Fish-Dream

By Sam Zarenmark

Twinkling lights, wailing winds: the hour before sunrise was alive with a muted, nervous energy that made the herring churn the black water and the dry grass rustle angrily.  A party walked slowly along the edge of the beach, zigzagging lazily along the hazy border where brown foam obscured the sand; they were a disjointed collective of coat-swaddled, red-eyed individuals who missed their beds desperately, whose movements were frenzied and erratic, and whose faces were made gaunt and featureless by the electronic glow of their lamps.  The water was like glass, reflecting the remnants of stars as they fell away from the night sky.  The cold invaded every crevice and attacked every source of warmth with a vicious, bitter indifference: the man shivered in his hunter’s coat, pulling the woolen flaps tightly around his heavy frame, keeping his eyes on the rods that drooped over the side of his boat.  

He had been fishing for a few hours already, patiently watching as his bobbers hovered on the water some meters away.  It was best to fish early in the morning, his father always said; the man would whisper that excuse to his snoring wife every morning he went fishing, as he snuck out of their bed to gather his gear and enjoy a quick breakfast.  He enjoyed the silent drive to the coast, with only the headlights of his Trabi to bring color to the roads that seemed to run impossibly far between barren fields.  There were never any other drivers on the road at that hour, and he could drive as fast and as erratically as he wanted to.  It did not bother him that none of the stores were open once he got into town, or that there was never anyone at the docks to greet him when he arrived; he enjoyed the procedural serenity in storing his gear on his rusting rowboat, untying the thick lines that secured the boat to the pier, and pushing off towards open water.  In the morning the other fishermen would come, cheery and leather-skinned men with metal lunchboxes, who would spoil the silence with their conversations and their laughter; they would bring along with them motorboats that belched noxious black fumes, and sailboats crewed by polo-wearing, smug-faced boys.  He would have to smile and wave at them, and make small talk and laugh with them.  The sun would pierce the water and reveal the wriggling, shining fish that swam beneath the surface, and the lights and sounds of distant Rostock would float across the water. 

There was nothing mysterious or pleasurable about fishing during the daytime.  No, it was always best to fish early in the morning, when the darkness allowed beasts and monsters to lurk and prowl; in those quiet hours, he could patiently wait for one of his fishing rods to twitch, listen for that splash of water that would alert him to the presence of a miracle-fish, and, most importantly, ignore what lied beneath the sun-bleached tarp at the bottom of his boat.  

He probably didn’t need to whisper anything to his wife, since she was always sound asleep as he was leaving.  But she loved him dearly, and he loved her just as much, so it bothered him to leave their bed at such an odd hour without letting her know where he was headed to, even though she knew that he always left at three in the morning whenever he went fishing, and even though she was never awake to hear him whispering.  It did not bother her that she often woke up to an empty bed, or that he often came home later than he had promised her; she trusted him completely, and she was perfectly content to wait for him so that they could have their morning breakfast together, even though the eggs would grow cold and the butter would begin to melt.  She only wished that he was safe and happy; it was all she wanted for him, and it was all he wanted for her.  

He rather adored his wife, and had adored her ever since they were teachers at the Polytechnische Oberschule in Rostock.  He had taught civics, while she had German literature; he had been a tired man of forty-one years whose hair had begun to gray noticeably, while she had been a pig-tailed, rosy-cheeked girl for whom life was still delightful and brimming with possibilities.  He had marveled at the way she could take something mundane and dress it in metaphors, allusions, and allegories until it was barely recognizable, and then gleefully undress it in a moment; she had marveled at the strict and unforgiving institutions he described in his lessons, each constructed upon difficult and immeasurable desires and emotions.  She loved the way he melted when the two of them were alone, revealing to her the tangled mess of intense and conflicted emotions that he concealed like a wound; he loved the way she looked at him, her green eyes twinkling with all the promise and beauty of emeralds, imbued every day with the same intensity that they had glowed with when they had first met.  Their relationship had endured years of working side by side, and survived the state that had first employed them; they had married once they left the Oberschule, in a small ceremony that only their families were invited to.  Moving out of their cramped apartments in Rostock, they found a small cabin nestled between some birch trees, far out of sight from anything cosmopolitan, and there they were content.  They lived by themselves, for themselves, without a care in the world; they made each other happy, and took pleasure in each other’s company.  They were considerate of each other, and were thankful that they had each other; they knew that they were happy together far more than they could be if they were apart.  Nothing and no one bothered them in their self-imposed isolation: not the animals that nibbled on their plants or occasionally rummaged through their trash cans, nor the cars that sometimes sped past on the nearby road.  No one came to visit them, and the aging telephone made from chipped baby-blue plastic that they had brought with them from the city never rang; they lived a secluded, happy life in that cabin, together, and they enjoyed it and each other immensely.  

Something suddenly tugged on one of his rods, almost pulling it out of its holder.  The man jumped out of his seat and made his way over to the rod, making sure to step gingerly over the sun-bleached tarp at the bottom of the boat.  Gripping the handle tightly with frozen fingers, he watched without emotion as the line flew out in the direction of the fish.  He let his hand hover over the reel, spinning frantically as it gave up more line to the frightened fish, and waited for the moment when the fish would finally tire itself out.  He considered this to be his favorite moment of fishing: he enjoyed the tension right before he would have to fight to reel in the fish, and long before he would have to bring it upon his boat and reveal its glimmering form beneath a flashlight.  During the fight itself, he could pretty quickly get a sense of whether he would be able to reel in the fish, and what sort of fish he was dealing with; it would not take him long to realize if he had a small fish at the end of his line, and sometimes he would quickly tug on the reel to tear the hook out of the fish’s mouth if he thought it was too small.  But at this initial stage he knew nothing about the fish at the end of the line; he only knew that there was a fish there, and in those moments of uncertainty he could create and nurture fantasies of fish as large as men, whose impressive and uncommon features served to individualize and enshrine them in the memories of those fishermen who caught them.  He enjoyed the prospect of catching something so nearly impossible, something so wildly significant, even if the thought of facing such a challenge secretly terrified him.  And so as the reel whirred beneath his waiting hand, and as the rod twitched and shuddered while the fish fled deeper and further to sea, the man began to smile, then grin, his muscles frozen in the unfamiliar expression until they began to hurt.  

His son had hated it when they had first moved out to the cabin.  He was only twelve or thirteen then, just approaching that age where peace and quiet meant nothing and chaos and noise meant everything.  He could not understand how two people who had spent their entire lives in a city could decide to move out into the wilderness, and he frequently made his confusion known at the dinner table.  He despised the pervasive absence of everything and anything human, and could not find anything remotely enjoyable about the chirping of the birds and crickets, the rustling of grass and leaves, the whistling of the wind.  When the time came, he applied to Humboldt in Berlin, along with universities in Leipzig and Dresden; when he was accepted to one of them, he left and never returned.  He sent letters for a while, and occasionally the aging telephone made from chipped baby-blue plastic would obnoxiously ring.  But soon the telephone grew silent, and eventually the letters stopped coming; some years after his final letter, the son finally disappeared from his parents’ thoughts, and only his name would occasionally resurface in the form of a mis-addressed letter or unpaid bill.  

The man had tried to show his son how he could enjoy living at the cabin, in the same way that the man did.  He took his son fishing and taught him how to build snares; he took his son on hikes that meandered through farmers’ fields and dark forests, past abandoned bunkers and burnt-out hulks of forgotten tanks, beyond sight of the cabin and back to it before dusk fell; he showed his son how to listen to the silence, admire the stars that shone like pearls, and enjoy the smell of dew-damp grass in the mornings.  But his son never enjoyed those moments, nor learned anything from what the man tried to teach him; and the man felt that his wife was to blame for that.  She never tried to show their son the beauty of nature, but instead sat in the cabin, the phone receiver perched on her shoulder, as she lazily scanned through whatever magazine had arrived in the mail for whatever mail-order deal could entice her that day.  He felt like she had taught their son that there was nothing of interest outside of the cabin, which itself had nothing particularly of interest within; he thus felt that it was ultimately unavoidable when their son finally abandoned them, and he blamed her every day for it.  

He rather hated his wife, and could not remember a time when he had not hated her.  She was the reason that he fished alone in the mornings these days, rather than with his father and grandfather.  They had once fished together every Sunday morning, three generations silently coexisting on a rust-encrusted rowboat; yet his wife despised his father and grandfather, and she hated the fact that her husband disappeared every Sunday morning to listen to their obscene stories and laugh at their crude jokes.  She thought that the two of them were yellow-toothed, foul-mouthed, flea-ridden right-wingers who saw her as something to be objectified and wolf-whistled at, and who had only survived the past few decades because no one cared enough to listen to what they had to say.  For him, they were his last remaining family, his mother and uncle having passed away during the war, and his grandmother long before that; for his wife, they were anathema, and she told him just as much one night when he came to pick her up from her apartment.  They were headed to a restaurant to celebrate a colleague’s retirement, and she had been wearing a silvery cocktail dress that slid from her bare shoulders down to above her knees – something that she had bought from a friend-of-a-friend who frequently travelled to the West for work, something that would have gotten her in trouble had there been anyone who cared enough to report her for it.  He remembered how the dress sparkled and thrashed as she slammed her foot down and forbade him from spending any more time with his father and grandfather.  It did not matter that his father and grandfather actually did not see her as something to be objectified and wolf-whistled at, but instead as a member of their family who they deeply cared about and wanted to develop a stronger relationship with; it did not matter that she herself objectified them, trapping them in their stereotypes without ever granting them the possibility to escape her vicious characterizations; it did not matter that he and her were not married.  He had tried explaining those things to her as she pounded her fists against his chest, screaming and wailing to drown out his words, drawing neighbors to their doors and balconies until he finally broke down and agreed.  

Yet even though he had hated her in the past for that, he hated her more now for how much she spent.  She spent thousands of Marken every day, ordering products on their aging telephone made from chipped baby-blue plastic from the magazines that appeared every day in their mailbox.  At first he had allowed it, because she always seemed so excited when a package arrived, and because he too was tempted by the limitless possibilities that seemed to present themselves with each magazine.  Yet soon their cabin became increasingly cramped, and their rooms and hallways cluttered; he grew increasingly panicked that soon they would drown in their little cabin, submerged in a sea of useless things.  She had become addicted to the ease and accessibility that mail-order offered, and he was too scared to look at their shared bank account with their retirement funds, which he was certain was growing increasingly empty, despite never checking the balance.  It kept him up at night thinking about how their retirement funds might run out before either of them had passed away, and that poisonous thought often distracted him whenever he was busy doing something else, even at the moment when the fish suddenly swerved frantically and swam under the hull of his rusting rowboat, tearing the fishing rod from his hands and almost pulling him overboard.  The man managed to grab the side of the boat and keep himself from falling, holding on as the boat rocked dangerously close to the edge of the water, but he could not hold on as the boat rocked back in the opposite direction.  He lost his grip and fell into the hull of the boat, where the tarp that had been draped over what he had hoped to ignore and forget had fallen away.  And so as the sun began to rise over the horizon, its bright and shimmering rays falling upon distant Rostock and dancing across the Baltic, the man found himself face-to-face with what laid beneath the tarp.  

The Fish stared back at him.  It was a true behemoth, so large that the man had to cut it in half just so he could store it at the bottom of the boat.  It was absolutely hideous, with silvery scales that glittered like ancient coins, bright red flesh that stank like sulfur and ungulated with the rocking of the boat, and enflamed gills that seemed impossibly large along its sides.  The bloated eyes stared out emotionlessly, perfect black orbs that seemed to capture all of the darkness of the universe in their blank expression; the mouth remained perpetually open, frozen by advanced rigor mortis and months of unforgiving cold, posed as if caught mid-word.  Perhaps it had been interrupted while revealing some secret of the world, some lasting, painful, undeniable truth: but the man had not heard what the Fish had said, and he secretly doubted that he could have understood it if he had.  He had caught it on one of the first trips he had made alone, after his then-not-wife had forbidden him from fishing with his always-father and always-grandfather.  He had hauled it upon his boat with an unknown strength, torn out the hook and slaughtered it with his fishing knives, said nothing as his blades cut through the quivering flesh; he had hidden it there once he was finished, unbelieving of the magnitude of his deed.  The Fish had been nothing to him then, and was nothing to him now: he had no love or hatred for the Fish, only cruel indifference.  He had killed it effortlessly, meaninglessly, without a single morose moment wasted thinking about the life that he had just taken; for the Fish did not have a life for him to take, in the way that his Trabi or that aging telephone made from chipped baby-blue plastic had no lives to be taken.  For him, the deed was as insignificant as blinking or breathing, committed carelessly and senselessly against something that he could not care about enough to love or hate.  He did not know why he did it, and yet he had done it; he could not understand what had led up to that moment, and yet he knew with the utmost certainty that it had been inevitable.  All the histories of the world had foretold it: and so as he stared deeper and deeper into those glossy, emerald eyes, which had lost none of the promise and intensity that they had held when they had first fallen upon him, and the twinkling lights and wailing winds grew ever brighter and ever louder, and the voices of the party on the shore grew increasingly more coherent to produce a single word, a name – something familiar, bittersweet, meaningful and meaningless – he felt absolutely nothing at all.  

Sam Zarenmark is from Westchester County, NY, and enjoys writing in his free time. He is
currently pursuing his bachelor’s degree in Ithaca, NY. He lives with his dog, Mieke.