East is East

The first day he dumped in about a hundred Elassoma, all of them a depressing uniform brown, though some of the males, in a certain light, showed an encouraging grayish tinge. The fish, barely an inch and a quarter long, all but vanished in the vastness of his two hundred gallons, and he began to think that a smaller tank would have served his purpose just as well. But the tank was inhabited now, and he was excited, lit by the same charge that had electrified him when his father surprised him on his eighth birthday with a ten-gallon starter tank. The next day he added another hundred pygmy sunfish and a sampling of other species too—the warmouth, the flier, the least killifish and the golden topminnow, and a pullulating little swarm of half-inch bullheads to patrol the bottom.

He woke the following morning—the morning of the party—to find thirty of his pygmies floating belly up in a slick of mucus at the surface. He checked the pH of the water, and it was fine—slightly acidic, like the peat-tinctured waters of the swamp itself. Puzzled, he fished out the pale bloated little corpses and dumped them in the flowerbed beneath the window. When he came back later that afternoon, half the fish in the tank were dead and even the bullheads were struggling near the surface—and you couldn’t kill them with a hammer. And then he noticed that the water had a distinct yellowish cast to it, as if the fish were swimming in pickling brine or urine instead of the pure filtered well water he’d been careful to provide. Something was wrong, seriously wrong, and he turned to the pages of Axelrod’s Exotic Aquarium Fishes for enlightenment.

Under the section headed “Invasive Organisms,” he discovered that the pristine world he’d created had been infiltrated by undesirable elements. Protozoa—he remembered them from freshman biology, virulent little animalcules with waggling microscopic tails—were blooming in the water—his water—and wiping out the desirable elements. He discovered too that the solution to the problem was permanganate of potash, which would eradicate the protozoa and leave the fishes unharmed, and after driving to a pet shop on the mainland, procuring the chemical and dosing the aquarium with it, he watched most of the remaining fish float slowly to the surface and breathe their last. The next day a swarm of carnivorous water beetles materialized from nowhere to finish off the survivors.

In the absence of Ruth, Jane Shine provided solace. After dinner that evening, he led her down the hallway and into the back parlor, where they stood gazing on the pale massed bodies of the dead.

“It’s a shame,” she said. “All that wasted effort.”

He watched her out of the corner of his eye, her face lit in the soft glow of the aquarium, and he felt guilty. Ruth would kill him. Eat him alive. But he was depressed and discouraged and where was she when he needed her? He sighed. “I guess I’m going to have to tear down the whole thing and start over.” He gave her a rueful smile. “God had the same problem. Or so I hear.”

“It’s so beautiful,” she murmured, her eyes fixed on the aquarium.

They watched as a crippled killifish rose feebly to the surface, enfolded in the spidery grip of a water beetle.

Jane turned to him. “It’s the plants,” she said. “They’re coming in on the plants.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“I’d go to a place like Aquarium City—do you have anything like that around here, in Savannah maybe? Get your plants there. At least you know they’re clean.”

He nodded. Aquarium City. It was so simple: nature was subversive and untidy, and the kindly folks at Aquarium City would be only too happy to sanitize it for him. Yes, of course. And the way she spoke, clipping off each phrase as if it were too precious to part with, reduced him to helplessness. How could he question that voice? She spoke, and he felt like a toppling tree.

Otherwise”—she gestured toward the quivering fish—“well, you could wind up with anything in there.”