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!