We Are All Such Humans Here

In case you're wondering, this is as good a time as any to tell you that I fell into a koi pond when I was three, and by the time my father could pull me out, my eyes were bulging in their sockets like a carp’s, and I’ve gone by the name Fish ever since, which was a far cry better than other names such as Butterball and Porker, given the cruelty of others and the fact I was, according to my mother, a big-boned child. She didn’t care one way or the other about my three- year-old physique, but she wasn’t fond of humiliation, no matter to whom it might have been directed. As a result, friends, family, and casual acquaintances have always known me as Fish, and I’m not sure if, on the day they died, my parents could have told you my Christian name without a mental inventory of my baptism. It was only most recently that my father had taken to calling me Cyrano, and that as a rebuke for Ellen’s leaving. She left because she couldn’t stand to see me so sad and blue, nervous and unhappy all the time, but my father believed that she left because she had discovered that all the poems I had sent to her over the years—in birthday cards and in anniversary cards and as love notes on the bedspread—had been written by others. This was not such a great revelation. I mean all it required was a freshman literature course or Googling a line or two before the author’s name came up—since my reading was hardly wide- ranging or esoteric—but my father believed that I had traded on the benefit of others’ words before finally reaping the disgrace of an exposed if not embarrassed plagiarist. That he gave me the name of the sensitive author rather than Christian, the mouthpiece, was just his engineer’s mind and a bad interpretation at work, in the manner of those who call the monster Frankenstein.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments…” and so on and so on. If Ellen was surprised to find out that such music belonged to Shakespeare rather than Fish, she never said. As a receptionist for an accounting firm, she was not so obtuse. She wouldn’t have wanted to admit such ignorance in any case. Then again, in the moments she opened an envelope containing the usual greeting card schmaltz buttressed by the words of our common betters, she never asked. Then I lost my job, which was my more important failing, and she left, and we never cleared the air.

But really, who would believe such sentiment of a Fish?