Impossibly, despite the rubber gloves, I had favorites. A certain way the light caught their eyes and all of the sudden this one had a story, a wife and kids and a signed Talking Heads cassette. Take Me From the River. Har har har. The glint made it look like their eyes moved, like they had awoken and found themselves in a nondescript kitchen with rubber gloves thumbing their gills and knife skating, intimately, across their belly scales. Just in this moment of lucidity, they might look past the ground-ice display cooler, past the fillets and the tuna steaks and the shrimp to a little kid, who sees this same spark in every one of the still-bodied eyes.
The spark left, for my sake, when the knife tip traced the second layer of flesh under the scales, spelling my name, or at least, my lines, through the dermis and into the muscle. Sometimes there was a little twitch, a little release of tightened-wire tension from the circumscribing skin no longer feeling quite so much of the burden of protecting its insides. One swift cut all the way through to the spine, the knife bouncing up and down a little as I ran over the vertebrae. I learned in my years here the precise levity with which to hold the knife so that it neither slipped loose nor ground and lost its sharpness against the bone, I learned the precise levity with which to chop off a head in front of a little kid and laugh a little and not look like a psycho.
I don’t even really eat fish anymore. I tried them all and they all had that spark in the eye, they had tree rings in their steaks, they had a deformed muscle that told me they had been bitten and survived. I looked more and more for new and more exotic fish to taste and compare and study, and when I had finally cataloged them all, when I had eaten what could not be eaten and what had not yet been named by the academics, it became entirely uninteresting to me. It just became another job. This one just came in from the boat, had it myself for lunch, take the other half of the very same fish is a story I sold (improbably) more than twice a day.
I got better at talking to the customers, it wasn’t something that came naturally, unlike the knife work. When I came home, almost ten years ago now, I had left a few chunks of my leg and the nicer part of my thinking in a crater on the side of a road a few klicks west of Baghdad. It seemed impossible to work a job without flesh and blood, a job uninterested with the beating heart, with life and the naive struggle for life. I thought about the French Foreign Legion, I thought about contract wet work, I even thought about re-upping. But the kid was around, and I figured I shouldn’t leave him with my parents any longer than I had to. It’s a different kind of obsession with life, having a kid. Suddenly thirty-five million is not an abstraction of anything, it is a year's worth of blood, a year's worth of a primordial engine ticking. My knife cuts a vessel in the fish’s abdomen, and a spurt of blood runs towards me. This is a good balance. Blood for blood, spurt for spurt.
I took my little rascal to the aquarium one day. We walked under a tunnel of glass and overhead drifted barracudas and bluefin tuna and salmon and anglers. My boy looked at their scales, and their colors, and the way the tails moved and pushed against the water. He floated from one end of the tunnel to another, trailing one specimen's slow, bored path over and against the glass. I want to eat that one, he said, and in an instant, in my mind's eye it was pinned by my palm, already still, and the knife was falling and, eyes glittering, it said I don't think this is what the kid meant.