On Such a Full Sea (9 page)

A few weeks after Fan left B-Mor, while she was making a place for herself in Quig’s compound, the number of us here who were bringing up discomfiting questions had grown to the extent that the directorate even issued a reminder notice about the undesirable nature of nonofficial public gatherings.

A particular incident that occurred in one of the parks may have prompted the general notice. Various sundry B-Mors were enjoying their free-day. There was nothing out of the ordinary, no strange weather blown in, no special anniversary from our history, or anything having to do directly with Fan and Reg.

Apparently, it began with a set of parents and their young boy, who, suddenly tired of the crème-filled wafer cracker he was eating, chucked it into one of the ponds in the park. Ponds grace all of our parks and they are all stocked with fish, not the fast-maturing and easy-eating varieties that are grown for commerce, but rather the more colorful types of grouper and carp that can become immense over time, and are duly admired and prized. They are believed to be wise. These fish are primarily meant to be ornamental but are also inspirational objects, as their majestic way of arcing and gliding through the fastidiously maintained water, accented with picturesque lily pads and stone outcroppings and aeration fountains that are lighted at night, expresses the ideal shape of our exertions.

Every other year there’s a select culling of these fish, with an associated celebration and feast, when all of B-Mor streams out to the various parks and scores of temporary food stalls are set up for deep-frying the flesh and making a special soup from the head and bones that supposedly boosts the blood’s capacity to store oxygen, and which is known as milk broth, though, of course, there is no milk or cream in it. You see everyone walking about with a paper cone of golden-brown fish morsels and a cup of broth, and with the string lights and music coming over the speakers, the festival is one of the most cherished events on our calendar. It goes without saying that we appreciate the symbolism of the ponds and understand the importance of keeping the fishes’ pelletized diet, formulated for optimal health and color, strictly dosed and unadulterated, which means monitoring by us and us alone, a concerted, communal vigilance being always more effective than any round-the-clock workers.

So when the little boy threw his half-eaten cracker into the pond, his parents should have immediately waded in and picked it out, or better yet, made the boy himself go get it. But for whatever reason they did neither, simply allowing the cracker to bob and float in the crystal-clear water until it was naturally snatched from below, the commotion of the big fish’s rise enough to attract the attention of the other people at their pond-side leisure. That should have been the end of it, something like this happening probably more than we’d like to believe. But then someone else threw a shrimp chip into the water, provoking another thrashing at the surface, which in turn elicited more offerings around the pond. There is a brief vid someone took and uploaded that captures how quickly the few tossed tidbits here and there turned into a full-scale onslaught of snacks and sandwiches and poured-out sodas and then, shockingly, inedibles like straws and napkins and drink boxes. A frenzy of littering is what it was, with one older fellow in the background so frustrated that he didn’t have anything with which to join the fray he pulled off his baseball cap and flung that in, though from his stricken expression it seemed he immediately regretted it. The whole episode lasted for no more than a few minutes, and when the park staff rolled in on their scooters and carts, you could see the young and old and parents and strollers scattering in every direction like just-disrupted ants, and then disappearing on the paths through the many shady copses and glades.

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!

In any case, we have been fortunate in how solid the producer-consumer relationship has been for both communities, the sole interruption being more than twenty years ago, when for several weeks every fish tank had to be emptied and scrubbed after an outbreak. The scales of the fish fell off in patches, which led to infections and suppurations and eventually death. As a precaution, the trays of plants suspended over the tanks were also completely cleared, and until the new fish and plants could become mature, our Charter customers had to source their food from unfamiliar facilities, which you can imagine made them very nervous. Charters are famously nervous, for despite their wealth and security and self-satisfied demeanors, they are obsessed with minimizing hazards of any kind, and are perhaps racked most of all by the finally unknowable dangers of what they ingest. It’s the only thing that they have not mastered.

As for B-Mor, it was a particularly difficult period, to say the least. With our routines disrupted and with no work to do, an unwelcome enervation set in, people quickly becoming irritable, and soon enough irrational; with so many folks milling about the streets and stoops, there were more scooter and bicycle accidents, plus incidents of fisticuffs and vandalism in the malls, with the few verified homicides in B-Mor history also taking place during that time, the usual lovers’ quarrels and bad business dealings disastrously inflamed. A fourth cousin of ours, in fact, was poisoned by his wife, who found out he was going to leave her for a tea-shop girl the same age as their daughter, and laced a sweet red-bean bun (that he himself had brought home from the tea shop) with rat poison, causing him a most protracted death.

Charter biologists and engineers revised our feed and tank formulas, and instituted new facilities practices, and an outbreak of that scale has not happened since. Every level and composition—from the feed, to the water, to the air, to the grow media, to the spectrum of the lighting—is constantly monitored and reviewed, though the truth is that over the years the calibrations have grown so fine that new equipment was necessarily developed, given how decimal places kept being added, the measuring process itself evolving into a kind of test of our mettle, to see how far we could go in realizing an ultimate standard.