“Wharf pilings,” Tino concludes, deadpan.
But not for a lack of planning. Almost two years earlier, Arthur and Tino continue, they had begun to prepare. They had commissioned the fabrication of fake vinyl-polyester-fiberglass pilings, instructed a dive team to submerge them in the bay and secure them to actual pilings in the hope that the fakes would acquire a similar decorative cloak of invertebrate life. It was only much later, with the aquarium at the cusp of completion, that they realized their mistake. The desired populations—colonies of mussels and barnacles and anemones—had become so well established that it was impossible for even the most observant, capable aquarists to physically separate the fake pilings from the real ones, much less tell them apart.
And this is where she stops listening, because when they tell the next bit, she knows they will tell it wrong. They won’t talk about how, when they broke the news to her, she didn’t speak and she didn’t sigh. Instead, she removed the penknife from her pocket, placed it on the blank, spotless expanse of her desktop, and spun it on its narrow end like a top, Tino and Arthur watching in horror as the knife took a handful of tight revolutions before falling with a clank.
“What should we do?” Arthur asked.
“We’ll move forward precisely as intended. We’ll remove the pilings and put them in the tank.”
“But the whole wharf could collapse if we take the wrong ones,” Tino protested.
“This entire town could collapse,” she replied, aware of the ensuing hyperbole but doing nothing to stop it, “and I wouldn’t care. As long as my aquarium remains standing.”
At midnight, then, the team reassembled, ready to do as instructed. The divers descended and made their best guesses, their cleanest cuts. The aquarists attached floats to the severed pilings and towed each of them over to the launch ramp. Tino and Arthur backed the boat trailer into the water and helped maneuver the pilings on board. The collectors covered the pilings with seawater-damp burlap sacks. When everything was loaded, they all waited for a moment, wincing. They expected to hear the creaks and snaps of breaking wood, the jarring, sonic-boom splashes of big things falling into an even bigger body of water. But they heard nothing, so they began the slow, careful journey back to Cannery Row, Tino and Arthur in the tow truck, the others in a motley fleet of vehicles following close behind, Margot sitting protectively astride one of the shrouded pilings on the trailer, her jeans cold and wet, the night wind weaving through her hair as she guided the secret, merciless parade away from the shore and into town.
The conference room is silent now. They are all looking at her: Arthur and Tino and the aquarists, looking at her and grinning in a way that reminds her of Ricketts. And she wants to say something that will express her gratitude, maybe even her love, but the moment has already passed. The meeting is under way again, the staff’s attention precisely where it should be: on more urgent, more Mola-related matters.
And it’s a shame, because the story of the wharf pilings has been left unfinished. Not in a strictly narrative sense—beginning, middle, end—but in terms of its lesson. For a while there, in the years immediately following the incident, she could barely contain herself. She was so pleased by the grand gesture, so proud of it. She honestly believed the retrieval of the pilings was the sort of anecdotal monument outlandish enough to send a ripple through space and time, theatrical enough to change things, powerful enough to reach him in that place beyond life. In the years since, however, she’s recognized an upsetting pattern, a certain scorched-earth mentality. The self-inflicted leg wound comes to mind, as does the time she traveled to Key West to hunt down and seduce the reclusive designer of a revolutionary new jellyfish tank. There was also the time she insisted on using her own two hands, instead of a trained professional’s, to weld the surge machine for the kelp forest exhibit. So loud, these actions. So dramatic and unsubtle. And she regrets them not because she’s embarrassed, but because Ricketts’s latest message is now so clearly in opposition, so clearly laid out on the surface of this big, expensive table.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” she says, standing.
“But we were just about to—”
“Not now.”
“But we need you to decide about the—”