At the end of this speech there was silence and then a long, snot-filled intake of breath. She got out of bed to blow her nose, several times in a row, in the bathroom. She hadn't generated snot like this since her first trimester of pregnancy.
“It's okay. It's okay,” he said when she got back into bed.
“No,” she said, “it fucking isn't.”
Also, during the next few days Max did them the favor of being his usual self, which is to say a terror, as if he wanted to remind them the whole situation wasn't going to get any better and they should stop pretending it would, as if he didn't want the situation to be clouded by cheap sentiment arising from his acting like a normal kid. He insisted, to the point of hysteria, on wearing his football helmet to bed, and in the middle of the night he woke them up by banging his helmeted head against the wall. One afternoon, while Erica was in the shower, he went into Hank's study and pulled down all the books from the shelves, then managed to pull the shelf itself down on himself, covering himself in scabs and bruises (though not, thankfully, breaking anything) that made him look like the victim of some horrible household abuse and was only going to earn them more doubting looks from all the various child-care professionals in his life. The doctors concluded that they needed to up his medication.
Hank escaped to the fish. Starting in college, fish had been his calm and his succor, and once he'd married Erica and had Max— both of whom he loved, and never wanted anybody to think otherwise for a single second, and he was grateful he had them and would die if anything happened to them, okay? — the fish had mattered even more, because they were quiet. They swam around quietly, they ate quietly, they developed patterns of sexual selection quietly. The occasional splash or ripple was all you ever heard, and you had to love them for that. When your home was full of falling bookshelves and indeterminate midnight whispering, the quiet of fish was a blessed thing.
What he'd been studying was the relationship between predator presence and sexual behavior in Poecilia reticulata. Purdy, he knew, thought of this as dating in the fish world: the males were trolling the aquarium for dates, their orange spots standing out like unbuttoned shirts and gold chains on chests. The females were hanging out at the bar, eyeballing the available options, waiting for the flashiest candidate to pick them up. To Purdy, fish were interesting only insofar as they provided corollaries to similar patterns of behavior in humans. Mere ammunition for his theories about sexual competition and male hierarchy, they provided the biological context that proved (so Purdy thought) that humans were exceptions to no rules.
Whereas Hank, not that he was some starry-eyed undergrad, thought the fish mattered in their own right. In fact, some wiseass in the lab had plastered a bumper sticker to the side of a tank that said FISH MATTER. These were the kinds of jokes that made Erica dread department parties, and Hank couldn't blame her— but still. When Purdy, on the day in question, came in and tapped on the glass with his jerky, it obviously annoyed him. So Hank asked him, very politely, very calmly, if he could please not do that anymore, and then mentioned that he was trying to finish a paper for the upcoming meeting of the ichthyological society and it was going slowly and that he'd really appreciate some peace and quiet.
“You bet, guppy man,” Purdy said, cheerfully as always. And this, for some reason, was the last thing Hank wanted to hear. Guppy man. He basically just could not stand those two words coming out of Joe Purdy's mouth. And Purdy, incredibly, was smiling at him as he said this, even waving his jerky good-bye as he started for the door, and Hank knew guppy man was code for a lot of things that weren't related to guppies at all. That, in sum, is why he stood up, crossed the room, and smacked Purdy square in the jaw, causing him to stagger backwards, hand on his chin, jerky flying across the room — though even in his expression of shock Hank couldn't help noticing that there remained a kind of smirk, as if yet another hypothesis about male dominance and hierarchical behavior had just been substantiated by real-world observations. Then Purdy, from the floor, said, “Whoa, Jesus, Hank,” and blood streamed out of his nose, thick and red as if in a drawing by Max.
The next few minutes passed in a kind of a blur.
Hearing Purdy cry out and fall to the floor — actually, he fell against a filing cabinet, knocking off a stack of journals on top of it, and then fell to the floor with a clatter and violence that, admittedly, gave Hank no small amount of satisfaction — two of his grad students came in and took him away, apparently to the hospital, although it seemed unlikely to Hank that he personally could generate enough force to put someone in the hospital. He wasn't exactly brawny. But the grad students were shaking their heads and clucking almost maternally over their fallen leader and stage-whispering things like “What the hell's the matter with that guy?” and “We'd better get to the emergency room right away,” which Hank, sitting back in his chair, acted like he couldn't hear. They left him alone in the office, the fish still swishing quietly, and he could hear mutters and whispers outside in the hall, and no doubt everybody in the department already knew about this behavior, which, though it might confirm Purdy's research, could still potentially get him fired. Which would mean no more escaping to the fish. Which would be the last thing he needed just now. Which is how he came to be alone in his office as day turned to night, afraid to go home and face Erica and Max, unwilling to face even the hallway outside; instead he was sitting there typing this analysis of some recent troublesome behavior.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
It is possible to think logically about all this. Like a female guppy responding to the brilliant orange spots on the male, which mimic the orange fruits that guppies like to eat, the subject's behavior arose in response to a clearly defined set of stimuli. If he were to defend himself to the chair of the department, or at the very least provide evidence of these stimuli, Hank would have no trouble providing the data. He could, for example, present the following data points:
TABLE 1. Annoying Behavior of Joseph Purdy
TYPE OF ANNOYING BEHAVIOR
NUMBER OF TIMES IN RECENT MEMORY
Starting conversations about grant funding merely in order to brag about the amount he has gotten
8
Mentioning expensive renovations done to house, clearly paid for by salary attached to said grant funding
6
Offering deer jerky and using offer as opportunity to brag about hunting exploits
5
Asking questions about fish, then not paying any attention to the answers
4
Tapping items (e.g., jerky) against aquarium glass and bothering fish, which even a behaviorally challenged five-year-old knows not to do
MORE TIMES THAN CAN BE COUNTED
This was not the only data. Ideally, for a complete discussion of the behavior in question, other figures would be designed and included — a graph, maybe, showing the relationship between these factors and the factors at home. An xy graph, where x would plot Purdy's annoying interruptions and y would plot Erica and Max, and the two would intersect in a jagged, mountainous line cresting at the peak point, which would represent the events of today.
Yes, a graph like that would certainly illuminate the subject.