Watch the trailer forLittle Fishbelow:
Little Fish
August, twenty-six months ago.
This is my earliest memory.
I saw him across the platform, another person too old to be there.
He was handsome and he smiled at me and I thought our cheap nostalgia made us kindred spirits.
For a moment I forgot to smile back.
The teenage lifeguard gave my tube a little kick and said, Go!
The top opened up as the slide paled with sunlight, and the blue afternoon yawned above me.
I splashed into the shallow pool where mothers stood knee-deep, lazily awaiting their children’s safe return.
A storm was coming.
January, twenty-two months ago.
In the beginning, they called it NIA, the neuroinflammatory affliction, causing a slow deterioration of memories.
And in the beginning, we were not scared.
In San Francisco we were expert optimists.
Jude liked to visit the block of exotic animal shops in the Sunset after brunch.
The shopkeeper let him hold a patient iguana each afternoon we visited.
I’ll call him Seymour, Jude said, gently stroking the scales on its head.
We are not taking him home, I said.
But then Seymour cansee more, Jude said.
The small mansion with bay windows we would buy in Pacific Heights.
Our modest yacht where we’d let friends hold their weddings.
Summers in Spain and winters in South Africa.
All right, I said, and laughed.
Swear, he said.
I said, I swear.
I swear I will marry you.
No one’s going to Baltimore, anyway, I said, and we all laughed at that one.
The shopkeeper lifted the bag, heavy now with the water and the fish.
He said, It’s not true what they say, you know, about fish and their memory.
That they have none?
He frowned and twisted the bag shut.
They can remember longer than most people think, he said.
I guess they still forget.
But not right away.
Look at them, said the shopkeeper.
And look at all they get to rediscover.
We took the fish home.
February, twenty-one months ago.
We were a little drunk and Jude was beginning to get a little scared.
Look, Jude said.
Let’s tell each other all our important memories now, in case this thing gets us.
Get us, I repeated.
This isn’t funny.
It’s in Texas.
There are major cities in Texas.
They can’t quarantine Dallas.
And we don’t even know what causes it yet.
They don’t really know what causes Alzheimer’s and we seem to live with that.
He got quiet, holding my hips under the covers.
Okay, he said.
All I knew was that my dad told me it was all right.
Maybe we should just stay here in bed, I said.
Then we’ll never get it.
We’ll install a dumb waiter and dolly up pain au chocolat from downstairs.
I stole money from the hat of a homeless man when he fell asleep.
I remember his sign said Hungry Hungry Hobos.
I said, I can live off of chocolate and bread.
I know I can.
He said, Stop it.
When I was twenty-four, when my mother died, I was the only one in the room.
I was holding her hand and I saw her stop breathing, and I didn’t do anything.
I didn’t go get my dad or a nurse.
I just sat there with her.
Even though I knew she was gone.
I said, I’m sorry, but I don’t remember my life before Jude.
We should write this down, Jude said.
We should write it so we don’t forget it.
We won’t forget it, I said.
How do you know?
What we have are feelings.
You don’t forget feelings.
I remember the way you looked when we decided to get married.
Look, I said, holding a cell phone screen up to my mouth.
I’m your aquarium.
March, twenty months ago.
A young researcher took the stage to make the announcement.
She had blonde hair she kept brushing out of her eyes.
I am pleased to announce we have identified the root cause of NIA, Melinda said.
We have successfully identified in all recorded cases the absence of an enzyme necessary for memory retention production.
Then she did something strange, but also kind of charming.
She stifled what sounded like a hiccup, and her eyes got even wider.
She clutched the podium with her slender hands.
She’s pretty, I said.
We are still on thewe are still trying toI’m sorry, she sputtered.
She stacked and restacked her note cards.
The buzz of the audience reached the microphones.
No one came to the stage to help her, and she said nothing.
Jude quickly turned off the television.
Then he stood and walked over to unplug it.
When I went to him, crouched near the outlets behind the credenza, he was breathing fast.
I suppose I was, too.
Until then, we hadn’t seen it happen to someone before our own eyes.
I have an idea, he said.
We got in the car and Jude drove and drove.
We didn’t turn on the radio.
He tried another set, and another, and then there were no more doors to try.
I stood by the car, watching him.
He had brought a camera and threw it down next to his feet.
It’s okay, I said.
He walked over to me.
We’ll just go somewhere else, I said.
The rain clouds were clearing and the moon was coming out.
Jude’s camera lay next to us, where in its lens we were only tiny furious reflections.
Afterwards, I put my hand on Jude’s chest and felt the oceanic beating.
I said, How could I ever forget this.
April, nineteen months ago, through October.
He pulled off the highway in Bodega and walked into the marshes.
He bent down and splashed water on his face.
I did not photograph it.
Philadelphia got bad some time in the summer.
Nothing had been stolen.
I watched still, convinced I was right.
He worked night and day and came home after a week and never talked about it.
My mother called from Germany, where she was a nurse.
Maybe we never took the iguana home.
Maybe we just continued to go to the shop in the Sunset on the weekends.
To maintain some sense of normalcy.
I was a veterinary technician, and was hard at work that summer.
Who’s to say if they had any memory of their owners.
Who’s to say who forgot whom.
The shopkeeper did finally own the store in full.
I remember he showed us the deed the day it arrived.
To find them roving the streets, wondering where their homes were.
She called me one afternoon and started talking very fast about the value of love in wartime.
She said it was foolish to dedicate our lives to someone who was sure to die.
Greyson, I said.
There’s no war on.
I didn’t realize the call was accidental until she said, Who’s Greyson?
My mother called once more from Germany, as autumn set in.
She said she had fallen in love again, with a man named Bruno.
He was taking her to Italy and they were going to live there together until this ended.
He makes the best arancini I’ll ever taste, she said.
Don’t worry, dear.
Don’t come here.
I’m doing this for myself.
The scientist said, Maybe that’s not the lesson.
November, twelve months ago.
We’re not taking new residents, the nurse said over the phone.
I’m not looking to move there, Jude said.
I’m looking for my father.
So is everyone else, the nurse said, and hung up.
No new residents, we can’t help you, leave us alone.
I told him to stop calling, but he didn’t.
They were like that everywhere.
We didn’t blame the hospitals or nursing homes.
They did all they could, until they couldn’t.
Sometimes they’d leave them there on the steps of building.
And this was late November, the beginning of winter.
December, eleven months ago.
I should have told her not to come.
And the panic, which was proving more infectious than NIA, still hadn’t reached us.
I should have told her that the new year would calm things down.
But Jude insisted that if we were all together, we’d be safe.
He had ideas about how to survive this, and strength in numbers was one of them.
If she can just get to us.
If only one forgets, I muttered.
I watched the camera close in on the bodies before swinging away at the last moment to the newscaster.
It’s beautiful here, she said through the cell phone’s static.
How far away are you?
When she didn’t answer his question, I asked, What does it look like?
She paused and then said, Another planet.
Like no one ever thought to live here.
She got back in her car for the final leg through Nevada.
I don’t know what happened to her.
Or maybe I forgot it.
I’ve already forgotten what Amelia looked like.
I want to say that she, like Jude, was beautiful.
That Amelia was beautiful.
January, ten months ago.
After the new year, a startup out of Santa Clara launched a chain of memory banks.
Those who couldn’t afford it watched online videos of other people’s orphaned memories.
What would you record?
Getting married to you, he said.
We didn’t invite anyone except the pastry chef downstairs, who came as a witness.
I wore jeans and Jude wore his favorite bright yellow rain slicker.
We used cheap rings from a tourist shop downtown.
Justice of the Peace Cornelia Brown married us.
We had the pastry chef record the ceremony.
I forget where those discs are.
Afterwards, we rain-hiked the old Spanish and Mexican outposts in the Presidio.
The drizzle played on the Redwoods and Eucalyptus above us.
It was so wet I slipped right out of his hands.
We’re in the jungle, Jude said.
No, Tahiti, I said, my eyes closed.
One of those over-water huts.
We’ve just gotten married and we’re in Tahiti.
We did, I said.
We did just get married.
It’s a warm rain.
There are sharks in the water below us.
The kind in the shop down in the Sunset.
There’s no bottom to the ocean in Tahiti.
The water’s so clear, there’s no algae in Tahiti, I said.
Never has been, he said.
What about earthquakes, tsunamis?
It’s the safest place on earth, Jude said.
See, I said.
See, we just created a memory of something that never existed.
Jude grabbed my thumb and squeezed.
He said, I’ll never forget our honeymoon in
Tahiti.
February, nine months ago.
Since what we needed came from the algae, they told us to eat more fish so we did.
We panicked and we ate all the fish we could find.
But it turned out the doctors and scientists were wrong.
There was nothing left in the algae.
And they couldn’t synthesize the enzyme.
It was one of those rare things, a naturally occurring phenomenon that was humanly irreproducible.
Did any water quaver when the last of it dissolved?
For a while, it almost sticks.
It almostfeelslike a necklace, an invisible pendant.
And then, of course, the beads drop.
The thread is the enzyme.
The beads are the moments.
May, six months ago.
Jude succumbed in May.
It’s January, he said.
I held out my hand, showed him the ring.
I said, We’ve been married for five months.
We’ve been married for two weeks, he said, and then he said it again.
The ocean was quiet that day, and there were no seagulls, if you might believe it.
There was the epic stretch of the Golden Gate before us, lit and sprung by the high sun.
I held my shoes in one hand, and his hand in my other.
I thought, he looks the same.
I didn’t let go of his hand.
It’s what you do.
Jude’s insistence on recording our memories didn’t matter, and he forgot everything.
And I was wrong, too: with his memories went all his feelings for me.
There was no order in how the memories were lost.
Why could he remember high school graduation and meeting me, but nothing in between?
Where was the apartment?
Some days I cried with him, because his losses were mine, too.
But some days, I pretended with him.
We had to fit our memories together like a child’s puzzle, but then we were off.
We would be homeless for hours.
We rediscovered the city, places we had known in special ways were now new to us.
We even went back to the Presidio in the rain.
He looked at me with a wet face and said, Have we been here before?
But then just as quickly, he shook his head.
I didn’t think about the day when I would become altogether foreign to him until the day came.
I stood there, hands in my pockets, posing for a picture in front of the manicured hedges.
Jude peeked out from behind the camera and said, A little to the right.
I waved my hands, but he was already looking somewhere else.
I followed him all the way to the intersection, he didn’t look back once.
Maybe he would have fallen out of love with me anyway.
Maybe I would have left him.
Isn’t it worth something that we did have a life together?
Blankets of stretched-out fog were burning off in the sun.
Jude is nearly all gone now, and I am going, too.
One day I’ll re-read this and think someone else’s life must have been beautiful.
One day we won’t be strangers to each other.
We’ll only be new.
