Monterey Bay(58)

The entire peninsula, in other words, was breaking apart. And she was just the one to fix it.

So she finally began to set things in motion. Arthur and Tino were on board, as were the scientists at Hopkins, many of whom were persuaded to leave the institute to work alongside her. There was some generalized resistance at first, just as there had been in her father’s day. The fishing fleets feared the fickle interference of tourism; the historical preservationists wanted everything to stay the way they presumed Steinbeck would have wanted it; the residents of Monterey and Pacific Grove moaned about traffic and parking. Permits were another issue. The old cannery from which the aquarium was to be fashioned straddled the border of the two towns in question, which meant that permission had to be granted from each municipality, a bureaucratic quagmire that nearly derailed the project before it even began.

Work, then. Work unlike any that had come before, that made her apprenticeships to Anders and Ricketts seem frivolous in comparison. Dark mornings, sweaty afternoons, weepy nights. A cast of humans to manage, but also a cast of fish and plants, none of them quite as amenable as one would like. Lingcods devouring the black-eyed gobies, sea otters using any object within reach to make deep, irreparable gouges in the three-story acrylic windows, seven gill sharks bashing their snouts against the tank walls and refusing to eat unless a sushi-grade salmon steak was clipped to a pole, dangled directly beneath their mouths, and made to thrash around in imitation of a live fish. A sea turtle was acquired from an aquarium in Japan, its suspiciously low price explained when, after its painstaking installation into a million-gallon exhibit, it attempted to mate with one of the volunteer divers. And the turtle wasn’t the only one. The aquarists, too, couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Almost every time she went into the service corridors behind the tanks, she would find a new couple going at it in the darkness: up against the filters and fiberglass, shirts off, pants down, the fish bearing witness.

“It’s not an amusement park,” she told the offending aquarists as they stood before her, their hair mussed and their eyes lowered. “And I’m not amused.”

When it came to matters of aesthetics, however, no one needed much convincing. The architects understood perfectly, as did the exhibit designers. The old did not bow to the new, nor did the beautiful cave to the efficient, nor did money prove an object. The original system of overhead piping was preserved despite outrageous inconvenience and expense, as was the gigantic boiler, which was made an exhibit in its own right. When it was discovered that the whistle towers—the ones that had once summoned the cannery workers to the lines—would not survive the rigors of large-scale renovation, the originals were quietly demolished and precise fiberglass replicas were assembled and installed over the course of a single weekend. Floor tiles of sparkling gray quartzite were specially ordered from Mozambique. The font on the informational placards was designed on commission and then trademarked. Indulgences, she sometimes answered whenever the Herald came asking. Secretly, though, she knew it was something else entirely. A vision both enamored of and at odds with itself, a private need made public, a dream that had both everything and nothing to do with the waking life that had inspired it.

And then there was the matter of the ocean itself. It wouldn’t look good, she knew, for an immaculate aquarium to preside over the shores of a spoiled bay. So she began the long-overdue task of repairing the damage the canneries had once wrought. Anders’s schooling was key. Know a politician’s needs, he had advised her, and you’ll be more powerful than the politician. So she pulled her strings and called in her favors and it wasn’t long before environmental safeguards were recommended, legislation was written, and a sanctuary was established, the fishermen’s livelihoods now secondary—and rightfully so—to those of the fish.

Then, without warning, it was almost time. They were in the final phase of construction now, the crews laying the foundation for the sprawling outdoor deck and amphitheater. Because of the tides, this work couldn’t be done during the day, so she hired night laborers at an expense that seemed to necessitate supervision. Hidden in the darkness, she would stand there on concrete that was still semi-wet underfoot, her body held precariously aloft on ad hoc plywood “snowshoes,” and she would imagine the bay’s prehistory. She would watch the blowtorches spray and hiss, she would hear the pneumatic fire of the nail guns, and she would summon the gods, Greek in girth and temperament. How to make that first, submarine slice? A trident dragging across the earth’s skin and splitting it open. Out of wounds, something must flow or else it’s not really a wound. So, sulfur: sulfur spewing from huge, hollow columns, sulfur on which blind things began to feed. A richness to these depths, pea-soupy and sinister. A shift in temperature, a lightning strike of radical warmth, the gods of earth and sky finally taking an interest. The land carving Santa Cruz to the north, Pacific Grove to the south. The first inhalation of fog, the rich deepness rising. And then the feast. The filter feeders siphoned in whatever they could from their anchorages on the rocks. Fish, big and small, gorged themselves silly. Whales, too, blues and grays and humpbacks, suckling calves in tow. The blood shadows of sharks and sea lions, teeth snapping at the periphery. Then, the people. Only a few of them at first: a calm, resourceful tribe who ate the sea urchins straight from the tide pools and used their spiny tests as currency. Then, visitors from elsewhere, harbingers of thievery and sickness and faith. Gold, otters, squid, sardines, oil: bait for a new worship. And standing there on the deck, on the black edge of her own creation, she knew. She knew she was not one of the people summoned by the gods. She was a god herself. Angry, jealous, impulsive, cruel, but also possessed of more than a little magic, more than a little immortality. If she waved a hand across the water, actual waves would rise up in response. If she bled into the bay, it would start to boil. If she gave enough of herself, this town would love her even more than it loved its own children.