He handed her the bucket without comment. She carried it to the water’s edge. The tide was well on its way to lowness, their feet surrounded by piles of cannery refuse and lawns of algae. A trio of plovers side-eyed them as they used their tweezer-shaped bills to mine the sand for bugs.
“Look down,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”
Her chin dropped to her chest. It was the fourth time in as many days that he had brought her here and attempted an explanation that didn’t quite take, and this was perhaps the biggest failure of them all: the fact that, despite urgently wanting to, she was unable to fathom how he worked or what he was hoping to achieve by it. It was enough to make her want to crack her head open again or reempty the jug of formaldehyde: whatever would return her brain to the looseness it had possessed on her first night in the lab, to the semi-stupor required to understand him and his methods.
“The ocean.” She sighed.
“What else?”
“A tide pool.”
“And what’s inside of it?”
She studied his face for traces of familiarity or suggestiveness, for any indication that he felt as unsteady as she did. But he was responding to her exactly how he responded to everyone else, with a happy crispness that seemed to shut the door to any possibilities except the honorable ones. And that, she told herself, was the cruelty of charisma: how it’s never satisfied with the capture of an individual. How it requires the ensnarement of the masses to thrive.
“Sardine heads.”
“What else?”
“A crab. A snail. A little fish.”
“You haven’t learned the Latin nomenclature yet?”
“You hired me to draw them. Not memorize their names.”
Then an unexpected yet deeply satisfying response: a whistle and a shake of the head, an exasperation that seemed more like the product of amusement than annoyance.
“Fair enough. Just put them in the right piles and that will suffice.”
“But your piles make no sense.”
“Of course they do.” He gestured at the three creatures, each one different in every respect save its general placement in relation to the waterline. “Things that live together should go together. And things that live elsewhere should go elsewhere.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t? I feel like I’ve made it perfectly clear. And on several occasions.”
“You find them in a certain spot today—”
“The high intertidal.”
“You find them in the high intertidal today. But by tomorrow, they could be anywhere. All the way out. At the bottom of the ocean. Any of them could go anywhere they like.”
“That’s precisely it, though! They could go anywhere. But they never actually do.”
She dipped a toe into the pool in question and stirred it around. She watched the fish panic, the crab scurry, the snail remain blindly in place.
“But a crab looks nothing like a fish,” she muttered. “And a fish looks nothing like a snail. Or haven’t you noticed?”
“You sound like the boys over at Hopkins.”
“You mean the real scientists? The ones who know what they’re doing?”
“For your information,” Ricketts replied, his tone still alarmingly good-natured, “they keep my specimen catalogs on their shelves. They use them for their graduate course work.”
He blinked and grinned. She didn’t desire her father’s intrusion, not in the least. She did, however, desire his clarity, his confidence, his brutal adherence to a system that had long since been praised and proven.
“I’m going back inside,” she said.
“Absolutely not. You’ll do it right today. Even if it kills me.”
She set her jaw and met his gaze, trying to hold it for several seconds longer than usual, to finally extract something from it. He was already on the move, though, approaching the shark tanks and beginning to inspect each one in turn, seemingly oblivious to her company. For the next few minutes, she just stood there, watching. Once or twice, she tried to stop herself. She tried to do something that would convey the presence of her free will and the absence of an infatuation so deep, it had begun to border on servitude. But it was hopeless. All she could do was marvel at him: the air gathering around him as he studied his captives, the world shimmering beneath his single-mindedness, eliminating everything in its periphery.
The saddest part was that on the first morning of her apprenticeship here, she had assumed it would be easy. Bolstered by her triumph on the night of the party, she had entered the lab without knocking, eager to see the look of surprise on his face, the surprise morphing into delight. Instead, she was met with an empty room, the whole place completely abandoned save for a selection of preserved tide pool creatures already lined up on the desk, inert and perfect in their jars of yellow fluid. On the seat of the desk chair was a note written in a somewhat feminine hand, detailing both the manner in which the specimens should be portrayed and the full contents of the kitchen in case she got hungry. She sat down and tried to work but found herself unable. Her eyes wandered away from her papers at every opportunity, divining the clues that, if assembled in the right order, would help to shrink the distance between her body and his. She wanted to stand up, jump around, knock things from the shelves. She had, however, made herself certain promises: detachment, maturity, indifference, restraint. So she forced herself to remain behind the desk, her only concession to her weaker impulses the occasional visit to his bathroom, where she would stare at herself in the mirror and perform the sorts of actions that, until now, she had always considered wasteful and sad: the fluffing of hair, the pinching of cheeks, the releasing of the top two buttons of her shirt, anything to ensure her attractiveness when he eventually found her sitting there with his jars, one living body among the dead.
The morning came and went and still he failed to appear. At around noon, she put her sketches into an immaculate pile and rose from the desk. She went into the kitchen and cut a chunk of salami from the links that hung above the stove top like stalactites. She opened a can of the same sort of sardines her father either was or was not in the process of canning. She washed one of the dirty glasses in the sink and filled it from a pitcher of milk in the icebox. Then she took her meal out to the balcony that overlooked the shark tanks and the shoreline, and that’s when she finally saw them: Steinbeck and Ricketts and Wormy, all of them out as far as the tide allowed, all of them bent over the same patch of water as if whatever was inside of it required three grown humans to successfully subdue.
Her lunch forgotten, she descended the stairs to the back lot and positioned herself in the most obvious spot: sitting on one of the lidded concrete tanks, faced in their direction. She could hear Ricketts guiding the others as they rummaged through the water and filled their buckets. Occasionally, there was a small spark of excitement or humor: a rogue wave dousing them with spray, a slapstick stumble on the rocks, a sea cucumber eviscerating itself onto Wormy’s hands, Steinbeck insisting he had been bitten by a periwinkle until Ricketts reminded him that on a purely technical level, periwinkles didn’t have teeth but, rather, a rasplike tongue called a radula that was used to scrape algae from the rocks. Otherwise, it was meditative in the extreme, the spell unbroken until, about an hour into Margot’s observations, Wormy suddenly looked up from the water and into her eyes. It wasn’t a long glance and it wasn’t a combative one. But it was enough to make her retrieve her lunch and return to the lab, mortified.
“Don’t mind me.”
Arthur was rocking in Steinbeck’s chair, one of Ricketts’s essays sitting on his lap.
“I won’t,” she replied.
She put her dishes in the kitchen sink and reclaimed her place behind the desk. Before stopping for lunch, she had been sketching a clownish, misshapen little gastropod called a sea hare, and now, as she resumed the task, she could feel the cold, unwelcome spark of Arthur’s surveillance.
“They mate in orgies, if you can
believe it. Hundreds of them sometimes. Right there on the seafloor. They’re hermaphrodites, so it doesn’t really matter if—”
She looked at him sternly. When he scratched his scalp, she could hear sand falling from his hair and onto the manuscript.
“Have you read that before?”
“What?” He swept the sand from the papers. “This?”
She nodded.
“Sure. Plenty of times, but not this particular draft. Every time he rewrites it, I learn something new.”
The wisest course of action, she knew, would be to leave it at that, to express no further interest. But she couldn’t help herself.
“Like what?”
“Well, like this.” He cleared his throat and took on a deeper, more authoritative tone. “‘Not dirt for dirt’s sake, or grief merely for the sake of grief, but dirt and grief wholly accepted if necessary as struggle vehicles of an emergent joy—achieving things which are not transient by means of things which are.’”
She frowned. He beamed.
“Almost makes you want to cry,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”
And when she returned to her sketches, she expected to feel just as scattered and uninspired as before. It was, however, the opposite. The images were flowing from her with such frantic accuracy that she almost thought herself possessed, and this, she realized, was how she would eventually win him. Long hours, half-empty rooms, dirty hands, wet feet, watching and being watched until she appeared, especially to herself, to be the sort of person he might want.
So it was for the next thirteen days: sketching in the morning, lunching alone from her spot on the shark tank while the others searched and collected. She tolerated Arthur’s presence in the afternoon. She listened to the sound of Wormy typing on the typewriter in the bedroom. Most of all, she waited for Ricketts to acknowledge her in even the most cursory way, and in this regard, she sometimes got her wish. He would nod at her from the tide pools or offer a polite, dimensionless hello as he wandered into the kitchen for a bottle of beer, and the thrill of the encounter would be just enough to sustain her until that evening, when she and her father would both make their separate returns to the house on the hill. At dinner, which was still being prepared without conversation or camaraderie, they would stand at the kitchen counter and Anders would look at her in a way that seemed heavy, that sought to convey something; but he never asked any questions or voiced any suspicions, and she was never forced to lie or brag or defend herself. For some reason, she was no longer expected to play the spy, which meant her days in Ricketts’s lab remained unnoticed, unquestioned, and began to acquire a dreamlike quality as a result.
Today, though, she knew it was real. As she stood there tracking his progress through the grid of shark tanks, she knew the universe was solid and verifiable, and she wanted to do something to prove it. So she reached down and grabbed the nearest object she could find: a small, sharp-edged rock that landed in the bucket with a clang.
He whipped around, hurried to her side, and held out his hand.
“Let’s see.”
She passed the bucket to him. As he peered inside, she watched his face closely, desperate to see something—anything—that would replace that look of epic, imperturbable calm. So when he smiled broadly, it was contagious, the last remnants of her reserve mutating into relief.
“I’ve been trying so hard to—”
“Come here,” he said. “Slowly.”
She bent down next to him, as near as she could come without touching. His face was just inches from hers, so close that she could practically feel his beard against her cheek. When he extended his hand to retrieve the rock, she saw the source of his sudden happiness: two worms, flat and pale and oblong, their bodies covered in blue, branchlike markings that reminded her of trees in winter.
“Large flatworms,” he said.
She nodded. “Alloioplana californica.”
“I thought you hadn’t bothered yourself with the names.”
“I lied.”
Another smile, another seizure in her heart.
“Well, everyone has a different idea of the truth, I suppose.” He shrugged. “As for these two little miracles, there’s no doubt. They’re excellent finds but delicate ones. So much as brush them with a fingertip, and they’ll split in two.”
He reached into his pocket and extracted a glass microscope slide. Then, with what seemed like an excess of caution, he maneuvered the slide directly beneath the bigger worm’s head and remained motionless, wordless, as it recoiled slightly before oozing its full length onto the glass. He secured the rock between his knees, careful to leave the second worm untouched. Then he removed a glass vial from his other pocket, filled it with seawater, and eased both the slide and the worm into it.
“God, I love these,” he said quietly. He plugged the vial with a rubber stopper and then tilted it up toward the sky. “Most people think they’re appalling, but I just love them, I really do.”
In the high, bright glare of the shore, she could see, more clearly than ever before, the evidence of his age. There were wrinkles—deep ones—across his brow, a stubborn quality to the way he held his mouth. In his eyes, though, was that flintlike spark, the glow of the fog internalized.
“You try the next one,” he said, resting the vial beside the bucket and producing another microscope slide from his pocket.
“I don’t think—”
“Just do it. Nice and slow.”
He passed her the slide, retrieved the rock from between his legs. She did her best to mimic him: holding the slide with a light grip, approaching the worm with a reverence that seemed wholly disproportional to the task at hand. For a moment, the worm seemed unwilling, its body contracting, its branches rippling, but she didn’t flinch. Instead, she remained perfectly still as the worm began to pour itself incrementally forward, making its deliberate transition off the rock and onto the slide.
“Oh,” he said. “Very nice.”
He held out his hand. She passed the slide to him. He slipped the second worm into the vial alongside the first.
“I’ll draw them,” she said.
He looked away from the worms and into her face. And there it was: the expression she had been trying all this time to cultivate, waiting all this time to see, a new sort of wickedness framing his grin, a glad darkness born from the type of pain that, if you endure it long enough, eventually turns to pleasure.
“Yes,” he replied. “But first, we need to kill them.”
They were in a room she had never seen before.
“Sit over there, on the Buick,” he instructed. “I’ll let you know when it’s time.”
“Can I—?”
“A moment, please. Only a moment.”
His voice was brisk and methodical, as unfamiliar as her surroundings. She took a seat on the hood of the car. They were in a garage: a ground-level chamber flush with the back lot and one level below the main building. There were two metal sinks against the far wall, dozens of bottles on a series of warped, poorly hung shelves, all of them labeled in a chemist’s obscure script, an icebox just as dilapidated as the one in the kitchen, lidded trash barrels filled with what she could safely assume was not the usual sort of trash. On the raw-wood countertops was a variety of scientific equipment: microscopes, flasks, burners, tongs, an abundance of glass slides like the one she had used to capture the worm, all of them stored upright in a box marked PROPERTY OF HOPKINS MARINE STATION. What really drew her eye, however, was the old china hutch at the base of the staircase. It was filled with what looked like hundreds of bottled specimens, many of which she had seen in isolation before, but never all together.
“Come here.”
She looked away from the hutch. He was standing in front of the sinks. She slid down from the hood of the car, and went to his side. Most of the morning’s collections had already been sorted and categorized into metal bins: hermit crabs cowering in their pilfered shells, snails stretching their gooey feet up the sides o
f their enclosures, small sea stars curling and uncurling their slender, spiky legs as if desperate to signal something. The worms, however, were still alone in their vial, untouched and alive, resting quietly on their microscope slides.
“Well then,” he announced, his voice perfectly amiable now, but also too jaunty, too official. “We’ll start with one part menthol to nine parts seawater, which should get them nice and relaxed. And because we’re feeling fancy, we’ll add a dash of magnesium sulfate, but not too much because we’re running low and my current supplier is one of those shortsighted types who insists on being paid.”
He let out a snort, but she remained straight-faced, intent.
“Awfully serious today, aren’t you?” he said.
“I thought this was serious business.”
“It is.”
“So what happens next?”
“Like I said, a nice splash of menthol.”
He selected a bottle and held it directly beneath her nose. When she inhaled, there was a brain-flushing odor halfway between pine and mint, the strength of it almost enough to push her over the edge.
“Into the bin?” she rasped, eyes watering.
“That’s right.”
She took the bottle from him and let a glug or two escape. Then she watched him uncork the vial that held the worms, and as the worms slid from the vial and into the liquid, she expected something intense and purifying, something like the burning sketchbooks. But the worms barely moved, their edges making a slight upward curl before falling from the slides and stiffening into gradual paralysis.
Monterey Bay Page 11
