The Lightkeepers

by Abby Geni

  Jewel is my favorite instrument. No question. A large-format mechanism requires effort and time, but in the moments when I am hidden beneath the cloth, the whole universe is condensed into the bright image in front of me. My brain is awash with shadow and movement. I don’t see the islands as they really are. The truth is obscured by a wall of black. I can only see what I want to see—what I choose to observe through my lens—what I decide to record for posterity.

  There is no darkroom on the islands. I cannot develop my photographs here. Instead, I must remove the film from the camera and place it in a light-tight box. I do this by feel, rather than sight, my hands inside the changing bag that keeps my equipment protected from the sun. I open Jewel up and detach its precious cargo. With my eyes closed, I palpate the film, transferring it into the container that will hold it for the next few months. Then I dust off my hands and walk away.

  When using my other cameras—my digital instruments—I have a particular routine. Each evening, I look over all the images from the day, systematically erasing the ones that don’t satisfy me. On the weekends, I go through the whole memory card, doing the same thing on a grander scale, reviewing all the photographs I have taken during my entire time on the islands. This allows me to maintain an active dialogue with my catalog of pictures, to see what I have done and what I have yet to do. It also allows me to gain a bit of distance from myself. Sometimes an image will seem lovely the day it was taken, but after a week or two it will fade. It can be difficult, at first, to separate my mind from the camera. I know so well what I hoped to capture in each snapshot—the light, the energy, the atmosphere—that when I look at my own work, I will sometimes see what isn’t there. I will see what I wanted to make, rather than what I actually made. I need time and space to be able to perceive my images with an objective eye, as though they belong to someone else.

  When it comes to my large-format camera, however, I do not have the option of viewing my photographs. Not yet. This kind of film requires a pool of chemicals and a darkroom to come into being. I can’t turn the camera over and peer at the back. I will have to return to the mainland, to civilization, before I can develop these images. For now, the film is stored beneath my bed in watertight tubs. Each week I add more treasure to the supply, like a dragon hoarding gold. Sometimes I cannot bear to wait. It seems impossible that months will pass before I can see my pictures.

  But sometimes, instead, I relish the feeling of hope, of expectation. Like a fetus in the womb, my photographs are gestating in darkness. I am curious to see what will be born.

  ON A DAMP December morning, I saw my first elephant seal pup. Only a few females have come ashore, so there have been no babies—until now.

  Mick has been rising early in anticipation. He is the expert on these animals, as he is on so many things. Marine mammals of every sort are his province, cetaceans and pinnipeds in particular. Seal Season is his favorite time of year. He has been in a jubilant mood.

  The females will continue to make landfall over the next few weeks. The males are frantically establishing their hierarchy. The alphas will mate over and over. The betas will assist and obey the alphas in hopes of being allowed to breed as well. The gammas—the ultimate losers—will spend the winter in a state of barren frustration. This is a fraught period on the islands. The males have whipped themselves into a fever of expectation. Their guttural cries fill the wind. Their immense gray bodies are always in motion, lurching up and down the coastline, coated in spray. I have to be careful where I go. I have to maintain my distance. An elephant seal could run me over like a steamroller. It could snap me in half with its teeth.

  Mick has told me about the strange life of these creatures. The males do not eat while they’re on land—and they are on land for months, throughout the whole of Seal Season. They will drop half their body weight before the end of winter. They have spent the rest of the year fattening up in preparation.

  When the females arrive, the entire world will change. They come to the islands to give birth, then get pregnant. They are single-minded and efficient. They gestate for eleven months, during which time they live an aquatic existence. Little is known about their experience at sea, since they are capable of holding their breath for hours and diving to depths of more than a mile. Human beings can’t follow them where they go. Maybe they eat octopuses. Maybe they eat small sharks. Maybe they stay near the islands. Maybe they travel into the deep ocean. Maybe they remain in family groupings. Maybe they voyage alone. No one can be sure. At last they come ashore, pregnant with a sixty-pound fetus. They deliver immediately.

  I was on the grounds with Mick when we came across the seal pup. We were on our way to Dead Sea Lion Beach, where the first females had finally emerged on land. The air was thick with a combination of rain and mist. I had not brought my camera with me, unwilling to risk the damp. Mick and I were both draped in ponchos that rustled as we moved. My eyelids were beaded with wet. He had a hand on my arm, steadying me as we slipped and crunched across the granite.

  I heard it before I saw it. The baby’s call was like nothing I’d ever encountered—at once tremulous and gravelly, somewhere between the whine of a kitten and the cough of a bear. Mick’s fingers tightened on my shoulder.

  “Oh no,” he whispered.

  We held still. Through the fog, a shape appeared. It was jet black. It moved hesitantly, shuffling and pausing. The fur was soft, the eyes brimming, the nose aquiver with whiskers. Though the pup was large, about half my size, it still managed to be cute in that distinctly mammalian way. It lifted its maw, keening.

  Involuntarily I took a step forward, reaching for it.

  “No,” Mick said.

  “It’s lost,” I said. “It’s going the wrong way.”

  “That happens.”

  The baby wailed again. The sound tugged at my gut. Somewhere its mother was making an answering call, lost in the wind and the waves.

  The pup lumbered toward us. There was a suggestion of exhaustion in its manner. I sucked in a breath. It would have been the work of a moment to pick the baby up and turn it around, pointing it back toward the sea, toward its family, toward safety. All it needed was a nudge in the right direction.

  “Can’t we just—” I began.

  “No.” Mick’s hand was a vise, keeping me in place. “If it dies, it dies.”

  I moaned. The strength of my own impulse surprised me. I wanted the pup close to me, cradled in my arms. The loneliness of that little figure was unbearable. I could not tell if I was crying. It might have been the cold rain on my cheeks. Mick held on, unrelenting. We watched as the baby headed further inland, struggling through the mist, crying out to no one, until the gauzy air swallowed it up.

  19

  WHEN IT COMES to you, I am sometimes tempted to play the What If Game. This is a dangerous game, no question—but in low moments, I do find it appealing. What if you had lived? What if?

  It opens up a world of possibilities. If you had lived, I might not have become a nature photographer at all. I might never have been afflicted by wanderlust. I might have had a home of my own by now. I might have had a dog, or two, or three. I can imagine myself kneeling in a garden, elbow-deep in earth, my face shaded by a straw hat, my mind clear. I might have hosted dinner parties. I might have woken up every morning of my life knowing where I was. Everything about me might have been different, refracted through the lens of What If.

  If you had lived, I might have had friends—not coworkers, not colleagues, but dear companions. I might have had a romantic relationship, at least once in my life, that lasted more than a few tempestuous months. I might have been able to fall in love with a man the way I have fallen in love with the islands. I might have formed human attachments, rather than spending my affection on the sky, the waves, the elephant seals, the mist, and the cold. I can imagine myself writing letters to a pen pal. Not a ghost, but a living person. Someone who would write back.

  If you had lived, I might never have come to the Farallon
Islands. I would never have crossed Andrew’s path. I can draw a direct line from your death to my assault. If you had lived, I might have been protected, nurtured, safe.

  I might have been happy. The core of my nature might have been joy, rather than loss.

  If you had lived, I would have been able to forget you sometimes. This is how normal people seem to think. I can imagine—just barely—a reality in which I might take my mother for granted, in which you would be a backdrop, like the blurred middle ground of a photograph, important but unremarked.

  The What If Game applies to my father too. I can imagine a circumstance in which he might be less focused on his work, less absent mentally. He might not turn on the TV every night with the weary, glazed expression of an alcoholic reaching for the bottle. For years now, he and I have been like roommates, like acquaintances. Whenever I am home between assignments, we fall into the same old grooves, deep ruts that run parallel but do not touch. He has his poker game on Friday nights. I stop by the farmers’ market on Wednesdays. He goes for a jog every morning. I take long, hot baths in the afternoons. We each have our own shelf in the cabinet, in the fridge. We each have our own hobbies—I do crossword puzzles, he does sudoku. We each have our own routines for sleeping and waking, drifting past each other in the hallway in our bathrobes without bothering to make eye contact.

  If you had lived, all this might have been different. Dad and I would not move around each other with this gentle brand of detachment. We would not spend hours together in a concentrated silence, each of us preoccupied and withdrawn, as alone as it is possible for two people in one room to be.

  I did try to discuss this very matter with my father once. I remember it well. He and I were sitting in the living room, in our usual stillness. The wind filled the trees outside. It was evening, and the robins, the first birds to stir in the morning and the last to sound at night, were twittering. Dad was frowning at a file in his lap as I flipped through a catalog of photographic equipment in a desultory way.

  At last I cleared my throat. “Hey.”

  He glanced at me, then back at his file.

  “About Mom,” I said.

  He nodded, though he kept his gaze fixed on the page.

  “If she hadn’t died,” I said, “do you think you and I would have been closer? That we would have been able to talk more, maybe?”

  A pause. A long pause.

  “We’ll never know,” he said.

  CHRISTMAS IS ON the horizon. This has brought out a previously unseen side of Charlene. She has gone on a holiday rampage. In some back closet, she found a blow-up Christmas tree, the sort of cheap, rubber affair that could serve in an emergency as a flotation device. The greenery is the hue of Astroturf, the baubles painted right onto the plastic. It smells like a child’s wading pool. It is an abomination. Charlene blew it up herself, puff by puff, and set it in the middle of the living room. We all have to walk around it a dozen times a day. She has taken to wearing a Santa hat around, which she apparently brought to the islands specially, packing it into her luggage months in advance. The red clashes magnificently with her auburn hair. And she has not stopped there. A few days ago she rooted through the garbage, unearthing any bits of metal she could get her hands on. The girl has made tinsel out of empty cans.

  Our ancient television now blares day and night. The old Christmas standbys are playing on a loop. The TV screen is officially broken; if any of us stares for too long into that chaos of static, we might go blind. Yet Charlene does not appear to care. Legs folded, smiling, she sits in an armchair and listens with her eyes closed. She seems to know each film by heart, laughing at bits of unseen slapstick, tearing up during a romantic moment that is invisible to the rest of us.

  I, of course, am not a holiday person. Dead mothers are not festive. Christmas has meant very little to me over the past twenty years.

  But Mick has gotten into the swing of things. He and Charlene recently organized a Secret Santa. They urged me to pluck a name from a hat. In vain did I remind them that there were no stores to be found on the Farallon Islands, nowhere for me to get a little shopping done. Mick and Charlene were undaunted. I anticipate that we will all be getting a shark tooth, or a box of crackers, or a stapler, or a worn pair of socks, each gift festively wrapped in moldering newspaper and tied with filthy string.

  This is a busy time for all of us. As the elephant seals have come ashore in greater and greater numbers, Mick has been run off his feet. But the other biologists have their own work to do as well. Though the white sharks are out of the picture, Forest and Galen must now tally up the data they collected during the summer. How many kills. How many Sisters. How many members of the Rat Pack. Everything has to be cataloged. Forest has been making copies of all his videos, ready to be shipped to the mainland. Galen has been filling out forms, which he hates. He will sit at the table, running his hands through his hair in exasperation until that white crown stands up in tufts. At his side, Forest will gently correct his work: “No, that was Thursday, not Wednesday. Hand me the eraser and I’ll fix it.”

  Lucy, the bird girl, has been taken up with the storm-petrels. This has caused her a certain amount of angst. Normally she would have been able to assist Mick throughout Seal Season. That has been the pattern in the past. Normally Andrew would be in charge of the winter birds, which were his area of expertise. But Lucy must fill in for him now. She has been paler than usual, circles under her eyes.

  I did not know there were storm-petrels on the islands at all—but in this case, my ignorance is not my fault. Storm-petrels do not make visible nests. They live in burrows in a sheer cliff face at the water’s edge. In addition, they are nocturnal. Their eerie voices echo all night long. When Lucy mimicked them for me, I realized that I had heard that cry without fully registering it, the sound woven throughout my dreams. The storm-petrels skim over the sea in the darkness, hunting what Lucy refers to as “planktonic animals,” returning to their burrows only at dawn. In the breeding season, they will coordinate their parenting with the phases of the moon, fledging their chicks during the brighter lunar periods. Now, however, they are childless. They are practically phantoms. A few days ago, Lucy located their hidden homes by following a distinct, musky odor, the by-product of an oily, orange goo the birds emit when disturbed. She uncovered a veritable storm-petrel city.

  Charlene, of course, has been deputized to help whoever needs her most, following obediently in Lucy’s wake with an armful of equipment or fact-checking all of Galen’s paperwork. That has left Mick and me. We have climbed Lighthouse Hill together, binoculars in hand, to observe the pattern of elephant seals strewn across the shore. We have visited Dead Sea Lion Beach. We have kept an eye out for the elusive fur seals. It is not always possible to travel by boat nowadays. The surf is wild, thundering against the shore. The Lunchbox cannot be safely lowered into such choppy water, and the Janus is little better. White spray bursts against the coastline and rises in ashy tufts. At times, it looks as though the ocean has lifted a hand clear of the water and is trying to pull Southeast Farallon down into the depths.

  But every now and then, Mick and I have managed to find a convenient lull. Occasionally the wind has worn itself out. The sea has dozed for an hour or two, as flat and glistening as an ice rink. Mick has dragged me out in the Janus, despite my protestations. Having no weather sense, I am convinced that the climate might turn on a dime. No sooner would we leave the shore behind than a vicious gale would come screaming in out of nowhere—that has been my belief. Mick has laughed at me. One morning we trolled together past the Perfect Wave, a turquoise curl that scrolls perpetually along Shark Alley. It would have been a temptation to any surfer, except, of course, for the predators that lurk beneath the surface in warm weather. On another afternoon, we motored to the Lower Arch, where I snapped photos of the harbor seals: hides peppered with spots, flat flippers gripping rotund bellies.

  More than once, I have dreamed about the lost elephant seal pup. I never found out wha
t happened to it. I can only assume it died of starvation and neglect. Mick would not let me look for it, not even to find its body.

  But in my dreams, I hear its aching cry once more. I find myself on the grounds again in the mist and rain. This time, I am determined to save the baby. I see its weary black shape in the distance, stumbling and shuffling. The pup is wailing for its mother. There is nothing more primal than that sound. In the dream, I can almost understand its language—a kind of underwater warbling, like speech filtered through fluid. Given enough time, I believe I could figure out what it is saying. It wants its mother, but I will be the one to answer. Bewildered by the fog, I hurry across the granite slope, following that echoing call. My hands outstretched. My heart in my throat. Despite all my efforts, I never succeed. Every time, I am left with empty arms.

  OLIVER THE OCTOPUS has reemerged. Recently Lucy decided to effect a massive feng shui reorganization of her bedroom. It took her a while to arrange all her furniture. I did not, of course, venture in to see how the work was progressing. The dragon might have been slain, but I was leery at the thought of entering his former lair. From my room upstairs, I listened to the creaking, the scrape of wood on wood, the occasional burst of cursing. I did not ask Lucy what had motivated this spate of activity. She would not have confided in me, even if I had wanted her to.

  She and I have achieved détente, of a kind. She has stopped dropping catty comments, and I have stopped bristling like a hedgehog in her company. We nod and smile at one another in passing. We are civilized. Since Andrew’s death, the others have demonstrated endless compassion for Lucy. They give her hugs. They rub her back. They ask her how she’s doing in honeyed voices. I do not. I am well aware that she does not like me—but her enmity is less focused now. Andrew’s passing has overshadowed such petty concerns. I get the feeling that I am a mild but persistent annoyance to her, like an ugly painting on the wall.