Monterey Bay(9)

“So?” he asked.

She returned the manuscript to him. Her brain didn’t feel right anymore. The synapses were firing a bit too fast, the ideas too big and loud.

“You’re wrong,” she said.

“About what?”

“Tragedy doesn’t always clarify. And pain doesn’t always produce.”

“You must have misread me, then, because I never said it did.”

She took another swig from the jug. And because she was feeling particularly righteous, abnormally eloquent—the drink and his essay and their pulpy fusion making her tongue warmer and her mind looser than ever before—she supposed it wouldn’t hurt to expand her argument. She supposed it wouldn’t hurt to begin even earlier than the Philippines, even earlier than her own birth. Her grandfather’s exodus from Sweden, his relocation to New York City’s most squalid tenement, the amputation of his surname—Filtzkog—into the leaner, more American-sounding Fiske. Then, the birth of her father, Anders, and the onset of his precocious entrepreneurship, his knack for using known infrastructures to exploit unknown sources of income: mining zinc in the British uplands instead of copper, farming ostriches in South Africa instead of goats, distilling vodka in the Spey River Valley instead of Scotch. All of this emerged from her fluently and in a way that seemed to prove her point. It was only when she reached the part about her mother that her confidence flagged and another drink was taken. As for this tale, she had heard it only once, so it was easy to feel unsure. New Orleans, she told the biologist. The Babineaux family, Louisiana’s most viciously aloof clan of French transplants, their longing for the homeland fierce enough to present itself as a genuine psychological disorder. Marcelle Babineaux, seventeen years old: a narrow waist, a substantial topknot of hair, a caustic temper. A hasty courtship, an even hastier marriage, and then a departure for Bolivia, where Anders purchased a coffee plant in the hope of switching it over to chocolate production. Work was not halted when the floods started or when Marcelle began to vomit all morning and sleep all afternoon. And so it was that Margot was born at 11:59 P.M. on February 13, the rain drumming away at the hut of the village midwife, Anders shivering beneath a leafy overhang outside, thrilling to the shrieks of his first and only child as she emerged into a wet and borderless world.

Here, she paused, waiting for the charm of her birth story to sink in. But instead of looking awed, the biologist looked impatient.

“What’s your point?” he said.

The point, she replied, was that Marcelle would never actually meet her daughter. By the time Margot emerged, her mother was already dead, a victim of hemorrhaging and fever. Per local custom, the midwife let the body stay in the hut long enough for the baby to take a few fortifying suckles at the breast, long enough for Anders to kiss both mother and child on their sweaty brows, and then Marcelle was carried to the outskirts of the village and burned in a fire that, because of the rain, took nearly two days to adequately dispose of the corpse.

She stopped talking. The biologist was staring at her, unsmiling.

“A straight line, then,” he said finally, taking the jug from her and drinking what seemed to her like slightly more than his share. “Between two fixed points.”

“What do you mean?”

He waved at her drawing, at the babies and the breasts.

“A coincidence,” she replied.

“And what about the fires? And what about the collections and the copies? All of them just as good as the real thing but also incalculably worse?”

“More coincidences.”

“No! The fakes in the root cellar, the fakes on my walls. Circles are circles, Margot Fiske. That’s why everything always comes back around.”

“Circles? I thought you said it was a straight line.”

“All right.” He took a deep breath and retrenched, and she was surprised at how much it thrilled her. The man in the tide pools—the dull, pointless obstacle—was gone entirely, replaced by a bizarre yet compelling intellect, one that seemed to both reek and glow. “A personal example, then. When I was a boy, my uncle gave me a field catalog, a drawer full of dusty old animal corpses, and the very same magnifying glass I still keep chained to my belt loop. And now, here we are. As if not a moment has passed, much less thirty-odd years.”

She had had beer and wine before, but never anything much stronger. It was as if she could actually see and smell the corpses: their papery skin, their powdery hides.

“That’s precisely what I don’t understand, though,” she protested. “How can anything in that essay be related to anything in the tide pools? How can any of it be connected, except by someone who’s trying to make excuses for himself?”

He took the jug from her and put it on the windowsill. Then he hopped up from the bed, left the room, and returned after what seemed like only a few seconds.

“Here,” he said when he was sitting beside her again. “I got you a live one.”

He placed something yellow and cylindrical into her hand. There was the urge to flinch, to toss it across the room in disgust, but she kept her hand steady. She let it roll against her palm, light and wet, its ridges like worn-down tire treads. Then she picked it up by the small stem at its base and held it above her, as if peering into the speckled center of a foxglove.

“What are you doing?” he asked.