Jim Fish.
A bright yellow fabric caresses her skin. Hong Kong actress, Elanne Kwong is next to me and I’m drawn to the yellow, draped over her leg like silken sun cut from a kid’s painting. This image drifts, attaching itself to various fragments of memory and in each scene I can’t place her expression or reconcile what she says with the sound of her voice. All I notice is the contrast of yellow against olive-painted and awkwardly sculpted thighs. I try to keep that picture still, assuring myself that it’s why she’s beautiful –that I notice how beautiful she is in a unique way –but I can’t. With each new detail the rest must be re-evaluated and, in turn, each change (∆y) itselfmust be integrated (\sum \to \int where ∆y→∞) into the scene. I explain again that it wasn’t my fault when Arlie stopped breathing.
It starts with sitting on fresh pink linen in a dorm closed off by pale strawberry curtains. The light coming through is inoffensive, like the chatter outside that falls dead before I can make it out. Physical disturbances in the air, I say to myself. If Elanne Kwon were in the room, her leg tied in yellow ribbon, she might ask what I am mumbling. “Your ear!”I could say, “it helps translate waves into words, images or even textures that make up memory. You couldn’t just remember a series of vibrations.”
She is not impressed and she frowns. “Don’t pretend that you actually think this through logically. Like everyone else, you panic when you think about something that hurts you, whether or not it happened reasonably.” She would say something like that –something about my calmness seeming aggressive, something that makes it obvious that she does not understand. Or perhaps the tone’s not right. Maybe she’s calm, herself –concerned and solemn, “She’ll be awake soon. You can let her know that you’ll make things better soon.”
Afterwards, far less excited about my insights on memory and sound, I am lying next to Arlie at home. The lining of her liver is tender, and the acidity of her stomach unsettles her, but for the most part she is disorientated and fatigued. I want to hold her so close, allow our bodies to fool me into thinking that I can keep her safe, that I can shield her from enemy fire. But, instead I hesitate, apprehensive that she’ll be disgusted, bored, or that she’ll get sick from the motion. I’m afraid to fall asleep. I’m exhausted. I didn’t, but I should –at this point –gently relinquish the sheet and swivel my knees out of bed. Elanne Kwong with a yellow scarf wrapped around her hips sits in the dark on the landing outside the room and I stand in front of her. “I do panic,”I say. The darkness makes me wonder whether she hears. It occurs to me that I’ve told her this before –that I’ve been with her before any of this. Do I keep noticing the legs and the yellow because we’ve slept together?
It’s impossible to tell for sure.
One night, she sits beside me on my bed, holding a Chinese tea cup of yellow powder. Imagine using a yellow pencil to colour a many-rayed sun on a large vertical canvas. The layers of yellow slide like graphite, some remaining on the canvas, others (infinitesimally small) floating down and being caught in this cup. “Your mother’s outside,”she says looking at the yellow crystals –I wonder how such fine grains could still hold pigment. “She’ll have to find you.”
“It shouldn’t bother you so much if things are out of order,”she says and I recall the psychological adage that if you hear a conversation out of order, your logical mind reorders it before committing it to memory, like the ear unscrambling waves.
“I’m not stupid,”I say. “we impose linear orders on things so that we can deal with them, fill in the gaps and missing colours so that they can be processed without confusing us. Like partially ordered sets. It’s like this…
Let Abe a set of memories (concerning both events and thoughts) that are subsumed into your identity and let ρ be the relation “causes”, (i.e. a ρ b if a causes b). (A,ρ) is then a partially ordered set (poset[1]). Let k be your current state of mind : a ρ k \forall a \in A\{k}. If there exists (\exists) an e: e ρ a \forall a \in A\{e} →(A, ρ) is a lattice, and teleologically, e is the single most important influence on k. Presupposed here is, of course, the imposition of an order and the possibility of a homeomorphism such that ρ might be substituted with “is more influential than”. Furthermore, the likelihood of a unique k and/or unique e might be insignificant, except in the case of fish with |A| \approx 2.
“…I know that it’s pointless to look for order or initial causes. They’re just excuses and empty consolations.” I say.
Elanne Kwong listens to the story about my fish, my mind is swimming somewhat at this stage. “It’s okay,”she says. “I might have given you too much.”
Arlie and I had fish. Jim was my fish and he was kept company by a jumping fish. The jumping fish kept escaping from the small fish-bowl, and so sometimes we used a grey cooking-tray to stop her from jumping out and suffocating. She’d still jump of course, and we’d watch her mope close to the stones for a few days after hitting her head. Jim was pretty fascinated by her, and was close-by whenever she was fixing to jump, although he kept his distance when she sulked at the depths of the bowl.
One day, we saw Jim with her near the stones. When she returned to the surface a few days later, he hadn’t moved. He stayed there, pining after her until his stomach began to bloat and what at first appeared to be lazy finning lapsed into a drift, and then finally he was floating sideways at the surface. His little gills had not been used to the deep water like those of the jumping fish.
I don’t remember whether Jim died before Arlie stopped breathing in the car or not. I don’t really remember the sequence between the night I see Elanne Kwong with the yellow scarf after the hospital (it must have been a hospital, with white instead of strawberry sheets), and the car. I may have been upset some of the time but I was calm. I wanted her to calm down.
“The water would not have been so deep that your fish couldn’t swim there.” Elanne Kwong says, skeptically interrupting. “Maybe the jumping fish hit Jim on the way down,”she returns to the empty teacup. “After hitting its head…maybe it was his head and not his gills?”
I don’t remember how I react to that. In any case, there should be nothing I ought to feel guilty about. I’ve never told Elanne Kwong how beautiful Arlie was. I haven’t confessed that the same trepidation from being beside her would be repeated and stretched over the following months –wanting so much to comfort her, but too afraid to touch her. Beautiful and inconsolably sad. I’m sitting in the car seat with that succession of moments between us, like a pulse of light from a supernova. Rather than attempt to reconcile the disparate timeline evoking the collapse, I console myself that everything is as it should be (\sum ∆y→0 as y→∞).
I think Elanne Kwong, wearing a guava t-shirt, will open the car door soon. My mind drifts and I imagine seeing myself climb into the driver’s seat. What do I say? Tell myself that all powerless experiences should be replayed, their outcomes altered with the newly developed coping tools? Tell myself that everything he fears will happen, happens –it won’t matter so much? Tell him the sun’s light isn’t coherent, but if painted it can be filtered into a flat and bright yellow?
I get a small fright when an unfamiliar body resumes the driver’s seat. She looks at the sun, and its fingers. “I don’t want to forget,”I tell her. “I don’t want to rearrange and recolour the memories until they resemble something I’m okay with.” I want to say that I don’t want to be okay with it, but I might have said this already.
The girl looks away from the sun, her eyes toward me for the first time. “You’re worried that it’s a compromise between relinquishing and reconciling, that you can’t reconcile your Arlie before the hospital with the one after.”
“No,”I say, half to myself. “They’re the same. I know. People don’t act rationally.”
“But if you don’t believe it yourself, your efforts to see her as both widens the rent. Neither Arlie is real.”(a \in Ɽ → a+i,a-i \in Ɽ) Do you ever wonder which of Kafka’s girls he loves most?
Caressing this girl’s leg is a soft red fabric. The red seems ornamental, flowing down from her wrist to her hips and slightly touching her thighs. The thighs are beautiful, they would arouse me if I would let them. The red is a bit harsh; not so delicate like a daffodil yellow.
(a,b) \in ρ→(b,a) \in ρ \forall a,b \in A(a≠b) (anti-symmetric)
(a,b) \in ρ \cup (b,c) \in ρ→(a,c) \in ρ \forall a,b,c \in A(transitive)
