THREE-SECOND MEMORY
By Krishan Coupland

After his sister left forever Tyler got a job at the toy store. The manager there didn’t even look at his CV before handing him a yellow plastic jerkin. It was warm to the touch and had a picture of an emu giving a thumbs up on the back. Tyler held it against his chest like a precious thing as he was shown around the store: the rank of tills, the stockroom, the aisles of Soft Toys and Early Years and Board Games and Electronics.

“Nobody your age ever _wants_ to work here,” said the manager, as he showed Tyler the staff room.

“I do,” said Tyler.

“Why?” The manager looked like the godfather from a mob movie: grey and asymmetric and sweaty, but somehow terribly dignified. “What are you hiding?”

“Nothing,” said Tyler. “I just didn’t know what else to do.”

The manager accepted this with a slow nod. It was almost seven o’ clock by now, and the lights that crossed the ceiling were clunking off one by one. The cleaner patrolled the aisles on the back of a wet and roaring machine. Arrayed in the darkness, the toys looked like armies.

*

His supervisor was called May, and Tyler thought that she was beautiful. Her hair was unnaturally blonde, the roots creeping a line along her scalp like a burn in a row of corn. When she smiled, her left front tooth was a black gap in a line of white, and her eyes were dark and ringed; she looked as though she never slept.

“You look like my sister,” he said.

“That’s nice,” said May. She showed him how to work the barcode reader, and how to use the trolleys from the stockroom. Also, she showed him Pet’s Corner. As it stood there were no Pets, just empty cages lined with sawdust. Health And Safety, she explained. Animals had been out of the question for a while now, ever since the flu. But they did have fish, a whole huge tank of them. It was illuminated, photographic coral backlit by a source brighter than daylight. The filter hummed. It smelled like a dentist’s waiting room. Through the glass Tyler could see castles and treasure chests and seaweed swaying in the greenish water. And the fish — little flecks of gold shivered like dropped coins in that shipwreck gloom.

“It needs cleaning, really,” she said. “Maybe you could do it? They could be your responsibility.” Tyler looked at the fish, not swimming so much as drifting. Fins like jelly waving through water grey with sediment. “You like them?” she said.

Tyler nodded. He liked the fish. They were beautiful, exotic. Looking at them made his eyes start to water. He put his hand on the glass and the glass was warm. He could see May’s reflection in it — her eyes dark as tide pools, the gap between her teeth as impossible as an ocean.

“I’ll need a bucket, please,” he said.

The next week — and the week after that, and every week of every month after that — Tyler cleaned out the fish tank. It scared him at first; the fish looked so vulnerable out of the water, as if made from nothing more than bubbles and glitter. They flopped and wriggled in the little green net, and Tyler knew that they were fragile, and that they were his responsibility. His and no-one else’s. That first day he netted out the fish, drained the tank bucket by bucket into the hand sink in the employee bathroom, sleeved away the fuzzy mould that clung to the sides, splashed everything clean. The ornaments were filthy; a mulch of shit and discarded flakes lay beneath the layers of gravel. It took hours, but when the fish went back in the water was clear, and the surface webbed with glassy bubbles. They glooped through the tank at him, grateful. 

Sometimes May would help him. Between them they could lift the empty tank and carry it out to the car park. May would use the hosepipe usually reserved for the trucks. The smokers watched them from the delivery entrance, laughing at private jokes just a little too loudly, sometimes pointing. May ignored them.

“You really like these things, don’t you?” she said once.

Tyler nodded.

“Good,” she said. “Someone _should_ care about them.” She tapped the glass and a goldfish whipped around in urgent circles. Other times, Tyler helped customers and stacked shelves and worked the tills, but he didn’t like any of that. He only liked the fish.

*

The first time they called to him he could barely hear because the water and the glass and the air were in the way. Closing time had just gone and he was alone, left behind to finish his ritual with the tank. Nobody else, the aisles half-lit. The water looked beautiful: clean and glassy and safe. Heated, even, to body warmth. Tyler climbed up on the plinth, lifted the lid and plunged headfirst in.

He fell deep, everything a mess of bubbles and ballooning, mute sounds. Huge here, without the flat dimension imposed by gravity. Water rushing like aeroplane engines in his ears. The surface was above him now, rolling, reflections blinking distortedly through the water.

The fish came. They were big as dolphins up close, heavy, proud creatures bristling with scales. Faceless and wonderful. They blinked and opened their gills and took Tyler down to their castles. Ruined castles, slanting in beds of plastic gravel. They surrounded him, pressing in, mouthing urgently. Soft, aquatic bodies. The pressure popped Tyler’s ears. His lungs strained.”There was a war here,” they said. One of the goldfish butted up against his chest, gentle and reptilian. Her gills siphoned water, the gulp and the vortex obvious up so close. “A terrible war. Our cities. Our children...” They showed him the skull of a giant, crashed down in a beach of purple stones. It looked forlorn there, and to them it was as much a mystery as any standing stone. They swam together through the eye sockets, under the yellowed cathedral of the dome. The hollow space echoed even underwater. “Tell us,” they said. “Tell us...”

Tyler tried to speak, but only bubbles came out, the last of his air. He pulled back, somehow landing on his feet. Water spattered the store-floor linoleum. He gasped, dripping and swirly with the sudden rise, the monumental back-crash of noise and light. He put his face up to the fish tank. The little fishes glooped at him.

*

He mopped up the water. He didn’t tell anyone. He started sleeping in the store. 

It was a simple enough thing to do. He took an Action Man sleeping bag from the Outdoors aisle and kept it rolled up in his locker, jerkin and box lunch and other working paraphernalia wedged in around the sides. So long as he stayed by the tank the motion sensors would not catch him. He ate the leftover sandwiches and yoghurt-pot dregs from the bins, along with whatever chocolates or cheesy crisps or energy drinks he could shake from the faulty break room vending machine. He washed and shaved in the little bathroom at the back of the store. Nobody knew. Nobody needed to know. It was fine, just him and the fishes and nobody else. 

In the day he worked the aisles, staying clear of customers. He hid from kids and their parents, away from sticky hands and crying and want. Better that way. He couldn’t stand the children when they yelled, or when they touched things. Some mornings he would set up a semi-circle of Wet Floor signs around the tank, just to keep them away.

May came in with her wrist in plaster, stiff white and scrawled with marker. She saw him looking at it, trying to read the names of her well-wishers. The two of them were stacking up radio-control Batmobiles (_with real light-up action_). They often worked together that way, close but in silence. One-handed, she had to trap the boxes beneath her chin, slide them onto the shelf like an injured forklift.

“What happened?” he said.

“Oh,” said May, holding up the arm inside its casing. “This?” And she told him about the steep stairs in her apartment. It was her own fault really. She was always falling down.

Later he told the fish about May, but they weren’t interested. They circulated lazily. They floated up against the glass and then they floated away, and it seemed like they had things to show him. It was understandable, Tyler supposed. You couldn’t expect them to know what went on outside the tank anymore than he could be expected to know what went on outside the store. He said, “I’m fighting a war too, you know.” He climbed up and splashed cleanly into the water. Cool, glorious. 

They were pleased to see him. They tried to say his name, mouthing like babies over the weird human syllables. They brought him flakes which they had saved from feeding time. He smiled and touched their heads.

This time they showed him the reef. When you were underwater everything was different, Tyler found. There was nothing invisible, nothing so small you couldn’t see it and know it and not be afraid. Down among the plastic forest everything was green and lucid. Tyler pulled his way through the leaves while the fish flicked in and out, there and away. They took him to the back of the tank, where the light dispersed even and tranquil against the photographic reef. The curls of coral were huge, indistinguishable from real. The fish swam up against the glass and butted their heads. Tyler watched. He felt in his stomach how much they longed to be out there. A longing in the brain — wired-in, instinct. They didn’t understand, he realised. They didn’t know, couldn’t know, just how thoroughly they were trapped. He put his hand against the glass and breathed bubbles that wobbled upwards like startled bugs.

“It’s only a photograph,” he said, and this time his voice came out clear and audible. The fish flicked back and forth. Eyes rounded, fins shuddering.

“Photograph?” said one goldfish. 

“Help us,” said another. But his air was gone, and Tyler shut his eyes, pulled back and landed wetly in the darkened corner of the toy store. 

*

The way he lost his job was by hitting a kid. He hadn’t meant to, but the little boy had been up on the platform with the tank, leaning out so precariously that the whole thing was liable to fall at any moment, his fat, pale arm hooked over the top edge, waving around in the water. Fishing, Tyler realised, in the moment before his brain shut down and his body took over.

For a while, a lot of people shouted at him. He hated it. He hated himself. In the manager’s office he shut his eyes and covered his ears, even though it made him look like a child. They took back the jerkin and gave him an envelope and sent him home, forever. Tyler hadn’t been home in weeks, and it seemed in his absence as if everything had cooled. Like a crime scene; he was amazed that someone hadn’t come and taped up the door, started dusting for prints. All this time his apartment had simply sat there, the same as ever. It smelled musty, and there was a stain on the ceiling. 

Tyler went and stood in the shower until it was dark. The water tasted gritty in his mouth, cold and unlived-in. He dressed and sat at his table. He thought of the fish, and then of his sister, many-thousand miles distant. Thoughts of her lead to thoughts of May. He made himself soup in his kitchenette and ate it in the dark. 

The next day he went back to the store. He went straight to the fish tank. He knelt down and pressed his face up against the glass and gulped and the fish gulped back. “Tell me,” he said, “what do I have to do?”

“Rescue us,” they said, and then a hand descended on his shoulder. It was May.

“You’d better go before someone sees,” she said flatly. There was a bruise on her left temple and without thinking Tyler reached out and touched it. She didn’t move, she stopped breathing. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I walked into a door. I’m always walking into doors.” She laughed weakly. He stood up and for a second neither of them moved. Tyler felt that something important was expected of him, but he had no idea what it might be. He broke away and walked, head down, out of the store.

*

When he returned the retail park was floodlit, standing empty. A single stray trolley heeled at the bottom of the car park. CCTV cameras blinked from every eave. He skirted the fence and squeezed through to the delivery entrance. It was cold and frightening. He felt sick and his hands shook and he had to force himself to breathe. He kicked the service door until it opened. At the noise and its echo he cringed, sweating underneath his clothes. Nobody came to look. The store floor, he knew, was equipped with motion sensors; he’d heard them clicking at him from the corners every morning. Maybe, thought Tyler, if I move slowly enough...

He moved slowly, big-bird steps, muscles groaning and alert for that tiny click that would mean the end. It never came. And when he reached Pet’s Corner May was there, hunched against the wall. The tank lamp was on, casting blue and wavering light over her body.

“Hey,” she said sleepily, and smiled. “I thought you’d be back.” 

“I’m here for the fish,” he said. 

“Me too. I’ll help, I mean. I want to help.”

The tank light was the only light in the entire store. Behind them and to their left the aisles stretched off and faded into nothing, ballerinas and race cars and board games dissolving into the dark. Everything dormant and repeating.

With her good hand, May dragged a clear plastic bag through the water, and they worked together to net out the fish and tip them inside. They came obediently, the big goldfish mouthing something unknowable as they were caught and lifted clear of the water. They filled the bag, and then another, the creatures inside shifting thickly like bags of subtle glitter. In a minute the aquarium was empty. Tyler switched off the light, and reached down into the amniotic warmth to kill the running of the filter. 

“Okay,” he said.

“Time to go,” said May. They went.

*

They were crossing the stockroom when the alarm tripped. A single bell, at first, like the shattering sound of a midnight telephone call... except that it did not stop, and then there were other bells ringing, deeper in the store. Tyler almost choked. They ran, crashing out through door after door, out into the fresh shock of the night. With a dim feeling of surprise Tyler found he was holding May’s hand, the injured one, the plaster-shelled palm and the thin protruding fingers laced with his. He hadn’t touched another human being like this for years, but it was May; she was safe. Their steps made confused echoes across the car park tarmac, the world all rush and terror.

 Up a dirt bank and across an empty carriageway. Running now in the middle of the road. Here, somehow, Tyler fell. Later he would replay it in his mind: if only he hadn’t panicked; if only he’d looked where he was going. Whether it was him or May who first stumbled he could not be sure. His feet caught and the bag of water and fish went squirting away. May’s hand was gone... everything stopped as suddenly as it had began. They were far from the store now and could barely hear the alarm. Tyler lay where he fell. The scrapes on his arms stung with a dull and weighty insistence, and he knew that something was wrong, something which in a moment would come into focus, something which soon he would have to face. 

May was saying something. She was there, she was with him. He forced himself to breathe. She pulled him onto his knees. “Look,” said May. “The fish.”

The bags had burst. 

In the dark it was impossible, but they searched all the same. The smaller ones all were dead; in his panic Tyler trod on two of them, feeling the slack collapse of their bodies beneath his shoe with a sense of shuddering horror. By the time they found the others they had stopped flopping altogether. Inert now, cold as in life. For a minute Tyler thought that it was over, but then May shouted for him to help her. There in the collapsed remains of the bag was one still trapped, pinned inside a slim bubble of water. Gasping, twitching like a trapped nerve. Some miracle. They made a bowl with their hands and ran awkwardly through the empty streets. Every jolt shed another few drops, another few precious minutes. By the time they arrived at Tyler’s place the fish was flopping lamely in their empty hands.

In the hall he had a bowl full of water ready, and they dropped the goldfish in. May hovered by the door.

“You live alone?” she asked.

“I didn’t used to. My sister... but she left.”

“Left?”

“She went to America. Got sick of me. She knows someone there.” Tyler watched the fish. It swam a few tight circles, seeming stiff and weary. But it was alive, at least. “I haven’t heard from her in weeks.” 

“Oh.” May came inside and sat down next to him in the hallway. They didn’t turn on the light. Together, they watched the fish swimming and swimming. After a minute May leaned her head against his shoulder, and then that became a hug: tight, wordless, all about mistakes and worry and more mistakes.

She said, “I’m sorry. About the fish.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“It is. I know... I mean, I fell.”

“_I_ fell.”

“We both... Listen, I fall over all the time.” She held up her arm, still cased in plaster, covered with faded marker scrawl of names and promises. “It’s a joke. I walk into doors. Nobody walks into doors, not really. But I do. I fall down stairs. And then I tell people about it and they think... well, they think all sorts of things. You know, don’t you?”

Tyler said that, yes, he knew.

“I tell people the truth and they don’t want to hear. Everyone’s so eager to rescue everyone else. Or be rescued, I guess. It’s like you have to choose, one or the other. Otherwise nobody knows what you are.” Her tongue probed her missing tooth. “I would have told you, anyway. Sooner or later.”

“It’s okay,” said Tyler. “I’m sorry I stepped on them.”

“It’s okay.” It wasn’t. Tyler thought of all those little corpses on the tarmac. The scene of a massacre, an anti-flood, artificial disaster. How could you explain this to anyone, ever? And the ones he had crushed — their poor, smashed bodies. For a moment he was sure that he was about to cry, but he didn’t.

May released him. She stood. “Do you have a phone?” she said. 

While she was away, Tyler put his face up close to the glass and listened. “You were careless,” said the goldfish. “You were stupid and clumsy and careless, and because of you I’m the only one left.”

“I’m sorry,” whispered Tyler. He was sorry. Deeply. He tried to dive into the fish bowl, but it was too small and too empty, and so he couldn’t. He sat back down instead and watched the fish some more. It glooped at him, resentful, like the very edge of a knife blade in the darkness. He put his ear to the bowl and listened hard. Small, womb-like murmurs from within. At last, sounding wretched, the goldfish spoke: “Feed me.” So he cracked open a plastic jar of fish flakes, and sprinkled them on the surface, and the goldfish ate.