A Fish ...
We can make any shape we want today. Dill remembered that often, the words coming to him time and again just like a memory in a movie—the details, fuzzy, the voice full of air and spaced out evenly through the whole room. He was in art class in first or second grade, sitting cross-legged on a tightly knit rug. Dill couldn’t recall specific materials, maybe pieces of paper, or paint brushes, but that first sentence from the teacher was so clear, it seemed to beacon Dill, to be making itself known because he needed to find it. There are teal desks with thin, metal legs, many loose and teetering. Looking through them towards the end of the room is like seeing past tall grass.
Dill was at the pet store counter buying his first can of fish food when he remembered it again. We can make any shape we want today. He was thinking about that moment when he hopped on the Free section of Craigslist almost a week earlier. No one knows that he scrolled through pages and pages of broken bedframes and cracked couches before seeing a post about a fish. That he found a fish in the middle of a data storm, and that he went to Chelsea to pick it up from a girl about his age, and that it came with a little bit of food and a bowl, but he had to go get more after a few days.
Those items in the grid, sloshing and folding into each other like tempo, making and breaking itself. The grid of Craigslist posts meanders repetitively, making repetition suddenly and somehow beautiful. It constructs itself infinitely downwards like a bridge in a videogame, or forestry loading forever on the horizon. There is an immense sense of sameness: a grayish carpet, a dresser that’s just way too big, a TV stand. He feels like a pig face first in the trough, scrolling faster and faster.
The fish needs a name. It’s been almost a week and he hasn’t even thought about a name. As Dill walks back home from the pet store, trees bend in the wind, and millions of blades of grass spring forth in different places. He passes diners and dollar stores, watching them close down in what feels like real time. He figures the pet store, local and unincorporated, probably won’t last long either at this point, and that it’s important to support. As he approaches his front door on return, he’s seeing constellations. The gum-specked sidewalk in a thousand different grays and purples. Lines between the tiny pebbles of melted down asphalt, all the doors and windows like mirrors, shining. The phone buzzes:
Yo im right by u are u home we can smoke
yeah I just got back pull up
yeah I just got back pull up
The key is in the door. He leaves it there, before turning, and looks behind him at the outside. Dill can’t stop thinking about the pet store shelves, packed with bottles of poorly branded food for various fish and reptiles. Many different shapes and sizes of cans and tins have been devised over the decades for our storing and shipping needs. Trial and error led us all towards these cylinders for sodas, tennis balls, fish food—there’s a delicate design balance in play between material efficiency and structural integrity.
He remembers scanning the shelves of poorly branded bottles, thinking of silos. Thinking of absolute mountains of corn and grain. He wants to climb the side of a 60-foot container of fish food and see what’s inside. They’re the same, surely, these thin, subtle symbols, storing something deep and invisible. Invisible in the darkness, giving off the faint notion of physicality only because you know so certain that something comes out the other side. Looking from the top down into a container of fish food must be the same as this feeling: towering over the top of a silo, leaning a little closer towards the edge of a cliff.
He taps the side of the bottle over the fish’s bowl, in the same way one would tap some spices into a pot on the stove, or ash something with their index finger, instead of flicking. He is a big hand in the Sky. Even now more than ever, now that he sees something real coming out of the bottle’s end, he wants to pick apart the pellets and see what’s been dried amongst the colors. Flakes settle on the water’s surface like featherweight debris after a volcanic eruption. They’re almost light enough to just suspend themselves in air. Before touching down—just before—he thinks they might really do it. Whole salmon, peas, egg, brine shrimp, spirulina powder, wheat germ, squid. Soymeal, cottonseed meal, bone meal, corn grain, wheat middlings, corn gluten feed, dicalcium phosphate, lysine HCl, animal fat. Fish meal, bone meal, oyster shell meal, soybean grits, maize bran, rice polish, wheat bran, mustard oil cake. Salmon / Herring / Menhaden, Wheat / Brewer’s Yeast / Corn / Soybean, Omega-3 Ocean Oil, Cane Molasses, Calcium Propionate, Vitamin A Acetate, Vitamin D3, di-Alpha Tocophenyle Acetate, Sodium Bisulfite Complex, Folic Acid, Thiamine, mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, manganese proteinate, zinc proteinate, copper proteinate, cobalt proteinate, sodium selenite, purified marine & plant bio-active compound additives (Bio Wellness).
Why give a fish vitamins? Chalk it up to good parenting. Dill takes comfort sitting by the fish’s side and watching it grow healthily, taking pride in the knowledge that he played a part in something pure. The fish gets big and strong, donning a smile in response to its fulfilled sense of wellness and being. It turns to him,
“Yes. These vitamins make me feel great. B12 energizes me. “
“That’s good to hear. Glad I could help.”
The fish bowl is on a tucked away shelf, in a kind of pantry. He brings it over to a windowsill and then anxiously returns it to the shelf, trying to trust his instincts. The kitchen faces North, without much direct sun, but there’s a pleasant, ambient light halfway towards brightness. The bowl is just above eye level when he takes a seat by the kitchen island. A fish spins in loose sorts of circles, swirling a blank knot around dried pellets of processed meal and bone grain that linger in the water. It makes errant trips around the eye of a storm, swimming tighter and tighter laps, mapping cleaner repetitions over each other as the fish’s orbit stabilizes, obscuring the oddities, spinning a whitethread shape out of nothing in the water.
Like yarn around a few fingers, a small wake bends behind the fish’s tail. Like egg whites coagulating around a poaching yolk. When the fish reaches top speed, a tight little whirlpool swallows up those dried earthly bits.
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Dill is sitting on a stool, thinking about cane molasses. Do fish eat sugar in the wild? He can’t figure out why it’s in the bottle, or why it’s in his fishbowl and now his fish. He’s watching this new fish go somewhere and nowhere at once. Spinning with such fervor, though he barely has to move his eyes. The fish can go on for 10 years like that, traversing hundreds of miles. But there is no measure of distance for the fish. Only the awareness of a process taking place, the tracing of a path that fades. It’s like a question pointing all around itself, or a thick syrup making its way around something wildly less viscous.
Slow music climbs the air, hoisting itself through the window. Something with a whole horn section. Like in Dogen’s Genjokoan, “water is the ‘field of activity’ for fish,” where there is nothing but dreamy motion (208). “The field of activity is completely boundless,” extending to a horizon that fans out, away from the vanishing point. The fish is in water, bending and bouncing light in the way a sphere of mirrors would.
Even buying a vegetable, like broccoli, fills Dill with an amazing sense of responsibility. You have to feed that fish when it gets
tired, when it’s done spinning. Fake leaves cover parts of a fence, moving in using like a sail as air pushes against them from
the other side. They seem to expand parabolically, in the way an inflating lung would. Dill exhales.
Cane molasses. Of course there’s an answer, just a search away. “Molasses is relatively rich in several important minerals such
as potassium and iron.” It’s not a simple sugar, and can be quite useful in small amounts as a binder. A search is just that: a
looking for, a going after. Even through the screen, there is something tangible waiting to be found.
Between the question and it’s many offered answers there are traceable patterns of flashing light, waiting to be lined up. He
follows the light and tip-toes into the other side, meeting the Oxbow Animal Health Blog. He’s learning that this is no normal
sugar. Molasses helps hold things together.
He wants to draw the fish, because he’s been thinking about it so much, so he goes to the other room and pulls a small book
out of a desk drawer. He wants to remember how he sees the fish right now, making a path that’s all wound up in that little
bowl. Everything becomes elongated in Dill’s vision. The bowl is pulled apart and flattened so the fish can move straight
the surface. It moves with determination towards something way off in the distance—determination that may have been there
before, though it’s hard to tell. The fish floats down interstate highways, from New York to the Badlands. Stepping out into a
purple sky.
Dill is by no means the best at drawing; he tries to get it out as accurately as he can. To get curves and angles right, step by
step, so that all of the parts cohere when he puts it down. There’s something unmistakably forced in what he draws. Everything
is shadowed by Dill’s eye, because without training and practice, that’s the only tool he can handle. The fish, standing on
fine rock foreground, facing something deeper off in the drawing. Turned, slightly.
He remembers his own angles being worked by a woman giving free headshots. Chest towards the wall! 😊 Closer to the umbrella.
😊 Now look at me, honey! 😊 The phone vibrates:
Im about to be outside
Dill leaves the phone alone—the open door answers. She would give him flags and foam fingers, asking which one
he liked holding the best, and if he was excited to leave. The foam finger surprised him with how rough it was. His hand slid
through something between sponge and sandpaper. I could have sworn I saw her on the highway, riding.
When he tries to remember her face, he sees it only in the driver’s seat of a light gray SUV coming directly towards him, in
the middle of a light gray highway. The roadpaver lines bleed effortlessly into a pale, perpetual haze. Even the yellow lines
dividing the lanes are faded. Chipped, but more than chipped. Just gone. Her steering wheel clearly isn’t moving.
Why did he put the fish in the Badlands? He knows it somewhere from his memory as a dramatic place, as a place that would
look cool if one were to step out of a car upon pulling up. He returns to his phone, ready to get lost in a satellite view of
South Dakota. Zooming rapidly in on tigerstripe mountains of porcelain and pine. Are there buffalo in South Dakota? In Badlands
National Park? He finds a deal for $150 to fly out at the end of next month. Rugged natural formation & wildlife.
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1 Dogen, Eihei. Dogen’s Genjokoan: Three Commentaries, translated by Nishiari Bokusan, Shohaku Okamura, Shunryu Suzuki, Counterpoint, 2013.
2 https://www.oxbowanimalhealth.com/blog/cane-molasses-why-is-it-in-my-pets-food/
1 Dogen, Eihei. Dogen’s Genjokoan: Three Commentaries, translated by Nishiari Bokusan, Shohaku Okamura, Shunryu Suzuki, Counterpoint, 2013.
2 https://www.oxbowanimalhealth.com/blog/cane-molasses-why-is-it-in-my-pets-food/
Stair, hallway, vestibule. Two square-plate doors between the inside and the street. Dill can see Soda before they even hear
each other, his headphones nestled into his ears and his head cocked a little bit towards the street. His white headphones snake
through firm light against a black hoodie. Soda, born Sota, went to elementary and middle school with Dill. He was the only
kid in second grade showing up to the cafeteria with 7-Up and Coke in his lunchbox, so the nickname was inevitable. Some
people just have a certain metabolism, voracious and elusive, swallowing up and spitting out energy like a black hole. Needless
to say, Soda presented as healthy, while being secretly powered by a constant stream of corn syrup and Red 40.
The main door opens like an air lock. The hinges squeak, almost lost in the blaring traffic horns. All of a sudden, the scene is
suffused with sound. Heels clicking against gumspecked concrete, cans knocking against the inside of a trashcan, someone on
the phone. Then, Soda turning around:
Are you seeing this right now?
His eyebrows are pushing new heights. There’s the indication of an actual muscle inside his cheek and jaw. Dill was suddenly
alerted to the fact that Soda was an animal with a biology, an internal system of muscle and organ and bones, pipelines for
blood and oxygen, just like himself. The very thought of being a physical machine, somehow distinct from the thoughts and
ideas of seeing, feeling, and recognizing his friend and, indeed, the entire world, approached the point of completely engulfing
Dill and sending him somewhere right in the doorframe, before he looked briefly towards the corner and saw just what Soda
was talking about.
It looked like they were saving someone, frantically. A car on the corner was on its side, smoke heading towards something
else. The car’s underbelly faced Soda and Dill, like people would be crouched behind it on the other side. The wheels on top
looked all crooked, like they just wanted to get back on the ground. The pipes and the tanks and the other things, all pushed
up towards its insides, looked like a map embossed in a metal plate. So much stuff that it dissolved into pure texture.
Smoke was leaking out of the top and the sides, and the boys could barely see how crushed the car had really been. There was the surface. It moves with determination towards something way off in the distance—determination that may have been there before, though it’s hard to tell. The fish floats down interstate highways, from New York to the Badlands. Stepping out into a purple sky.
There was the surface. Glass on the street, and firetrucks. Soda, while staring, was trying to explain what he had seen. Just
pulling up, when I sent you a text, and I looked up, because I could feel it happening.
The cops are pulling a woman out of the car, clumsy and covered in grease. What he had seen, what he was eeing. Soda still
had one headphone in when they saw this person, eyes closed, legs limped, being slinked out of the narrow hole where the
window was, before it got blasted out. There was something serene about her rising, an undistrubable moment, but whatever
silver lining was making itself known was shut out by the fat hands putting her somewhere else. Even in the crash there was
spectacular beauty, cascading lights and overwhelming noises.
No one was dead—Dill knew that. But where were the EMTs? An ambulance? This was a dozen armed men. It looked more
like they were pushing this person, upwards, somehow, instead of helping them out of a tight spot. Dill stepped out past the
sidewalk into the street, towards the rising smoke behind the crumpled car and this rising person. The car like a stepped-on
coke can. Swirling, blinking sirens cutting through smoke, just to complete the atmosphere. He could feel himself getting
winded. Before he had even registered words, he was on his back. The whole sky now was blinking red.
I said step away!
Soda saw them put the woman in the back of a big, black car. They drove off.
Think about a fish in the face of a buffalo. I want to remember this idea--the fish standing on its fork-tipped tail like two
pointed feet, facing something deeper in the drawing. There’s the background rockscape and a buffalo with one of its front
legs bent in the air. The buffalo faces the fish (and me), slightly turned. Keep zooming. This snow isn’t like snow. Cliffs break
into rocky capillaries before blurring together. When I switch to Terrain Mode, everything looks metallic. I feel like an impression
in a plane.
The buffalo faces you, but its face isn’t drawn yet. It can’t be shown to anybody. We could pass it
all the way across a room, so everyone could get a look at the buffalo, and so the buffalo can get a taste of real life. Someone
wants to hold onto it, but the card gets thrust over and over again towards new hands. The buffalo doesn’t move. The fish
can’t even move. Another middle age brushes their hand in front of the buffalo without so much as looking down. The buffalo
and the fish slide leftward in stopstart pushes. The howl of the Badlands, bison hooves scraping the dusty flat, a fish standing—
all in between these tiny fingers and thumbs. Laid bare on a millimeter of paper.