There was a time, however, when it wasn’t like this. Not at all. In the aquarium’s early days, it happened right there in the little man-made cove below the deck. The aquarist surrogate—usually a woman, undisguised and unfragranced—would teach the poor orphan everything a mother otter would have. How to dive, how to hunt, how to get the clam and the rock, how to bang them together, how to clean up afterward. When the lessons were over and the final test was administered, the losers would be put on exhibit while the winners would be fitted with orange flipper tags and sent on their way. But then one day, disaster. A released otter returned to the cove, heartbroken and homesick and vengefully jealous, and charged the aquarist surrogate as she swam with her newest pup, biting down onto the ex-mother’s face, thrusting ineffectually, and refusing to let go.
And as she stands here now—the Humboldts beginning to rot on the nearby beach, their corpses filling the air with a scent that is both inadvertent and authentic—she can turn her back on the rehab tank and look down onto Cannery Row from above. She can see the intern and the banjo player, she can imagine them failing and being placed inside a tank of their own. Tourists are everywhere, invasive and necessary, giving the street life and taking it away. There is a desperation to their desires, which she supposes would be all right except for one thing: the fact that desperation never arises out of certainty. Beneath all of this—beneath all the tributes and distractions and renovations—is a deep and fundamental doubt, and the aquarium is not immune. The real version can never peacefully coexist alongside its imagined twin, which is why the real bay and the fake one probably fight each other when the doors are closed and no one is looking, two thirsty giants battling for ownership of the night.
In her own life, it’s happened before. She can trace the scar on her forehead to several verifiable sources, some obvious, some not. Some imagined, some actual. Today, however, only one seems to matter, only one seems to provide a rebuttal to his assertions. A collecting trip not in his tide pools but in the Amazon—she plus three other aquarists in search of arapaimas and traíras and peacock bass—during which a botfly bit her on the head. For the week following the implantation, she endured. She allowed the egg to gestate within a walnut-sized lump directly beneath the old scar tissue, the irritation growing each day, reaching heights she had never anticipated, until one night, alone in her tent with the river outside sloshing its way through the sort of mud that starts and ends civilizations, a tragedy took place, a tragedy even worse than the prodigal otter. The subcutaneous squirming and itching became too much and she was forced to expel the little embryo with a long, sad breath and a gentle application of the fingernails. Two lives at a mutually exclusive crossroads. A parasite and a host, a tourist and a local, and it’s up to her to determine which is which.
9
1940
“YOU GET THEM WITH A KNIFE,” ARTHUR EXPLAINED. “Slide it under the foot. I’ve got a Japanese friend in Chinatown who dives for them and eats them alive.”
Margot continued to draw. An abalone today, a mollusk about the dimensions of a rugby ball, a scythe-shaped trail of pinholes marking the uppermost curve of its terraced shell, dark feelers emerging from the holes like tendrils of spilled ink. Yesterday, it had been an orange sea star, its plumpness veined with a net of prickly white. The day before, a turban snail, its black spiral topped with an opalescent crown. And in the days preceding it had been worms, what seemed like hundreds of them—flatworms, roundworms, polychaete worms, tube worms, fat innkeeper worms—their interminable numbers accompanied by Arthur’s equally interminable monologues about the local sea life, the detail and enthusiasm of which stunned her. It was clear he was trying to imitate Ricketts: his unrushed cadence, his casual erudition. Most of the time it didn’t work, but sometimes it did. Sometimes she would listen and respond, especially when the information seemed exotic or violent. Mostly, though, she kept to her sketchbook as he yammered on, his voice acquiring the same bland omnipresence as the surrounding fog.
And the fog. The fog. Always the fog. It was the most persistent phenomenon, meteorologic or otherwise, she had ever seen. Each morning as she stepped out onto the porch, there it was. Occasionally, it burned off in the afternoons to reveal a porcelain-like blue, but most of the time it stayed put, causing each passing hour, each passing day, to appear identical to the one before it. In any other instance, it would have been intolerable. Here, however, it meant something. It was a blank canvas on which she could envision a huge and glorious design, an abstract blueprint of her future inside the lab. With each new creature she was asked to draw, she could feel her desire taking shape again, her earlier doubts fading into something as useless and desiccated as the squid tentacle, which, after she had finished drawing it, had been kicked off the porch and into the dirt beneath the bougainvillea. And it was only a matter of time, she reassured herself whenever it caught her eye. Only a matter of time until she was once again in the center of things, until the right opportunity presented itself, until she could reclaim what had been promised her and unpack it with gratitude and greed.