in her movie-star glasses, was to and through the doorway, waving the candy wrapper in one hand, flapping her art pad with the other, and calling back to them, “Grazie, grazie, beautiful people!”
Colin turned to Helen. “Ephemeral art?”
Ephemeral art was the least of it. Helen wanted to know how a person who seemed to understand saturation horizons could also embrace woo-woo energy fields, and why that person would need to add Italian to her enthusiastic French. People thought she lived in two worlds.
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
