The Feast of the Fishes
There’s a knowing sense that fish have of an incipient storm, when lightning begins preparing its quiver of bolts, thunder tuning up its subwoofers. The fish sense this; the fishermates sense that the fish sense it. Even before a telling cloud, there’s a telling fish. It’s a subtlety of their undulating swim: more abashed toward the surface, a reticence that a fishermate peering a few meters down in clear waters can see. In a freshly caught fish, it may be a slight suggestion in their post-catch rictus, a change in their writhing on the hook. You can always tell.
And so but a storm is set to come. So all the fishermates out at sea pack up their poles, unwinch their trawling nets, and align their tillers and prows landward. Several boats have propellers, some dual- or tri-propellered for a turbo-charged return to land, but the Old Man (simply known as such for as long as anyone’s remembered) likes to travel old-school — his boat has oars.
Rowing landward with only one catch — a trout, it not being a fortuitous day of catch for him, as his usual bounty is at least four times more — he sees all the other fishermates in their single- and multi-propelled, tiller-equipped boats zipping past him to port and starboard as he rows implacably and blankly homeward, the wake of the boats careening past successively rolling his dinghy.
By the time the Old Man reaches the berth outside his home beside (but not overlooking) the sea, the storm has begun in full force. After placing the wooden fish box on the foyer table and doffing his raincoat, a fulgurant flash illuminates the house. There’s a terrible comfort about a room briefly lit by lightning. Taking up the candelabra in the foyer, he lights it; holding it in one hand, he picks up the fish box in the other, lighting his way toward the kitchen. Arrhythmic rain raps on the rooftop, desperate-sounding. It’s a simple house, a seafarer’s house, homely in a way houses feel when you’re inside during a storm. (Seaside houses have a sense about them that they’re ensconced or occluded from water in some way, even if it isn’t storming — a kind of inverted boat on land.)
And so he, the Old Man, walks to the kitchen, placing the candelabra on the kitchen island he made. The house is completely candlelit. All his neighbors along the shore have electric or gas. Some of them lob a glib jest like “high utility bill, huh” his way, guffawing smugly.
The Old Man’s partner was lost at sea — lost to the sea, perhaps. Many years ago. Never found. Went out one day to fish and never returned. No sign of boat or body. They left only a note — a note that he keeps in his locket; he reads it often, aching to find something in it to explain his loss, something to help make sense of it all. His partner’s disappearance remains an unsolved, gnawing mystery. He looked for years before giving up, often spending weeks at a time at sea scanning, hoping. Maybe they’re still out there, he thinks. Surviving somehow. Lost, stuck, or else swallowed whole by the sea.
It’s supper time, so he takes out his teakwood cutting board, butter knife, and last week’s newspaper and lays the fish on it (the board). (Butter knife for descaling; newspaper for the mess.) After cleaning the fish, he runs the butter knife forward and back against the fish to descale it. The Old Man doesn’t live alone: a mouse is there too. Not a pest or pet but a live-in resident, arguably older than the Old Man himself, who’s not “old” in the traditional sense but rather stopped counting altogether a while ago — not out of resigned old age but of a young, ferocious defiance against keeping track of his age — continually pushing it (age) further and further out of his mind until it became ungraspable, metaphysically speaking. The mouse, unnamed by the Old Man, has a house within the house: burrowed rooms within the paneling of the house’s rooms, reticulated by complexly bored hallways. The Old Man likes to imagine how the mouse’s rooms and hallways are furnished.
After descaling the fish, he opens the island drawer to reveal a mucronate fillet knife; he makes a shallow incision from the vent, the backmost portion of the fish’s underside, to near the neck. As he cuts out the viscera, tossing them into a bucket at his feet, he inadvertently punctures the fish’s stomach and out slips, to his nonplussed reaction, something unmistakable: a message. Not in a bottle but nonetheless with the same obvious kind of message-in-a-bottle type look to it. What it is is some kind of hermetically sealed, anti-digestive film around papyrus paper, the kind associated with scrolls.
The Old Man carefully rends the film with his filet knife (the film’s strangely durable even though it has the appearance of being thin). The scroll unravels, almost by its own will. The Old Man’s right eye twitches in part annoyance and part strain as he finds that what he’s viewing — what’s perhaps the most bizarre, flummoxing, interesting thing that’s happened to him in recent memory — perhaps ever — is utterly indecipherable. Cuneiform-esque. Even more obfuscating than Cuneiform. A weird confluence of futuristic and atavistic glyphs. The scroll’s length is about the size of his palm, maybe a little longer; almost every inch of paper is used. There’s no way to tell what it means, but the Old Man has a gnawing feeling that it’s somehow important, profound. Urgent, even. Since explicating the text is out of the question, he begins to wonder why and how. If such a message was essential and urgent, why the abstruse and unreliable conveyance? Through a fish? How would such a transport be possible? Yet here it is. What would it augur about the author of the text? An author lost at sea, gone mad by the vastness of the ocean who’s begun — in their ill-fated, ineffectual boat — to construct an entirely new, fey, and rarefied ideogramic language, perhaps. Might it be that in this inscrutable text penned by a pelagically damned soul is the deepest, most real, emotive, poetically urgent writing of this era? And maybe this author was not only lost at sea but swallowed by a Physeter macrocephalus or sperm whale — ship and all, improbably so — and wrote this text whilst inside the whale, passing it along through a fish the whale had swallowed but not devoured and that managed (the fish) to swim out of the whale’s mouth, past the gauntlet of teeth in the whale’s narrow jaw to safer waters until it was skewered by the Old Man’s little hook. The irony: surviving the maw of a predator 50 times your size to be impaled to death by a fishing hook — like defeating Goliath only to die shortly after by tripping and hitting your head on a rock. But again, why? Someone young making an early attempt at greatness, trying to create meaning? Someone old giving it one last shot, one last chance to pour themselves into something, to really say something, do something? A lost lover driven insane by the loneliness of the sea, plangently calling out…?
These were the questions he asked as he tried to sleep that night, the hermetic papyrus text ensconced on his bedside table. A hush of cold air from the window snuffs out the room’s candle’s remaining flames as the Old Man tosses and turns, like a tempestuous sea.
That night the Old Man had a dream — a nightmare, perhaps. In the dream, he’s in his little dinghy with tackle box, fishing rod, and sundry fishing accoutrements out at sea. The boat has anchored sculls to row.
At the start of the dream, the Old Man feels that he’s been rowing for eons — as if the dream began medias res and he’d been at it for a while — when he looks down and notices that the entire sea below and all around is gelid. Frozen. He thought he was making rowing motions, but he’s not sure he actually heard the sound of waves or spruce oars whumping ice or anything at all. The frozen sea wasn’t obvious visually, either, at least not until he looked down and noticed it. The horizon merely a phantasmagoric rendering of the sea.
When he stops rowing, he notices that three doors have appeared on the ice a few meters north of the bow. The doors are supine on the frozen sea, not standing; that if the door were to open, it would open into the ocean. The doors are off-white with beveled panels, two long rectangular sets and one squarish pair toward the top — a typical bedroom door. However, there’s no knob. Not on any of the doors.
He looks to port and a new door appears, as if created at will. It’s the same as the others, yet it can open. Kneeling down on the frozen sea next to the door, he looks up to see a full moon, its light beaming down through an aperture in the night’s wispy gauze of cloud as a bird flies majestically in and out of view. He opens the door and dives in.
The next morning, the Old Man resolves to go to the fish market, cryptic text in hand, and ask his local fishmonger if they’ve seen anything like this— esoteric text or not — inside any fish lately, or if they’ve heard of anyone else stumbling upon this strange surprise.
After arriving at the al fresco fish market in town, the Old Man espies the avuncular fishmonger Cleo in what look like an eerily Dickensian reenactment of the “I Got Rhythm” scene from An American in Paris: fuliginous, scally-capped guttersnipes surround her as she holds court, donning a naval cap, gnarled jeans with fish stains, and sweater sleeves rolled up to elbows revealing multivariate tattoos only a hardened seafarer could sport. There was something jaunty about it, the weirdly Dickensian Gene-Kelly-as-Cleo-the-fishmonger scene, but also so incongruous as to be near-hallucinatory.
The Old Man, hand out to catch Cleo’s attention amid the gamboling: “Morn, Cleo. Do you have a moment? Something I’d like to ask you . . . about the fish.”
She makes a dismissive gesture to the guttersnipes, like a teacher gently shooing away students from her desk. “Aye, whye shore, laddie,” she responds.
“Have you noticed anything strange lately, about the fish? I mean, well, so I was gutting a fish the other day — one that I caught out asea the other day, you see — and I, well, you see there was something really odd, about this fish, you see. I, um, well . . . you see I was gutting the fish and cut into the stomach and — I jest you not — out came a scroll. A scroll of text. I know, I know, but it’s true. Here’s the text,” he says, taking the paper out of his scrip and brandishing it.
“Hmmpf, nowe tat iz unoozual aye will saye . . . boot whaite . . . hmm, noooo. No. Kant saye aye ave becus I aven’t. Proble just ay practicul jest, eh,” she says, cordially slapping the Old Man’s left bicep, her hand wet with fish slime.
“Sure, I suppose so. Maybe. Interesting how it hasn’t happened before. That I’m the only one.” After a brief stilted silence, he resumed: “Well, that was it. I ought to go now. Er, thanks, Cleo.”
“O’ course, laddie.”
Leaving the fish market bemused and curious, the Old Man decides to ship out to sea today to see if it happens again — the catching of a fish with a message.
As he’s oaring his way further out to sea toward his perennial fishing latitude-longitude haunt, the Old Man’s face appears pensively empty, thinking about everything and nothing. A trillion little thoughts and feelings flow through his head; he can’t explain most of them. He is just like anyone else. His life, partner, parents, history — they all flash into his head just as quickly as they leave, like a car passing a gauntlet of tunnel lights.
By the time he reaches his fishing coordinates, which are memorized (having a “nautical sense” for them, at this point), the sky’s weeping. A bird flies overhead, destination unknown. No thunder, lightning. Vistas of thin-sheeted rain on undulating waves. Smell of cold brine. The pattering static of rain on the ocean. It’s not that rain is immanently calming or the moon preternaturally romantic, but that we can interpret them as such, allow them to mean. An ocean ceases to be a body of water: it becomes a metaphor for feeling, what it is to be human: a body that can appear still on the surface but beneath it lies profound depth, mystery, fear, wonder, loss, energy — life. A fish with a message — gnomic. Inexplicable. Unless it is given meaning.
Not but an hour goes by of casting his line into the sea before the Old Man gets a bite. Rain purls off his bright yellow coat in all directions, nylon gleaming. Not without some strain does he manage to reel the fish in, onto the floor boards of the dinghy. It’s flailing around wildly, the fish. He picks it up with both hands, removes the hook from its cheek, and sticks three fingers in to further part its lips, widely opening its mouth, as if to speak.
Neil Agnew is a writer living in New York. His short stories and prose poems have been self-published on Medium. A longtime musician, avid cruciverbalist, and neophyte Super 8 filmmaker, Neil has a passion for different kinds of art, but writing is his home.