Free The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind by David Guterson Page A

plastic glasses. He stood at the cash register with a pencil behind his ear eating popcorn from a brown paper bag, and looking, to Paul, a little sinister for some reason. His shop had the vaguely menacing aura of a laboratory set up in a cave. Four rows of aquariums stretched away into the darkness. Only they were lit—nothing else. The fish hovered as if in a dream, secure in their lit glass houses. The place smelled of jungle; vapor fogged all its windows. In another room caged birds sang.
    “Wow,” Paul said. “It’s neat in here.”
    “Look around,” the man advised. “Go ahead. Dry off. Put your books down and look some.”
    “Okay,” Paul said. “Thanks.”
    He wandered between the rows, peering into each tank with his hands on his knees, feeling immense suddenly. The man had hung a placard over each aquarium: PARADISEFISH—FROM TAIWAN; CHOCOLATE GOURAMI—THE MALAY PENINSULA; BANDED CLIMBING PERCH—THE ZAIRE BASIN . The imprisoned fish appeared to lead effortless and aimless lives. They hung suspended in corners, one eye to the glass, or tipped themselvestoward the membrane of the surface. Some swam diligently, but most seemed to understand there was no point to that. They went wherever the water took them as it bubbled up from the filters.
    Paul watched them for some time. He decided—though he had no words for it—that they lived in a private and trivial universe, subject to currents of thought so removed from their lives that their identities as individual fish had been submerged. Perhaps they had known all the miseries of capture; perhaps in transport from some exotic home the unassailable loneliness of the world had been revealed to them. Now they swung about in watery cages, forgetting or remembering, uncertain if what occurred in the course of their hours constituted an actual existence. Paul, with a conscious exertion of the imagination, thought of them as they might have been in their other lives—free, inhabiting a warm and boundless ocean, darting joyfully, their hearts light, feeding, in conquest, at liberty to live. He thought of them as cultivating a preordained singularity, nurtured by forces that were rightfully in effect, according to the universe’s grand plan.
    When he looked up the man at the counter was watching him suspiciously. He still stood behind his cash register stuffing his mouth with popcorn.
    “You’re interested,” he said to Paul. “I can tell.”
    Paul nodded.
    “Start small,” the man advised. “Ten gallons, max. Decide if you like it, then move up gradual. You’ve got all kinds of time.”
    “I already know I like it,” Paul said.
    The man crammed more popcorn between his lips. “Oh, yeah?” he said. “How can you tell?”
    “I just can,” Paul said. “I’m like that.”
    “Well,” said the man. “Fine then. If you know yourself that well, fine.”
    Paul came upstairs at six-thirty. His parents were in their living room now—he’d heard them turn the lock fifteen minutes before, he’d given them time to get settled. The television was on: news. His father sat in the wing chair with his feet across an ottoman, listening through headphones to the CD player, pieces of the mail scattered on the floor beside him. His mother—her feet pulled up beneath her on the sofa—leafed through a mail-order catalog.
    “Hello,” Paul said to them. “You’re home.”
    His father pried off the headphones. “Hello,” he said. “Did you use the VCR after school, Paul? I noticed someone left the power on.”
    “No,” Paul said. “I didn’t.”
    “You’re wasting electricity,” his mother said.
    “I didn’t use it,” Paul repeated.
    They stopped talking in order to watch a television advertisement. A car rose up from the surface of the road and flew off into the glitter of deep space. Then it returned, a woman got into it. A man in jeans, leaning jauntily against the side of a barn, watched her flash by. She went around a corner, got out in front of