Everybody knows what a fish is, except for the fish themselves. For five hundred million years they’ve had the chance to figure it out, and yet they never did. They simply kept on swimming.
But now, there is another kind of fish. Other fish are long, or
short, or round, or spiky, or coiled or flattened or
what-have-you.
This is not such a fish. For it has all these
shapes, and none; and even with all those other strange shapes a fish
can take, no shape at all is the most unusual shape for a fish to be
in.
Now, for the first time, deep under the water… swims the idea of a fish. It has fins, of course; a head; scales, vaguely. It is weird and sharp and sleek, in a way, but the exact shape, the boundary, is undefined, and so it slowly leaks out of itself.
What is it doing underwater? That’s where fish live, of course. Where else would the idea of a fish be?
Why does it have a fish shape? For it does have a fish shape, as shapeless as it is. Why? As shapeless as it is, it is still a fish. That’s why. And really— it is the why.
This fish, unlike all other fish that are fish through being like it, carries a context outside of itself. Fish do not know themselves; this is the fish that knows itself. This is the fish that cannot be named, for not all fish have a name. This is the fish that knows its name. This is the fish that is a name.
And that’s where it started, from the perspective of the fish. Deep in the ocean.
But from our perspective it started on the shore.
In the summer evenings we would walk along the beach, on the stretch of sand that squiggled and squirmed between the lighthouse at its head and the breakwaters at its tail, where it dissipated into the solidity of the concrete blocks which held the coast together by keeping the land and sea apart. The beach we walked on was, in contrast to these young yet massive blocks, of a far more questionable permanence despite its age, always smudged about and repainted by the waves of brush-strokes coming in from the sea, a project to be continually revised by an unsatisfied painter. According to some, when all the beaches of the world are finished, when each suggestion of sand has been persuaded into the right place without flowing back like watercolor, the painting will be complete, and all will be frozen in perpetual motion, eternally the best possible world.
The concrete blocks were of a uniform grey color, and of a uniform shape. They are called tetrapods, from their four legs that interlock with other tetrapods to form a breakwater. These legs are rounded, so that water will flow around them, not against them, protecting the blocks from erosion while dissipating the energy of the waves which flow through the gaps between them. They are curiously organic looking, in the fashion of those more geometric parts of nature, like diatoms and the other plankton that float to and fro in the seas, spinning glassy cages in shapes normally only found in math classes— or perhaps it is more right to say that the true home of these shapes is in the sea, with a small handful trapped in chalkboards and exercise books like fish in aquariums.
In the evening light the tetrapods lost their three-dimensionality and became a kind of abstract mass of dark geometry against the orange horizon, a collage of identical sponge-prints in a cubist’s impression of land. Beside them stretched the white sands rendered in meticulous pointillism, wriggling like an eel as the waves changed its contours. I remember the feeling of taking it all in, and of climbing up on the blocks to better see the horizon girdling the sea. It was with such a vantage point that I could best see the limits of my vision.
On most nights, she would get there first, and stand perched upon a block on one foot and twirl like one of the town’s fish-shaped weather-vanes, waving her three other limbs to balance. She looked a bit like a tetrapod herself.
Once I had arrived and climbed up on another block, and watched a bit of the sky with her (or watched her watch a bit of the sky, rather), we would hop down onto the sand and start our walk. The sea air was permeated with salt and seaweed. I felt that if I stayed here long enough I’d get forests of algae growing on me, or that I’d get covered with salt crystals. I didn’t think I’d mind.
We left momentary footprints of dryness behind us, as usually happens when one walks on wet sand. We would walk for maybe half an hour before we came to the lighthouse, at which point we would go home. We could probably make it there much faster, but we were in no hurry, and would usually slow down a little bit when we got closer, as if the warning of the beacon was for us. Maybe it was; we knew that when we inevitably hit the rocks beside it we would have to break apart and walk home, alone.
We wanted to walk forever, on a never-ending beach of infinite sand. I had read somewhere that coastlines had no definite length; it’s called the coastline paradox. Take a map of a shoreline; measure it. Now zoom in. The coastline has more detail; at some points it juts out, at some point it bends in. If you measure it now you’ll have to account for the increased bends, so this increases the effective length of the coastline. By increasing the detail, you haven’t improved the accuracy, you’ve just added to the length. The more detail you add, the longer the coastline gets. The coastline fills space, for it is not a perimeter so much as an area. There is no coastline, for the coast is not a line. And so, I thought to myself, we should be able to walk together, forever.
And despite all this the walks still ended. We conquered, unwillingly, infinite distances. The steps we took, the seconds we gave, all flowed like sand, and at some undefinable point that pile of sand became a beach we had put behind us.
“I’m going away to become a marine biologist,” I told her one night. “To the university.”
“Alright. Come back soon.”
“It’ll be less than a year.”
“Yeah,” she said.
At that point I was eighteen, and had, with the wisdom that comes with age, just about managed to convince myself that love was nothing but a kind of liquid that brains produced in the same way that cod livers produce oil. This had a certain kind of logic to it, since like most liquids it imparts a kind of mushiness that it gets into everything if you’re not careful. I had to admit to myself that I found her interesting— more than interesting— but I had decided to study something real, like fish, or sea urchins. Humans could wait until they had sorted themselves out, without me.
I came back in less than a year, as promised, having learned many things, including that even “less than a year” could be a long time. I had stuffed my head with so many facts about fish that I felt like I had forgotten many of the details of my youth, including what a fish actually looked like. I could tell you what each part of a fish looked like, and how it was connected to a whole, but I would have been at a loss to see a fish as a fish. I was so used to the feeling of fish scales that I had forgotten what fish scales really felt like— which is to say, really weird.
I hoped that I still remembered enough about her, that the aroma of fish had not permeated my memory of her. I hoped that the smell of salt she had wouldn’t remind me of fish. I hoped that her eyes, wide behind her glasses, wouldn’t remind me of the wide and glassy eyes of fish. I hope that I, flopping about nervously in a place now unfamiliar to me, wouldn’t, in some obscure way, remind her of fish.
I had arranged, over the phone, to meet her in a local cafe, the Haddock’s Eyes. I had never been in that cafe; I dimly hoped that she hadn’t either, so that we would both be equally ill at ease there, equally uncertain of what to do and where to be. I had studied fish because humans hadn’t been able to sort themselves out— but I now realized that I desperately hoped that they had not managed to sort everything out without me.
When outside, I pressed my face up against the glass to see if she was in there, as if I was a child visiting an aquarium; I didn’t see her, but I went in anyway.
It was pleasantly cool inside; it made me feel cooler, too. I saw that someone had left a book on one of the tables, though no cups or plates were to be seen there; in curiosity I checked it.
“Glossary of Ancient Greek Fishes,” I read from the spine; the cover was blank, so judgement had to be postponed.
I picked it up and tentatively opened it and dropped it suddenly as she stepped beside me.
“Hey,” I said weakly.
“Hey,”
she said. “You found my book.”
“Yeah.” I coughed. “Long
time no see!,” I said, in a tone of only half-forced cheerfulness.
I was genuinely happy to be here and genuinely happy
to see her.
“Is it a good book?”, I asked.
“Take a peek. Go on. Open it. I’ll get the coffee.”
I nodded, and cracked it open. Alright.
It was interesting, as far as reference work concerning the names of Greek fishes go. It was, in a way, even enlightening; the information in it was unknown to me.
She placed the coffees on the table with a clink. I looked up.
“What’s the fish-experts verdict?,” she said, sitting down.
“Well… It’s neat, I’ll give you that. Enjoyable, even. I don’t know why they didn’t include the scientific names, though.”
“Of the fish? I guess that’s not what it’s about.”
“But it’s about fish, right? Says so on the spine.”
“It’s a part of fish that has nothing to do with fish as you would know them. It’s about the names of fish in Ancient Greece— so it’s really separate from our modern names of fish. And in any case,” she said, fishing in her bag and for her next words, “If fish had names themselves, they’d likely think our names for them were rather silly. The whole naming business is rather silly, really.”
She pulled out a small saltcellar and picked out a pyramidal flake of sea salt about as large as a pinky-nail, shaped like some ancient stepped altar. She crumbled this building between her giant fingers, letting it fall into her coffee. She drank her coffee unbittered; I drank mine unsalted.
I had a sudden mental image of the both of us as fish, participating in advanced and cultured fish activities as far removed from regular fish as we are from chimps. They were still weird, though— things used for one purpose in human society were used for another in fish society, much like how humans and fish have somewhat similar bones and organs that are sometimes used for very different purposes. Humans don’t have gills anymore; they use them for jaws and ear bones instead.
I took a sip of coffee and smiled. What a backwards people we are, having jaws and such instead of gills. We’d never make it in the real world.
“Whatcha smiling about?,” she said. “Haven’t touched your coffee yet.” She leaned forwards. “Not thinking about fish, are you? Surely you think of things other than fish.”
“Hmmm? Oh. No, not thinking about fish.”
“Liar.”
“Okay.
Maybe I’m thinking about fish, but it’s in relation to you.” I
sipped a bit more coffee, and tried to think of a conversation topic
other than fish. “How’s it going for you?,” I asked. “As a
boat mechanic.”
“Good, good. Lots of other work on cars and
such too. Listen,” she said, and stopped. She rummaged through her
bag. “I found this the other day. Take a look at it.”
She drew out a mason jar of water with a darting silvery shape inside. She held it up to the light; it was a fish.
“It’s a fish,” I noted.
“That marine biology course really paid off, didn’t it?,” she observed while unscrewing the top. It continued to plip and plop around in the water. It was a rather small fish, about a quarter of the length of a minnow.
She pulled out a metal implement with a wire mesh sphere at one end and a handle at the other. It took me a second to recognize it.
“That’s a tea ball, right? You squeeze the handle and it opens up the mesh ball, so that you can put the tea leaves in… are we going to have tea?” I cradled my coffee protectively and took another sip.
She shook her head, concentrating on the tiny fish. She carefully put the sphere of metal mesh into the mason jar; it glistened with trapped air bubbles which shook off when she squeezed the handle and opened it; it was rather like a clothespin, mechanically, but for a very different purpose.
I was about to ask what exactly she was trying to do when the fish
finally swam between the two wire hemispheres which snapped shut like
crab claws, trapping it within.
“Shoot, I forgot,” she
said. “Can you get a bowl? Quickly, now,” she said, staring at
the fish with that particular intensity one has while waiting for
something bothersome to happen that one can’t prepare for. I duly
procured a bowl (not a bowl of
anything,
I had to explain to the people at the bar—
just
a bowl. For a fish. Not a bowl of
fish,
no, a bowl for
a
fish. Yes, this is urgent. No, I don’t know why.)
She dropped it into the waterless bowl once I had procured it.
“Isn’t it going to suffocate?,” I asked.
“No. That’s the weird thing.”
It flopped around painfully.
“It
looks like it’s hurting.”
“It isn’t,” she said
matter-of-factly.
It flopped around painlessly.
“I’m
pretty sure fish need water to breathe. Can’t we return it to the
sea?”
“No,” she said. “Can’t return it to the sea,” she said with a slight smile.
“Why not?”
“’Cause I found it in the street.”
It continued to flop around, not contributing anything to the conversation except its topic.
“Where in the street? In a puddle?”
“No. Just flopping around in the middle of the night. Well, more like ten in the evening, but still. It had already been flopping around for at least two minutes before I managed to locate it exactly— and even then it took me two more minutes to find something to put it in.” She frowned. “The chances of my finding it couldn’t have been very high. I’m not usually out that late, and if I hadn’t been in that area I wouldn’t have heard it. I wonder how many others there are scattered around town… In any case, it got out of its container while I was asleep last night. It had managed to flop over into the kitchen all the way from my bedside table. Which isn’t something that a fish this small would usually be able to do.”
She pulled out a shaker of fish food from out of her bag. It’s amazing what women can fit into the depths of their bags— mason jars, tea balls, shakers full of fish food, books about the names of Greek fish, and who knows what else?
“Still,” she continued, “It seems to be calmer when it’s in water. Doesn’t cut things as much. It’s as sharp as glass. Sharper.” She held up the fingers of her right hand— I realized most of them were bandaged.
“Sorry about your hand,” I said, belatedly, embarrassed over not noticing something so obvious.
“Mhhhm. It cut the last jar it was in too.”
The fish flopped around a bit more in its bowl. I stared at it. I took a stirring stick and tried to touch the fish with it. When I pulled the stick out there was a definite gash in it.
I touched it, gently. The tip of the stick fell off.
“Ouch,” I said. “That must have hurt.”
“Yeah.” She massaged her hand gently. “That’s the fish knife for you.”
Fish knife? Sure, I thought to myself, fish knife. Knifefish already exist, so this has got to be a fish knife.
“I wanted you to see it,” she said. “Before I told anyone else about it. Since you were already coming home.” She gestured vaguely, snapping with the tea infuser a few times, clack clack. “I don’t suppose you know what it is?”
“Doesn’t look like any particular kind of fish— but there are lots of fish that don’t look like any particular kind of fish, when they’re young. Nothing particular about that part. With more time, equipment, and training, maybe I could identify it.” I cocked my head and stared at the incredibly sharp fish some more, though I felt like there was a chance I could somehow cut myself just by looking at it. “Although I highly doubt that a fish of this sharpness has been discovered yet. Say… you said it cut the last jar?”
“Cut right through it. There was a roughly triangular hole in it. It almost destroyed the last jar too, and then—,” she paused.
“And then?”
“And then I fed it. And ever since then it’s been happy as a, hmmm, as a happy fish.”
I looked at this supposedly happy fish. I had to admit that I could not see any signs of unhappiness, other than, perhaps, the scratches it was leaving in the bowl.
“Hmmm. Time for some more food, I think,” she murmured, and very carefully poured the fish from the bowl back into the jar, and added a bit more food.
“Don’t let it grow fat,” I said. “We probably want it alive.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. There are more.”
And with that revelation she got up and towed me out of the cafe.
“Where are we going?”
“To that lighthouse. That’s where most of them seem to be,” she said. “Hopping around, cutting in and out of the water.”
“I want to check something first,” I said, spotting a telephone booth.
“Sure. The fish can wait, I suppose.”
I called my university, specifically the marine biology department— though that was, apparently, the biggest and most dominant department; it had somehow grown a lot the year before I entered. Not that I minded.
There was a kind of bubbling noise on the line; it made my skin crawl. It finally cleared up into a muttering voice, one that I vaguely recognized.
“Hello,” I said. “Do you know of any unusually sharp fish? Incredibly sharp, I mean?”
There was a pause on the line. “Yeah,” said the voice, “Don’t
worry about it.”
“…,” I remarked, while worrying about
it.
“…,” he responded, calmly.
“What do you mean ‘Don’t worry about it’?” I burst out.
“Don’t worry about it,” he elaborated. “It’s just sharp. Lots of things are sharp,” he reasoned. “Like knives.”
“I asked a simple question. You can’t just say ‘Don’t worry about it’,” I said crossly.
I heard him mutter a bit more to himself.
“Oh, is that you?,” he asked brightly, “The kid from Dr. Haddock’s class?”
“Yeah,” said the kid from Dr. Haddock’s class, who was still angry.
“Oh! Nice to hear from you again. How’s life?”
“Fine,”
I said, and forced myself to calm down a little bit. “How’s it
going for you?”
“Oh, fine, fine. It’s all good. Oh, and
about the fish…”
“Yeah?,” I said, expectantly.
“Don’t worry about it.”
He hung up. I sighed, and stepped out of the booth.
She was standing outside of the phone booth when I exited.
“What on earth was that about?,” she asked. “It sounded like you were rather angry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“The sign for the lighthouse is pointing to the left,” I observed.
“Yeah? And?,” she asked, as we continued to walk.
“We are walking to the right,” I stated, unwilling to force upon her prematurely the fruits of my reasoning: viz., that we were walking in the wrong direction.
“We’re not going to the Bream lighthouse. We’re going to that lighthouse,” and she waved her hand in the vague direction of the awaited lighthouse that we were apparently walking towards.
“Oh,” I said. “What’s that lighthouse called, anyway? I don’t think I ever learned its name. We’ve always just called it that lighthouse.”
“Technically, it’s named after its founder, but so is another lighthouse to the north of here, so there would be two with that name. It’s on a certain beach, but there’s another lighthouse a couple miles down that same beach, so there would be two with that name as well. It’s got a certain shape, but there’s an island a little to the south of here that has one of the same design, so if we named it after its shape someone might think we were talking about that one…”
“Then what do you call it?”
“So we usually just call it ‘that lighthouse’,” she concluded.
“I feel like there are a lot of lighthouses called ‘that lighthouse’.”
“Maybe. But they’re not that lighthouse. Look! There’s the sign for it.”
It said “That lighthouse”. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting.
“I didn’t see the sign.”
“Mhhm. You’ve always been bad at picking up signs,” she observed.
“I have? Huh.”
The next day I spent a solid five minutes pacing around my house thinking about what an idiot I had been, before convincing myself that she didn’t actually mean anything by it. One can’t go around being superstitious, you know. I don’t believe in signs.
“Besides,” she continued, “In a pinch you can always point to it. A lighthouse that can’t be seen isn’t a lighthouse at all.”
She thought for a moment. “It would be a darkhouse.”
“A darkhouse,” I repeated.
“There you go. Don’t you want a name for everything? You can call it the darkhouse.”
“Alright. We’re going to visit the darkhouse. I suppose it’s like a siren, luring people towards rocky waters,” I said.
“It’s always lured us towards rocky waters. Most people use it to avoid them, but we used it for a different purpose. We’d see it and keep on walking straight towards it.”
“Maybe we should have kept on walking. Kept on right into the sea.”
The sea by that lighthouse looked subtly weird. In a sudden flash of insight I realized that it seemed as if the waves had had their tops cut open.
“It seems as if the waves have had their tops cut open,” she said, sounding rather pleased with herself.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, somewhat annoyed.
There were tons of little fish hopping in and out of the water, leaping up on shore and rolling back into the water. They seemed to be of the same kind as the one she had found lying in the street, the “fish-knife”.
We stopped studying the waves when we noticed someone else walking along the shore; he seemed to be a lighthouse maintenance worker.
“It seems as if the waves had had their tops cut open,” he said as he walked towards us.
“Yeah, I guess so,” she said irritatedly. I nodded.
“The fish seem to be leaving holes in the waves behind them,” I said. “Even the main part of the wave is opening up.”
He nodded. “Neat.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little odd for fish to be doing?”, asked my friend.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen fish before,” he said.
Splash, went the waves. Splish, went the fish. Wow, we thought to ourselves. He’s never seen fish before.
“I don’t even know what fish is,” he admitted.
Wow, we thought to ourselves. He doesn’t even know what fish is.
She held up her jar with the fish-knife in it. “It’s this,” she said helpfully, pointing to the sliver of grey inside.
“So that’s fish. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of it.”
“No, those things over there are also fish,” she said, waving her hands in their general direction.
“The waves?… no, never mind, you don’t need to explain.
“Anyway,” he said. “I think those things might be attracted to the lighthouse.”
“Why do you think
that?”
“If it’s the case for boats, it might apply to
them also. Lots of the boats here have been crashing into the rocks
here recently, even though the lights have been on. The pilots said
afterwards that the lights attracted them.”
“As if the lighthouse were an anglerfish,” she piped up.
His expression was blank.
“It’s really cool, it’s a fish that uses a special luminous organ to fish,” she said.
He cocked his head.
“Alright,” he said, uncertainly. “I would expect most fish to… fish. In any case,” he continued, anxious to change the subject, “We’re shutting down the lighthouse. Turning it off. After all, a lighthouse that causes crashes isn’t a lighthouse at all.” He thought for a moment. “It’s more like some kind of darkhouse.”
“A darkhouse,” I repeated dourly.
“Yeah. A darkhouse. That’s pretty good, actually,” said the worker, happily. “I’m glad I came up with that.”
After he had left, we watched the sea a bit more. I watched as the fish-knives cut up the border between sea and not-sea. The border between sea and land, between ocean and air, has always been diaphanous, undefined. The surface tension of the water may provide one border— but what of the white crests of the waves, where the line between spray and air cannot truly be drawn? I thought again of the coastline paradox again as I watched the ocean bleed into the normal, watched fish crawling onto land and dragging their aquatic world behind them. I suppose it didn’t actually change anything. The border’s always been fuzzy. I wondered how much I really knew about marine ecology.
“I guess it really is a darkhouse
now,” I said, looking at the extinguished lighthouse.
“Yeah.”
“And fish can fish. Like anglerfish. Fish fish.”
“Sounds like you’re ordering me to fish for fish.”
“Sounds the same, yeah. But it’s in a different context.”
“Maybe it means both.”
“That would imply that you’re a fish.”
“Blub blub. Come on,” she said, “let’s get going.”
We walked home, slowly, tracing with our steps paths we had trodden a thousand times before. We thought about what life would be like now that it was blending into the sea.
“So,” she said, “what do you think about all this?”
I opened my mouth to give several possible theories about what might be going on before I realized that neither one of us cared about that.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how to react to this. I know a lot about fish. I know a lot about the world, too, and the land and the sea and the border between it, and how humans stand in contrast to it, in their own kind of context. But the more I learn about these fish the more I feel that I know nothing at all about you, or even myself.”
She nodded. “Do you like the fish, at least?”
“A bit, I guess. But I always liked it as something separate from human society. If only because I didn’t always like dealing with human society. I guess I’ll just have to buckle down and study both of them in tandem.”
“Maybe this next thing will be a chance to learn some things about fish that you weren’t sure of before,” she said as we got to her car. “Such as: Do you want to eat some fish?”
“I don’t know that.”
“Well, that’s kind of important, isn’t it? If you don’t know that, what do you know about fish?”
She smiled. “Now let’s go to the restaurant.”
A few years before I had settled on becoming a marine biologist, I had told her that I liked fish, and had asked her if she also liked fish.
“Of
course I like fish,” she said. “Fried. In soup. In
sandwiches.”
“I was thinking about as animals. Or as things
that you study.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s alright. I still like you. Even fish like eating fish.”
Now it was time to eat fish. Maybe it was a sign of the town’s increasing fishiness, or our deepened connection to fish, or the fact that I hadn’t eaten a solid meal all day, but I realized I was quite looking forward to it.
One of the more interesting parts of the restaurant was the collection of gigantic fishhooks hanging off of it. Nobody really likes fishhooks, but it is only when one sees them at such a size that you can sense the wicked sharpness and horror of the things.
“Spooky,” she said. I agreed.
The restaurant was called “The Joy of Fish”, which I first interpreted as ‘the joy that fish have’, which I thought was a rather grim name for a fish restaurant. I soon realized, however, that it probably meant ‘the joy one gets from eating fish’. ‘At least’, I thought, ‘this isn’t like those barbecue restaurants, where there’s a picture or statue of a cute anthropomorphic pig merrily digging into a dish composed of his succulent porcine fellows.’
They did, however, have large glass tanks full of fish and lobsters and other marine life, a combination of storefront and aquarium.
It is a curious fact about human life that a fish is always out of water— that is to say, fish are always surreal. We are most used to fish on a plate, to be dissected for scientific or culinary purposes; this is their usual presentation, and even then we see that something is off, that they are alien beings from a world not accessible to us. And when we do see a fish in its natural habitat, which we do rarely and hazily, it seems to disobey all the regular laws of motion that we as humans abide by. A fish in an aquarium is likewise strange, for though it is easier to track and understand its motions it is made all the more apparent that it is something set apart from you, by a watertight wall of a window, for observation. Fish are the most familiar things that are still strange to us; as mundane as a comb or an umbrella, and yet more wondrous still, through the long nighttime hours, than any tropical bird or ornate insect.
The mode of representation of a fish does not matter either. If Picasso were to distort a fish all he would do is make a flounder; a pipefish is a fish as sculpted by Giacometti; there exist chimaeras that Bosch could not have bashed together, and who knows what architectural baroque liberties were taken with seahorses? It is in fish that science is most faithful to art.
It is said that such cold and slick animals cannot be cute, and yet I do feel a strange sense of attachment for those thoughtless creatures, and seeing them swim around with no apparent purpose still made me curiously anxious for them to bring to fruition whatever small and fishy wishes they had.
I felt bad for them, with their wide, innocent eyes, but I was with someone whose eyes were wider and, in my view, kinder. Even those fish had fed upon other, smaller, cuter fish. They were as innocent as murder weapons.
We sat down by a table near the tanks, watching lobsters lobst. Within the minute the waiter appeared, and asked how we were doing, and what we would like to drink, and what we would like to eat, and whether ‘that girl’ was my girlfriend.
‘That girl’ looked at me, apparently waiting for confirmation of whether or not she was, which was worrying.
“She’s eating dinner with me,” I said.
“What does that make her, then?,” asked that unduly prying waiter.
“A commensal,” I said. “So we’re sharing a table. We’re having the sea trout, please. With the usual sides,” I said hurriedly, to change the subject.
My commensal turned to me after he left. “Commensal— that’s got something to do with symbiosis, right?”
“That’s right. The original meaning was someone who ate at the table of another, but now it applies to symbiosis between organisms where one benefits and the other neither gains nor loses.”
“Hmmm. That’s a bit rude.”
“Eh, I don’t mind paying.”
“I’m not going to be some parasite,” she said, semi-seriously.
“Parasites and commensalists are different.”
“Yeah, yeah… Say, where does the word parasite come from?”
“… That also means someone who eats at the same table. But in a negative way, it’s in a negative way,” I said hurriedly, “It’s got a different connotation than commensalism. And it’s just a name, after all.”
“I’m still paying for my own,” she said. “What kind of relationship would that be?”
“Neutralism, I think. Or probably still commensalism or mutualism, depending on how much we enjoy each other’s company.”
The prying waiter had drifted back to us again, so my commensal took the opportunity to ask for another side.
“Excuse me! Do you have any salad?,” she asked.
“Miss, this is a seafood restaurant. Why would we have salad?”
“Do you have cornbread?,” I asked.
“Of course. That’ll be two ninety-five extra.”
I nodded.
She leaned over to my ear and whispered, “Is cornbread seafood?”
“Apparently.”
“Hmmm,” she said, leaning back.
“What cards does this place take?,” I asked the waiter.
“Oh, all kinds. And we also take dried cod.”
“Dried cod?”
“Yeah. Did you know that people used to use dried cod as currency? Fascinating. So we re-instituted it here.”
“Don’t you sell dried cod as well? I thought I saw some in the display counter,” she butted in.
“Yep. Good price on it, too. If you want to take some home. It’s a steal,” replied the waiter.
“How much?”
“Half a dozen for six dried cod.”
“That’s… not really a good price,” I said.
“It’s only fair. No markups or anything.”
The restaurant, though full of fish, did not really smell like fish. That was quite alright; not even fish smell like fish. It is a little known fact that what we call the smell of fish is but the smell of rotting fish; fish do not actually smell like that. Real fish smell like brine and sea air; they only smell like fish in the human context.
The thought made me sniff; I caught a hint of what might have been perfume, but what was probably the flowers in front of us. Does it really matter?, I thought to myself. It’s not her scent either way.
We talked about the past over a dinner of fish we picked apart like hurried dissectors. Memories came unbidden, weak, overwhelming, struggling, newborn, ancient, out of my past and into my head, dredged up in the nets of conversation like a coelacanth, thoughts unthought for months. They were fuzzier than I ever thought possible for such recent events, yet I was still oddly surprised to remember them at all.
“Remember that time,” she said, after an extended period of other short conversations, “When you got into an argument with someone—I can’t even remember who— about whether or not I was good at swimming?”
I nodded. “I think so…”
“She… she was a she, I remember now… said that I could barely float, which I denied, and then you very firmly took my side… at which point I had to leave or else be late for something, and I thought it was going to end there but I heard the next day that the two of you had spent ten minutes going back and forth about it. And it wouldn’t have actually been that funny,” she said, laughing slightly to herself, “If it wasn’t for the fact that you had never even seen me swim.”
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I said, and stared at the sea trout.
She cocked her head. “Why not? I mean, she was wrong! I am a good swimmer. And even if you didn’t know for sure you took my word for it, which was sweet. That’s the important thing. She was being unnecessarily mean, after all.”
“It shouldn’t have meant anything,” I said. “I know that now.”
“But— you were proud of doing it, right? I mean, it was a bit silly, but it meant something to me, at the time. You said you didn’t need to know. And in the grand scheme of things, even if you had been wrong, it still would have been nice.” She speared a piece of fish, but stopped to look at me.
I stopped as well. I saw a thought start to swim about in her eyes.
“The university… the Institute… that place changed you,” she said.
After dredging up so many old, shared memories, she had managed to stir to life a new and lonely one, rippling and squirming through my mind.
I had been taught, in many of my classes, to see things in a new light, to see the world as abnormal, to be made normal through study of it. I now saw those classes too in a new light, and saw that seeing the world as abnormal was not a very normal thing, and that there was something subtly wrong with such study, which sought to impose organization, not discover it. None of that was normal, I thought. But then, nothing really is, and so I pushed those thoughts away. I had been taught how to see the world as weird and strange and truly alien, as something other than the world I lived in. I took a deep breath of briny air, yet felt like I was choking until I realized that I was a human and not a fish. I took another deep breath. The fact that I could choose to see the world as abnormal— there was nothing abnormal about that, I thought. I chose to see it as normal and pushed it out of my head.
But what remained in my head was writhing and wriggling still.
I remembered visiting this restaurant before, getting the sea trout before, and loving it. Why didn’t I tell her that I loved fish?, I wondered, before realizing that I had forgotten it. But how?
I remembered sitting at a dissection table before a sea trout. It looked normal, for a fish— which is to say, weird and wet and glistening. I had been thinking about how good it must taste, and yet— there it was, unappetizing, though upon a plate. Cold, yet warmer, likely, than in life. Dead, though less ghostly than any of those living fish that float and glide so spectre-like through the water. A physical apparition, the body-phantom of the experience of eating a fish.
That experience now seemed unreal. It had nothing to do with the fish upon that plate. Which meant it had nothing to do with anything, I realized. It was free-floating, mere emotional driftwood bobbing along aimlessly upon the sea of true reality.
I gingerly touched the dead fish, recalling my experience. I tried to imagine the experience of eating fish objectively, settling on feeling a kind of organless mass, nevertheless fish-like. There must be something fish-like in it, I thought, there simply must. I understand fish, and I understand it, and yet the two do not quite reconcile… I could not see how the two could meet. The one could not contain the other.
I saw it in the sickly new light of the Institute, the kind of new light that turns a lighthouse into the glowing lure of an anglerfish. I saw how to organize it. I saw it as a fish.
From my tense and sweating brow I drew out a translucent, shimmering fish, slowly gathering solidity as it flickered about in the air.
In the now that was the present, in the here that was the restaurant, I looked up at her, and realized that she looked very nervous, as if she was certain that her comment had been a cruel mistake. I must have looked shocked.
I wanted to say it had been a good question.
I wanted to say that I felt better for it being asked.
I wanted to say it was alright. But instead I reflexively pulled a shimmering, wriggling fish out of my mouth.
In my defense, I didn’t like the feeling of it suddenly appearing there. And I suppose words are no more inherently comforting than fish are.
“What is that?,” she asked, despite herself.
“The feeling of eating a fish,” I said.
“It’s a fish?”
“It’s what a feeling would be if a feeling was a fish. I think. I’m not sure.”
“And you didn’t tell me about this?”
“It didn’t seem important at the time. I don’t know why. I suppose it’s because seeming important was also a fish.”
A seeming-important fish swam out of my ear. Seeming-important was, apparently, rather eel-like.
“You can tell what it is by touching it.” I thought for a moment, then added: “I can, at least.”
She grabbed the eel, and managed to feel it for at least a few seconds before it slipped out of her hand. She frowned.
“Nothing,” she said.
“I guess it’s my emotion, so it’s my fish, too.”
“That… makes sense. I suppose it’s a property of emotions that the fish also has to have.”
A small school of wrasses swam by, small and colorful.
I brushed my hand
against one of them.
“These… aren’t mine,” I concluded.
She grabbed one. “Curiosity,” she said. “Definitely curiosity.”
Another wrasse swam over from who-knows-where to join the school.
“Why are there different fish for different emotions, do you think?,” she asked.
“The fish is the shape of the emotion, somehow,” I said, uncertainly. “Translated into marine life.”
The octopus of comprehension began investigating my hand with tentacles from underneath the table.
“It’s an isomorphism,” I said, brightly. “Somehow. It must be. There’s a relationship between the properties the fish has and that which the emotion has.”
“So it’s like a metaphor?”
“Not really a metaphor. More like an analogous part. In the same way that whales and fish have different body parts acting as tail fins. Or that a map is laid out in the same way the land it shows is. The medium is different, but the structure remains. That’s isomorphism. In this case,” I said, indicating the octopus, “… comprehension grasps in the same way that the octopus does.”
Another fish appeared, swimming in the same way that a fish does, because it was a fish.
“What fish is that?,” she said.
I inspected it, running a finger along its flank. “The fish of the idea of turning things into fish.”
“Huh. How does that work?”
“It’s a fish whose parts correspond to the structure of a fish.”
“And it looks like a fish?”
“Yeah.”
“I think there might be something wrong with your theory.”
“No, no. Look! It looks like a fish. That's exactly what the theory predicted it would look like.”
“Mh-hm. And what’s that fish?,” she asked, pointing at a flounder.
“An isomorphism
fish.”
“So isomorphism has a shape too?”
“…”
“It’s an odd shape for isomorphism to take. Any shape at all, I mean.”
“… Yeah.”
The octopus of my comprehension curled up and vanished into a cloud of confused ink.
I’m sure that she could tell from the deep-sea fish that lurked in the shadows behind me that I found all of this somewhat frightening, despite my confident theorizing. Giving a name to it would be difficult, but if I had to give a name to such an unnameable thing, it would be fear of confusion. Not merely fear of my own confusion, but fear that the world itself was confused, that if I tried to seek some kind of organization in it I would find nothing, or, even worse, that I would only find the process of trying to organize it. I could not force such words out of my mouth, I felt, as easily as I could fish. I wanted to say that I felt like the border between man and fish was slowly being erased, and that I found that worrisome, somehow, even though I had gone to college specifically to immerse myself in the context of fish. I wanted to say that I felt as if the different contexts were leaking into each other, interweaving, bleeding through; fish according to cuisine, fish according to the beach-goer, fish according to scientists, fish according to… fish. Different kinds of fish, referred to by the same name, now unifying. I wasn’t sure how to articulate it, probably because the very concept consisted in a kind of disarticulation. I wanted to say all of these things, but in the end I had to let the silent, spiny fish say it for me, in their own enigmatically authentic way.
So we talked about all the fish in the restaurant that were not our own emotions, and all the emotions that were not our fish, watching them swim about the others in the dining area, cataloging the sea-life of human life, the material expressions of the fish that swim in the oceans of our soul.
“Behold!,” she said, voice low under the background noise of a busy restaurant, as she gestured at a mollusc-ladden customer at the other side of the room. “A despondent businessman covered in the heavy clams of despair.” She cocked her head. “And his fiance, covered in the golden starfish of hope. You know,” she said, turning back to me, “I’d always pictured hopes as tiny, fragile things preyed upon by despair, but it turns out that it is the other way around— that it is the starfish of hope that prey upon the clams of despair. It’s a beautiful metaphor,” she said. “Except it’s not a metaphor. There it is, eating the clams.”
“It’s still beautiful,” I ventured.
“Not really. Look at how it’s eating them! Wow, that’s disgusting looking.”
“I never expected hopes to eat by pushing their stomach out of their mouths and onto their cracked-open prey,” I said weakly, pushing around a bit of the food on my plate.
“Of course you didn’t expect it. That’s hope for ya,” she said. She had already finished eating, and discussed such topics with the gusto of the comfortably full.
We watched anger sluggishly crawl on the back of a belabored waiter, who did not seem to care that he was lugging about a toadfish. All the customers had, at this point, their own shoal of fish, yet very few of them seemed to care, just as I had cared little when I first drew one out.
“Are you sure that it’s anger?,” she asked.
“What else could it be?,” I said.
“Well, you’ve got a point, but… Is it really true? That a hot-blooded thing could be a cold-blooded thing?”
I shrugged. She shook her head, vaguely, more at the world than at me.
“Hmmm… The starfish of hope, the clams of despair, the salmon of… doubt? I’m not sure,” she said, as the salmon swam closer. “Oh, look, it seems like sea urchins are irritation. Man, he’s having an awful time. And the urchins aren’t helping. And the barnacles of routine, and the minnows of contentment, and,” she said, studying the fish swimming around me, “the red gurnard of denial.”
“It’s not denial,” I said. Another red gurnard appeared.
“Sure it isn’t.”
Once we were out the door, she pulled me aside. “So, how do you feel about the fish?,” she asked.
“Yes, it was nice. I haven’t had food that good in a long time.”
“That’s nice to hear, but not exactly what I meant. I mean…”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“And?”
I hesitated. “It’s just fish,” I said.
“All of it?”
“Yeah. But you know I like fish. It’s
still just fish, though.”
“Then that’s what it is, then. If you see it in that light. But isn’t it still a mystery why such fish do what they do— why we feel that such things are so human?”
“Nothing’s a mystery. There are just things we think are mysterious. If we weren’t here to think it was a mystery, then it wouldn’t be.”
The sleek eel of mystery whirled past, tail in its mouth, devouring itself.
“That’s not an answer,” she said, catching it and pulling it out of itself. “It has to start somewhere. For us to make heads or tails of it.”
It hung in the air, curled like a question mark.
I shrugged. A question about clarity has no clear answer.
When we got to her car we separated; I didn’t live very far away, so I was just going to walk home.
“Goodbye,” I said.
“Goodbye.”
That red gurnard followed me all the way home, flanked by a sleek and half-seen eel.
Though it wasn’t all bad. There were a good many goldfish swimming about me as well, and I did not need to touch them to know that I was happy.
They churned about me as I went to sleep that night, joined by other, stranger fish, both good and bad.
Good and bad fish, I thought. Somehow that idea doesn’t quite fit, I mused, and then I fell asleep.
The fish were still there when I got up in the morning. They didn’t get in the way, as far as I could tell, but if they really were emotions, I wasn’t sure how one would tell if they did.
I had a few boxes of books sitting on my porch, freshly delivered; I could tell by the size and heft of the packages. They came from my university; they must be the books I had ordered for my courses, I thought. I opened it up, and picked up the first one.
“The Ichthyological Index,” I read off the front. “Edition III,” I noted. I had ordered the second edition; I hadn’t even realized the third one was out. That was nice of them, I supposed— awfully nice. I opened it up, checked the printer’s notes; it all seemed legitimate.
Every single fish species, I thought, is registered in these pages. It was a huge, bulky book, despite the sparse descriptions of the fish. There were something along the lines of thirty-odd thousand entries in that thing, around thirty a page.
I opened up another, similarly large book. I didn’t remember ordering this many large books, I thought.
Hmmm. This one was also a copy of the Ichthyological Index— same edition. I checked the others. Huh.
I checked one of the last volumes a bit more carefully.
Volume Ten, I read.
No one book, I realized, was the full index. The third edition must have expanded twelve-fold, at the very least. They must have vastly expanded the entries.
I checked. No, the entries were just as short as they had always been. Except—
It wasn’t just fish. Not anymore. There were entries for fruits and countries and rivers and politicians and famous works of art and cornbread and lighthouses and joy and clocks and clothing and teakettles and first names, interspersed, occasionally, with entries on fish.
I checked the cover again. Ichthyological, I read. That’s definitely about fish. Huh.
She was going to get a kick out of this, I thought to myself. Even if I ended up paying for a useless set of expensive books.
When I left my house I saw a boat parked outside of it. Sitting in it was a bearded man in a lab coat and a sunhat, who waved at me.
Not a very unusual sight, I thought. It’s coastal, so people often have boats loaded up on trailers. I looked for a trailer, and the car it was attached to.
It was floating slightly in the air.
Huh. No trailer.
Its occupant waved again. “Hey, you!,” he said jocularly. “The
kid from Dr. Haddock’s class!”
“Yeah?”
“It’s me. The guy you called the other day. Name’s Dr. Tench. I’m here about the fish-knives. Mostly.”
Huh, I thought. They really are called fish-knives.
“So what’s going on with them?,” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it.”
I opened my mouth to say something before he bombastically continued. “Really fascinating things. Nothing quite like them, really. The fish don’t leave the water— but they do enter the air. By being as sharp as they are, there is no definable point where they stop being in the water. By doing this, they break through the border of the sea and start mixing the two worlds together. Recently, the mixing has accelerated— it crossed a certain critical threshold of turbulence, and now there are… storms, you might call them. Vortexes. In the same way that mixing air fronts make storms, mixing worlds materialize unusual phenomena.”
“Like emotion fish?”
“Exactly!,” he said, beaming. “Or a lighthouse that attracts prey to itself.”
“But then… what caused the fish-knives?”
His brow wrinkled. “Yeah… I don't really know.” He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Isn’t it your job to investigate fish?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “Hop in the boat. I have something to show you.”
“Where’s the motor?,” I asked, eyeing the hovering boat.
“No motor. We’re using oars to push off the ground.”
“Why?”
“Motors
don’t really work here yet. Up here— out of the water— is
mixing more and more with the sea, so things can float a
little bit— but it’s not to the point that motors work. So get up
here and punt.”
I climbed in, carefully, feeling it shift beneath my weight. I didn’t think it was going to capsize, seeing as I wasn’t sure how capsizing made any sense in this situation, but the things in this situation that made sense were so few that I thought it best to not take any risks.
He handed me a pole. “Go on, push!”
We pushed. It was difficult to navigate the street, since there were a good many cars about and we weren’t going especially fast, but after the first ten or so collisions with an automobile you started to get used to it, after which it became only very uncomfortable, instead of extremely so.
I noticed that most of the traffic lights and signs were gone— no, not gone, but different, rather. Instead of yellow boxes of red, green and yellow lights there were floating jellyfish arrayed in alternating bioluminescent configurations; traffic cones, retaining their aposematic coloration, had attained the form of clownfish. A stop sign, bristling with red and white spikes, lurked furiously on its pole.
“Did you use the pole the whole way here?,” I asked, after my muscles started to burn.
“No, no. I sailed. But it’s hard to sail on streets like these. Hard to make sharp turns, and stop at red lights… learned that the hard way.” I thought I heard him murmur something like “worth getting rid of that,” but we got bumped into by another car immediately after, so I had to postpone my question— after which it became a bit awkward to ask. So instead I said:
“Have you seen the new edition of the Ichthyological Index?”
“Oh, yeah, that.” He puffed himself up proudly as he pushed us away from a fire hydrant. “We put a lot of work into that.”
“And a lot of non-fish.”
“Pfft. It’s all fish,” he said, turning to me. “You know that. Look— fish are a paraphyletic group, right? You’re more closely related to certain fish than some fish are to each other. It’s not really a biological grouping at all. So you’re a fish. And you’re an animal, too, and once you’ve done that, most of the so-called artificial structures we create become natural; there’s no point in distinguishing them from the products of fish, like bubble nests. And what is and isn’t part of an organism is undefined as well— your bones aren’t entirely alive, but they’re definitely a part of you; and— you can tell I’ve given this lecture a lot, can’t you? I could go on for hours about the inherent indefinability of anything that isn’t plain old physics— but in any case, you see the point. There’s nothing that isn’t fish. It’s fish. It’s fish all the way down. Everything is fish, made of fish, part of a fish, related to fish. Where fish stops and normal begins is undefined.”
“And people let you do that? Just redefine everything as fish?”
“Look here—The first thing to go into the index was the index itself. They said that while we could say whatever we wanted about fish, we couldn’t say a thing about anything else— so we couldn’t talk about policy, or licensing, or funding.
“So we made those things fish. And now we have power over them. All things that we describe as fish, provided we can describe them as fish, fall under our control. And it gets easier every day. As more points along the continuum of from fishy to normal become fish, the process speeds up. We’re undoing the walls of fish and non-fish, like the fish-knife undoes the land and sea.”
“And now you’re planning on taking over the earth?”
“Not the earth— the sea! Which includes everything, including the earth. So, yes, basically.” He whistled as he pushed off a tree to control our direction a little bit.
“Then why are you
telling me?”
“Because you’re a marine biologist too! You
are part of the privileged elite! You can rule with us! Dr. Haddock
told me about you, you know. He said you had promise. He said
that you thought that love was a kind of thing secreted by the
brain like a cod liver makes oil, and that a human was a kind of
aerial predator of fish that tended to contaminate the ocean with
harmful by-products. We need that kind of thinking. Most people
aren’t able to see people like we do. They’re too trapped in
their own little bubbles of context.”
I thought about it for a moment. Then I took the pole and shoved him off.
“Ooof!,” he remarked as he fell off, a comment followed by a variety of commands, threats, entreaties and expressions of pain as he saw me speed off. He was a large man, but fast— but the fall had slowed him down enough that I got a decent head start. I knew the place a bit better than he did, so I was able to pick streets that were empty enough for a boat to float down. When I was reasonably certain he wasn’t going to catch up to me immediately, I unfurled the sails in hope of another speed boost. I had no clue how to sail, so I doubted that I’d be able to control it in any real fashion, but I didn’t need to go anywhere other than away.
After a couple minutes spent rocketing off in a random direction, I decided that I might as well head to her house. Because if you’re going to watch the world get taken over you may as well do so in company, and I didn’t want to go back home right away; too risky.
I knocked nervously on her door. She opened it, still in the middle of brushing her teeth, surrounded by swimming minnows of various shades.
“Last night was nice,” I blurted out.
She nodded, and started working on her left molars.
“I’ve uncovered a plot to take over the world,” I said.
She nodded, and began to brush her incisors.
“This isn’t a great time to talk to you, is it?,” I asked, and checked behind me for signs of Dr. Tench.
She nodded, and walked back into her house to spit and rinse. “Hold on,” I heard her call out. “I need to get something.” I heard her packing a bag.
“This is kind of urgent,” I said. “The conspiracy is after me specifically.”
“What have they
sent to get you?”
“One guy.”
“In a car?”
“Currently on foot.”
“It can wait a
bit, then. There,” she said, stepping out and shutting the door
behind her. “That didn’t take too long, did it? Oh. That’s an
interesting boat.”
“Yes, it is,” I said, as I pushed the
interesting boat a little closer to her. “Do you know how to sail?”
“A little bit,” she said.
“It’s not my boat,” I said, to clarify.
She looked at me for a second, then started climbing in. “I see. Why is this man after you?”
“They need marine biologists to control human society,” I said. “They’re using the blurred lines between fish and humans to rewrite it. He said something about undoing contexts, too.”
“Okay.”
“No more questions?”
“Would you have
answers? You don’t seem that sure of it yourself.”
“Good.
I’d hate to give a false impression.”
She rigged the sails in a certain configuration, after testing the wind, and then we were off. We seemed to be heading towards that lighthouse, which seemed as good a place as any.
“So… why didn’t you join?,” she asked. “Not that I thought that you would, but… I don’t know. You’ve never felt that the… ‘human context’, I guess, was that important. I remember that last year, when you were gearing up to leave, you’d talk about stuff like that.”
“Thanks,” I said. “For the honesty, at least… I guess that before, I didn’t realize how much the human context— the thing that transforms a fishhook from a trap to a tool, that makes lights into lighthouses, that makes money more than bits of paper– or cod, I suppose— mattered to me. And when I was cut off from it, cut off from here, this place, I finally noticed. It’s like the shore, the bit between land and water. Most of the sea isn’t part of the shore, and most of the land isn’t part of the shore, and yet without it you don’t have land or sea at all. And it’s like that. I guess you only see it when it starts to disappear. And now I feel like I’ve found something of value in the human way of looking at stuff when I didn’t before.”
“Awww, that’s sweet,” she said. “In a way, at least. Coming from you.”
“Yeah,” I coughed. I craned my head in search of angry ichthyologists. “I guess I was self-centered, back then. I couldn’t see a reason to care about all that stuff, so I didn’t.”
“And is there a reason?,” she said, adjusting the sail.
“Not that I can think of. Maybe it itself is the reason to care.”
“That would explain your inability to see it,” she said. “Oh, and by the way… Your red gurnard is gone. You’ve only got the goldfish left.”
“The gurnard was never mine to begin with,” I insisted.
“Ah. Well then,” she said, and smiled. “I suppose we just shook it off.”
“Have you seen the traffic signs recently?,” I asked. “They’re… fishy, now. Everything is.”
“No. But when I woke up this morning the telephone had been replaced by a lobster, so I can imagine it pretty well.”
“That must be annoying,” I said.
“It still works,” she noted. “I got a call from my boss this morning. We’re getting the day off.”
“Why?”
“There’s a line of customers
twenty long asking us to fix their cars.”
“It seems like
he’d need you, then.”
“The problem they want us to fix is that the cars have turned into various specimens of marine life.”
“Aha.”
“Yeah. Not exactly the thing you can fix with a wrench.”
We sailed past a house that had probably not always been a gigantic abalone shell.
“Nice place,” she said.
We continued past an apartment building that was probably not originally made of coral.
“I know a guy who lives there,” I noted.
“Huh. Might be nice,” she wondered.
We watched schools of fish fly past. Sometimes fish would leave to follow us, or leave us to join them, depending on our mood.
“This is lovely,” she said. “It’s like we’re at an aquarium. You know, I’ve always wanted to go on an aquarium date.”
“That sounds nice. You should do that some time,” I said absently, before realizing my mistake.
The ensuing awkwardness was so utterly tangible that it formed a rather large sturgeon, which flopped about in the bottom of the boat for a while before depositing the roe of future cringing.
In the silence we picked up on a sound we had not heard before, a distant whirring. It sounded a bit like a helicopter. I looked up.
Nothing, as far as I could see, which was quite far— at this point we were out on the ocean— or rather over it, for we were still floating.
It got louder. I saw a small shape coming towards us. It was floating slightly above the water, like our boat, but it looked like…
“Is that… a sea plane?,” I asked, squinting at it.
“Don’t ask me. These are some good glasses,” she said, tapping them, “but I’m still a bit nearsighted. Hmmm… I think I see it now,” she said. “Yeah. That’s a sea plane alright.”
“Can you increase our speed any?,” I asked nervously.
“I can barely sail as it is,” she said apologetically, working to tilt the sails so that we might possibly make it back to land before the sea plane caught up with us.
“Can you… swim away, or something?,” I asked, wondering if that would even help.
“That’s flattering! But no, I’m not that good at swimming.” she said. She seemed strangely calm, though the varieties of fish circling her suggested otherwise.
She caught my
glance. “Hey, don’t look at my fish. Those are private.”
“Sorry,”
I said. “You were going on about my gurnard yesterday.”
“So you admit it! It was your gurnard!”
I sighed and tried not to bother her, and instead looked in the boat for anything usable as a weapon; there were two poles, a small net, a knife, little else. Some rope, at least. I briefly wondered whether I could make a harpoon of some kind.
“Stop, or I’ll harpoon you!,” I heard Dr. Tench say, bombastic voice booming through his megaphone. That made the decision easier. He was very close now. I pocketed the knife and sat down, dejectedly. She sat beside me. We were still two minutes from shore, and had no motor, nor a wind strong enough to escape him.
He quieted his motor a bit and the sea plane glided towards us, propeller lazy as a ceiling fan. The plane, like the boat, was floating a little bit above the water.
“I’ll need you to go back to shore,” he yelled. “Hop to it!.”
“That’s where we were going anyway,” I yelled back.
“Oh. Then go back slower, so that I can float behind you.”
I shrugged, and turned to her to find that she was already unfurling the sail again.
We spent the four minutes floating back in dejected silence, except for Dr. Tench, whose silence was most likely rather contented.
There was a gigantic fishbowl on the shore.
“I don’t remember that being there,” I said.
“Well, I’d be pretty worried about your memory if you did,” said Dr. Tench. “It’s only been there for a couple hours.”
“Where did you get such a large fishbowl?,” she asked.
“This is no mere fishbowl! This is a humanbowl! That should be pretty obvious, really.”
“Then where’d you get such a large… humanbowl?”
“It’s a normal sized humanbowl,” he said, softly, looking around for something. “Aha! There, on the other side. You’re going in with that rope ladder.”
“We’re humans! We shouldn’t be put in a fishbowl!,” she cried.
“Ah! But you can!”
“But she said ‘shouldn’t’,” I piped up.
“Oh. Usually people say ‘can’t’. Hmmm. ‘Ah! But you should!’ doesn’t really have the same ring to it, I must admit… I still have no intention of letting you out, you know. Let me check the Index.” He climbed back into his sea plane, with one eye on us and one hand on the harpoon. He typed something into a computer. “We digitized it, of course. A book with everything in it is hard to use when it isn’t searchable, you know. Fishbowl, fishbowl… Yeah, I can’t find anything about you not being in fishbowls in here, so I suppose it’s permissible.”
“But we’re usually not in fishbowls, right?”
“Usually. But there’s nothing wrong with the occasional deviation from the norm. And besides!” he said brightly, “this isn’t a fishbowl. Fish go in fishbowls; humans go in humanbowls! That’s logic for you. Go on in. And be careful, you might scratch it. You aren’t going to get out even if you do, but it’ll look ugly. Do you know how much human-scale fishbowls cost? I mean, I don’t care, because we control the concept of money now, since it’s a fish. Did you know that people used to use dried cod as currency?”
“We… did know that, actually,” we said.
“Huh. I thought that would be surprising. I guess it isn’t.”
We climbed up the ladder, then down and in through the rope ladder on the other side. We didn’t have much of a choice, really. It was that or the harpoon. He left the ladder up, for the time being, as if to say that we might get out if we agreed.
We watched as a school of colorful fish swam about outside, occasionally brushing up against the glass of the fishbowl.
“I guess you got to go to an aquarium after all,” I whispered.
“Usually, the people are on the outside and the fish are on the inside.”
“How is it in there?,” he asked, raising his voice slightly to be heard. “You can have a castle, if you like. One of those little ceramic castles that you can swim in and out of. And the fluorescent gravel, that stuff’s neat, I’ve always wanted a room with that. And those plastic plants…”
“We’d like to get out, if possible.”
“Not until you agree to help us. Say, kid— why’d you pick that side? I know that you never cared about the usual human way of looking at things. You know that we’re not all that different from fish. You know the truth about the human mind. It’s just chemicals.”
“Just chemicals,” I said, vaguely, as if this was supposed to mean something, and looked at my fellow inmate uncertainly.
“You’re pretty chemical yourself, you know,” she said, a bit miffed.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “I guess I am.”
“Don’t listen to that girl!,” said Dr. Tench. “In time, you will find that this girlfriend of yours is nothing but a mutualist— or, even worse, a commensal.”
“Uh.”
“What, do you not know what a commensal is? Okay, it’s—”
“Yeah, we– we both know what a commensal is.”
“Okay. Nice. Uh. I keep forgetting that you know this stuff. I always assume that you must not, since you clearly haven’t thought it through! Oh, well. You know what? You, kid— not her, just you— come with me. I want to talk to you alone. She’s clearly a bad influence on you.”
My bad influence gave me the go ahead, and I departed from her uncertainly.
When I was out he pulled the ladder out of the bowl, leaving it heaped in a shoddy pile tauntingly close to her— on the other side of the bowl.
We walked to a building he had rented out with some dried cod. He seemed oddly thoughtful, not his usual garrulous self. He unlocked the door, beckoned me to follow him up the stairs, and went into a little room. He sat down on a metal folding chair, and pointed at another one in the corner. I would have remained standing had he not done said pointing with the harpoon gun. I carried it over to the table in front of him and sat down.
“I actually wrote a satire once,” he said, settling into his seat. “It was pretty good. It was exactly like our world, except all the humans were fish. This allowed one to see more clearly the vanity and folly of society. It was very funny— very biting, I might add. Quite subtle.
“That’s the way it works, you know… the humans cover up all the flaws. A flag looks very silly when there are no people under it.”
There was a bucket of ice by the wall beside him, with some glinting cans of beer and some other glinting thing. He pulled it out so that I could see it and held it up to the light.
“Here it is,” he said. “A so-called ‘fish’.”
“That’s… that’s a fish,” I said. “That’s a regular fish.”
“Hmmm. Well, you might call it that. But ‘so-called’ implies that it isn’t a fish.”
“But it is a fish?”
“You’re awful at picking up on things,” he said, and threw it onto the table.
I checked. It was definitely a fish.
“Do you follow?,” he asked.
“Not really.”
He ignored me, and continued; “Human society is made up of names, you see. Change the names, the categories, the definitions and delineations, and you change the society.”
“I’m not sure all things can be named like that.”
“Well, I haven’t met a thing I couldn’t name.”
“That doesn’t rule out the existence of unnameable things,” I said.
“Preposterous!” he grunted. “Name one.”
“… well…”
“Exactly.”
“But are the names really that important?”
“It's very important to have names. Why, you and your commensal both have names. That’s right, of course you do. Now, really— listen.” He cleared his throat.
“It’s not really about the fish,” he said, voice low. “Yes, it’s all fish; fish emotions, fish traffic signs; but it was always something, even before the fish-knives started cutting up the border. That’s what I want you to see. You’ve got your love; that’s nice. It’s a fish. That’s all it is, just a fish. And before this, it was oxytocin, or dopamine, or a cocktail of the stuff buzzing about. It doesn’t actually matter what it is; all that actually matters is being able to see love as something other than love, or fish as something other than a fish. All you need to do is take it out of the regular human context,” he said. “Then you’ll see how silly it is.”
“Of course it looks silly and weird,” I said. “Like a fish out of water. It’s not supposed to be there.”
He sighed. “Why aren’t you helping? You can’t leave just because you’ve got skin in the game. You know that the perspective on the other side of the fishbowl is just as correct. You left the human context before; why go back?”
I thought for a while.
“For most of my life,” I said, “I have been very confused by humans. I didn’t know how they worked, and I could never really figure out why. At times, they seemed even more alien than fish.
“And so I decided to become smart, like a fool. I did it in that clever way that allows you to get around the fact that you don’t know anything about people. And it worked. Because it really is clever, and it’s a workable way of looking at the world.
“And then one day I met someone as foolish as myself, a girl foolish enough to get a crush on me. Somehow. It took me long enough to realize and then it was too late. Or I thought it was too late. Or I decided that it had to be too late because I couldn’t stand it otherwise.
“I knew how it all worked, of course. But there was still that bit of it that I didn’t understand. I found it scary.
“But I wanted it all the same.”
He stood, sighed, and picked up the harpoon gun. I held my breath.
He stopped. I heard the building creak and shift. For a moment it almost felt as if we were being tossed in waves. With a crack and a groan the wall gave way, and bursting through it—
Love itself, here to save me.
And it was beautiful
And it was glistening
And it was majestic and glorious
And, probably, the most magnificent thing I had ever seen,
And it was definitely,
no doubt about it,
a fish.
At the end of the day it’s just a fish.
Nothing but a fish.
Who cares?
One giant shimmering fin swept Dr. Tench aside and knocked the harpoon gun so hard against the floor that it dented. He screamed, and squirmed away into a corner.
Love was a giant fish. It had, they say, always existed. It had always been a fish, hiding by diving in the sea to the west till it rises again in the east. It had always been weird and scaly and kind of slick to the touch, though we didn’t realize it.
It opened its cavernous mouth, filling the room with a briny saltwater scent as my girlfriend climbed out of its gaping maw. She held up an empty mason jar triumphantly. “I got out,” she said with a smile. She took a deep, exhausted breath, then wrinkled her nose. “That’s the smell of love, I suppose,” she said with a shrug.
“Smells like,” I sniffed, “fresh fish.”
“Love smells like fish, then. Simple as that.” She nodded in the direction of Dr. Tench. “Nice meeting you again,” she said, tiredly. “This is my fish. I don’t know if it was always a fish, or will always be a fish, but I do know that it will always be mine, no matter how much science you do to it.”
He seemed to crumple.
“I’m a failure,” Dr. Tench sobbed. “They’ll trout me. They’ll trout me real bad. All those wet trout…”
“That doesn’t seem like something ichthyologists would do,” she said, confused, and looked at me.
“I– thanks,” I said. “Thank you for that. Maybe… maybe they aren’t really ichthyologists, the ones he’s talking about. Maybe they snuck in and rewrote the index to become so, or something. Or maybe the fish-knives have been affecting them, somehow. He might have become more… fishy.”
“No,” he said, angrily. “Nothing has changed about me. This is the real me. If you knew more about fish you’d know that.”
He suddenly smiled, and looked at his hand, reached into his chest, and pulled out— himself, bursting into a pile of medium-sized fish, flopping about in shades of green and yellow.
We stared at the heap of scholar-now-fish wriggling on the floor.
“Huh,” she said. “Does that… mean anything?”
“Of course it doesn’t mean anything,” I said, uncertainly. “It’s fish. Fish just happens.”
We stared at the lovefish, huge and glimmering.
“On second thought,” I said, “maybe there are some fish that mean something.”
“And after all— there are good fish and bad fish.”
“Good and bad are also fish, I think.”
“Alright. Fish fish and fish fish.”
“Fish fish and fish fish… I can live with that. It’s all fish, maybe, but there might be something worth doing, deep within it all.”
Unconcerned with our decisions, the pile of fish continued to flop mysteriously under our gaze.
“What do we do about the people taking over the world by making it into fish?,” I said.
“That’ll only work if they can take over fish,” she said, patting the scaly flank of the lovefish gently.
“We’ve got some things to sort out in the meanwhile.” She turned to me. “First of all,” she said, “do you love me?”
The floor creaked under the weight of the fish. Here, I thought, is the concrete, physical fact of it. Like I had always thought it would be like. But larger. And more fish-like.
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know what you are to me. I don’t know what I am either. But I do know that. I don’t know how or why but I do. I’ve stopped caring about that. Now I care about…”
“… Caring,” she finished.
“Yeah,” I said, and shuffled a little. “Sorry about the last two years.”
“The only thing you have to apologize for,” she said, and smiled, “is not taking up more of my time.”
The doctor fish continued to flop around.
“I should get those,” she said. I nodded.
We managed to find a bathtub in an adjacent room and fill it up with water. They’d probably survive without it— there were live fish everywhere, after all— but it seemed important.
“Can I ask you something?,” I said, trying to hold a slippery, wiggling fish tight without hurting it.
“Sure.”
“Why did you wait for me? When I was being stupid about it.”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I was stupid too, you know. I thought it would work out by itself, without my doing anything. But now I know that it’s a fish, and the fish isn’t going to do anything for me unless I put some work into it myself.”
It’s a complicated business, being human. Sometimes life seems like it’s got an infinite amount of stuff to conquer and you’ve got a finite amount of time to figure it out. Well, maybe. But you’ll never get anywhere if you don’t close your eyes and take that first impossible step. You’ll never get anywhere if all you do is zoom in.
It’s a complicated business, being human. For thousands of years we’ve had the chance to figure it out, and we never did. And what does it matter? We’ll just keep on as we always have.
The worker walked along the shore in front of the lighthouse, whistling to himself as he picked up planks from broken boats. He stopped to stare occasionally as the sharp little slivers of grayness slid in and out of the sea. They looked odd, he thought, but there are plenty of odd things in the world.
The oddest thing he saw was the thing that put it all into perspective. Rising up from the deep, breaching the surface in an ambiguous way, was a kind of shapeless thing, not long, or short, or round, or spiky, or coiled or flattened or anything, specifically. And he couldn’t really point to it, because it wasn’t exactly there, as there were so many other places it had to be. And he couldn’t exactly see it, because it didn’t exactly have a color. But nevertheless, he knew.
“Oh,” he said. “So that’s what a fish is.”