It’s movement a kind of flight. Jones watches this impossible thing, it’s long, thin tail passing above like an airplane. The jellyfish are pink clouds that pulse mysteriously, belonging more to outer or inner space than this world we imagine we inhabit. Jones’ face against the aquarium window, his little finger prints visible as he watches a shark move indifferently past. The face is impassive, the blank eyes heartless and never in doubt. It moves through the water a kind of God.
The next tank is the wall of anemone. An astonishment of beauty. After a moment the man standing next to me says, “Imagine waking up to that every day?” His words are soft, though, almost whispered. As if emerging unbidden from his body and then slipping through his lips and into the world, and I can tell he is not looking for conversation. And so we stand there quietly. The puzzling light above refracting through the water, and falling to us as if through stained glass.
It was packed with children, as you might expect, but still, it remained a sweet and manageable excursion. Jones was an explosion of excitement, running from one tank to the next, his finger pointing, his face animated by the most desperate urgency, “Look, look, mommydaddy, look!!” And a fish would glide mysteriously past, unaware of this constructed universe in which it lived. A world not quite of this world, beautiful and narcotic, it manifested around us like the dream it most surely was. And then we came upon the eels, and something in them sent a shudder into Jones’ soul and he was done with the aquatic for the day. “No more fish,” he yelled, running off to the Christmas tree in the foyer, to the decorative presents beneath, certain in his heart that each one contained a universe constructed for him alone.
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