Aquarium

by David Vann

  I settled in for the long wait. I had my homework, which wasn’t much, but I unzipped my backpack and pulled out the math book. Fractions and percentages. Mr. Gustafson had taught us to tell stories from our own lives for each problem. If ten people made a family, and my mother and I were the only two, we were one-fifth of a family. If a shark swam into a school of forty fish and ate 10 percent, there were four less fish.

  Do you have a parent here, or guardian?

  It was one of the customs officers. He was staring down at me, holding his coffee. Short hair, older. A gun on his hip.

  Leave her alone, Bill, one of the others said.

  How old are you?

  I’m twelve, I said. I was afraid of this man. He wanted to hurt someone. That was clear.

  Where is your parent or guardian?

  My mother is working overtime.

  Single mother?

  Bill. Cut it out.

  Bill ignored them, kept staring down at me. What’s her name?

  Sheri Thompson.

  Sheri Thompson. You tell her to come see me. Inspector Bigby.

  I couldn’t move. He was like a dog, watching and ready to bite. Skin reddish, weathered, shaven but all the dark holes of his whiskers visible. Then he turned away and the others laughed and they walked out.

  This portable like its own tank, lit from above, but at the aquarium, they were careful which fish went together. They would never have let Bill in. Real life was more like the ocean, where any predator might come along at any time.

  I couldn’t do my homework. I couldn’t focus. I put away the math book and just sat there alone for hours, afraid to move, listening to the rain on the roof and the diesel engines of the cranes. I was afraid Bill would come back, afraid also that he was out there looking for my mother. I didn’t know what he’d do if he found her. I didn’t know whether we were in trouble.

  When my mother finally arrived, I ran to her.

  She picked me up, something she never did anymore.

  What happened? she asked. What’s wrong?

  I tried to answer, but I was crying against her neck, these awful out-of-control sobs.

  She set me down. Caitlin, you have to tell me, right now.

  Inspector Bigby, I said. He asked if I had a parent, and he wants to see you. He’s one of the customs officers.

  My mother looked out the window, as if he might be watching us right now.

  His first name is Bill, and he’s mean, and they were laughing.

  Come with me right now, she said. We’re going to the car. Walk fast.

  I grabbed my backpack and we hurried through the rain, exposed for anyone to see. Big floodlights.

  I jumped in and my mother held the door. I have to tell my foreman I’m leaving, she said. I’ll be right back.

  Don’t go, I said. I told him your name.

  It’s okay, Caitlin. It’s going to be okay.

  My mother jogged away then through the rain, still wearing her helmet. I was afraid she wouldn’t come back. Bill would take her in his new Jeep to some prison even though she hadn’t done anything wrong, and I would never see her again. Locked away somewhere.

  And she was gone a long time. Needles of rain on the roof of the car, bright lights in a darkness swallowing my mother.

  But she did return, and we drove slowly through the yard, to the gate where she stopped and gave her ID, and then we were free, back on West Marginal Way Southwest and then the bridge.

  When we arrived home, my mother parked in front of our apartment, turned off the engine, and slumped forward against the wheel.

  I’m sorry, I said.

  No, sweet pea, she said, quiet now. It’s not your fault. And it will never happen again. I think there’s some law that says I can’t leave you alone, without an adult. So I won’t do overtime. We should still be okay. I’ll have enough for rent, and food and gas, and you have your aquarium pass. I can afford the water and heat. We just won’t have any extras. I’ll cancel the phone and TV, if I can.

  Will we still get ahead?

  My mother laughed. Sweet pea. You’ve been listening to me too much. It’ll be okay. I won’t be putting anything into retirement for me or college for you. That’s what I meant by getting ahead. Maybe saving for a house, but that wasn’t happening anyway. But you can still go to college. You just have to study hard, okay?

  During art period, I made a paper-mache of Inspector Bigby. I didn’t use a balloon, because I was going to be sticking him with a lot of needles. I wadded up newspaper and then wrapped it in wet strips. I would paint his head red and uniform white.

  And what is this? Mr. Gustafson asked.

  Inspector Bigby.

  Is he part of the Buddhist pantheon?

  What?

  Is he one of your Buddhist gods, like the golden fish? Will he be riding in the sleigh?

  No.

  Well then?

  I ripped Inspector Bigby into pieces, tore at the newspaper and let it fall to the floor. Then I started crying. I couldn’t help it.

  Great, Mr. Gustafson said. Just what I need. Shalini, can you take Caitlin to the bathroom to cry?

  Everyone was looking at me. I kept my head down as Shalini led me out by the hand. I could see her golden bracelets, hoops that slid and bounced, and we escaped down the hallway to the bathrooms.

  We were twelve years old. She didn’t have any wise words for me, or even tell me things would be okay. I wasn’t able to tell her what was wrong. But I remember standing in front of the mirror, my eyes red, and she hugged me from behind. Pressed all against my back, arms pulling tight, her face tucked in close against my neck, feel of her breath. Her hair so black against my blond in the mirror. It’s the clearest image I have of us, because of that stupid mirror, and my face crumpling in self-pity, like any kid seeing herself cry.

  The old man knew right away. What’s wrong? he asked.

  I had found him resting on a bench near the jellyfish. I sat down and leaned against him and he put his arm around me.

  It’s all right, he said.

  Cold smell of his coat. He must have just arrived. Very few people here today, dark corridors warm and humid and private. Crowded in the summer, but who would go to an aquarium in December?

  Did you know the jellyfish aren’t fish? I asked.

  That makes sense, the old man said. I guess I didn’t really know, though.

  And they’ve lived for five hundred million or maybe even seven hundred million years. They’re older than anything.

  I hid against the old man and watched the jellyfish rise and fall. Slow pulse of life, made of nothing, from another world.

  I can’t imagine seven hundred million years, he finally said. It doesn’t mean anything to me. Four or five times as old as dinosaurs, but who can look back before dinosaurs, before sharks? It’s the same as trying to imagine, well, I don’t know what. South America would be part of Africa then, I think, or who knows, and no birds. Can you imagine no birds? And nothing yet learned to crawl. I guess there were plants, but what kind of plants? Were there even plants? Maybe a few ferns?

  There were no plants, I said. No plants on land.

  Holy smokes.

  I wish we had a box jellyfish, I said.

  Why’s that?

  They have twenty-four eyes and four brains, and two of the eyes might be able to see.

  What do you mean? Don’t all eyes see?

  They only sense light, jellyfish eyes. But the box jellyfish might be able to see. A jellyfish might have been the first thing to ever see.

  Where do you learn this stuff?

  Fish Mike.

  What’s that?

  He gives a talk here, every two weeks. The last one was about jellyfish.

  What else did he say?

  That a hundred years from n
ow, most of the fish might be gone, and we might be back to only jellyfish. He said we should enjoy the fish now, because this is a last look.

  I still can’t believe there were no plants, the old man said. I’m imagining a world of only rock and sea, nothing else, just rock and sea, and the only thing living in the sea are jellyfish. They have the entire planet to themselves. And now I hear they’re getting it back, as if time is reversing. You’re only twelve years old, but do you know that what you’ve said today is more amazing than anything I’ve heard in my entire life?

  I sat up and looked at the old man. I thought he was making fun of me, but he wasn’t laughing. He seemed serious. He put his hand on my head, the way my mother sometimes did.

  Caitlin, he said. I feel so lucky to be here with you.

  I knew something was wrong. Even at age twelve, I knew you don’t just meet an old man like this. But I needed him, so I ignored anything that seemed creepy. I settled in against him again, his arm around me, and I looked at the jellyfish in their slow and endless pulsing, heartbeat before there was any such thing as a heart, and I felt my life become possible. The old man had said I was amazing, and in that moment, I felt I might become anything.

  So what’s wrong? the old man asked. Why are you upset today? You can tell me.

  I didn’t know how to speak about Inspector Bigby. He wasn’t just a man. He was part of some larger threat, my mother taken away from me, and I didn’t know if we had done anything wrong. I was just afraid, but I was afraid of everything.

  I’m sorry, he said. Caitlin. You’re breathing really quickly right now. Are you okay? Are you having some kind of panic attack?

  I couldn’t answer.

  Caitlin. You have to calm down.

  He put his hand on my chest.

  God, your heart is racing. Please say something.

  The old man let go of me and stood up. I’ve never been good at this, he said. I’m sorry, I have to go. He left then, walking very fast for an old man, running away, and it seemed like he was rising uphill, the floor tilting, and I was sliding downward.

  Please, I said, but my voice was so quiet. I was alone in this dark thin hallway, fallen to the bottom, and I curled on the bench and watched the jellyfish above. Rings of light, moons come alive. My heart felt made of rock, dark and hard, but the jellyfish were made of something calmer, reassuring. Slow drift endless, begun so long ago. They were beautiful, and if you looked at them long enough, you could believe they were made only for beauty.

  We know so much more now about ocean acidification, and I should hate the jellyfish as a sign of all that we’ve destroyed. In my lifetime, the reefs will melt away, dissolved. By the end of the century, nearly all fish will be gone. The entire legacy of humanity will be only one thing, a line of red goop in the paleo-oceanographic record, a time of no calcium carbonate shells that will stretch on for several million years. The sadness of our stupidity is overwhelming. But when I watch a moon jelly, its umbrella constellation pulsing into endless night, I think perhaps it’s all okay.

  My mother was able to live without a future. This was perhaps her best quality, that she never despaired. And she knew when to cheer me up. That evening, instead of driving home, we went for pizza and a movie, and it wasn’t a date with Steve. I had my mother all to myself.

  The pizza had artichoke hearts, like jellyfish gone opaque and yellowed, washed up on a beach of dough.

  I watched the jellyfish today, I told my mother.

  How are things going for them? Any big changes?

  Mom.

  My mother was smiling. Have they noticed yet that they’re in a tank?

  They might have been the first things to see. Ever.

  What do you mean?

  I mean nothing else could see. There was this whole world, and nothing could see it.

  That is cool, I have to admit. You’re a trip, Caitlin. I never thought of that, the planet before anything could see it. There might as well have been no day, no light.

  Yeah.

  And then the jellyfish opened their eyes.

  Yeah.

  I imagine them like dogs sleeping on a carpet, slouched down and then one of them puts its head up and takes a look.

  Mom.

  Sorry. I’m not a fishhead like you. I don’t see the world as fish. I see dogs.

  Can we get a dog?

  Caitlin. You know you’re allergic.

  I want one anyway.

  That’s my daughter. I’m just like you. I’ve always wanted the things I can’t have. But the trick is to just focus on the pizza and enjoy the salt and cheese. And then we watch a movie, and then we go to sleep. Close your eyes now and enjoy the salt and fat.

  I tried it. I closed my eyes and focused on salt and fat and oil, and it was good. I was only a mouth in the darkness.

  I watched only a few parts of the movie. Mostly I watched the shifting light on the balconies above us, great rock formations on a seawall extending upward to a surface I couldn’t see. We were set back in the lowest cave, the safest place, in the largest school, all hung vertical like razorfish but not inverted. The roof above us the floor to another cave. All eyes peering outward into endless expanse, open ocean, heavy curtains on the walls in folds like dark rippling of light in the depths, always seeming to move closer. The faces around me all registering the same emotions at once and maintaining perfect spacing, flash of cheeks as they turned their heads and then gone in darkness again. Crunching sounds as they fed on the reef, always feeding even as they watched.

  All was the same as when I watched TV with my mother at home, except now we were in a large school. Two of us or two hundred of us, there was no difference. All silent still, watching, looking outward into the light, waiting. And the sea itself unchanged. Sound magnified, booming, and only sound marked time.

  Even as a kid, I felt this sense that there was no why to any fish or person. The school could be one hundred and ninety-nine instead of two hundred, and this would have no effect on the ocean, no effect on sound or time or light. I was always vanishing. In that theater, I appeared and disappeared and reappeared, all without effect, and the rock above remained constant, and the formless air. I tried to do what my mother did, tasting the salt and fat and oil and now watching patterns of light before sleep, but I could never immerse. I was never able to find my way into any tank at all.

  We drove home in darkness, this car the smallest cave, glow of instrument lights on my mother’s face. Moving at impossible speed, as if our wheels had no contact with ground. My mother lost in the movie still. She had grabbed my hand in the tense or sad moments. I don’t think she was even aware she did it. Immersion came naturally to her.

  When we arrived home, she was tired and quiet and we simply went to bed. She didn’t make me go to my own room, but her bed might as well have stretched hundreds of feet across. The freedom of pizza and a movie was over. Now there was only her exhaustion and another day of hard work waiting after a sleep too short.

  Too soon we were back in the car, driving again in darkness, north in a stream of lights, some massive current sweeping all of us toward the greater light. Seattle something resting on the ocean floor, enormous starfish with bright ridges and fingers of black between. Bioluminescent glow pulling everything near, individual lights of aircraft in the depths above like deep-sea anglers. Their bodies invisible, shapes drifting through darkness and cold and no sound. Nothing known.

  I could believe the day would never come. Daylight seemed unlikely, and unwanted. The city so much more beautiful in darkness. I was bundled in my jacket and hood against the cold, and I would have drifted along with my mother for any length of time without end, but she left me at the curb of Gatzert Elementary, saying have a good day, sweet pea, giving me a kiss that barely touched my cheek. Her breath still heavy, still half asleep, each exhale a kind of sigh. And then she was gone, an
d I walked to the front doors where the janitor always let me in. In another hour, teachers would arrive, and during the half hour after that, the other kids. But I was always the first except the janitor, who seemed to live here through the night.

  I waited on the only bench, outside the principal’s office. All chairs were kept inside rooms, leaving the hallways smooth and clear, long tubes to direct the surge of each tide of students and teachers. The rooms rock pools, microcosms, left stagnant and then swept away again. A world with many moons, most of them invisible, the janitor and I the only riders at six thirty and nowhere to cling.

  At seven thirty, the next low tide, he unlocked the rooms, let each door swing free, and each room begin to fill with the returning sea, teachers brought in slowly by the current, sleepwalkers with papers and books and mugs of coffee, jackets dripping from the rain outside, every floor becoming a slick.

  I think most fish would not survive so many moons and tides. I think the current would exhaust them, and they’d become confused. The surge would pull them away from whatever anemone or rock or bit of sand or coral was home, and in all the cycles afterward they’d lose direction and never find their way back. What we’ve become is very strange.

  At twelve, I had only the sense of pressure, some premonition, riding each surge and waiting for the counterpull, believing, perhaps, that all would release at some point. Each day was longer than the days now, and my own end not yet possible. It was a simpler mind, more direct and responsive. We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.

  So perhaps I’m wrong about immersion. Not sensing the tank doesn’t mean it’s not there, and even loneliness must be in some way contained. The teachers nodded to me as they passed, mumbled hello, but I had sat there so many mornings I had become like rock or coral, no more than structure.