in for, I got into an argument last October at a house party with a fleece-clad day trader about whether there was a dead pufferfish lodged in his esophagus, which there obviously was, but of course no one wants to acknowledge these things.
I’m not sure what Twelve uses to make the tiny bricks she builds the walls with. She hauls them out to the rec area in metal lunch boxes.
Some mornings I meet an old man named Six in the atrium for table tennis. Recently he said to me, “Forgive my pace of play, young man. If I don’t recite The Angelus in full, I can’t serve.” Of course I knew this. I had spent more time waiting for him to finish his recitations than I had serving, receiving, and holding volley combined.
I told him well that’s just the character of the dead fish in his esophagus. He expressed articulate doubts about this. But I got my hand in and out of his neck without too much fuss, and once it was out he was willing to listen. It was a zebrafish. Compulsive repeaters, those.
Sometimes during outdoor rec time I try to persuade Twelve to let me reach into her esophagus and pull out the fish that compels her to construct these miniature walls. Perhaps it’s a blue-spotted jawfish? They don’t trust doors, so they rebuild the wall around their home every day.
“Wouldn’t you like to see whether it’s pretty?” I once asked.
“That’s a sexist thing to ask a woman,” she said, “presuming I’m going to think the salient part of finding a dead fish in my throat would be whether it’s pretty. No, the salient part would be the principle.”
The little walls she builds will keep enemies out, she says. As one of the strong, it is up to her to protect the weak. In the future when a colony of warlike ants emerges beside a colony of peacenik ants fond of psychedelics and tapestries, her walls will save the latter from the former by circumscribing the former in an impenetrable perimeter, cutting off their supply lines.
One day, perhaps because it was hot and I was bored and wanted to stir up some shit, I asked Twelve what if the warlike ants attacked the peacenik ants underground? Like by tunneling under the walls?
She refused to speak to me for days. Even when I found her in the dirt patch during outdoor rec time and pressed my hairline against her hairline and our noses touched, she refused to meet my eyes.
At the end of the week she found me in the cafeteria and said, “I’ll build walls underground too.”
“But how? You’d have to map their tunnel system.”
She palmed the table hard, rattling everyone’s compostable spoons. “I’ll dig deep.”
That was weeks ago, and she hasn’t been coming to lunch. After the night nurses are persuaded by my sleeping pose, I sneak down the hall to her room and crawl under her bed.
“Do you know how yet?” I whisper loudly.
“Not yet.”
“It might help to know what kind of fish yours is.”
She is silent.
“Do you not want to talk tonight?”
“Not if it’s going to be about fish,” she says. She rolls onto her side and lets a hand hang over the edge of the bed. Dirt fills every wrinkle of her knuckles. Two nails have cracked to the root. She’s been digging by hand.
“Why don’t you join us for lunch tomorrow?” I say.
She yanks her hand back. For a while I wait for her to say something but she doesn’t, so I sneak back to my room.
At indoor rec time the next day, Six and I meet in the atrium with our paddles. Without the Marian devotions, pace of play is much improved. Six’s aging face and bent back disguise his powerful serve. Straight, fast, back-spun, every time.
Twelve comes to watch us play. I’m glad to see her.
“Not dead yet I see,” she says to Six, who everyone is waiting to see how long he can live.
“Not yet. And I’ve taken up fornication.”
Neither of us ask with whom. I think Six is one-hundred-and-thirty years old.
Ants get in the cafeteria food. At lunch, Twelve watches an ant fight the surface tension of her rice goop for freedom, and says, “They can’t all be escaping. Some of them must be drowning inside, and we must be eating them.”
Everyone at the table tells her to shut up, including Six, who is usually polite. Twelve does not understand that something being true does not make people want to hear it. But why shouldn’t it? I don’t get it either.
Nurse Em stops by the table to ask if conflict mediation is needed. Everyone gets quiet and lowers their head until she walks away.
Nurse Em started a month ago, to replace Nurse Darrell, whose throat I reached into during group session. She’s heard the story, I think, because she never calls on me.
Under twelve’s bed at night I propose a new strategy: what if instead of waiting for a warlike colony to emerge near a peacenik colony, we found a warlike colony and sealed it in? That way they would starve, and the resources they consume would become available to support the emergence of a peacenik colony at a later time. “It’s the same as your strategy,” I say, “but in 4D instead of 3D.”
She likes the idea.
The ants in our rice demonstrate aggression. They are red with serrated antennae. Twelve and I decide to start our search for warlike ants there.
The next time Nurse Em stops by our table, Twelve asks her for a kitchen shift, and Nurse Em says Twelve can have any shift she wants if I’ll swear to never speak in group session. She doesn’t want me bringing up the fish.
“Nurse Em, if I could be gag ordered I would not be in this place.”
Nurse Em drags a chair over from the adjacent table. She is committing to the conversation. “Your cooperation with me on this would mean so much.”
Twelve tunes out and combs her rice goop. She assumes I will not sacrifice for her, that there will be no kitchen shift.
“Fine,” I say, quietly. My insides wriggle.
“Sorry?” Nurse Em leans in to hear better.
“I said okay.”
When we confer the night after her kitchen shift, Twelve reports that these ants endure great hardship to carry small bites from the food vat back to their family. They scale the vat’s aluminum walls, hike the pantry’s dunes of flour, and traverse the freezer room tundra before arriving at a hole in the corner of the wall that leads to their mound outside.
It’s good that she’s located the enemy, but the way she describes their struggle makes me wonder if she’s developed sympathies. “Have second thoughts found you?” I say.
“No. I knew they would lead hard lives. The warlike always do.”
The sense she makes compels me to nod in agreement, even though she cannot see me under her bed. Twelve is capable of great insight.
On our first day building walls to enclose the warlike colony, it rains, and the rain tears down the walls faster than we can build them. To keep pace, Twelve goes at it two-handed, with two pairs of chopsticks, but alas. The bricks lose solidity when wet. Thunder cracks, we have no umbrellas, and Nurse Em herds everyone else back inside.
“Laying siege is the worst way to wage war,” I say. “Sun Tzu wrote that.”
“But we have to do this, for the peaceniks.”
“What if we just poisoned the hill?”
She punches the dirt. “No. We have to wall them in.”
“That’s your fish talking.”
When I see her reaction, I realize I’ve made a mistake bringing it up.
Twelve launches out of her squat. Before I can gather my wits she’s gripped my shirt collar in her muddy hands. “What the fuck is with you and this fish shit?”
“Just let me reach in and show you.”
“No!”
“I’m going to reach in!”
“You’re not!”
I reach in. She gags. Once I’m elbow deep I can feel it, and yank it out by the gills. It falls between us in the mud. It’s not a wall-building jawfish as I expected, but rather an Atlantic salmon. Its meaning eludes me.
Twelve falls to her knees and tugs at fistfuls of hair. Her mouth moves but she cannot speak. The dead salmon, two feet in length and girthy, challenges her most basic anatomical education. She must now shed her schemas and return to a more flexible, intuitive state of perception to accommodate its existence.
It’s exactly this process that day trader at the house party refused to undertake when I pulled the pufferfish corpse out of his neck. Before I presented the evidence, he had leaned in close to inspect my pupils, expecting to find them larger than appropriate for the lighting. But I was sober, more sober than him, more sober than the officers he called, more sober than Nurse Darrell was, more sober than Nurse Em would ever dare to want to be.
The storm clears after a while, and Twelve’s shock gives way to acceptance.
“We could probably build walls now that the rain’s stopped,” I say.
“No,” she says. “Let them be.”
When her eyes meet mine, there is a vast presence behind them. Twelve is here in the moment, unburdened by ideas, seeing me.
We rejoin the group for session. Session is where we sit in a circle of metal fold-out chairs in the garden and discuss problems with obvious solutions. Across the circle from me, Eight says he has to flush toilets at least four times—even more when it’s a shit—a problem that’s burdened him for fifteen years and soured his relationship with his mother and every live-in girlfriend he ever had, plus insisting that his mother’s and girlfriends’ objections, while nominally about water bills, were actually about control (of him), because toilet flushes cost at most a few cents.
All someone would have to do to fix the man is reach into his neck.
Twelve, seated beside me, senses I am fighting the urge to speak, and places a hand on my thigh. She whispers, “You were right. You saw what I couldn’t. You are perceptive. I respect your view of the world and will consider it as a reasonably weighted input in the construction of my own. You matter to me. I respect you. Thank you for being in my life.”
There is no prompt I can identify for her to say this. To choose these words, she would have to see into my heart. By what dark means can she do so?
A heat and then a chill pulse through my tissues. I shiver. I heave. It works its way up my esophagus, coating it in slime. It falls out of my mouth.
Flopping on the ground before us all is a baby shark, half decomposed.
Nurse Em hops up onto her chair, holds out her binder as a shield against the shark. This is unnecessary because it is three yards away and sharks cannot move on land.
Six pats me on the back and winks, as if to say job well done young lad.
Twelve nods, says to herself, “Makes sense, makes sense.” Her bangs shine in the sunlight. She sits regally, legs crossed, hands clasped.
I am understood.
