Ramblings

I had an appointment to go see Susan at her office. We didn’t really have much of an agenda. “Just a chat,” she said the other day on the phone, like we were old friends or something.

I arrived at her office, and the secretary told me to wait while she checked to see if Susan was in. I waited, looked down at her desk and saw three small fishbowls, each containing a small goldfish in a different state of expiration. The word fishbowl is really a generous title, as they were really just small glass jars, no bigger than coffee cups—something you would store paperclips in, or a handful of Hershey’s Kisses—not containers suitable for live animals that needed to swim around in, I don’t know, at least a quart of water.

The fish on the left was clearly dead, belly up at the surface. It was kind of remarkable how stereotypical it was, how fish can only float in this one position after they’ve died. The one on the right had passed away long ago, only leaving behind brown murky water and the lumpy remains of its body. The one in the middle, head at the surface, pathetically gasping for air, could only pass his dying moments by looking around and seeing his own near and distant future in the jars surrounding him. His one eye, looking up at me from the surface, was asking me to help him save his dignity by getting this all over with and just flushing him down the toilet already. Clearly he hadn’t had much of a life, even by the standards of a goldfish.

I imagined this woman keeping all her animals in terrible conditions, never knowing that there were more responsible ways to go about pet ownership. At home she probably had ferrets living in mailboxes, hamsters in Tupperware, a bird in a shoebox, puppies trying to run around inside a burlap bag under the bed. As long as their bodies could fit inside, then it must be good enough.

The secretary came back after a minute. Maybe she honestly just didn’t know about the condition of her fish, just like how you just don’t know when you have food stuck between your teeth. Maybe nobody had ever told her the obvious, that her fish weren’t doing so well.

“I don’t think your fish are doing so well,” I said, pointing to her jars.

She looked down at her fish with a look of stern disapproval, like she was shaking her head at a disobedient child who was being forced to sit in the corner.

“They’re always acting like that. They’re just faking it,” she said before adding, “They’ll be fine.”

“Oh,” I replied, glancing at the mud-colored pudding of a goldfish on the right side of the desk that had clearly been rotting for quite some time. Who knows, maybe they would be just fine. I was hardly an expert. The last time I had a non-mammalian animal to take care of was in the 8^th grade, when we were all assigned crayfish and anoles to study in their little plastic bio-domes. All of the crayfish ended up dying over Christmas break when nobody came in to feed them or change the water in their aquariums for three weeks. I still remember how bad that room smelled. Most of the anoles managed to survive the winter break, except for mine which was devoured by the very crickets we had placed in the terrarium for it to eat.

“Stupid anole,” I thought when saw the half-eaten remains upon my return. “How could you not figure this one out?” A billion anoles in the world and I manage to get the vegetarian who couldn’t even put up a decent fight against a handful of bugs. Every ecosystem it seems, even the ones you buy in a plastic box and watch on your desk, can be a cruel place.

The secretary told me that Susan was in her office, so I forgot about the fish and the anole and I walked down the hall. I found Susan in her office at her computer, talking to herself in a clearly audible voice.

“I’m just so busy. Got all these emails. Oy.”

Susan worked in the English as a Second Language Department at my university. With graduation looming and no real plans, I had agreed to teach English in Korea. It was either that or move back home and sleep on the floor at night while slowly being driven insane by my parents, something I would wish on nobody. And I only had sixty dollars left in my bank account.

She told me to have a seat. “I know, I know—you’re not supposed to smoke these in university buildings,” Susan said as she removed a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, “but I have ways of getting around all of their rules.”

She pulled a screwdriver out of her desk, jamming it between the screen and window frame, cracking plastic and twisting metal. Once the screen was pried open a couple of inches, she lit up a cigarette and let it hang outside the window as she exhaled through the screen.

“The administration can be so uptight around here, but what they don’t know can’t hurt them.”

It was like watching the guy who lived across the hall from me when I lived in the dorms, who would smoke pot and exhale through a cardboard tube lined with dryer sheets, which did little, if anything, to conceal the smell. He eventually got kicked out of the dorms for stealing glassware from the chemistry department, which he had fashioned into an impressively sized bong. The last I heard his mom had tricked him into going to rehab in Minnesota.

“I loved teaching and living in Iran,” Susan told me, who had taught English in Iran back in the 70s, while taking a drag. “But then, you know, the revolution happened and I had to leave in a helicopter from the embassy,” she added, nonchalantly, dismissing the Islamic Revolution with a wave of her hand.

“Don’t worry though. Nothing like that could ever happen in Korea.”

“Now, if you have any teaching experience—lifeguarding, for instance—” I almost stopped her, wanting to ask if lifeguarding really was teaching experience, since you mostly just sat in a chair all day, not really talking to anybody, but I decided to let it slide, “—then you should put that on your resume for sure. The Koreans like to see that you’ve been in a classroom before.”

Her advice, though good intentioned and more or less sound, didn’t seem to make sense. I’d already applied and been accepted. I mean, I already had a work visa in my passport and everything, and a plane ticket. Again, I decided not to bring it up.

Susan’s husband came into the room, one of the largest people I’ve ever met with a thick beard and British accent. That guy had to have been, I don’t know, at least nine feet tall and just as wide. He seemed nice and shook my hand with his soft, dinner plate-sized hand. I’ve always wondered how couples like this manage to get together—Susan, maybe five feet tall, and her husband, who very well could have been a trained bear.

Our meeting ended—“That’s enough for today,” she told me, “I think we’ll get going now”—unsure if we had even talked about anything, except maybe how to get away with smoking while inside a state-owned building. Why had I even made any appointment to talk to her anyway? I couldn’t really think of a reason.

Two days before my flight, Susan called me on my cell phone, desperately worried that since I was unprepared to teach in Korea. She was practically hysterical on the other end.

“It can be really tough over there. You might not be able to handle it at all,” she said, contradicting everything she had been telling me since I first met her. “It’s very, very strange over there.”

I made an appointment to see her next day, the day before I had to leave at 5 AM to make it to the airport on time, but she ended up standing me up. I think that was the first time that had ever happened to me, and, to be honest, it made me kind of sad. The secretary—her fish, apparently, still doing fine according to her—mentioned something about Susan needing to leave early and get started on dinner.

The next day I got on my flight, a fully loaded plane at O’Hare, and went to Korea. I was picked up at the airport by Mr. Lee, Susan’s contact in Korea who arranged schools for everyone to teach at, and his 14-year-old daughter, which I thought was kind of weird. I guess he didn’t want to leave her at home alone. He was nice and claimed to have learned English from reading novels with the help of a dictionary, which I also thought was kind of weird. Maybe I should have read more Korean novels when I was over there.

As soon as I could I emailed Susan and told her that I had arrived and things were going pretty good. She never returned my email and I never heard from her again. I heard later that she ended up quitting after Mr. Lee was replaced by another guy, Mr. Kim, who was kind of a jerk.

But, everything turned out alright in the end, except for the fish (they died)…34,899 out of 100,000.