The first language of fish is the blue language, the language of water, of wholeness and connection—a language of the medium. In it, everything touches everything else. It is a language of sensation, a language without words, a way of being. The boy loved to swim in the sea, to be surrounded and enveloped by water. The ocean explored him as if to find out more about who or even what he was while schools of fish swarmed around him like flashes of light.
He knew about light. He knew dawn and the coming of day. He understood the sharpness of shadows, the cutting light of noon-time, the rays of sun reflected and deflected. Sometimes, at midday, he wanted to hide, to be away, to find protection, not so much to sleep as to close his eyes against the assault of too much seeing, of colors that were too intense, of brightness that hurt. He preferred the dawn and the dusk with their soft light on the water.
And he could swim. He couldn’t remember a time when he couldn’t swim, a time when he didn’t know how to hold his breath and dive or sink beneath the surface. He found a pair of goggles in someone’s trash. These allowed him to see clearly underwater, and that was where he wanted to be. He wished he could stay forever in that place where fish schooled around him and nibbled at his skin. But soon enough, his lungs cried out for air, heating up, aching as if they were on fire, and he had to rise and gasp.
Still, he learned to hold his breath for a very long time. Each day, at the end of many dives, he would find the T-shirt he’d left on the beach and head back to his makeshift home.
Near the dunes, he’d constructed a small house of old packing crates and a few pieces of corrugated metal. He lived there by himself, and he was living quite well. There was a public bathroom further down the beach and a spigot where he could fill his plastic water bottles. He had everything he needed. For supper, he scavenged in the alleys behind cafes and restaurants and almost always found something good to eat.
Then too, an old woman who lived in a real house nearby sometimes gave him food. Usually, she offered a bowl of rice with beans. She never asked any questions. He’d sit on her steps and eat it, not slowly but not too fast. Then he’d hand her the bowl through the screen door. Her house smelled a little. It wasn’t such a bad smell, but it wasn’t a good one either. He did not know her name. He suspected that, like him, she no longer had a name.
When the fish nibbled at him under water, it was like a caress. He dropped down and down until finally, almost without volition, he pulled back toward the surface. It went on this way day after day. He swam whenever he wanted to swim. He swam until he was exhausted. At night, wrapped in a blanket and curled up in his little house, he was happy, happier than he had ever been. He dreamed, and his dreams always happened under water.
When he walked the streets of the town, no one looked at him or spoke to him. His invisibility suited him. He was used to being on his own and didn’t feel lonely. But sometimes he had bad dreams, dark dreams, and then he woke up remembering the terrible thing he was trying to forget. Then, he’d feel a fear that didn’t go away until day’s light returned, and gray dawn peeked through cracks in the packing case that was his front door.
***
When the men in uniform approached, the boy felt something different was about to happen. The two officers looked directly at him.
“What’s your name?” one of the men asked.
He didn’t answer.
The other man poked around his house while he watched.
“Looks like he’s living here.” The officer lifted up a T-shirt with a stick as if afraid to touch it.
“Where are your parents? You can’t be down here by yourself.”
Parents. The word scared him. He felt his skin getting hot. He wanted to run. It wasn’t even a thought. It was just instinct. When fish were threatened, they swam away as fast as they could. One moment they were there and then the whole school was gone. But before he could run, one of the men grabbed his arm.
The second language of fish is the language of blood, the red language, the language of iron, metallic like a taste in the mouth, in the fish’s gills or in the nostrils of a young boy. The language of blood is the language of the body being violated. It is also the language of fear, of fight and flight. The thing he did not want to remember had been spoken in the language of blood. He desperately wanted to forget that thing, but sometimes he failed at the forgetting. Then his mind screamed with remembering, and the only way to make it stop was to go into the water and turn himself into a fish.
He lay there alone. The room was white, and the sheets on the bed were white.
For the first time he understood that, for a fish, the language of air is the language of death. Why were they keeping him in this place? He began to feel angry. The anger came in the red language and made his body flush hot. Why wouldn’t they let him go? He didn’t want to talk to these people. He wished to return to his old life. He thought about escaping, but he wasn’t even sure where he was or how he had gotten here. His only desire was to go home, to be able to get up in the morning, eat some bread he was keeping in a plastic bag to keep it free from ants, and then go down to the beach.
He remembered wading into the water, its coolness as the waves caressed his ankles. This was the only thing he wanted to touch him. And he wanted to swim. He would swim hard out beyond the breakers. And he would drop down deep, only to rise again.
***
“Anything new?”
“Nothing. He still doesn’t talk. Hasn’t said a word since he got here.”
“Something is wrong. We just don’t know what it is. He’s traumatized.”
They gave him a book. He’d never gone to school, so he couldn’t read. They gave him some toys—a little truck and some plastic army men. He didn’t know what to do with them. They brought him another book with some coloring sticks. The lady showed him how to fill in the lines with red or blue, but he couldn’t see the use of it. His toys were different. He made things. He constructed stuff with old boards and nails using a flat rock for a hammer. Once, he made a little town with odds and ends. Maybe it didn’t look like a town to anyone else, but to him it did. At night, in the hospital, he sank back into his pillow. In his imagination, he turned himself into a fish and swam away.
***
“Someone recognized him.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, after they put that picture in the paper, a guy came forward. Turns out the father shot the mother, then killed himself.”
“Why didn’t someone pick up the kid?”
“Maybe they didn’t know about him.”
“We’re not sure how to help him. We need to get him to talk. Kit thought we’d show him pictures of his parents—images that might jog his memory, but there aren’t any photos. They were squatters living in an abandoned warehouse.”
“He must have been there. Or maybe he found them.”
***
He’d been outside when it happened. He often went outside at night because he knew his father didn’t really want him there. He had a sixth sense about when he was supposed to make himself scarce. Night was a good time to scavenge for stuff he liked and needed and even for food. When he came back, they were always sleeping. He’d lie down on his cot then and curl up under his blanket. It was the way they lived, the only thing he knew. But that night was different. That night he found them, and he ran. That was when he went to live on the beach.
And now he was here. He must have gone crazy when the officers came for him because he couldn’t remember anything that happened after that. He did like the one man here named Kit. Kit wore a white coat, and he always wore a colorful tie. One of his ties was blue with a fish on it. He wanted to touch the tie but thought that might be wrong. Maybe the man wouldn’t like it.
***
When he saw his old neighbor Ben, he choked.
“Hey, Danny.”
Ben said his name. He didn’t want to hear his name.
“They won’t let me swim,” he croaked. These were the first words he’d spoken in a long time, and he was surprised by the sound of his voice. He didn’t want to speak. The effort hurt his throat.
“Danny, do you know Ben?” It was the man named Kit. He was wearing his tie with the fish on it.
“I want to touch your tie.”
“Sure, touch it. If you like it, you can have it.”
“No, it’s yours.”
Ben sat down in the chair next to Danny’s bed. He had on a white T-shirt and a black plastic watch. Ben wasn’t smiling. Kit didn’t smile either.
Suddenly, Danny realized they knew everything. They knew all about him, and he knew they would never let him go back to his old life. He would have to learn to speak another language, not the blue language of water or even the red language of blood but the language of air, the language spoken on dry land. For a fish, the language of air is the language of death, and it felt that way to Danny too. The language of air is not about the medium. The language of air is a language in which every special thing has been replaced by a word that is supposed say what it is but doesn’t.
***
They were seated at a small wooden table sipping a drink. It was strong alcohol, stronger than he’d expected. Maria was having one too. He needed to decide on his order, but when he looked down at the menu, the letters formed unintelligible patterns that swam before his eyes, reminding him of how it was before he knew how to read. The waiter stood by. He forced the dancing vowels and consonants to cohere into words.
“I’ll have the house salad,” she said, “but add chicken and an order of garlic bread. The bread is always so good here.”
“I’ll have the linguine with shrimp.”
He felt as though his words were coming from far away, as though he was separated from the rest of the world by a pane of glass. He looked toward a couple on the other side of the room. Their wine glasses glinted in the candle’s flame, and the woman gesticulated as if to make a point. He turned back toward Maria. She gazed directly at him.
“Your real parents.” She hesitated. “Do you remember much about them?”
She’d never asked about this before. Usually no one asked. It just wasn’t something people talked about. All that was in the long-ago past. Yet he could still envision it so clearly. He remembered the blue language of fish. He recalled being underwater. He could easily recreate the rage that overtook him when he felt the hook in his mouth and swam and swam in the red light trying to escape from the thing he wanted to forget. But he’d been forced to remember and to come up for air. He had to leave his watery world behind and take back his name. He became Danny and later Dan, and all the things that had happened to him had really happened and he couldn’t deny them.
He paused for a moment. “I don’t remember much,” he finally commented, but he knew he was lying. He just didn’t have the words to say what he wanted to say.
“You’re very brave to have survived something like that.” She didn’t smile. He stared at her slender wrist with its blue veins.
“I don’t know about that,” he replied and meant it. How could he tell her that sometimes he wanted to go back and be that boy who lived in a packing crate house and swam in the sea with such abandon? That world felt infinite, and he’d been happy there. Now he lived in a measured, bounded world—a world of confinement, of squared off rooms, names, and numbers. There was a part of him that wished he had not been rescued, a part of him that still wished he could turn himself into a fish and swim away.
“I guess it was the ocean,” he said after a moment of silence. “The ocean saved me.”
“We should go to the beach tomorrow,” she replied.
Tomorrow was Saturday—the day they often went to the beach. He looked up finally to meet her gaze and felt relieved. He could see she understood the things he was saying to her without words. The waiter passed by the table carrying plates of food for the couple across the room. Their own order should be coming soon. He took another sip of his drink.
***
Jeri Griffith is a writer and artist. She regularly publishes essays and short stories in literary quarterlies. Many of these can be accessed through her website. Her artwork—paintings, drawings, and films—can also be viewed on her website: http://www.jerigriffith.com. Jeri lives and works in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Cypress Review 