They named me Tobit.

Not quite Tobias, not quite obituary. T. Obit, when they’re feeling dark. T.Ributary, when they’re feeling poetic. That Tobit – the father is struck blind. His son, Tobias, journeys across distances with a disguised angel and a fish, plucked from a river. They gut it. Use its gall to heal the father’s eyes. The cure for blindness was swimming beside him all along, unnoticed, without a name.

But I am just a fish, swimming in borrowed time, inside the cool rim of a Roman fountain in the gardens of the BSR. Before this, I was no.0506, or no one at all. Just another flicker beneath the papyrus pads, a curve of gold below the surface. Now I am someone’s grief made small enough to cup in two hands. Is Grief the thing with gold scales? Are scales the things with a name? Is a name the thing with grief?

They found me bloated, like a Pope’s body, turning awkwardly on my side – floundering, they called it, as if my body itself were a pun. They lifted me gently, a human hand cupped under my failing belly, and spoke to Christine with the solemnity of one reporting the fall of a minor empire. And into the glass box I went, a quarantine tank, square metre of last rites.

And now they hover, wiggle fingers against the glass. I rise, because I must. Not for affection – fish do not know affection and any of those self-deprecating feelings – but for instinct, that flicker of hunger mistaken for devotion. They pretend it is something more. They play Sinead O’Connor in the background and let the music drip:

You were born on the day my mother was buried

My grief my grief my grief my grief…

A song for mothers, for ghosts, for fish that go unnamed. Or named too late.

Do they think I don’t see the trembling in their jawline when they say Tobit? The little flinch that comes after hope is spoken aloud? Do they think I don’t feel the weight of their refusal? They’ve read the euthanasia protocols. They know about decapitation and pithing. They cannot bring themselves to wield the knife, so they drop a single green bead of phthalo-coloured medicine into my water every few days and wait – hoping for resurrection, or reprieve, or an unremarkable death.

But in this city, this watery underworld of saints and saints’ mistakes, death is never unremarkable. I dream of Rome now, and the fish of Rome carry history on their scales. The Aniene, that quieter river, has swallowed boys like Genesio, ragazzi di vita whose stories flicker like the silver shades in Pasolini’s films. The Tevere has cradled Accattone’s broken body, heavy with gold and desire, his final leap from Ponte Testaccio whispered with a relief that resembles mine: Ah! Mo sto bene.

I am no Accattone. I have no gold. I am not even Genesio. I have never leapt. But I, too, belong to these rivers. Or at least, I dream of them. In this tank, I conjure them – slipping through the green of memory, wondering whether the Tevere would carry me gently, or whether the Aniene would take me quicker at the point in which the two rivers kiss.

And so, if I die, let me not be no.0506. Let me vanish unnamed. Let me be a broken portmanteau, son of grief, tributary to something larger than this glass box. Let me be the fish that reminds them that even tiny griefs deserve a song. And let the rivers have me.

And if the drop of green works, then let me swim, part of an unnamed brigade, in this strange city that forgets everything, even its smallest, unrequited deaths.

As told to Roberto Binetti and Ian Law.