“You know,” he said, watching her closely, “last time I drank this stuff, some strangeness happened.”
“What sort of strangeness?”
“Well, a slapping contest for one thing. Right on top of my desk. Joe and I sat there for hours and hit each other as hard as we could. Then John took a turn.”
“Why?”
He smiled and looked sheepishly at his essay, which was still sitting on the bed. “We wanted to see if we could break through.”
It was as if he were speaking in code. And the most puzzling thing was that she hadn’t even earned it yet. It usually took so much more than this to be invited inside a stranger’s world. Money, connections, shows of good faith. But she had offered him none of this and yet, here she was.
“Let’s do it,” she said. The tequila was a sword in her brain: brave and shimmering. “Let’s do another slapping contest.”
“Absolutely not.”
She raised a hand and tried to connect it to his face, but he grabbed her wrist and forced her arm back down. When he released her, she shifted onto her side and faced the wall. There was only one light source in the room—a rawhide-shaded lamp on the bedside table—and the shadow it cast of her body was huge against the expanse of paneled wood.
“Don’t pout,” he said after a moment. “It wouldn’t have worked anyway.”
Sleep was overtaking her now, quickly and violently, and she was glad of it.
“There’s another technique, though.” His voice cut through her drunken fatigue like scissors through wet silk. “One that’s a bit less likely to leave a mark.”
In response, she didn’t flip all the way around to face him. Instead, she rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.
“I’ll need to look into your eyes,” he said.
“Then look.”
She kept her gaze fixed firmly upward. He snorted in either amusement or frustration. Then, suddenly, he was the only thing she could see: his body covering hers but not touching it, his legs spread wide, his torso held aloft on bent elbows.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked.
“Nothing. Just stare at me. Stare the life right out of me.”
The air was gray dust and her fingers were driftwood. She had been taken here against her will, just like the Styela, and she would end up like them, too: prodded and observed and put to death. Her earlier instincts had been right. Resist, retreat, run.
But then she met his eyes and a different set of concerns surged forth. Just a few hours earlier, she had been so proud of her portrait of him. Now she felt differently. It wasn’t enough to represent something faithfully. The important thing was the order in which it all happened. Was she, in other words, taking something whole and breaking it apart? Or was she building up disparate elements until they formed a known shape? Her father always judged his success on the product, on the amount and quality of what came out. But what if it was actually about what went in? You’re getting somewhere, she told herself. You’re finally getting somewhere. But then all she could think about was her left shoulder. He was stroking it with his thumb, tracing the seam in her shirt.
“Explain it to me,” she said. “Explain it like I’m the dumbest person in the world.”
The thumb stopped. But then it resumed its tracing.
“You’re not dumb at all. I’ll bet you did marvelously in school.”
“I’ve never gone to school. Just to work.”
“Which I suppose explains the Surrey collar,” he said, popping the fabric. “Very debonair.”
“My father and I share a tailor.”
“Of course you do.”
“Please. Explain it.”
He sighed. There was reticence in his expression and she knew why. She had never tried to justify her drawings to anyone because she knew it would sound complex, and complexity could easily be mistaken for weakness.
“Like I said before,” he began carefully, “I collect specimens from the tide pools. Then I preserve them and sell them to universities. But I also do other things.”
“The essay.”
“Yes. And other essays much like it, none of which I can ever seem to get quite right. I like trying, though. I like to think about poets and composers and artists and their access to the divine. There’s the shark oil situation, which I believe in fervently. I’m trying to get the real story from both the fisheries and the population scientists to determine just how many sardines are left in the bay and whether or not we should keep on canning them. In my more optimistic moments, I feel like I’m just one idea away from figuring out a whole new method of categorizing each and every living thing. And someday I’m hoping it will all come together in a clear and beautiful way. In a way that even the dumbest person in the world will understand.”
From somewhere on the street outside, the sound of glass breaking, women howling in laughter. She had always thought her father was ambitious, but his goals were nothing compared with this. The biologist’s fingers moved from her collar to the side of her face. She felt very ugly. Very young.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t.”
“Oh,” he said, pushing himself back onto his heels. “I thought you were—”
“I’m not,” she replied, the words slightly emptier than she intended.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t usually try that sort of thing unless I’m quite certain.”
“Certain of what?”
At this, his eyes went blank. Then he stood from the bed and sat on the beer crate, the mattress shifting audibly beneath her as if dismayed by the sudden imbalance. She, too, felt dismayed. It hadn’t necessarily been pleasant to have him above her, to have him touch her on purpose. Pleasant, however, no longer seemed to be the point.
She stood from the bed and moved to the doorway, toward the room from which, if she listened hard enough, the music still seemed to emanate, even though it had stopped hours ago.
“Where do you put them all?” she asked.
“All of what?” He was standing now, too, and watching her more intently than ever.
She cleared her throat. Something was blocking her voice.
“You should lie back down,” he cautioned. “You might feel like you’re ready, but you’re not.”
“You go out there and take things.” He was right, she realized. Reclined on the bed, she had felt fine. But now that she was standing, the blood was plummeting from her head and the liquor was staking its belated claim. Within seconds, she would pass out and fall over. “You take things from the ocean and put them in here, so when do you know when it’s enough?”
“Well …” He grinned. “That’s the thing. It’s never really enough.”
When the next urge arose, she aimed herself in his direction and steeled herself for the impact.
“Whoa, there.” He caught her by the waist and guided her onto the bed. Instead of returning to the crate, however, he remained upright, his thigh within easy swatting distance.
“I actually am,” she said. The fabric of his trousers felt slightly damp beneath her fingers. She was finding a seam, too.
“Excuse me?”
“I actually am … interested.” What’s the other word? she asked herself. The less ambiguous one? “Available.”
Ricketts grimaced and shook his head.
“Rumor has it your father’s going to ride all over this town, guns blazing. Only an idiot would knowingly step into the crossfire.”
“Good thing you’re a first-rate idiot.”
“Barely a day together,” he said, smirking, “and it’s like we’ve known each other a lifetime.”
“Then what’s the harm in getting to know each other even better?”
Whose words were these? she wondered. Whose desire?
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, a sparkle of sweat visible at his hairline.
“Too late,” she replied.
She had heard him laugh before, but not like this.
“Some more music
?”
“Please.”
He ran from the room. She held her breath, expecting the return of that measured, careful polyphony. This time, however, the noise from the phonograph was something very different: a song that might have been popular during her father’s boyhood, a tenor’s excessively upbeat caterwauling.
“Not this,” she said when he reappeared in the doorway. “I want what was playing earlier.”
“Oh.”
He excused himself and made the switch.
“You were right,” he said upon his return. “Bach is a far better choice.”
She scooted over to make some room for him on the bed. For several seconds, he didn’t move. Then it was just as before: a resumption of his earlier position, all four of their legs stretched out in chaste, nonconjoined parallel. At one point he started swiping his feet back and forth to the beat. After a bar or two, she joined in, and so it went until he purposefully broke the rhythm in order for their toes to collide. Negotiation, she remarked to herself. I know about this. So she made what she hoped was a persuasive counteroffer: flinging her entire left calf over his right shin. An error, though. It was too much and he was retreating now, his joints stiff, so she responded with the only remaining maneuver in her arsenal: doubling down and then some, tilting herself over and slightly up until her mouth was touching his.
He let her remain there for several seconds and then gently pushed her away. She sank back against the pillow, jaw grinding.
“Maybe it’s best to keep things simple,” he said. “The world already has far too much trouble as it is.”
“What makes you think I’m trouble?”
“Because I can’t seem to resist that sort of thing.”
She closed her eyes, certain it was all over. Whatever instinct had spurred her on was proving itself unreliable now, unsafe. But then she felt a hand on her leg—the same leg that was still crossed over his. Her eyes flew open.
“Margot Fiske,” he mused. “Sounds like something that should be on the marquee of a Left Bank cabaret.”
“I don’t sing or dance. And certainly not for money.”
“A woman of business. I know, I know.”
The hand drew the leg even closer to him, even farther apart from its twin.
“I thought you didn’t like trouble,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes trouble is good. Sometimes trouble makes things show up.”
With his index finger, he pressed down on her kneecap as if pushing an elevator button. Then he was looming over her again. He looked at her for a while, appraising the stitches, savoring the sight of his own handiwork. Then his mouth was where his eyes had been, kissing the perimeter of the wound.
“Ouch,” she whispered.
“Liar,” he countered, moving his lips down the bridge of her nose and onto her mouth.
And this time, she realized, it was real. Earlier, when she had been in charge of the kiss, it hadn’t quite taken shape. But now the imbalance was being righted: form and function, all in one, just as he had said. The form of his mouth, the function of his hands, everything moving slowly and with lethal purpose. Once or twice, she found herself distracted by the smell of his beard, but not in a bad way. After several minutes, he pulled back. He took off his shirt, unfastened his trousers.
“There is a final question, though,” he said, head tilted, eyes downcast. “The question of … uhhhh … age.”
She felt her face turn a color: white or red, she didn’t know which.
“Not that I’m particularly hung up on that sort of thing. But in this case I feel like it might be best, you see … for all involved … just to be certain …”
“Guess.”
“Excuse me?”
“Guess how old I am.”
He brightened, visibly pleased by the challenge.
“You just turned twenty. This past spring.”
“Spot-on.”
He shucked his trousers to the floor and freed himself. She undid her own buttons as quickly as possible so that he wouldn’t see her hands shaking. Then a moment of genuine uncertainty. When his face vanished, she felt disappointed. But then his mouth made itself known again—not on her mouth this time, but on a different place, equally eloquent, equally unstable—and when he crawled back up the length of the bed and entered her, there was almost nothing in the way of resistance or pain. Nothing was being broken. If anything, it felt like diving into very hot water. His lips pulled, his hands worked, a blade-sharp knowledge consuming her from the inside out, his convoluted philosophies suddenly crystal clear. Time was passing, but there was no telling how fast, and when she finally stiffened and cried out, she saw light in the darkness of his eyes, his face slack with an emptiness she hoped matched her own.
When it was over, they lay there for a long while, her head on his chest. She curled her arms and legs into balls; she tried to make herself as small as possible. Soon, the sun was rising, the gulls screeching at it, calling it forth or pushing it away. Sea lions, too, what seemed like hundreds of them, barking like hounds. Beneath the ruckus, his heartbeat: the sound coming at her through a fortress of tendon and flesh and bone. Put it in a bucket, put it in your hand, squeeze it, and make it soft. He knew her name, but she didn’t know his. And the fact that this inequity barely troubled her was the first indication of something she hadn’t even expected to consider: that failure, as she had always understood it, might be something else entirely.
Then, a duet of sounds that made her jump. Footsteps climbing the exterior stairs, a voice calling her name.
She jerked away from the biologist’s body. He vaulted off the bed.
“You’ll want to freshen up?” he asked, dressing himself with remarkable speed. Her clothes still lay in a pile next to the pillow.
“Please.”
“I’ll tell him you’re in the bathroom.”
He nodded vigorously, glanced over to where the jug and the sketchbook lay upended on the floor, and left the room.
When he was gone, she rose from the mattress, the pain in her head snarling instantly back to life. She didn’t feel strong enough yet to put on her clothes, so she staggered to the bathroom naked. In the bathroom, it was very difficult to stand, so she gripped the edge of the sink and looked into its basin, the color of which seemed to be the same color as the throbbing between her eyes: a mottled white that wanted very much to be clean but wasn’t. She could hear voices from the front room, the words obscured. There was fluid running down her thighs and she needed to wipe it away, but she was afraid to let go of the sink. So she tightened her grip and stared into the mirror. The wound looked precisely the way it felt, like something out of a comic strip: deep, diagonal, a battlefield gash running all the way from her hairline to the bridge of her nose, the broken skin sealed shut with thick and uneven stitches, a patch of lurid blackish purple marking the place where her forehead had hit the rocks.
“Margot!” her father called.
She bit her cheek and looked down.
“Margot!”
“One moment!”
She looked up again. And even more affirming and more cartoonish than her wound, somehow, was the rest of what she saw in the mirror: her face and body, yes, but also the bathtub behind her. Like the sink, the tub was stained and chipped and dirty white, but instead of being empty, it was filled with the pus-colored bodies of nearly a hundred tiny crabs, their small forms scampering over and under one another, clawing at the walls as if trying to escape a catastrophe only they could predict or understand.
4
1998
WHEN SHE ARRIVES AT THE AQUARIUM—FOR REAL this time, not in the prior night’s dream—she receives his first message. A mass beaching of Humboldt squid on the same spot where, as a girl, she once read the morning paper.
It’s upsetting on many levels, but mostly because it’s a distraction. For weeks now, she’s tried to whittle down her focus to a single point: to the release of the Mola mola, or ocean sunfish, a lon
gtime aquarium resident that has grown far too big for both its tank and a conventional sort of extraction. She’s sketched out some plans, she’s consulted with her aquarists, but decisions like this are far easier discussed than made, so she rises from her desk in her office in the administrative wing, puts her work aside, and goes to the window. The first body—nearly four feet long and red as blood—has already rolled up with the surf, tentacles and mouth arms twisted like intestines. The second one appears moments later, bigger than the first, mostly white with some purple around the eyes, which are the size of bocce balls and just as blind looking. When the third body materializes, she knows it’s only a matter of time. The institute scientists will show up, a jogger on the bike trail will get nosy, the tourists will descend and congratulate themselves on their discovery, so she postpones the task at hand. She takes her camera out of the filing cabinet, looks at it, and then puts it back in. Then she hurries outside: past the food room, past quarantine, through the employee parking lot, through the automatic gate in the security fence, and down onto the sand that, in the minutes since she’s left her office, has welcomed an additional five corpses.
At first she just stands there, the toe of her black rubber boot touching the smallest one’s soft, blotchy flank. In truth, she’s been expecting something like this for a while now, but she didn’t expect it to look so inconclusive. For one thing, they’ve assembled themselves wrong: some of them stranded high up on the beach, some of them logjammed horizontal to the surf line, all of them indicating different compass points, different ways to explain and excuse the same human life. Disappointed, she reaches down to take a quick feel, the flesh slick and taut and familiar. With the same hand, she rubs the scar on her forehead. She looks behind her. The TV news crews are parking their vans on the street above. Soon, they’ll be stringing their paraphernalia all the way from the bike trail to the water’s edge, a net of cameras and microphones and excellent teeth ready to exhort and ensnare. The onlookers will layer themselves like sedimentary rock, several strata deep and stiff with geologic certainty.
Monterey Bay Page 4
