— No more than calling it Chinese Whispers. I’m sorry, I was thinking out loud. It took a moment to realise you said ‘overworking’…
— I didn’t. I said I’m overlooking. But you’re right, as always, my love: I don’t actually know what I meant by it. We might have invented another game: Overlook.
— What is this? Shakespeare meets Stephen King?
— Sorry. It’s an odd word, I see that. I’m overlooked in my birth.
— I guess you’re overlooking the rays.
— Yes, I’m looking after them. But I only meant I have this strange feeling of looking too much, seeing too hard. Like I said, things are blurred and bright at the same time.
— So: go to a doctor or optometrist or whatever.
There follows soon afterwards a torturously lengthy examination process at the local optician’s, with the optometrist over-close, fitting the measuring cage to the face, quietly spoken, insinuatingly moralistic:
— And when did you last have an eye-test, sir?
The examination seems interminable.
— I’m now going to shine this light into your right eye, sir. Very bright is it, sir? We’re almost done here, if you can just bear with me for a few more minutes. Turn to the right, please: look straight ahead. That’s splendid. And to the left…
— Hmm, says the optometrist finally, his breath cloudy in your face: That’s not so good.
Yes, finally you are told, your eyes have grown markedly weaker, and new glasses are provided with unexpectedly promptness.
— Are they helping? I ask him in due course, as easy-going as I can.
— Let’s wait and see.
You are an increasing worry, more elusive, desultory. I miss you intensely and wish I could join you but work commitments prevent me for at least three months. In the past we have undergone longer periods of being apart, but now things seem more precarious and difficult.
There’s no substrate, you say.
Words appear to you in a dream: ‘In the grave you hear no sound / But all the things in the ground.’ And then another time: ‘The asseveration comes in the night.’
You keep dreaming that you are late for the funeral. You miss it altogether. You miss most of the reception as well, like the cousin who turns up only at the end. You haven’t organised anything properly. You still have to do the gravel. This recurrent nightmare proceeds, you believe, from a sense of outrage at the so-called specialists who have the gall to suggest that there is no need for a substrate. It may come as quite a surprise for the creatures on arrival and they will certainly experience discomfort, for they are accustomed to using their pelvic fins for shifting through the substrate and they’ll find themselves slipping horribly. But they can get used to it, these specialists imply, as if these creatures that so love to bury themselves, whether out of sudden fear or simply in order to express a deep behavioural instinct, the delight in covering themselves so that only the eyes protrude, and the joy in blowing water into the substrate, to spout up morsels of food, could readily adapt to the imposition of a completely different, nonspecific gravity, the carpet pulled out from under their ghost-white bellies.
I remember when you first mentioned these creatures, around the time of your mother’s death. You came to see me, not long after, and said in the car as I was driving us out of the airport that you’d like to visit a sea-life centre of some kind to see if they had any rays. What a strange man, I thought, how I love you. Who else would come out with a remark like that, more or less the first thing you say to someone having not seen them in several months?
And so the next day we located somewhere, in fact one of the oldest aquaria in the country, in a little seaside town a couple of hours’ drive away, and sure enough they had a ray pool or, as they called it, a touchpool. It was in that dead period, no longer winter, not yet spring, with a raw wind blowing off the ocean, and we were the only ones there, besides the girl who worked at the aquarium who was feeding them. It was the first of many trips to marine-life centres, but I’ll never forget the strangeness of that first time. I don’t think I had ever in my life really looked at a ray or given a moment’s reflection to the subject. I guess I fed off your fascination, and also caught something from the girl, since she seemed surprisingly well-informed about these creatures and at the same time obviously fond of them. It still feels odd to talk of being fond of rays, I guess, but standing there with you and the girl (despite the freezing cold and gray blank of the afternoon) I came to share something of what you called this ‘new imaginary’. I mean, when I looked at these fish, really looked at one, for the first time, up close, in detaiclass="underline" weird!
Of course we didn’t know at this time about the injurious effects of touchpools. The girl eventually asked would you like to touch one. I said, don’t they sting? She said they’ve had them removed. An image of strange pathos came into my mind: the art of archery, without arrows. It’s a constant discombobulation to reflect on what we overlook, for of course then it was plain as day the creatures at the base of their tails featured these pinkish stumps. Your distaste for the trade began right then: I could see it. Driving back to my apartment I saw that you were sobbing. I assumed it had to do with your mother, but all you said was:
— Those pointless stumps!
On later trips to marine-life centres you would often become visibly enraged at seeing the spines had been snipped off, if that’s the right phrase. Doubtless an understatement. ‘Sawn off’ is more apt, more in accord with the brutality of the act, even if it is done with an anaesthetic like Finquel.
The first we witnessed were a cow-nose variety, not the loveliest on the eye, but still they were eerily engrossing. Even then, on that first encounter, when the girl invited you, you wouldn’t touch. Already there was a certain reserve in relation to these creatures who were to acquire such centrality in our life. I couldn’t simply say they were beautiful, because there is also something uncomfortably negative about them. They’re never exactly a happy-go-lucky sight. They always remain wayward. Irreproachably creatures of elsewhere is how I think of them. Even if you are close, as we were that afternoon, to this fellow with a sad stump rendering him completely harmless, and he comes bobbing up through the surface and looks up at you like a blind pet spaniel. You can feel you’re infinitely far away from him, but still there’s this singular unease he generates. Gazing in a quite detached way, just as you might find yourself other creatures in an aquarium such as sharks, still you get caught up short somehow. You are unable to have a clear impression of what perspective or dimension to look at them from. Are they upside down or back to front, fat or thin, facing you or away? How can this creature be looking at me? Fish don’t look at you. Makes no sense.
Neither fish nor fowl, they move like moles in the gravel of the substrate, burrowing and blowing up air, like animated pancakes, or stay at rest on the bottom, half-hidden dark moons. Or they glide through the water like ghosts on a shopping spree in an empty mall. But the otherworldliness is constantly undercut by a kind of normality. They gently bump into one another and shift accordingly, like courteous commuters. They eat with their little plates of teeth, grinding up whatever it is they select as the plat du jour. They shit into the watery depths, like muting birds in flight. They indulge in sexual congress, though it was a fair number of visits to sea-life centres before finding ourselves one day, in Portugal, peculiarly a party to that voyeurism.
How to talk about them? They are eerie machines for creating and overturning words. Every time you think you have come up with an appropriate way of describing them, a submarine bird or robotic frittata or psychodelic beret, you are undone. You’re mere bystanders. They’re Teflon: nothing sticks because in reality they are the cooks, the makers, somnifluent agents of provocation and alterity in a maddening game with invisible rules in operation before you set eyes on them and being perpetually revised. But nothing sparks talking like the constraints of doing so. Our telephone conversations thus find respite of sorts, from the more or less constant anxieties over which we range, regarding nightmares and eye problems, the apparently never-ending business of clearing the house and gardens, and how rawly we experience each other’s absence.