He passes me the shell. I touch the slug’s foot, feel it react to the stimulus, stiffen under my finger. I place the shell back in the water, lowering it to the bed of sand rather than dropping it. There are several tanks of this species. The digital thermometers against the glass show different temperatures, and notes are written in black wax right on the glass. I turn to ask Ness something and see Ryan dabbing Ness’s cheek with a rag, cleaning the wound I made. A pang of guilt laced with a twinge of jealousy courses through me.
“Why me?” I ask. And I realize that this is the question that has haunted me all week, from the guest house to the helicopter to the depths of the ocean floor to the beach. Why me? I wipe my wet hand on my shorts and close the distance between Ness and myself. “Why not show this to the scientific community? Publish a paper? Do a TV special on Discovery? Why would you show me?”
“We need to win public support before any legal campaigns start,” Ness says. “We need the whole world on our side.”
“Who would be against this?”
I know as soon as I ask. Ness answers anyway.
“The same people who were against me before,” he says. “The same people who burned one of my father’s oil platforms. The ones who see any tampering with nature as bad, who have given up, who won’t be happy until we’re the ones who go extinct. And they’ll have people they normally hate on their side, the people who don’t believe in playing God. And of course, there are those who love shell collecting for the money and not the shells. They won’t support this either. Neither will those who get paid to crack down on operations like this.”
He’s right, of course. He’s absolutely right. About all of it. It’s just what he told me on the beach an hour ago.
“So who will support this?” I ask. “Politicians?”
All three of them laugh, and I hear how ridiculous this sounds. The lobbying will be fierce. And when did reason ever stand a chance in that game?
“The people who love the sea are our only hope,” Ness says. “And they tend to love quietly. They love in the middle of the night with their flashlights. They keep their love from others. But we need them to be loud. We need to win this all at once or we don’t stand a chance.”
I shake my head. Making my way to the stairs, I lower myself to the treads and sit down. “No,” I tell him. “No.”
Ness sits beside me. I can sense his desire to put a hand on my knee, realize that somehow this sort of gesture has become natural between us, but he resists the urge.
“You never stood a chance,” I say. “Not with me. Oh, Ness, what did you think I’d be able to do? Work a miracle for you? Get people to agree on this? Help get policies written by force of will, by some lyrical appeal to nature and love and life?”
The way he’s looking at me, I can tell that he did believe this. And the way Stewart and Ryan look piteously upon this man I think I love, I can tell that they told him so, that this was a fool’s errand from the start, the errand of a hopeful, romantic fool.
“That’s your grandfather,” I say. “Your grandfather had the right words, and he lived in the right time. He could have convinced his generation to undo what they’d done—“
“The science wasn’t ready,” Ness says.
“Well the people of our time won’t be ready. You’ll have the majority of hearts, Ness, but you won’t have much else.”
“Write the story,” he tells me. “Write the truth, and the rest will come.”
“It won’t,” I promise him. “Ness, listen to them.” I indicate Stewart and Ryan. “They’re right. They aren’t hopeless romantics like us. They deal in the concrete, in the knowable—“
Ness leaps up and takes two angry steps away from me. His body is rigid, his fists clenched. I think for a moment that he’s angry with me, but consider that he might just be angry at the world. He must know that I’m right. Without realizing it, I’m behind him, one hand on his shoulder, the other lacing between his knuckles, coaxing that angry fist into an open and then interlocked hand. My mind is whirring, with ways to soothe him, with ways to take the bubbling vats of wonder in that room and bring my childhood to life once more—with ways to heal what I’ve wounded, what all of us have wounded.
“There is another way,” I whisper, even as it comes to me, even as I realize what we have to do. I don’t want anyone but him to hear, so I say it with a whisper. “Ness, there is another way.”
41
The bow of the boat undulates with the sea, rising and falling, rising and falling, a hiss of foam forming along the fiberglass sides and then sighing back into the ocean with the rhythmic and hypnotic grace of a swell rolling toward the beach. I watch the spray, enjoying the small rainbows that materialize and disappear like a mirage, and consider this illegal cruise of ours.