SCENE III
The world in a fish bowl.
Fish
I am a memory. White slave eleven years old, indentured by my father on boat, male child of significant duration, living through civil war, giving birth to four daughters, disappearing and selling myself and daughters as dairy servants, growing up giving birth to more daughters, disappearing as a man or woman laughing inappropriately at the death of a grandfather or mother, becoming a suffragette and geometry teacher, thinking more like a crustacean in a porno film than …
Pelican
I have this great part for you.
Fish
You’ve been listening to me again.
Pelican
I’ve been trying to make up how to prove you don’t exist.
Fish
Oh. Man. First I am trapped in the illusion that remembering inhibits one’s jouissance, and I am remembering something else so I seem now to have side-stepped experience. Now all this self-analysis is promising on the one hand and on the other I am just mopping myself up and throwing myself out to sea.
Pelican
Well, yes. That is a good plot, but I think we need a few more characters.
Fish
But if you put me in the movie, I will not disappear. Returning to the ocean will only be an illusion in a movie. In fact, I might even exist more than I do now, become larger than life. But why do you want to do away with me?
Pelican
Why do you think non-existence is so bad? Why do you think it means diminishment? Why can’t you be non-existent and popular at the same time? You and I are part of the great chain of nature. If you jump off the pier in my movie, honey, you and I reaffirm the great dynamic between the predator and its prey.