by Ruth Ozeki
“The belly of the beast,” Callie said. “Those cruisers are the people we have to reach. They’re the ones who have the resources to make change happen.”
She often told a story about the time she was standing on the deck of a ship bound for Anchorage, pointing out a pod of humpbacks to the excited passengers, who were crowded around the railing, snapping pictures and shooting video. One elderly man stood apart from the rest. When Callie offered him her place at the rail so he could get a better view, he laughed, derisively.
“They’re just whales.”
Later in the cruise, she gave a lecture about the order Cetacea. She showed video and talked about their complex communities and social behaviors, about their bubble nets and echolocation and the range of their emotions. She played recordings of their vocalizations, illustrating their clicks and songs. To her surprise, the old man was in the audience, listening.
Later, they spotted another pod, which came closer this time, treating them to a spectacular display of surfacing behaviors, breaching, spy-hopping, lobtailing, and slapping. The old man came up on deck to watch.
At the end of the cruise, as they were approaching port in Vancouver, the old man sought her out and handed her an envelope.
“For your whales,” he said.
When she thanked him, he shook his head. “Don’t.”
They disembarked, and Callie forgot about the envelope. When she got home, she found it and opened it. Inside was a check made out to her marine mammal protection agency for half a million dollars. She thought it was a joke. She thought she had miscounted the zeros. She sent it in to the office, and they deposited it. The check cleared.
Using the passenger list, she tracked the old guy down at his home in Bethesda and questioned him. At first, he was reluctant, but finally he explained. He had been a bomber pilot during World War II, he told her, stationed at an air base in the Aleutians. They used to fly out every day, looking for Japanese targets. Often, when they couldn’t locate an enemy vessel, or the weather conditions turned bad, they would be forced to abort their mission and fly back to base, but landing with a full payload was dangerous, so they would discharge their bombs into the sea. From the cockpit of the plane, they could see the large shadows of whales, moving below the surface of the water. From so high up, the whales looked small. They used them for target practice.
“It was fun,” the old man told Callie over the phone. “What did we know?”
“They’re filter feeders,” Callie said, about the barnacles. “But they’re not very good at moving their cirri around, so they rely on a vigorous movement of water to get their nutrition. That’s why they prefer more exposed shorelines than ours.”
“What’s a cirri?” Ruth asked, putting two mugs of tea down and then pouring a third for Oliver, who had just come back from tree planting. He took off his jacket and hung it up, and then he joined them, with the cat following hard on his heels.
“Cheers,” Callie said, taking a sip of the tea. “Cirri are the barnacle’s arms and legs. Feathery tendrils they use to pull plankton in.”
“I don’t see any feathery tendrils,” Ruth said. She didn’t like the barnacles. They were ugly and they gave her the creeps.
“They only extend them when they’re underwater,” Oliver said, wrapping his reddened fingers around the warm mug. “And anyway, these guys are dead.”
Ruth inspected the barnacles, which looked pretty much the same as they had when they were alive. They were attached to the freezer bag by long dark stalks that were tough and rubbery and covered with small bumps. At the free end of each stalk was a hard white cluster of platelike shells that looked like fingernails. Callie used the tip of her pen to point to one of the rubbery stalks. Pesto jumped up onto the counter to watch.
“This is the foot, or the peduncle,” she said. “And this hard white part is the capitulum, or the head.”
The cat sniffed at the barnacle, and Ruth pushed him away. “Does it have a face?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” Callie said. “But it’s got a dorsal side, which is up, and a ventral side, which is down.”
She took a small plastic box from the pocket of her fishing vest and opened it. Inside was a collection of forensic instruments: a scalpel, a pair of tweezers, forceps, scissors, a small ruler. She selected the largest barnacle and used the scalpel to slice carefully between the plastic bag and the base of the peduncle. She removed the barnacle and laid it on the counter in front of her. She took out the ruler and measured the creature from foot to head.
“Can you tell how old it is?” Oliver asked.
“Hard to say. They reach sexual maturity at about a year, and full maturity at five. They can live up to twenty years or more. This fellow, or gal—actually it doesn’t matter because they’re hermaphroditic—is a mature adult. They can grow up to twenty centimeters, or about eight inches long, but this one’s only just over three inches, which suggests that the colony is fairly young, or the conditions weren’t great, or both. Hey, Oliver, can I test-drive that scope on your iPhone?”
He had recently hacked his iPhone by attaching a small 45X digital microscope lens onto the case with superglue. Somehow Callie already knew about this, too. She had just gotten back to the island. How could she know? She held out her hand, and he snapped the case mod onto the phone, opened the app, and passed it over to her. The app activated the iPhone’s light as she aimed the lens at the barnacle’s head. A close-up image appeared on the small screen. “This is awesome!” she said. “You see these gorgeous calcareous plates?”
Ruth peered over her shoulder at the small screen. The plates looked like toenails on the foot of a prehistoric reptile.
“When they’re first secreted, they’re shiny and pearlescent, but gradually as they’re buffeted about by the waves, they get pitted and dull.”
“Like us,” Ruth said, sitting back down.
“Exactly,” Callie said. “So that’s another clue to age. All in all, I’d say that this colony’s been floating around for at least a couple years, probably more like three or four.”
“Three years puts it before the tsunami,” Oliver said.
“Well, like I said, it’s hard to be more precise than that. But it seems unlikely that we’d be seeing stuff from the tsunami washing up on our beaches yet. We’re tucked in pretty far back here.”
She turned off the light on the microscope and admired the lens. “How’d you attach it?”
As Oliver explained the hack, Ruth picked up the severed barnacle between her fingers and studied it. This new information added little support for her tsunami theory. Perhaps Muriel was right after all. Perhaps the freezer bag had been jettisoned from a ship, although Nao didn’t seem like the type to take an Alaskan cruise. Maybe she had cast it out to sea, like a message in a bottle, before the tsunami, or maybe it had been in her pocket, along with the rocks, when she walked into the ocean and drowned. Any of these were plausible explanations, but none of them felt right. Ruth didn’t like the barnacles to begin with, and now she resented them for failing to provide the evidence she was looking for.
“Why are they called goosenecks, anyway?” she asked. “They don’t look anything like geese.”
Callie had returned the iPhone to Oliver and was packing up her kit. “Actually, they do. There’s a kind of goose called a barnacle goose, which has a long black neck and a white head. Your little friends here were named for it. People used to find these guys attached to a piece of driftwood, which they assumed was a branch from a barnacle tree. They thought the capitula were eggs laid in the tree, and that the barnacle geese hatched from them. It’s a reasonable chain of assumptions, but of course they were entirely wrong.”
“Assumptions suck,” Ruth said. She put the barnacle down on the counter, and Pesto, who was waiting, promptly snatched it and ran off with it. He carried it to the middle of the kitchen floor and dropped it, took another sniff, and then turned up his nose. He wouldn’t deign to eat an already dead thing.<
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“They’re a great delicacy in Spain,” Callie said. “The peduncle is especially tender. You boil it for a couple minutes, peel off the skin, hold it by the shell, put the foot in your mouth, and . . . pop!” She pantomimed this, making the sound with her lips. “Meat slips right out of the shell. Dipped in a little garlic butter and lemon . . . yum!”
. . . . .
It was just before six, and already quite dark outside. Ruth took a headlamp and they walked Callie to her truck. Looking up, she could see that the clouds had parted and a full moon was lighting up the sky. In the moonlight, the treetops were threaded with pale tendrils of mist, but below, the boughs of the cedars were dark and heavy with the rain that had been falling all day. The beam of her headlamp caught a shape in the branches.
“Hey, is that your Jungle Crow?” Callie asked.
Focusing her light, Ruth could see the gleam of black feathers and the glint of a jet-black eye. “Muriel,” she said, as though it were the answer to Callie’s question.
Callie laughed. “Of course,” she said. “But everyone’s talking about it. Our local nativists already have their knickers in a twist.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?” Callie said. “Invasive species. Exotics. Black slugs, Scotch broom, Himalayan blackberries, and now Jungle Crows?” She turned to Oliver. “Speaking of exotics, how’s the Covenant War going?”
He made a face. The NeoEocene site, where he was planting his climate-change forest, had been clear-cut by a logging company and then placed under a covenant, which stipulated that any subsequent reforestation be limited to species that were native to the extant geoclimatic zone. His trees were deemed to be exotic and thus in violation of the covenant. Neither Oliver nor his botanist friend who owned the property had been aware of this.
“Not good,” he said. “The covenant holder wants me to stop planting, but I’m arguing that given the rapid onset of climate change, we need to radically redefine the term native and expand it to include formerly, and even prehistorically, native species.” He looked discouraged. “Semantics,” he said. “So stupid.”
As though in agreement, the Jungle Crow gave a harsh caw, and Callie laughed. “See?” she said. “He’s acclimating. Don’t be surprised if our island xenophobes storm this place, armed with nets and kerosene torches.”
Ruth looked up in the tree at the outline of the crow in the darkness. “Did you hear that?” she called. “You better watch out.”
The crow flapped its wings and hopped along the branch, sending a shower of water raining down onto Callie’s head.
“Hey,” she said, wiping the wet from her face. “Cut it out. I’m on your side.” She turned to Ruth. “They’re very clever. Did you know—”
Ruth held up her hand. “I know,” she said, but Callie carried on.
“—that in Sliammon mythology they’re magical ancestors who can shape-shift and change into human form?”
“You don’t say,” Ruth said.
Callie grinned. “You should get Muriel to tell you about it sometime . . .”
6.
That night in bed Ruth read the day’s allotment out loud from the diary. Pesto lay on Oliver’s stomach, purring, while Oliver stared up at the ceiling and rubbed the cat’s forehead. She read the part about Nao’s funeral and the video that went up on the Internet.
gone gone, gone beyond,
gone completely beyond . . .
The story of the bullying made him angry. “I hate that,” he said. “How could the school allow that to happen? How could that teacher participate?”
Ruth didn’t have an answer. Pesto stopped purring and looked uneasily at Oliver.
“But it makes total sense,” Oliver said, glumly. “We live in a bully culture. Politicians, corporations, the banks, the military. All bullies and crooks. They steal, they torture people, they make these insane rules and set the tone.”
She slipped her hand between the pillow and his head and kneaded the nape of his neck. The cat reached up a paw and laid it on his chin.
“Look at Guantánamo,” he said. “Look at Abu Ghraib. America’s bad, but Canada’s no better. People just going with the program, too scared to speak up. Look at the Tar Sands. Just like Tepco. I fucking hate it.”
He turned over on his side, pitching the cat onto the mattress. The cat jumped off the bed and left.
After Oliver fell asleep, Ruth got up and went to the window. Somewhere out there, the crow perched in the boughs. Their crepuscular crow. She couldn’t see it, but she liked the thought of the black crow hidden in the shadows. She wondered if it had managed to make friends with the ravens yet. She crawled back into bed and drifted off.
That night, she had the second of her nun dreams. It was the same temple. The same darkened room with the torn paper screen, the same old nun, dressed in long black robes, seated at the desk on the floor. Outside, the same moonlight shimmered softly in the garden, only now in the distance, beyond the garden gate, Ruth could dimly make out what looked like the outline of a cemetery, its jaggedy silhouette of stupas and stones, stark against the pale night sky.
Inside the room, the harsh, cold light from the computer illuminated the old nun’s face, making her look haggard and sickly. She looked up from the screen. She was wearing the black glasses that were similar to the ones Ruth wore. She took them off and rubbed her tired eyes, and then she spotted Ruth. Unfurling the wide black wing of her sleeve, she beckoned, calling her closer, and then Ruth was beside her. The nun held out her glasses, and Ruth, realizing that she’d left hers on the bedside table, took them. She knew she had to put them on. She blinked. The lenses were thick and murky. Her eyes would need a moment to adjust.
No, this wouldn’t do. The nun’s lenses were too thick and strong, smearing and dismantling the whole world as she knew it. She started to panic. She tried to pull the glasses from her face, but they were stuck there, and as she struggled, the smear of the world began to absorb her, swirling and howling like a whirlwind and casting her back into a place or condition that was unformed, that she couldn’t find words for. How to describe it? Not a place, but a feeling, of nonbeing, sudden, dark, and prehuman, which filled her with such an inchoate horror that she cried out and brought her hands to her face, only to find that she no longer had one. There was nothing there. No hands, no face, no eyes, no glasses, no Ruth at all. Nothing but a vast and empty ruthlessness.
She screamed but no sound emerged. She strained into the vastness, pressing into a direction that felt like forward or even through, but without a face there was no forward, or backward, either. No up, no down. No past, no future. There was just this—this eternal sense of merging and dissolving into something unnameable that went on and on in all directions, forever.
And then she felt something, a feather-light touch, and she heard something that sounded like a chuckle and a snap, and in an instant, her dark terror vanished and was replaced by a sense of utter calm and well-being. Not that she had a body to feel, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, but somehow she experienced all these sensations, nevertheless. It was like being cradled in the arms of time itself, and she stayed suspended in this blissful state for an eternity or two. When she awoke to an insipid beam of winter sunlight filtering in through the bamboo outside her window, she felt oddly at peace and well rested.
Nao
1.
Have you ever heard of metal-binding?72 It’s something that everyone in Japan knows about, but nobody ever heard of in Sunnyvale. I know because I asked Kayla, so maybe Americans don’t have it. I never had it either until we moved to Tokyo.
Metal-binding is what happens when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t move, like some gigantically fat evil spirit is sitting on your chest. It’s really scary. After the Chuo Rapid Express Incident, I used to wake up thinking it was Dad on my chest, and if he was sitting there it meant that he was a ghost and therefore he was dead, but then I would hear him snoring across the room and realize it was
metal-binding. You open your eyes and stare into the darkness. Sometimes you can hear voices that sound like angry demons, but you can’t speak or even make a tiny noise. Sometimes while you’re lying there your body feels like it’s floating away.
Before my funeral, I was getting metal-bound a lot, but it stopped after my funeral, probably because I became a ghost myself. I ate and slept, I wrote email to Kayla sometimes, but inside I knew I was dead, even if my parents didn’t notice.
Kayla had figured it out, though. We’d pretty much stopped trying to live-chat because of the time difference. Tokyo is sixteen hours ahead, which means that it’s daytime in Sunnyvale when it’s nighttime here, and since I was living in a two-room apartment the size of Kayla’s walk-in closet, it wasn’t like I could get up in the middle of the night and turn on the computer and start chatting, so mostly me and Kayla were using email, which was a drag. I hate email. It’s so slow. On email it’s never now. It’s always then, which is why it’s so easy to get lazy and let your inbox fill up. Not that mine did anymore, but it used to. Right after we left Sunnyvale, everyone was emailing me like crazy and asking me all about Japan, but it took Dad a couple of weeks to get an Internet connection set up, and by then all my friends were involved with their summer vacations, and then school started, and they all kind of dropped me.
I tried to have a blog for a while. My eighth-grade teacher in Sunnyvale, Mr. Ames, told me to start one so that I could write about my impressions and observations and all the interesting stuff that was going to happen to me in Japan. My dad helped me set it up before we moved, and I named it The Future Is Nao! because I thought that my future in Japan was going to be one big American-style adventure. How dumb was that?
Actually, it wasn’t completely dumb. At the time I was feeling hopeful, which now seems kind of sad and brave. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t understand what was happening. My parents weren’t exactly being up front with me about our reasons for leaving California. They were saving face and pretending everything was fine, and I didn’t actually know we were broke and unemployed until we got here. When I saw the crappiness of our Tokyo apartment, it started to sink in, and I realized that I wasn’t going to have any big adventures, and that basically there was nothing I could post on the blog that didn’t make me feel like a total loser. My parents were pathetic, my school life was horrible, the future sucked. What could I write about?