Monterey Bay(33)

“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.





12


    1940




“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.