So when the little boy threw his half-eaten cracker into the pond, his parents should have immediately waded in and picked it out, or better yet, made the boy himself go get it. But for whatever reason they did neither, simply allowing the cracker to bob and float in the crystal-clear water until it was naturally snatched from below, the commotion of the big fish’s rise enough to attract the attention of the other people at their pond-side leisure. That should have been the end of it, something like this happening probably more than we’d like to believe. But then someone else threw a shrimp chip into the water, provoking another thrashing at the surface, which in turn elicited more offerings around the pond. There is a brief vid someone took and uploaded that captures how quickly the few tossed tidbits here and there turned into a full-scale onslaught of snacks and sandwiches and poured-out sodas and then, shockingly, inedibles like straws and napkins and drink boxes. A frenzy of littering is what it was, with one older fellow in the background so frustrated that he didn’t have anything with which to join the fray he pulled off his baseball cap and flung that in, though from his stricken expression it seemed he immediately regretted it. The whole episode lasted for no more than a few minutes, and when the park staff rolled in on their scooters and carts, you could see the young and old and parents and strollers scattering in every direction like just-disrupted ants, and then disappearing on the paths through the many shady copses and glades.
The pond was easily cleared of whatever the fish didn’t instantly consume. They seemed to linger for a while near the shoreline, surely awaiting another rain of exotic treats. Allow me another grilled chicken gizzard! How I would love a pineapple ice pop! Those particular fish did not get a second chance but at most of the other parks in B-Mor they got a taste, a rash of pond “feedings” occurring soon thereafter. These, too, arose spontaneously, bloomed with startling speed and fury, and subsided just as quickly. Word was spreading but it must be said that there was no real talk of the incidents, no online discussions or gossip or even much commentary around the tables and row-house stoops, as if we each had a solitary desire that should not be named but whose expression, once sparked, was so instantly enacted that it felt as pure and instinctive as fleeing from a house fire. For how can it be denied that these incidents were in some tangled way inspired by Fan’s actions? Moment to moment we act freely, we make decisions and form opinions and there is very little to throttle us. We think each of us has a map marked with private routings and preferred habitual destinations, and go by a legend of our own. Yet it turns out you can overlay them and see a most amazing correspondence; what you believed were very personal contours aligning not exactly but enough that while our via points may diverge, our endings do not.
And the funny thing, it occurs to us, is whether what Fan committed, as well as the fact that she left us, was aberrant at all.
We have not gone over what happened in the tanks that day because it is already recorded in the official B-Mor ledger, and maybe someday, when this era’s troubles are not so much startling to us as simply fascinating, even quaint and benign, there will be a small interpretive installation at the historical museum that lights up with the account. Which will likely offer this: here was a young woman possessed of superior diving ability but with the burdens of an infirm mind, most clearly proved by her cruel, callous actions of leaving two tanks of dead fish, numbering in the thousands. Add to this the fact that she simply walked out of the gates, with no provisions and no hope whatsoever of finding Reg, and the portrait of her pathology should be complete.
But certain little-known details suggest that more need be said. A seasoned tank diver in Fan’s facility, Selena Chiu, who had to retire unexpectedly because of a diagnosis of terminal illness, told some of her household that it was not just the fish in Fan’s tanks that perished. There were other tanks of dead fish that had to be emptied and sanitized, their filtration systems and pipes and tubing dismantled and replaced as well. These blights occurred in a different facility altogether, one that Fan had never been to; Selena herself had been transferred there for several days, though just after Fan had departed B-Mor, to help train some rookie divers. Apparently, Selena noticed an empty tank being cleaned and assumed it was just a regular maintenance rotation, but one of the divers-in-training said that they were, in fact, cleaning out several tanks after a sudden die-off. Of hatchlings? Selena said, for the fry can be especially sensitive to water conditions and will sometimes get sick and die. No, no, the young diver said. A tank of mature fish. Practically ready for harvest.
When she asked another longtime diver at the facility about this, she was met with a faraway stare and a mumble of ignorance and an instant switch of topic to the latest doings on a popular evening program, which Selena, as most all of us would, seamlessly obliged. But after that, she couldn’t help wondering how such a thing could happen, when over the years every factor of temperature and water composition and nutrients et cetera has been engineered and tested and monitored, the formulations optimized to the extent that there are code manuals for every stage of development, each stage broken down into smaller intervals, such that the tank operators can recalibrate almost hourly, say, by adding a certain mineral tincture or upping the temperature of the inflows a half degree. Even the daily cleaning of a diver’s suit is done the same way each time, exactly, so as to minimize the introduction of contaminants.
Trace Levels Show Haste Levels! the facilities motto goes.
And while no word of other die-offs arose after that, it was clear from the incidents in the parks that people were conscious of the possibility, if expressing it in a surprising way. But perhaps it’s not so unusual. Might an exhausted new mother force-feed a colicky infant to punish it and herself? Or might you mar your brand-new scooter if a part of you felt oppressed by its shiny perfection? For sometimes you can’t help but crave some ruin in what you love.
And you could begin to think: so what if Fan poisoned her fish? What does all this mean for the rest of us in B-Mor, we who have made our way through steady work and, if not grown fantastically prosperous like Charters, have for generations endured with aplomb and dignity. If she did cause their deaths, what did she get out of it? What was she desiring? It’s too easy to say it was some temporary insanity, or some raging, dark grief over Reg, especially when she never once exhibited such capacities. Her household is, of course, gone now and resettled out west, so there’s nobody to query directly, but we know from pix and vids that she was a happy infant and schoolgirl and even adolescent, most often captured with her siblings and cousins, using her smallness and speed to swoop around as mirthfully as a swallow on the first day of spring. She was tiny at every age, but at every age she was well proportioned, her skinny legs sized just right so that she appears a person exquisitely turned and finished, only the fleeting presence of others in the frame betraying her stature. And if this is a roundabout way of suggesting Fan was incapable of perpetrating the flagrant or extreme—unless, of course, she was compelled—then let us move forward to the idea that she did so for a reason, perhaps the best and only one: to save us and B-Mor.
Back around the time that Fan left, there were rumors arising of a shift in demand for our goods in the Charter villages. Of a change in sentiment, in fact, about our products. For decades now there has been a very simple relationship between B-Mor and the Charters it supplies. We provide pristine, beautiful fish and vegetables, and in return we enjoy estimable housing and schooling, technical training and health care, and a salary (if prudently managed) that makes possible modest levels of entrepreneurship, and even some exotic travels. Last month another big group of the retired and the terminal flew their once-in-a-lifetime global to Amsterdam, one of the few cities that is still like it was in olden times, inhabited by permanent residents but also completely open to any who wish to visit and tour and buy souvenirs and snacks. The group crossed the city on bicycles and rode canal boats and brought back posters and placemats from the Van
Gogh Museum, the overwhelming favorite painting being his Almond Blossom, which you see in every other kitchen and parlor of B-Mor, the celadon background and the dulled white of the petals and the twisting, mossy branches a tableau that somehow captures the exact hue of our lives, this bright-tinged gloaming. If only he had painted fish!
In any case, we have been fortunate in how solid the producer-consumer relationship has been for both communities, the sole interruption being more than twenty years ago, when for several weeks every fish tank had to be emptied and scrubbed after an outbreak. The scales of the fish fell off in patches, which led to infections and suppurations and eventually death. As a precaution, the trays of plants suspended over the tanks were also completely cleared, and until the new fish and plants could become mature, our Charter customers had to source their food from unfamiliar facilities, which you can imagine made them very nervous. Charters are famously nervous, for despite their wealth and security and self-satisfied demeanors, they are obsessed with minimizing hazards of any kind, and are perhaps racked most of all by the finally unknowable dangers of what they ingest. It’s the only thing that they have not mastered.
As for B-Mor, it was a particularly difficult period, to say the least. With our routines disrupted and with no work to do, an unwelcome enervation set in, people quickly becoming irritable, and soon enough irrational; with so many folks milling about the streets and stoops, there were more scooter and bicycle accidents, plus incidents of fisticuffs and vandalism in the malls, with the few verified homicides in B-Mor history also taking place during that time, the usual lovers’ quarrels and bad business dealings disastrously inflamed. A fourth cousin of ours, in fact, was poisoned by his wife, who found out he was going to leave her for a tea-shop girl the same age as their daughter, and laced a sweet red-bean bun (that he himself had brought home from the tea shop) with rat poison, causing him a most protracted death.
Charter biologists and engineers revised our feed and tank formulas, and instituted new facilities practices, and an outbreak of that scale has not happened since. Every level and composition—from the feed, to the water, to the air, to the grow media, to the spectrum of the lighting—is constantly monitored and reviewed, though the truth is that over the years the calibrations have grown so fine that new equipment was necessarily developed, given how decimal places kept being added, the measuring process itself evolving into a kind of test of our mettle, to see how far we could go in realizing an ultimate standard.
Which is why, when you think about it, there should be no sense in the notion that our Charter customers have lost a taste for B-Mor goods; they are their goods, after all, of wholly their conception, from genesis onward. We have simply made their wishes real. For what could be more important? Other settlements near and far-flung provide their clothing and gadgets and furnishings and so on, but we sustain them fundamentally, we enable their children to thrive, while all along offering them full confidence that there are no compromising or exogenous elements, nothing but the fortifications exactly specified by them and them alone.
And yet now there was noise of a new movement in the Charter villages, what the proponents were calling Back to Soil; it’s said that select teams of Charter experts had identified certain experimental plots in the open counties, and even planted them, presumably to see what the qualities of what they raised and grew in a totally “natural” way might be. The fact that “natural” is no longer a dirty word is amazing, seeing how the Charters had pretty much given up on everything outside their gates and ours, leaving it to the livestock and agro-companies whose artificially boosted yields are purchased by the ever-numerous counties masses, both here and abroad. Most every canton of the world ecology, in their view, had been contaminated beyond remediation, at least for the foreseeable future, which is why a place like B-Mor was developed at all, and then replicated many times over after our successes.
Ensure the input to ensure the output!
Back to Soil, we have to explain to our young ones, is a reprise of an old philosophy about the unequaled purity of naturally growing things, that a particular and endemic matrix of earth and water and air and sun will result in the ideal expression of whatever one is growing, in color, structure, taste, and, of course, the most critical quality of all, which can only be healthfulness. The definition of healthfulness, of course, is different for Charters from what it is for us, and quite different still for counties folk, who can’t hope for anything beyond the basic functions and have to trade away too much when needing attention (if they’re lucky) from someone like Quig. We B-Mors are looked after pretty well, but once a potentially terminal episode is diagnosed and treated, it will not be treated again, unlike for Charters, who have enough wealth to visit their specialists as often as they wish, theoretically ad infinitum, or at least until their bodies eventually succumb to the accrued effect of the interventions. Nobody goes C-free—nobody—an axiom that we B-Mors and counties people have surely accepted but that Charters probably never will, given the obscuring veil their essentially inexhaustible resources can throw over reality.
Which brings us back to our most humble Reg.
Reg, whose gangly, sapling-like figure seemed ill suited to most every occasion and task, whose brightest sparks were borne of heart rather than mind, whose place in the annals of B-Mor before his disappearance was like any of ours, which is to say genealogical, and no more. For each of us has a perch on the tree. After we are gone, that perch is marked by a notch, permanent, yes, but with its edges muting over time, assuming the tree is ever growing. Years from now someone can see that you were here, or there, and although you had little conception or care for the wider branching, in the next life there might be a sigh of wonder at how quietly flourishing it all was, if never majestic.
But by now Reg—or more specifically, the idea of Reg being C-free—had overtaken B-Mor. The place reposed anew. Was there more birdsong in the air? Did the streets show a heightened gleam? With the directorate gone silent, all that remained was our imagination, which had been ours alone but somehow felt completely unfettered now, like an old swaybacked mare whose pasture fence has been dismantled; she runs no faster but there’s a lift to the breeze, a ready vault to the ground, and with the high motoring in her chest, she is almost certain that she will sprout wings and fly.
So we must picture Reg in a Charter laboratory, sampling from a buffet of typical B-Mor dishes prepared solely for him. Through a straw he sips a tall salt lassi in between nibbles. He hasn’t gained any weight for his naturally speedy metabolism and his homesickness and most of all his lovesickness for Fan, even as he can’t help but eat ingenuously and with enthusiasm. A troupe of physicians monitors him from behind a glassed booth, debating the interplay of his genetic panel, his blood and hormone levels, even his posture and demeanor, trying to unlock the secret of his constitution. Is it his minuscule inflammation factor, several deviations below the mean? Is it his particular fusion of original and native blood? The fact that he eschews alcohol? Spicy foods? Or is it the discovery, when the caterers took in the dishes, that the young man did not touch the fish.
Come again?
The caterers are instructed to provide fish again in several different preparations. It’s verified. Again he does not eat any of it, not a morsel of sweet cheek, not a flake of the tail. The fish is ours, of course, fillet of #1 B-Mor primes, and when they ask Reg how long it has been since he’s consumed any fish, he tells them he never has, as he’s put off by the smell, which to him has the odor of a pair of old slippers left out in the rain. Indeed, he cannot be too close to Fan if she hasn’t shampooed her hair after working in the tanks, though he doesn’t mention this to the experts, saying only that perhaps he’d been fed fish as an infant, though he cannot remember for certain.
For the researchers, this is startling information. They can’t quite believe it; for who in B-Mor would decline their single most prized product, drastically discounted for the
m and which not even every Charter could afford to have daily? Not to mention that it was a primary source of pure, low-fat protein in B-Mor, where red meats and fowl are served only for special holidays and celebrations.
Almost immediately public health surveys were ordered in the Charters and in B-Mor and its sister facilities to track the correlation between levels of fish consumption and every form of the disease, and though they would uncover nothing substantive, near countless other mandatory surveys were developed and distributed, testing hypotheses about various vegetables, grains, sweeteners, salts, et cetera, until there was almost nothing left to be examined and they returned to the inquiry into fish, which set off a mini-panic in the Charter villages and a precipitous decline in sales. Suddenly nobody had much of a taste for our fish. Within weeks, the Charter distributors halved their B-Mor orders. Tanks went unharvested, the volume of water per head steadily decreasing, and our pampered, exquisite #1 primes began to jostle for room, they started to nip at one another. Soon they couldn’t help but bite, and when the first of them was gravely injured, the others didn’t hang back as they might have before but pounced in a frenzy of flashing fins and teeth.
For a period, they sold the overgrown fish at B-Mor stalls, three for the price of two, then two for one, which was cause for great rejoicing and a rash of household gatherings and block parties until certain murmurs about what was happening in the tanks bubbled up and we, too, began to question why the fish were so plentiful and cheap. At the dinner tables the younger children were soon complaining about eating too much fish, for there was fish salad and fish fritters and countless tureens of fish soup, the air swam with the dead-sea aroma of salted fillets drying in the breeze like pennants, until in our dreams there were no more fish left and we turned to one another and wondered how we could feel so full yet so forlorn.
On Such a Full Sea: A Novel Page 10