Through the Children's Gate (38 page)

So we talked the children into goldfish, and then the weary fish salesman talked us into bettas instead. (“The goldfish will die,” he said shortly. “Then what?”) We bought them bowls and gravel and decorative architecture to swim around in, and took them home. Luke named his Django—a family joke, since he has often heard the story that this is what I had wanted to call him until his mother vetoed it, firmly—and Olivia gave hers the more descriptive name of Bluie. For a while, she seemed to accept his provisional, placeholding nature with equanimity.

For a pet condemned to live in so many brackets of meta-meaning, a fish passing as a hamster hoping to become a dog, Bluie had a pretty good life. In the constant struggle of parents of two children—one obviously large and one (especially to herself) irrefutably, infuriatingly small—to even life up, we got Bluie a castle, a bigger object for his tank than we got for Django. It sat on the gravel, and rose almost to the surface—a Disney-like princess's residence, with turrets and castellations and plastic pennants. There was even a route from the base of the castle to the top turret that Bluie could swim up. A third betta, won at a street fair, joined Bluie on Olivia's dresser, but this new guy, named Reddie, had only a bowl to swim in. Reddie, we thought, kept pressing to the edge of his bowl to stare at Bluie's real estate with
a certain resentment, the way a guy who lives in a condo on Broadway and teaches at City College might regard a colleague who writes best sellers and lives in a penthouse on Central Park West.

O
ne Sunday night around bedtime, my wife called me into Olivia's room. Bluie was stuck in one of the windows of his castle, wriggling and huffing, with just his head out, looking ahead and trying to swim away. He wasn't supposed to be able to swim up there into the windows—he was supposed to stay within the channel in the castle. But the castle obviously had a design flaw.

“Bluie's stuck in the window!” Olivia cried.

“Calm down, Olivia,” Luke said. “He's just a fish.”

“Bluie is my best friend,” Olivia said. “I could tell him things I couldn't tell anyone else!” Until that moment, Bluie had seemed to be just a finny bit of decor, but at that moment, at least, he mattered to her crucially.

I watched Bluie wriggling in his window, staring out, stuck.

I felt for him, another victim of grandiose Manhattan real estate, undone by his own apartment. It was one of those moments, of which parenting is full, when you scream inside,
I don't know what to do about this!
while the parent you are impersonating says calmly, “I'll fix it.”

I picked up Bluie's bowl and took him into the kitchen, leaving Martha to console Olivia. I slid the kitchen door shut and then reached into the water and tried gently to draw Bluie out of the window. I tugged lightly and then realized that he was really wedged in. I tugged again, just a touch harder. Nothing. I saw that if I pulled at all firmly I was likely to rip his fins right off. I tried pushing him on the nose, urging him back out the way he came. Still nothing. He was stuck.

I looked around the kitchen. The remains of a sea bass that we had eaten for dinner—and that had doubtless, when it was up and swimming, had a lot more personality than Bluie ever did—rested on the counter, filleted skeleton and staring, reproachful head, waiting to be tossed out.

“Why can't Bluie think,
I got into this mess by swimming forward, I'll
go back the other way?”
Luke said. “It's like he doesn't have a rewind function in his brain.”

He had slipped quietly into the kitchen beside me and was watching, an intern to my baffled surgeon. Like many ten-year-olds, he is obsessed by what philosophers call the problem of consciousness but he calls the thinking-and-feeling thing. “Does Bluie know he's Bluie?” he would ask when we watched the fish swimming in his bowl in Olivia's room. “I mean, I know he doesn't think,
Oh, I'm Bluie! But
what does he think—does he know he's him swimming around? Or is he just like a potato or something, only with fins, who swims but doesn't think anything?” What does it feel like, he wanted to know, to be a fish, a hamster, a monkey, a chimp? What does it feel like to be someone else?

When my sister, the developmental psychologist at Berkeley, came to visit, she sat Luke down and said, smoothly, that scientists once thought that life was a problem, but then they had not so much solved the problem as dissolved it, by understanding ever simpler forms of life. Luke's problem, why we know what it feels like to be alive, would probably dissolve into its parts, too. Luke had nodded politely, but I could see he still held that the problem of thinking and feeling certainly felt like a problem when you thought about it.

“Swim backward, Bluie,” I implored. “Get out of there.”

Bluie, of course, did nothing but wiggle some more, wedged in his window.

“Is he thinking,
I'm dying?”
Luke asked at last.

Finally, I settled on a cowardly postponement of what even then I knew to be inevitable. I walked back to Olivia's room. “Let's take Bluie to PETCO in the morning and see if the experts there can help him,” I said to Olivia as we tucked her in. “They've probably got a whole team of guys who are specialists in castle extraction.”

At five in the morning, I woke up to look in on Bluie. He was dead. I tried to think about what to do. I decided to take him out, still stuck in his castle window, and put him and the castle into a white plastic bag. Then I sat down to read at the kitchen table, in the gray light of the June Manhattan dawn, spring in Manhattan feeling so much more
accelerated, so much quicker and time-lapsed and vivid than it does in any other city, a wave of pollen and warmth and renewal blowing in the window.

My sister had given me a kind of reading list to help me answer Luke's questions at a deeper level than I could on my own, and I had read many of the philosophers who have something to say about his problem. I read David Chalmers, who thinks that consciousness is the ghost in the machine, the secret irreducible presence in the mind that distinguishes us from computers and goldfish and other creatures who provide only a zombie-like imitation of our self-knowledge. I read those philosophers who think that what we call consciousness is just an illusion, and bears the same relation to the workings of our real minds that the White House press spokesman bears to the workings of the White House: It is there to find rationalizations and systematic reasons for feelings and decisions made by dim, hidden powers of whose pettish and irrational purposes it is aware only long after the fact.

Of all the theories that I came across, the most impressive was Daniel Dennett's. He argues that consciousness is a by-product, not a point—that it is just the sound that all those parallel processors inside our heads make as they run alongside one another, each doing its small robotic task. There is no “consciousness” apart from the working of all our mental states. Consciousness is not the ghost in the machine; it is the hum of the machinery. The louder the hum, the more conscious you feel. If Bluie had had a more interesting life, he would have known that he was having it. Bluie did not know that he was Bluie because there was not enough Bluie going on in his head to make being Bluie interesting even to Bluie.

Luke woke up and padded into the kitchen. He asked what had happened to Bluie, and I told him. We decided that we would bury Bluie before Olivia woke up, and then tell her that we had taken him to PETCO. That would buy some time, anyway. I emptied Bluie's bowl, hid it in the closet of my office, and Luke and I got dressed. We carried Bluie, in his castle, in his white bag, down the hall to the trash room. We held our caps over our hearts as he went down the chute. Then I
took Luke to school. He was silent on the way, but at the school door, he turned to me.

“Dad, whatever you tell her, don't do a big Bluie's-in-the-fish-hospital thing,” he counseled me. “That she'll never buy.”

When I got home, I woke up Martha. “Bluie didn't make it,” I whispered. “What are we going to do?”

“We're doing the full
Vertigo,”
she announced, almost before her eyes were open. She had obviously been thinking about it since last night. “You're going to PETCO and buying a fish that looks just like Bluie, and then we 're going to put him in the fishbowl and tell her that it's Bluie. If it worked with Kim Novak, it can work with a betta.”

She was referring, of course, to the plot of the fifties Hitchcock classic, which we had seen as part of an impromptu Hitchcock festival about a week before. In
Vertigo,
James Stewart falls in love with a mysterious, cool blond beauty, played by Kim Novak, who he comes to believe is a mystical reincarnation of her long-dead great-grandmother, compelled to imitate her actions. When, like her great-grandmother, she launches herself to her death from a bell tower in a restored Mission town, Stewart is devastated. Haunted and desperate, he stumbles on a brunette shopgirl who looks eerily like Kim Novak, and forces her to dye her hair blond and dresses her in tailored gray suits, turning her into a precise replica of the Kim Novak character.

Actually, though, she
is
the Kim Novak character. She had been hired by the bad guy to play the part of the first Kim Novak character—another woman was thrown off that tower, as part of an insurance scam—and to make it even odder, the fact that this is so is given away by the second Kim Novak character (in a flashback) right in the middle of the movie, so that the viewer, unlike poor Jimmy Stewart, is never in doubt about the reason the new Kim Novak looks like the old Kim Novak. The meaning of Hitchcock's choice to give away the key plot point in the middle of the movie, against the advice of everyone around him, is, I have discovered, a subject as much argued about among the cineasts as the nature of consciousness is among the philosophers.

Martha went to wake Olivia and get her dressed for school.

“Bluie 's in the fish hospital, darling,” I heard her say. Boys and men don't believe in the fish hospital; mothers know that it is where all problems should be sent, while we wait to solve them.

S
he'll just walk in, like Jimmy Stewart, and will be strangely reminded of Bluie—then he'll become Bluie for her,” Martha said a few hours later as we watched the new fish swim around in Olivia's tank, though I could tell that she was trying to reassure herself that this would work. I had gone to PETCO and bought a Bluie look-alike. It was easy—the bettas all looked like Bluie.

But I was beginning to doubt that this was such a good idea. I remembered that in the movie Jimmy Stewart goes nuts, and Kim Novak ends up throwing herself off that bell tower for real.

“Are we doing the wrong thing?” I asked. “I mean, won't she figure out at ten or so that Bluie died?”

All this while, Martha, as a New York mother in crisis, had her cell phone cradled under her jaw. Everybody had had a dead-pet problem. Goldfish had floated to the tops of bowls; hamsters had been found dead in their cages, their furry feet upward; and more gruesome pet-on-pet homicides had taken place, too. Each family had a different tack and a different theory. There were those who had gone the full
Vertigo
route and regretted it; those who had gone the tell-it-to-'em-straight route and regretted that. In fact, about all one could say, and not for the first time as a parent, is that whatever one did, one regretted it afterward.

I made only one call, and that was to my sister the developmental psychologist. She explained to me instantly that it was normal for children to develop intense attachments to pets, even “zombic” ones that did not reciprocate affection, and that a pair of Japanese psychologists, Hatano and Inagaki, had done studies of how children develop intuitive theories of biology by having pets.

“They claim that all kids, Western and Eastern, go from having primarily just psychology and physics to having a ‘vitalist’ biology right around age six,” she told me. “That is, they start to think there is some
vital spirit—you know, kind of like Chinese Chi—that keeps animals and humans alive, gets replenished by food, damaged by illness, and so on. And here's the cool thing. Hatano and Inagaki show, experimentally, that giving kids pet fish accelerates the development of this kind of vitalism. We give them fish as a learning device, though we don't know that when we do it. Olivia is probably in transition from a psychological conception of life to a biological one, which may be why she's so bewildered.”

It seemed that the mere presence of a fish in a bowl, despite the barriers of glass and water and the fact of the fish's mindlessness, acted as a kind of empathy pump for five-year-olds, getting into the corners of their minds. Olivia was a vitalist, and Bluie was no longer vital. According to my sister, children's education proceeds in stages. At three, they're mostly psychologists, searching for a theory of mind; at six, they're biologists, searching for a theory of life. At ten, they're philosophers, searching to understand why our minds cannot make our lives go on forever.

“My sister doesn't think we're going to screw up Olivia's mind,” I said to Martha a few moments later. “She does think that we're going to screw up her theories of biology.” Martha was still watching the tank and trying to see if new Bluie would pass. “Olivia is going to think that dying things go away to PETCO and come back as good as new.”

L
uke was the first one home. He studied the new fish, too. “Does new Bluie know that he's not Bluie?” he asked. Reddie was looking at new Bluie, but we couldn't even guess what he was thinking.

In the end, when Olivia came home from school, we did neither the ingenious Hitchcockian thing nor the honest thing; New York liberals, we did the in-between, wishy-washy, split-the-difference thing. Martha told her that Bluie had been successfully extracted from his castle window by the fish specialists, but he had been so stressed by the experience that he was resting, and it might take a long time for him to recover. Meanwhile, they had given us Bluie's brother.

Olivia took one long, baleful look at the new Bluie.

“I hate this fish,” she said. “I hate him. I want Bluie.”