Aquarium

by David Vann

  And what you don’t know is that things can be lost quickly. I can lose Steve, and it only takes a few nights like last night. Only a few, and it won’t matter everything we did together before. All of that can be erased. All you have to do is hold out a little longer and you’ll take him away from me. Do you want that? No more Steve?

  I’m not trying to do anything.

  You can cut that crap, too. You know what you’re doing. You haven’t listened to anything I’ve said about the past. You don’t care what he did to me. And don’t start crying. I’m sick of that whole self-pity thing. Your life is easy. We have to go now anyway or we’ll be late. And do you know why we have to go so early?

  I wasn’t looking at her. I looked at my bowl of cereal and tried not to hear.

  We’re going because your mother gets to be a slave all her life, so that the little princess can have a better life. This is what parents do.

  Parent, I said. One parent.

  Oh, that’s beautiful. So you really do want to fight.

  I tried to do better than the lungfish. I tried to burrow down and turn to stone. No hole of dried mud to emerge from at the first rains, but my body turned to rock.

  You’re not going to say anything more? Just that little gem and that’s it?

  I thought my mother would hit me, but she didn’t. She stalked away and grabbed her stuff and opened the door. We’re going now.

  I was tempted to stay. What would happen if I just didn’t move? But I was afraid of her, so I stood up, grabbed my backpack and coat, and slid past her out the door.

  Cold, snowing, cones of yellow flakes in the streetlights pressing downward and come from nowhere, only black above. I held the handrail in case of ice. I could feel the air in my nose and throat.

  It’s gonna be great at work, my mother said. What a pleasure to be outside in nature, with all the steel beams and slush and oil and hydraulic fluid and grime and salt sprayed everywhere, and great to know this is still the beginning, that it’ll be about four more months of the same. More rain than snow, but still cold. What a great pleasure. What an honor.

  My door was frozen shut, so I had to yank to break it free. My mother was scraping ice off the windshield. No one else around at this hour, the cars and apartments dark. The ground cracking beneath us. I slid in to the bench seat, my legs instantly cold through my jeans. I sat on my gloved hands and hunched over to conserve warmth. If we just sat here for a few hours and did nothing, we could die.

  My mother cranked the engine, and it was slow to start. She revved it, smooth fans of power, no sound of pins. And then we drove slowly down our street onto East Marginal Way South going north, taillights of other cars ahead now and lights of the city beyond.

  My favorite part, my mother said, is when I get all sweaty and then we have to wait awhile, just standing around, and the sweat freezes.

  I’m sorry, I said.

  Well that’s a start.

  But I’m not doing anything wrong.

  That’s maybe not as good an apology. I didn’t think this was going to happen for another year, until your teens, but I guess it might as well start now. Why have another year of peace when we could fight right away?

  You’re the one who’s making it a fight.

  Yeah, my mother said. Yeah. This is the beginning. I did this to my mother, too, until she started dying. Then I wanted to cut out my nasty little tongue for everything I’d said. So what can I do to short-circuit you? Maybe tell you about your father. Would you like to hear about your father?

  Yes.

  I bet you would. So let’s save that for a time when you’re playing nice.

  You’ve never told me anything.

  That’s right.

  My mother flicked on the heater, the engine warm enough now, and we sat in our own small desert, blown by hot wind at our feet and in our faces while the snow fell outside. Like rain in the headlights but white and slower, suspended then caught in a rush as we collided. The lights of the city muted and blurred.

  It was a long time before we reached East Yesler Way, driving up the hill into what no longer felt like a city. Gatzert waiting lit and lonely by the side of the road.

  What time? I asked.

  I don’t know. Maybe four thirty, maybe five thirty.

  She was gone then. She would be outside all day in the cold, and next winter would be the same, and the winter after that, all the years until I was her age and she would still be working, another twenty years, and another ten years after that, three more of my lifetimes, an eternity. I think that morning was the first time I understood. It was too awful to be true. My own mother trapped, a slave just as she had said.

  The old janitor let me in and disappeared into his cage somewhere, and I sat under the soulless fluorescent lights and waited. This was the beginning of my mother’s life, waiting and doing nothing. The cold, and we keep breathing, and that’s it.

  I hadn’t done any homework, but I couldn’t pull out the books now, and Mr. Gustafson wouldn’t be checking anyway. I remembered then that he had said not to even bring the books. So I just sat and waited for an hour and a half until everyone was yelling and running and laughing and finally Shalini appeared, sleepy and soft, and she had her arms around me for about two minutes and then we had to go to class.

  Mr. Gustafson had stopped trying. We wouldn’t be ready for the Christmas parade—there would be unpainted parts of the dragon and sleigh, bits of wire showing in the legs and antlers of the reindeer, Lakshmi Rudolph with almost no legs at all, a formless Santa, a dreidel that would never spin—and he was tired. Every other year had probably been a failure too, and he had no plan B.

  I remember being angry at Mr. Gustafson, but Shalini never was bothered. She didn’t mind chaos, and she found the ridiculous funny.

  Look at his tongue, she said. His tongue is out. And it was true. As he looked at his book of cars, his mouth had opened and his fat tongue was bulging out over his lower lip.

  Yuck, I said.

  Come over here, she said, and I knelt behind our Rudolph. I love your hair, she said. So light. It weighs nothing. She lifted my hair and kissed all along my neck and my skin tightened everywhere, goose bumps and chills. I was shivering, even though I wasn’t cold. She kissed my ear and all along my jaw until she reached my lips. I wanted to breathe her in, to hold her inside, and I wanted everyone else to disappear, to just go away.

  My mother won’t let me see my grandpa.

  Shalini kept kissing me. Don’t talk, she said.

  I’m worried she never will.

  Shalini stopped then and opened her eyes. You saw him yesterday, didn’t you? You went running off.

  Yeah.

  And you can see him again today?

  Yeah.

  Well then. Everything is okay.

  But I don’t want to hide and have secrets.

  Caitlin, she said. Look at what we’re doing now. You are going to have secrets.

  I ran to my grandfather again, ran until my lungs ached in the cold and my legs felt brittle, made of glass. It was snowing still, a layer now half a foot thick and made of nothing, my feet sinking through as if the snow were only air. The city disappearing, all edges softened, the sky the same as the land. Only streetlights and windows remained, and the dark tracks cars made in the road.

  I had to walk, to catch my breath. Heart pounding and skin slick with sweat under my coat. I didn’t want a secret life, hidden from my mother. I couldn’t imagine living that way.

  There was no telling where the sun might be. The faint light an emanation that came from everywhere at once, the sea vanished, this road shortened at both ends and the sky close enough to touch. The sound of my own breath.

  I ran again, but it seemed to take forever to reach the aquarium. Inside felt hot, and I stripped off my coat.

  I found him at the l
argest tank just as a school of mackerel came at us with their mouths hung open, straining for plankton.

  Look, my grandfather said. You can see right through their mouths to the water behind. Their mouths go nowhere.

  I had never noticed that before. The food would never reach their stomachs. They’d be forever hungry, always eating and finding nothing. That’s wrong, I said.

  I don’t understand it, he said. Where does it connect?

  What I saw was every part of a fish wandering the oceans on its own. One of these gaping mouths straining through endless water with no body attached, a tail like a boomerang flinging itself through blue empty space, an eye floating alone. What if everything was unfinished? What if everything was made incomplete?

  They’re alive, my grandfather said. And they’re fast swimmers, so obviously it all works out somehow, but I don’t see how. And what are plankton, really? They seem made up, like fairy tale. Some huge whale skimming through nothing with an open mouth and ending up fed.

  I think it’s not finished, I said. I think none of it is finished.

  What do you mean?

  I felt overwhelmed. I don’t know, I said.

  I think I see what you mean, he said. We think the world is done, that this is the way it is, but it’s really still making itself. In a million years, the mackerel will have some balloon opening to its stomach to match that head.

  That’s not what I mean, I said.

  What do you mean?

  That we’re not put together yet. Parts are missing.

  So the first version isn’t done? Not that there will be other versions, but even the first one isn’t yet complete?

  Yeah.

  Hm. I understand that. But I don’t think it’s true, Caitlin. I think we’re okay. I think we’re complete. I mean our lives are all screwed up, but I think we have everything we need.

  The mackerel were far away now, at the other end of the tank, pale shadows gathering, tricks of light, no more than dust motes in air. The sea a great blindness, too thick, shapes coming into view only up close. No warning.

  Cod in close now, low against the rocks and weeds, fattened and slow, yellow-brown and aimless, dull eyes. A kind of saltwater catfish, waiting only to be eaten. The flat rounded plates of their heads, armor, thick sad lips, one white tendril for finding food in sand. Perhaps they were complete, but for what purpose?

  What’s that? my grandfather asked.

  Cod.

  Dinner. I didn’t know they looked like that. They’re so yellow, they make the water around them look yellow. I never would have noticed them if you hadn’t been looking.

  I looked up again to where the mackerel were coming around, bright silver heads gasping open, and they did make the water itself brighter, bluer, just like he said. You’re right. The cod make the water look muddy and yellow.

  The mackerel were so fast, kinks of light with black racing stripes, turned and gone.

  Most of the fish here we don’t even see, my grandfather said. Someone visits the aquarium. They look at the sharks, see the king crab, point at the brightest colors, but most of the fish go unnoticed, anything drab or brown, anything slow.

  That’s true, I said. I’ve never seen anyone look at the cod for this long.

  And the cod will be here forever. The mackerel look like they’re trying to escape. Like they’re looking for a way out. And they’ll probably find it. But the cod don’t care. They’re willing to believe this aquarium is the whole world. They’re going to have lunch or be served for lunch, and it’s all the same.

  I feel sorry for the cod, I said.

  Me too. They just look sad. I don’t think I can keep looking at them. We have to move on to something else.

  I know where we can go, I said. Just upstairs. This same tank, but the highest part, all open water. The mola mola. Have you seen him?

  I didn’t know there was an upstairs.

  I was so excited I felt like jumping up and down. I could show my grandfather something new.

  Let’s hurry then, he said. I’m dying to see.

  We walked up a narrow dark ramp with round portholes, like a submarine. Don’t look, I said. You have to close your eyes until I say to open them.

  I took my grandfather by the hand and led him up to the small room that looked out on a deep and endless blue. No rock formations, no seaweed, no cod or other bottom fish, and even the mackerel and albacore and sharks made only brief visits on their rounds. But the mola mola loved to lie flat on the surface, open to the sky, one eye looking upward. And then he’d submerge just below and swim all along the edge of the tank in his unlikely, twisting way. My grandfather kept his eyes closed patiently, and I waited until the fish was right in front of us.

  Open, I said.

  Oh, he said. Oh my god. It’s the man in the moon.

  And suddenly I could see it. A crescent moon in white, and his face looking upward.

  That mouth, he said. And the white eye. Not his real eye, in darkness, but that small white one just ahead forms another face. His real eye looks afraid, but with that other eye he’s seeing god, looking into the heavens in rapture.

  The mola mola turned and twisted away, the dark side of the moon all we could see now, dark craters and canyons fading into the deeper blue on great fins we weren’t normally allowed to witness, what propels each planet and moon.

  Caitlin, he said. That was nothing less than a vision. Thank you.

  He pulled me close against his side, and we watched the shadow form circling, waited for its orbit to come close again.

  We hurried across Alaskan Way in the snow. End of the day, diffused light, thick traffic crunching along slowly, a few tires with chains, others with studs. Endless migration.

  My grandfather able on his feet, maybe younger than he looked. He unlocked the passenger door for me, went around to the driver’s seat. He held the key to the right and nothing happened. Glow plugs, he said. They heat the engine for twenty seconds. Then he turned the key the rest the way and the engine came to life, sounding like a tractor idling. He went out to scrape the windshield and I waited.

  I wish we could stay in the aquarium, I said when he returned. He was breathing hard.

  Me too.

  I’d like to live there. I could have a bed in the hallway and look up at the fish before going to sleep.

  I’d want to stay in that upper room with the mola mola, he said, gasping. I’d become a monk and worship with him, looking upward.

  He’s called the great ocean sunfish, but I like mola mola better.

  Me too, my grandfather said. Mola mola sounds like the name of a god. An easy god.

  We drove then, slowly up Yesler, and I didn’t want to say good-bye. I wish you could come to our house, I said.

  That would be wonderful. But we have to give your mother time. It was horrible that I left her, and I don’t deserve to be forgiven, but I hope I will be anyway, only because I want to know you and also know her. I want to be there, part of a family. We have only this one life, so we have to hope for forgiveness.

  When we arrived at Gatzert in the snow, there was a car at the curb with its lights on, my mother’s car.

  Oh no, I said.

  It’s okay. This had to happen at some point.

  He parked and she stepped out in her blue coveralls, stained with oil. Another mechanic, I suddenly realized, just like him. Her head bare, hair loose and tangled.

  I don’t care what she says, I told my grandfather.

  Caitlin, go to your mother. It’s okay.

  So I opened my door and stepped out with my backpack.

  Get in the car, Caitlin, my mother said. She was lit up bright in the headlights and falling snow, hair wild, like some goddess of winter. And as soon as I moved, she stalked over to his car and kicked his door.

  Stop, I yelled, but s
he kicked his door again, hard. He just sat there and watched her.

  I ran around the front of his car and tried to stop her, tried to grab her arm, but she pushed me down into the road, my hands and knees wet in slush, and she kept kicking with her steel-toed boot, denting in the side of his car. Dark blue form hunched and maddened.

  Stop, Mom. Please stop.

  But she was beyond hearing, a thing of rage. She hopped up on his hood and jumped, the metal buckling beneath her. Enormous dents. Then she climbed onto his roof and leapt into the air with her knees high, slamming down with her boots to cave it in. A fury fallen from the sky, no less elemental than that. She was not my mother. She was something else I had never seen. The rage in her more than I ever would have imagined.

  My grandfather’s hands on the steering wheel still, looking at me where I crawled in the slush. He wasn’t going to move. She would destroy for as long as she liked. He looked terribly sad, caves for eyes. Wearing his rain jacket and a dark blazer beneath that, and a collared shirt. Always dressed up whenever I saw him. As if he were going to church. Waiting patiently for the service to begin.

  She was yelling now as she jumped and pounded. You don’t get to come back, you fucker.

  She jumped down to his trunk and slipped. The metal must have been icy. She fell hard onto his back windshield and slid and rolled overboard onto the pavement and slush.

  Mom! I yelled.

  My grandfather rolled down his window quickly. Sheri? he asked. Are you okay?

  But she rose again, unhurt, one side soaked now and darker. She swung her boot high to kick in a taillight. Splintering sound of plastic and glass. Soft explosion of the bulb.

  Nice of you to ask, she said. Maybe about nineteen years late. But thank you for thinking of me.

  She kicked in the other taillight.

  Stop! I screamed.

  I hope you love this car, she said. I hope it means something to you, Daddy.

  Sheri, I’m sorry.

  Save it.