“You know, I’ve never read any of that stuff. Not a single page.”
Arthur, his hair a coppery white nest, is standing in the doorway and bouncing on his toes like a boy.
“Why not?” She closes the book and puts it away.
“I didn’t like how he acted when Doc died. Breaking into the lab and burning everything controversial. It wasn’t right.”
She thinks of her old sketchbooks, the ones permanently lost to fire. Not right, but not wrong. The same could be said for Steinbeck’s plans to improve Cannery Row after the canneries shut down. Scatter it with fake sardine heads, he had quipped. Bring in some actresses to play hookers, pump in the smells of fish meal and sewage. None of this happened, of course. Something hopeful and monumental and sincere happened instead. And this, finally, is how she knows she’s won, because what is an aquarium except a gigantic heart? Fluid coming in and fluid going out, fluid passing through multiple chambers and then returning to the larger body with new offerings in tow?
“Is it time?” she asks.
“Sure is.”
By the time they get to the top of the tank, the other aquarists have already arrived.
The volume of water is outrageous, the drones of the chilling and heating units unearthly. There are glaring halogen lights overhead, just like the ones the squid boats use to draw their catch to the surface. It’s endless and shimmering and spooky, and she’s hit with the urge to jump: an urge so strong, she has to remind herself she’s too old to indulge in something so lamely symbolic. So she leans back from the railing. She cannot see what this water contains, and for a moment, there’s a terrible suspicion. Empty, she tells herself, scanning the depths. Completely empty. But then she sees the familiar shape: a fish that doesn’t resemble a fish so much as it does a massive severed head.
“I’m the Mola. M-o-l-a, Mola,” Arthur sings happily. “You know. Like the banjo player’s song.”
She smiles at him and so do the other aquarists, who for the next minute or two do absolutely nothing. They just watch the fish’s blunt circumnavigation, its rectangular dorsal and pelvic fins windshield-wiping through the water in awkward inverse. It moves behind the horizontal curtain of the water’s surface very slowly, very carefully, an almost prehistoric stupidity in its eyes, an unshakable ignorance of its own place in the world and how that has or hasn’t changed as a result of its captivity.
“All right,” Arthur announces. “Let’s go.”
The aquarists spring into action. First, they usher the Mola out of the big tank and into a small outdoor holding tank via a gated underwater tunnel. Then, they drain the holding tank, a process that commands the better part of a half hour. When the water becomes too shallow for the Mola to remain vertical, one of the aquarists helps it flip onto its side and there is a brief murmur from the crowd, an expression of either recognition or sympathy. The body of the fish is a massive disk, a gigantic communion wafer, fins moving gently and without any visible signs of panic or displeasure. Its upturned eye is a ping-pong ball, its skin a crust of white, its forehead heavy and round and, from a certain angle, reminiscent of the top half of a human profile.
Then, with a sound that reverberates beneath their feet, the pipes are sealed shut. Two aquarists clad in wet suits descend a retractable ladder, step into the water, and position themselves on either side of the fish. One of them guides the sling—an expanse of blue tarp within a ring of PVC tubing—into the holding tank and the Mola immediately complies, situating itself calmly, voluntarily, in the exact center of the sling’s perfect circle. A measurement is taken. Two hundred seventy-five kilograms. More than six hundred pounds.
And when the helicopter appears, she lets out an audible gasp because it is, in fact, a surprise.