Aquarium Quotes

I’m stuck babysitting turtle eggs while a volleyball player slash grease monkey slash aquarium volunteer tries to hit on me.” I’m not hitting on you,” he protested. No?” Believe me, you’d know if I was hitting on you. You wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from succumbing to my charms.

The structure was like an aquarium filled with air instead of water, and Dani and Zephyr were the “fish” inside, there for the enjoyment of the Water People, or for whatever other purpose their captors had in mind.

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.

I experienced car creepery at thirteen. I was walking home from middle school past a place called the World’s Largest Aquarium—which, legally, I don’t know how they could call it that, because it was obviously an average-sized aquarium. Maybe I should start referring to myself as the World’s Tallest Man and see how that goes? Anyway, I was walking home alone from school and I was wearing a dress. A dude drove by and yelled, “Nice tits.” Embarrassed and enraged, I screamed after him, “Suck my dick.” Sure, it didn’t make any sense, but at least I don’t hold in my anger.

Incredible,” Jason said. “These are really good brownies.” “That’s your only comment?” Piper demanded. He looked surprised. “What? I heard the story. Fish-centaurs. Merpeople. Letter of intro to the Tiber River god. Got it. But these brownies—” “I know,” Frank said, his mouth full. “Try them with Esther’s peach preserves.” “That,” Hazel said, “is incredibly disgusting.” “Pass me the jar, man,” Jason said. Hazel and Piper exchanged a look of total exasperation. Boys. Percy, for his part, wanted to hear every detail about the aquatic camp. He kept coming back to one point: “They didn’t want to meet me?” “It wasn’t that,” Hazel said. “Just…undersea politics, I guess. The merpeople are territorial. The good news is they’re taking care of that aquarium in Atlanta. And they’ll help protect the Argo II as we cross the Atlantic.” Percy nodded absently. “But they didn’t want to meet me?” Annabeth swatted his arm. “Come on, Seaweed Brain! We’ve got other things to worry about.

Besides, Reyna will do what she can to slow things down. She's still on our side. I know she is." "You trust her." Piper's voice sounded hollow, even to herself. "Look Pipes. I told you, you've got nothing to be jealous about." "She's beautiful. She's powerful. Se's so...Roman." Jason put down his hammer. He took her hand, which sent a tingle up her arm. Piper's dad had once taken her to the Aquarium of the Pacific and shown her an electric eel. He told her that the eel sent out pulses that shocked and paralyzed its prey. Each time Jason looked at her or touched her hand, Piper felt like that. "You're beautiful and powerful," he said. "And I don't want you to be Roman. I want you to be Piper. Besides, we're a team, you and me.

They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood. . . . There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all.

All my life, I [Pari] have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath.

And when you come back to Japan next summer, let's have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we'll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find.

I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

Sharks have a deadly form of claustrophobia. It's not so much fear of enclosed spaces as it is inability to exist in them. No one knows why. Some say it's the metal in aquariums that throws their equilibrium off. But whatever it is, big sharks don't last long in captivity

Odd choice of a word, isn’t it? Fish is either singular, or plural. Imagine my surprise when I walked in the study and found not one fish in a tiny fish bowl, but an entire aquarium.” She practically vibrated for the need to fight. “Otto was lonely and you were practicing animal cruelty. He was too isolated. Now, he has friends and a place to swim.” “Yes, nice little tunnels and rocks and algae to play hide and seek with his buddies.

Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage. Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed. Eventually, however, religions became aquariums. Then hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim.

When I can’t sleep, I think about the transparent glass box that is still stirring with life even in the darkness of night. That pristine aquarium is still operating like clockwork. As I visualize the scene, the sounds of the store reverberate in my eardrums and lull me to sleep.

Each thing that happens to us, each and every thing, it leaves some dent, and that dent will always be there. Each of us is a walking wreck.

I’m in an aquarium – if you tap on the glass the fish swim away.

Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you anymore. [while admiring fish in an aquarium]

Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make us and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that's the world we know forever after. It's the only world. We can't see what it might have looked like otherwise.

Look- here's a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. [...] On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. [...] The most interesting thing here isn't even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room... except we are together. We are close. We're having a meeting of the minds. [...] We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.

Even now, I still believe metamorphosis is the greatest beauty.

Too many Christians are no longer fishers of men, but the keepers of the aquarium.

There's not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn't depend in some way on advertising. It'd be like an aquarium without water. Why, ninety-five percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for.

I'll give you your Christmas present now if you'll give me mine." I shook my head. "At breakfast." "But it's Christmas now." "Breakfast." "Whatever you're giving me," she said, "I hope I don't like it." "You'll have to keep them anyway, because the man at the Aquarium said he positively wouldn't take them back. He said they'd already bitten the tails off the...

The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with s kind of eternity, unbearable.

That’s why we like fish in aquariums; they remind us of ourselves, well fed but incapable of moving beyond the glass walls.

The dead reaching for us, needing us, but this isn't true. There's only us reaching for them, trying to find ourselves.

Having something to look forward to changes everything. I've always needed a future. I can't live without one.

If wishes were fishes, aquariums would be much more terrifying.

Nous sommes en 50 avant Jésus-Christ. Toute la Gaule est occupée par les romains... Toute? Non! Un village peuplé d'irréductibles gaulois résiste encore et toujours à l'envahisseur. Et la vie n'est pas facile pour les garnisons de légionnaires romains des camps retranchés de Babaorum, Aquarium, Laudanum et Petibonum...

The world that was the emonation of divine had been reduced to a handful of dust. Thousands of people, all caught in profile looked into their mobile fish tanks. Each face, each car, transporting grief, boredom, rage. Someone in one of these cars was contemplating murder. Someone, rite now, in the privecy of his aquarium, threaded the beads of his suicide through his fingers, praying along the chain like a rosary. Someone begged for help from a God he didnt quite believe in, yet had no one else to appeal to.

[L]et us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. ... On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. Whoever will dip into Hugh Miller's works on geology, or read Mr. Lewes's “Seaside Studies,” will perceive that science excites poetry rather than extinguishes it. And whoever will contemplate the life of Goethe will see that the poet and the man of science can co-exist in equal activity. Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it? Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake, does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedge-rows can assume. Whoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found. Whoever at the seaside has not had a microscope and aquarium, has yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the seaside are. Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena—care not to understand the architecture of the universe, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!—are learnedly critical over a Greek ode, and pass by without a glance that grand epic... upon the strata of the Earth!

After counting all the sheep in the world I enumerate the wildebeests, snails, camels, skylarks, etc., then I add up all the zoos and aquariums, country by country. By early light I am asleep in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood,

Even though the aquarium divider is gone, the mollies act as if the barrier is still there. Are we like mollies, stuck in the world we’re used to?

A hotel is a temporary aquarium for people. That’s why I travel with a fishing pole, and erectile dysfunction medicine.

The water trapped in my window makes it like an aquarium—which makes me the fish.

not the shore but an aquarium filled with exhausted water and warm seaweed

Here is my room, in the yellow lamplight and the space heater rumbling: Indian rug red as Cochise's blood, a desk with seven mystic drawers, a chair covered in material as velvety blue-black as Batman's cape, an aquarium holding tiny fish so pale you could see their hearts beat, the aforementioned dresser covered with decals from Revell model airplane kits, a bed with a quilt sewn by a relative of Jefferson Davis's, a closet, and the shelves, oh, yes, the shelves. The troves of treasure. On those shelves are stacks of me: hundreds of comic books- Justice League, Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, the Spirit, Blackhawk, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Aquaman, and the Fantastic Four... The shelves go on for miles and miles. My collection of marbles gleams in a mason jar. My dried cicada waits to sing again in the summer. My Duncan yo-yo that whistles except the string is broken and Dad's got to fix it.

Many women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is at the toll gate collecting, one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona, one is straddling a cello in Russia, one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt, one is painting her bedroom walls moon color, one is dying but remembering a breakfast, one is stretching on her mat in Thailand, one is wiping the ass of her child, one is staring out the window of a train in the middle of Wyoming and one is anywhere and some are everywhere and all seem to be singing, although some can not sing a note.

So it was that my most impressionable years of boyhood were spent gazing at not a whale, but a whale's penis. Whenever I tired of strolling through the chill aisles of the aquarium, I'd steal off to my place on the bench of the high-ceilinged stillness of the exhibition room and spend hours on end there contemplating this whale's penis.

What if I wanted to rule the world?" she asked lightly. "I might desire to sit on a throne of skulls and be the universe's dark queen." "I'd totally help you with that," Jared told her. " I am so willing to be a minion, you have no idea. I will throw people into aquariums full of mutant octopi and sharks with lasers on their heads on command.

People who are hungry don't have the heart to think about others. Sometimes they can't even care for their own family. Hunger quashes man's will to help his fellow man. I've seen fathers steal food from their own children's lunchboxes. As they scarf down the corn they have only one overpowering desire: to placate, if even for just one moment, that feeling of insufferable need.

I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.

Hunger quashes man's will to help his fellow man.

A fish tank is just interactive television for cats.

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona. When this giant new tap turned on, developers drew up plans to roll pink stucco subdivisions across the desert in all directions. The rest of us were supposed to rejoice as the new flow rushed into our pipes, even as the city warned us this water was kind of special. They said it was okay to drink but don't put it in an aquarium because it would kill the fish. Drink it we did, then, filled our coffee makers too, and mixed our children's juice concentrate with fluid that would gag a guppy. Oh, America the Beautiful, where are our standards?

I would like to congratulate each and every one of you for ruining my Saturday plans with my granddaughter. She’s ten years old and recently developed an affinity for tiger sharks, and she cried when I told her I couldn’t take her to the aquarium today. Everyone, give yourselves a round of applause for making a ten-year-old girl cry.

was a study on fulmar carcasses washed ashore on North Sea coastlines. Ninety-five percent had plastic in their stomachs—an average of 44 pieces per bird. A proportional amount in a human being would weigh nearly five pounds. There was no way of knowing if the plastic had killed them, although it was a safe bet that, in many, chunks of indigestible plastic had blocked their intestines. Thompson reasoned that if larger plastic pieces were breaking down into smaller particles, smaller organisms would likely be consuming them. He devised an aquarium experiment, using bottom-feeding lugworms that live on organic sediments, barnacles that filter organic matter suspended in water, and sand fleas that eat beach detritus. In the experiment, plastic particles and fibers were provided in proportionately bite-size quantities. Each creature promptly ingested them.

Daydream, which is to thought as the nebula is to the star, borders on sleep, and is concerned with it as its frontier. An atmosphere inhabited by living transparencies: there's a beginning of the unknown. But beyond it the Possible opens out, immense. Other beings, other facts, are there. No supernaturalism, only the occult continuation of infinite nature. . . . Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe. . . . The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss . . . and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange animalities, weird vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night.

A change in those moments, some switch turned off forever, the end of trust or safety or love, and how do we ever find the switch again?

The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with a kind of eternity, unbearable.

Maybe this is as near as we can come to forgiveness. Not the past wiped away, nothing undone, but some willingness in the present, some recognition and embrace and slowing down.

An aquarium is just an echo of the ocean.

Under normal circumstances this would be nice and I'de latch onto it like a sucker fish to the side of an aquarium.

And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright, orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. Others will step of the shadows like Boo Radley and make you catch your breath or take a step backward. They're often so rich, these unbidden thoughts, and so clear that they feel indelible. But I say write them all down anyway.

If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and two minutes later he gets eaten by another fish — that’s tragic. But it’s only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of a dynamic process, a molecular dance, and made a separate entity out of it.

(Sartre) (The world is full without me, as in Nausea; the world plays at living behind a glass partition; the world is in an aquarium; I see everything close up and yet cut off, made of some other substance; I keep falling outside myself, without dizziness, without blue, into precision.

We do pool parties and aquarium fundraisers and the occasional water park event, and every time we put on our tails and put ourselves on display for a bunch of people who want us to be real, we’re dragging the human race a little closer to remembering what it’s like to believe in happy endings.

All I can register of these people is a pattern of blur, one string of masks instead of faces. Atonal, solid, boring. They look like fish, crowded by the glass of a gigantic aquarium, hoping you’ll feed them, give them a morsel of something special that will make them forget their misery for a minute

At the Seattle Aquarium, Sammy the giant Pacific octopus enjoyed playing with a baseball-size plastic ball that could be screwed together by twisting the two halves. A staffer put food inside the ball but later was surprised to find that not only had the octopus opened the ball, it had screwed it back together when it was done.

The perturbations, anxieties, depravations, deaths, exceptions in the physical or moral order, spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations fostered by the will, torments, destruction, confusion, tears, insatiabilities, servitudes, delving imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the chemical singularities of the mysterious vulture which lies in wait for the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious & abortive experiences, the darkness of the mailed bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the inoculation of deep stupor, funeral orations, desires, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors, strange inquietudes which the reader would prefer not to experience , cants, nervous disorders, bleeding ordeals that drive logic at bay, exaggerations, the absence of sincerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the lugubrious, childbirths worse than murders, passions, romancers at the Courts of Assize, tragedies,-odes, melodramas, extremes forever presented, reason hissed at with impunity, odor of hens steeped in water, nausea, frogs, devilfish, sharks, simoon of the deserts, that which is somnambulistic, squint-eyed, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulistic, viscous, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anemic, one-eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino, pederast, phenomena of the aquarium, & the bearded woman, hours surfeited with gloomy discouragement, fantasies, acrimonies, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, ordure, that which does not think like a child, desolation, the intellectual manchineel trees, perfumed cankers, stalks of the camellias, the guilt of a writer rolling down the slope of nothingness & scorning himself with joyous cries, that grind one in their imperceptible gearing, the serious spittles on inviolate maxims, vermin & their insinuating titillations, stupid prefaces like those of Cromwell, Mademoiselle de Maupin & Dumas fils, decaying, helplessness, blasphemies, suffocation, stifling, mania,--before these unclean charnel houses, which I blush to name, it is at last time to react against whatever disgusts us & bows us down.

All cultures have things to learn from all other cultures. Don’t get stuck in your culture! Go beyond it! Get out of your aquarium; get out of your farm; get out of your castle; break your bell jar! Give chance to other cultures and to other opinions! This is the best way for you to see the insufficiencies, absurdities and stupidities in your culture!

Each one a little bit different but following some blueprint somewhere. As if each of us might have a blueprint. As if somewhere there's the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.

A clear-eyed view of the hell I had landed in certainly would have thrown me deeper into despair. There is nothing like thought to deepen one's gloom.

A giant Pacific octopus—the largest of the world’s 250 or so octopus species—can easily overpower a person. Just one of a big male’s three-inch-diameter suckers can lift 30 pounds, and a giant Pacific octopus has 1,600 of them. An octopus bite can inject a neurotoxic venom as well as saliva that has the ability to dissolve flesh. Worst of all, an octopus can take the opportunity to escape from an open tank, and an escaped octopus is a big problem for both the octopus and the aquarium.

Currents of cigarette fumes wafted through what passed for air. Attractive young women in bright-hued gowns glided through the streams of smoke, like tropical fish in an aquarium. Detecting the white uniforms and leathery faces, they promptly approached the Navy men. Very pretty, Ed thought, but hungry, a school of piranha. Just what the doctor ordered: fun and games with no complications. Right: no complications.

At the time, I remained relatively calm before that spectacle of horrors, which is perhaps the most telling indication of just how desensitized I had become. The more I witnessed such atrocities and rubbed shoulders with death, the more I desired to stay alive, no matter the cost.

Yes, but in this case, the fatality was a shark. The tractor-trailer was carrying four sharks from the Florida Keys to an aquarium in Coney Island in New York City and one of the sharks was ejected during the crash. Fortunately, it didn’t hit anybody, but the fact remains that there was, briefly, an airborne shark on Interstate 95, and it could have hit a car, which would have been tragic, by which I mean pretty funny.

A pretty vampire woman in a cheongsam came flying down the hallway, ribbons waving from her purple-streaked hair like a silken flag. Her face was familiar. Alec had seen her at Taki’s, and around the city more generally, usually with Raphael. “Save us, oh fearless leader,” said Raphael’s lady friend. “Elliott’s in a huge aquarium puking blue and green. He tried to drink mermaid blood. He tried to drink selkie blood. He tried to—” “Ahem,” said Raphael, with a savage jerk of his head in Alec’s direction. Alec waved. “Shadowhunter,” he said. “Right here. Hi.” “He tried to keep to the Accords and obey all the known Laws!” the woman declared. “Because that’s the New York clan’s idea of a truly festive good time.” Alec remembered Magnus and tried not to look like he was here to ruin the Downworlder party. There was one thing he and this woman had in common. He recognized the bright purple she was wearing. “I think I saw you earlier,” said Alec hesitantly. “You were—making out with a faerie girl?” “Yeah, you’re gonna have to be more specific than that,” said the vampire woman. “This is a party. I’ve made out with six faerie girls, four faerie boys, and a talking toadstool whose gender I’m unsure about. Pretty sexy for a toadstool, though.” Raphael covered his face briefly with his non-texting hand. “Why, you want to make something of it?” The woman bristled. “How happy I am to see the Nephilim constantly crashing our parties. Were you even invited?” “I’m a plus-one,” said Alec. The vampire girl relaxed slightly. “Oh, right, you’re Magnus’s latest disaster,” she said. “That’s what Raphael calls you. I’m Lily.” She lifted a hand in a halfhearted wave. Alec glanced at Raphael, who arched his eyebrow at Alec in an unfriendly way. “Didn’t realize Raphael and I were on pet name terms,” said Alec. He continued to study Raphael. “Do you know Magnus well?” “Hardly at all,” said Raphael. “Barely acquainted. I don’t think much of his personality. Or his dress sense. Or the company he keeps. Come away, Lily. Alexander, I hope I never see you again.” “I’ve decided I detest you,” Lily told Alec. “It’s mutual,” Alec said dryly. Unexpectedly, that made Lily smile, before Raphael dragged her away.

For the modern woman, it can be quite difficult to make the time to relax, unwind, and unplug. Especially in today’s ultra fast-paced achievement-oriented workaholic culture. In some circles, if you weren’t working 80 hours a week in addition to a half dozen semi-professional level hobbies while dating 2 or three potential live partners between your volunteer shifts at the aquarium then you are basically good for nothing lazy piece of shit.

at California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium found a banana peel on the floor in front of the Shale Reef exhibit at 3 a.m. On closer inspection, the banana peel turned out to be a healthy, fist-size red octopus. The security officer followed the wet slime trail and replaced the octopus in the exhibit it had come from. But here’s the shocking part: The aquarium didn’t know it had a red octopus living in its Shale Reef exhibit. Apparently the octopus hitchhiked there as a juvenile, attached to a rock or sponge added to the exhibit, and grew up at the aquarium without anyone knowing it was there.

I once believed man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn't support this opinion. In the camp, there was no difference between man and beast, except maybe that a very hungry human was capable of stealing food from its little ones while an animal, perhaps, was not.

When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he'd got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keat's Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere here, I'm not yet ready to take them out and look at them again.

(Jen gets completely sloshed and it's not her wedding) I was supposed to meet Carol and her family at the aquarium the next morning, and somehow had the presence of mind to leave a voicemail apologizing in advance for not being able to make it. I was please at myself for being so responsible and considerate. After I left the message, I blissfully headed off to bed, wearing a face full of makeup, all my grown up jewelry, and a relatively restrictive girdle. Suffice it to say, yesterday was rough, what with my apartment spinning and all. But today I felt better. That is, until Carol played me the voice mail I left for her at 1:03 AM. Somehow I thought I had been able to hold it together on the phone. Following is a transcript of the message I left: 30 seconds of heavy breathing, giggling, and intermittent hiccups (At first Carol thought it was a 911 call.) Oh, heeheehee, I waassshh wayyyting for a beep. But noooooo beeeeeeep. Why don't you hash a beep on your, your, ummmmmm...celery phone? Noooooo beeeeeeep, hic, heeheeeheee. Um, hiiiiii, itsch JEENNNNNNNN!! It's thirteen o'clock in the peeeeeee eeeemmmmmmm. Heeeeeeeellllllllllloooooooo! I went to my wedding tonight and it wash sooooo niiiiiiiiiice. Hic." More giggling and the sound of a phone being dropped and retrieved Nannyway, I am calling to telllll you noooooooooo fishies tomorry...no fishies for meeee! I hic, heeeee, can't smake it to the quariyummm. Maybeeee you can call me so I can say HIIIIIIIIIIIIIII later hich in the day hee hee hee. Call me at, um, 312, ummmmmmm, 312, uummmmm, hee hee hee I can't member my phone, Hic. Do you know my number? Can you call me and tell me what it isssch? I LIKESH TURKEY SAMMICHES! 10 seconds of chewing, giggling, and what may be gobbling sounds Okay, GGGGGGGGooooooodniiiiiiiiiggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhttttt! No fish! Um, how do I turn this tthing off? Shhhhh, callllls' over. Beeee quiiiiiiietttt, hee hee hee." 15 more seconds of giggles, hiccups, shushing, and a great deal of banging Perhaps this is why most people only have one wedding?

Perhaps an even more surprising case was reported in June 2012, when a security officer at California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium found a banana peel on the floor in front of the Shale Reef exhibit at 3 a.m. On closer inspection, the banana peel turned out to be a healthy, fist-size red octopus. The security officer followed the wet slime trail and replaced the octopus in the exhibit it had come from. But here’s the shocking part: The aquarium didn’t know it had a red octopus living in its Shale Reef exhibit. Apparently the octopus hitchhiked there as a juvenile, attached to a rock or sponge added to the exhibit, and grew up at the aquarium without anyone knowing it was there.

[...] The negative turned positive, black misery sublimated into heightened consciousness, suffering into solidarity!

Apa yang kau lihat di layar yang berpendar ini, Kay? Serupa senja yang tumbuh dari sebatang pohon di sebuah tempat yang kau bayangkan seperti surga. Cahaya lampu itu menyapu wajahmu dengan warna lembayung dan berkilau seperti sayap kupukupu. Tapi tak ada apapun yang kutemukan pada seri wajahmu selain nafsu yang tertahan dan seulas senyum kemesuman. Persis di puncak penantian dari segala perhatian yang tertuju pada dirimu. Mata yang tak pernah menyadari, bahwa mereka tengah tersesat dalam raga belia yang entah milik siapa. Pada aura kemudaan yang berasa sia sia. Benarkah, telah kau reguk semua kebahagiaan dari wajah wajah tolol yang ditunggangi oleh nafsu alter egonya? Atau barangkali, telah habis kau hirup wangi dari kelopak mawar hitam yang tumbuh di ranjangmu setiap pagi? Sudah lama sekali rasanya waktu berlalu. Seperti ketika kau masih suka nongkrong di cafe sambil meneguk cappucino dari cangkir yang perlahan mulai retak. Sementara laju usia terus mengalir dari tenggorakanmu yang bening bagai pualam. Waktu meninggalkan jejak buta di dalam hand phonemu. Menyisakan tatap mata orang orang yang tak lagi mampu memahami atau menafsirkan apa yang tengah engkau lakukan. Bukankah, mereka tak lagi melihatmu sebagaimana adanya dirimu saat ini atau sepuluh tahun dari sekarang. Tak satu pun dari mereka yang percaya, bahwa saat itu usiamu masih belum lewat dua puluh tahun. Mereka hanya mendamba merah muda anggur kirmizi yang tumbuh di dadamu. Tetapi tak ada satu pun telinga yang sanggup melawan sihir dari gelak tawamu yang terdengar getir. Mata mata bodoh yang tak sanggup melupakan bayangan pisang yang dengan brutal kau kunyah sebagai kudapan di tengah jeda pertunjukan. Benarlah, hidup tak seperti kecipak ikan di dalam aquarium transparan yang tertanam di dinding. Atau air kolam di pekarangan yang seakan menjelma jadi bayangan jemari yang tak henti menggapai gapai. Menjadi gelembung gelembung kekhawatiran yang seakan tak sanggup memahami makna puisi yang sengaja ditulis untuk mengabadikan namamu. Ketauilah Kay, taman yang kau bayangkan itu bukanlah surga yang sesungguhnya. Di sana tak ada sungai keabadian atau pangeran tampan yang sengaja menunggu kehadiranmu. Yang ada cuma kelebat kilat dan hujan airmata hitam. Mengucur seperti lendir laknat yang mengalir dari hidungmu saat kau meradang karena influensa. Di sana tak ada satu hal pun yang menyenangkan, Kay. Hanya sedikit saja tersisa hal hal yang busuk dan menjijikkan, sebagai satu satunya bahan obrolan untuk perintang waktu.

The only lesson I got pounded into me was about man's limitless capacity for vice - that and the fact that social distinctions vanish in a concentration camp. I once believed that man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn't support this opinion.

That’s true. It doesn’t make any sense. Welcome to the adult world, coming soon. I work so I can work more. I try not to want anything so maybe I’ll get something. I starve so I can be less and more. I try to be free so I can be alone. And there’s no point to any of it. They left out that part.

Why would you need a ship, Max? You're thinking of leaving already?" No, no," Max said. "This would be just for fun. Or emergencies." Carol's face had darkened and his eyes had gone small. His expression scattered Max's brain so much he started babbling: "It'll have a trampoline. And a big aquarium. An aquarium under the water, inside the ship, where we keep the fish and squids and stuff we like...

We left in the same kind of truck that had brought us to the camp ten years earlier. When it started up, I was taken back to our departure from Pyongyang, and to my mother's tear-lined face as it receded into the distance. The vision struck me with new and unexpected force - for I had all but forgotten my mother.

...here we have the first lesson about the nature of memory: what you wish to forget, you may not be able to. What seems to have died, perhaps is just asleep. On the other hand, sometimes you wish to remember something, and there it stands at the doorway of your consciousness, and refuses to come in. You know you know something, the name of some useless celebrity, perhaps, and yet you cannot fish that name out of your inner aquarium. And this illustrates a critical feature of memory, which resembles, as it turns out, most of the processes in the internal realm: the same cause will regularly yield different, even opposite effects.

Furthermore, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii had begun his oral translation as if he were not quite sure he could make the words hang together, going back over every sentence to iron out the syntactical creases, manipulating the phrases until they were not completely rumpled, smoothing them, clipping them, stopping at every word to illustrate its idiomatic uses and its commutations, accompanying himself with inclusive gestures as if inviting you to be content with approximate equivalents, breaking off to state grammatical rules, etymological derivations, quoting the classics. but just when you are convinced that for the professor philology and erudition mean more than what the story is telling, you realize the opposite is true: that academic envelope serves only to protect everything the story says and does not say, an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit allusions. Torn between the necessity to interject glosses on multiple meanings of the text and the awareness that all interpretation is a use of violence and caprice against a text, the professor, when faced by the most complicated passages, could find no better way of aiding comprehension than to read them in the original, The pronunciation of that unknown language, deduced from theoretical rules, not transmitted by the hearing of voices with their individual accents, not marked by the traces of use that shapes and transforms, acquired the absoluteness of sounds that expect no reply, like the song of the last bird of an extinct species or the strident roar of a just-invented jet plane that shatters the sky on its first test flight. Then, little by little, something started moving and flowing between the sentences of this distraught recitation,. The prose of the novel had got the better of the uncertainties of the voice; it had become fluent, transparent, continuous; Uzzi-Tuzii swam in it like a fish, accompanying himself with gestures (he held his hands open like flippers), with the movement of his lips (which allowed the words to emerge like little air bubbles), with his gaze (his eyes scoured the page like a fish's eyes scouring the seabed, but also like the eyes of an aquarium visitor as he follows a fish's movement's in an illuminated tank).

Only around 1983 did I begin to realize that not he but rather Kim Il-sung and his regime were the real causes of my suffering. They were the ones responsible for the camp and for filling it with innocent people. All during my childhood, Kim Il-sung had been like a god to me. A few years in the camp cured me of my faith.

A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was clearly the Western World's substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convolsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend.

The clear liquid in our eyes is seawater and therefore there are fish in our eyes, seawater being the natural medium of fish. Since blue and green are the colours of the richest seawater, blue and green eyes are the fishiest. Dark eyes are somewhat less fecund and albino eyes are nearly fishless, sadly so. But the quantity of fish in an eye means nothing. A single tigerfish can be as beautiful, as powerful, as an entire school of seafaring tuna. That science has never observed ocular fish does nothing to refute my theory; on the contrary, it emphasizes the key hypothesis, which is: love is the food of eye fish and only love will bring them out. So to look closely into someone's eyes with cold, empirical interest is like the rude tap-tap of a finder on an aquarium, which only makes the fish flee. In a similar vein, when I took to looking at myself closely in mirrors during the turmoil of adolescence, the fact that I saw nothing in my eyes, not even the smallest guppy or tadpole, said something about my unhappiness and lack of faith in myself at the time. ...I no longer believe in eye fish in [i]fact[/i], but still do in metaphor. In the passion of an embrace, when breath, the win, is at its loudest and skin at its saltiest, I still nearly think that I could stop things and hear, feel, the rolling of the sea. I am still nearly convinced that, when my love and I kiss, we will be blessed with the sight of angelfish and sea-horses rising to the surface of our eyes, these fish being the surest proof of our love. In spite of everything, I sill profoundly believe that love is something oceanic.

To know Seattle one must know its waterfront. It is a good waterfront, not as busy as New York's, not as self-consciously colorful as San Francisco's, not as exotic as New Orleans, but a good, honest, working waterfront with big gray warehouses and trim fishing boats and docks that smell of creosote, and sea gulls and tugs and seafood restaurants and beer joints and fish stores--a waterfront where you can hear foreign languages and buy shrunken heads and genuine stuffed mermaids, where you can watch the seamen follow the streetwalkers and the shore patrol follow the sailors, where you can stand at an open-air bar and drink clam nectar, or sit on a deadhead and watch the water, or go to an aquarium and look at an octopus.

I remember his last day. He was lying calmly in bed with his eyes closed, when his whole body suddenly went slack. He made a little gesture with his hand, smiling slightly—what I later realized was his final farewell. That’s how he died, without our even realizing it. That scene changed my perception of death. Previously, it always wore a mask of terror; I never imagined it could be so peaceful. Since then, death no longer scares me. My father showed me it could be a moment for smiling.

Night-time, regarded as a separate sphere of creation, is a universe in itself. The material nature of man, upon which philosophers tell us that a column of air forty-five miles in height continually presses, is wearied out at night, sinks into lassitude, lies down, and finds repose. The eyes of the flesh are closed; but in that drooping head, less inactive than is supposed, other eyes are opened. The unknown reveals itself. The shadowy existences of the invisible world become more akin to man; whether it be that there is a real communication, or whether things far off in the unfathomable abyss are mysteriously brought nearer, it seems as if the impalpable creatures inhabiting space come then to contemplate our natures, curious to comprehend the denizens of the earth. Some phantom creation ascends or descends to walk beside us in the dim twilight: some existence altogether different from our own, composed partly of human consciousness, partly of something else, quits his fellows and returns again, after presenting himself for a moment to our inward sight; and the sleeper, not wholly slumbering, nor yet entirely conscious, beholds around him strange manifestations of life—pale spectres, terrible or smiling, dismal phantoms, uncouth masks, unknown faces, hydra-headed monsters, undefined shapes, reflections of moonlight where there is no moon, vague fragments of monstrous forms. All these things which come and go in the troubled atmosphere of sleep, and to which men give the name of dreams, are, in truth, only realities invisible to those who walk about the daylight world. The dream-world is the Aquarium of Night.

Look—here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot-stub upon which it is contentedly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. Do we see the same thing? We’d have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do. There will be necessary variations, of course: some receivers will see a cloth which is turkey red, some will see one that’s scarlet, while others may see still other shades. (To color-blind receivers, the red tablecloth is the dark gray of cigar ashes.) Some may see scalloped edges, some may see straight ones. Decorative souls may add a little lace, and welcome—my tablecloth is your tablecloth, knock yourself out.

God, San Francisco was such a thief. A lady of the night, a sorceress with her hands out. Every time, all my years as a child, that we crossed the bridge, we had to pay to get in, pay to get out, pay for every little thing. Oakland was free, San Francisco was not. Pay me, pay me. Pay for the Pacific Ocean and the beach. I am expensive, the city always said, so pay me for my wonderful dark treats like the Steinhart Aquarium, with its dark wide hall lit up by tank after tank of bright gold green blue sharks dolphins whales stinger fish, cold-eyed still-as-a-corpse fish that didn't blink or budge when we tapped the thick glass with our fingernails. Pay, the voice said, to whomever took us on Saturday to the Fleischacker Zoo ... the hand of San Francisco reaches out to grab your stupid little nickels and dimes. Pay. Even as I stood in front of the Fat Lady, whose cackling gap-toothed twelve-feet-high, three-feet-wide body made me laugh for a solid hour, even as I collapsed in tears driven out of my eyes by laughter, I understood that the other name for San Francisco wasn't Frisco; it was pay you dumb jerks from Oakland pay.

Fo Black lives on Canal Street, which used to be a real canal. He didn't speak very good English, because he hadn't left Chinatown since he came from Taiwan, because there was no reason for him to. The whole time I talked to him I imagined water on the other side of the window, like we were in an aquarium. He offered me a cup of tea, but I didn't feel like it, but I drank it anyway, to be polite. I asked him did he really love New York or was he just wearing the shirt. He smiles, like he was nervous. I could tell he didn't understand, which made me feel guilty for speaking English, for some reason. I pointed at his shirt. "Do? You? Really? Love? New? York?" He said, "New York?" I said, "Your. Shirt." He looked at his shirt. I pointed at the N and said "New," and the Y and said "York." He looked confused, or embarrassed, or surprised, or maybe even made. I couldn't tell what he was feeling, because I couldn't speak the language of his feelings. "I not know was New York. In Chinese, ny mean 'you.' Thought was 'I love you.'" It was then that I noticed the "I♥NY" poster on the wall, and the "I♥NY" flag over the door, and the "I♥NY" dishtowels, and the "I♥NY" lunchbox on the kitchen table. I asked him, "Well, then why do you love everybody so much?

Goldfish in a glass bowl are harmless to the human mind, maybe even helpful to minds casting about for something, anything, to think about. But goldfish let loose, propagating themselves, worst of all surviving in what has to be a sessile eddy of the East River, somehow threaten us all. We do not like to think that life is possible under some conditions, especially the conditions of a Manhattan pond. There are four abandoned ties, any number of broken beer bottles, fourteen shoes and a single sneaker, and a visible layer, all over the surface, of that grayish-green film that settles on all New York surfaces. The mud at the banks of the pond is not proper country mud but reconstituted Manhattan landfill, ancient garbage, fossilized coffee grounds and grapefruit rind, the defecation of a city. For goldfish to be swimming in such water, streaking back and forth mysteriously in small schools, feeding, obviously feeding, looking as healthy and well-off as goldfish in the costliest kind of window-box aquarium, means something is wrong with our standards. It is, in some deep sense beyond words, insulting.

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie. I remember how much I used to stutter. I remember the first time I saw television. Lucille Ball was taking ballet lessons. I remember Aunt Cleora who lived in Hollywood. Every year for Christmas she sent my brother and me a joint present of one book. I remember a very poor boy who had to wear his sister's blouse to school. I remember shower curtains with angel fish on them. I remember very old people when I was very young. Their houses smelled funny. I remember daydreams of being a singer all alone on a big stage with no scenery, just one spotlight on me, singing my heart out, and moving my audience to total tears of love and affection. I remember waking up somewhere once and there was a horse staring me in the face. I remember saying "thank you" in reply to "thank you" and then the other person doesn't know what to say. I remember how embarrassed I was when other children cried. I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and all the fish died. I remember not understanding why people on the other side of the world didn't fall off.

I leave entry for the first day of the tenth month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls This morning I fetched the small cardboard box with the word AQUARIUM and the picture of an octopus on it. It is the box that originally contained the shoes Dr Ketterley gave me. When Dr Ketterley told me to hide Myself from 16, I took the ornaments out of my hair and placed them in the box. But now, wanting to look my best when I enter the New World, I spent two or three hours putting them back in, all the pretty things that I have found or made: seashells, coral beads, pearls, tiny pebbles and interesting fishbones. When Raphael arrived, she seemed rather astonished at my pleasant appearance. I took my messenger bag with all my Journals and my favourite pens and we walked towards the two Minotaurs in the South-Eastern Corner. The shadows between them shimmered slightly. The shadows suggested the shape of a corridor or alleyway with dim walls and, at the end of it, lights, flashes of moving colour that my eye could not interpret. I took one last look at the Eternal House. I shivered. Raphael took my hand. Then, together, we walked into the corridor.

Go away,” she said voicelessly. Aureliano, smiled, picked her up by the waist with both hands like a pot of begonias, and dropped her on her back on the bed. With a brutal tug he pulled off her bathrobe before she had time to resist and he loomed over an abyss of newly washed nudity whose skin color, lines of fuzz, and hidden moles had all been imagined in the shadows of the other rooms. Amaranta Úrsula defended herself sincerely with the astuteness of a wise woman, weaseling her slippery, flexible, and fragrant weasel’s body as she tried to knee him in the kidneys and scorpion his face with her nails, but without either of them giving a gasp that might not have been taken for that”“breathing of a person watching the meager April sunset through the open window. It was a fierce fight, a battle to the death, but it seemed to be without violence because it consisted of distorted attacks and ghostly evasions, slow, cautious, solemn, so that during it all there was time for the petunias to bloom and for Gaston to forget about his aviator’s dream in the next room, as if they were two enemy lovers seeking reconciliation at the bottom of an aquarium. In the heat of that savage and ceremonious struggle, Amaranta Úrsula understood that her meticulous silence was so irrational that it could awaken the suspicions of her nearby husband much more than the sound of warfare that they were trying to avoid. Then she began to laugh with her lips tight together, without giving up the fight, but defending herself with false bites and deweaseling her body little by little until they both were conscious of being adversaries and accomplices at the same time and the affray degenerated into a conventional gambol and the attacks became”“caresses. Suddenly, almost playfully, like one more bit of mischief, Amaranta Úrsula dropped her defense, and when she tried to recover, frightened by what she herself had made possible, it was too late. A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like. She barely had time to reach out her hand and grope for the towel to put a gag between her teeth so that she would not let out the cat howls that were already tearing at her insides.

How recently have the sharks been fed?" the guy next to me asked. Alex and I were in a small room with a dry-erase board, a perky blonde aquarium emplyee, and three guys from Rutgers who'd won their fraternity Christmas prize. True to Alex's promise, no one had seen me in my miniscule jungle print. Another perky girl had handed me a wet suit and pointed me into a changing room. So as I listened to the basics of shark tank etiquette, I was fully encased in blue neoprene from ankle to jaw. The frat boys kept sneaking looks at me when they thought I-and Alex-wasn't looking. It made me feel just a little bit better. Alex's promise that I didn't have to get into the water if I really didn't want to helped, too. It had gotten me out of the car and into the aquarium. "You can do it," he'd coaxed. "Yes," I'd answered, thinking of the skateboarder a little and "fake it til you make it" more. "I can do it." "Yesterday." Perky Girl answered the feeding question. "Believe me. They're not hungry." I wanted to know exactly how she knew that.Did she ask the sharks? "Okay," she chirped. "Let's get snorkeling.

Something Rich and Strange She takes a step and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I'll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she has passed the Red Cross courses. The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won' t hit her head on a rock and for the first time she's afraid and she's suddenly back underwater and hears the rush of water against her ears. She tries to hold her breath but her knee smashes against a boulder and she gasps in pain and water pours into her mouth. Then for a few moments the water pools and slows. She rises coughing up water, gasping air, her feet dragging the bottom like an anchor trying to snag waterlogged wood or rock jut and as the current quickens again she sees her family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep from it as the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into the whiteness and she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and the water holds her there and she tells herself don't breathe but the need rises inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through her chest and throat and as that need reaches her mouth her mouth and nose open and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room, the smell of chalk dust that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final, beautiful thought - that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism's colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.

up for it, and I’m sorry. That’s not enough. You’re going to search until you find something, and you’re going to tell me. Right now. Sheri. Please. You do it now or we’re gone. You give me some way to have some sympathy for you as I stand in this nice house, all lovingly redone, and think about the broken house you left us in, with its leaky roof and no heat and no insulation and nothing. Tell your sob story about the fucking war, whatever it was that my mom thought you were so broken about. My grandfather closed his eyes. No story ever explains. But I’ll give you what you want. I think I know the moment you want, because I made a kind of decision. There was some change. But I can’t start the story at the beginning. I’ve never been able to do that. I have to start at the end and then go back, and it doesn’t finish, because you can go back forever. Do it, my mother said. I don’t think Caitlin should hear. She can hear. Okay. You’re her mother. That’s right. So I won’t give the awful details, but I was lying in a pile of bodies. My friends. The closest friends I’ve ever had. Not piled there on purpose, but just the way it ended up because I had been working on the axle, lying on the ground. And the thing is, the war was over. It had been over for days, and we were laughing and a bit drunk, telling jokes. There was something unbearable about the fact that we’d all be going our separate ways now. The truth is that we didn’t want to leave. We wanted the war over, but we didn’t want what we had together to be over. I think we all had some sense that this was the closest we’d ever be to anyone, and that our families might feel like strangers now. So that’s it? You couldn’t be a father and husband because you weren’t done being a buddy? No. No. It’s the way it happened, in a moment that was supposed to be safe. After every moment of every day in fear for years, we were finally safe, and that’s when the slugs came and I watched my friends torn apart and landing on me, dying. That’s the point. We were supposed to be safe. And with your mother, too, I was supposed to be safe. A wife, a family. The story doesn’t make any sense unless you know every moment before it, every time we thought we were going to die, all the times we weren’t safe. You can’t just be told about that. You have to feel it, how long one night can be, and then all of them put together, hundreds of nights and then more, and there’s a kind of deal that’s made, a deal with god. You do certain terrible things, you endure things, because there’s a bargain made. And then when god says the deal’s off later, after you’ve already paid, and you see your friends ripped through, yanked like puppets on a day that was safe, and you find out your wife is going to die young, and you get to watch her dying, something that again is going to be for years, hundreds of nights more, all deals are off.