Tower of Glass

1

Look, Simeon Krug wanted to say, a billion years ago there wasn’t even any man, there was only a fish. A slippery thing with gills and scales and little round eyes. He lived in the ocean, and the ocean was like a jail, and the air was like a roof on top of the jail. Nobody could go through the roof. You’ll die if you go through, everybody said, and there was this other fish, he went through, and he died. And there was this other fish, and he went through, and he died. But there was another fish, and he went through, and it was like his brain was on fire, and his gills were blazing, and the air was drowning him, and the sun scorched his eyes, and he was lying there in the mud, waiting to die, and he didn’t die. He crawled back down the beach and went into the water and said, Look, there’s a whole other world up there. And he went up there again, and stayed for maybe two days, and then he died. And other fishes wondered about that world. And crawled up onto the muddy shore. And stayed. And taught themselves how to breathe the air. And taught themselves how to stand up, how to walk around, how to live with the sunlight in their eyes. And they turned into lizards, dinosaurs, whatever they became, and they walked around for millions of years, and they started to get up on their hind legs, and they used their hands to grab things, and they turned into apes, and the apes got smarter and became men. And all the time some of them, a few, anyway, kept looking for new worlds. You say to them, Let’s go back into the ocean, let’s be fishes again, it’s easier that way. And maybe half of them are ready to do it, more than half, maybe, but there are always some who say, Don’t be crazy. We can’t be fishes any more. We’re men. And so they don’t go back. They keep climbing up.