by David Vann
The old man stood before them, mouth hung open, as if before his god. I remember he looked like that. So unlike any other adult I knew. His mind wasn’t on a track. He was ready to be surprised and stopped at any moment, ready to see what would happen next, and it could be anything.
I think there’s no answer to that, he finally said. Those are the best questions, the ones that have no answers. I can’t imagine how sea horses could have come to be, and why they have heads like horses on land, why there’d be that symmetry unknown. No horse will ever see a sea horse, or a sea horse a horse, and nothing else might ever have recognized both of them, and even though we do recognize the symmetry now, what’s the point? That’s exactly the right kind of question.
Are they made of bone, all those ridges?
The old man looked at the written descriptions beside the tank. Let’s see. Hey, they’re telling us here to look for pygmy sea horses, on the gorgonian coral. Should be red and white.
Both of us leaned closer. Above the handfish cave were branches of coral dusted pale white with pink warts, but no sea horses.
I don’t see anything, I said. Just coral.
They’re only two centimeters long, he said.
That’s tiny.
And then I saw it. Warts too pink, too bright and clean, not dusted pale. Double wrap of the tiniest tail around a branch, like a miniature snake made of glass. The rounded belly and horse’s head and the smallest black dot of an eye, and covered in these pink mounds just like the coral.
I found one, I said. Then I noticed the shadow beyond, a second pygmy sea horse in exactly the same position, as if all things must be doubled in order to exist.
Where? he asked, but I couldn’t speak.
Ah, he said. I see it now.
A shadow self, not made of flesh. Brittle as the coral. Hanging in a void. Already one of these sea horses was mine, known, and the other was other.
I don’t like the second one, I said. The second one gives me the creeps.
Why? He looks pretty much the same. Or she, or whatever. How can you tell male or female?
I can’t stay here.
Living things made of stone. No movement. And a terrifying loss of scale, the world able to expand and contract. That tiny black pinprick of an eye the only way in, opening to some other larger universe.
I walked away quickly, past tank after tank of pressure magnified and color dimmed, shape distorted. They had speakers for the tanks, and at the moment it was all too much, the parrot fish tearing at coral and shrimp clicking, chittering of penguins. Sound increased beyond measure, the shifting of a few grains of sand like boulders.
I stopped at the largest tank, an entire wall of dim pale blue, reassuring, no sound. Slow movement of sharks, same movement for a hundred million years. The sharks like monks, repetition of days, endless circling, no desire for more but only this movement. Eyes going opaque, no longer needing to see. No fancy clothes but hung in gray with white beneath. Viewed from above, they could look like the ocean floor. Viewed from below, they could look like the sky.
What’s wrong? the old man asked. He was kneeling beside me. He was kind.
I don’t know, I said. And this was true. I had no idea. Just some childhood panic in me, and I think now it was because I had only my mother. I had one person in this world, and she was everything, and somehow that shadow-shape, that doubling in the tank of coral, made me feel how easy she’d be to lose. I had nightmares all the time in which she was underneath a crane in the port and one of those huge containers flying through the air above her. We know fish are always on guard, hiding at the mouth of a cave or in seaweed or clung to coral, trying to look invisible. Their ends could come from anywhere, at any time, a larger mouth out of the dark and all instantly gone. But aren’t we the same? A car accident at any moment, a heart attack, disease, one of those containers coming loose and falling through the sky, my mother below not even looking up, seeing and feeling nothing, just the end.
The old man put a hand on my shoulder. You’re okay, he said. You’re safe.
I do remember he said that. He said I was safe. He always said exactly the right thing. I gave him a hug then, my arms wrapped around his neck. I needed someone to hold on to. Hair dry as grass, bones in his shoulders, nothing soft, as armored as a sea horse and as ugly, but I clung to him like my own branch of coral.
My mother that evening was tired. She lay on the couch and I snugged against her and we watched TV, mostly commercials. Back in our aquarium, as territorial and easily found as any fish. We had only four places to hide in this tank: the couch, the bed, the table, and the bathroom. If you checked those four spots, you’d always find us. The bare white walls gone blue in the light from the TV, no different from glass. A ceiling clamped down above so we couldn’t jump out and escape. Sound of a filter and pump running, the heating unit, keeping us at the right temperature. The only question was who was outside, looking in.
Are you going to marry Steve?
Whoa. Slow down there, cowgirl.
But you like him?
Yes. Yes I do.
So why not marry him?
I turned to look at my mother, and she was studying me, too.
You’re wanting a father?
I didn’t answer. We had talked about this before, and I always got in trouble somehow.
Look, she said. There’s something that adults call expectations, which means that we never get what we want and in fact we don’t get it because we want it. So the way it works is that if I really want Steve, if I want to marry him, then he runs away. If I don’t want him, then he’ll keep coming around and we won’t be able to get rid of him. And this will be even more true for you, because being a father is a much bigger thing than being a husband. So if you want Steve to be your father, he’ll run. But if you can just enjoy Steve because he’s fun, maybe he’ll stick around for a bit.
That doesn’t make any sense.
That’s true. It doesn’t make any sense. Welcome to the adult world, coming soon. I work so I can work more. I try not to want anything so maybe I’ll get something. I starve so I can be less and more. I try to be free so I can be alone. And there’s no point to any of it. They left out that part.
Who’s they?
The evil little gremlins who run the world. Who knows. Don’t make me talk about this stuff. Just watch TV. I’m tired.
Sorry.
It’s okay. It’s not your fault. Don’t let me ever make you feel that any of the problems in my life are your fault. They’re not.
Okay.
My mother rarely spoke like this. I wanted to fix the world for her, make it all make sense. She was good and strong and should have been given everything. She kissed the top of my head and pulled me closer and I burrowed in.
I didn’t watch the TV. I watched the walls, the flickering light. Somehow all colors became shades of blue, as if the air really were water. And why weren’t all fish blue, in a range dimming from white-blue to blue-black as they went deeper? Why were any fish bright yellow, or red? They were all hiding, so why these bright flashes and patterns?
Where did you grow up?
Caitlin. You know I don’t like to think about any of it.
But you never say anything.
That’s right.
But it was here in Seattle?
Yes.
And was it a room like this?
No. I mean maybe it was the same kind of room, but what matters is who’s in a room, or who’s not there, not the room itself. Although the room itself wasn’t anything like this either.
Well tell me.
No.
Why not?
Because it’s enough that they wrecked my life. They don’t get to touch yours.
But what happened?
Caitlin.
Okay.
We had no family. No one at
all. Everyone at school had a family. They didn’t have fathers, many of them, but they did have aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins. And almost all fish were in more than pairs. Although as I thought about it, many of the fish in the aquarium were in fact in pairs or alone, and how could that be? It couldn’t be like that in the ocean.
The entire planet one ocean. I liked to think about this. When I went to sleep each night, I imagined myself at the bottom, thousands of feet down, the weight of all that water but I was gliding just above ground, something like a manta ray, flying soundless and weightless over endless plains that fell away into deep canyons of darker black and then rose up in spires and new plateaus, and I could be anywhere in this world, off Mexico or Guam or under the Arctic or all the way to Africa, all in the one element, all home, shadows on all sides of me gliding also, great wings without sound or sight but felt and known.
Mr. Gustafson had us all preparing for Christmas. There was a great confusion about this, because we were also preparing for Hanukkah and Chinese New Year and Diwali and something in Korea, but the dates weren’t the same and we all knew we were really preparing for Christmas without being able to say it. Everything was red and green and said Happy Holidays. This was our last year of grades that didn’t matter, so we were still free to work on art projects.
I was working on a paper-mache reindeer with Shalini, who was from New Delhi, so we were making it a Diwali reindeer, even though Diwali had already passed a month ago on November 3. It was a different date every year according to the moon.
Add more water to the paste, Shalini said. She was bossy.
Our reindeer was a goddess named Lakshmi Rudolph and wore a hat we were going to paint gold. She was going to make everyone rich and beautiful whether the other reindeer allowed it or not. She would still have a red nose but maybe not any horns, which were difficult anyway in paper-mache.
Shalini had a scarf that was gold, and I was intensely jealous. She had delicious lunches in Tupperware from home, but I had to eat the school lunch. Tater tots almost every day, steamed vegetables, and some kind of meat with gravy, even though I didn’t like meat. I was going to be a vegetarian like Shalini when I got older, and I never ate fish.
Shalini was also allowed to wear perfume, which my mother said was ridiculous for twelve-year-olds.
Let me smell your wrists, I said.
You always ask for that.
I like it.
She lifted a wrist for me. Her smooth, beautiful brown arm, and I put my nose against her wrist and closed my eyes and breathed in another world. Things I couldn’t name, spicy and sweet.
Your mother should let you wear perfume.
She won’t.
Let’s keep moving, Caitlin and Shalini, Mr. Gustafson said. Rudolph has no legs.
Lakshmi Rudolph, I said, but Mr. Gustafson had already moved on to the sleigh.
Shalini scrunched her nose to make a pig face. She always said Mr. Gustafson looked like a pig, and it’s true the end of his nose did seem cut short a bit, so you could see the dark holes of his nostrils. But every teacher in school was named after an animal. Mr. Callahan was named badger, Miss Martinez was called turtle. None of them were named after fish.
Lakshmi Rudolph had a thin chest still, and bare wire legs, but her head and crown looked good, and her butt and small tail, which we were going to paint white at the tip. Shalini was working on the ribs.
Tell me more about your family, I said.
You always ask about my family.
Tell me more about the wedding, with two elephants and many days and hundreds of people.
That was in India. You should come to my house for a sleepover.
Yay!
Okay. I’ll ask my mother.
There was almost no snow left outside. Everything soaked, every patch of lawn swelled, slush in the gutters, ribbons of black. Even the pavement and buildings looked fat with water. Clouds bending downward, gray and darker gray, nothing white. I was one of the only walkers. Everyone drove.
East Yesler Way didn’t seem like it was in a city. Lined with two-story apartment complexes, with front yards that looked like backyards, some of them littered with plastic toys and laundry and thrown-away furniture but most looking tidy enough behind their chain-link fences. Smokers standing in the cold, watching me pass. Maybe it did look like a city. Just not downtown, even though we were close.
Almost every day someone was moving in or out. And they could be anyone, any race or age, with or without kids. Like one big motel, that entire long street, built for no one’s dream. I didn’t like East Yesler Way because no one belonged, but for some reason I never walked down one of the other streets. I had a pathway, a route, as unthinking as the sharks that circled like monks. I felt safe, at least, in my big jacket, and no one bothered me, which I find amazing when I look back on it now. I Google the street and see the crime rate at three times the national average, car theft almost six times higher. I think of my mother and the teachers at school letting me walk that route every day, and I’m filled with a rage that will never go away because it comes from some hollow vertigo unfinished. I feel dizzy with fear for my former self, and how can that be? I’m here now. I’m safe. I have a job. I’m thirty-two years old. I live in a better section of town. I should forgive and forget.
The only thing that kept me moving along that street each afternoon was the blue at the end, the sea visible because we were on a hill. That blue promised the aquarium. A gauntlet leading to a sanctuary. I could have stayed in an after-school program, but it was my choice to visit the fish. They were emissaries sent from a larger world. They were the same as possibility, a kind of promise.
When I crossed over the freeway, downtown began. The hill slanting downward, large buildings shaped like wedges burrowed into the hill, hiding in their own caves. Hunched for safety, as if something enormous swam in the skies above. One brave skyscraper at the end with a pointy top, trying not to look soft. The entire city a colony like coral, made of an endless network of small chambers. I imagined each room a polyp, a creature without a spine, tentacled mouth looking up toward the sky, finding a place to sit and excreting its exoskeleton, a thin layer of concrete, to attach itself here forever, at each full moon waving its tentacles upward and releasing gametes, fairy creatures made of light, each of them a new room floating through the air, looking for a place to build itself.
And so the city would grow without end, but why here? This was no Bali or Belize. Cold, raining all the time, windy, overcast, and dark. Seattle never made sense to me. We had orcas, and beautiful islands I had never seen, called the San Juans, but why the city?
I walked along the ferry terminal, the large green and white ferries that went to these islands, and I wished my mother was free and had money and we could ride north on the water. We would never stop but would just keep voyaging all over the world, across to Japan and down to the Philippines, from island to island, learning to dive, visiting every reef.
I passed fireboats and private yachts, the same private yachts that were always at the dock, never used, always waiting, owned by people with money who never left either, caught somewhere in the city. The waterfront park and then the aquarium. I had a yearly pass, but they all recognized me here and I never had to show it. I just walked in, as if it were my home.
I found him at the darkest tank, in a corner, alone, peering through what could have been a window to the stars, endless black and cold and only a few points of light. Hung in this void like a small constellation, the ghost pipefish, impossible.
Like a leaf giving birth to stars, I said, whispering, as if any sound might make the fish vanish.
Yes, the old man whispered back. Exactly that. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Sometimes I can’t believe you’re only twelve. You should become an ichthyologist. This is who you are.
Body of small green leaves, veined, very t
hin, its fins painted in light cast from elsewhere, but from his eye out his long snout, an eruption of galaxies without foreign source, born in the fish itself. An opening in the small fabric of the world, a place to fall into endlessly.
He’s my favorite fish, I said, still whispering. I ask everyone what their favorite fish is, and I always hope they’ll say the ghost pipefish.
Well he’s my favorite now, because of what you’ve said. The old man looked up at the signs above the tank. Randall Halimeda Ghost Pipefish.
A light flutter of fins, and the fish turned away, became nearly invisible, so thin, suspended in nothing. Some days I waited here and never saw him, only a black tank nearly empty, a dark wall of rock in shadow, a few drab seaweeds along the bottom, camouflage he never used, as if he knew all was staged and no predator coming. This tank could seem like nothing, and then it could dazzle.
Well, the old man said. You see that and it’s hard to care about the others. And I have to say, I’m surprised at how many fish here don’t look like fish. A leaf giving birth to stars is exactly right, and you’d never see that on your plate.
I don’t eat fish, I said.
No, no. I shouldn’t either. I’ll stop.
I love them too much.
Yes.
What was your favorite fish until today?
I come from Louisiana. Long ago. And they have giant catfish there, fish you wouldn’t believe, living down in the mud. They’d never get one in this aquarium. The real world is too big.
What do they look like? I’ve only seen regular catfish, and small tropical ones from the Amazon, white with black spots.
These are plain. Dark backs, black or brown, rough-looking with some spots, but no regular pattern. White bellies, an obscene white like fat. They look almost like tadpoles, baby frogs, because the belly is so big and rounded and the rest of the body in one long slab, much slimmer. And it doesn’t look like flesh. It looks like yuck, like whatever makes frog. But it’s hundreds of pounds, longer than a person and much thicker. With stubby little front fins like arms that didn’t grow. Long white tendrils around a big hole of a mouth.
