Later that day, in a cavern, my dive partner, Carol, kept gesturing vaguely at me, and when I shrugged at her—I don’t understand, what are you trying to tell me?—she grinned and shook her head. Back on the boat, I asked her what she’d meant. “A moray,” she said. “Right behind you in his den, the whole time.”
In Roatán, off the coast of Honduras, the sand is smooth as white silk, and the foam flows along at the edge with a snake’s hiss. The little village of West End is scattered with wanderers from around the world, many sporting cherry-red sunburns. I dove one afternoon with Sergio, a six-foot-tall Spaniard twenty years younger than me. Such pairings are the stuff of diving. We took a little skiff out to the reef wall at the end of the lagoon. Everyone on the island was in siesta, it seemed; there was no one in sight, no current, just the two of us buzzing on glassine water under a hazy sky. We hooked to a mooring and slid in, to drift slowly along the coral wall with barely a kick. The tumbled stone wall was interlaced with the lilac vases and greenish lettuce leaves of sponges, the twisted pipe cleaners of wire coral, and the wavering Christmas ribbons of soft corals called knobby candelabrum and dead man’s fingers. Two huge crabs shuffled back and forth like gunfighters at high noon. A small, tight band of black margate formed a square wall to one side, turning in unison as we passed.
I was floating in the kind of sensuous abandon that drives time out of one’s mind altogether, hearing only my own exhalation, when something slipped into my peripheral vision. I turned to see a great green moray right beside me, glorious and iridescent. He matched my speed, watching me with a thoughtful eye. Sergio was ahead, hovering, absorbed by some small creature. His tan, lean body hung horizontally beside the wall. The moray, with what seemed a meaningful glance in my direction, slid sideways toward Sergio and parked just above him, inches behind his head, like a semi heading smoothly into a truck stop. Morays smell through two small tubes like snorkels jutting out from the snout; the eel seemed to be inhaling the scent of Sergio’s shampoo. Its huge, undulant body was as long as the man.
I slowly sidled over, trying to get in front of Sergio, wanting to catch his attention in a quiet way. I could feel myself grimacing a little. Finally he looked up and I gestured, Come here, with just my fingertips—nothing dramatic or abrupt. He must have noticed my darting eyes, because he turned around and then leaped away. He stopped beside me and there we hung; we watched the eel and he watched us and this just went on and for a long while. The eel was an elephantine leaf, a scarf, a nymph, a dragon. A sea monster, a dream. I longed to touch it.
Morays are hermaphrodites, sometimes transmutating male to female, sometimes fully both genders at once—screwing willy-nilly with whatever moray or Spaniard comes along. They court when the water is warm (who doesn’t?) and they really gawp then—breathing hard, wrapping around and around each other’s long, slippery bodies like tangling fringe, like braids, like DNA. Eggs and sperm are released together, and the eels return to their anchorite dens. When the eggs hatch, endless uncountable larvae called leptocephali dissipate, a million shreds of wide ribbon—tiny fish heads on long, flat bodies. The larvae float for nearly a year. (The ocean is always a bath of barely visible infants; one swims in a snow of newborns.) The survivor of that perilous year absorb their pectoral fins and grow into elvers, which is what juvenile eels are really called, and in time each finds an empty spot and makes a den and lives for decades. They have few enemies: a couple of the biggest fishes. Bigger morays. You.
The Roman aristocracy loved morays; they farmed them as livestock and kept them as pets in elaborate ponds. Now and then a master fed his less obedient slaves to the eels, presumably in pieces; human blood was thought to fatten a moray nicely. Delicious or not, it’s always a bad idea to eat an alpha predator. A bit like unprotected sex—when you eat the top of the food chain, you eat every link. A wee dinoflagellate (Gambierdiscus toxicus, a microalga that feeds on dead coral) produces a neurotoxin called ciguatoxin, becoming more concentrated in each successive species. It’s possible to get ciguatera from herbivorous fish, and little guys like snapper, but the alpha predators bank it like gold. The toxin is a nasty one—almost everyone who eats a fish with ciguatoxin will get sick. Victims vomit and suffer diarrhea; their lips and fingers go numb; cold sensations switch with hot; they feel profound weakness and pain in the teeth and pain on urinating and arrhythmias and respiratory failure. The symptoms last for months and you can pass the toxin to others through sexual activity and pregnancy. King Henry I of England may have died of ciguatera; he collapsed after gorging on eels. At one Filipino banquet featuring a large yellow margin moray, fifty-seven people got sick; ten went into comas; two died.
Weeks of wind and rain lashing the sea kept us land bound on Cat Island. Carol made hats out of sticks and wrack. I restlessly walked the same path several times a day. One morning I found a perfect set of frog legs lying on the path. They had been nipped off at the waist. An hour later, they were boiling with brown ants. By afternoon, the ants had dug a hole beside the path, and tugged the legs halfway in; they were bowed, as though swimming into the earth. By morning, there was only skeleton; long, slender toe bones pointed to the angry sky.
The world is a strange place, for all of us—strange to me, strange to frogs, to ants, to eels. Strangely full of all those others, who are utterly unlike us, who look and act insensibly. If they are thoughtful, these are thoughts that have nothing to do with me; if the glance is meaningful, there is no way for me to know the meaning. But we do insist that we know what it is, that it is familiar in some crucial way. Everyone wants the familiar. (Yes, people often say the opposite, that they crave the new and long for adventure and novelty. They really don’t. What we call adventure is the process of meeting the new and turning it into the known as fast as possible. We want to name the unnamed and touch the untouched so that they are no longer unnamed and untouched. No longer strange. Then we can go tell people all about what we’ve found.) Perhaps it is always most difficult with the sea, to which so many are drawn as though by a piper, and where none of us belong. No shared fundament in the sea; coral and sponge and fish are a wonder to me, but there is nothing of me there.
Ah, we long for commonality. The idea that an animal is simply out of reach, forever opaque, is not to be tolerated. The unknown makes sociopaths of us all, turning animals into objects to meet our needs, affirm us, befriend us. So one imparts motive, emotion, even morals to an animal. And one sees what one expects to see. Perhaps a vicious sea monster. Perhaps a puppy who takes a biscuit from your hand. In both cases, one will be wrong.
Since that first trip to Bonaire, I’ve seen a lot of fish feeding. The point is a good photograph, an exciting moment—a good tip at the end of the dive. Hot dogs are used because they don’t fall apart; frozen peas sink nicely in the sunny water. Cheez Whiz is quite popular—people find it amusing to squirt a can of Cheez Whiz under water and stir a school of damselfish into frenzy. As a species, we are easily amused. Besides the nice tip, fish feeding gives us control. It bounds the boundless. We’ve interacted, we’ve made a connection. Whether the damselfish or stingray or moray eel feels the same way is not at issue here (though people are remarkably quick to ascribe motives like pleasure or play or, God knows, affection to the behavior of a carnivore chasing a sausage). The last thing we want to admit is that they may be indifferent to us. We tiny fragile mammals, stunned by the danger of the world; we press our fear against the vast, improbable gestalt of the sea.
I like to dive at night; the reef is wide awake, softened and kinetic with a million little bodies. Slipping into black water is always a little spooky, a reminder: my legs dangling out of sight above the primeval deep. At night I carry only a little light and cover a smaller territory, so I can focus on one thing at a time. The stalk eye of a conch slowly turns as it hauls its great shell across the sand. Coral polyps dance like hands hauling in a net. Carol’s fairy light bobs in the distance. A red snapping shrimp rises up to a boxer’s stance when my l
ight passes by. A basket star unfurls itself into a burnt-orange tumbleweed. And at the edge of my little circle of light, a moray slides across the ivory sand and is gone into the dark.
On one night dive, with a group too big for me, too much the herd, the dive-master led us to a moray’s den, the young green eel’s head caught in a dozen headlamps like a startled deer. It turned from side to side, trying to watch all of us at once. A German man with a big video camera kept darting in, trying to get a good close-up of the eel’s face; finally, he took the camera and started bashing the eel on the head. I felt myself retract far deeper than the eel could go, retreat all the way out of the human species. Bite him, I thought. What are you waiting for? He had fingers to spare. But I also knew it would likely be the death of the eel. Finally the dive-master pulled the man away, and we ascended to a rocking sea. The sky was close and thick with stars; there was sheet lightning all across the horizon, silent, huge. In that moment I wanted never to speak to a person again.
Some time later, I was back on Roatán. Carol and I dove through a splendid set of winding, narrow coral canyons separated by rivers of sand. The day was bright and wide beams of sunlight shone down on the reef. We flew through the wonderland, this solid chunk of long time. We finned slowly up one canyon, around, and down the next, back and forth, watching the abundant schools of blue tang and sergeant majors like flocks of butterflies. I stopped to watch a glorious queen triggerfish hovering shyly in the distance. Then I turned around and saw a huge green moray hanging there, a single poised muscle a few feet away.
We hung eye to eye. He was more than five feet long, a dusky, piney green that seemed to shimmer in the light. For a half hour the eel stayed near us: flowing straight along the reef an inch off the coral, matching every curve; sliding over low ridges like, well, water; slipping sideways in and out of thin breaks and reappearing around a turn as though waiting. I felt blessed—not by some imagined connection, not by recognition or a meeting of minds, but by the strange that will remain forever strange and by its strangeness tell me who I am. We found ourselves fifty feet down at the base of a straight ridge, Carol and me and the big green eel, and then it spun around and swam straight up the coral mountain toward the bright sky and was gone.
Night Walks
Cole Swensen
1.15.13
Ambling around the neighborhood this evening—it really can’t even be called walking—it’s too pointless, I’m reminded of the French verb errer or to err—i.e., to go nowhere, or rather, to wander, to go anywhere. It’s the opposite of getting lost: Everywhere you end up is exactly what you want. My neighbor from the fifth floor passes on his bicycle, waves, and as he passes, I see, tucked in on his little shelf under the seat, the white rat with whom he lives, who looks back at me. He never goes anywhere without him.
5.17.13
In a relatively quiet street that swells out at a certain point into a small square overlooking the river, a man on a cell phone is out walking his dog, milling aimlessly around the square as he talks, as does a woman, also on a cell phone, also walking her dog, and, of course, the two people don’t notice each other, but the two dogs do, and by straining gently but insistently on their leashes, keep trying to arrange a closer exchange, which the two people, of course, completely ignore, though finally the man gets tired of the constant strain on his arm and, jerking the leash, stalks off, heading east, leaving the distinct impression that his phone call is not going as well as planned.
5.29.13
It’s a world unmarred by color tonight, un-jarred. Which is a matter of the light, no doubt, perhaps its angle—perhaps its angle is unusually sharp, what there is of it, as it’s almost dark, what there is comes in low and flat, and the shadows are black and the sky that odd white that you only get right before nightfall.
Night falls. And all the dogs, too, tonight are black or white, with everything else different—size, fur, ears—but then I notice, so too are the cars, though occasionally one is black and white, but only rarely.
6.21.13
Walking down a long, quiet street in the dark, thinking that this is the shortest night of the year. For a while my footsteps are the only sound I hear until I hear something up ahead, and the noise grows louder, and soon is clearly a party in full swing, clearly coming from a building down the block a bit, and as I pass the building, I notice that every window of every apartment in it is dark.
I turn the corner and notice two people, somewhat similar in appearance, yet with identical dogs—schnauzers—pass each other without a glance and continue walking in opposite directions.
6.25.13
We have a cat. “We” is used here in the broadest sense, and in this case, one that signifies a body constituted by affection, and, in this case, for a particular cat—one with black and gray stripes in that odd but very common way in which the gray actually has a slightly green cast. The cat slithers through the café, particularly the sidewalk part of it, a few times a night, always clearly heading somewhere else, does not look to the left or right, but leaves in its wake this “we” who affectionately watch it pass.
7.5.13
Seagulls crying in the dark over the park or the not-so-dark, their cries sharp and always sounding so far away, though in fact they’re circling aimlessly albeit gracefully right overhead as I pass by the darkening park on the second day of summer weather, thus the streets are busier at 11:00 p.m. than they’ve been all day long, and no one is going anywhere.
7.13.13
The eve of a major holiday, so everything is very busy, very loud, with people absolutely everywhere, some of them literally dancing in the streets—it’s really quite nice. I turn into a particularly busy street, no cars—there’s no room for them—but down which a young couple is trying to negotiate a stroller in which sits a very miserable little girl, maybe four, crying her eyes out and clutching a cat. A very patient cat, which she brushes across her face to dry her tears, then goes on crying, while the cat continues to stare straight ahead.
7.19.13
In the course of my nightly walk, I stop, as I often do, at a certain sidewalk café, often to write down the thoughts and impressions of the walk of the evening—or of the night, depending on how late it’s gotten. And out of the corner of my eye, I see a cat scooting by, or perhaps I should say that I have the sense of a cat’s fleeting form against the face of the granite curb at the edge of the street just off to the side. It’s an unusually high curb—it amounts to a screen about a foot high. And this happens several times—several cats, all black and all zipping west at a good clip, which, after a while, I think, seems a little odd—when I happen to look up at just the right moment to see that, in fact, it’s nothing more than the shadow cast by bicyclists hit by a streetlight not strong enough to strike the building beyond, but turning the curb (much closer) into a lanterne magique. People walk by too, but because they’re moving much more slowly, their shadows can’t turn them into animals.
7.25.13
Cooler this evening, particularly crossing the bridges, where the wind picks up and is making a mess of the surface of the water. People walking, lots tonight, and almost in rhythm, as if it were a way of collectively resisting the wind. I stop and look over the parapet, down onto the quay, where five pigeons seem to be marching in step in a single, evenly paced line. I know this is only the projection of a human attachment to order onto random avian behavior, but still, it’s a remarkably straight line and remarkably evenly paced.
Fables
Bennett Sims
1.
THE BOY BEGS HIS MOTHER to buy him a balloon. As they leave the grocery store and cross the parking lot, he holds the balloon by a string in his hand. It is round and red, and it bobs a few feet above him. Suddenly his mother looks down and orders him not to release the balloon. Her voice is stern. She says that if he loses it, she will not buy him another. The boy tightens his grip on the string. He had no intention of releasing the balloon. But the mother’s prohibition disquiet
s him, for it seems to be addressed at a specific desire. Her voice implies that she has seen inside him: that deep down—in a place hidden from himself, yet visible to her—he really does want to release the balloon. Otherwise, why bother to forbid it? The boy feels stung by her censure. He grows sullen at the injustice. It isn’t fair. He didn’t do anything. They approach the car in the parking lot. The day is bright and all the car roofs glint. His fingers fidget, his palm throbs. Before, the balloon had been just a thing that he wanted to hold. Now, he cannot stop thinking about letting it go. He wants to release the string, to spite her. But he knows that this would only prove her right. By forbidding a thought he hadn’t had, she has put that thought into his head; now, if he acts on the thought, it will be as good as admitting that he already had it. He glowers up at the balloon. Why had he begged her to buy it in the first place? What had he ever planned on doing with it, if not releasing it? Maybe she was right. For there is now nothing in the world that he more desires—has always desired—than to be rid of this balloon. The boy knows that it is the prohibition that has put this idea into his head, and yet, he can’t remember a time before he had it. It is as if the prohibition has implanted not just the desire, but an entire prehistory of the desire. The second the thought crossed his mind, it had always already been in his mind. The moment his mother spoke to him, he became the boy she was speaking to: the kind of boy who releases balloons, who needs to be told not to. Yes, he imagines that he can remember now: how even in the grocery store—before he had so much as laid eyes on the balloon—even then he was secretly planning to release it. The boy releases the balloon. He watches it rise swiftly and diminish, snaking upward, its redness growing smaller and smaller against the blue sky. His chest hollows out with guilt. He should never have released the balloon. Hearing him whimper, his mother turns to see what has happened. She tells him sharply that she told him not to release the balloon. He begs her to go back into the grocery store and buy him another, but she shakes her head. They are at the car, and she is already digging through her purse for the keys. While she unlocks the door, he takes one last look above him, raking that vast expanse for some fleck of red.
Menagerie Page 6
