Monterey Bay(65)

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.