He was, like so many New York fish and mice and turtles, a placeholder for other animals, which the children would have preferred to have as pets, but which allergies and age and sheer self-preservation have kept their parents from buying. It is not surprising, these days, to see a set of them on a child’s dresser in Manhattan, held in separate containers, in a kind of glass-bowl parody of the co-op apartment building that surrounds them, each fish furiously pacing its cubic foot of space and waiting for the other to turn up the stereo.Īnd then, in a deeper, damper sense, Bluie was not really a fish at all. The only drawback is that male bettas fight with each other, and have to be kept apart. It can be red or black or violet or blue, and it is, at least according to the pet-store people, the Vietcong of pet fish, evolved in rugged isolation in the rice-paddy puddles of Indochina and just about impossible to kill off. The betta is a handsome fish, with long, sweeping fins.
He was a betta, a goldfish-size fish that the people in pet stores encourage you to buy in place of the apparently tetchy and sickly true Asian goldfish. To begin with, Bluie, as his name suggests, was not actually a goldfish. Bluie’s life and his passing came to involve so many cosmic elements-including the problem of consciousness and the plot-line of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”-that it left us all bleary-eyed and a little shaken. When our five-year-old daughter Olivia’s goldfish, Bluie, died, the other week, we were confronted by a crisis larger, or, at least, more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet.
What does it feel like for a fish to be a fish? Illustration by Philippe Petit-Roulet
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