Fish, Finality: An Essay in Two Parts

Part 1 of 2: Life as it's Lived, or Do Fish Live?



On Thursday night, Maddie and I went to the New Museum with a small group of fellow ex-Grinnellians, including visiting Chicagoans, Kei and Mordecai. For reasons I need not get into here, I ended up getting quite drunk over the course of the evening, and by the time Maddie had successfully shepherded me through the maze of public transportation that separates lower Manhattan from upper Brooklyn, I was incoherent and craving apple juice. Kindly, Maddie suggested that we stop by Rachel's, the 24-hour grocery store near the intersection of Nassau and McGuinness. Approaching the store, we noticed a sign that neither of us had previously seen. It said:

LIVE FISH $2.99
CLEANED $3.99

And indeed, where there had once been bins of multi-hued apples and plastic grab bags of overripe vegetables now stood two long plastic troughs filled with hundreds upon hundreds of carp. The scene was terrifying. Hundreds of rubbery O-shaped mouths gaped and groped airwards, while a few utterly defeated fish lay flat and immobile on the water's surface.

“Disgusting,” I said.
“We could eat one!” Maddie replied.

This is not the first time that Maddie and I have jointly encountered large groups of creatures straddling that sometimes fin-thin-line between life and death. A few months ago, after dropping Matt Blake off at a Chinatown bus station, we took a mini-tour of the surrounding supermarkets. Here is what I wrote, after-the-fact, to a friend who often thinks about fish and who hypothesized that “fish don’t know if they’re alive or dead:”

Maddie and I stayed on, perusing weird Asian fashions at a split-level shopping mall and looking at an assortment of weird dead animals in a quintessentially disgusting Asian supermarket. Birds, fish, rabbits— all bodies with heads, all heads with eyes. Some of the fish weren't even dead and flopped listlessly in giant waterless buckets, surrounded on all sides by friends above and friends below. If only we could all be so lucky as to die on a bed of FRIENDS. Well, some dead and some thinking they were dead and some wishing it could be true and some knowing that they weren't but would soon surely be—or are those all the same categories for Their Kind?

You may already know that I have fish issues. They are somewhat complicated. I can eat fish that does not look like fish and enjoy doing so. One fish in a tank is fine. Aquariums are usually okay. However, at certain times, for reasons I’ll probably never understand, large groups of fish (schools, I suppose) make me go rigid with fear. Hordes of dead or dying fish are the worst. They symbolize, in my mind, the incoherency of experience and the ultimate pointlessness of life.



And so, it’s been a bit alarming to watch our section of Greenpoint being transformed into one large fish emporium. Beyond Rachel’s, another fish market has mysteriously opened in a once-vacant building on Nassau, and many of the other local supermarkets have upped their stock of headless fish-on-ice. Hoping that these changes might be seasonal, I googled “Polish fish Christmas,” and learned that, when cleaning the Christmas fish, one should “not throw the scales away—put them in your wallet and they will bring you wealth. Also, you may place scales in a red sack. Nail it to the door. It will bring love.” Moreover, unmarried women are advised to place raw fish beneath their chairs during Christmas supper. Afterwards, a dog is released into the room. The girl sitting above the first fish it consumes will be the first to get married.

Of course, it's a bit ridiculous to believe that these probably antiquated customs are responsible for the sudden skyrocketing in the fish population around Greenpoint. As an alternative explanation, Maddie has suggested that the Polish may have their own version of the Seven-Fish-Christmas-Feast rumored to take place in certain parts of Italy, or that many Catholics eat large amounts of fish around Christmas.

There’s a reason we call her “Smarty-tail.”

The author as fish in 2004.