Then some of the hitchhikers on the edge of the hull’s clump started getting real nervous. They said there was a predatory dog whelk trying to invade our mussel bed and they needed our help; they had plans to tether it with threads, tie it up for good. Bluey, pacifist, refused, said it was wrong to starve another creature, even an enemy, to death like that. Muss was all for it and so was Gallos, taking his lead from Muss, and I didn’t know what I felt. I thought of starving to death, what that might be like. I let Muss and Gallos go off to stalk the dog whelk with the other boys, and they had a bit of a party that side when it was done, and I woke up next to Bluey and felt the cold metal gaps on the hull where Muss and Gallos normally were and wished I’d gone with them. I couldn’t understand then why I hadn’t, why sometimes I liked to be alone and sometimes I wanted to be consumed by the group, at the social core of things.
Another girl came along on her fleshy foot to distract me from the miseries of myself. I persuaded her to hitch on overnight, in the spot where Muss had been. She was older than me, more ridges to her blue-black shell, and open to anything.
‘You got a name?’ she said.
‘Sure. My friends call me Sel. But my real name is Myti.’
‘A little guy like you, called Myti. That’s swell.’
‘Listen,’ I said to her. ‘You hear that?’ It was the jazz music that somebody on the ship liked to play, always late at night, illicit and lovely, even underwater. ‘It’s the beat that gets me, like the beat of oars slapping on water.’
‘Mmm,’ she said.
We fooled around a bit but I was too sad to do much.
‘You think that being on the same boat means something for you and your friends, don’t you?’ she said after a while.
‘It does,’ I said. ‘The sea is a great leveller, a master comrade.’ I closed my shell, then on second thoughts opened it again. ‘It’s not what you think, not really,’ I said. ‘I don’t love it here on the hull, sometimes I hate it. I don’t know whether I want to be around them all forever or run away to a dark deep valley of the ocean to be on my own.’ But she was asleep.
In the morning, looking bloated with too much seawater, her gills not functioning so well anymore, she said, ‘You stay hungry, boy. You’re onto something, I’ll give you that, living so spontaneous and all, improvising, making it up as you go. It’s the only way to endure this grubby life, turn it into something sparkling. You’ll get there if you can survive this. But there’s no virtue in rushing towards death, remember that. Let the others live fast and die young. You live slow and die old.’
‘But there are millions upon millions of mussels in the world, and I am but one,’ I said.
‘Yes, but you are a world in your own self, as I am,’ she said. ‘We are all little worlds.’
Then she moved on, to my relief, and Muss and Gallos returned yelping with glee about the dog whelk they’d tied up and left to die. Bluey stopped talking to them for a few days. He said they’d been infected by militancy and he wanted none of it. So I made a grand little speech: ‘When we’re sailing, man, there’s no more of that stuff. We have to live together, and if we pitch in together, it’s right fine. But if one guy bulls it all up, then it’s no shuck-all of a trip – it’ll be all fouled.’ And Bluey listened, and Muss and Gallos listened.
We got to the port at Astoria, Oregon, real beautiful place, and some of the other stowaways dropped off as our battleship slowed down, soon as the smoke out of her funnels thinned. Our ship moored there awhile. For weeks the boys and I thrived and jived and got up to mischief in the bay, making sure we didn’t stray too far from the hull. All of us except Bluey, who got dark and homesick there in Oregon and said he wanted to go back home to the underwater farm. I tried to talk him out of it, so did Gallos, so did Muss, but Bluey wouldn’t listen. He said he missed sharing his food with his parents and his little sister and he missed having something to hold onto and knowing he could hold onto it for good. We didn’t understand but we let him go, hurting, as the flames of a hot red morning played upon the masts of fishing smacks and danced in the blue wavelets beneath the barnacled docks …
It was not enough. I got fidgety, jumpy, I needed to feel the current through me, I needed to be on the move. Two days after Bluey dropped off to head home we felt the humans above us begin the frenetic activity which meant we would be underway again, thank the gods, and soon we felt our battleship begin to move, much more slowly than before. It was being towed across the North Pacific, south and west. Muss and Gallos and I moped about this awhile. Our fever dream all along had been to get to San Francisco Bay and hang there with his girl. I said something stupid then, that I wouldn’t mind dying so long as it was in San Francisco, sunk at the bottom of a garlicky soup in a jazz club in the Tenderloin, but Muss said I shouldn’t think of death like that, there was no glory in it. Only nothingness.
He and Gallos and I talked for a long time about that nothingness. Muss said we go a different colour when we’re cooked, bright orange and ink-black, and I believed him but Gallos didn’t. Muss said no humans will eat our byssal threads, that they don’t consider them to be part of our bodies, though we consider them to be the nub of who we are. Gallos said if we ever found ourselves in a pot of boiling water we should try to keep our shells closed tight as tiddlywinks. He said it was the only way to fool the humans into not eating us. I didn’t say what I thought then, what a whole fat lot of use that would be. If your game’s up, it’s up.
After a few weeks of towing, our battleship slowed down even more. The water got a lot saltier, the temperature rose, and we sensed that the ship was entering another harbour, on a purple coastline. Our ship put down anchor alongside a row of battleships: beautiful, untested, vulnerable, like us.
Muss detached and took a float around the underwater scene straight away and returned out of his mind with excitement. ‘You know where we are?’ he said. ‘We’re in Hawaii, my friends, y’ear me? Damn! Here we are in Battleship Row, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, boys! We’re making it!’
Then something weird happened. The temperature and salinity change acted as a stimulus to a mass joyous spontaneous spawning by every mussel in our stowaway colony on the ship’s hull, every single one of us. Each male spewed sperm into the water, and each female released millions of eggs, and for days the boys and I could concentrate on nothing but fertilising, having our merry carnal way with anyone we pleased. We humped and spawned and reproduced at rates that shocked even randy little Muss. The smell of sex was almost as strong as the smell of food – there was food everywhere in the harbour, so much that we all got fat, quick and fast, fatter and fatter. I wasn’t so sure this was what we’d been searching for, this life of plenty. But it felt pretty damn good, damn damn damn good, gorging and humping ad infinitum.
After a while, the sea got thick with our free-swimming drifting larval kids and started to look kind of milky. We weren’t expected to care for our thousands of offspring at first. There were too many of them. But after a couple months of fornicating and feasting, the drifters we’d created began to settle down as juveniles in the open water compartments and along the pipeworks in the harbour, and against the hulls of the battleships,’til every goddamn underwater surface had a purplish tinge to it.
And it dawned on me and Muss and Gallos what we had done. We’d wasted our freedom. We had become the elders within the colony, all of a sudden expected to be the Founding Fucking Fathers. These juveniles kept coming up to us and asking very solemnly about the search for meaning. What meaning? All we ever promised was a search, a journey, a trip, a ride. How did it happen, how could we possibly have spawned this strange new young beatific generation who thought that life should have meaning?
Gallos had a nervous breakdown, left our hull and moved in with a more radical colony to jolt himself out of his lethargy. It didn’t work. He put on more and more weight, his foot got so fat and heavy he could hardly move. We had to go visit him if we wanted to see him, but we stopped going after a
while because his mind had turned incurious, reactionary. He stopped writing poetry.
Then Muss and I met the lobster. He scared us at first, we thought our time was up. He looked hungry. But when we got to talking I understood he was on a journey too, not going anyplace specific, not looking for meaning, just hungry for experience, as we had been before the mistake of our communal spawning. He’d come a long way, been around the world, survived all kinds of voyages and been tossed over the side in Pearl Harbor by some humans on a trawler. The reason he didn’t eat us was because he was fasting, to think more clearly.
‘This European war will brew and spilleth over even here, my little Mytilus galloprovincialis friends, mightily galloping away from your provincial existence, so be careful,’ he said. ‘You’ll be in demand whenever meat rationing kicks in, just you wait – you’ll be famous, on menus in seedy neon-tubed diners across the country! So will I, for that matter.’
‘That’s not us, man,’ I said. ‘We’re Mytilus edulis.’
‘Oh. What a pity,’ the lobster said.
On a very bright, spring-like underwater morning, he gave me and Muss each a speck of something to ingest that he said would help us see beyond the here and now. I filtered it through my body, and waited.
That speck kicked in and took me on a trip so Technicolorful I hallucinated I was stuck inside an oil-slick rainbow. Muss got talkative and I went quiet. He and the lobster riffed on all sorts of things while we tripped. I heard bits and pieces as I zoned in and out, chasing the colour spectrum to the edges of the universe and back.
‘No, it’s the imbalance of trade,’ the lobster was saying. ‘The only thing the Europeans can export to America anymore is their philosophy. Existentialism. I stalked Sartre for a while. He thought he was going insane, thought he was imagining he was being stalked by a lobster! I wanted to learn from him. I wanted him to put a leash around my neck and take me for a walk, just as – if Apollinaire is to be believed – my great-grandfather was taken for strolls down the grand boulevards of Paris.’
The next time I tuned in, Muss was saying to the lobster, ‘I’m a sessile species.’
‘Sessile species, special specious, Seychelles series, seashell spacious,’ said the stoned lobster. ‘It’s poetry, man. You little guys are way ahead of your time.’
We were so high we laughed hard when a starfish edged into our territory, ready for a meal of mussel. Its shape was just so out there. Five-pronged crazy joke of a creature! It got pretty close but at the last moment the lobster scared it away. Then he gave me and Muss another speck and my trip lost all colour and sank into shades of black and white and grey. Muss lowered himself onto my wavelength of silence and the lobster began to sing something sad and French. The peals of the church bells from a cathedral somewhere on shore were absorbed into the sea and drifted down to us like silver balls filled with air. It was Sunday morning.
Something splashed into the water and streaked towards us, glittering like a school of barracuda on the hunt. We admired it, not quite knowing what it was, until it hit our battleship. A living waterspout was sucked up and over the ship’s stack. The lobster was killed instantly. The piece of the hull Muss and I were attached to was blasted out into the port as our ship began to list and shudder, hit again and again and again. The humans pulled alarms – no more training drills, not now – and suddenly around us in the water were things that should never be seen in the sea: valves, legs, fittings, heads, coins, arms, helmets.
We should have embraced it, this moment of collapse we had been awaiting, but we were freaking out. A man with no legs tried to cling onto our piece of the hull. Vibrations came through the water, sick wave after wave, bombs detonating somewhere in the fire, compressing my sad little sac of a body so forcefully I thought I would implode. The seawater around us began to heat up from the raging oil fires on the surface and I remembered what Gallos had said about surviving in boiling water and tried to close my shell. I couldn’t. Half of it was gone.
Muss and I both knew what he had to do if he wanted to live: let go, drop off and seek shelter among the cooler beds of our kind below, leave me with my broken shell to simmer slowly in the warming water.
He landed on the seabed far beneath, nestled in among the traumatised useless colony we had created. Panic filled me; I did some deep filtering to calm down. I floated and drifted and found myself thinking of a sunset over the Hudson River way back home. I used to watch the sinking red sun from my place on the brokendown pier when the tide left me uncovered, and in the face of that terrible beauty I’d thought, Nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old. But the panic rose again: this isn’t the way it was meant to be, me, hunter-gatherer of all experience, dying at sea! What would Muss be without my gaze on him, what would any of you be? The world is upside down. Good luck with it all, the spawning, the living, the dying. I won’t miss it, not much anyways.
And I thought of Muss, and thought of Muss, and I thought of Muss until I died.
PLAUTUS: A MEMOIR OF MY YEARS ON EARTH AND LAST DAYS IN SPACE
Soul of Tortoise
DIED 1968, SPACE
The Hermitage
One morning in the early spring of 1913, soon after I had woken from my long winter sleep, I decided to run away from the hermit Oleg and present myself to the Tolstoy family who lived next door.
So off I set, at a rip-roaring pace, to march through the undergrowth towards their estate, and three months later, in June, I reached the steps leading up to the house. I was exhausted, and could not find it in me to climb the stairs. I ate some dandelions to restore my strength and settled down to wait there, hoping that the great writer, Count Leo Tolstoy, would stumble upon me and be persuaded by my beauty – this was back in my early middle age, you see, and my shell was still a magnificent shade of topaz – to make me his pet.
Some regrets presented themselves to me while I waited, at having abandoned Oleg in his custom-built house at the bottom of the landscaped gardens of the noble family next door. The family had hired him half a century before to be their ornamental hermit in the Hermitage, one of several architectural follies the estate contained, imitations of the grand English manors of the eighteenth century. They believed him to be an old man when they appointed him, but in fact he was only thirty years old – he’d managed to fool them with his filthy long hair and beard and the druid costume he wore at their first meeting. The terms of his contract were that he would not wash or cut his hair or nails; would not engage in conversation with anybody else on the estate (servants included) except by repeating a single phrase in Latin (Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur: It is a wise man who speaks little); and would take exercise around the grounds whenever they had guests, looking appropriately melancholy and carrying with him a skull, a book and an hourglass which they’d purchased for him.
In return, he would receive food and wine and free lodging in the Hermitage. Fifty years later and the poor man was still there, eighty years old and completely insane. The irony of the situation did not seem evident to the family: their ornamental hermit had morphed over his lifetime into the real thing. They were always threatening to kick him out of the Hermitage (one of the granddaughters wanted to convert it to a conservatory) and replace him with a stone garden gnome, a threat to which he would respond, as per his contract, ‘Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur.’
Unfortunately he wasn’t so wise in private. Over the years, he coped with his solitude by reading and talking endlessly to me. His reading was haphazard, arbitrary, manic, which meant that he burned through fascination after fascination without ever letting the knowledge he was acquiring really change him. Quite early on he became obsessed with the Ancient Greeks and Romans – one of his recurring delusions was that he was the original hermit owned by the Roman Emperor Hadrian. It was at this time that he named me Plautus the Tortoise, after the Roman comic playwright who valued imagination and the fantastic above anything he could scavenge from real life. Oleg b
uilt himself a lyre, thankfully using an old tortoise shell that he found in the garden, and liked to pretend he was Orpheus, entrancing me – the wild beast – with the sweetness of his playing. In this role I was expected to sway on my four feet and close my eyes.
He was won over by the scholars who argued that the famous Ancient Greek storyteller Aesop was in fact an Ethiopian slave whose fables about animals were adaptations of tales from African oral traditions, and were intended as disguised moral kicks in the teeth to his owners. Oleg would put coal dust on his face and shorten his tunic so that it looked a bit Greek, and sitting beside the fire he would orate Aesop’s tales about me, the tortoise, throwing his shadow dramatically with sweeps of his arms. In this way I learned that I was given a shell because one of my ancestors couldn’t be bothered going to Zeus’s wedding supper and had a night in at home instead, so Zeus punished him by forcing him to carry his home on his back forevermore; and that eagles like to drop tortoises from great heights (then eat our exposed flesh) because one of my less cautious ancient ancestors insisted that the eagle teach him to fly.
Then there was Oleg’s Far Eastern phase. I awoke from my slumber one year to find that he had woven his beard into a thin plait and had broken apart the lyre so that he could use the tortoise shell for the ancient Chinese art of divining the future. This involved polishing the shell and heating it with hot pokers until it cracked. The goal for Oleg was to have his questions about the future answered in accordance with the sound, speed or shape of the cracks, but he must have done something wrong for the whole shell split in two. I watched this warily, knowing that my own attached shell stood between Oleg and his second chance at predicting the future. Luckily for me, soon afterwards he read a passage about the ancient Chinese belief that the entire universe is supported on the back of a tortoise, and he looked at me with new admiration. Not only that, but according to the Chinese, the tortoise was one of the divine animals beside P’an Ku (the Chinese version of Adam, as Oleg described him to me) while he tinkered away building the world, creating massive chunks of granite to float suspended in space.
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