A man came by selling fish in plastic bags. They were skillfully pinned to a wooden pole that he bore like a cross over a thick shoulder. Of course, I let him into the apartment. Not because I had any intention of buying fish, but because I wanted advice, and he seemed like the kind of person who would offer it without reservation. He had that kind of face.
I had a problem with ants. I could not get rid of them, and overnight their number multiplied. They stalked along the walls in palpitating lines, establishing new pheromone trails and, having rallied courage, even traversed the center of some of the smaller, less noble rooms.
The man came in and set the pole-and-bag contraption down on the table, propagating unsettling sounds. He wiped his hands on his wide-legged trousers and launched into a plodding spiel about the extra-special qualities of the fish and why I ought to buy them, but I could not be swayed because I hate fish. I hate everything about them, down to their notochords and opercula. “Don’t you think,” I said, “it’s interesting that these fish are carried around in plastic bags when inside each of them a tiny bag shrinks and swells with oxygen so that they can maintain an optimal water depth?”
He licked his lips, rubbed his blocky fingers together, and said he hadn’t thought of that before. I tried very hard not to psychoanalyze him as people say I am wont to do. “Persimmon?” I asked, proffering the bright red-orange fruit from my palm. I had been holding it since before he stepped into my life with his fish, and it had grown very soft and warm in my hand. He took it all in, shaking his head like someone who had just received astonishingly bad news. Just then, the horn of light that had been growing all morning in the room through the open second-story window speared through the bags of fish. A wavering slab of rainbow appeared on the tabletop with erotic and procreative power. I think we both took pleasure in it.
“Is direct sunlight good for the fish?” I asked.
“You will not buy my fish, will you?”
“No,” I said. “I will not. To be honest—” but I stopped myself there.
The man sighed. “Then I will be on my way.”
“I think that fish is dead.”
“So it is,” the man said, unhooking a bag and lifting it up with pinched fingers. The fish, whose tiny internal bag was bloated with decomposing gases, hovered belly-up near the water’s surface.
“Most fish sink immediately after death,” I said. “That one must have been dead for some time.”
The man gave me a vicious look.
“I’m drunk,” I said. “Don’t listen to me.”
The hard lines in his face disappeared.
“Leave it here,” I said.
“What will you do with it?”
“Take it off your hands. Lighten your load.”
He couldn’t argue with that. He handed over the bag and, before setting out, made sure the other fish were in good health. In an attempt to perk up the mood, I tried my hand at telling a joke but botched the punchline. “Hm,” the man said. “I think you meant ‘tossing and turning.’” And he was right. The smell of exhaustion glazed his skin like an earthly grease. I knew that to ask his advice about the ants would be but a burden, so I thanked him instead and gently shut the door as he descended the staircase.
I arranged the bagged fish and the persimmon side by side and studied the composition from the sofa. I saw that it was good, but it stirred nothing in me. Nothing. I grew sleepy. I closed my eyes.
The fish was not where I’d placed it when, much later, my dream body evaporated and I woke up. An army of ants had hefted the bag up like treasured nectar and toted it halfway across the room. Their strength and predatory resolve shook me. Why the fish and not the persimmon? Who was to say that one night they would not march into my body and lose their way because their specialized cells could no longer detect the sun’s polarized light? They would begin to trail one another in a continuously rotating circle, eventually dying of exhaustion. I would be but a sack of dead ants, and I did not wish for that to happen.
I scooped up the bagged fish and cast it out the window with both hands. To my surprise, it did not burst open when it struck the begonias but sprang up once, then twice, before staying put among the splay of disrupted leaves. As I’d hoped, the ants, momentarily harried, reorganized themselves and began to trickle out the window. I was not sad with their steady leave-taking, but I was not happy either. I chose a place on the windowsill to hamper their newly made trail with my finger. At first, the smooth line of ants became messy, a shiny clump with many moving parts milling about before my living tissue. But soon enough, they grew bold. And, lo, how they trampled upon my flesh!