Fish Tank

A story of an ex Vietnam vet who, oddly enough, is not insane.

                                                            

                        Fish Tank

     Anderson hated the fish tank.

     It was the first thing he noticed when he entered the first floor, living room of, Mrs. Baileys boarding house and it was the first thing he noticed, ever since the last three months that he had lived there.

     It really wasn't the fish tank that bugged him but all that fake, plastic, underwater foliage and imitation stone ruins_now presumably sunk beneath the sea_that decorated the floor of it. For one: there was just too much foliage. Few fish, swimming in the large tank even bothered to attempt to penetrate it but as Anderson knew full well: the real reason he hated the underwater scene was because it reminded him too much of that goddamn jungle.

     He could easily imagine Vietcong hiding there, waiting to spring forth in a moment's unawareness and let loose a blazing, hell which would leave him broken, torn and dead, laying in trampled grass, on foreign grounds.

     But Anderson was a survivor. He had learned the secret. “Always keep your eyes open, always remain alert.”

     This advice, first given to a scared 19 year old, fresh from the real world and dropped in the middle of hell, was given by a dirt and sweat, smeared marine who spoke with the wisdom and authority of an underworld god in love with his kingdom.

The advice had served Anderson well. Who he had watched, was this soldier. Through him he had learned.

     He learned to avoid trip wires that set off maiming or killing traps, he learned to search the trees for bodies that didn't belong there, he learned to hear the screaming silence that warned of danger about to, instantly turn the world upside down and he had gotten good at staying, half a step ahead of it all. He had gotten good at staying alive while those around him died.

     Now, almost a year back in the world, this primitive, combat instinct rushed back to his awareness, whenever he set eyes on the Goddamn fish tank. In a boarding house living room, a million miles and a year away, from that hell.

      It was stupid, of course.

     It wasn't as if, Vietnamese were actually hiding in the aquarium, waiting for a chance to kill him but nonetheless, as he crossed from the front door of the house to the stairwell leading to his room on the second floor, his eyes made sure the underwater jungle was Vietcong free.

     Seemed harmless when it first began but the sudden, leaping fear of imminent danger grew stronger as the weeks passed. Anderson soon began to fear, not only for his own life but for the lives of all those in the house. However, his madness_ if madness it was_ hadn't taken complete possession of him. He was still sane enough to know that no one would see the danger that he saw, so he kept his insane knowing to himself.

     And then the insomnia began.

     He would be flung from his sleep, at or around three o'clock in the morning by the absolute certainty that, the Vietcong were rising up out of the fish tank, wave after wave of tiny soldiers, flowing like living sand, climbing up the inside of the aquarium glass, down the outside of it and spilling down to the floor. The floor that gave them access to the stairwell, which in turn gave them access to the rooms upstairs.

     It would be just like “Charlie” to hit him in his sleep, Anderson scoffed inwardly as he kept his eyes on the light coming through the crack, under his room door.

     And here he was without a weapon.

    That would not do.

     Later that day, he boarded a city bus which took him downtown to a pawn shop that sold guns.

     He knew he couldn't equip himself with all the firepower necessary to beat off several troops of the Vietnamese army but his rapidly deteriorating mind told him two, high caliber sidearms, fired simultaneously, with both hands just might do the trick. After all, Anderson joked to himself as he looked over an assortment of nine millimeters in the shop, the target was little green men so, anything was possible. That he could laugh at himself, he further noted, proved he wasn't crazy.

     He slept well the next four nights, after his purchase. He hid both nine millimeters under a second pillow, on his bed.

     On the fifth night, the gut stabbing, stirring alarm of sudden fear gripped him again, jumping him to full wakefulness.

He grabbed both pistols in a flash of instinctive motion and aimed them at the crack of light under the door.

     “That's the line,” he uttered out loud, under his breath as the sounds and smells of the jungle closed in around him. “Let none cross it.”

    He lay propped up in bed, both arms stretched forward, his fingers loving the familiar feel of the heavy caliber weapons as they wrapped themselves around the guns like snakes waiting on the signal to strike.

But no signal came.

     Sleep reclaimed him instead and in the morning, when he woke up and found both pistols tossed aside and forgotten among the covers, fresh terror gripped him. What the hell had he done, falling asleep under a threat? It was only by the grace of God, the V.C., hadn't attacked.

     No, Anderson concluded, lying in bed, waiting on the enemy was not the smartest move. Better to meet him half way. Instead of letting them come to him, he would take up position near their location so that he would see them the minute they began to move.

     So began the early morning vigils.

     Whenever the screaming certainty of attack woke him up, he'd get out of bed, grab his guns and make his way, silently down stairs where he would take up position, sitting in an old recliner, three feet away and facing the fish tank. He sat there, one gun held in his lap, in his left hand and the other, in his right, trained on the quiet, bubbling, underwater world.

He waited and watched until daybreak before being convinced that no attack was coming.

     “They're afraid of me.” Anderson would tell himself as he climbed back up the stairs. “The whole Vietnamese army is afraid of me.”

      But the enemy wasn't afraid of him, the enemy was in no hurry, a secret voice in his head, did the math: hundreds of them, One of you.

     Even the Vietcong can count.

    For the following three nights, the Vietnamese had remained hidden. Anderson scanned the fake foliage, the ruined, stone wall and columns but could detect nothing of the threat he knew was there. They had to be hiding behind trees, hiding behind the stone wall or behind blades of plastic grass.

     “Can't shoot what you can't see/get a sighting, make it bleed.” He remembered his old chant, coming back to him now like a long lost, faithful pet. A deadly magic charm he use to whisper, prior to bringing violent death on many, unknown human beings.

      Then came the deeper, more disturbing thoughts concerning the taking of human life: what if it was wrong, regardless of whether society approved of it or not? The world may forgive a soldier but does life? What if there is a reckoning force there? Something that makes sure balance and a certain order are maintained?

     At such times Anderson would feel as if there was a great distance between what is real and what he had been taught was real.

     On the fourth night the enemy attacked.

     The early morning quiet of the neighborhood in the vicinity of the quiet boarding house, was shattered by the thunderous sound of rapid gun fire as Anderson saw the Vietnamese surge upward from their hiding places. The glass aquarium exploded in a shower of glass, and flowing water, spilling out color-bright fish and an endless number of Vietcong, all over the plush, carpeted living room floor. The endless flow of micro soldiers continued unabated. They made their way out of the shattered tank, moving like an endless army of crawling ants intent on gaining the prize.

     Anderson knew he was going to die.

     He knew there was no way he could kill them all.

He had lived by the sword and now he would die by it but he would go down fighting. He blasted away with his nine millimeters until, ten minutes into the fury, the enemy made him stop.

     Several silent minutes later, Mrs. Bailey came cautiously out of her first floor bedroom which opened up to the living room, as three of the braver tenants, upstairs came out of their rooms and made their way, quietly to the stairwell. Outside sirens could now be heard, faint at first but growing clearer and louder as the seconds passed. The roomers made it to the bottom of the stairs and stood there as Mrs Bailey stood, opposite them, just outside her bedroom door, all staring, in speechless silence at the destruction between them.

     Only the base of the aquarium remained in tact. Bits of jagged glass running along it's edges was all that was left of it's glass walls. Several large bullet holes dotted the living room wall behind the tank and the bulk, of the center, of the deep plush, beige rug had been turned into a swampland of puddled water, colorful, flopping, flipping, dying fish, broken glass and many more bullet holes, torn through the carpet, leaving large holes in the hard wood floor underneath.

     Three feet away from the ruined aquarium, the recliner had been moved slightly from it's original position and was now riddled with thousands of tiny holes. White, exposed stuffing showed along many of the holes and lying on the floor behind the chair was Anderson.

     His bare upper body, arms, face and head were covered in tiny puncture wounds, like the chair but unlike the recliner, Anderson's wounds had covered him in blood, which flowed from the tiny wounds and collected in an, ever larger, growing lake of blood beneath him.

     The police and an unneeded ambulance arrived. Anderson was pronounced dead on the scene by the coroner as two detectives and a uniformed officer looked the scene over, trying to figure out what the hell happened here.

One of the detectives, an older man with silver hair, knelled next to the body, studying the penetration wounds.

     “These look like bullet wounds.” He spoke his thoughts out loud. “Tiny a*s, miniature bullet wounds.”

     He stood up and fished a pocket knife from his pants pocket, opened the knife up and turned his attention to the recliner. He dug the blade of the knife into one of the tiny holes of the chair, opening it up a bit, careful not to disturb it's final depth, looking for an object, logic told him, had to be there.

       “Dave,” the detective called to the coroner. “You got a magnifying glass in your little bag of tricks?”

     The coroner chuckled to himself as he opened a small black bag, retrieved the item and handed it to the detective. The older man bent back over the recliner, raised the magnifying glass to his right eye and peered into the opened hole.

     “Goddamn!” He uttered in surprise even though the tiny object was exactly what he expected to find_ inexplicably, unbelievably and totally unreal_ a tiny slug, fired from what had to be an equally tiny gun.

     “What is it?” The second detective asked, looking over the older one's shoulder.

     “It's...” the senior detective paused, looking for words. “ A crazy world, is what it is.” He answered, having no idea of the truth of his own statement.

     In an unseen corner of the living room, in a portion of the thick carpet, untouched by the violence and unnoticed by all in the room, a swarm of micro soldiers moved swiftly and silently through the deep weave forest, disappearing into a small crack in the baseboard.

Author's Note

I'm just curious, does this story work?