It occurs to him that he
need not continue to work at his job. He tells Mrs. Bleen so. She says: “For a
fish? All this for a fish?”
She looks at him
silently for a long time, then says:
“I made a promise to
your mother, you know.” She waits for a response. When he gives none, she says:
“I’d better come see this fish.”
That afternoon she
closes the store early and walks the eight blocks back to his apartment. The
day is hot as an oven. As they walk, moisture begins to bead on her brow. At
the apartment building, the super tells them that the elevator is out of order.
Mrs. Bleen groans. She walks up the five floors slowly. She gasps, her mouth
opening and closing. Walking behind her, he can see the threaded blue veins on
her legs, and the rolled, discolored flesh of her inner thighs, appearing and
disappearing as her skirt moves.
By the time they reach
the sixth floor, sweat has spread in large dark circles under her arms, and is
trickling down her neck, pooling in the soft, crepey skin there. He lets her
into the apartment and she collapses onto one of the hall chairs, breathing
deep, fast breaths. She asks for a glass of water and he brings one. After ten
minutes or so, she is ready to proceed. He understands; he would not wish to
see the Jewfish while exhausted either. It demands a certain degree of
concentration. He opens the door to the living room and they enter.
The smell strikes him
at once: it is stronger now than it has been before, a rich scent of ozone. Mrs
Bleen gasps and covers her nostrils with her handkerchief. She flicks her eyes
toward him, and then back at the fish. It is dark and gleaming; it seems to him
larger than it was before. Mrs Bleen stares at the green-yellow scales, the
stripes of brown. She glances briefly around the room, at the piles of paper,
the collapsing bookcases filled with manila folders and yellow legal pads, at
the remains of the past three weeks’ meals strewn across his dining table. Her
eyes are drawn back toward the fish, though. They both stand, looking, for a
long time. At last, she takes her handkerchief away from her mouth and nose, to
say:
“What the hell kind of
a fish is it?”
He tells her.
Her eyes blink open, a
flush spreading across her cheeks as though he had said something filthy or
despicable. In a minute or two her surprise subsides and she returns to her
contemplation of the fish.
At last, she turns to
leave the room. He follows her and notices that at the last moment, as he is
closing the door behind him, she inclines her head to catch one final sight of
the fish.
She says: “You should
get rid of that thing. You should get rid of it today, throw it in the trash or
set it alight or cut it into a million pieces. It won’t bring you any luck.”
He knows it won’t
bring him any luck.
She says: “This isn’t
what your parents taught you. This isn’t the way to behave.”
He has come to the
conclusion that his parents did not know all that was required or, if they did,
they didn’t tell him.
She says: “It doesn’t
go looking into these things too hard. It’s best to let them be when they’re
quiet. Time enough to be worrying about them when they’re not.”
He thinks it’s rather
too late for that, even if he agreed with her.
“Well then,” she says, “I guess I won’t be
seeing you at the store anymore.”
***
He begins to speak to
the fish. He knows in his heart that it may not respond; it is dead after all.
But he begins to mutter to it, late at night, before he goes to bed. There are
things he must know. Things only it can tell him. Tell me, he says, tell me the
secret of how you were caught. What bait did they use? How many of them? Where
did they catch you? How did you fight them? Might you have won if you had only
done something different? He places his lips to the dead lips of the fish,
finding them surprisingly supple, inhaling the aroma of the sea. It does not
concern him. The scent fills his apartment now, in any case.
During the achingly
hot afternoons he fills the tub to the brim with cool water, sprinkles it with
salt and submerges himself. He is able to remain under water for longer and
longer periods, breathing out in small round bubbles, thinking only of the
gentle pressure against his eyelids, the soft pulse in his wrist. When he
leaves the tub, he treads wetly along the hall to the fish and places his moist
fingers against its gills. Sometimes, he thinks he might see them flutter,
remembering the sea. He begins to long for water, constantly. He sleeps in the
tub, running water onto his comforter so that he is damp all night long.
The newspapers pile up
in the hall outside his apartment until the super knocks on his door to
complain. They’re a fire risk. He takes them in great handfuls down to the
trash cans by the basement door. As he is doing so, he glances at one or two of
the headlines. They’re not important. But simply looking at them, simply
wondering, brings a sudden fear pounding in his chest. What if, in one of them,
is the thing he’s been waiting for? What if it’s now, the time when he should
act? If, instead of spending long days in salt water he should be taking out
the final list left by his mother, reading it through again, packing his bags.
He feels something close to terror at that thought. How can he have been so
foolish?
He calms himself by
thoughts of the fish upstairs, contemplating its own serenity. He walks to the
building’s side door and peeks around to the front. A crowd of thirty-seven
people are waiting, looking up at his sixth floor window, their faces patient,
as though they knew that the thing they were expecting would appear at any
moment. In the crowd, he sees Mrs Bleen, along with two of the other young men
who help her in the store. The building super is with them, wiping his brow
with his sleeve. The people don’t speak to each other but, he notes, they are
breathing almost in unison.
***
For the next three
days, he reads the newspaper as he always used to, with perfect concentration,
taking five or six hours over the job. It’s funny. According to the list,
there’s nothing important. But now he can see that certain things are important
nonetheless. There is a small story, tucked away in an inside page, of a dream
some people are having every night. They dream of fishing, it says. They dream
of tracking through long days and nights a fishy prey which might, at any time,
turn around and kill them with one swipe of its tail. In the dreams, they
follow it despite their fear. They dream of the dark places where the fish
lurks, of its gleaming body. The newspaper offers no explanation of this
phenomenon, nor even any justification for having printed it.
In his dreams, now,
the fish has begun to speak with him. He cannot yet understand its words, but
it has shown willingness to instruct him in its language. Each bubble it speaks
contains a word. He must unwrap each bubble like an onion, being careful not to
miss the meaning at its very center. One day, he knows, the words will form a
sentence. That sentence will tell him all he needs. He will breathe under
water. Until then he must concentrate and practice.
The crowd downstairs
grows slowly but steadily. Every two or three days, a new face arrives. There
does not seem to be any link between these new people; they are of every age
and race, both men and women. They leave at night, but in the morning they
return. He only goes out at night, now, unwilling to face them. One night, he
finds that someone has drawn a large green-and-yellow fish on the wall of his
building. He stares at the image for some time. It is remarkably accurate. He
cannot tell how they have made it shine like that, even at night. The next morning,
the crowd is larger by eight people. It grows more quickly from then on.
He wakes one morning,
cool and moist in the tub, puzzled about his surroundings. He cannot imagine
why he has kept all these files and boxes of paper. Morning memory returns, but
nonetheless he sees that all the papers are now irrelevant. That evening, while
the heat of the day is still rising from the asphalt, he drags 358 brown
folders down to the trash cans and sets them alight. The flames remind him of
the fish, as so many things do nowadays: they are alive, they are beautiful,
they are a simple power, devoid of intention, simply acting as they must. In
the flames he detects various colors: at first white, yellow, red and orange in
their majesty, later the blackness around the flames becomes visible to him,
not as an absence of light, but in itself, complete. At last, just before dawn,
he sees that the flames are not red or yellow or white or black; they are blue.
The blue is the blue of the sea.
When he returns to his
apartment, he finds that, on his front door, someone has drawn a fish of green
and yellow, shaded around with blue. He looks around, but cannot see who might
have done this.
***
He knows it will not
be long now. His apartment is almost empty, the shelves bare, the cabinets
yawning. In the living room, the Jewfish swings constantly in a shallow
circular movement, casting its shadow across the other museum artifacts: the
carelessly stowed minerals, the scattered harps, the withered mallow. He stands
and looks at the fish. The fish does not return his gaze. He had not known that
he could feel such a variety of simultaneous emotion: both joy and sadness,
both love and hatred, both agony and delight.
He is surprised to
discover that he is hungry. There is no food in the apartment. He will have to
go downstairs. As he leaves the apartment building, a murmur, like a single
word whispered over and over, rises up and is gone. The crowd look at him. He
looks at them. There must be four or five hundred people standing on the
sidewalk, in the road. Not crowding or jostling, simply standing. They part and
allow him passage, silent and constantly watching.
He walks down to
Bleen’s Grocers, but the store is closed. He notices that quite a few stores
are closed: maybe one in four or one in five. The people on the streets are
different too. They seem to be walking a little more quickly and no one, he
sees, is talking to anyone else. The only sound is of the cars whizzing past,
on their way to somewhere else. He walks down Broadway and finds that the
street seems busier the further away
from his apartment he is. About 20 blocks down, he finds a deli making
sandwiches. As he walks in, one or two of the customers look at him intently,
as though they recognize him. Most simply continue to eat. He asks for a bottle
of soda and a pastrami on rye. This is what he remembers his father bringing
home if ever his mother was sick. Pastrami on rye all round.
Clutching the sandwich
in its greasy paper bag, he walks over to Central Park. It’s been a long time
since he was last in the park. The day is uncomfortably warm; four or five
people are lying under the trees but otherwise the park is lifeless. The air is
still. The grass is dry and crisp. Away in the north, a bird is singing – a loud,
insistent, repetitive trill, like the ringing of a bicycle bell. He sits on a
bench and eats his sandwich. When the sandwich is finished, he drinks the soda,
then folds the paper bag up very small and feeds it in through the neck of the
bottle. He rubs his fingers on his trousers to rid them of the pastrami grease.
He considers. He might
simply leave. His checkbook is in his pocket. He could go to the bank, withdraw
his money and go elsewhere. This is, of course, what his parents would wish him
to do. This is what they prepared him for. He pulls his mother’s list from his
breast pocket and looks at it again, appreciating the urgency of its tone.
Leave, his mother says, leave now, take what you can and run. It is the only
way. Run.
He comes to his decision.
In late afternoon, the day no cooler nor any less still, he walks back to his
apartment. The crowd seems larger now, even, than in the morning. On the corner
of his block, someone has turned on the fire hydrant. Water is spraying across
the block, descending in large round droplets onto the silent people below.
They are wet and they wait. He passes through them and returns to the
apartment, signified by the sign of the fish.
***
In the cool of the
apartment, he makes everything ready. He closes the drawers and replaces the
empty shelves of the bookcases. He throws all the empty food cans, stray
Kleenex, fluttering pieces of paper, into a large plastic sack, then ties it
neatly and leaves it by the back elevator. He spreads one of his mother’s clean
white tablecloths on the dining table and arranges his museum collection again.
When all this is completed, he bathes himself using the good soaps, and dresses
in a clean white shirt and black trousers. He smoothes his hair down, black and
sleek against his skull.
He is waiting for
sunset. The Jewfish agrees: sunset is the time. He hangs out of his window to
watch the sun dip, livid orange, into the horizon, slowly vanishing, fragment
by fragment, stretching its fingers out into the sky for as long as it can
until it is finally gone.
There is a knock at
his door. He pauses. Answer the door, says the Jewfish. He opens the door.
***
At first, they do not
speak. They stare at the Jewfish, open-mouthed. Some begin to mutter under
their breath. Most remain silent. He is able to look at them and is struck by
how similar they have become to one another. It is difficult to tell them
apart. He thinks that he sees Mrs Bleen toward the back of the crowd, but the
woman’s face is fuzzy and indistinct. It may be someone else.
They say: “Do you know
why we are here?”
He looks to the fish
for guidance, but it makes him no reply. He must answer alone:
“Yes. I think I do.”
“Are you afraid?” they
say.
“Yes,” he says. “I am
very afraid.”
He cannot tell whether
this answer pleases them or not.
They advance.
He does not feel the
pain at first, only the sensation of several sharp blows. What he notices is
the blood, splashing. Tiny red specks appear on the white tablecloth, a fine
spray of red dusting the sea urchin and the glass jars of asphalt and benzoine.
He looks up at the impassive face of the Jewfish and sees that large sticky
circles of red have stained its flank. He falls to his knees. It is then that
he observes the pool of blood beneath him, growing larger splash by splash. It
is then that he begins to feel the pain.
He says: “Why? I still
do not understand. Why like this? Why this?”
The Jewfish says: Do
you not see? This was always available to you. It has been waiting for you
since the beginning. You paid for it in advance of delivery.
He begins to
understand. He wishes the blows would cease, just for a moment or two, that he
might reorientate his thoughts around this new understanding.
He says: “But where
was the hook? I didn’t notice it. I was looking, but I didn’t see.”
The fish seems to
smile. It says: I have a secret for you, if you have ears to hear it. This is
the secret you have yearned for. The secret is that you are wrong. You have
mistaken your role. You are not the fish. You are the hook and you are the
worm.
He says: “But these
people, surely, are the fishermen, setting their hooks? Surely I have been
caught by them?”
The fish replies:
These are not the fishermen. They have no plan. They have set no traps. Were
you to ask them to explain their actions, they could not. They have seen
something glittering far away, they cannot but pursue it. They are the fish.
They do not know why they seek you.
An enormous clarity
has burst upon him, as though the sun had risen once more. He sees it now. He
feels himself wriggling, speared through with a curved blade. He watches as the
people around him start to nibble.
He says: “And the
fisherman? Who has set me as a hook and worm?”
The fish utters a
large and perfectly round bubble. It says: How can I answer such a question? I
do not know the fisherman. I am simply a fish.
He notices, calmly,
without fear, that there is water all around him. The water is blue, and the
Jewfish is swimming away. It is remaining in place. He is beneath the water.
His lungs ache as though he had been kicked and beaten, but he knows that it is
only lack of oxygen. The water is pressing against his lips, demanding entry.
He is alone. He is among a crowd of people. He notes that their faces are
without understanding. They will not breathe under water. At last, at long
last, he knows it is time. His understanding is partial at best, but maybe it
will be enough. Another sharp pain strikes his lungs, his kidneys, his stomach.
He opens his mouth and inhales.
