Outside on Cannery Row, the crowds gather and roll. The little squid’s internal spillage is still fresh on her hands, the food room’s brightness still blinds her. An unrest. An imbalance of power neither unpleasant nor new. Her first and last nights with Ricketts.
And more recently—but not too recently—the aquarium’s opening day. Almost fourteen years ago now: October 20, 1984. There was a festival to commemorate the occasion, which she had specifically designed to appear homey and nonthreatening. A Dixieland jazz band made up of local musicians. Kids in hand-sewn sardine costumes, tinfoil scales falling from their arms and legs as they sang and danced in what barely resembled unison. Speeches by a handful of surviving cannery workers, all of them visibly inebriated. Balloon animals. Food trucks. Beneath it all, though, beneath the rough-hewn feel-goodery and Sicilian-style calamari, there was an unmistakable taste of something sleek and epic, audible whispers of the double-edged reward of impending world renown, of just how long it would take for the entire town to become unrecognizable as a result.
And has it come to pass? Is it unrecognizable? It’s a question she asks herself often, especially now that historical preservation has come into vogue. Yes and no, she always says, like how a fingerprint does and does not resemble an actual finger. Sometimes you have to look hard—you have to look beyond the T-shirt shops and the laser tag—but the past is still there, a past even more necessary than Steinbeck’s: the Costanoans and their lost, peaceful, shellfish-hungry tribes; the Spaniards who conquered and catholicized California, their fervor outwardly attributable to divine right and the glory of a distant throne, but that on closer inspection emitted the wet, fragrant heat of personal vendetta.
As for his message, it’s not hard to spot. In many ways, it’s as obvious as the beaching of the Humboldt squid. This time, however, it has taken human form: the two aquarium employees entertaining the visitors in line. The first is an intern in a full-body otter costume. The second is a banjo player singing well-known popular tunes rewritten in honor of the aquarium’s residents: the Beatles’ “Eight Days a Week” rewritten as “Eight Arms and a Beak,” referring to the eight arms of the octopus and the calciferous mandible concealed therein; the Kinks’ “Lola,” which is about a transvestite, rewritten as “Mola,” which is one half of the scientific name of the Mola mola, the gigantic fish she still needs to figure out how to release.
Work, then, is calling: loud as it ever has, loud as it always will. But so is he. Stay, he says. Watch and listen. And she’ll be damned if he isn’t right. The intern is a girl of fifteen. The banjo player was once Monterey’s only known homeless man. To anyone else, it would seem like an unfortunate pairing, but not to her. It reminds her of the good times—of October instead of May, of mammals instead of cephalopods—which means she’s now following his instructions and then some. She hurries to the sea otter exhibit, right there among the paying public. She watches the little captives float and flip, somnolent one moment, clownish the next, fiddling with the hamster balls full of prawns and the tangled lengths of neoprene kelp: toys that are supposed to keep them from going mad in captivity.
Then, suddenly, she’s on the aquarium’s roof, standing in the shadow of a very different sort of tank. None of the otters up here are on display. Rather, they are on probation, undergoing a stint in rehab in the wake of maternal abandonment. The whole thing is very scientific, very sound, designed with the noble intention of eventual rerelease. The aquarist surrogate wears a welding mask, a poncho, and rubber gloves, all of it smeared with seaweed to obscure her human scent. The person, in other words, remains separate from the otter. The mother remains separate from the mothering.