Deep Fish

Jon Chaiim McConnell | Issue 2.10

Cover Art: L. Erickson

A courier, a little man, a tiny man in a vest and harness bag, knocks, recoils at the opened door, and hands the note to you.

Your mentor from the pier has died.

The handwritten note requests you sift through the remains.

The remains? you ask the courier, finding money for his outstretched hand.

His remains, he says, principally. But also any metals, glassware, sediments. Specimens. The usual river trawlings. He wrote this about an hour before it happened.

Did you know him well?

The courier turns away, upset, alights his ebike, glides away.

Your mentor was a biologist and river guide, museum tender, and, often, diver in the south of France.

He had died in a pressurization accident, you surmise, as you walk through the doors of his obliterated museum laboratory.

As the officers promised, they did not touch a thing.

There he is, twisted monstrously between a clamp of shorn aquarium steel, the lapping of the room’s brown slurry at his neck.

The stench is powerful, the slurry gritty, the specimens inverted floating fish skins now, blown limp without their habitats, slick and expansive.

An officer hands you a long wooden pole through the doors and whispers that this must have been left for you.

He is correct. You interned here as a boy, your father waiting in the car for hours on his phone while you organized your mentor’s notes and cleaned the glass on the tanks.

They were all deep fish, catalogued up from the sea and stored in this mechanically thickened room, more a 1,500 square foot walk-in containment device of internet provenance.

Your mentor loved this place.

You did too.

You cultivate phytoplankton at the aquarium because of him.

You pole some notes down from the second tier of a desk shelf and they fall into the slurry, which you had not been meaning to do, but grief can sometimes express through the limbs.

You pole down several more binders and pluck up the cleanest one.

You were hoping that it would contain the record of exactly what he was trying to add to his collection, or if maybe he had reason to recalibrate the settings, but it doesn’t. Not this one. You take it anyway.

Outside on the sunbleached pier bench you wait for your legs to dry and cake clean while an officer eyes you up and down.

What’s your politics, he eventually asks, Angela Davis or Geena Davis?

You would rather not say. Besides, you think that it’s clear from your circumstances.

And, eventually, he is called away to a property dispute.

The pole wedges diagonally through two windows of your car and, as you circle the neighborhood trying to intuit where your mentor lived, there are large groups of sneering children massed on every hill. Simultaneous bomb threats have evacuated the schools. You must look ridiculous.

You call your girlfriend at a four-way stop.

He was a man of great temperament, you say.

She says he must have breathed a lot of water in his lifetime, a real man of the damp, a heavy-lunged man.

Yes.

You’ve told her a lot about your mentor over the years.

His house will have that same temperament. You’ve never been there, but you’re sure. You’re on the lookout. You end the call with love. You’d been feeling a little out of sorts, beforehand.

And you do find it.

The color of smoked salmon, junked and crumble-fenced, walked and lawned, a house tended poorly by an otherwise savant.

As you pole the door open there is no indication that your mentor has ever shared his home, and a passing neighbor pivots twice along the sidewalk, opens their mouth to shout a thing, but instead they shrug and carry on.

There are tube TVs and a stack of videogame discs in a single open case, a toppled years-high pile of birthday and holiday cards from a grandmother.

The kitchen is of driftwood.

Not one magnet on the fridge.

Upstairs a bedside trashcan holds the jism of a man possessed.

A pristine litterbox in the bathroom; no other evidence of cats.

A very handmade wooden balcony extends from one side of the house to within perhaps six feet of the next one over, spindly metal patio furniture, three grimed coffee mugs, pointed directly at the window of what appears to be a study, where a bald man vapes and watches you, phone to his ear horizontally.

Overall, not nearly as nautical themed as you assumed it might be.

In your mentor’s office you find his car keys, portfolios full of fish tank schematics, a shirt with its tag still on that says “A+R H+M HVAC Ltd.,” and a bobblehead of Arlo Guthrie, all of which you take after dumping out a banker’s box of takeout menus.

A woman in a tight fleece greets you at the door with a clipboard, the police watching from across the intersection.

You tell her that all of your mentor’s affairs seem to be in order.

The funeral is semi-open casket: there’s a sheet.

Over egg noodles your father makes it a point to tell you that he always liked the man, found him forthright and easy to talk down a rabbit hole.

You ask him what they used to talk about. You can’t imagine. You were there, but you can’t. You can hardly remember them meeting at all.

Auspices, he says.

He waves his hand slowly back and forth, indicating the enormity of what he would prefer not to explain.

Your girlfriend watches you intensely at the house. On the couch she hugs her knees in what could seem a defensive posture, though, as a rule, she does tend to perch. She is worried about your slipping attentions, the threat that can live inside grief, she admits one night from behind her phone. With article in hand, you suspect. With her mother’s words very likely at her back.

Scared?

You had met in wetsuits. You quickly discovered what it felt like to run trauma shears up one another’s thighs.

With all of this in mind you build the fish tank that’s suggested by your mentor’s notes. A smaller version of it, a replica. About as wide as the kitchen table. About as thick on every side as a fist. The portholes are eyeglass lenses, sourced from the thrift shop, which you’re particularly proud of.

The thing, overall, leaks.

Several drops a day, beaded in the creases of the table’s upheld leaves.

You buy five semi-exotic fish that remain very still, turning only periodically in the direction of their food, in the exact middle of the tank, for a month, until you can no longer bear it. There’s a lid you could have made but didn’t, with clamps and seals and an annihilation button.

I hope you appreciate this, little dudes, you say to them all, ribs in the river, pier at your back. Tank in the silt. Small-schooled, no tide, doomed things. Go. It takes nearly twenty minutes for the fish to escape.

Eventually your girlfriend’s toes flex against the back of your shoulders to get your attention and you look back up her legs to the pier. She is twirling one finger. Turn around. I want to check something, she says. She has always been amused by your bisection, manages to catch you in a waistlet of the world.

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Jon Chaiim McConnell lives in Delaware. His short fiction has previously appeared in Blackbird, Yemassee, and Heavy Feather Review, among others, and he can be found at his website.