What's in a Fish?

Charlie sat in the waiting room, glancing nervously back and forth between the months old Golf Digest in his lap and the generic paintings on the wall. The secretary handed him some paperwork to fill out. When he finished, he handed it back to her and she smiled politely as she motioned him into the office.

Dr. Warstein, a large man with a salt-and-pepper beard and sparkling, intense eyes, sat behind a large mahogany desk that was covered with neatly arranged photos in bronze frames. Charlie couldn’t see the pictures, as they faced the doctor, but he assumed them to be family photos. There was a large landscape painting with a red barn that dominated the frame behind the doctor. As Dr. Warstein looked up from his scribblings, his head was framed in the doors of the barn.

“Ah, Charlie, nice to meet you.” The doctor came around the desk and shook Charlie’s hand. The doctor had a strong grip that made Charlie feel at ease, comfortable and welcome. Two deep brown leather chairs faced each other over a long coffee table. Dr. Warstein motioned Charlie to the chair closest the door, then sat carefully down in the other. He smiled at Charlie thoughtfully as the secretary placed two cups of coffee on the table, with cork coasters under them to protect the wood.

Charlie sat slumped down into the back of the chair and peered at the doctor over his fist, which hid his mouth and nose. The doctor smiled back at him, pen and paper at the ready.
“Well,” said the doctor, “what brings you in? What can I do for you?”
Charlie thought for a second, then spoke through his fist.
“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before, so a step-by-step wouldn’t hurt.” Charlie resumed his blank stare as Dr. Warstein uncrossed his legs, recrossed them, and leaned forward. He shifted his notepad to his left hand and spoke carefully.

“Well, Charlie, this is your time. So you talk about whatever you want. I’ll ask questions if you want me to, to keep you headed in the right direction. But mostly I’m here to listen and to facilitate you getting to the root of your anxieties.” The doctor paused and looked at Charlie to gauge his reaction, but none was forthcoming as Charlie continued to hide in his fist. Dr. Warstein continued.
“Where would you like to start? We could talk about your childhood, your parents. Work, maybe? Or anything, any thought that might have struck you recently. It’s up to you.”

Dr. Warstein sat back and positioned his pen, ready to take notes. He smiled and looked thoughtfully at Charlie, who finally removed his fist from his mouth and adjusted himself in his seat.
“OK, alright then; I’m here, um, I’m here because I’m depressed; it’s been bothering me for a little while now. But I don’t really want to talk about the depression itself yet. And I really don’t want to talk about my parents; later yes, but not now. I thought we could start less painfully. I’ve been having this recurring dream, something from my childhood.”
“That’s a great place to start. Tell me about the dream.”

“OK, the dream takes place down the street from my house; at the end of the street, past a long row of pines, there’s a tiny park with a picnic table and a couple of those dirty grills that are cemented into the ground and you’re always afraid to eat off of them. There’s a creek that goes by the park. Willow trees line either side of the creek and the branches dip down into the water. It’s a beautiful place, really.

”We used to walk the creek in the summer as a way to cool off. It was rarely very deep, so we’d wear ratty shoes and go exploring. You could start at the park in the neighborhood and walk until you reached another park downtown, behind the police station, but we hardly ever went that far. Usually, we’d look for a place where it was deep enough that we could swim, though we knew there was no such place.

“This is where the dream starts: Once, we were walking the creek and found some older kids hunting carp. I guess I could call it fishing, except they were using a bow and arrow. The creek was rarely more than two feet deep at the most, but somehow some really big fish lived in there. Some of the carp were like a foot and a half long. So these kids were stomping and splashing and moving the big rocks that the fish hid under, trying to scare them out so they could shoot them with an arrow. The arrows were easy to find when they missed because of the shallow water. They actually shot one or two, and these big fish were floating there in the water, their pale yellow scales tinged with the red blood oozing slowly from the small wounds where the arrows hit them. This is where I wake up, with the image of these dead fish in my head.”

Dr. Warstein’s smile grew wider. “Very interesting,” he said, “what do you think this means? What might these symbols, the creek and the fish, mean to you?” For the first time Charlie broke his blank stare and smiled shyly back at the doctor.

“I don’t know; that’s the problem. There’s another dream, another memory, that keeps recurring as well. It’s very similar. Once, I was fishing with some of my friends – I don’t remember which friends, and no one else factors into the dream – and we spotted a goldfish, a koi, in the water. We tried to catch it with our fishing rods, but it wouldn’t bite, no matter what we tried. So we ended up just chasing it around for a while, until I spotted this piece of wood sticking out of the water. It looked too smooth and polished to be a branch, so I pulled on it until it popped out of the muck. It was some sort of gardening tool, but one I’d never seen before – and haven’t again, for that matter. It was short, maybe two, three feet long with a metal tipped that forked slightly like a snake’s tongue; it was spear-like in appearance, so that’s what I used it for.

“So I’m jumping around and yelling and chasing this fish, just missing each time as the water altered the trajectory of our gardening spear ever so slightly. Finally, after getting so close a bunch of times, I hit it. Or, I thought I did. The spear didn’t go through the fish like I thought it would. But its movements slowed, and it stopped hiding and kind of fluttered around for a minute and I picked it up and it was slimy in my hands and I carried it over to the picnic table and laid it there on the table. It was dead now, with its gardening spear wound and no oxygen; really, the wrong kind of oxygen, being breathed through the wrong respiratory system. I had a pocketknife, a tiny little knife on a key chain that also held my little Phillies baseball player key chain. And I figured, why not, so I started to cut the fish with my knife. It felt weird when it broke through the scales, like cutting through the hard crust on a loaf of bread, only the insides of the bread were fleshy. I cut a square, like a window to the inside of the fish.”

Dr. Warstein interrupted Charlie dream-story. Charlie’s head snapped to attention, almost as if he had been dreaming the dream right then and the doctor’s voice had woken him.
“What were you trying to see through the window?” the doctor asked, watching Charlie’s face the whole time. Charlie’s eyes, which had seemed to not focus on anything during the recounting of the dream, now looked intently at the doctor.

“What was I looking for? Did I expect to find fish like my mom puts on the dinner table, filleted and gutted and cleaned, cooked nicely all the way through? Maybe I was hoping to find something more, some sort of evidence of a fishy soul that would rise up in front of me, and wings and a halo would appear seemingly from nowhere, but I would know that they came from heaven and the fish soul would float away playing a soft, sweet, fish melody on his gold fish harp.”

“What then?” asked the doctor. John’s eyes had lost focus again, and this time they did not refocus on the doctor.
”The fish had no soul. All it had were organs, and worms in its stomach or maybe the worms were intestines. The dark, bile color of the intestines contrasted sharply against the bright orange of the scales and made me feel sick and sad at the same time but I didn’t know why. I looked at my knife and there was blood on it and I wiped it off on the table, trading the blood for bits of the rotting lumber that flaked off and stuck to the blade. I wiped it once more on my shorts, folded it up and put it in my pocket. Then we gathered up our fishing rods, our shoes, and walked home.”

Charlie stopped there and looked at Dr. Warstein, hoping that the doctor held the answers to the infinite unasked questions that swam in Charlie’s head, fighting each other to be the next sound to exit his lips. None of them won, though, because each thought gave way to the next and Charlie gave up trying to think of something to say.

“I think this is a good place to stop,” said the doctor as he rose quickly and unceremoniously from his seat. “We’ve accomplished a lot in establishing a groundwork for future sessions, but we don’t want to do too much at once, now do we? I want you to think about what your dreams mean to you and when you come back next week we’ll discuss things more in-depth.”

Charlie got up from his chair and shook the doctor’s hand and nodded a friendly goodbye-I’ll-see-you-next-week nod, all the while his brain yelling at him no we’re not done here I don’t think I can make it another week it seems like just a dream but you went to school for this take a wild fucking guess what it means, then nodded to the receptionist who smiled politely as he walked through the waiting room past the generic paintings and months old issues of Golf Digest.
“Next week,” said the doctor with a wave, “we’ll get you sorted out.”