Читать книгу pH: A Novel - Nancy Lord - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

When it was sufficiently dark, Annabel joined the crew to watch them tow for plankton. Robert, the kindly doctoral student in charge, explained the mechanics of a bizarre contraption called a Multinet as three other students, in their float coats and steel-toed rubber boots, danced around the back deck to “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”

The idea was that, under the cover of darkness, zooplankton and small fish rose through the water column to feed near the surface. The tows, with different fine-meshed nets opening in different parts of the water column, would capture what was present at the various depths. The collections would then be preserved in jars and hauled back to the university for analysis—to determine how they compared to other years and how they related to water temperature and other conditions.

“It’s mostly plankton,” Robert said, as he jerked on the Multinet’s frame, sliding it another foot toward the stern. He was a tall man with a freckled face and broad hips emphasized by his blousy, bibbed rain pants. Annabel was sure he was gay, not that she cared about such things. “We won’t get many fish,” he was saying. “Fish can outswim the nets, so any fish we collect are usually dead or dying. They also get squished once they’re in the net, from the pressure.”

The ship slowed, and the nearly full moon that had been trailing them began to make tremendous bounces through the dark sky. They were rolling up and over the swells now, as opposed to plowing straight through. Off the stern, fingerling fish leapt from the water like popcorn, flashing silver as they caught light from the deck.

Annabel got out of the way while they deployed the Multinet, and then Ray appeared in his slippers and watched with her.

The cable went out, and where it cut through and disturbed the water a sparkling that was not reflected moonlight surrounded it.

“OMG,” she said. Her hands flew to the top sides of her head.

“Dinoflagellates,” Ray said. He looked at her, as if trying to see whether she had any clue about what was happening, or if her head might be coming apart. “These are single-celled, microscopic, major producers in the ocean because they’re photosynthetic—they deliver the sun’s energy to the rest of the food web. Their bioluminescence is a defense mechanism, triggered when a disturbance, like the movement of a potential predator, deforms the cell.” He might have been laughing, amused with what he was saying. “The light flash is meant to attract a secondary predator to attack the one trying to eat the dinoflagellate. What a system, huh?”

He went on to tell her more about bioluminescence than she could possibly understand—about oxygen, ions, chlorophyll, cysts. Different organisms used it for different, and sometimes multiple, reasons: to evade predators, to attract prey, to communicate with their own species (“Here I am—come mate with me”), to communicate to other species (“Here I am—get the hell away from me”).

She was stuck on the name. “Terrible whips,” she said.

“Huh?”

“From the Greek and Latin. Like dinosaur, terrible lizard.”

“Actually,” he said, “I think it’s dinos, whirling. Whirling whips. They have the two flagella. Their propulsion—one makes them whirl, the other acts like a rudder.” He went digging in his pocket, pulled out a crinkly packet, held it out to her. “Ginger?”

She shook her head. She wanted to keep her eyes on the spark-glow, dimmer now, and on the mercuric surface of the moonlit water. All that nearly invisible life was pulsing together in a radiant force, a vital energy. She could feel her Vishuddha chakra heating her throat and spilling into the flow that unites all creation. Her hands took the prayer position over her heart.

“Tomorrow,” Ray said, “come by the dry lab if it’s not too rough, and we can look at some live zooplankton. I’ll find you some pteropods. We’ll do a ring net tow in the morning and see what we get.”

“I’d like that,” she said. “Thank you.” Annabel would never mention it—not unless he asked—but the man’s aura was darker and ashier than a healthy person’s should be.

Very early the next morning, Annabel stood alone at the rail, watching the Gulf of Alaska pitching into white peaks that collided with other waves and collapsed. “A confused sea” was the term she’d heard for this, when individual waves come at one another from different directions. She loved this, the way the waves moved, and the language of confusion. She held her camera out over the rail and pointed it straight down, snapped a picture, then studied the image on the little screen. The focus was as confused as the sea, blues blurred and softened into such beauty that she wondered for two seconds why she even tried being an artist, why it wasn’t enough to simply welcome what nature already provided, to see it clear or squint-eyed or as though through tears.

But then, it was because she was an artist that she had that aesthetic reaction. And if her personal aesthetic leaned to the blurry, abstracted side of things, that was what she could present to the world: the beauty not of nature itself but of sight. She had written in her last artist statement, “I don’t copy nature; I reveal it.” When Ray had invited her to look at his magnified zooplankton photos, she’d admired them. They were clear, literal, scientific images. The pteropods she was anxious to learn about featured exquisite whirled shells, gossamer wings, buds of antennae like tiny soft nipples. The representations were perfect unto themselves. But they were not art. The most imaginative things about them were what some people saw in them, the common names they’d given the two kinds: sea butterflies and sea angels. So much lovelier than snails and slugs.

Ray had been kind to take the time to show her his photos and to explain some of the plankton studies. His daughter had been with them, looking more interested in Annabel’s hair than in the photos and the colored graphs that showed what Ray called a time series. “Are you famous?” she’d asked.

Annabel was used to getting this question from children and had learned that modesty was not her friend. If she said no, children simply wandered off and gave her, and whatever art lessons she might have been teaching, their complete disregard, as though she were no better than a fly, or one of their own parents. But if she said yes, she had their full, admiring attention.

She was nowhere near famous—how many artists were?—but she did have adequate credentials. She’d once, years ago, won an arts council fellowship, and the Anchorage Museum had purchased one of her light installations. She also had several commissioned projects in and on various public buildings, including a waste-water plant. And she had been to two prestigious artist colonies. A medium-sized fish in a small pond, she knew, but what the heck.

“Yes, I’m quite famous,” she’d told Aurora, who regarded her with revived interest.

Annabel liked science and scientists; really, she did. She was always interested in the links between art and science. Both required creative minds, speculation and hypothesizing, experimenting, sometimes-tedious detail work, a willingness to fail and try again. She read about the sciences and did her best to understand them, at least in the broad scope of meaning. She appreciated their importance.

She could not say the same for the reverse relationship. What was with the raised eyebrows and rolled eyes, the looks of incomprehension? The worst of it had come from that constipated man who was fortunately now gone. When they’d first boarded the ship and she’d struck up what she thought was a cordial conversation about the chemicals used in papermaking and why she made her own art paper, he’d looked around her as though searching for an emergency exit. Although now that she knew he really was looking for a way off the ship, she would cut him some slack. His mind would not have been prepared to consider the ecological shadow of treated paper products and the superiority of hemp paper.

Annabel snapped another picture as a milky jellyfish floated by. Her past was streaming into memory: water lapping at her perfect small toes, the cries of gulls, the salty taste when she accidentally swallowed a mouthful of ocean. Back there, at the Jersey Shore, the child she was had collected shells, of course, and arranged them carefully on her windowsill at home, inspired by their whorls and polished shapes, by their pink and cream colors. She’d brought home starfish, too, and was aghast when they began to stink and she realized she’d dehydrated and killed living creatures.

The intricate designs of bird feet in the sand, the patterns the waves and wind made in the same sand, the different colors of the ocean on different days, the shells and the pebbles and the tiny grains of sand themselves—all of that, she was sure, had shaped her as an artist. She was all about seeing the patterns and finding the sequences, this and this and this going together, and then breaking the pattern, with that.

Naturally, she’d been drawn to Alaska. In addition to having incredible light, it was a good fit for her pioneering, anarchistic bent. She’d lived now for a long time in the Interior, attuned to the curves of oxbow rivers and the lines of birch forests, to feathers of frost and the peach colors of winter days. She’d worked with natural materials like birchbark and branches, always careful to collect only from downed trees and not too much of that. She still had a recurring nightmare that involved writhing starfish, legions of them baking in the sun with all their podia flailing.

Here she was finally on a ship at sea! Her entire boating career to this point had been one summer sternwheeling down the silty Tanana past dog yards and expensive log homes. Her, a cruise guide! It hadn’t been much money, but more than an artist makes, and the tourists had been agreeable enough, even if they were more interested in the chicken dinner than the river and all began to look alike after awhile, which was a terrible thing for an artist to admit.

The shoreline now was already far behind them, lost somewhere beyond a bank of fog. The bottom was a long way down. She took another photo of the water, and then of water meeting fog, distance.

She remembered, from when she was very young, an annoying uncle joking with her: “Why does the ocean roar? Because it has crabs on its bottom!” He had thought it fun to pinch her skinny butt. He would not have known that her own delight came from somewhere else, from within the language. A bottom was one thing, and it was something else compared to that thing. That might have been the beginning, for her, of visualizing possibility.

Later that morning, when she got to put her eye to the microscope focused on Limicina helicina, the shelled pteropod, she was very excited, until she realized she was looking at the fluttering of her own eyelash. This was not easy work—bouncing in a boat while trying to hold still and peer through a lens at a minuscule something that was sloshing around with a bunch of other teenytinies. It seemed they were in the wrong season to find many mature pteropods, which would be visible to the eye—like a lentil pea, Ray had said. She conjured up the images she’d seen on his computer. In those, brownish snail bodies stretched from their spiraling, translucent shells into the parts that were specialized feet, not made for sliming along trails but for moving—flapping, even—through water. In some of the photos the foot was clearly split in two, exactly like wings. The foot-wings, Ray told her now, with what seemed like excessive pleasure, made a mucous that was cast out like a net to catch algae. “That’s how it feeds.”

It was good that she had a well-developed imagination, because when Annabel finally thought she could see the little beast she couldn’t see any shell at all, just a tubish body and fuzzy twitching parts that she assumed were the mucousy wings. It was entirely possible she was out of focus or still looking at an eyelash.

“Especially in the spring, these guys are usually found in swarms in surface waters,” Ray was saying. “Not so much now. The other pteropod we have here, the naked, carnivorous one we were talking about, is larger but much less common.”

It was a pteropod-eat-pteropod world, that was for sure. Annabel remembered seeing the naked one among Ray’s photos, too. It looked to her like a miniature—very miniature—beluga whale, its long bulbous body flanked by stubby foot-wings that were like the whale’s stubby flippers. It was largely transparent, with a peachy sac in its center. Ray had made a point of telling her that in a well-fed animal, the sac, which was its digestive gland, would be bigger and darker.

“You are wearing glitter?” the Russian girl asked, with what seemed like alarm.

“Da,” she said.

“Da?” The girl’s nostrils flared, horselike.

“Yes, I am wearing glitter.” Annabel was not, as a rule, very big on conventional makeup, but she did like to apply a little metallic blush to give her face sparkle. The color in this instance, an orange-gold, was called “perpetual praline.” Heck, she hadn’t bought it for its silly name or the fact that it was “lickable”; she’d just liked the color, and the discount price. It occurred to her now that perhaps the Russian girl was afraid that flecks would fall into her sample and be counted as a new species.

Annabel was, if nothing else, glad to be in the presence of living, moving, perhaps flailing creatures. The previous night the ones from the Multinet looked, once they were concentrated and “fixed” in jars, like pea soup. “Mostly euphasiids,” Robert had said to her, swirling the contents. The deepest tow had picked up a couple of finger-length lantern fish that everyone had seemed excited about. Lantern fish, one of the girls told her, lived in the deep sea and were bioluminescent—except that particular pair were quite dead and squished, their big eyes popping free. But this was cool: each species had its own pattern of lighting up, and males and females of the same species had different lit parts.

“And what is your art?” the Russian girl asked now.

The Project, as she thought of it, was in fact coming together, had all night and all day been forming and reforming in her mind, like a school of fish swimming in circles and grabbing bites of plankton. She hadn’t spoken of it, but now both girls and Ray, smelling of ginger, were staring at her, waiting to hear.

“I’m building paper sculptures,” she said, although she had not yet begun the actual work of the paper folding and softening she had in mind, nor had she settled on the inscriptions they would carry.

“Sculptures of what?”

These very literal, very concrete, very need-to-know people—they couldn’t help themselves.

“We’ll see,” she said. “Inspired by the sea and its creatures. And by your work,” she added pointedly.

Ray looked down his somewhat-reddened nose. “Does it have a title?”

“Titles usually come last for me. You know, given by the work.”

He didn’t know; that seemed clear. He rearranged his face, a jollier look. “Don’t forget our charismatic microfauna.”

Huh?

“The pteropods in particular. We love them.”

“He is hugging Clione,” the girl added.

Annabel again visualized the blobby naked one, the one that ripped the others from their shells. Beautiful, in the way that every being was, but the charisma was escaping her. Some people called it a “sea angel?” She would meditate on that. These fine, obsessive people were indulging her, and she would indulge them back.

For the next few days Annabel worked like a dervish. She was in and out of the dry lab, putting cake pans of water in the big freezer, then popping them free and stacking up her ice floe collection. In her cabin and in the small library where she could spread out, she was cutting, folding, softening, and sculpting her homemade paper. She recruited Aurora to help her massage the paper to softness. Her locker filled with creations. She forgot to attend meals at the scheduled times and lived on fruit and nuts from the bowl in the galley. One day, when she sought the air, she watched an albatross following the ship, its huge long wings scything, and she was so overcome with emotion and exhaustion that she had to lie flat on the deck in the reclining goddess pose until her equilibrium was restored.

The girls in the lab went about their business, counting copepods and incubating batches of various zooplankton species to calculate their growth rates. They listened to music on their iPods and talked too loudly. Once, squeezing past with pans of fresh water, Annabel bumped into Marybeth and spilled water on the floor.

“Oh, no!” Marybeth shouted. “I’m so sorry!”

“No problema,” Annabel reassured her. “But could you open the freezer door for me?”

Marybeth pulled out her earbuds and opened the door. “You don’t need to remeasure? Is it water?”

“Yes, water, H₂O, neutral pH of 7. See what I’m learning?”

“You learn that freshwater freeze?” said Nastiya. “You are brilliant scientist.”

“It’s for her art,” Marybeth said.

“What art you make from your frozen Frisbees?”

Annabel gave Marybeth a big wink. “The art is incubating,” she said.

An hour later she came back with two inch-high sculptures of paper that she’d rubbed and rolled into tender gray softness. The girls were gone from the lab. She balanced each of the sculptures on the microscopes’ flat plates, as though they were next to be examined. One, she decided, bore a faint resemblance to a coccolithophore, the incredibly ornate soccer ball she’d been studying in books she found in the library. It was only an alga, she’d discovered, and got less love than the little animals, the way a cabbage got less love than a moose. The other—the one she gifted to the sensitive Marybeth—had appendages that might be wings, though, of course, that wasn’t the point—to look like anything. Instead, the sculptures carried an intention. She didn’t want to have to explain the intention but to let it simply emanate from her hands through the material and shaping into the universe—a healing gesture. Each one also carried a manifest symbol, folded inside where it would not be seen but might still be felt, like a heartbeat. She’d written the characters in the seal script she’d taught herself during her Chinese language phase. For Marybeth: sweet and happy. For Nastiya: kindness.

The right night, their next-to-last on the water, arrived. Annabel made the announcement at dinner. She stood in the front of the galley in her Nepalese robe and a paper headdress decorated with silver stars and announced, “The spontaneous event that will not quite be spontaneous—because I’m telling you about it now—will occur tonight after dark. You may wish to appear on deck.”

They all just looked at her.

When she was seated again with her curried rice, Ray slid in next to her.

“What spontaneous event?”

“My art.”

“And what might that be?”

He didn’t look well. She would have liked to assist him with his diet.

“The paper sculptures I’ve been making.”

He seemed to relax then. After a minute he said, “It would probably be a good idea for me to know a little more. Do you require anything from the crew? You’re going to be on deck? Isn’t paper going to blow away? We can’t have anything going in the water.” He added, “Not that you would want to lose it.”

“I was going to go chat with the captain after dinner, about pausing for the performance.”

“Now it’s a performance?”

She really didn’t want to go into detail, especially since the whole room seemed to be silenced (but for the engine noise and the cook’s clattering with the roasting pans), not even chewing now but leaning in, toward her and Ray. “Remember when you asked me for a title?”

Ray nodded, but she could tell he didn’t remember.

“Let’s not play games,” he said. “I’m in charge of this cruise, and I really need to know what everyone’s doing. It’s a team effort, even you.”

“I’m calling it ‘Fire and Ice,’” she said.

“Well, I trust you’re not going to be lighting anything on fire,” Ray said. “Fire on ships is a pretty big no-no.”

“Oh,” she said.

He leaned in closer. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

“Maybe we should go into the hallway,” she said.

Even then, she was sure everyone in the galley heard his explosion. It was something like, “Fuck no! You can’t light paper on fire! And you can’t put anything in or on the ocean! That’s completely prohibited by MARPOL!”

(Like she was supposed to know who or what MARPOL was.)

And then: “I don’t give a fuck if it’s organic and biodegradable! I don’t give a fuck about neutral pH.”

She had never guessed that the man who loved copepods could project quite so much negative energy. Something was seriously out of alignment.

They went up to the wheelhouse to talk to Captain Billy. He was picking on his guitar, but he stopped to hear her out. If his eyebrows went up, at least he didn’t yell. Potentially this was because Ray had already led with, “I told her absolutely no, but she wants to explain to you herself what she was going to come up here and tell you anyway. It’s about art.”

And so she had to defend the whole effort again. The paper she used was made from plant fibers and had not killed any trees or been bleached or chemically treated in any way; it was acid-free. The ice was made from freshwater and was not significantly different from sea ice, which loses its salt when it freezes. (She knew they must both know all about sea ice, but she felt it important to show that she knew.) There was a little soy-based ink on some of the sculptures, very organic. And she would be using very small dabs of an organic clay as adhesive. She would not light the sculptures until they were in the water, and she would use a pole to immediately steer them away from the ship. The weather was as calm as could be, a good omen.

Captain Billy looked amused.

“It’s out of the question,” Ray said.

“I’ve been seeing a lot of pomarine jaegers,” Captain Billy said, pointing through the window. “More than usual.”

Annabel said, “I’ll wear a float coat and will also tie into a line that someone can hold. I’m always very safety-conscious.”

Captain Billy turned to her. “You won’t throw any stones into the sea, will you?”

“No, of course not. I don’t have any stones. It’s just paper and ice, and they’ll both disappear.”

Ray started to say something, but Captain Billy cut him off. “Because throwing stones into the sea causes huge waves and storms.”

Annabel couldn’t tell from his face if she was meant to believe him.

“And no flowers?”

“I don’t have any flowers. Where would I get flowers?” She didn’t say that perhaps some of her sculptures might look like flowers.

“That’s good, because flowers on a ship are very bad luck. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because they can be made into a funeral wreath.”

Ray said, “I thought it was because flowers would draw it to earth and other flowers. The same reason it’s no good to paint a vessel green. That’s just asking for it to go aground.”

Annabel looked from one to the other. Surely they didn’t believe that crap?

Captain Billy glanced down at her sandals. “I have to ask. You don’t have flat feet, do you?”

“No, I do not have flat feet.”

“Because flat feet are very bad luck on any boat.” He adjusted something with the steering. “Well, then,” he said. “We’ve done worse things on this ship. Haven’t we, Ray? That time two years ago, the spring cruise?”

Ray pressed his lips together.

“But what I don’t get,” Captain Billy said, “is, how is that art, if there’s nothing left to see? Sorry for my ignorance.”

“Exactly my point,” Ray said. “How does that meet the objective of bringing our work to the public, of helping to interpret oceanography so that the public will have a deeper appreciation of what we do out here?”

They both looked at Annabel, like sharks that thought they had her trapped. But this was a question that she had heard before. “With art,” she said, “you don’t look for results. It operates in ways we can’t anticipate and in ways that might not be obvious. This project is about healing the ocean. That’s the best work I can do, putting my energy and my skills into that.” She paused before adding, “This is what I do. I don’t question what you do. I figure you know your business, and I trust that it has value even when I don’t understand what the measurements are or how to read these screens.” She nodded toward the electronics, with their green lines and pulsing points.

They were apparently stunned by her logic. Neither of them said anything. Captain Billy was steering his ship, and Ray picked up binoculars to look at something in the distance. When he put them down, he said, “You do understand that burning things puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and the ocean absorbs much of that?”

“Compared to the fuel this boat is burning?”

“Ship,” Captain Billy said. “Maybe that’s the point. We’re all a bunch of fucking hypocrites, crying about what we’re doing to the earth and ocean while we make it all worse. Like fucking recycling, sorting out cans and cardboard. Like it makes a difference. I hate that shit.”

“It does make a difference,” Annabel said. She didn’t really mean to, but she did stamp her foot a little on the carpet, and she did have an issue with her arches although she was never going to admit it on this boat. “Every little bit makes a difference. Intention makes a difference.”

Ray put back the binoculars. “I’m going now. You two can discuss art and hypocrisy all you like. I’m not involved.”

When he was gone, Captain Billy said, “I’ve done more than I want of memorials at sea. Ashes blowing in the wind. Laying wreathes. I’m not opposed to doing something now and then that’s a bit more fun.”

Thus it was that, when the sky was dark and the smile of a moon hung over them, they gathered on the back deck. Captain Billy was standing by the closed gate, having turned the pilothouse over to the first mate and put himself in charge of operation safety. Annabel’s eleven ice platforms formed an aesthetically pleasing line across the deck and reflected the light in an interesting, fractured way. She was busy making final adjustments, adhering the sculptures to the ice with her bits of clay. She was aware that the second mate, the engineer, and the cook were all standing by the back door, looking moderately interested, and that students from both shifts were gathered around, leaning in to see what she was doing, chattering away about what they imagined the sculptures to be. “Moon jelly,” she heard. And “Irish Lord.” “This look like lemming in hospital gown,” said Nastiya, who had crouched beside Annabel and was poking a finger into one. “Nudibranch,” Marybeth said. Annabel didn’t know what a nudibranch was, but she liked the sound of it, and she liked that the girls were deploying their imaginations.

When everything was ready, Annabel gave her little speech, her invocation. She praised Sedna, the sea goddess, and asked her to forgive their boat upon the water, and all their transgressions. She specifically mentioned ocean acidification and called it, familiarly, OA. “We know not what we’ve done,” she said. She pressed her hands in the prayer position and made her bow. “Namaste. The light in me greets the light in all of you.”

The ship was now idling, just the thrum of the engines like blood coursing through all living beings. Captain Billy opened the gate and took the first sculpture on its ice base from her mittened hands into his gloved hands. He had come equipped with a sling for lowering the sculpture to the water and a trident for holding it away. The second mate stepped forward with another pole with a butane torch attached to its end and, like clockwork, the three of them passed, lowered, and lit her magnum opus. One flaming beauty after another sailed off into the darkness.

The ship throttled forward, and the lights grouped and strung out, flaring and reflecting just as she’d seen them in her mind, those bright centers of hope spreading their warmth over the surrounding sea and then dwindling, fading, dissolving into the other elements. The messages of sacred love and healing, soy-inked inside the paper folds, were released to the universe.

Tears streamed down her face, and the scene blurred before her, the tiny lights like fireflies now, blinking and wavering, and then turning off. Behind her there was a great silence and then, when the last light disappeared into the darkness, a cheer went up from the crowd. “That was so cool!” Tina was shouting in her ear. Alex had his arms thrown up over his head. Marybeth was trying to hug her. Captain Billy announced, “It never happened,” but he was smiling and posing with the trident like King Neptune. She heard someone else say, “I have no clue, but I liked it.” Helen crept up and took ahold of her sleeve. “I suppose you know that in the mythology, Sedna’s father cut off her fingers, and her fingers became the seals, walrus, and the whales.”

It was right then—at that perfect and preordained minute—that the porpoises appeared. They were suddenly all around the ship, their splashes catching the ship’s light and making their own fire. The sound of them, breaking the water and blowing their quick and bubbled breaths, rose above the ship’s rumble.

It was in that same moment that Annabel became aware of Ray and his daughter at the side rail. Aurora stood in front, Ray behind her with his arms wrapped around her shoulders. “Stood” was not the right word. The girl was leaping, springing from her toes, and singing out, “I see them! I see them! I see you!” and her father was trying to hold her, however awkwardly, down to earth.