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.