Aquarium Read Free

grass.
    What are the golden pearls? I asked. Are those eggs?
    I see what you mean. I think so. I think they’re guarding eggs, and we look like we might want to steal a couple.
    I’ve already had lunch.
    The old man laughed. Well, I’ll be sure to let them know.
    The handfish opened his mouth, as if he might say something, then closed it again. His elbows flexed at the windowsill.
    It doesn’t look like they have scales, I said. They look sweaty.
    Up all night, the old man said. Guarding the eggs. Those sea horses are not to be trusted.
    We looked up pale green fronds to where the sea horses hung uneasily, pitched unlevel. Bodies of armor assembled in layers, made of something like bone. Not meant to swim.
    What’s the point of sea horses? I asked.
    The old man stood before them, mouth hung open, as if before his god. I remember he looked like that. So unlike any other adult I knew. His mind wasn’t on a track. He was ready to be surprised and stopped at any moment, ready to see what would happen next, and it could be anything.
    I think there’s no answer to that, he finally said. Those are the best questions, the ones that have no answers. I can’t imagine how sea horses could have come to be, and why they have heads like horses on land, why there’d be that symmetry unknown. No horse will ever see a sea horse, or a sea horse a horse, and nothing else might ever have recognized both of them, and even though we do recognize the symmetry now, what’s the point? That’s exactly the right kind of question.
    Are they made of bone, all those ridges?
    The old man looked at the written descriptions beside the tank. Let’s see. Hey, they’re telling us here to look for pygmy sea horses, on the gorgonian coral. Should be red and white.
    Both of us leaned closer. Above the handfish cave were branches of coral dusted pale white with pink warts, but no sea horses.
    I don’t see anything, I said. Just coral.
    They’re only two centimeters long, he said.
    That’s tiny.

    And then I saw it. Warts too pink, too bright and clean, not dusted pale. Double wrap of the tiniest tail around a branch, like a miniature snake made of glass. The rounded belly and horse’s head and the smallest black dot of an eye, and covered in these pink mounds just like the coral.
    I found one, I said. Then I noticed the shadow beyond, a second pygmy sea horse in exactly the same position, as if all things must be doubled in order to exist.
    Where? he asked, but I couldn’t speak.
    Ah, he said. I see it now.
    A shadow self, not made of flesh. Brittle as the coral. Hanging in a void. Already one of these sea horses was mine, known, and the other was other.
    I don’t like the second one, I said. The second one gives me the creeps.
    Why? He looks pretty much the same. Or she, or whatever. How can you tell male or female?
    I can’t stay here.
    Living things made of stone. No movement. And a terrifying loss of scale, the world able to expand and contract. That tiny black pinprick of an eye the only way in, opening to some other larger universe.
    I walked away quickly, past tank after tank of pressure magnified and color dimmed, shape distorted. They had speakers for the tanks, and at the moment it was all too much, the parrot fish tearing at coral and shrimp clicking, chittering of penguins. Sound increased beyond measure, the shifting of a few grains of sand like boulders.
    I stopped at the largest tank, an entire wall of dim pale blue, reassuring, no sound. Slow movement of sharks, same movement for a hundred million years. The sharks like monks, repetition of days, endless circling, no desire for more but only this movement. Eyes going opaque, no longer needing to see. No fancy clothes but hung in gray with white beneath. Viewed from above, they could look like the ocean floor. Viewed from below, they could look like the sky.
    What’s wrong? the old man asked. He was kneeling beside me. He was kind.
    I don’t know, I said. And this was true. I had