Playground, p.33
Playground, page 33
The sea she wrote about was a jumble of other wild senses. Sharks that used two-thirds of the weight of their brain to sniff out one drop of blood in several million drops of water. Parasitic nematodes that tasted heat through their skin. Blind cavefish that felt objects at a distance by using cells that ran the length of their sides. Porpoises and dolphins and killer whales whose ears could see tiny differences in buried objects. Ubangi elephantfish that smelled electricity with their chins. Sea turtles that navigated by feeling the twists and tugs of the Earth’s magnetic fields.
Everything Evie once learned through her own senses she now learned again, through the ears of her imagined readers. She wrote of the thousand-mile-long meandering rivers of scent in the atmosphere that seabirds smelled, tracking the plankton to find the krill that fed on it. She struggled to capture creatures that seemed designed by a committee of excitable children, creatures with four-, five-, six-, and eightfold symmetry, creatures that changed their shape and colors as easily as the wind shifted off a rocky headland. She transcribed the cacophony of underwater sounds, the grunts, groans, and honks that were so much more crucial to underwater life than the medium of light—the click of triggerfish grinding their spines, the toadfish’s spectacular boat whistles and drum solos, the high-pitched chirps of herring farts and the bellow of roaring lionfish, the rhythmic piping of her beloved mantas, the songs of whales that carried for thousands of deep-sea miles.
She lavished attention on one of the loudest noisemakers, a pistol shrimp. There were six hundred species, but she had fallen in love with one during a month in the reefs of the Solomon Islands. The creature’s claws were not typical pincers but consisted of a special jointed structure resembling the hammer of a gun. The shrimp cocked this hammer, then triggered it to slam against the claw’s lock, making a tremendous snap.
The noise of these tiny shrimp rivals anything in the deep, even the booming of the great whales. When a whole colony of pistol shrimp start snapping together, the chorus can jam the Navy’s most sophisticated sonar. The snap of a single pistol shrimp is louder than the roar of a jet engine from half a block away. And the explosion made by its snapping claw creates a wave of bubbles strong enough to stun a large fish or break a glass jar. These bubbles contain so much energy, they emit flashes of light almost as hot as the surface of the sun.
But something else about the pistol shrimp earned it extra space in Evelyne’s book. She wrote of going back day after day to spy on one of the ocean’s weirdest partnerships. She watched for hours as a pistol shrimp worked away, digging out a burrow big enough for two families. But the other resident of this communal den wasn’t a shrimp or another crustacean or even a fellow invertebrate. It was a goby, a small ray-finned fish who relied on his shrimp partner to dig out and maintain their den.
The shrimp is a great digger but is almost blind. The goby stands watch outside their shared burrow, catching food for them both. The shrimp constantly feels for the fish with long antennae. The goby tells the shrimp what is happening outside, using a language of special fin flicks. At the first sign of danger, the goby whisks them both back into the fortress that the shrimp has built.
BECAUSE SHE WAS NOT a native speaker, because she struggled with writing, and because she herself was still twelve inside, she wrote in a disarming style that would make young readers recognize her and want to rush to her side. Her sentences tumbled forward, naked and impatient, free and ingenuous and lost in awe. Her paragraphs were filled with a palpable astonishment greater than the amazement she had felt back when first seeing those things.
She said it simply and hid nothing: diving was the only time she was not going somewhere else, the only time she was happy inside her body and at ease in the world. And so her book felt like going home. Her pages had the salt-breeze smell of the sea, and the words underneath her words teemed like the waters themselves, where nine-tenths of the native species of possible thoughts had yet to be identified.
In her second-to-last chapter, Evelyne’s book turned dark. The coasts of Florida, where she dove so often in her own girlhood, had traded their mangrove forests for subdivisions and high-rises. The coral cities of the Indian Ocean that crowded with life when she swam in them in her early twenties were bleaching and filling up with sludge. Oil now spilled from rigs and ships a hundred times a year. From inside a submersible, miles down in the sunless zone, she had filmed fields of canisters filled with radioactive waste.
I will tell you honestly: Like everyone, I thought that the ocean was infinite and could not be harmed. I was wrong. The waters are warming. The large fish are disappearing. Plastics and metals and poisons are concentrating all the way up the food chain. And worse is yet to come. . . .
Without your love, the ocean will die.
FOR A LONG TIME, she struggled with how to end the book. Having dipped into the future’s naked truth, she now needed a way to hold out hope without lying. Neither of her children ever had much use for false comfort. They both could smell wishful thinking like a shark smelled blood.
Weeks of searching, and she realized: There was no such ending. Hope and truth could not be reconciled. The things that had filled her with awe were passing away. There was no other honest ending. Blocked, she reread what she had written so many times it made her ill. She began to doubt the book and then to hate it. Every page revealed the flaws in her attempts to write in a language she’d never mastered. She was a scientist. What had made her think that she could pass herself off as a writer?
She decided to cut her losses and return the advance. But, of course, she had spent the money on her family already, twice over. She went to Limpet, desperate. He was sympathetic but unhelpful.
“You’ll find your ending. The sea will provide.”
He predicted this with such confidence that it infuriated Evelyne. She wanted to file that very afternoon for the long-avoided divorce. His certainty in the face of her distress made her seethe. How had she and this man ever had children together?
AND THEN, ON THE VERGE of taking her expensive word processing machine off the coast of Southern California into international waters and throwing it overboard, she found her ending, just like her husband said she would. It was a simple memory of a stunning moment, a memory so important to her that she’d hidden it from herself when she went looking for her final chapter. Perhaps the scientist in her was wary of closing with a tale that bordered on the mystical. But once her memory surrendered the pearl, she knew it was the only way her book could end.
It had happened years before, on her second research trip to the waters of the continental shelf off the east coast of Australia. She was there to observe the complex relations between cleaners and clients at a cleaning station northeast of Cooktown. She had dived every day for three weeks when one afternoon she stopped a short distance from her field site to watch an excited giant cuttlefish moving about near the entrance to its den.
The creature was pulsing in the most extraordinary colors. Evie drew close, by centimeters, trying not to startle the animal and cut short its crazed display. The cuttlefish failed to pay her any mind. It stared straight past her into deeper water, as patterns of reds and oranges and pale greens cycled across its skin like the strobing lights in a disco. She thought she had seen all the colors a cuttlefish could make, but this one made cinnamons and russets, scarlets and carmines and clarets unknown to her. It flashed colors so subtle and varied she couldn’t even tell where on the color wheel they fell.
The lights coursing across the length of the cuttlefish’s body throbbed and evolved. They flashed a theme followed by ever-expanding variations. The light show put her in mind of the Strip in Vegas, the scrolling Technicolor marquees of Times Square. Some kind of grammar infused these florid patterns, a rich syntax and semantics with inscrutable rules and moves, and while Evie could decode none of it, she knew it meant something.
Was it signaling? Not to her, certainly. It had been reciting its fabulous color-soliloquy long before Evie arrived on the scene, and even as she lurked near it, the beast kept its back turned, gazing out toward the network of three thousand reefs whose two thousand kilometers of living architecture could be seen from outer space. Nor were any other large creatures to be seen, although Evie knew the senses of animals to be so strange and keen that the singer might have been singing to other cuttlefish nearby in some way other than she could know.
She thought of a violinist she had seen once, decades ago, on a summer’s day in the open plaza in front of Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, wrestling with Bach’s massive Chaconne the way Jacob wrestled with the angel, as if the fate of the world depended on it. The cuttlefish concert unfolded in the same profound way. Sequences shifted in both series and parallel. Melodies built up in virtuosic counterpoint. Chords of color shot forth in profound progressions—stabs of sharp yellow, a suite of brownish purples fading toward a deep and muted blue.
The shapes made by the swirling colors eluded her. Constellations and blueprints, patterns of dazzling dots and dashes progressed in weird formation around and down the tube of the animal’s body. But the cuttlefish hovered in place, treading water with its fins and squirting tiny corrective jets with its orbiting siphon. Minus the relentless light show, he might have been a monk on a mountaintop, deep in meditation.
There followed something that still defied belief, even as Evie wrote about it years later. The light-slinger seized up, contracting his body into a rigid mass. Still without any audience but the open water, the singer started dancing. His arms pinwheeled, then drew in. They stabbed out in opposing directions, like some choreographed move by Martha Graham. He cycled through postures that biologists claimed were only used for competition or display—without a competing creature in sight but the single human he meticulously ignored. His entire body blanched as white as Antarctica, and he knotted himself into a wild warrior pose. Spiky goose bumps erupted all over his skin, which then burst into flame. The arms turned into swords, a saber dance for no one. He thrust his blades out everywhere, the spitting image of Kali, the goddess of time, change, destruction, and creation.
The cuttlefish was putting on a play.
From that great fortissimo climax, the cuttlefish worked his way through calmer postures and poses to a quiet denouement. He was going through the intricate steps of a ritual. When the light and movement stopped and the spent creature drifted off to his den, Evie was left dumbstruck, unable to grasp what she had just seen, certain that she would be able to tell no one, but knowing, too, that someday she would have to.
That day was now, and she closed her book with a simple retelling of that performance, the strangest and most disconcerting thing she had ever witnessed:
If the cuttlefish was displaying, I couldn’t tell for who. They might have been random bursts of energy, but the animal’s patterns were so purposeful that they felt like messages. More than messages: he seemed to be telling an epic poem, painting a wild action painting, singing an endless song. . . .
We will never know what it’s like to be a cuttlefish, but I’m certain they are smarter than we think. Maybe they are smart in ways too strange for us to figure out. Those complex codes of color and movement must have had a subject. But what could it be?
I don’t know what the cuttlefish was saying. But I think I know what drove his wild performance. It must have been the thing that filled his mind every moment of his existence, everywhere he ever turned. Clearly it was Ocean.
The scientist in her watched in alarm as those words took shape. They had come from someplace reckless and unfounded. But they came with such force that she had to let them be. She had found her way back to her title by accident. Or rather, her conscious mind had found its way to the arrival point that her animal mind had already reached, way back when she was just setting out and her title was all she had. The ocean was forever unfolding, forever exploring, forever tinkering with form, and every part of it was busy talking about what was all around. So was she. So was every being that came from those waters. Which meant every living thing.
SHE GAVE THE MANUSCRIPT to Limpet. Half an afternoon later, he was finished. The thing that had taken her almost two years to write took her husband a little more than two hours to read. There was something terribly wrong with that equation.
“Well? Don’t just sit there with that funny look on your lips. Tell me what you think.”
Bart Mannis held the manuscript in his lap. He closed his eyes and shook his head. It made her crazy. She saw how the book was wrong in every possible way. She would have to start it again.
“For God’s sake, tell me! Is it hopeless?”
He breathed in, saying nothing. It maddened her. She wanted to hurt him. Until he spoke again.
“It is exactly what it needs to be.”
Relief rushed up around her, like the tides in the Bay of Fundy. She teared up and cursed in Joual.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Have I ever?”
It amazed her to realize that he hadn’t. No significant falsehood, in all their years together. Who gets that?
She felt seized by a wave of newfound energy. “So what do I do now?”
“Get ready.”
“For what?”
“For lots of grateful young people falling in love with you.”
SHE WASN’T READY. She had made a sound like the click of a crab’s claw, and it roared into the world like a jet half a block away. Clearly It Is Ocean immediately went into a second printing, and then a third. A five-minute spot on a national television omnibus showing her in her wet suit playing with an octopus and wild chirping dolphins sent the book up onto the bestseller lists, where it stayed for the rest of the summer. Readers in twenty-two countries, desperate to connect with a fading planet and clinging to the remnants of their childhood animism, bought the book in scary numbers.
The letters poured in. They contained pictures and stories, poems and heartfelt declarations. “Your book changed me. It changes everything.” Not just from young adults: people in middle age wrote to thank her for reminding them that, even now, in what felt like the end-time, ninety-nine percent of the world’s available living space was stranger than they knew how to imagine.
She dumped a sack of mail at the feet of her amused husband. “What am I supposed to do with these?”
“Answer them?”
“How? Another sack comes in every week. If I give each of these letters the answer that it deserves, I will never have time to dive again.”
His face fell. He didn’t want her punished for a good deed that he had encouraged.
“Maybe you could hire a secretary to answer them.”
She looked at him, horrified. “Are you serious? And slap every one of these people across the face?”
ANSWERING THE LETTERS proved harder than writing the book had been. Chained to her desk again, slaving over the urgencies of strangers, she answered questions she was shaky on and gave aid and comfort that she was not qualified to dispense. It came to her that this was why she had always shied away from human love. To give it was always to incur a growing obligation: someone else’s gratitude.
“My girlfriends love it,” her daughter said. “You’re their hero.” It took all Evie’s willpower to keep from shouting, But what about you? Dora had read it. That was gift enough.
“I never knew most of that stuff,” Danny told her. It was the most affection her son had shown her since he was ten.
For a year and a half, Evelyne talked on the radio and gave interviews for newspapers and magazines. She went on television and accepted invitations to give keynotes around the country. She hated it all. Every seat on an airplane was an exercise in soul-strengthening misery. She would be sick to her stomach in her hotel rooms before each event. And then some other creature would take control of her body and she would breeze out onstage in front of hundreds of people, somehow able, for an hour, to make them laugh, gasp, and cry over the ocean, the source of all amazement.
Her disconcertment was not helped when Bart came to her with more news.
“Enrollment is up at Scripps. And we’re not alone. I checked. Ocean studies programs around the country are reporting significant bumps. Woods Hole is blaming you.”
It made her want never to step out of the house again.
But she had discharged her obligation to the Earth. She could retire, give up everything, do nothing but dive and look in silence for the rest of her days.
Then the letter came from the White House asking her to serve on the President’s national advisory board on the oceans. It was followed by another, asking if she would help to run the United States Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. The invitation came from Dr. Earle, her former captain in the Tektite mission and now the first female chief scientist at NOAA. Evie revered the woman too much to turn her down. Earth was losing whole ecosystems before people could discover what was in them. And it fell to her flawed, powerless, bureaucratic agency to try to slow that down.
Administration. Washington. Trapped in a terrestrial life, among bickering humans. The brutal penalties of success were now complete.
FOR FOUR YEARS, Evelyne Beaulieu flew back and forth between the coasts. She saw less of her family than she had during those years of absence that her book meant to atone for. Daniel got admitted into the mechanical and civil engineering program at Caltech. Dora went to Pomona, where she enrolled in every class of medieval history on offer. Bart was publishing research again. While Evelyne worked in D.C., the twins morphed into irony-loving adults with sonorous, deep voices who wrote her sophisticated letters filled with witty anecdotes of college life, including tales of friends who fetishized them for being the children of the author of Clearly It Is Ocean. In the back of Evie’s mind was the hope that when Washington and Dr. Earle let her go, she might still be able to return home, make friends with these exotic new grown-ups, and learn the secrets of their land-based confidence.
