Their Bodies Are Too Small for Their Brains

I was visiting a friend and we went to the aquarium together. We had not been there before, at least not together. Their parents apparently took them there as a child, although their memories of it are hazy. “It was probably all different back then, too,” they said. I had never been to an aquarium, but I had also never felt particularly drawn to them.

Despite this, I did enjoy the visit. The smaller tanks which contained some of the more exotic and colorful fish were very pleasant to look at and the crustaceans especially fascinated me. Their alien morphology and movement excited me. They seemed so very far away from me, despite only being separated by an inch of glass.

Near the end of our visit, however, something had happened that anchored this pleasant but ultimately forgetful afternoon in my mind for a long time. We had finished a round along the outer aquarium tanks, the smaller ones and wanted to make our way to the main attraction of the establishment: a large circular tank containing Nemo, a beluga whale. It was the aquarium’s pride and joy. They sold plushies of it and even had marketing materials with a cartoon version of it.

We came into the hall that the tank was housed in – or rather, the hall that abutted it. The tank was massive. It was circular, but the side that formed one wall of the visitor space was barely curved. It was a deep, deep blue. The whale’s white skin was striking against this background. It floated in the water near the visitors. There were only about a dozen people in the large hall.

We had barely entered the room, when a man picked up a chair from the seating area at the far side and threw it at the tank. It recoiled with a dull thud and fell to the floor. He picked it up again and this time hit the tank with it. The rest of the visitors seemed unsure. They stepped back a few feet, but no one fled. Everyone looked at him.

“Look at their eyes!” he shouted. “Look at their eyes!” He swung the chair again. A tiny chip was visible in the glass. “They think like us.”

The whale meanwhile floated serenely in the water, just a few meters away from him. It looked directly at him, at the crowd beside him. Its body was upright in the water, as if it were standing.

“They’re intelligent.” Another swing. “They know too much.” Meanwhile, more people had gathered, in the hall and outside. He continued swinging at the glass. “They’re trapped.” More and more chips kept appearing in the glass. Two men in uniforms with very broad shoulders used them to make their way through the crowd. My friend and I didn’t think to make way for them; we were just as transfixed by this man as everyone else.

“Their brains are trapped in there,” he shouted. The security guards stood on either side of him, though given their size, they may as well have encircled him. “They are trapped in useless bodies. They cannot do anything. Their brains are twice as large as they should be for an animal that size.” They grabbed the man by the shoulders. He resisted, trying to wind his way out of their grasp. “Their bodies are too small for their brains.” He escaped them somehow, lunged aside, still continuing his monologue. “They are trapped in bodies that cannot express what they are thinking and feeling.” The security guards pulled out rubber batons. “Look at them! Look at their faces! They cannot speak” They drove him into a corner. “Look at their fins! They don’t have hands. They don’t even have hands.”

They hit him over the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious. A tiny streak of blood stained the wall behind him. A third and fourth guard came in and pushed the people out towards the hallway. The whale was still floating in that same spot, looking benevolently at the disappearing crowd, smiling. They pushed us out into the hallway and cleaning carts into the room. I could see above the shoulders of the security guards that they mopped up the blood and carried the man out through a side exit.

After this episode, the beluga whale room was closed for the day. The story apparently appeared in the newspaper the day after, although not much of a story developed. It didn’t even give the name of the man; just “a middle-aged man.”

A few months later, I was back in the city on some unrelated business. I had to kill some time around noon and decided to visit the aquarium again, since it was a work day and I hoped to find some peace and quiet in the steady hum of the aquariums. The hallways were indeed almost devoid of visitors and I found myself mesmerized once again by the quiet goings-on in the fish tanks.

On the way back from my tour through the exotic and tropical fishes, I came past the entrance to the beluga whale room and decided to drop by. The incident still popped up in my mind. The room was still the same, but without people it felt very different. The glass had been fixed.

The whale, Nemo, was swimming around its tank. Sometimes it was further away, a white smear moving through ultramarine water. Then, it came closer to the front where I could see it. Its body was big and bulky, almost bloated. It looked misshapen. After a few rounds, it slowed down and stopped in front of me. It floated upright in the water and looked down on me. Its head had a bulbous protrusion at the forehead. Its eyes were tiny black holes, very far apart, sitting on top of an unmoving grin. It looked like an alien, a Martian.

I took a step closer. I felt compelled. I put my hand against the glass. It moved closer, slowly, until its head bumped softly against the glass where my hand rested. In that moment, I saw it. The mammalian skeleton hiding beneath layers of blubber; tiny hands and feet reduced to fins, unable to move or grasp. It opened its mouth in a silent scream. It saw me, saw directly into my soul. It had put its head against my hand. It was trapped in a body that couldn’t express what it was thinking and we had put it in a cage.