The Physical Impossibility of Living
- Nov 1, 2024
- 5 min read
by Spencer Nitkey
In 1991, the artist Damien Hirst took a tiger shark from the ocean — well, to be specific, a fisherman took the shark from the ocean — so Damien Hirst took a shark from a fisherman who, at his request, had taken it from the ocean and submerged it in a steel-framed glass tank filled with formaldehyde. He titled the piece “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” The millionaire who had paid him 60,000 something dollars for it then sold it to a billionaire for anywhere from 6–12 million dollars a couple years later. The end.
In 2009, I was seventeen and Everett and Sasha and I broke our usual Saturday-shoplifting-headphones-and-makeup-pallets-from-the-CVS-next-to-school-routine and went to New York City. I remember the drive there because Everett was so busy trying to convince Sasha he had good taste in music that he almost drove into the median on the lower level of the George Washington Bridge, and I saw my whole flat, unescaped corn maze of a life flash, and I think I screamed, because when he straightened the car out, they couldn’t stop laughing.
We walked around the city and Everett finally churned up the nerve to hold Sasha’s hand near Park and 63rd, and I was beginning to wonder why I enjoyed being a passenger in other people’s lives more than living my own. Like, take this small example: I had just spent my entire Friday night watching Everett play world of warcraft for six uninterrupted hours while I lay on his bed mostly silent. It was the most relaxed I had been in months. And that day, in the New York spring, I was just watching Everett and Sasha decide whether they would break each other into little pieces when everything ended a year or two later, whether it’d be worth it. And I was having fun, more fun than I had had on stage in the shitty school musical, or on the wrestling mats, or in my room, alone, reading books I was too young to understand but that made me feel smart.
And they were walking — and this was a few months before Mom, mine to be clear, would get The Call about Dad, so everything was bright and sunny and not all fogged over like a finger-smudged picture frame — and I felt the hot air balloon in my stomach fire and launch when he reached out for her at a crosswalk and interlocked his fingers with hers, and she interlocked them back and looked up at him and the sun bounced off a car hood in the intersection and a truck horn blared and someone was screaming at their husband and God was it beautiful. Maybe I was in love with Everett, too, a little, but I didn’t know that then and that wouldn’t have explained everything I was feeling anyways. But it felt perfect and I had a very real desire to lower the whole moment into some kind of cryostatic tank and freeze it forever for scientists to study so someone could show me a couple charts and a well-written narrative about why this moment was so perfect in particular, and maybe freeze and study me too, cause while they were at it, I had a few other questions, but so ok:
We were walking, and they were a half-stride ahead of me, and everything was perfect even though I was sweating through my undershirt and felt a kind of sticky grime pooling between the back of my knees and my pant legs and I said I really wouldn’t mind some AC and by now we were close to the Met and Sasha said she loved art, so Everett had to pretend to, and I got to follow their little half-finished pirouettes through the museum.
It went like this, Everett feigned interest in oil paintings, Sasha shed a tear at one of the Rothkos and it wasn’t an act, or pretentious or anything, she just really and truly felt whatever it was that pulsed from the painting. Her reaction moved me a lot more than any of his colors did, and maybe I was jealous of her for being able to feel something that deeply without any apparent self-consciousness, and maybe I was a little in love with Sasha, too. So we all walked around and around and around and on the second floor there it was, a fucking shark, in a tank, with its mouth wide open. The sun from the windows hit the tank and the blue was so rich I almost had to squint to really look at it.
There it was, this undead creature, hanging, gaping at me. The black orb eyes accused. I squatted and looked into its jaw. The saw-blade teeth gave way to an almost supple white mouth. Deeper, its throat fell into a pitch black empty. I wanted, so badly, to disappear into the welcoming void. The rending and all that would be small prices to pay for whatever peace I was certain waited for me in its empty belly.
When I finally looked up, who knows how long later, Sasha and Everett were gone. I was alone for the first time in 3 straight days and so, ok, I didn’t handle it well. I had to sit on the ground. I looked at the gallery description on the wall nearby and it turns out this wasn’t even the original shark from 1991. He hadn’t been very good at using formaldehyde and the thing started disintegrating, so when the billionaire bought the piece from the millionaire, the artist just totally replaced it, which I thought seemed like maybe ought to have been cause for retitling it, because it wasn’t like a Theseus situation, right, this happened all at once, it was very obviously a different shark. And I was alone, and the two people I loved most were maybe about to destroy one another, and I wouldn’t even get to taste it. And suddenly there were tears right on my face, so I assumed they were coming from me, even though I hoped they weren’t. And I thought that maybe I wanted Sasha to see me crying and assume it was about the art, even though it wasn’t. Or Everett to touch my shoulder and ask if I was ok or something, but neither did.
And while we’re offering critiques, I have to say, the title should have changed anyways because as far as I was concerned, death isn’t impossible at all, right? The nothingness of the shark’s gaping mouth. The wide open jaws of midnight. The Call. The unceremonious passing off as this shark as the same as the old one, as if anyone is interchangeable for anyone else, dad. As if nothingness was all that hard to imagine. And even before Everett and Sasha came back with their eyes glazed over and their hair tousled and their lips fat and red, I knew that the real physical impossibility was living. Because no one can ever do it for long. Everything is bent, winding, diving like pelicans into the bay, in total freefall toward death. And if we’re gonna dip anything in formaldehyde and sell it off to billionaires and display it in art galleries, couldn’t it be that moment on the street, where everything felt so perfect, when it wasn’t obvious to me, yet, that watching other people forever, with only a silk-thread thin whisper connecting us wouldn’t really be enough, even though I wanted it to be. That at some point I’d have to be the fisherman and the artist: get waist deep in the sea, pull something teethy and violent from its churning depths, give it the wrong name, and call all that living. The end.
Spencer Nitkey is a writer, researcher, and educator living in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Apex Magazine, Diabolical Plots, Lightspeed Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, trampset, Weird Horror, and others. He was a finalist for the 2023 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, the Pushcart Prize, and the Rhysling award. You can find more of his writing on his website, spencernitkey.com.
