A Man Displayed in a Glass Box in the Center of Town

Justin Portela

I eat the same thing for lunch every day. That way I can’t be made to be a jerkoff. For dinner too, no snacks in between, and I never eat breakfast. Half pound of ground turkey, one cup of rice. For 54 years it was beef but as of last year it’s turkey and a whole bowl of brussel sprouts —the doctor. He says I’m pre-diabetic. So I’m already half a jerkoff; do I need to go all the way? No. And I never change my walk to work either. Not for weather, or any person, and certainly not for construction. The first step to becoming a jerkoff is opening yourself up to the possibility. You think I hate my sad and boring life? Is that what you want me to say? Fuck you.

How long does it take you at the supermarket? I only buy 3 ingredients, I know exactly where they are, and the whole thing takes me fewer than a hundred seconds. Everybody else? Doodling around like jerkoffs, staring blankly at the aisles and drooling with indecision. This includes you. You buy new and exotic foods that you see on the computer. Sometimes you overcook them or you misread the label and accidentally buy the mushy tofu. Your life is a clusterfuck compared to mine. Every venture into the unknown is a concession to the possibility of becoming a jerkoff.

Except, of course, for the rabbits. A person needs direction and motivation in life; the dilemma of modernity is that every neuron in every brain is fastened to a different noose which is in turn strapped to a different horse, and all the horses are bucking and sprinting in completely different directions. It must be remembered that the combination of every individual color yields black.

I have one and exactly one pursuit in life, which is the wellbeing and care of the family of rabbits that live in the field outside of my office window. This leaves me very little time for the dehydrated screen gawking, directionless dawdling, and vacant-eyed drooling that composes the vast majority of the average person’s waking hours.

That’s why, on the first day of The Man Displayed in the Glass Box in the Center of Town, while every other pedestrian glared and rubbernecked through the city square like lemmings and mongoloids, I proceeded resolutely and did not even read his sign, which probably explained why he had put himself in The Glass Box in the Middle of the Town Square and why the box was slowly filling with water. I had faced nastier detours than his and not once have I ever momentarily considered changing the pace of my gait. I get to work at the same time every day. No exceptions, no deviations.

Nice try, asshole.

Can we recap? Let’s recap.

Items of value: Rabbits.

Items of zero value: Men in Glass Boxes.

On the second day I took a little glance. Just to see. The tank had no straps, no strait jacket, and no Houdini. In fact, this plain-looking guy could have been any of the thousands of other guys I’ve seen and not bothered to remember. He wore cargo shorts and an otherwise unremarkable face. Maybe, maybe, you could say he looked like Jeremy Irons. Eh. I’m looking again. Same sandy blonde hair but the bone structure is off. Not Jeremy Irons. But let’s be clear, not just some guy either. This guy had elevated himself to the realm of the proper noun. He was The Man in the Glass Tank in the Middle of Town, and only he had water around his ankles.

What he wanted was two dollars. That was the sick game. If anybody gave him two dollars, or if two people each gave him a dollar, or any such fundraising combination, he pulled a lever, the water stopped filling the tank, then he left. Counterfactually, I suppose, he drowned.

That was it.

Except I didn’t glance at all. Have you been listening? Of course, I didn’t glance. I read it in the Journal; that’s what I do when I get to work. Man in the Glass Tank in the Middle of Town. You think I wrote that? That was the headline.

Every day, for one hour, I read the Journal. Then I get coffee and watch the rabbits. Then it’s time for lunch, which I make the night before and pack in a lunchbox. Then I do the crossword, then I go home. It has been 15 years; I have never met my boss. I do not know what my company produces, and nobody has ever asked me what I am working on, which is nothing. Mostly they make small talk and invariably I avoid it. I dislike chit chat and I especially dislike discussions of glass-tank-based fundraising. But I do like the Journal, which is where I got the details about the guy in the tank. This proves my whole point, really. You should never stop for anything. If it’s so important, you’ll see it in the Journal. If I had stopped to see glance, then now I’d have seen it twice, read the sign twice, and had the exact same thought about Jeremy Irons twice. Which would have made me a jerkoff.

The third day you’d have thought there was a wedding in the town square. Probably because the Journal reported on it. Now you got tourists. And people from the suburbs. But there are thousands of weddings every day, mostly Asian. Do you think I stop for them? You’re getting the idea.

But I hear at work, while I’m trying to watch the rabbits, that today the guy wanted six dollars. See, there are two primary rabbits, Chester and Edwin, plus the litter of small rabbits they’re raising. The whole thing hasn’t been easy on me. Because first I had to name them. Then, and do not inquire into the details, but I had to confirm the gender of the rabbits, because otherwise how could I properly name them? Then I learned that, despite the cartoons, rabbits do not eat carrots, or any root vegetables, for that matter. I had to go all the way to a pet store to get special rabbit food. “Do homosexual rabbits have special diets?” This was a real sentence I had to say to the man at the pet store. But no, it turns out, Edwin and Chester are just picky eaters, and that fact is completely separate from the fact of their cohabitation and constant humping.

Edwin has fallen slightly ill in recent days. Me, being large, and them, being small, the rabbits are understandably quite afraid of me. This means I cannot simply carry Edwin to the veterinarian. Instead I had to bring pictures. “How can you be sure that he’s sick?” the veterinarian asks, looking at the pictures of Edwin I’ve taken. How do I know he’s sick? Well he hasn’t been eating, and he’s been slower. He sleeps more than usual. I feed them every day so if you could just give me some medicine then I can make sure it gets to them. “Well,” the veterinarian says with his feable little jerkoff sigh. “Well what?” I cut him off, “I spend hours each day looking at these rabbits, I know what is normal behavior and what is not.” It all worked out, I got the medicine, but as you can see, There is quite a lot to do for these rabbits and I’m quite invested in their outcomes, so you can imagine how much it disturbs me to be sidetracked by some water cooler droning about the glass tank man, by some man or woman who has actual work to do, or worse, some newly-hired soul wishing to discuss the glass tank man with me, too naïve to know that low-temperature commentary is not one of the tasks for which I am responsible here.

But while he has me, he being some gingham-collared lackey named Ted Dee, which, I swear to resurrected Christ, is his legal name. Theodore Dee, like Teddy, but Ted Dee, which, fuck me, I don’t even have the cranial capacity to ponder the mysteries of this prep-school jerkoff and his absurd namesake. But while he has me, I ask if The Man in the Tank is getting the money.

Every time so far, says Ted Dee.

I’ve just started to be able to differentiate the little rabbits from each other so soon I’m going to have to settle on names for all of them too. There are 6 in the litter, plus Edwin and Chester, which makes 8 total. But I can see over Ted’s shoulder that Edwin and Chester are napping with their children, so I have time for one more question, which is how high does the water get before he gets the money?

Oh, he gets it almost immediately, says Ted Dee. It hasn’t gotten past his ankles so far.

Day one was a dollar, day two was 2, day three was 4, day four was 8, so, by the pattern, on day 6, he should have asked for 16, because it’s doubling. But this guy thought he had the world by the balls.

10 thousand dollars. That’s what he was asking for. It took everything to keep my walk steady when I heard the number rise from the whispers in the crowd.

This had to be a test from God. There was absolutely no fucking chance this guy was getting this money, which meant, if it were my bet, he was either going to have to pull the chord prematurely and end this charade once and for all, or, even better, all these people were going to watch a man die. Live death was always the subtextual threat, let us remember. Give me money, or watch me die.

But I can trudge through that, I’m thinking on the morning of the fifth day. If he doesn’t die, then there was nothing to see, and I’ll read about this colossal failure in the Journal. And if he does, well, if I wanted to watch somebody kill themselves, I could probably find plenty of videos online.

But you know what got me? The fucking balls. This fucking Icarus went from eight to ten thousand. No subtlety there. It’s anthropological, really. And, if you think about it, if I stop to watch, I won’t even have to read the coverage in the Journal. Because I’ll have seen it. I can skip that part, which will save me time, and I can get to the rabbits early.

And now that I’ve decided to stop, now that I’ve made this decision, I realize that the glass is totally soundproof. This gets me apoplectic. You cannot ask questions or reason with the man at all. There’s only the one-way dialogue of the sign, which is just an explanation of the ultimatum. You have no ability to consent to the game. You agree to play the second you read the sign, and, even worse, it’s your move.

Alright. Let’s play ball. My move. I choose to do nothing. Water at his ankles now. I gotta hand it to the guy that he was clever enough to start taking credit cards today. Harder to raise ten grand in cash. With the credit card reader comes a counter, at the top of the tank, with the current amount raised. By the time the water reaches the knees, he’s only at 200 dollars.

I can’t even get a great look at his face because I’m so far in the back of the crowd. I wiggle up a little bit; if I’m going this far out of my way, I’m going to get a good view of the thing. By the time I jostle to the front the guy has water at his stomach, 800 bucks. 3 feet high and rising.

How’s the weather in there? 4 feet high and rising. There are whispers going around, some people throw in small bills, but I don’t see anybody taking out anything bigger than a twenty. You can see the lever, which he can pull at any point, and it seems his fingers are getting itchy for it. By my count he’s got about 90 seconds before his nose goes under and he’s probably only got about 2000 bucks so far.

Once the water hits the nipples the people start to get antsy. A bit more money coming in, but every credit card tap takes about 15 seconds, so even if every person gives a hundred, the math isn’t on his side. One brave soul gives another three thousand so by the neckline he’s halfway to the goal.

Fuck this, I thought. I cannot let this happen. You have to understand. I had to do something.

I move right to the front, right where the credit reader is. I wave everybody else away. I’m gonna save the day.

“Does anybody have a pen?” I ask to the crowd, pulling out my checkbook.

About 10 seconds for the pen to arrive.

“I assume you take a check?” I ask the man in the tank, who can’t hear me, but the whole crowd laughs, probably because I’m old. That’s another 10 seconds.

“Who do I even make this thing out to?” I ask, this time more quietly, so only the small circle around me laughs, but the joke doesn’t get to the folks in the nosebleeds.

Another 5 seconds to make it out to cash, 5 to write the date, 5 for the amount, and with about 25 seconds before this guy is completely submerged, I write out the words ‘eight thousand dollars’ as slow as humanly possibly.

I take at least ten seconds on a big curly E, then I drop the pen. “Whoops.” Here’s the beauty:

I’ve controlled the entire game. Nobody is going to give money, no matter how slow I go, both because they figure that the game is over and because my large and pre-diabetic body is physically blocking the cash basket and the credit card reader. They’re completely right, actually. The game is over. But I win.

By the time I start my signature the water is at his nose. This guy is itching to get out, his hands are wrapped so tight around the lever. He’s just waiting for the check to hit the basket.

Nice try, asshole. I rip the check-up in front of him. His move now.

How did it end? You know how it ends. There’s no such thing as art and the guy was a total fucking con artist. I called his bluff. What a sight to watch this guy have to exit the glass box, soaking wet, every single eye on him, and he has no clue what in the world to say. This asshole never thought this would actually happen. He really thought he was going to get the money. Sorry. Now you can see the shame bleeding from his eyes.

But his wasn’t as bad as mine. I realize this, watching Chester dance across the dotted grass while his perfect children bathe in the sun. He conned me, but nobody else was a bigger jerkoff that day but me. Sure, the Man in the Glass Tank was soaking wet and a total fool, but when I got to the office, after my normal route and timings had been completely deviated and changed, I counted once, then twice, then three and four and over and over again. It was unmistakable. I counted Chester, then two, three, four, five, six, seven rabbits. Only Seven; no Edwin. I didn’t even have to go out and look. My glasses hung loose off my ears and honestly I could only breathe barely. When the dust settled, I was covered in dust—my tears fell wet and fast onto the crossword.