added.
Annabel again visualized the blobby naked one, the one that ripped the others from their shells. Beautiful, in the way that every being was, but the charisma was escaping her. Some people called it a “sea angel?” She would meditate on that. These fine, obsessive people were indulging her, and she would indulge them back.
For the next few days Annabel worked like a dervish. She was in and out of the dry lab, putting cake pans of water in the big freezer, then popping them free and stacking up her ice floe collection. In her cabin and in the small library where she could spread out, she was cutting, folding, softening, and sculpting her homemade paper. She recruited Aurora to help her massage the paper to softness. Her locker filled with creations. She forgot to attend meals at the scheduled times and lived on fruit and nuts from the bowl in the galley. One day, when she sought the air, she watched an albatross following the ship, its huge long wings scything, and she was so overcome with emotion and exhaustion that she had to lie flat on the deck in the reclining goddess pose until her equilibrium was restored.
The girls in the lab went about their business, counting copepods and incubating batches of various zooplankton species to calculate their growth rates. They listened to music on their iPods and talked too loudly. Once, squeezing past with pans of fresh water, Annabel bumped into Marybeth and spilled water on the floor.
“Oh, no!” Marybeth shouted. “I’m so sorry!”
“No problema,” Annabel reassured her. “But could you open the freezer door for me?”
Marybeth pulled out her earbuds and opened the door. “You don’t need to remeasure? Is it water?”
“Yes, water, H2O, neutral pH of 7. See what I’m learning?”
“You learn that freshwater freeze?” said Nastiya. “You are brilliant scientist.”
“It’s for her art,” Marybeth said.
“What art you make from your frozen Frisbees?”
Annabel gave Marybeth a big wink. “The art is incubating,” she said.
An hour later she came back with two inch-high sculptures of paper that she’d rubbed and rolled into tender gray softness. The girls were gone from the lab. She balanced each of the sculptures on the microscopes’ flat plates, as though they were next to be examined. One, she decided, bore a faint resemblance to a coccolithophore, the incredibly ornate soccer ball she’d been studying in books she found in the library. It was only an alga, she’d discovered, and got less love than the little animals, the way a cabbage got less love than a moose. The other—the one she gifted to the sensitive Marybeth—had appendages that might be wings, though, of course, that wasn’t the point—to look like anything. Instead, the sculptures carried an intention. She didn’t want to have to explain the intention but to let it simply emanate from her hands through the material and shaping into the universe—a healing gesture. Each one also carried a manifest symbol, folded inside where it would not be seen but might still be felt, like a heartbeat. She’d written the characters in the seal script she’d taught herself during her Chinese language phase. For Marybeth: sweet and happy. For Nastiya: kindness.
The right night, their next-to-last on the water, arrived. Annabel made the announcement at dinner. She stood in the front of the galley in her Nepalese robe and a paper headdress decorated with silver stars and announced, “The spontaneous event that will not quite be spontaneous—because I’m telling you about it now—will occur tonight after dark. You may wish to appear on deck.”
They all just looked at her.
When she was seated again with her curried rice, Ray slid in next to her.
“What spontaneous event?”
“My art.”
“And what might that be?”
He didn’t look well. She would have liked to assist him with his diet.
“The paper sculptures I’ve been making.”
He seemed to relax then. After a minute he said, “It would probably be a good idea for me to know a little more. Do you require anything from the crew? You’re going to be on deck? Isn’t paper going to blow away? We can’t have anything going in the water.” He added, “Not that you would want to lose it.”
“I was going to go chat with the captain after dinner, about pausing for the performance.”
“Now it’s a performance?”
She really didn’t want to go into detail, especially since the whole room seemed to be silenced (but for the engine noise and the cook’s clattering with the roasting pans), not even chewing now but leaning in, toward her and Ray. “Remember when you asked me for a title?”
Ray nodded, but she could tell he didn’t remember.
“Let’s not play games,” he said. “I’m in charge of this cruise, and I really need to know what everyone’s doing. It’s a team effort, even you.”
“I’m calling it ‘Fire and Ice,’” she said.
“Well, I trust you’re not going to be lighting anything on fire,” Ray said. “Fire on ships is a pretty big no-no.”
“Oh,” she said.
He leaned in closer. “What exactly did you have in mind?”
“Maybe we should go into the hallway,” she said.
Even then, she was sure everyone in the galley heard his explosion. It was something like, “Fuck no! You can’t light paper on fire! And you can’t put anything in or on the ocean! That’s completely prohibited by MARPOL!”
(Like she was supposed to know who or what MARPOL was.)
And then: “I don’t give a fuck if it’s organic and biodegradable! I don’t give a fuck about neutral pH.”
She had never guessed that the man who loved copepods could project quite so much negative energy. Something was seriously out of alignment.
They went up to the wheelhouse to talk to Captain Billy. He was picking on his guitar, but he stopped to hear her out. If his eyebrows went up, at least he didn’t yell. Potentially this was because Ray had already led with, “I told her absolutely no, but she wants to explain to you herself what she was going to come up here and tell you anyway. It’s about art.”
And so she had to defend the whole effort again. The paper she used was made from plant fibers and had not killed any trees or been bleached or chemically treated in any way; it was acid-free. The ice was made from freshwater and was not significantly different from sea ice, which loses its salt when it freezes. (She knew they must both know all about sea ice, but she felt it important to show that she knew.) There was a little soy-based ink on some of the sculptures, very organic. And she would be using very small dabs of an organic clay as adhesive. She would not light the sculptures until they were in the water, and she would use a pole to immediately steer them away from the ship. The weather was as calm as could be, a good omen.
Captain Billy looked amused.
“It’s out of the question,” Ray said.
“I’ve
