Monterey Bay(24)

As for his message, it’s not hard to spot. In many ways, it’s as obvious as the beaching of the Humboldt squid. This time, however, it has taken human form: the two aquarium employees entertaining the visitors in line. The first is an intern in a full-body otter costume. The second is a banjo player singing well-known popular tunes rewritten in honor of the aquarium’s residents: the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week” rewritten as “Eight Arms and a Beak,” referring to the eight arms of the octopus and the calciferous mandible concealed therein; the Kinks’ “Lola,” which is about a transvestite, rewritten as “Mola,” which is one half of the scientific name of the Mola mola, the gigantic fish she still needs to figure out how to release.

Work, then, is calling: loud as it ever has, loud as it always will. But so is he. Stay, he says. Watch and listen. And she’ll be damned if he isn’t right. The intern is a girl of fifteen. The banjo player was once Monterey’s only known homeless man. To anyone else, it would seem like an unfortunate pairing, but not to her. It reminds her of the good times—of October instead of May, of mammals instead of cephalopods—which means she’s now following his instructions and then some. She hurries to the sea otter exhibit, right there among the paying public. She watches the little captives float and flip, somnolent one moment, clownish the next, fiddling with the hamster balls full of prawns and the tangled lengths of neoprene kelp: toys that are supposed to keep them from going mad in captivity.

Then, suddenly, she’s on the aquarium’s roof, standing in the shadow of a very different sort of tank. None of the otters up here are on display. Rather, they are on probation, undergoing a stint in rehab in the wake of maternal abandonment. The whole thing is very scientific, very sound, designed with the noble intention of eventual rerelease. The aquarist surrogate wears a welding mask, a poncho, and rubber gloves, all of it smeared with seaweed to obscure her human scent. The person, in other words, remains separate from the otter. The mother remains separate from the mothering.

There was a time, however, when it wasn’t like this. Not at all. In the aquarium’s early days, it happened right there in the little man-made cove below the deck. The aquarist surrogate—usually a woman, undisguised and unfragranced—would teach the poor orphan everything a mother otter would have. How to dive, how to hunt, how to get the clam and the rock, how to bang them together, how to clean up afterward. When the lessons were over and the final test was administered, the losers would be put on exhibit while the winners would be fitted with orange flipper tags and sent on their way. But then one day, disaster. A released otter returned to the cove, heartbroken and homesick and vengefully jealous, and charged the aquarist surrogate as she swam with her newest pup, biting down onto the ex-mother’s face, thrusting ineffectually, and refusing to let go.

And as she stands here now—the Humboldts beginning to rot on the nearby beach, their corpses filling the air with a scent that is both inadvertent and authentic—she can turn her back on the rehab tank and look down onto Cannery Row from above. She can see the intern and the banjo player, she can imagine them failing and being placed inside a tank of their own. Tourists are everywhere, invasive and necessary, giving the street life and taking it away. There is a desperation to their desires, which she supposes would be all right except for one thing: the fact that desperation never arises out of certainty. Beneath all of this—beneath all the tributes and distractions and renovations—is a deep and fundamental doubt, and the aquarium is not immune. The real version can never peacefully coexist alongside its imagined twin, which is why the real bay and the fake one probably fight each other when the doors are closed and no one is looking, two thirsty giants battling for ownership of the night.

In her own life, it’s happened before. She can trace the scar on her forehead to several verifiable sources, some obvious, some not. Some imagined, some actual. Today, however, only one seems to matter, only one seems to provide a rebuttal to his assertions. A collecting trip not in his tide pools but in the Amazon—she plus three other aquarists in search of arapaimas and traíras and peacock bass—during which a botfly bit her on the head. For the week following the implantation, she endured. She allowed the egg to gestate within a walnut-sized lump directly beneath the old scar tissue, the irritation growing each day, reaching heights she had never anticipated, until one night, alone in her tent with the river outside sloshing its way through the sort of mud that starts and ends civilizations, a tragedy took place, a tragedy even worse than the prodigal otter. The subcutaneous squirming and itching became too much and she was forced to expel the little embryo with a long, sad breath and a gentle application of the fingernails. Two lives at a mutually exclusive crossroads. A parasite and a host, a tourist and a local, and it’s up to her to determine which is which.





9


    1940




“YOU GET THEM WITH A KNIFE,” ARTHUR EXPLAINED. “Slide it under the foot. I’ve got a Japanese friend in Chinatown who dives for them and eats them alive.”

Margot continued to draw. An abalone today, a mollusk about the dimensions of a rugby ball, a scythe-shaped trail of pinholes marking the uppermost curve of its terraced shell, dark feelers emerging from the holes like tendrils of spilled ink. Yesterday, it had been an orange sea star, its plumpness veined with a net of prickly white. The day before, a turban snail, its black spiral topped with an opalescent crown. And in the days preceding it had been worms, what seemed like hundreds of them—flatworms, roundworms, polychaete worms, tube worms, fat innkeeper worms—their interminable numbers accompanied by Arthur’s equally interminable monologues about the local sea life, the detail and enthusiasm of which stunned her. It was clear he was trying to imitate Ricketts: his unrushed cadence, his casual erudition. Most of the time it didn’t work, but sometimes it did. Sometimes she would listen and respond, especially when the information seemed exotic or violent. Mostly, though, she kept to her sketchbook as he yammered on, his voice acquiring the same bland omnipresence as the surrounding fog.