Chains of the Sea, Page 2

  “You going to work tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Of course I’m going to work,” he said loudly. “Somebody has to around here. Just because you’re having a baby doesn’t make you the Great American Princess, you know.”

  “Because it’s late. You’ll never get up.”

  “You let me worry about that. I don’t mind getting out of this house.” After he finished undressing he went into the far comer of the bedroom, where two large tanks sat, their pumps humming, aerators bubbling, green lights shining and casting soft reflections on the dingy walls of the room. He switched off the green lamps first, then stooped down to check the equipment.

  One tank was a normal large aquarium, holding fifty gallons. This was placed on a stand against the short wall, beneath a window that opened out on the street four stories below. The other arrangement was a group of three smaller tanks connected step- fashion, situated against one of the longer walls, opposite the bed. A ten-gallon tank was on a platform about chest level; a second was set against it about two feet lower, and a third rested on the floor. Water pumped up from the bottom tank caused the top aquarium to overflow into the second, which emptied into the lowest one, and so on in a cycle. This was Paul’s breeding apparatus. Young fish born in the top tank were swept over the edge and into the second tank, thus protected from their cannibalistic parents, which were prevented from following by a strip of netting across the waterfall’s lip. The babies eventually were swept again into the bottom tank when they came to the water’s surface in search of food. Then the middle tank was sealed off, so a later brood of babies from the top tank would have the middle area without competition from the original fry.

  “Feed them and come to bed already,” said Linda. “God, you worry more over those fish than you do about me.” Paul said nothing. Linda sighed. “Well, I knew that already. I mean, you worry more about them than you do about yourself, and that’s crazy.”

  “My mollies are dead,” said Paul quietly.

  “That happens,” said Linda, turning impatiently to face the other direction. “Mollies are not such a terrific long-term investment. So scoop out the dead ones and flush them down the toilet.”

  “Linda,” said Paul softly, tensely, “they’re all dead.”

  “All of them? For God’s sake, you can’t even be trusted with some fish. What kind of care did you take of them? I mean, God, what kind of trouble is a lousy fish?”

  “They were all right Friday night when we left.”

  She turned to gaze at him, completely without sympathy. “You let all those fish die. First you move in that ridiculous tank and spend I don’t know how much to fill it full of fish. Then you pay a hundred dollars for filters and pumps and all the junk the guy in the store said you needed. Then you build that ugly waterfall thing. And when you’re all done, you let your fish die. You like looking at just the water and the green light? What’s the matter, the fish get in the way?”

  “They don’t even look like they’ve been sick,” said Paul. “No fungus or nothing. And it’s silly to think the ones in the big tank would catch something from the mollies in the breeding tank.”

  “You left the heaters on too high. You boiled your own fish.”

  “The thermometers say eighty-one degrees. Perfect.”

  “You starved them.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Paul sourly.

  Linda gave him a mocking laugh. “Me? I’m not the one who killed all your fish.”

  “I had two broods in the step tanks, plus the breeding stock. I had over a hundred mollies in the big tank. Not a single one of them’s still alive.”

  “It must look pretty sick, with all those dead fish floating around on the top of the water. Well, you don’t need that pump noise no more. Turn it all off and go to sleep.”

  Paul stood slowly. He felt completely helpless. Linda was right, he did look foolish. There was nothing he could do to stop her gloating over his misfortune. If only he could just explain the thing to her without looking like a total idiot. But he had no idea why all the fish had died; in the morning he would test the water for acidity and salt content. Even so, he could only go to the store and buy more mollies. He didn’t look forward to what Linda would say then.

  It was a Sunday morning when Dr. Johnson gave me the bad news about my poor mollies. Of all the tropical specimens in our community tank, the mollies were my favorites. There was something about them that attracted me; the cherry barbs were far too ferocious, the black-lace angels too prim, the upside-down catfish, though comical, were still too gross. But the mollies held a simple charm. Flat, stark black they were, darting like scraps of shadow somehow let loose in the water. The males were so aggressively sexual that I always had to laugh. The poor exhausted females would try such maneuvers as hiding behind the plastic clam-shell bubbler, but it never did any good. And the constant production of live young mollies appealed to my scientific senses—here was the Mystery of Life in miniature.

  Except that now I had the Mystery of Death on my hands. I scooped out the bloated bodies of my former pets and examined them hurriedly. No white spots of ich, none of the telltale symptoms of velvet. I couldn’t bear to look at them for long and ran downstairs to the unoccupied servants’ quarters to flush the mollies down the loo. The toilet water swirled and roared, and the fish were swept along, tails pointing down toward their porcelain necropolis. I have to admit that I shuddered to see them go, imagining that in their dead, sodden movements I could recognize a sad farewell gesture.

  The death of my mollies had upset me more than I had thought. I felt a sudden and very intense attack of anthropomorphism, and I hurried back to the lab. There was only one thing to do, and that was to replace the fish as soon as possible and forever after pretend that nothing had happened.

  “Did you see them off all right?” asked kindly Dr. Johnson when I returned.

  “Yes, indeed. Thank you.”

  “Why, you’re as pale as a ghost,” he said, with his customary concern. I started violently. Apparently my co-worker noticed, and apologized. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I suppose I’ll have to guard my tongue for a few days. I had no idea those mere fish meant so much to you.”

  “How could you know?” I said bitterly, immediately regretting my tone. “You care for nothing but those cold glass test tubes of yours.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Dr. Johnson, not taking offense. He must truly have understood the extent of my grief, and deep inside I was grateful for that. “Have I never shown you my own pets?” he asked.

  “No, you have not.”

  “Then I must, tonight. They can be seen to best advantage after the moon has risen. It is nearly full, isn’t it?” I only nodded, wondering what strange hobby he had adopted, and had successfully kept hidden from me.

  “It is a strange thing,” I said, feeling suddenly philosophic, a mood I had rarely entertained since achieving adulthood. “I fail to understand how we, as members of the scientific community, can still be so upset by death. I mean, inasmuch as we are privy to so many of nature’s quixotic secrets. Should we not, therefore, be more apt to accept death as just another universal constant, to be calculated and assessed, with no more emotional weight than, say, Boyle’s law?”

  “For me, at least, that is true,” said Dr. Johnson with a faraway look in his eyes. “I cannot fear death. I am not repelled by its concrete signs. It is so common a phenomenon and, as you say, so universal that I tend to overlook it as I do the nightly progression of the stars. Death, where is thy sting?”

  “The sting of Death is dying,” I said quietly. Somehow I had to shake this illogical humor, in which I forced human traits on objects inanimate or even incorporeal. I had to change the subject. “What do you think of the Indians’ chances this year?” I asked.

  “Haven’t followed them since 1954.”

  “It’s very interesting lately,” I said nervously. “With most of the country’s ath
letes still suffering from the old disasters, the ball clubs have signed many well-known scientists to play.”

  Dr. Johnson turned to look at me thoughtfully. “I wonder,” he said, and then fell silent again.

  “Did you like the Indians?” I asked sadly.

  “They died like flies in the mid-seventies. I saw a bunch of dead Indians in Arizona. Just lying around, stacked like cordwood. It’s not true what they say about dead Indians vis-a-vis good ones. You have to learn which generalities you can trust.”

  And there we were, talking about death again. This new catastrophe, of which the death of the mollies was the first indication, was a lot more drawn out than the usual. Almost as if it wanted to inflict every last bit of mental torture before it began the physical.

  I will cease calling my phrases “anthropomorphic.” From now on I think I’ll just say “romantic.” Nowadays, who cares?

  The morning after the loss of his fish, Paul arrived at the factory at nine o’clock sharp. His foreman met him in the coatroom. Paul nodded and hung his jacket in his locker. The sight of Kibling waiting by the bank of dark-green lockers annoyed Paul. The foreman couldn’t wait for five minutes while Paul punched in. The company had to drain every penny’s worth of work out of its employees.

  The Jennings Manufacturing Corporation paid Paul three and a half dollars an hour to do meaningless tasks. At least, the succession of chores never seemed to him to have any connection. Today, more concerned with the mollies’ mysterious accident, he was in no mood to be bullied by his employers.

  “Morning, Moran,” said Kibling. “Here, I got a job for you.”

  “You know something, Gary?” said Paul, grinning so Kibling might think that he was only joking. “You know, you always got a job for me. It never fails. I come in on time every morning, and every morning you sure as sunshine got some dumb-ass job for me.”

  Kibling did not think that Paul was joking. He just sucked his teeth for a few seconds. “Any time, Moran,” he said at last. “Any time you don’t want the job, well, we got enough guys waiting outside.”

  “I wasn’t serious, Gary,” said Paul. “It’s like a game. I never know what I’m supposed to do from one day to another.”

  “Try to think of that as an extra.”

  “Great. What’s today? Front panels again?”

  Kibling shook his head. “No, you didn’t do too good on them last time. You’re going to do the oven this morning. Get these plates done by lunch and I’ll put you on subassembly for the afternoon.”

  Paul frowned and took the small, odd-shaped pieces of alloy steel from the foreman. The oven was the worst of his several chores. Kibling must have understood that; Paul got the assignment only once or twice a month. He had to toss three or four of the metal sheets into a small but very hot furnace. Every ninety seconds he reached into that glowing pit with a long-handled shovel and flipped them. He let them bake according to a standard schedule. When he removed them he put them aside to cool, dipped them in a strong-smelling chemical bath, knocked the coating of ash off as best he could, and sent the package on to Quality Control. Then he began all over, pitching another three or four sheets into the kiln.

  The job gave him a lot of time to think. That was by far the worst part. Every word that Linda had spoken the night before came back to him, and he was infuriated all over again. He remembered his own replies without pleasure. While he waited for the steel pieces to cook, he thought up better answers. He knew what he’d say to her tonight, if she started that same argument.

  After Linda, he thought about his fish. By lunchtime he had stopped worrying about them. The situation didn’t allow that; there was nothing to be gained by regretting the waste. Black mollies were cheap enough. Wholesale, he could get a good pair of them for about a quarter. Ten females, three or four good, strong males, and he’d have all the dead fish replaced in six to eight weeks. No, it was just the surprise of seeing them all dead that had upset him the night before. He couldn’t summon up the same emotion now, twelve hours later. And, no doubt, Linda would try to run the matter into the ground when he came home. He changed his mind: rather than fight, he’d have to ignore her.

  Paul decided to get the new mollies after work. Then he wouldn’t have to go straight home, and when he did, he’d have something to occupy him. Even cleaning four tanks and changing the water was better than hearing Linda’s new problems. Paul watched the clock all afternoon, and punched out on the time clock precisely at five. The subway was uncomfortably crowded with rush-hour commuters, but Paul just closed his eyes and disregarded them.

  They were all a little like Linda, in their pushing and shrieking. If they were quieter, more subtly insistent, then they might have infuriated him. But Paul had a great deal of practice in shutting irritations out of his mind.

  The fish store was not just a neighborhood pet shop. It had no large front windows filled with romping puppies to lure the sentimental passerby. The store dealt only in aquariums, equipment suited to the needs of the fish-raising hobbyist, and the fish themselves. In the past few months Paul had become well known in the establishment, so that the proprietor had offered to buy Paul’s growing supply of mollies. Paul had agreed to accept payment lower than the store paid to its regular distributor. But now, with the demise of all of Paul’s salable goods plus the breeding stock, he was back in the role of customer. No longer did he belong, in the sense of being a fellow breeder, a colleague in the small field of tropical-fish raising. Now he was just a man with eighty gallons of bubbling water and no fish.

  “Mr. Moran!” said Moss, the store’s night manager. “Haven’t seen you in a couple of weeks. Have you thought about our offer?”

  Paul nodded glumly. “Yeah,” he said, “but the deal will have to wait. I had some kind of accident or something. I was away for the weekend, and last night when I got home every molly I had was dead.”

  Moss looked surprised. “You had quite a few, I know. It sounds like you had some kind of plague.”

  “I doubt it. The fish were in four separate tanks, one big one and the step-breeder. I can’t figure it out. There wasn’t enough time for them all to catch sick and die.”

  “No,” said Moss thoughtfully, “I didn’t really mean that. It would have to be a mechanical failure, or a sudden change in pH or temperature.”

  “That was what I figured, too,” said Paul, “but I checked all that as carefully as I could. The pH was perfect, the salt was as high as it’s supposed to be, the temperature was right on eighty-one, where it’s always been. Even if the pump had quit, there wasn’t enough time for the water to go bad. I know there wasn’t a mechanical failure.”

  “Have you ever had a pandemic infection before?” asked Moss.

  “Huh?”

  “You know, something gets in and kills a few fish. Then in a couple of weeks they’re all dead.”

  “No,” said Paul, discouraged that the expert in the store wasn’t being more helpful. “Anyway, you’d have to be pretty careless to let something like that happen.”

  “A lot of people are that careless,” said Moss. “We build our profits on them.”

  “This was just over the weekend,” said Paul impatiently.

  “I don’t know, then,” said Moss. “So what do you want, more breeding stock?”

  “Yeah. I guess I’ll just have to start from scratch.” Paul followed Moss toward the back of the store, where the walls were lined with scores of small tanks, each containing a different variety of tropical fish. When they got to the three tanks of black mollies, Moss stopped abruptly and stared. Every molly in the store was dead. “You ought to keep a closer watch on your tanks,” said Paul. “That sure won’t impress a new customer.”

  “I just started work about fifteen minutes ago,” said Moss. “Let me see if any of the day staff knows anything about this.” Moss went to the front of the store to question the young man who worked behind the cash register. Paul stayed behind and exami
ned the tanks of dead mollies. There was something chilling about them, beyond the mere coincidence. Whenever a single fish had died in Paul’s tank, he scooped it out with the long-handled net and ran with it to the toilet, where he flushed the limp, dead thing out of his life. But the sight of so many fish lying on the bottom or floating upside down forced the idea of death into his consciousness.

  While Moss was checking with his employee, Paul tried to see if the store’s mollies resembled his own dead fish. The common diseases to which mollies were susceptible were obvious to the knowledgeable observer. Mollies are small fish, smaller than goldfish but larger than guppies. They come in many varieties and many colors, but the most popular strain is the pure black. The black molly is a dramatic addition to a community tank; the jet-black color is an exciting contrast to the many luminescent hues of other tropical fish, and mollies can be bred to develop fantastic fin and tail forms. They are usually hardy fish, prolific breeders in captivity, and thus make ideal pets for both the specialist and the casual hobbyist.

  The most hazardous illness is ich, a parasitical disease that shows up as small white specks against the pure-black body. The disease is extremely contagious, and a tankful of mollies can be wiped out in a matter of days if no steps are taken to check it. Its presence generally means that the water doesn’t contain enough salt, as mollies like their water a little brinier than most other tropicals. Without the salt, their protective coating of slimy film is easily penetrated. But there was no sign of this disease, neither on Paul’s dead fish nor on the store’s. Looking closer, he could see no symptom of molly velvet or any other sickness with which he was familiar.

  “Mr. Moran?” said Moss. Paul turned around, startled. “I asked some of the day staff, and they knew that the mollies had died. Miele said they were already dead when he checked them first thing this morning. But as you can see, there aren’t any traces of disease. The tanks were left for me to examine, but I don’t think I’ll have any more success diagnosing ours than I had with yours.”