“It doesn’t matter. Surprise me.”
And within the aquarium proper, within the spaces meant for tourists—tourists who observe and mock and praise and sometimes imitate, tourists who think it’s all for them, all for show—she feels, for the first time in years, like a failure. The darkness she sensed on the rooftop, the darkness at the perimeter of the otter rehab tank, is now falling in earnest. She’s seeing shapes in the periphery, the shadows of doomed company, eerie black profiles against the vivid, backlit blue, the ghosts of people who once felt this same thing and couldn’t crawl out from under it. Outside, the banjo player offers up an acoustic homage to Duran Duran entitled “Hungry Like the Wolf Eel.” Inside, the white sturgeons trawl the tank bottom with their Confucian whiskers, giant sea bass loom midwater like obese, blue black sentries, white-plumed anemones sprout in furry, albino gardens. She doesn’t hate it. Of course she doesn’t. But she can imagine being someone who does. Not just the fish and the anemones and the repurposed pop songs, but the aquarium itself. She can imagine hating how its perfection and cleanliness approach the realm of parody. She can imagine hating how whenever the fish speak their own dual names—Mola mola, ocean sunfish—she’s never quite sure which one is the alibi: the one used by the scientist or the one used by the layman.
“Oh, just put it out of its misery,” she said upon first learning that the Mola had outgrown its tank.
“You’d honestly rather murder it than just let it go?” Arthur gasped.
“I don’t see the difference.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
And she’s frantic now and sweating, the aquarium’s crowds suddenly indistinguishable from the ones that used to attend Ricketts’s parties. Why, she asks herself, do both courtrooms and aquariums have the same word for the thing that contains the evidence: exhibit? Why do the visitors always—always—tap on the exhibit windows, even though they are expressly requested to refrain from doing so? Is it because they want the fish to acknowledge them in the same way they are acknowledging the fish? And why do they take so many photographs? Hundreds and hundreds of snapshots without a single human face in them: a thought that freezes her in place right beneath the gray whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling of the atrium, her sweat starting to cool, her muscles beginning to shake. A family photo album, she imagines, horrified, in which both people and fish are given equal precedence. Fish pouting and mugging alongside the newly born and newly betrothed. Fish exhausted by their singular, immersive knowledge, suspending mankind’s breakable prism in a way that both devours light and excretes it.
12
1940
“YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.”
She lifted her pencil to shoulder height and let it fall onto the desk.
“Come,” Ricketts said. “I’ll show you. Again.”
She gave him a narrow look. Then she rose to her feet and followed him through the lab, down the rear stairs, and into the back lot. Outside, she squinted into the fog as he retrieved a bucket from beneath the balcony’s overhang. It was the most unsubtle hour of the morning, sharp and white with noise and light, the canneries running at full throttle. The sharks were restless in their tanks today, their bodies stirring the water into a chop. Her father’s place of business was not far from here, the possibility of his appearance both immediate and real, but she didn’t care. All that seemed to matter was the fact that for the past two weeks of coming to the lab, the only thing she had succeeded at was failing. Failing to maintain even the faintest shred of aloofness and disinterest, her excitement at his closeness still obvious and hateful. Failing to entice him in any manner, his treatment of her still formal and unwilling.
He handed her the bucket without comment. She carried it to the water’s edge. The tide was well on its way to lowness, their feet surrounded by piles of cannery refuse and lawns of algae. A trio of plovers side-eyed them as they used their tweezer-shaped bills to mine the sand for bugs.
“Look down,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”
Her chin dropped to her chest. It was the fourth time in as many days that he had brought her here and attempted an explanation that didn’t quite take, and this was perhaps the biggest failure of them all: the fact that, despite urgently wanting to, she was unable to fathom how he worked or what he was hoping to achieve by it. It was enough to make her want to crack her head open again or reempty the jug of formaldehyde: whatever would return her brain to the looseness it had possessed on her first night in the lab, to the semi-stupor required to understand him and his methods.
“The ocean.” She sighed.
“What else?”
“A tide pool.”