David Vann - Aquarium

They look like hummingbird frogs, Shalini said.

Everything here looks like something else, my grandfather said. These to me look like burglars, with masks on so we won’t recognize them.

They’re so sweet, Shalini said.

They always have that same pattern on their backs, I said. It can be a turquoise background with orange squiggles or an orange background with blue squiggles, but always the same squiggles.

My grandfather was looking around at the other mandarins now, his face so close he was almost touching the glass. You’re right, he said. It’s almost the same pattern. It looks so random, but they all have two circles on their backs, one forward and a bigger one farther back. 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.

I remember he said that, because I’ve thought of it ever since, the idea that we don’t stray far, that what feels like discovery is only the revealing of what was hidden but there, waiting. I remember because I think this might be a path to forgiveness, to realize that no matter how violent, how frightening my mother was, it was not random but at least partly inescapable, that who she was had been set in motion long before and she had to suffer that person as much as I did. And the moment she looked at me in disgust, as if I were a monster, was something she was powerless to hide, because she was overwhelmed. When I think back on all that happened that day, I try to remember she was at a breaking point, try to remember back to before my grandfather appeared, before she was put under such pressure, when we’d arrive home and she’d collapse on her bed and let me collapse on top of her and I clung to her like a frogfish, my hands and feet tucked under, the soft strong mountain of her beneath me, and it felt like we were all the world.