Monterey Bay (22 page)

“I am.”

“Then why, if you don't mind my asking, did you come at all?”

She nudged her drink, watched the bubbles rise and gather.

“Call it nostalgia,” she said, half choking on the lie.

“That's never a good reason.”

“I know. Thank you for indulging me.”

On the way back to the house, she chose the path closest to the beach.

At one point, when the beers began to take their toll, she found a dune and took a seat and watched how her nylon stockings—a postwar luxury that was just now becoming morally permissible—were acting like little sieves, letting the smaller grains of sand in and keeping the larger ones out. The sky was an intense, bright gray: a color that, in all her travels, had never materialized anywhere else in the world but here. After a long while, she stood from the dune and returned to the street. She was thirsty, but her flask was dry. So she went to the new liquor
store on Lighthouse and bought their smallest, most expensive bottle of gin. At the house, she drew the curtains against the afternoon, sat down at the kitchen table, and drank as much as she wanted. Then she searched the rooms, looking into closets and cabinets for anything that would disprove her father's death. She found an undergarment that was still stiff with starch, the pulverized nub of a pencil. She returned to the kitchen and rooted through the wastebin, hoping to find a fugitive drop at the gin bottle's bottom, but there was nothing left. So she opened the door and went outside to her old spot on the porch, the air tightening behind her in a silent peristalsis, an expulsion of the living from the dead.

She sat there for several minutes, not thinking, not moving. When she saw a shape at the base of the hill, she rose to greet it.
Tino's lawyer
, she thought, knees buckling on account of the booze.
Right on schedule.
But as the person continued his climb, she realized her mistake. This was not a lawyer, but a boy: a young man of the same age Arthur had been, but larger and coarser and somehow unknowable looking, as if the very nature of children had changed since she was last able to count herself among their ranks.

“Miss Fiske,” he said, his voice respectful and disinterested all at once.

“Yes?”

“Ed Ricketts sent me.”

She held her breath before responding.

“You work for him? Catching cats?” The very thought of it made her want to laugh.

“Cats?” He frowned. “No.”

“What does he want?”

“Just a moment of your time.”

HIS FINAL MESSAGE COMES TO HER FROM INSIDE A BOTTLE.

The first sip is an arrival, especially after so many years of abstaining. The second sip, however, is nothing more than a false portal, so she caps it up and returns it to its hiding place in her desk drawer. It's night and the aquarium has closed hours ago, but she hasn't gone home. Instead, she's stayed here. The
Mola
problem persists, the anniversary of his death has come and gone without either resolution or recompense, and now she doesn't know what to do.

She looks outside the window. In the light of the crescent moon, she sees that the dead Humboldts are no longer on the beach. They've been taken away. They've been taken to a biological laboratory, no doubt, where they will be injected and preserved and sold for study, and the students who study them will
learn certain things. They will learn that humans and squid share a common evolutionary history. They will learn that squid ink contains dopamine, the chemical responsible for sex and drug addiction. They will learn that squid blood is the same blue as a swimming pool.

What they won't learn, though, is how to keep them in a tank. She knows this because for a span of several years, she tried it. She tried to put live squid—the small ones native to Monterey Bay—on exhibit. The challenges seemed great but by no means insurmountable: a short life span, an extreme sensitivity to changes in pH, a penchant for cannibalism, a tendency to kill themselves by colliding with the tank walls. She put her best people on the job; she consulted experts of international renown. But after a string of spectacular failures, the truth became apparent. It wasn't worth the time or money or psychological strain. So, with a sigh of communal relief, the last crop of dead squid was returned to the sea, the tank was repurposed, the project was permanently abandoned, and, for the first and perhaps only time in her life, Margot accepted defeat with what an outsider would have certainly interpreted as grace.

The weird old clock on her desk, the same one that used to reside on her father's mantel, strikes eleven forty-five. The bay is alive with squid boats.

And she didn't get tired or sleepy, for the beauty burned in her like fire.

Good old Steinbeck. She smiles, rising from her chair. Always so much better with a modified pronoun or two.

By the time she arrives at the wharf, the squid boats are going out for their second set.

She finishes suiting up. In the window of the candy shop behind her, a hook works and reworks a giant pink tongue of saltwater taffy. In the water beneath her, rockfish hover and plot. Usually, the summers here are notoriously foggy, but this summer will be different. It will be wildly, inexplicably warm: the pinecones popping in the pine trees, their fat little grenade shapes bursting open under the shock of the unusual temperature. Crystal blue skies scarred with the thick, columnar evidence of forest fires. Algal blooms and acidic oceans, reports of extinction and collapse.

“Wait. Stop.
Stop.
”

The three-man crew of the nearest boat looks up at her in unison. She takes a step forward, her neoprene boots making low, muffled taps against the wharf. Feet on wooden planks? No: the fists of a giant on the skin of a huge tribal drum. She looks ridiculous in full scuba gear, even more ridiculous than that poor intern inside the otter costume. She doesn't
feel
ridiculous, though; that's the thing. She feels as though something
is burning away her insides, something powerful and without precedent, something only an ocean can extinguish.

“Stop.”

The vacuum is already on. She has to scream to be heard.

“What do you want?” one of them screams back.

And there are, she supposes, many ways to answer. The simplest, most honest answer, though, is that she wants to swim with the whale sharks again. Or at least Monterey's version of them.

“I'm Margot Fiske.” She tightens her weight belt. “I'm coming aboard.”

The crew's eyes grow wide. They nod in assent. She tries to make a respectable entrance, but she's far too old and far too eager, so she flings her torso over the side and lets the weight of the air tank do the rest. She staggers to the bow and stands there alone. Soon, the boat is moving again: past the moorings, past the breakwater and its resident sea lions, their shapes that of unbaked dough. For nearly an hour, nothing. Her legs shake, her courage wavers. Then, suddenly, light. Annihilating, brutal, shadowless, opaque, a false sun in a black sky. The boat heaves forward, cutting a sharp diagonal against the waves. The skiff races, the drum spins, the net slides, the floats skitter loudly off the gunwales and into the bay. A return to stillness, taut and total, the other boats drifting close and then drifting away, inspecting one another's territories with the careful aggression of diplomats. Some of the fishermen move to the edge alongside
her, their eyes on the water, their bodies waxen beneath the halogen lamps overhead. She, too, looks down. At first, she thinks it's sickness; the ocean is sore and inflamed and lumpy with pus. But then there's an unexpected blast of vitality—reds and purples—which is when she knows it isn't sickness. It's squid. A huge, vibrant shoal of them, a kaleidoscopic swarm squirming and flashing, tentacles weaving as they rise toward the light.

She steps away from the edge. So many years of working and wanting, so many stabs at the metaphoric vein. It can all be put inside a tank. All of it. Except this. Except him. Anger is not new to her, but bewilderment is, and now all she wants is one simple courtesy: for everything to stop until she figures it out. The catch, however, proceeds. The door to the hold creaks open to expose the refrigerated blackness beneath. The crew rushes and shouts and shoves her out of their way as if they've forgotten who she is, what she's worth, how much she knows.

“If you're going to jump,” one of them growls, “you've got to do it
now
.”

The metal housing is inside the purse. The vacuum is on, sucking the squid belowdecks in greedy, globular drafts. The overhead lamps are fading, the bulb filaments glowing orange and squiggling in the darkness like neon worms. In the last of the light, she thinks she can see some larger bodies on the periphery of the shoal. Humboldts, dozens of them, arms reaching out not to embrace their tiny cousins, but to consume them.

Oh, Margot
, she hears him whisper.
I always thought you were wonderful.

And below the surface, she joins the riot. She's down there with the squid, just like the Chinese fisherwomen. Vast and noiseless, thousands, tens of thousands, joining and separating and rejoining, genderless to the naked eye, fused end to end, red arms flashing. A delicate, urgent process, one night only: mating, egg-laying, and dying, the decisive acts of a species' continuation. But they don't even notice her in their midst. They don't notice her big, clumsy intrusion. They simply carry on without disruption or pause, receiving her body as if she were yet another addition to the fray; as if, were they only able to relax certain physiological expectations, she would be fair game for anything they had gathered there to accomplish. Suggestions of terror but also of eternity, time both condensing and expanding, dizzy and happy, wishing the deepness were deeper. She's falling fast now—much too fast—into the grayness, but instead of fear, there's wonder. Why grayness? she wonders. Isn't it supposed to be blackness? But it's grayness, the clean grayness of the aquarium's Mozambique quartzite tiles, a beloved maze leading her in and up and around, up to the tops of tanks she has never imagined or seen, her own body replicated in the water below, the water above, her own body budded and cloned to produce the schools of endlessly circling fish, everyone she has ever cared for standing on the deck and looking down into the water, friends gazing on with fondness and confusion, parents alive with pride,
lovers pointing at her and inventing reasons for wonder, wondering when she will do something interesting, wondering when she will be fed, wondering whether she will become placated or enraged once the things she's always wanted are finally between her jaws.

THEIR TRIP DOWN THE HILL WAS FAST AND SILENT.

Along the way, sobriety appeared and disappeared like a mirage, the boy keeping several steps in front of her.

When they finally arrived on the Row, it was like being stabbed. There were still small groups of workers pacing the streets, still a pillar or two of exhaust wafting from the canneries' smokestacks, still a glowering cluster of packers standing outside the Del Mar building and gossiping over their cigarettes. Otherwise, it was empty.

And then they came within sight of the lab.

“What's happening?” she asked the boy.

Outside, at the base of the front steps, there was a crowd twice as large and loud as the ones that used to attend his parties, faces upturned, cameras snapping like claws.

“So many of them,” he scoffed. “Ever since that damn book.”

She tried to see above the heads but couldn't.

“Let's go,” she said. “Let's get to the front.”

For some reason, she tried to take the boy's hand, but he had already disappeared. So she moved forward on her own and then stopped. Ricketts was standing on the stairs, his back against the door, something huge and ugly in his hands.

A massive tentacle found his arm. A flashbulb popped. He peeled the tentacle away to reveal a stripe of bloody welts, some of them the size of silver dollars. The crowd murmured and flexed.

“What is it?” yelled one of the onlookers.

“Humboldt squid,” he yelled back, his voice so familiar to her that it almost sounded fake. “
Dosidicus gigas.
Not usually found this far north.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Came up in one of the nets last night alongside the smaller ones. Seemed to be eating them.”

The tentacles writhed. The crowd surged. He lifted his chin and stared out into the masses, and that's when she saw him become fully revealed by the strobe of the flashing cameras. He was dressed exactly as she remembered—long apron, knee-high black rubber boots—but his face was different. The beard was gone, and in its absence his cheeks and jaw seemed sunken and creased, a downward slant to the corners of his mouth, a
slackness in his lips, his skin bright white against the dark wall behind him. He looked both appreciative of his audience and dismayed by it, like an aging magician who had long since forgotten his best tricks but not the applause that used to accompany them.

Another flashbulb, another wince. His eyes found hers. She clenched her teeth. He appraised her for a moment and then extracted a damp hand from beneath the creature's mantle and beckoned her to his side. She began to push her way through the crowd again, but her progression seemed ten times as slow and laborious as before.

By the time she reached his side, the crowd was heckling her and she was breathing heavily.

“Thank you for coming,” he said.

“You're welcome.”

“You remember this fellow? From that very first bucket I sent up the hill?”

She nodded.

“We'll need to narcotize it before fixation.” He was whispering now, his lips on her ear. “Decrease the salinity—slowly—and add a dash of ethanol if the arms are still moving after a couple minutes.”

She nodded, ignoring the shouts at her back.

“And a formalin immersion won't work on this one.” He smiled. “Find a syringe. We'll have to inject.”

Later, she would remember the colors. Skin flashing devil red with the body's last angry pumpings. The chromatophores' final, dramatic assertions. A huge eye looking up at her from the bottom of the garbage barrel. The heart-stopping paleness of its sloppy weight as they hoisted it into the tallest glass display cylinder they could find.

When it was all finished, they put the cylinder in the corner because it was too big for the hutch, and then they went upstairs, Ricketts to the kitchen and Margot to the desk. She sat there and waited until he reappeared in the kitchen doorway with a beer in each hand. He put the beers on the bookshelf and ran both hands through his hair, which was sweat-heavy and unkempt, matted down around his temples and sticking up in the back like the plumage of a dark, flightless bird. He opened one of the beers and held it out to her, smiled a bit when she accepted it, and then settled himself into Steinbeck's old rocking chair. Her breath caught. Inside the lab, the squid safely bottled, he looked nothing like he had outside in front of the crowd. The weariness and pallor had disappeared, replaced by a handsomeness so potent, she could feel it taking up residence inside her.

“I don't suppose you have anything stronger,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow and stood.

“I'm fresh out of formaldehyde, but let's see what else I can find.”

He disappeared into the kitchen again and returned with a dusty ceramic jug.

“The boys gave this to me a month ago,” he said. “I took a taste the other night. It cured my toothache, but I couldn't hear for a full minute afterward.”

She took it from him, removed the cork, and sniffed its contents before putting her lips to the rim. When she drank, the effects were different from what he had described, but just as intense: her jaw went numb and her eyes started to water, almost as if she had begun to weep.

“Nothing has changed in here,” she said, wiping her cheeks and trying not to cough.

“Really? I feel like it changes every time I blink. Sometimes I'll reach for a piece of paper or a book only to find that it no longer exists. That even the place where it stood was gone. But I suppose that happens to everyone.”

He watched her take another sip, and the completeness of the inspection would have thrilled her were it not for its unimpeachable politeness. It was as if he were kicking the tires of a car he didn't intend to buy.

“You look just fine,” he said.

She looked down at the span of skin between her wrists and
elbows. It was marked with welts from the squid's suction cups, just like his.

“Likewise,” she replied.

“I heard about your father.”

“Yes.”

“You've been running the show on your own, then?” He sat down.

“No. I've been selling everything off.”

“You must be very rich now.”

“I am.”

“And you dress like it, too. Although I must say I miss the days when you used to walk around here looking like an overgrown newspaper boy. Where's that funny little bag you always used to carry?”

To punctuate the ensuing silence, she drank again. As the liquid ran down the ladder of her ribs, she closed her eyes, hoping it would wash away everything her heart didn't need. For a moment, she actually
could
feel her body become cleaner, her mind lighter. When she opened her eyes, however, the sensation was immediately reversed. He was on his feet now and making his way in her direction.

“And you?” she asked.

“And me?”

“You've been well?”

His smile betrayed a lack of conviction that alarmed her.

“I suppose so. It's been interesting with the sardines or, rather, the lack thereof. We've got a top-notch population biologist on the case, woman by the name of Frances Clark. And a young chap from Long Beach has been making the trip up and back, advising on new technologies and the like. Works for the bureau of fisheries. Last name Casey. Don't remember the first.”

“And the lab?”

“Oh, this old thing?” He waved a hand in a circle above his head. “Hard times, I'm afraid. During the war, I tried to keep it solvent by working up at the Presidio, running blood and urine tests for the army. Then a stint at Cal Pack as a chemist. And then a shred or two of hope regarding the Guggenheim, but that never came to pass.”

“I'm sorry to hear it.”

“Don't be. The money will come from somewhere. It always does.”

There was the heat of a certain look, but then it subsided.

“And Wormy?”

His eyes narrowed, his arms beginning to fold themselves across his chest.

“Pardon?”

“The woman—”

“Ah yes. She finally came to her senses while the rest of us were away in Mexico, for which I don't blame her, although I must say it took me somewhat by surprise. As did the departure of our old friend Arthur. Here one day, gone the next. No
explanations, no good-byes. Just picked up and went south. Last I heard, he was working in the canneries on Terminal Island.”

He went over to his collection of record albums, selected one, and then put it back down.

“But I think it's John who's taken it the hardest of anyone,” he continued. “After his book, things here took a bad turn and he started to feel responsible, so he hightailed it to New York.”

“I was under the impression the book did quite well.”

“It did. And perhaps that was the problem.”

He glanced over at the window, at the faces that were now looking in on them, noses pressed to the glass, eyes leering without compassion or shame.

“You could close your curtains,” she suggested.

“And become a prisoner in my own home? No. I'd rather have people look if that's what they want to do.”

She turned away from him and met the gaze of the strangers outside. She thought of the huge squid eye, its exaggerated roundness like an artist's rendering of a shiny black sun, bright with the cruelty of never being able to set. She took another swig from the jug.

“Powerful stuff, isn't it?” he asked cautiously.

“Are you angry at him?”

“Who? John?”

She nodded. He shook his head.

“His only crime was remembering things a certain way,” he said. “And I just happened to be in the middle of it.”

She drank again.

“You might want to take it easy,” he cautioned. “I only had one sip and it just about knocked me down.”

“Then why don't you help me finish it?”

He let loose with a stilted laugh. And that's when he finally closed the distance between them, walking up to the desk and taking the jug from her hands.

“You know,” he said, sipping and then wiping his mouth, “the worst part about getting older isn't the fear of death. It's the sadness of things that aren't anymore. All potential can't become reality. You've got to select. And it can make a person very sad.”

“When I w-was a girl,” she stammered, “on the night of the low tide, when you didn't come and you sent Arthur to—”

“I kept your original sketches,” he said. “All of them.”

She looked at the window again, at the faces that were still tracking her and Ricketts's every move despite the fact that they hadn't done anything worth watching. Not yet.

She gripped the edges of the desk.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Do you need to lie down?”

“You're not—”

But then a sound at her back, and as she turned around she knew, somehow, exactly what she would find. A woman in the bedroom doorway, lovely and small, clothed in a child's white frock.

“Hello,” the woman said.

“Hello,” Margot replied.

There was the scent of perfumed soap as she walked past the desk and toward the phonograph. When the music started, Margot prayed for the fugue: for the baker's dozen of opening notes, measured and solitary. But it was chords instead, blaring and insistent. The woman fell into Ricketts's arms. Margot buried her chin and smelled herself. Cigars, menthol, moonshine.

“Hello, Wormy,” he said, kissing the woman on the forehead and then slowly releasing her. “Will you be able to make it on time?”

“Just.”

“Travel safely, then.”

“I will.”

When the woman was gone, Margot tilted back in her chair. Her entire body was brittle, illiquid, a net made of nails and hair and bones. She tried to speak, but her voice had turned to sand.

“That's Alice,” Ricketts said, his words barely audible beneath the phonograph. “Music student up at Berkeley. We were married in January.”

She looked down at her hands.

“And God, does she love her Mozart. She's probably transcribed
Don Giovanni
twenty times by now.”

She squeezed her hands into fists, knowing it was useless to cry, but even more useless not to.

“Oh, Margot,” he said. “I'm so sorry. I always thought you were wonderful.”

She couldn't hear him, though, and she couldn't hear the music. All she could hear were the noises at the window. The people there weren't just watching anymore, she realized. They were tapping. One finger—tap, tap, tap. And then another. And then another, until five fingers became what sounded like five hundred and the sound was indistinguishable from drops of water against glass.

She looked up at him. His smile sprouted and grew.

“Your father once wondered if this town wanted an aquarium,” he said, eyes twinkling. “And I think the answer is finally yes.”