Halloran was smart. Too smart. And it was killing him. Being smart had ruined Halloran’s life. Now he yearned for one thing and one thing only: to be dumber.
“If I could just be really stupid,” Halloran told himself each morning as he sipped his Maxwell House. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful? To taste the joys of being dull-witted . . . maybe even insensate! How I’d love to be an unconscious boulder deep in the Rockies, or perhaps a cardboard deer.”
Halloran couldn’t forget the last thing Dorinda had said to him, as she lugged her tanning lamp out to the Volkswagen Golf: “You may be smarter than I am, Halloran, but that doesn’t mean I have to tolerate your shit!”
“Tolerate?” Halloran had wailed at her departing figure. “Tolerate? Hon, I gave you every goddam thing you wanted!”
But it was too late. The VW Golf had clattered around the corner, and poor Halloran had spent the next week sitting in the empty breakfast nook eating Cheeto Puffs from a jumbo-sized cellophane bag and washing them down with gallons of malt liquor.
He was suffering immensely. Fortunately, however, the South Marshfield Community College was on its week-long spring break, so he was spared the anguish of talking about relative clauses and grading dozens of “Process Essays” each day. But the week was speeding by, and Halloran felt pretty much like a decaying turd. His stomach had gone sour on him, and his midriff had ballooned way up on the Cheetos.
“I’ve got to get out of this apartment,” he told himself. “It’s haunted with the memory of Dorinda.”
What Halloran needed was a neutral setting, an anonymous space where he could sit and stare straight ahead . . . and maybe even drool a little. He needed a place where he could practice being dumb.
As good fortune would have it, the mailman soon came to his rescue – by dropping a colorful flier through the slot in his front door.
The Chicago Aquarium invites you . . .
To visit the mysterious world of the JELLIES!
Blinking slowly and burping malt, Halloran read about the “Major Jellyfish Exhibition” that was about to open at the lakefront fish palace.
Fascinating and intriguing, jellyfish are millions of years older than even the oldest dinosaurs. . . .
Halloran rapped the flier with the backs of his knuckles. “That’s it,” he told himself. “I’m going.”
Jellyfish couldn’t swim, according to the flier. Hell, they couldn’t even see where they were going – since they didn’t have eyes. All they knew how to do was pulse . . . while drifting helplessly wherever the current wanted to take them.
They’re really dumb, thought Halloran. I can learn from them.
Two hours later, he was standing in front of a pulsing “Blue Blubber”** – a really strange-looking animal outfitted with eight jelly arms that waved in every direction at once. The Blue Blubber wasn’t just weird . . . it was super-weird, since each one of the waving arms was equipped with its own tiny mouth.
So . . . the arm grabs a passing fish, stings it into submission, and then the mouth on that particular arm starts eating the fish?
Whoa, thought Halloran.
Yet he felt strangely peaceful here. He felt calmed, soothed.
A moment later he was watching an aquarium attendant push a big sweeper-broom along the corridor that flanked the Blue Blubber’s tank.
The broom-man wore a brass name plate above the pocket of his work shirt: Mr. Lincoln.
Halloran felt a surge of jagged excitement. He stepped toward the man. “Mr. Lincoln?”
“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Lincoln. “All right now. What’s up?”
All at once, Halloran’s eyes were swimming with tears. “Do you think . . . I mean . . . is there any chance I could work here?”
The janitor thought for a moment. “You want to work in maintenance?”
“I do,” said Halloran. “I really do.”
“Well,” said Mr. Lincoln. “That’s quaint. Tell you what: I’ll run you down to the Aquarium Office and we’ll get you started with an application. How would that be?”
**The Jelly Blubber (Catostylus mosaicus), also known as the Blue Blubber Jellyfish, is the most commonly encountered jellyfish along the Australian eastern coast and large swarms sometimes appear in estuarine waters.
–Wikipedia
Dispensations from Reality 