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 longtime 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.
Fine, she tells him. Fine.
And because she can’t go back to his lab, she does the next best thing. She goes back to the aquarium. Specifically, to the food room. Everything here emits light, everything echoes loudly. There’s a metal scale hanging from the ceiling like a huge, hard piece of mechanical fruit. The walls and floor are covered in large, white, hose-downable tiles; the radio on the windowsill is tuned just a few millimeters shy of the ideal frequency. When she opens the walk-in freezer, it belches white mist: a transient fog that surrounds her as she retrieves a cardboard box and wrestles it to the countertop. She removes a knife from the magnetic strip above the sink and cuts the box open. The squid inside are long dead, long cold, and only a fraction of the size of the ones on the beach. But they’ll do just fine.
And as she begins, it’s like listening to music she once knew by heart but hasn’t heard in ages. The head comes off with a quick, easy tug. Then she jabs her finger into the notch below the neck and sweeps side to side, separating the respiratory tract from the internal walls of the mantle, and then—pop!—those two dark, squishy eyes, a pseudoskull the size of a hazelnut, the whole thing coming free with an explosion of lace and slime, the squid’s guts trailing behind the head like the veil on a demented bride. The dull, satisfying snap of severed connective tissue, a vibration in her fingertips. Then a bulge beneath the skin as the livers rise and emerge at the busted lip of the body cavity: two mercury-dipped ovals, their silverness so dirty and organic that it takes her breath away to see the reflection of her own fingers on their surface. This silverness, she knows, will break. It will break and stain the cutting board with something that approximates the color and texture of old menstrual blood. First, however, there’s a brief and wondrous pause, the fluid inside held back by the temporary inertia of its own viscosity, and then a small tear in the silver, and then a tiny hole, and then there she is. Younger, angrier, smarter. Nothing in front, nothing behind, and for the first time in her life since before his death, she’s balanced on the edge of his fast-melting world.
5
1940