Last Swim

The goldfish died three weeks before Mark's wedding to a woman he'd known for six months—a woman who already hated his friends.

"It's just a fish," Sarah said when I found her flushing it while Mark was at work. She'd moved in two months ago and was systematically erasing him. His books, his routines, his friends. We'd all been warned away with soft excuses Mark never questioned. "It wasn't swimming right anyway. Probably sick."

I thought about the summer after college when Mark and I lived in that apartment with the leaky air conditioning, swimming at the public pool every evening because it was cooler than our place. We'd float on our backs talking about everything and nothing, water in our ears, skin pruned, watching the sky darken through the high windows. We were twenty-three and invisible.

Now he was thirty-two and getting married in a country club neither of us could afford, and his fiancée was killing his fish and saying nothing about it.

"Did he name it?" I asked.

Sarah laughed. "It's a goldfish. They don't have names. They have a three-second memory. They don't know they're alive."

That night at dinner, Mark asked how Gilbert was. I watched Sarah cut her steak precisely. I'd known him for ten years. He'd had that fish since his mother died.

"Gilbert died," she said smoothly. "Yesterday. Just old, I think. Fish don't live forever."

Mark went quiet. The restaurant noise swelled around us. He ordered another drink.

Later, he swam in the club pool while the wedding party milled about with champagne. I joined him—old habit, old reflex. We floated in our boxers while the people we used to be watched from the deck, ghosts in the steam rising off the water.

"Sarah says goldfish can't remember anything," he said, staring at the pool bottom where the lights made fractured patterns. "She says they just loop the same three seconds forever. That they're not really swimming anywhere."

"That's not true," I said. "They remember. They recognize faces. They live years if you treat them right."

He turned onto his back. "I think I knew that. Once."

The wedding was beautiful. Sarah glowed. Mark's friends were not invited to speak. I sat in the back watching them dance, thinking about goldfish in bowls they can't escape, swimming in circles they don't choose, forgetting there was ever anything else.