Monterey Bay(2)

The escape, then. The Philippines beckoned, but so did other places: Indonesia, the Channel Islands, Bolivia. In each locale, her apprenticeship to her father had taught her many skills, most of them in lucrative fields. She had a flair for languages and a talent for negotiation. She wasn’t a beauty queen, but with the possible exception of her height, she wasn’t a sideshow freak either. The one thing that stood in her way, logistically speaking, was the biologist. She had been forced into his company almost an hour earlier and since then had genuinely grown to hate him. Here was a case in which the hammer had already fallen, the wings had already been clipped, life’s capacity for meaningful action obliterated. There were several dozen yards between them, the sound of his whistling obscured by the crashing surf, his shape like its own shadow moving across the bay, but even from a distance she could see it all quite clearly. The dullard’s delight with which he allowed himself to be engulfed by the shoreline, the unnecessary reverence with which he plucked a specimen from the water, gave it an inexplicable sniff, and then added it to his bucket. When a sea lion belched, he paused and bowed his head like a penitent at the steps of an oracle. Then a furtive yet urgent search of his left trousers pocket. The withdrawal of a flask. A long, guilty chug.

Run, coward, she commanded herself. Run.

But her legs refused. They had already been eaten by the black pit of panic. So she stumped along, slipping and hobbling over the rocks, until, just a few steps from the beach, the sound of laughter made her freeze. In spite of herself, she turned around. The biologist’s mouth was emitting the sounds of mockery. His eyes, however, were flashing with mockery’s opposite: a gentle sort of surprise that almost made her proud.

He frowned at her. She turned and ran.

And then it was over. She was on her stomach, limbs askew, eye to eye with something that could have belonged in her sketchbook: a small black snail, its dark foot sliding across what she knew to be a widening pool of her own blood.





She dreamed of the biologist: his hands gripping the wheel of an old Buick, his fingers pale beneath the strobe of the passing treetops, her breath emerging as a drowned man’s gargle. The smell of fish. Heavy limbs, swollen head.

“We’re almost there,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.”





When she awoke, she was being carried up a staircase.

Although the pain was exceptional, it was also bright and precise. Not, in other words, a dream. It was all actually happening: the sound of feet against wood, the sensation of being hoisted up and turned around, of being shoved through a curtain or a door, of being dropped into a nest of laughter. The high scratch of a phonograph needle.

Then the most disorienting thing yet. Silence. A wide berth of it, white and expectant, the pain brimming and stretching.

She grunted and writhed and tried to escape. The biologist tightened his grip.

“Wormy,” he said. “Where’s Wormy?”

“Dunno, Doc.”

“For the last time. I’m not a doctor.”

“What happened?”

“Smashed her head.”

“She’s so . . . tall.”

“All of you. Go home. Now.”

“I’ll help.”

“Ethanol ampoules. The box in the garage.”

Silence again.

“Arthur! The garage!”

Another rattle of footsteps, voices retreating, smells of new and old milk, new and old smoke. A low ceiling and black walls, dented waves of yellow glass, small things watching her, bleached flesh and jellied eyes. An embryo in a glass jar, fingers on her head, pressing down, slipping on something wet that had been left there. And then a fierce tugging between her eyes, the suddenness of it wrenching her upright, and now it was only in the darkness behind her eyes that she could see what was happening. She was thrashing like an animal, but the fingers were strong, grabbing one of her wrists and then the other.

“Wormy. Hold her down. Tell her not to fight.”

A woman’s smell moving in close.

“Don’t fight.”

A vial nudging itself between her teeth.

“You can hate me for this later. Just lie still.”

“Who is she, Doc?”

“The Fiske girl. I tried to warn her about those shoes.”

“She isn’t one of your sharks, Edward. Please tell me you haven’t been drinking.”

“Out! Both of you. Out!”

High heels, low murmurs.

And when the sounds had faded away, when she was alone with the biologist again, all that was left were the fingers on her head and a sick suspicion. The rubbing alcohol, the needle, the thread. A process no longer of sewing something together, she realized as the room turned black, but of sewing something on.





3





INSECTS ON HER FOREHEAD. BIG, TROPICAL ONES.

She lifted a hand. She found the brittle legs. She tried to yank them away but couldn’t, and that’s when she remembered. The hotel, the tide pools, the biologist, the fall. Eyes still closed, she released the trail of sutures and lowered her hand, trying one last time to summon it: the prismatic color of the Philippines, its heat and certainty. But when it wouldn’t come, she opened her eyes. There was a sagging rope mattress beneath her, her feet dangling over its edge, and a moist woolen blanket atop her that felt as though it weighed several hundred pounds. The light was dim and bleary, a noon-hour dullness soaking its way through a green-curtained window above the bed and casting the room in a submarine gloss. And the biologist was sitting next to her on an upended wooden beer crate, gazing at her with a dark pair of eyes.