Monterey Bay

by Lindsay Hatton

  Inside, she found everything much as they had left it. Many of the other houses on the block had been abandoned and looted and given over to nature, but theirs hadn’t. The horsehair sofa was still inappropriate and cumbersome, the dust in its crevices as thick and white as frosting. A sheaf of her father’s papers was still in the wastebin beneath the kitchen table, a sherry bottle was still hidden in the cabinet above the sink. She drank what little was left and then spent the next hour finding things to clean. She tied a handkerchief around her mouth and beat the sofa with a broom. She scrubbed the grout between the bathroom tiles. She polished the door handles. She mopped the linoleum until she could see her own warped reflection in its surface. When the entire house was tidied to her satisfaction, she collapsed onto the sofa, too tired to sleep. But she slept anyway and, for the first time in years, dreamed. She dreamed she was exploring her father’s cannery by flashlight, its beam slipping across the barren walls like a yellow snake. There were no conveyor belts, packing lines, retort baskets, or boilers. No blood or oil or water underfoot, nothing that evoked the bio-efficient, almost intestinal quality of a fish cannery at work. Instead, there was a building as empty as it was cavernous, the floors swept clean.

  When she was done looking at the cannery from the inside, she looked at it from the outside. She walked out a door and onto a narrow catwalk above the water that led from the main body of the cannery to the pump house. The ocean was angry, spitting and thrashing, punishing the shore with sets of closely spaced waves. The crescent moon was orange and blurry behind the fog. In its light, she could see Ricketts sitting on the edge of the catwalk, his feet dangling toward the water. She switched off the flashlight and sat down next to him, their legs swinging back and forth in near synchronicity. It felt good at first, but then it didn’t. She considered withdrawing her sketchbook. Her satchel, however, was empty except for her father’s penknife, and she could hear noises behind them, a crowd gathering on the street outside.

  “Quick,” he said. “The knife.”

  But the parade was already upon them, the hill ablaze with lanterns, the saint’s waxen face glowing within the confines of her bower, a book in one hand, a human skull in the other. Tino Agnelli was at the head of the procession. Arthur was behind him, his head shaved bare. Her father was last in line, walking slightly apart from the crowd, coatless despite the gathering cold. The air was full of smoke.

  “Inside,” Ricketts said, taking her arm. “Before it’s too late.”

  They ran back into the cannery. She leaned against him. For the first time, she noticed the vast difference in their heights. He was so short, he could fit his head snugly beneath her chin without bending or crouching.

  “I did a bad job, Wormy,” he said, reaching for her forehead.

  And when he reopened the scar with the knife, the cut wasn’t made on her skin. It was made on the seafloor beneath her, the earth splitting itself along a famous fault line: the one that, according to centuries of seismological fantasy, would break California free from the rest of the jealous landmass and send it floating off into the night.

  The next morning, she walked to the wharf.

  The waiter in the parlor car had been wrong. The town was still recognizable, but disappointingly so, like a beautiful woman without her makeup. It was only when she reached the doorway of the old Agnelli warehouse that things took a more hopeful turn. Unlike the rest of Monterey, this building had thrived since her departure. The single window had been scrubbed clean, the corrugated metal walls painted white, a crimson awning stretched over the entrance. Inside, there was no darkness, no statue, no sardine cans, no henchwomen. Instead, it was bright and tidy and outfitted in a way that was clearly meant to evoke the Agnellis’ homeland but looked like a caricature of it instead: ropes of garlic sagging from the rafters, a gaudy mid-Crucifixion portrait of Jesus and the Virgin Mary staring down at her in gory benediction, tables covered in red-and-white-checked tablecloths, candles weeping streams of wax onto basket-bottomed Chianti bottles. The barman awoke with a jolt when he heard her enter. As for Tino, he was there just as he had promised in his note: sitting at a large table near the kitchen, flanked by his brothers, his chin in his hands as if presiding over the world’s most anticlimactic Last Supper.

  She studied him before approaching. Like the town itself, he had been eroded by the intervening years, but not necessarily disfigured by them. The primary difference was his nose, which was a good deal longer and narrower than she remembered and more emphatically wide nostriled. He had taken to wearing his dark hair slicked back from his forehead, which, in addition to highlighting the sharpness of his features, made the prematurely thin patches around his temples look as if they had been spray-painted there. He was still impossibly slim and spotlessly dressed. Even in this moment of what she assumed to be repose, he looked coiled and skeptical, thrumming with the exact same quiet, dissatisfied energy he had possessed as a boy.

  When he saw her, he raised his small, bony hand in the resigned manner of a forcibly dethroned potentate. She waved back.

  “You received my correspondence,” he said as she reached the table, the brothers tracking every inch of her approach.

  “It’s a restaurant now,” she replied.

  “To feed all the tourists.”

  A lone cannery whistle blasted in the distance, its sound fuzzy and dilute, as if it had traveled across the distance of years instead of the distance of physical space. In her memory, Tino had been someone she had once known well, but now that she was actually in his presence again, she realized her mistake. She had never really known him at all. She had once put her future, and her father’s, in the hands of a stranger.

  “Tourists?” she asked. “But the town’s a disaster.”

  “Interestingly enough, they seem to like it that way.”

  One of the brothers said something in Italian. Tino glared at him and stood.

  “Come,” he said to Margot, gesturing at an empty table in the restaurant’s farthest corner. “So we won’t be interrupted.”

  “Thank you. I’m fine right here.”

  Tino shrugged and reclaimed his seat. Margot sat across from him and removed a box of cigars from her handbag and offered one to each of the brothers in turn. When all of them declined, she selected one for herself and lit it.

  “Thank you for agreeing to this,” she said, taking a puff and trying to summon an unburdened smile. “The location you suggested is certainly appropriate, even if the hour is unusual.”

  “Habit, I guess.” His eyes traced the smoke as she exhaled it. “It was my mother’s custom to eat with the crew after the night’s haul. I continue to honor the tradition, even though there’s nothing much left to can.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She passed away. Shortly after your father.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “You are?”

  “I don’t suppose I could get a beer.”

  “Of course.”

  He nodded at the barman and made a series of quick gestures. The barman filled a glass, and when he brought it to her, she took the longest sip she could manage without gulping or coughing.

  “You’ve changed,” Tino said. “Rumor had it you were the only one who ever went to Ricketts’s lab and didn’t emerge blind drunk.”

  “I emerged pregnant. Which was probably worse.”

  Tino swallowed. The brothers traded glances.

  “You’ve changed, too,” she continued. “I wouldn’t have expected you to want to take the helm.”

  “Oh, life is less about what one wants, I suppose, and more about what one is willing to accept.”

  “It was your mother’s plan all along,” she guessed.

  “I suppose it was.”

  “And you’re still willing to buy?”

  “My family owes you at least that much, even though the reduction plant is barely worth the land it stands on anymore.”

  “It’s gotten that bad?”

>   “It has. During the war, the government took over and then bled us dry. Requisitioned our boats for shore patrol while simultaneously forcing us to meet impossible quotas. Evacuated some of the poorer Italians and all the Japanese. When the sardines disappeared, most of the canneries went under, but we were able to stay open because we switched over to squid.”

  She looked down at the table. The squid boats from Anders’s childhood. Orange sails. Women in the night water wrestling the heaving nets to shore.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “You look ill. Let me walk you home.”

  “I’ll be fine.” When she drained her glass, another one arrived as if by magic, full to the brim. “Let’s discuss our terms.”

  “Whatever you think is fair.”

  “Market price. Minus expenses.”

  “For both the house and the reduction plant?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll have my lawyer draft something. You’ll have it by this evening. I’m sure you’re eager to move on.”

  “I am.”

  “Then why, if you don’t mind my asking, did you come at all?”

  She nudged her drink, watched the bubbles rise and gather.

  “Call it nostalgia,” she said, half choking on the lie.

  “That’s never a good reason.”

  “I know. Thank you for indulging me.”

  On the way back to the house, she chose the path closest to the beach.

  At one point, when the beers began to take their toll, she found a dune and took a seat and watched how her nylon stockings—a postwar luxury that was just now becoming morally permissible—were acting like little sieves, letting the smaller grains of sand in and keeping the larger ones out. The sky was an intense, bright gray: a color that, in all her travels, had never materialized anywhere else in the world but here. After a long while, she stood from the dune and returned to the street. She was thirsty, but her flask was dry. So she went to the new liquor store on Lighthouse and bought their smallest, most expensive bottle of gin. At the house, she drew the curtains against the afternoon, sat down at the kitchen table, and drank as much as she wanted. Then she searched the rooms, looking into closets and cabinets for anything that would disprove her father’s death. She found an undergarment that was still stiff with starch, the pulverized nub of a pencil. She returned to the kitchen and rooted through the wastebin, hoping to find a fugitive drop at the gin bottle’s bottom, but there was nothing left. So she opened the door and went outside to her old spot on the porch, the air tightening behind her in a silent peristalsis, an expulsion of the living from the dead.

  She sat there for several minutes, not thinking, not moving. When she saw a shape at the base of the hill, she rose to greet it. Tino’s lawyer, she thought, knees buckling on account of the booze. Right on schedule. But as the person continued his climb, she realized her mistake. This was not a lawyer, but a boy: a young man of the same age Arthur had been, but larger and coarser and somehow unknowable looking, as if the very nature of children had changed since she was last able to count herself among their ranks.

  “Miss Fiske,” he said, his voice respectful and disinterested all at once.

  “Yes?”

  “Ed Ricketts sent me.”

  She held her breath before responding.

  “You work for him? Catching cats?” The very thought of it made her want to laugh.

  “Cats?” He frowned. “No.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Just a moment of your time.”

  24

  1998

  HIS FINAL MESSAGE COMES TO HER FROM INSIDE A BOTTLE.

  The first sip is an arrival, especially after so many years of abstaining. The second sip, however, is nothing more than a false portal, so she caps it up and returns it to its hiding place in her desk drawer. It’s night and the aquarium has closed hours ago, but she hasn’t gone home. Instead, she’s stayed here. The Mola problem persists, the anniversary of his death has come and gone without either resolution or recompense, and now she doesn’t know what to do.

  She looks outside the window. In the light of the crescent moon, she sees that the dead Humboldts are no longer on the beach. They’ve been taken away. They’ve been taken to a biological laboratory, no doubt, where they will be injected and preserved and sold for study, and the students who study them will learn certain things. They will learn that humans and squid share a common evolutionary history. They will learn that squid ink contains dopamine, the chemical responsible for sex and drug addiction. They will learn that squid blood is the same blue as a swimming pool.

  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 sk
iff 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.