In college, I lived in an off-campus room. This was one of those highly illegal setups where the landlord barely kept up a mouse-ridden aging four bedroom big old house, but also walled off the dining room and rented out the attic. Because legally only three unrelated people could be on the lease, the other six of us technically subletted from them. Two of the people on the lease were Shelly and Mike. Shelly had a fifty gallon aquarium in the common room. I did not much like Shelly. She was cranky and bossy, and abused her position on the lease to treat the rest of us like her minions.
When we moved in, there were two fish in her tank that she had imaginatively named Oscar (who was an oscar fish), and Jack (who was a jack fish). A year before, there had been twelve small fish in a beautifully kept tank, lovingly fed and adored. Then one day there there were eleven, and Oscar was a little bit fatter. Then like a dismal children's book, there were ten, nine and then eight increasingly paranoid fish. As their number diminished, Oscar noticeably expanded. Then one day, in the expanse of gravel and glass, there was just Oscar and just Jack.
Jack's life was a Kafka-esque nightmare. For some crime or mistaken identity in a past life, he was serving a life sentence in a fifty gallon see-through prison with a stone-cold, homicidal psychopath. He was condemned to swim furiously around the giant, desolate tank twenty-four hours a day, trying to avoid getting cannibalized by the malevolent, predatory Oscar. Like a Roman coliseum audience, we witnessed the quiet but desperate fish drama every time we were in the living room. Even with this traumatic history, though, the ultimate takeaway was that the living room had a big tank with two fish swimming around in it.
Then one day, doing his chores from the house list, my boyfriend may have knocked the aquarium pump plug out of the wall when he plugged in the vacuum, although he was certain that he did not. Most likely the pump simply have failed. Whatever it was, Shelly went ballistic, with screaming accusations of deliberate piscicide. Apparently the overweight stalker depended on the pump more than the fit athlete. The reign of terror had ended. Shelly was howling. Oscar was dead.
Jack, however, was alive, more alive than he had ever been in his whole life. And this is where there exception to fish being mostly floating decor, because within days, Jack developed an observable, quantifiable personality. He stopped his frantic marathon swimming and began to leisurely enjoy hanging out in different areas of the tank. But more extraordinary, Jack took up a hobby: renovation.
Every time you came into the room, the look of the aquarium had completely changed. Small hills would appear in the blue gravel terrain at the front of the tank. The next morning, the front was flat but a promontory had risen in the back left corner. The castle was buttressed, then regraded. Grabbing little mouthfuls of stones, Jack sculpted the eden that had so unexpectedly appeared out of his personal hell. If work is love made visible, Jack was a fish in love.
I can't claim that Jack represents entire genus. I've never observed another fish with much interesting going on, certainly not enough to justify keeping a tank full of them in the house. And Jack was pretty boring before his liberation. But afterward? He was fascinating. He will always be my second thought. Fish really don't have much character. Except Jack.
