Ren Arcamone
Assassin Snail
the tanks
The assassin snail is small, no bigger than my pinky finger, and doomed to an early death.
“You’re too small!” I say to the assassin snail, still in his aquarium bag. “You are doomed to an early death!”
The assassin snail says nothing.
I peg the bag in tank two, still closed, so the assassin snail can get accustomed to the temperature. Tetras, neons, and rasbora school and scatter under the cool aquarium light, hide their shiny bodies in the ribbons of grass. The foliage is green and lush, some of it so bright it’s fluorescent, and the tank is massive, eight feet across. It runs the length of the room. Tank one is just as big and spans the back wall. In tank one, there are no plants, just a big, deep red fish, an arowana, looping back and forth in the bare glass box. Together the two tanks form an L shape. I sit on the red velvet couch to admire them. The red velvet matches the red of the giant fish.
“Doomed!” I say.
I purchased the assassin snail on Dzindra’s instructions. Tank two is overcrowded with pest snails, and the assassin snail is meant to eat them. None of these fish are my fish, this place is not my home, and I have never cared for aquatic life. Still, I am here, in Dzindra’s godmother’s apartment, fish-sitting for the month. Dzindra is supposed to be fish-sitting, but Dzindra is in Amsterdam with her new girlfriend, Anne. I am a suitable replacement. I have been Vouched For.
Dzindra is so, so grateful, god, she can’t even say how grateful she is that I am willing to do this massive favor for her, I am like a total godsend, honestly. It’s fine. I feed the big arowana twice a day and change his water twice a week. I feed the little fish every morning. I like doing favors for Dzindra. Also, Dzindra’s godmother will pay me three grand.
I take a photo of the new assassin snail in his floating bag and text Dzindra. “Check him out! What should we name him?”
Dzindra texts back: Lol y u only get 1 he’s so smol. Then she sends me twelve dollars via kaSHING! The emojis attached to the money transfer message go like this: one snail, one dagger, one tropical fish.
Sometimes I think Dzindra hates me. Sometimes I think Dzindra is the closest thing I have to a best friend. We once dated for a week in acting school but that doesn’t tell me anything. Dzindra goes through girlfriends like an arowana goes through shrimp. Poor Anne doesn’t know what’s coming.
I make myself a smoothie in the shiny galley kitchen. The blender is so fancy it knows what to do without me pressing any buttons. The sound it makes is like a dentist’s drill. I say, “Thanks, blender!”
“Hey, healthy eater!” says the blender, in my own cheery voice. I load dishes into the pull-drawer dishwasher. “Love your work!” says the dishwasher.
In the afternoon I let the assassin snail out of his bag to join his freshwater friends. He floats down to the murky floor and lands on a blade of grass.
“Poor little guy,” I say.
“That’s what you think,” says the snail.
I think I’ll call him Frank.
the apartment
Dzindra’s godmother is a gazillionaire. Her space is designed to reflect that. The walls are creamy white and the windows run floor to ceiling. The artworks are by artists you either know or will know someday, Dzindra has told me. My favorite is in the library: a woman, trapped inside a tree, talking to a bird. This “luxury prestige apartment” is inside the Helenium, a residential skyscraper, on the ninety-second floor. When I get out of bed on the window side, I feel like I’ll plunge to my death.
Each morning I make coffee before I feed the fish. The kitchen is a narrow box at the head of the living room, or what Dzindra calls the “entertainment area.” The kitchen is state-of-the-art, all marble and chrome, but recently there have been “issues.” There is a plastic sheet taped over the button for the garbage disposal reading DO NOT USE. There is a trash chute in the laundry which maybe works, but when you open it there’s a smell like a burp. An electronic notification system should be emailing me updates, but that’s also on the fritz, so building management slips fliers under the door every couple of days, outlining “ongoing difficulties”: kitchen plumbing, bathroom plumbing, unspecified “leaking” in the elevator shaft. The main problem: the building is too tall. There are structural flaws baked into the design only now coming to light. Sometimes at night I hear creaking and I can’t tell what the creaking is. The fliers always close with the line THESE DIFFICULTIES WILL BE RESOLVED SHORTLY. There is no phone number to call.
The big red arowana jumps and scowls every time I enter the aquarium room. I think it’s worried I will eat it. Dzindra tells me it’s beautiful, but to me it just looks grumpy, its mouth comically downturned like the frowny-face emoji. I prefer the bright little darting fish in the other tank. I look for the assassin snail, and there among the hollowed-out shells of dead pest snails he is, a hungry king the size of a large marble. Frank.
“Wow!” I say. “You got big!”
“I told you so,” says Frank. The way I do it, his voice is low and clowny.
If I have an audition to go to, I will feed the fish and then get ready to leave, but mostly I do not have auditions to go to. Four nights a week I bartend at a 1920s aviation-themed bar called The Mile High. This means I can spend entire days not setting foot outside in the sunlight.
“What should I do today, Frank?” I ask the snail.
Frank appears to have his mouth full. Technically he does not have a mouth, or a tongue, or teeth, but instead something called a radula which serves the function of all three. The radula is studded with rows of hundreds of teeth. The teeth will fall out and replace themselves over and over.
“You should get outside, Rachel. Go walk around, get some fresh air. When you are inside all day your thoughts chase one another, you are prone to maudlin thinking, and you fixate on the emptiness of your life. Stop being so afraid of the damn elevator.”
It’s true. I am afraid of the elevator. According to the fliers from building management, it’s safe to use, but every time I step into it I feel the floor shudder, like something heavy has landed behind me.
The Mile High
I work in service and I am comfortable with that. When I get dressed for work I have a uniform: high-waisted pants, a blouse with my name stitched on it, and aviator’s goggles pushed up over my forehead. I tie the shirt off at the waist so it bares my midriff. It’s useful to have a defined role, rigid parameters permitting creative expression within. Acting is basically a service. Tell me who’s required, and I’ll be them.
Most of my shifts at The Mile High are with Miles. Miles keeps threatening to quit because he hates the way patrons make puns about his name. They look at the stitching on his uniform and say, “Miles, hi!” When he looks distant or bored someone will say, “Is Miles high?” He is surly with customers, but he is dizzyingly beautiful, so he gets good tips. Miles is also an actor, although he doesn’t like serving the way I do. He would much rather receive, to extract from another. This is why we’ve been sleeping together. He comes back to the Helenium and we fuck on the red velvet couch in the aquarium room.
“Give me your throat,” he says, and I do. “Give me your skull.” When he comes I gag and spill it on the sofa. The arowana looks offended. Miles holds me and we watch the fish beat its head against the glass of the tank’s ceiling.
“Is it supposed to do that?” asks Miles.
“It’s just hungry,” I say, which might be true, I don’t know. I’ve texted Dzindra about it, but she’s too caught up in her romance to text me back. I know because I’ve been watching her posts on social media. No couple photos, but you can tell she’s in love: dew caught in spiderwebs, hollowed-out watermelon rinds. It makes me hope the fish dies.
“I’m hungry too,” says Miles. “Got any snacks?”
I send him home with part of an oven-baked pizza. It’s best not to let him sleep over. Under his surliness is a deep need for kindness, and I’m careful not to fill it totally, to make sure he comes back. Alone, I lie in bed, listening to a torrent of water gushing somewhere behind the walls.
kaSHING!
I wait for a text back from Dzindra about the fish bashing his head against the ceiling. I take a picture of his grumpy face and draw a caption beside it that reads “OWWEEE!!!” She texts back: thats normal dont let him bug u. I text her another picture of the fish and tell her he’s listless, he seems sick, but he doesn’t really seem sick and I can’t decide what symptoms to invent. Dzindra doesn’t text back.
It’s not that her phone is broken. She’s not marooned or in hospital. She’s got her settings on kaSHING! set to public, so every money transfer between her and her new girlfriend is visible on her feed, and they’ve been paying each other back and forth for days. All the descriptions are cryptic. For instance:
Five days ago, Dzindra Blom to Anne Phelan: <manhole emoji>
Four days ago, Anne Phelan to Dzindra Blom: i am pointing at you w/ a <radish emoji>
Four days ago, Anne Phelan to Dzindra Blom: <ice skates emoji> <white flag emoji> <clown face emoji> <burrito emoji>
Three days ago, Dzindra Blom to Anne Phelan: crunch cranch ranch <lab coat emoji> <ghost emoji>
Two days ago, Dzindra Blom to Anne Phelan: WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!
I read the messages to the assassin snail. He is overlarge, nearly the size of a golf ball. “What do you make of this?”
Frank says, “All language is secretive, a code between maker and receiver, and none more so than between lovers. You lack a key to the cipher, but more importantly, you lack the key to any mind other than your own. You understand me perfectly because my speech is the invention of your imagination; we are wholly comprehensible to one another, more akin than lovers, than family. Stay with me, sit beside me. Feed me the arowana’s live shrimp.”
The arowana says nothing.
the storm
The schooling fish in tank two are disappearing, or at least their flesh is disappearing. The teeny tiny skeletons of dead tetras and rasboras float aimless in the current, catch themselves on the branches of the underwater plants. The assassin snail is massive and somehow sprightlier. He suckers his way up the glass, baring his terrible, genital underside.
“Yo!” he says. “Hi five!”
I press my fingers to the glass. He eclipses my hand.
I have been looking up facts about assassin snails. One fact: they’re also called “bumblebee snails” after their coloration, the bands of brown and yellow that ring their conical shells. Another fact: their maximum length is 1.25 inches. Frank must be a special assassin snail, the kind with a bottomless appetite. No wonder we get along.
“What’s your story, exactly?” I ask him. But no words appear in my head, so Frank says nothing.
Tonight there’s a storm due to blow through. Building management has littered the front hall with fliers warning residents to prepare accordingly. Lock all windows. Draw all blinds. Secure all unsecured objects. (What object isn’t unsecured?) It is the responsibility of all residents to maintain home and contents insurance. DO NOT USE THE ELEVATOR WHILE THE STORM IS ACTIVE.
My shift at The Mile High is canceled for the evening. Miles asks to come round, says we can watch a movie, something stupid. When he shows up it’s still bright out, the greenish light of pre-storm weather. He’s brought popcorn. He’s too eager. We fuck on the couch in the entertainment room, but it’s kind of a perfunctory fuck: necessary and almost involuntary, like a yawn. He doesn’t even choke me. After, he asks if I’m tired.
“Are you tired?” I say, and then, cruelly: “I have miles to go before I sleep.”
But instead of scowling he chuckles, then puts on a movie about a disgraced bad-boy mathematician charged with defusing an extra-terrestrial bomb. Midway through there’s a banging sound coming from the aquarium room. I clamber off to find the arowana frantic, chasing his own tail at the bottom of the tank. I don’t want to deal with a ninety-thousand-dollar brain-damaged fish tonight. I take off the glass lid, give him some breathing room. From the other tank, Frank starts up about Miles.
“I don’t like him,” he says. “No spirit. No real appetite.”
“Nobody asked you,” I say. Lately, it seems Frank’s gotten cocky. I’m surprised at the things he says, or rather, the things that appear in my mind for him to say.
Frank says, “When two minds are so closely aligned, who is to say where the borders of each end and begin? To converse is not to talk but to be with. From the Latin vertere, ‘to turn,’and con, ‘with’; our exchanges are a turning, a turning in unison, as you have always known. There is no food left in the tank. Will you buy me a pet turtle?”
“Hmm,” I say.
By the time I get back, Miles is dozing in front of the television. Useless. I nudge him awake and inquire whether he might tie me to the dining room table, but he just wants to sleep. I collapse next to him on the couch.
“I never learned Latin,” I say. “Can people learn Latin without noticing?”
Miles blinks his eyes open. “Tu es insanus,” he says, and shuts his eyes again.
Too late, I remember I can’t kick him out. Even if he could Uber home, he can’t use the elevator to get down to the street.
The storm is picking up. There’s a flogging, fluttering sound, like someone shaking out laundry, and the occasional metallic whomp. I fix myself a fresh-pressed juice—celery, apple, carrot, ginger—and sit on the white leather modular in the living room where I can stare at the painting by an artist who will one day be famous: the woman trapped in a tree, conversing with a bird.
the woman trapped in a tree, conversing with a bird
When Dzindra and I met in acting school I was eighteen and an idiot. I wanted everything, I was slick with need and ready to burst, disgusting, like a pimple. I followed her for years. We slept together for a week. Then I went back to following her, to being her dumb sidekick while she eyed other girls in the program, or exchanged numbers with strangers she met on the subway, or once, in a community center bathroom during auditions for an off-off-Broadway experimental theater production, fucked an electrician, and then got the part. I was a better actor, but it didn’t matter. People are just drawn to her certainty, her charisma. When she was with me alone it seemed I was the only person in the world who understood her, and I’m not blind, I know I’m still chasing that high. Miles can barely scratch the itch. He will never crack me open and understand my capacity.
Outside, the flapping and smacking of the storm continues, but under that, there’s a new sound: something splashing in the aquarium room. Standing in the doorway, the first thing I notice is the arowana’s tank is empty. That’s not good. The bigger, more important thing to notice is it’s in the other tank.
I sit on the red velvet sofa and peer into the murk. The arowana lists near the surface. It wanted out of its tank, and it jumped. Why did nobody tell me it could jump? Mixed with the red of its scales there is a different red, streaky and thin—it’s blood. The stuff clouds the water, darkening the vegetation. At the back of the tank is an enormous, ornamental rock I’ve never noticed before. The rock shifts a little, resettles.
“Frank?”
Very quietly, I hear Frank say, “Sleepy.”
at sea
I can’t find Miles. I test the light switches in each room but the power’s flickering on and off. I check outside the front door. Water gushes down the walls in a thin, flat stream, like an expensive indoor fountain. At the end of the hall the elevator stands mute. One door has shuddered itself half open, smelling of sewage and metal. Past the door there is only darkness.
I lean forward to press the button. Nothing happens. I stick my head through the shaft and a breeze ruffles my hair. For a full minute I’m stuck there, just staring into the emptiness.
Back in the apartment I am queasy, unsteady. I keep thinking the floor is moving. There’s a deep metal groaning coming from everywhere. It occurs to me that I’m on a ship, in the hull, passing through towering waves. I pitch from room to room, half-blind, calling, “Miles! Miles!” Something’s exploding and I stagger to the entertainment room. It’s just the TV, turning itself back on. The mathematician has failed to defuse the bomb, or he’s exploded a different bomb, and bits of alien limbs rain down over Manhattan.
Miles is not on the sofa, not in the kitchen, nowhere. I am reluctant to check the aquarium room. I have the sense that someone is calling me, saying my name lovingly.
But it isn’t Frank. It isn’t anything.
I find Miles in the guest bedroom, a sequence of lumps under the covers, breathing evenly, like the storm’s already passed, like nobody requires saving. A banshee shriek leaks from the air vent above the bed. I shake him awake.
“I thought you were dead!” I say. I rip back the covers and snuggle in, trying to drape his arms around me. I’m crying, but experimentally, as though real feelings might follow. He keeps saying, “I was asleep.” The more he repeats it the more annoyed he sounds, until eventually he rolls over and pulls the covers over his head.
I sigh and sit up. Horizontal rain batters the windows. I have to admit, it’s sort of anticlimactic to find him alive.
toppling
We are swaying. The building is swaying. I’m in the master bedroom and the floor is still, but whenever I lie down I know the Helenium will topple. I trudge out to the aquarium and clutch the doorframe. The arowana fish is gone.
“The building is swaying,” I tell the dark heap in the tank. “It’ll go down in the storm.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” the snail says. He is now so big he occupies a good third of the tank. The horn of his shell sticks out above the water. “Sit down. Catch your breath.”
I slide down the wall and hug my knees, obedient. The floor is damp.
“The whole building will go down,” I say.
“It won’t.”
“I’ll be crushed in the debris.”
“You won’t.”
“Dzindra will be devastated.”
“Is that what you want?”
“I want to be Amelia Earhart, lost at sea, and sought after for decades.”
The assassin snail coughs like he’s embarrassed for me. I examine my fingers.
The snail says, “Don’t you fantasize about the hour of your death because you imagine yourself living through it, watching the hordes of mourners at your funeral from the steepled roof of a church, when all the while you’re not even religious and the guarantee of an afterlife, or at least continuation beyond death, is suspect to you?”
I say, “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
The snail says, “At your funeral, there’s no guarantee Dzindra will be there, and little chance you’d know one way or another.”
“Cruel,” I say, “but not untrue.”
The snail says, “Isn’t connection that which gives meaning to separation, and isn’t union with another the nearest form of transcendence?”
I say, “I’m afraid,” but I don’t leave.
“I’m afraid too,” the snail says. “Come here, come join me in the tank.”
hundreds of tiny teeth
First there is a tickling sensation that starts at my fingertips. Then burning, then numbness. I am in the tank. The water covers me, but I can still breathe, until I don’t need to anymore. I’m being drained like a bath, and the gurgling, sucking sound coming from the bottom of the tank is me; I’m the thing pouring out and filling some other cavity. Little fish flicker past, and a great red arowana thuds against my back like a heart. I feel held, one part of many things. We are heavy and gelatinous. Time, briefly, means nothing.
I should know it won’t last. I wake to a sense of horrible spaciousness. Time is a jerk, gobbling up one moment, then the next. How can I blame it? I’m all hunger, every cell in me.
When I open my eyes, I see the world from a distance, like a telescope turned backwards. There’s the red sofa in the corner of the room, and in the doorway, a woman with a suitcase. She is middle-aged, tall, with a delicate lilac scarf around her neck. She smells rich and irritable, and under that, something else. Tired. Maybe even lonely.
“Is someone here?” she says. “Hello?”
She comes to the tank and leans over, curious. The tip of her scarf grazes the surface of the water and I feel the ripple with my whole body.