Monterey Bay (11 page)

“Well, in that case, try to do better than I did at sitting still.”

She nodded. As the needle entered and reentered her skin, she tried to pretend it hurt, but it still didn't, even when he tugged the sutures into a knot and pressed a strip of gauze firmly against her leg.

“You probably should have taken that ethanol. You look a little green.”

“I'm fine.”

“Glad to hear it. Let's hope I didn't botch this one quite as badly as the first.”

She leaned toward him.

“I thought I told you to sit still,” he warned.

But when she touched the back of his neck, he didn't move away. He just laughed quietly, as if remembering a particularly filthy joke, and she could feel the vibration of it as she put her mouth against his. When they moved apart, he wasn't smiling anymore.

“Fifteen,” he said, shaking his head. “Fifteen years old. Am I imagining things, or aren't they making girls like they used to?”

“My mother was married at seventeen.” Her fingers were still on his neck, pressing into the notch at the base of his skull, tracing the line of demarcation between his skin and hair. “I was born a year later.”

“And look what happened to her.”

She removed her hand.

“I'm sorry. All I'm trying to say is that these are different times,” he said. “Far different. A young woman of your caliber should have more useful things on her mind.”

“You sound like my father.”

“Your father's right.”

“Then let me work here. With you. Inside the lab.”

He laughed again, but still no smile. “I trust you'll understand why that's completely out of the question.”

“I won't be a bother.”

“I don't believe that for a second.”

They exchanged a long stare, and then she backed away just enough for him to see her fully. She had never attempted this sort of thing before—this arch and this tilt, this throwing back of the shoulders, this parting of the lips—but she knew she had done it right when his eyes briefly wandered down to her waist and then back up to her face, his breath coming through his mouth instead of his nose.

“Tomorrow morning,” she said.

He squinted at her and tried to stifle something: a giggle or a whistle, or possibly a groan.

“I won't get arrested?”

“I'm sure of it.”

“Fine,” he said, making for the door and allowing himself one half of a grin. “Mind your manners, though. I'm not the sort of man who stands for being harassed.”

HIS THIRD MESSAGE ARRIVES AT A BAD TIME.

Everyone is here, every last aquarist, in a conference room that is slightly nicer than a nonprofit should allow. She sits at the head of the table. The aquarists sit along the sides in a hierarchical phalanx determined mostly by tenure and a bit by skill. They are all dressed exactly like her, all of them in uniform, their blue shirts extending out to a vanishing point of which de Chirico would have been proud. She's assembled them well over the years; she's kept them to a certain type. Mostly men. Odd but not ashamed, or even particularly aware, of their oddness. Unkempt, ruddy, resilient, amenable to camping, bathing in rivers, repeated exposure to ticks, ingestion of iodine-treated pond water. Dressed as if for action: bleach-stained jeans tucked into black rubber boots that stomp across the wet floors with a specific sort of casual, unwarranted bravery. Most of all, though,
there's the fact of their relationship to their work. To a less enlightened soul, it could seem like drudgery: those endless loops of routine maintenance, knuckles permanently abraded by fiberglass and salt. They, however, treat it with a palpable sense of purpose, their aims so noble that they give her faith by proxy. Whenever she can, she invites herself along on their collecting trips. She's afraid of seeming useless, so mostly she just watches them in admiration disguised, for the sake of her reputation, as evaluation. She watches them blast tube anemones from their sandy burrows with a gasoline-powered pump and a hundred feet of garden hose. She watches them catch half-moons with pieces of candy-colored yarn on barbless hooks. She watches them lure garibaldis and señoritas into their nets with the luxuriant stink of fresh sea urchin roe, and by the time they return to the aquarium with their prizes in tow, she is drunk with secondhand excitement.

As for Arthur and Tino, they sit to her immediate right and left. Unmatched bookends, exceptions working overtime to prove the rule. Sometimes she wonders what her father would have done, but there's no way of telling. He could have gone either way, embracing them as comrades or vanquishing them as rivals. As it stands, she's pleased with her choice. They've each served their purpose nicely: Tino, in his long-ago willingness to turn over a crucial piece of property, to defuse the tension among the fishing contingent; Arthur in his jack-of-all-trades gregariousness, which in his old age has blossomed into
something downright beatific. It seemed only fair to take them in, to give them titles, to pay them for a loyalty she appreciates but can't explain.

Which is why she bites her tongue when the two of them begin talking. As boys, they were never friends. Their personalities were too different, their communities too segregated. In their old age, though, they've grown close. They come alive in each other's company, they relish the tag-team retelling of old stories, which is what they're doing right now: relating how in August 1984, two months prior to opening day, a complication arose.

“The wharf pilings exhibit was missing its . . . ,” Arthur begins, eyes big and vaudevillian.

“Wharf pilings,” Tino concludes, deadpan.

But not for a lack of planning. Almost two years earlier, Arthur and Tino continue, they had begun to prepare. They had commissioned the fabrication of fake vinyl-polyester-fiberglass pilings, instructed a dive team to submerge them in the bay and secure them to actual pilings in the hope that the fakes would acquire a similar decorative cloak of invertebrate life. It was only much later, with the aquarium at the cusp of completion, that they realized their mistake. The desired populations—colonies of mussels and barnacles and anemones—had become so well established that it was impossible for even the most observant, capable aquarists to physically separate the fake pilings from the real ones, much less tell them apart.

And this is where she stops listening, because when they tell the next bit, she knows they will tell it wrong. They won't talk about how, when they broke the news to her, she didn't speak and she didn't sigh. Instead, she removed the penknife from her pocket, placed it on the blank, spotless expanse of her desktop, and spun it on its narrow end like a top, Tino and Arthur watching in horror as the knife took a handful of tight revolutions before falling with a clank.

“What should we do?” Arthur asked.

“We'll move forward precisely as intended. We'll remove the pilings and put them in the tank.”

“But the whole wharf could collapse if we take the wrong ones,” Tino protested.

“This entire town could collapse,” she replied, aware of the ensuing hyperbole but doing nothing to stop it, “and I wouldn't care. As long as my aquarium remains standing.”

At midnight, then, the team reassembled, ready to do as instructed. The divers descended and made their best guesses, their cleanest cuts. The aquarists attached floats to the severed pilings and towed each of them over to the launch ramp. Tino and Arthur backed the boat trailer into the water and helped maneuver the pilings on board. The collectors covered the pilings with seawater-damp burlap sacks. When everything was loaded, they all waited for a moment, wincing. They expected to hear the creaks and snaps of breaking wood, the jarring, sonic-boom splashes of big things falling into an even bigger body of
water. But they heard nothing, so they began the slow, careful journey back to Cannery Row, Tino and Arthur in the tow truck, the others in a motley fleet of vehicles following close behind, Margot sitting protectively astride one of the shrouded pilings on the trailer, her jeans cold and wet, the night wind weaving through her hair as she guided the secret, merciless parade away from the shore and into town.

The conference room is silent now. They are all looking at her: Arthur and Tino and the aquarists, looking at her and grinning in a way that reminds her of Ricketts. And she wants to say something that will express her gratitude, maybe even her love, but the moment has already passed. The meeting is under way again, the staff's attention precisely where it should be: on more urgent, more
Mola
-related matters.

And it's a shame, because the story of the wharf pilings has been left unfinished. Not in a strictly narrative sense—beginning, middle, end—but in terms of its lesson. For a while there, in the years immediately following the incident, she could barely contain herself. She was so pleased by the grand gesture, so proud of it. She honestly believed the retrieval of the pilings was the sort of anecdotal monument outlandish enough to send a ripple through space and time, theatrical enough to change things, powerful enough to reach him in that place beyond life. In the years since, however, she's recognized an upsetting pattern, a certain scorched-earth mentality. The self-inflicted leg wound comes to mind, as does the time she traveled to Key
West to hunt down and seduce the reclusive designer of a revolutionary new jellyfish tank. There was also the time she insisted on using her own two hands, instead of a trained professional's, to weld the surge machine for the kelp forest exhibit. So loud, these actions. So dramatic and unsubtle. And she regrets them not because she's embarrassed, but because Ricketts's latest message is now so clearly in opposition, so clearly laid out on the surface of this big, expensive table.

“You'll have to excuse me,” she says, standing.

“But we were just about to—”

“Not now.”

“But we need you to decide about the—”

“It doesn't matter. Surprise me.”

And within the aquarium proper, within the spaces meant for tourists—tourists who observe and mock and praise and sometimes imitate, tourists who think it's all for them, all for show—she feels, for the first time in years, like a failure. The darkness she sensed on the rooftop, the darkness at the perimeter of the otter rehab tank, is now falling in earnest. She's seeing shapes in the periphery, the shadows of doomed company, eerie black profiles against the vivid, backlit blue, the ghosts of people who once felt this same thing and couldn't crawl out from under it. Outside, the banjo player offers up an acoustic homage to Duran Duran entitled “Hungry Like the Wolf Eel.” Inside, the white sturgeons trawl the tank bottom with their Confucian whiskers, giant sea bass loom midwater like obese, blue black
sentries, white-plumed anemones sprout in furry, albino gardens. She doesn't hate it. Of course she doesn't. But she can imagine being someone who does. Not just the fish and the anemones and the repurposed pop songs, but the aquarium itself. She can imagine hating how its perfection and cleanliness approach the realm of parody. She can imagine hating how whenever the fish speak their own dual names—
Mola mola
, ocean sunfish—she's never quite sure which one is the alibi: the one used by the scientist or the one used by the layman.

“Oh, just put it out of its misery,” she said upon first learning that the
Mola
had outgrown its tank.

“You'd honestly rather murder it than just let it go?” Arthur gasped.

“I don't see the difference.”

“You're kidding, right?”

And she's frantic now and sweating, the aquarium's crowds suddenly indistinguishable from the ones that used to attend Ricketts's parties. Why, she asks herself, do both courtrooms and aquariums have the same word for the thing that contains the evidence: exhibit? Why do the visitors always—
always
—tap on the exhibit windows, even though they are expressly requested to refrain from doing so? Is it because they want the fish to acknowledge them in the same way they are acknowledging the fish? And why do they take so many photographs? Hundreds and hundreds of snapshots without a single human face in them: a thought that freezes her in place right beneath the
gray whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling of the atrium, her sweat starting to cool, her muscles beginning to shake. A family photo album, she imagines, horrified, in which both people and fish are given equal precedence. Fish pouting and mugging alongside the newly born and newly betrothed. Fish exhausted by their singular, immersive knowledge, suspending mankind's breakable prism in a way that both devours light and excretes it.

“YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.”

She lifted her pencil to shoulder height and let it fall onto the desk.

“Come,” Ricketts said. “I'll show you. Again.”

She gave him a narrow look. Then she rose to her feet and followed him through the lab, down the rear stairs, and into the back lot. Outside, she squinted into the fog as he retrieved a bucket from beneath the balcony's overhang. It was the most unsubtle hour of the morning, sharp and white with noise and light, the canneries running at full throttle. The sharks were restless in their tanks today, their bodies stirring the water into a chop. Her father's place of business was not far from here, the possibility of his appearance both immediate and real, but she didn't care. All that seemed to matter was the fact that for the past two weeks of coming to the lab, the only thing she had
succeeded at was failing. Failing to maintain even the faintest shred of aloofness and disinterest, her excitement at his closeness still obvious and hateful. Failing to entice him in any manner, his treatment of her still formal and unwilling.

He handed her the bucket without comment. She carried it to the water's edge. The tide was well on its way to lowness, their feet surrounded by piles of cannery refuse and lawns of algae. A trio of plovers side-eyed them as they used their tweezer-shaped bills to mine the sand for bugs.

“Look down,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”

Her chin dropped to her chest. It was the fourth time in as many days that he had brought her here and attempted an explanation that didn't quite take, and this was perhaps the biggest failure of them all: the fact that, despite urgently wanting to, she was unable to fathom how he worked or what he was hoping to achieve by it. It was enough to make her want to crack her head open again or reempty the jug of formaldehyde: whatever would return her brain to the looseness it had possessed on her first night in the lab, to the semi-stupor required to understand him and his methods.

“The ocean.” She sighed.

“What else?”

“A tide pool.”

“And what's inside of it?”

She studied his face for traces of familiarity or suggestiveness, for any indication that he felt as unsteady as she did. But he was
responding to her exactly how he responded to everyone else, with a happy crispness that seemed to shut the door to any possibilities except the honorable ones. And that, she told herself, was the cruelty of charisma: how it's never satisfied with the capture of an individual. How it requires the ensnarement of the masses to thrive.

“Sardine heads.”

“What else?”

“A crab. A snail. A little fish.”

“You haven't learned the Latin nomenclature yet?”

“You hired me to draw them. Not memorize their names.”

Then an unexpected yet deeply satisfying response: a whistle and a shake of the head, an exasperation that seemed more like the product of amusement than annoyance.

“Fair enough. Just put them in the right piles and that will suffice.”

“But your piles make no sense.”

“Of course they do.” He gestured at the three creatures, each one different in every respect save its general placement in relation to the waterline. “Things that live together should go together. And things that live elsewhere should go elsewhere.”

“I don't understand.”

“You don't? I feel like I've made it perfectly clear. And on several occasions.”

“You find them in a certain spot today—”

“The
high intertidal
.”

“You find them in the high intertidal today. But by tomorrow, they could be anywhere. All the way out. At the bottom of the ocean. Any of them could go anywhere they like.”

“That's precisely it, though! They
could
go anywhere
.
But they never actually
do
.”

She dipped a toe into the pool in question and stirred it around. She watched the fish panic, the crab scurry, the snail remain blindly in place.

“But a crab looks nothing like a fish,” she muttered. “And a fish looks nothing like a snail. Or haven't you noticed?”

“You sound like the boys over at Hopkins.”

“You mean the real scientists? The ones who know what they're doing?”

“For your information,” Ricketts replied, his tone still alarmingly good-natured, “they keep my specimen catalogs on their shelves. They use them for their graduate course work.”

He blinked and grinned. She didn't desire her father's intrusion, not in the least. She did, however, desire his clarity, his confidence, his brutal adherence to a system that had long since been praised and proven.

“I'm going back inside,” she said.

“Absolutely not. You'll do it right today. Even if it kills me.”

She set her jaw and met his gaze, trying to hold it for several seconds longer than usual, to finally extract something from it. He was already on the move, though, approaching the shark
tanks and beginning to inspect each one in turn, seemingly oblivious to her company. For the next few minutes, she just stood there, watching. Once or twice, she tried to stop herself. She tried to do something that would convey the presence of her free will and the absence of an infatuation so deep, it had begun to border on servitude. But it was hopeless. All she could do was marvel at him: the air gathering around him as he studied his captives, the world shimmering beneath his single-mindedness, eliminating everything in its periphery.

The saddest part was that on the first morning of her apprenticeship here, she had assumed it would be easy. Bolstered by her triumph on the night of the party, she had entered the lab without knocking, eager to see the look of surprise on his face, the surprise morphing into delight. Instead, she was met with an empty room, the whole place completely abandoned save for a selection of preserved tide pool creatures already lined up on the desk, inert and perfect in their jars of yellow fluid. On the seat of the desk chair was a note written in a somewhat feminine hand, detailing both the manner in which the specimens should be portrayed and the full contents of the kitchen in case she got hungry. She sat down and tried to work but found herself unable. Her eyes wandered away from her papers at every opportunity, divining the clues that, if assembled in the right order, would help to shrink the distance between her body and his. She wanted to stand up, jump around, knock things from the
shelves. She had, however, made herself certain promises: detachment, maturity, indifference, restraint. So she forced herself to remain behind the desk, her only concession to her weaker impulses the occasional visit to his bathroom, where she would stare at herself in the mirror and perform the sorts of actions that, until now, she had always considered wasteful and sad: the fluffing of hair, the pinching of cheeks, the releasing of the top two buttons of her shirt, anything to ensure her attractiveness when he eventually found her sitting there with his jars, one living body among the dead.

The morning came and went and still he failed to appear. At around noon, she put her sketches into an immaculate pile and rose from the desk. She went into the kitchen and cut a chunk of salami from the links that hung above the stove top like stalactites. She opened a can of the same sort of sardines her father either was or was not in the process of canning. She washed one of the dirty glasses in the sink and filled it from a pitcher of milk in the icebox. Then she took her meal out to the balcony that overlooked the shark tanks and the shoreline, and that's when she finally saw them: Steinbeck and Ricketts and Wormy, all of them out as far as the tide allowed, all of them bent over the same patch of water as if whatever was inside of it required three grown humans to successfully subdue.

Her lunch forgotten, she descended the stairs to the back lot and positioned herself in the most obvious spot: sitting on one of the lidded concrete tanks, faced in their direction. She could
hear Ricketts guiding the others as they rummaged through the water and filled their buckets. Occasionally, there was a small spark of excitement or humor: a rogue wave dousing them with spray, a slapstick stumble on the rocks, a sea cucumber eviscerating itself onto Wormy's hands, Steinbeck insisting he had been bitten by a periwinkle until Ricketts reminded him that on a purely technical level, periwinkles didn't have teeth but, rather, a rasplike tongue called a radula that was used to scrape algae from the rocks. Otherwise, it was meditative in the extreme, the spell unbroken until, about an hour into Margot's observations, Wormy suddenly looked up from the water and into her eyes. It wasn't a long glance and it wasn't a combative one. But it was enough to make her retrieve her lunch and return to the lab, mortified.

“Don't mind me.”

Arthur was rocking in Steinbeck's chair, one of Ricketts's essays sitting on his lap.

“I won't,” she replied.

She put her dishes in the kitchen sink and reclaimed her place behind the desk. Before stopping for lunch, she had been sketching a clownish, misshapen little gastropod called a sea hare, and now, as she resumed the task, she could feel the cold, unwelcome spark of Arthur's surveillance.

“They mate in orgies, if you can believe it. Hundreds of them sometimes. Right there on the seafloor. They're hermaphrodites, so it doesn't really matter if—”

She looked at him sternly. When he scratched his scalp, she could hear sand falling from his hair and onto the manuscript.

“Have you read that before?”

“What?” He swept the sand from the papers. “This?”

She nodded.

“Sure. Plenty of times, but not this particular draft. Every time he rewrites it, I learn something new.”

The wisest course of action, she knew, would be to leave it at that, to express no further interest. But she couldn't help herself.

“Like what?”

“Well, like this.” He cleared his throat and took on a deeper, more authoritative tone. “‘Not dirt for dirt's sake, or grief merely for the sake of grief, but dirt and grief wholly accepted if necessary as struggle vehicles of an emergent joy—achieving things which are not transient by means of things which are.'”

She frowned. He beamed.

“Almost makes you want to cry,” he said. “Doesn't it?”

And when she returned to her sketches, she expected to feel just as scattered and uninspired as before. It was, however, the opposite. The images were flowing from her with such frantic accuracy that she almost thought herself possessed, and this, she realized, was how she would eventually win him. Long hours, half-empty rooms, dirty hands, wet feet, watching and being watched until she appeared, especially to herself, to be the sort of person he might want.

So it was for the next thirteen days: sketching in the
morning, lunching alone from her spot on the shark tank while the others searched and collected. She tolerated Arthur's presence in the afternoon. She listened to the sound of Wormy typing on the typewriter in the bedroom. Most of all, she waited for Ricketts to acknowledge her in even the most cursory way, and in this regard, she sometimes got her wish. He would nod at her from the tide pools or offer a polite, dimensionless hello as he wandered into the kitchen for a bottle of beer, and the thrill of the encounter would be just enough to sustain her until that evening, when she and her father would both make their separate returns to the house on the hill. At dinner, which was still being prepared without conversation or camaraderie, they would stand at the kitchen counter and Anders would look at her in a way that seemed heavy, that sought to convey something; but he never asked any questions or voiced any suspicions, and she was never forced to lie or brag or defend herself. For some reason, she was no longer expected to play the spy, which meant her days in Ricketts's lab remained unnoticed, unquestioned, and began to acquire a dreamlike quality as a result.

Today, though, she knew it was real. As she stood there tracking his progress through the grid of shark tanks, she knew the universe was solid and verifiable, and she wanted to do something to prove it. So she reached down and grabbed the nearest object she could find: a small, sharp-edged rock that landed in the bucket with a clang.

He whipped around, hurried to her side, and held out his hand.

“Let's see.”

She passed the bucket to him. As he peered inside, she watched his face closely, desperate to see something—anything—that would replace that look of epic, imperturbable calm. So when he smiled broadly, it was contagious, the last remnants of her reserve mutating into relief.

“I've been trying so hard to—”

“Come here,” he said. “Slowly.”

She bent down next to him, as near as she could come without touching. His face was just inches from hers, so close that she could practically feel his beard against her cheek. When he extended his hand to retrieve the rock, she saw the source of his sudden happiness: two worms, flat and pale and oblong, their bodies covered in blue, branchlike markings that reminded her of trees in winter.

“Large flatworms,” he said.

She nodded.
“Alloioplana californica.”

“I thought you hadn't bothered yourself with the names.”

“I lied.”

Another smile, another seizure in her heart.

“Well, everyone has a different idea of the truth, I suppose.” He shrugged. “As for these two little miracles, there's no doubt. They're excellent finds but delicate ones. So much as brush them with a fingertip, and they'll split in two.”

He reached into his pocket and extracted a glass microscope slide. Then, with what seemed like an excess of caution, he maneuvered the slide directly beneath the bigger worm's head and remained motionless, wordless, as it recoiled slightly before oozing its full length onto the glass. He secured the rock between his knees, careful to leave the second worm untouched. Then he removed a glass vial from his other pocket, filled it with seawater, and eased both the slide and the worm into it.