Chapter 7 pond

Many areas of Manhattan are submerged in water.I still remember when the new hospital in Bellevue was built.That was fifteen years ago.The first phase of the project was the most spectacular and the most complete. It was a huge square pool named Bellevue Lake.It's been around for two years, and the morose Bureau of Budget is still raising money for the next phase of the project.Fangchi is enclosed and can only be seen from the windows of the high-rise buildings of the old hospital, but it is really beautiful.In the hot midsummer, it is cool and blue; in the middle of winter, in January, it has the scene of Vermont, the ice city in the north, with a newly polished mirror surface, shining.The wall, like all city walls, always had broken gaps.We could have gone downstairs and used it.However, everyone knows that its excavation has stirred up the sinking of the East River.In Bellevue, there is a clear rule about the East River: whoever falls will be an emergency case in the infectious disease department, and the first step after resuscitation is to give a large dose of antibiotics. No matter what antibiotics, the hospital's Use whatever the pharmacy supplies.

But if the East River is clarified, you will get the city full of lakes and waters, at least embellishing the East Side of Manhattan.If you uprooted the Empire State Building and adjacent high-rise buildings, you would immediately have an inland sea.Drill a few holes in the right places and the water will go down the subway and you'll have some lovely underground canals running across the Hudson River to the north, the Harlem River to the north, Battery Park downtown to the south, that'll be It's an underground Venice, almost without pigeons. That's not enough, though, unless you can figure out a way to keep the fish out.New Yorkers can't stand live fish living in the open.I can't explain it, but that's how it is.

There is a new pond, much smaller than Lake Bellevue, on the east side of First Avenue, between Seventy and Seventy-one.When did it come out last year.It came about not long after a row of old apartment buildings was scraped and the foundations dug for a new one.By now it was a modest pond in Manhattan, a city block long, forty feet wide, maybe eight feet deep in the center, and slightly kidney-shaped, much like an oversized suburban pool, except Some floaters, and, now, goldfish. With goldfish, the pond seemed extremely annoying.There were hundreds of them, clearly visible from the sidewalk.At other ponds in Manhattan, passers-by usually watch the fish from openings in the fence.But it's different here.Neighboring residents often crossed the street and walked to the other side when they passed by, looking elsewhere.

There have been some complaints about the pond.In fact, the complaints were directed at the goldfish rather.How can a person do such a thing?Abandoning a pet, a dog or a cat, is bad enough, who would have the heart to abandon a goldfish?Those people must have taken advantage of the stillness of the night to hold the fish tank and pour it into it.How can they do it? Someone approached the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.One afternoon, their men came with rowboats, used nets, scooped up the fish, put them in the new confinement fish tanks, and took them away, some to Central Park, some to SPCA headquarters, and put them in fish farms pool.However, those goldfish have already hatched, or those who brought the fish tank downstairs at night still continue to come, sneaking and pouring it into the pool heartlessly.In any case, there are too many fish, and the association can't catch them. It's simply that the old organization has encountered new problems.An official put out a statement in the newspaper saying that the owners of the property would be asked to pump the water dry before the SPCA would come and clean them up.

Seeing people's expressions when they are talking, you will think that they are some mice or cockroaches.Get those goldfish out of the pond, I don't care.If necessary, glycerin explosives will do.You can get rid of them.Someone said that winter is coming, and the pond is so deep that they will swim around under the ice.Get them out. It wasn't the goldfish, I thought, but the deep knowledge of the East River in the heads of all Manhattanites.Goldfish in a glass fishbowl are harmless to the human heart.Maybe it's good for people's hearts.Yet goldfish left to fend for themselves, to reproduce themselves, and worse, to survive in stagnant pools like the East River, somehow threaten us all.We don't like to think that under certain conditions, especially under those conditions of Manhattan ponds, the existence of life is even possible.There were four broken tires, an uncountable number of broken beer bottles, fourteen shoes, one of which was a espadrille, and there was a visible gray-green layer over the entire water.That's the old resident of all the ponds in Manhattan.The soil by the pond is not the soil in the usual farmland, but the reused soil used for padding in Manhattan.It is the accumulated garbage, fossilized coffee grounds, grape skins, city excrement.There are goldfish swimming in such waters, small groups mysteriously darting in and out, apparently still eating, looking healthy and proud, like the ones in the glass windows of the most expensive aquariums. Like others, this means that there is a problem with our standards.It's insulting in a deep, unspeakable sense.

Once, I thought I spotted a particular fin, the dorsal fin of one of the two fish below the surface.With a burst of ecstasy, it occurred to me that there are all sorts of chemical possibilities in such a pond.It may contain some mutagenic factors.In this case, groups of mutant goldfish will soon be born.Just give them a little more time, I think.And then thought—I've never thought of things in the most typical Manhattan way—next month, the SPCA would be back, with their rowboats and nets.The property owner would come and pump the water from the ground.The nets would keep being cast, the rowboats would drop, and then the SPCA officials would suddenly start screaming.There was a burst of fluttering, and the gray and green water splashed in all directions. Around the pond, the goldfish would use their newly grown feet to climb up the old dirt used for land reclamation in New York City on the four banks. Sidewalks, crawling in all directions, crossing streets, crawling into foyers, crawling through fire escape doors, some of them with little suction cups on their little feet climbing walls and stairs, crawling through open windows, looking for something.

Of course, this situation will not last long.This kind of thing never lasts long.The mayor will come and reprimand him personally.The Sanitation Bureau would come and recommend buying fish-eating cats from outside the city, because city cats are inherently nasty.The National Institutes of Health will send a team of professionals from Washington with a new fish spray—a product that will be withdrawn in four days because it is toxic to cats. In a few weeks, anyway; things will pass, like so many events in New York.The goldfish would disappear without a trace, and the pond would be filled with espadrilles.There will be workers coming and dumping cement everywhere.By next year, new buildings will be erected and filled with people who will be ignorant of the effects of their particular circumstances.But what a touching scene it was.