Monterey Bay

by Lindsay Hatton

  The phone rang. She looked at the empty beer crate and then at her sketch on the wall.

  “Another drink for courage,” he insisted.

  She waited until the phone stopped ringing. Then she drank. To confess herself was not a possibility. Too pathetic. Too risky. Furthermore, there was no chance a man like this would understand the stakes, which was why, when she started talking, she knew the liquor had already done its work: summoning the words, doling them out with an almost magnanimous ease. She described their arrival in the Philippines, their occupation of a condemned colonial manor on Manila’s outskirts. She outlined their newest and most ambitious project to date: the acquisition of nearly a thousand acres of mango orchards and their subsequent transformation into tobacco fields. She had been doing this sort of work, she assured the biologist, almost since birth. She knew exactly how to assist her father in his industrial transformations, which meant everything went precisely as it should have until the night he fell ill. At first, it didn’t seem like much: just a moderate fever, an aching in the joints, chills that made his limbs tremble but not shake. By morning, however, his skin was blazing and his eyes were dull, his arms and legs thrashing, his mouth spouting foamy green bile, his slender torso coiled desperately around the expulsions.

  Later that night, he slipped into a coma. The next day, she took the helm. It wasn’t something she had attempted before: this total assumption of responsibility, this mimicry of experience and knowledge. But she had been raised to believe she was not only capable of such things but destined for them, and in this moment of decision, belief seemed tantamount to proof. She paced the mango orchards with the tobacco farmers and considered their advice on fertilizing with wood ash versus powdered horse manure. She debated with the local politicians as to which nearby village should be used to obtain the children who would lay the screens of protective cheesecloth across the delicate seedlings. She traveled to the city by mule-drawn cart and answered the banker’s questions with a succinct, merciless professionalism. For the next three months, she triumphed. The venture proceeded exactly as planned; success floated before her eyes like an opalescent sphere, a bubble that contained both the promise of the future and the substance of past. But then the bubble burst. Without warning or reason, the farmers began to mislead her. The children returned to their villages and wouldn’t be coaxed back to the fields. The banker claimed she needed to refile forms she had already filed twice. No matter how hard she worked, she couldn’t stem the tide. Each day seemed to drag her further down failure’s depressive, unpaved spiral, until it was clear to her and everyone else that she couldn’t manage it on her own.

  On the day she finally gave up, she didn’t tell her father. He had regained consciousness a week earlier, but he was still delirious with fever, and her shame was too great. So instead of confessing herself or trying to put things right, she roamed the manor that for the past several months they had called home. Since their arrival, she hadn’t had either the time or the inclination to explore it fully. Now she made a point of examining every room. In most ways, she was unmoved. It was just like all the other residences her father tended to favor: intact enough to ensure basic human comforts, yet squalid enough to invoke a sort of ethical high ground. The rooms were large and humid, all of them frilled with elaborately carved teak and ravaged by the twin stresses of abandonment and equatorial proximity. The only thing that seemed unusual was the almost biblical sense of loss, one that went above and beyond human haunting. She didn’t know why this was the case until she noticed the large, pale stamps on the walls where paintings had once hung, which led her, on instinct, to the root cellar. And there, stacked in the blue darkness among the piles of yucca and taro and sweet potatoes, she found the stash: hundreds of framed forgeries of well-known masterpieces. The sight was unexpectedly compelling, so she began to dig through the canvases. She didn’t know what she was looking for. All she knew was that, as she searched and studied, she could forget her recent failure, she could forget her father moaning and perspiring upstairs, she could forget there were things in life that evaded direct translation. She worked quickly. With the help of some books in the mansion’s library, she decided which artists were the most skilled and upsetting. She learned whom to emulate and whom to dismiss. When she had narrowed it down to a solid two dozen, she bought a sketchbook and charcoal pencil and a small leather satchel from a woman at the local market and allowed herself only an hour of immersion per day, two if she felt decadent, but it was among the most efficient and satisfactory learning she had ever done. She made copies of the copies, and then, when copying no longer seemed productive, she began to choose her own subject matter, her fingers clenched hard around the pencil as she made meticulous record of things she had witnessed both in the countryside and on the Manila streets. She tried out different styles, different methods of expression and organization: Fra Angelico, Holbein the Younger, Holbein the Elder, Rivera, Modigliani, Memling. The root cellar deepened itself: darker, wetter, colder, a realm of lawlessness and foreign language, much like being fathoms underwater. And it was in this way that a full six months passed, the Philippines taking on the characteristics of a place she loved, not because it felt comfortable, not because it felt safe, but because it showed the clearest and most direct route to what she had begun to believe was her destiny: a life of solitude, a life of work—hers, not her father’s—rising up around her like walls.

  But then her father recovered, his physical and mental health twice as robust as before.

  “And you were found out?” There was an excitement in the biologist’s eyes that, for the first time, actually reminded her of a biologist, of someone who was gathering data and imagining it being put to use.

  “Yes. By that point, the fields were beyond salvaging.”

  “He blamed you.”

  “And rightfully so.”

  “And what about the sketchbook?”

  “He didn’t care.”

  “Maybe someday the two of you will go back. Fix things up.”

  She shook her head. “My father never returns to a place he’s already been. What’s more, the embassy had started to evacuate on account of the Japanese.”

  “And your mother?”

  “What about her?”

  “Mothers usually have opinions about things like this.”

  “Not mine.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Oh no. I’m sorry.”

  The furrows in his brow were so dark and deep, they looked like tattoos. She shrugged and looked away.

  “Just the two of you, then, and so late in the game,” he continued. “No wonder you’re unhappy.”

  “Not unhappy. Just unproductive.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Just then, the air began to shriek. Three deafening whistle blasts from the street outside: short, long, short.

  “The Del Mar cannery,” the biologist explained, hands shielding his ears. He was trying to look disappointed by the interruption, but he was clearly as thankful for it as she was. “Arthur will be crushed. The poor lamb’s already worked four shifts this week.”

  “The canneries are open this late?”

  “The canneries are open whenever there’s something to can. The whistles blow, they open the throttles, and everything starts to shake.”

  She heard stairs being taken at a hurry, and then Arthur was in the doorway, panting. When he saw the two of them sitting together on the bed, his eyes widened.

  “Some of the Styela are still in the m-menthol,” he stuttered.

  “It’s all right. I’ll finish up.”

  “And I’m afraid one or two of the Okenia got a bit … flattened.”

  “It’s all right, Arthur.”

  “I’ll be happy to stay if you need some—”

  “No, no, no. We don’t want you on the foreman’s bad side. Again.”

  Arthur nodded at the biologist and then at Margot, a great seriousness on his face. F
or a moment, she felt serious, too, as if a piece of crucial information were about to be revealed, but then Arthur was gone and so was the feeling.

  The biologist let out a long exhale, lips fluttering.

  “My God, did you see that look he gave you? Someone needs to inform him you’re not a damsel. And you’re certainly not in distress.” He squinted at her forehead. “Or are you?”

  “I’ve endured worse.”

  “You certainly have.”

  She held his gaze until the aforementioned shaking began, until the tension that had existed prior to the whistle blast reknotted itself. Then she looked out the window. The green curtains were almost perfectly translucent now, the fabric dissolved by the streetlights, the canneries’ rattling seeming to both solidify the enclosure and erode it.

  “It’s all my fault,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “We were really starting to get along, but then I pushed too hard. And you told me too much.”

  “I don’t require careful handling.”

  “But you do require something. A balancing of the confessional scales, I think.”

  He stood and scanned the room in what looked like desperation. Then he went over to the bookshelf, retrieved the manuscript, and dropped it onto her lap.

  “I wrote it,” he explained.

  He sat down next to her again. She looked at the first page, which was blank except for a title. Breaking Through.

  “You showed me yours,” he continued. “And now I’m showing you mine.”

  She flipped to the second page, expecting to be disappointed. But from the very first sentence, she couldn’t look away. It was like reading the transcript of something she had dreamed and then lived and then dreamed all over again. There was almost nothing in the way of economy, even less in the way of design, the hand-scrawled edits in the margins nearly equal in volume to the typewritten text. The images created by his words, however, were indelible: the ghetto inferno, the split-open head, the tragedy, he wrote that someone else had written, that breaks a man’s face and a white fire flies out of it. A trinity, but not necessarily the Christian one, opposing forces meeting in honesty and a new magic birthing itself in the juncture. Most of all, there was his description of the aftermath. She had felt it before, and in otherwise disparate parts of the world: how communities acquired harder outlines following near erasure; how individuals, in moments of shock, catapulted themselves into unearned clarity. She had felt it, but she had never voiced it, and seeing it on the page was like seeing her own reflection in the harshest possible light.

  When there were just a few paragraphs left, most of which praised the trade unions in a way her father would have derided, she stopped reading.

  “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.<
br />
  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Looking.”

  “Would you like to know what you’re looking at?”

  “If I must.”

  “It’s a Styela. One of the animals you were supposed to be helping me collect. One of the animals Arthur failed to properly anesthetize. The tubular part is called a tunic. And the skinny part you’re holding on to is called the stalk. Which explains its common name: stalked tunicate.”

  “Oh.”

  “Some people also call it a sea squirt.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Give it a squeeze and see for yourself.”

  She held it over the edge of the bed and did as instructed. The result was precisely as he had described: a little bit of the sea squirting out onto the floor.

  “Are people always so literal?”

  He laughed. “For the most part, yes. But every once in a while you get a pleasant surprise. The sarcastic fringehead. The Portuguese man-of-war.”

  She pinched out the last of the seawater and put it in her lap.

  “Go ahead,” he said, picking up the sketchbook and pushing it at her. “I know you want to.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t.”

  “It has a heart, you know. It literally has a heart. The water came out of the atrial siphon.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “And it may not look like it, but it’s a closer relation to you and me than any other invertebrate. As larvae, they have backbones and spinal cords. Just like us.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “It most certainly isn’t.”

  “You’re trying to trick me.”

  “Why on earth would I do something like that?”

  Her father was never coming back, she told herself. And now everything was up to her, just as it had been in the tobacco fields.

  “I’d like another drink,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  As he reached over to the windowsill to retrieve the jug, she could see the strip of skin above his belt. She would squeeze him around the waist just as she had squeezed the Styela; she would see the ocean coming out. He passed her the jug. Her mouth and throat were completely accustomed to the sensation now; it was only her belly that continued to respond. The fire flaring up, the fire cooling down.