Aquarium
Winner of the 2024 Tobias Wolff Award (Fiction)
I always felt that the Aquarium was the eye of the city. From the top, it looked like a deep well that cast a shimmering dark blue shadow on people’s faces, making them seem transparent. The circular corridors of the gallery enclosed it like the Colosseum. Wearing a bulky costume and carrying an oxygen tank, I jumped through its door that opened like a camera shutter, imagining myself as a viscous, metallic raindrop, dissolving into the water.
*
The first day the Aquarium opened, my girlfriend Oksana read me a review of it from The New York Times over breakfast: “a futuristic venue that blends performance art, technology, and costume design…the most unexpected pleasure of this epoch.” It was trending on social media, and we started laughing at Twitter conspiracy theories that the performers must be brainwashed by some kind of sex cult.
“Now I’m curious. Where can I sign up for this job?” I said.
Part of me was serious. If I couldn’t find a job before my visa expired, I would be separated from Oksana, who was also on her work visa. Anything would do, I thought, even acting as a fish. Oksana forwarded the LinkedIn page to me. She raised her eyebrows, surprised that the job required an MFA in performance art: “Does being a fish require a lot of acrobatics? Do you need to spin volleyball with your nose like the sea lions?”
To my surprise, I received an offer soon after applying. On my way to the real-estate building where rehearsals took place, I could hear the chanting of the protesters in front of the Aquarium, divided into two groups: one accused the Aquarium of dehumanizing the workers, the other demanded that we should stop parodying the real captivity and suffering of the animals for human entertainment. Even so, the line in front of the gallery was so long that it wrapped around the block twice.
The director walked into the room–a strand of hair fell from their forehead to their eyes, but they didn’t brush it aside. They looked like a shaman, half god, half ghost. I remembered the untouchable, shiny ones at the top of the social hierarchy of grad school.
The exercise: to act like a fish without the costume, without moving our bodies. They talked as we struggled: “You need to find an aura that makes people doubt what they’re seeing and think, ‘Is that a fish or a human or both?’ even if you are just floating there, perfectly still. I want to see you push your bodies to the limit. You can’t just pretend to be a fish. You must truly become a fish. Work on your eyes. Now, make me feel your fear, your boredom, your endurance, your despair, and kill all these next second. Channel your memories. Have you ever felt like a fish in an aquarium?”
*
The surface of the water looked like a quivering pool of mercury from below. The reflections of jellyfish, anglerfish, sawfish, were constantly shattering and returning to wholeness. Time, unsegmented by clocks, became elastic, liquid. My time in the Aquarium felt like an afterlife. The “before” to this life was in fact “elsewhere,” and I hadn’t been allowing myself to feel nostalgic for it.
Remember when your parents, starving in Shanghai under zero-COVID, told you to never go back. Remember when you were at a sushi restaurant in Florida and the keyword in the Google Maps review was “waitress.” Remember all the gross things that you would rather not think about. I had been a fish in the aquarium all along, so being a fish was not so difficult. Sometimes it was even easier than being a human.
*
To avoid falling asleep at work, I learned how to read lips, and I would come home to tell my girlfriend about the conversations I had overheard:
“I feel so bad for them.” A woman said. The man beside her explained that the performers might have nowhere else to be, and they were taken in so they wouldn’t die on the streets. “Oh.” The woman said, and they moved on.
“That shark looks like an angry old man.” Another person said, pointing at me, a tired young woman.
Oksana laughed. “Poor visitors. Did they even suspect that what they said might be heard?” I was glad that she was amused. She once said that the Aquarium reminded her of how her grandfather died—drowned when building a dam in the Gulags—something she had told me on our first date to explain why she was a journalist.
But it became harder and harder to joke about my work. The casual things I lip-read from the visitors started to get into my head. Every time I heard the word “look,” I had a desire to punch a hole in the glass and escape. Even when I was outside of the Aquarium, I felt a pane of glass before my eyes. I listed reasons why I wasn’t a fish on the left side of one page (e.g., “I can’t swim”) and why I might be a fish on the right side (e.g., “People said my eyes looked like those of a dead fish”). The list on the right was not only longer but also far more interesting than the other.
“Why are we here? What’s the point of this? Don’t read me your artist’s statement. How did you pitch it, you know, to get funding?” I asked the director.
“I just showed them the math. Estimated cost and revenue of running an actual aquarium versus that of a human aquarium. Do you know that an adult dolphin costs about $200,000 and needs $400 worth of mackerels per day? Not to mention the medical expenses, training, maintenance, etc. With that money, how many actors can they hire? You can even charge higher for tickets—actual aquariums are too commonplace for contemporary taste anyways.”
They paused. The look on my face must be beyond disillusionment. “Why are you shocked? Why is it surprising that there is a price for human life when putting a price on animal lives goes unquestioned? If commodification and fetishization are all-encompassing, why expect artists to be the exception? What I’m doing is to draw attention to it, to make it visible and, well, interesting. We’re all going to be exploited one way or another, so why not exploit yourself to parody exploitation?”
*
Once, I fell asleep in the Aquarium. It was so warm and quiet in there that not falling asleep was almost impossible. I dreamed of my childhood courtyard house. It was the first time in a while that I had dreamt. My mother, uncle, and cousin were napping, but I couldn’t fall asleep. The blue shadows in the room thickened into liquid when the cicada chirping stopped. Water surged in from all directions, ready to drown us. I didn’t wake them up; instead, I swam out alone and climbed up the fire escape to the rooftop that had yet to be submerged. My palms were dyed red by the rusty ladder. It was a long time before I dared to look back, and instead of my family, I saw three huge fish in the newly formed brick-walled pond. They looked happy, as if I had not betrayed them, as if they were the ones who had left me.
Another dream was about an escape during some kind of apocalypse. My mother asked me to eat her. I refused. She covered my eyes. When her hand was removed, she had turned into a giant fish. The fish struggled to breathe, her mouth agape: Is it easier now?
I was soon admitted to the hospital for decompression sickness. The nitrogen in my body had dissolved, the doctor explained, forming air bubbles inside my brain, like carbon dioxide in a freshly opened can of Coke. The other performers said that when I was rescued by the lifeguard, I cursed and fought to get back inside the water. I didn’t remember doing it, but it made sense. The longer I stayed in the Aquarium, the more I felt that it was not a means to an end but an end in itself. It was the only place where I could feel anything at all.
*
“Are you really not going to quit your job?” Oksana said.
I said that I would think about it.
“What is there to think about? You almost died. If you want to keep your visa, I’m sure there are other jobs for you. America is not worth your life.” She seemed agitated.
“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “It may sound strange, but the thought of leaving the Aquarium makes me sad. I was less sad as a fish. Not that I was happy there.”
“Do you have any idea how many people are denied their humanhood? And you are just going to throw this life away?” She took a deep breath and softened her tone, “If you don’t want to quit, that’s your decision, but I’m planning to publish this article about the Aquarium, and it might impact your work. I thought that I should ask you first.” She showed me her draft, which ended like this:
Whatever provocative questions the artist behind the Aquarium might want to raise, we can’t just ignore the real-world implications of this project now that many performers have been injured at work. Neither the director nor the audience have anything at stake; the contract workers/performers are the only ones risking their mental and physical health for this project. … To be clear, my critique is not rooted in a conservative desire to censor art. I recognize that coercion can serve a purpose in conceptual art, provided it is executed with judicious intent and accountability. A good example of this is the artistic intervention by Graciela Carnevale that took place in Argentina on Oct 7th, 1968: She locked her audience inside the gallery they thought they were going to visit (for a sensible period of time)—no one inside the gallery took action to escape, and when one person on the street smashed the glass, some of them were angry at the rescuer for ruining the artwork. Although Carnevale claimed authorship to this event, she didn’t attempt to control the outcome; in stark contrast, the director of the Aquarium exerted so much control over the performers that they seemed like a dictator. Carnevale, by forcing the gallery-goers to actively participate, dissolved the dichotomy between the spectator and the spectacle, whereas the Aquarium reinforces and consolidates such a hierarchy. In this regard, the Aquarium is not just ethically problematic—it is also, frankly, bad art.
“You can publish whatever you want. That’s your freedom.” I said. I didn’t explain that we performers weren’t just terrorized by the director, that we had agency, that I felt acting as a fish gave a name to the shapeless feeling that had haunted me. Would she understand it at all? Had she ever felt like a fish in an aquarium?
We sat in silence for a while, and she leaned on my shoulder. Maybe that was all I needed from humans: to be able to feel their presence and not be pushed away.
The director soon announced, possibly in response to the criticism, that they were going to work alongside us as a performer. That week, on Friday night, they stayed inside the Aquarium after work. We thought it must be a part of their performance, so we didn’t intervene—until we returned to work the next Monday morning and realized that they hadn’t moved. The oxygen tank was empty from the beginning. They stated in their will:
“If I’m a human, why is there no place for me in this world? I have tried to perform humanity, but I was treated like a monster; now I’m acting like a fish and people celebrate me as an artist. I still have the desire to be recognized as a human, but this recognition can only be earned as a fish, and why is that?”
The Aquarium kept operating nonetheless, under a reformed schedule delineated in the director’s will: we would go underwater three times a day, two hours each time, to avoid risks of developing decompression sickness; during the breaks in between, we would be moved to the newly opened “Touching Zone,” which allowed us to interact with the visitors.
We didn’t understand the purpose of the Touching Zone, the way we didn’t understand what was inside the director’s mind, as we realized. All we did there was stand awkwardly in fish costumes on our two legs, and there were always people who interpreted “touching” as “do whatever you want.”
“Get a real job!” Someone said in front of the Touching Zone.
“Yeah! Anyone can do your job. Why are you getting paid for doing nothing?”
It’s not nothing, I wanted to say, but I remembered that I was supposed to be a fish. Then I heard a hollow thud through my bones. Blunt pain on my back. A blow to my head. Another after that.
“Stop!” Someone yelled, and another muttered, “Even if I don’t do it, someone else will.” It reminded me of the way I thought about the corned beef sandwich I ate for breakfast: Even if I didn’t eat this piece of meat, someone else would eat it. Either way, this cow was going to be eaten.
*
How do I describe my fatal disorientation? If you have lived in the countryside, you might know that sometimes, a sheep in the flock would stop grazing for no reason. It just stands there, for a long time, as if dreaming with its eyes open. Perhaps it’s like that.
At Jmart, I saw fish crammed into small water tanks. Some of them had their bellies facing up or to the side. The fish reminded me of a dog I saw in elementary school. It was chained to an iron fence, and my mother told me not to release it because it might belong to someone else. I wrote in my weekly journal that I had released the dog, when in fact I hadn’t, and the teacher commented, 子非鱼安知鱼之乐? Later I read the complete debate in its original context: “Zhuangzi said, ‘How these minnows jump out of the water and play about at their ease! This is fish being happy!’ Huizi said: ‘You, sir, are not a fish, how do you know what the happiness of fish is?’ Zhuangzi replied: ‘You, sir, are not me, how do you know that I do not know what the happiness of fish is? … By asking “how do you know the happiness of fish,” you already knew that I know it, and yet you asked me; I know it by standing overlooking the Hao River.’”
I didn’t stay there for long because I feared that I would kneel before the tank and kiss the dirty tiles on the floor, buy as many fish as I could, and release them into the Hudson River. It was rumored that Nietzsche hugged a horse that was being whipped before he went crazy, but why was empathy for another being the threshold in one’s transition to madness, not the other way around? When I was losing consciousness, the desire I thought I had extinguished when I turned away from the fish tanks returned: I wanted to feel everything that fish had felt, even for a second.
*
I woke up paralyzed in the hospital. Oksana told me that she was sued by the director’s sponsors and their family for defamation. Chances were that the lawsuit would drain her savings and there would be no money for my treatment—the insurance plan the Aquarium offered turned out to be pet insurance.
“They asked me to retract that article before suing me, and I refused. I should have agreed, shouldn’t I? Lawyers had warned me about the potential consequences, but I did it anyway. Now that I think of it, I should have never published the article. Maybe that was why the director devised the Touching Zone. Have I ever told you the other side of my grandfather’s story? After he was sent to the Gulags for dissidence, my mother and my grandmother were exiled for three years as well. When they came back, my mother was heavily bullied in school, and she decided to work her way up to join the Party so that she could have a career, a stable life. I had always admired my grandfather, even though my mother blamed him for abandoning them—it was the Party’s fault, I thought, forcing people to choose between two kinds of betrayal, between beliefs and loved ones. Now I’m not so sure about that anymore, and I don’t expect you to forgive me.”
I tried to touch her face, but my hand made a minuscule movement and stopped. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. My warrior woman. I have always liked you and envied you because I could never be against something as firmly and consistently as you were. Why are you, of all people, questioning yourself?
Soon, the hospital reduced my care to the bare minimum: I couldn’t pay them, and they couldn’t kill me. The nurses let their children play in my room.
“Mom said you used to be a fish. Why don’t you look like one?” A girl said, drawing scales on my face and fins on my arms with a marking pen. I smiled, even though no one could see.
Ye Ning (she/they) is a writer raised in Beijing and now based in Connecticut. Their fiction has been published by Sine Theta, shortlisted for the Hong Kong Youth Literary Award, and longlisted for Black Warrior Review's Online Flash Contest.
