When I was a little girl, my older sister refused to tell me fairy tales. My bedtime stories were instead about the sea. Ellie talked of turtles with minds that could map out the earth’s magnetic pulses, of whales with veins so big a person could swim through them, of the glimmering scales on shoals of fish that made up the living stars of the ocean’s firmament. “It’s like outer space down there, Baby Iris,” she said, dark eyes wide, “but better. Because it’s ours. It’s earth. Space is bullshit. We focus on all that stuff above us, when we have the actual ocean between our ears. Our cerebral spinal fluid follows the same tidal patterns as the sea. It gives salt baths to our brains.”
My sister and I had never seen a drop of ocean. We lived in a condo complex surrounded by soybean fields. Yet Ellie, who was eight years older than I, saw the world through the lens of the aquatic. I learned about sex through her oddly elegiac musings on the milky-blue clouds of surgeonfish that bred by the cycles of the moon, and I learned about love when she told me how bottlenose dolphins had been seen carrying their deceased calves over great distances. I learned about death through her lecture on the whirling tornadoes of plankton that created what looked like marine snow when they died, and I learned about mass death through her tales of the asteroids that hit earth, leading to the extinction for all sorts of creatures in the sea (“Everyone talks about the stupid dinosaurs, but do you know that only seventy percent of terrestrial life died, while ninety-six percent of marine life died from global warming at the end of the Permian period? That’s almost everything! And yet today, for now, the ocean has freaking orcas. What do we have on land? Some angsty apes”).
When I begged for just one normal fairy tale to lull me to sleep — for just one angsty ape of a princess in a forsaken tower in the woods, staring at the sky above, wondering if she’d ever escape the torture of the present moment — my sister instead told me about tube worms that lived in the seabed’s steaming toxic hydrothermal vents.
“Tube worms don’t have eyes or mouths or buttholes,” she said, tucking in my sheets. “Isn’t that terrifying? Or maybe it’s wonderful. Well. Sweet dreams.”
In the next room, our mother sat awake, watching taped episodes of Days of Our Lives.
Our father had died before I was born. A drunk driver smashed him into pieces, dividing him into many smaller bits — all this while I was floating in my mother’s belly, my own cells rapidly blooming, dividing, growing multitudinous in their quest to turn me into a single whole “I.” My mother’s grief after my father’s death had been so powerful, it was its own kind of pregnancy, a twin to me. The grief, too, grew fingers inside my mother, and claws, grew its own neural network and its own kind of brain. When I was born, my mother tended to me and her grief in equal parts at first, but the grief proved more magnetic. If my mother were a bottlenose dolphin, it was the grief she wouldn’t let go of, the grief she carried on and on, through oceans of time, singing to it all the while. Me she left behind. Her neglect wasn’t so total as to be very interesting to tell about. She fed me, she clothed me, she bathed me. But she did not sing to me, not ever.
Since my mother was so busy singing to her grief, my sister sang to me, made lullabies out of ocean facts like they were sea shanties. Yes, maybe what she told me was more like lullabies than bedtime stories. Melodic: How starfish had an eye on the end of each arm. How whales shut down only half their brains when they slept. How the word plankton was Greek for “wanderer,” how a plankter was defined as something that couldn’t swim against the tide, could only drift. She told me my job was to do well in school and not to drift. “In certain instances, it’s necessary to be antiplankton,” she said. “I think you’re going to be a teacher, Baby Iris. I’ve seen you playing school with your stuffed animals. You gave them an alphabet test the other day! I heard you.”
I played lots of things with my stuffed animals: School sometimes, yes, but also Hospital, also Tsunami, also Car Crash, also Alien Abduction. My sister seemed so excited about my being a teacher that I didn’t mention these other games.
“It’s good to visualize what you want to be,” she went on. “If you start visualizing yourself as a teacher now, this early in your life? Then you’ve got a really good running start.”
“What do you want to be?”
“A marine biologist. Obviously. That’s why I’m so focused on learning as much as I can now. I take out books from the library, but that’s not all. I’m always visualizing it.”
Sometimes I drew pictures of my sister’s ocean facts. The whales and the tides and the radial symmetry of the starfish seemed too daunting to try to capture. So mostly I drew wandering plankton, which I rendered as multicolored polka dots patterning a blue expanse. When I showed the pictures to my sister, she said they were beautiful. When I showed the pictures to my mother, she said, “Not now, I’m sleepy, baby.” When I showed the pictures to my teacher at school, she said, “Gor-gee-US! But maybe you should try drawing people sometime too? What about drawing your mom and dad?”
“My dad’s dead,” I said to my teacher, mostly because I liked the effect of these words on the unsuspecting. The way the blood drained from the face, panic and pity creating their own kind of tidal rush.
. . . . . .
Even though our dad hadn’t drowned, Ellie’s obsession with the ocean did, in fact, connect back to our dead dad, or at least with our dead dad’s name, which was Jonah.
Not too long after the car crash, when I was still a forming thing, Ellie began to go to church with a friend from her school who was very religious. “Your dad’s death is a test from God,” the friend’s mom told Ellie. If it was a test, Ellie wanted to pass. A few Sundays in a row, she went to church. One morning, the sermon was about Jonah, trapped in the whale. Ellie listened for a while, and then, suddenly, she had a vision. She saw herself diving into the ocean. She saw herself asking the whale to please vomit our dad back up because he was a very good dad, he made up silly stories and songs, and also he had a new baby on the way. The whale, possessing a deep cetacean understanding, released Dad Jonah. Dad Jonah and Ellie kicked their way to the surface, and there our mother waited with me in her belly, stunned to find her Jonah alive and wet and whole and wonderful and so, so stinky with whale gut. This sight broke our mother free of her own whale-sized grief. Everyone was joyful.
Ellie knew, even then, that her vision was more fantasy than truth, that our In-the-Ground Dad Jonah was good and dead and had no relation to In-the-Whale Prophet Jonah. Still, the two Jonahs seemed almost to feed off each other when she sat in that pew, fusing in her mind in a peculiar manner. She began to take out library books about the ocean. And the more she learned, the more she wanted to learn. When my mom got us a computer and installed the internet, she began to spend her free time online, reading about fish, plankton, long-gone ammonites. All this was in service of her Dad Jonah Vision.
Ellie explained all this to me years after her vision had occurred, when we were standing together in a pond near Condo Complex D. She didn’t like to talk about our father, or what she remembered of him, so I was a little stunned when she shared her spiritual vision. Small fishes swam around our ankles the whole time Ellie spoke about when she went to church. Ellie was near sixteen that day, I was near eight, and the pond would soon be drained and turned into Condo Complex E. It was our father’s birthday, the day our mother always stayed home from her job as a nurse’s aide and watched the news nonstop, her grief sitting right next to her, rapt with attention.
The water in the pond was very clear in the right light, and the fish resembled shards of terra-cotta pottery.
When Ellie was done talking about her vision, I said, “How deep does it go?”
“This pond?”
“The sea. How far down can you walk?”
“It’s not possible to wade into the real-far-down stuff. The pressure would crush your skull. Glen says that’s why the creatures that can survive down there are so weird.”
“Like tube worms,” I said. “They have no mouths. Or butts. It’s wonderful. Who’s Glen?”
“This guy I’ve been talking to online. He works on a research vessel.”
“How do they eat if they don’t have mouths?”
“Hm?”
“The tube worms.”
“They have a symbiotic relationship with bacteria. So basically the bacteria give the tube worms energy, and the tube worms give the bacteria a home.”
“Is Glen nice?”
“Yeah.”
“Is he tall?”
“Don’t quiz me.”
“Is he bald?”
My sister squatted, examined the pond pebbles around her feet. “I’m going to see tube worms for myself someday, with my own eyes, or at least with my own undersea camera thing. Soon I’ll be eighteen, which means I’ll be away at school, if I get an OK scholarship. And then I’ll be studying tube worms. And whales. And plankton.”
“With Glen?”
“Not necessarily.”
“What will happen to me? When you go?”
“It’ll just be you and Mom for a while. But I’ll call.”
After that talk, I stopped drawing just plankton. My teacher was right, I decided. I should try drawing people. I began to draw pictures of Ellie studying fish with a magnifying glass. Ellie walking into the ocean in a rainbow bathing suit, surrounded by seagulls. Ellie during the end-Permian extinction, hanging out with four fish to represent the four percent of surviving marine life. Ellie in a submarine, peering out a tiny window with binoculars, bird-watching the ocean’s bioluminescence. My hope was these images would help her realize her vision.
“These are pretty great,” Ellie said, looking through the pile of drawings I handed her. “You’ve really made some leaps. You’re kind of young to understand shadow like that.” And she pointed to the oval of darkness I’d drawn under the submarine. “Maybe you’re gifted, Baby I.”
She said “gifted” with a nervous edge, like the word gifted was no gift at all. I was too embarrassed to tell her that wasn’t the shadow of the submarine but my best attempt at a tube worm, waiting to be spied by my sister’s eyes alone.
I said, “Ms. Sherman thinks I test well.”
. . . . . .
Glen and Ellie began to talk more online, late into the night. Ellie asked our mom if she could move the computer into her room since she was the main one using it, and our mom said OK. When I asked Ellie for bedtime stories, she said I was now too old for that. Then she shut the door on me, so I pressed my ear to the crack. My bedtime stories became listening to her fingers on the keyboard, their movement like a kind of pulse.
A few weeks later Ellie asked me if I wanted to go on one of our wading walks in the pond, and I said yes, hoping she’d tell me more about her vision of Dad Jonah. We took off our shoes and rolled up our jeans. Although I was too big for bedtime stories, I was still too small, then, to visualize how the pond would disappear when it became Condo Complex E. I didn’t sense the future ghosts of parking garages, of different people occupying different futons, learning different lullabies and advertisement jingles from their phones and televisions. I couldn’t hear any piece of the future’s din. I could hear only the insistent plea of insects around us, and then my sister’s voice, low. She told me Glen was coming to pick her up the next night, to take her many states away to see the ocean, that he would park outside the condo and honk twice, and I couldn’t tell Mom where she was, not that Mom would even ask. But if she did ask, then the story I was supposed to tell her was that Ellie was going to Tiffany’s for a sleepover and that Tiffany’s mom was picking her up.
“Do you understand?” Ellie asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Repeat it back to me.”
“You’re going to Tiffany’s for a sleepover.”
“Don’t look so worried. You always look so worried. You’re supposed to be carefree.”
“I am?”
“Sure. You’re a kid.”
We went back into our apartment. My mother was scheduled to work a night shift, but she wasn’t feeling great, so instead she stayed home on the couch, watching television, drinking. We sat in the living room, Ellie and I and our mother and our mother’s grief, which emitted a smell scummier than usual. Ellie was wearing eye makeup, and when I reached up to touch the new line of darkness swooping just above her lashes, she grabbed my wrist and put it back down by my side and said, “Shh,” as if I’d tried to speak instead of tried to touch. I thought of my sister in a pew as a little girl, having her vision. Dad Jonah and Prophet Jonah seemed like brothers to me, and I was jealous that my sister, in some way, had met them both. I closed my eyes tight, wanting to imagine Dad Jonah in the whale. But I just couldn’t picture an extinct and exploded-up father made whole again like that. Behind my eyes I saw only darkness, with tiny little electric dots floating by — plankton-sized Jonah bits, I decided, adrift in the whale’s pitch-black gut. Perhaps this might count as a spiritual vision.
Glen was supposed to show up at seven that night, but seven came and went. Nobody honked. We all kept watching TV. The news had a special report. There was a large oil spill in the ocean. There was footage of some baby seabirds, covered in black goop. Glen wasn’t coming. On the couch, Ellie sobbed. Black goop gathered under her eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her cry. She pointed to the baby seabirds on the screen. “Human beings are so sick,” she said.
“You’re right,” our mother said with surprising tenderness, putting her arm around Ellie. “Humans are sick. We’re destroying our earth.”
Ellie sat up very straight and gently pushed our mother away. “The earth will be fine. The earth doesn’t need us. It’s Mother Earth we’re destroying. The idea that the earth is going to take care of us. That’s what won’t exist soon.”
Our mother picked up her drink and said, “Can’t argue with that.”
Ellie got up from the couch. She looked at me, and I looked at her. I thought if I flinched, she’d leave forever. I tried not to move. But my stillness didn’t matter. She took her backpack and left the condo and left Condo Complex D. Our mother said, when the door slammed shut, “It’s just Ellie’s age. All melodrama. She’s young. A phase. I was the same way. Don’t worry. She’ll be back. Iris, please. You always look so worried.”
My mother wasn’t even looking at the door, or at me. She was already back to staring at the TV. The stuff about the oil spill was over, and now there was a feature about how a woman had put an old clock radio in the closet for years. Its glowing numbers had leaked out something radioactive and eventually had given her cancer. But she had sued and gotten so much money that this story, it seemed from the newscaster’s face, had a happy ending.
. . . . . .
Here is the bedtime story I tell the women I sleep with when I am grown: My sister left us that night, the night of the oil spill. She disappeared. A vanishing act. Gone like ninety-six percent of marine life after the asteroids hit. I never saw her again. The end.
The women are so sad when they hear this. They stroke me, they coo, they say someday I’ll find my sister. A new lover’s grief is a kind of pop quiz, and the people I pick are intent on responding perfectly, in the just-right way. I grow warm under their attentions, and then, a few weeks later, I break things off before they can get close enough to the truth, which is murkier. Ellie left, but just as my mother predicted, she came back — the very next afternoon. She came back quieter, and with bruises on her arms. Whatever happened that night she went out, whatever new vision she encountered, it changed her in a way she wouldn’t talk about. Or maybe the change had been coming for a while, and I had just been too devoted to notice the shift. Ellie moved the computer back into the living room. Her grades dropped. She turned eighteen. She vanished again, and then came back, deserted us, returned again. She became the sea itself, in a way, a kind of wave in my life, retreating and then crashing down upon me with her presence, her needs, new terrors she uncovered in the outside world: the man who shoved her into a wall, the dog who chased her in a strange neighborhood, the woman at her new job who hated her and poured hot oil on her hand, scalding her fingers. It became exhausting, listening to my sister’s stories of the outside world and its punishments, bedtime stories that made me too itchily tired to get to sleep.
I got older, kissed a boy, then another boy, then a girl, and said, “Oh.” As I got older, I focused on leaving home myself. I applied to colleges far away. I tested well, and I worked hard. I thought if I stayed devoted to the sea, I’d be keeping the part of Ellie that had taught me from disappearing forever. I got into a few schools with enough financial aid to seem doable. One of them was near the ocean.
When I called Ellie, told her I had to decide where to go, she seemed excited. But then, the next day, she didn’t answer her phone. She didn’t come over for dinner as we planned either. When I emailed her, her messages were short and terse. I kept calling her, emailing her, and at last she wrote and said, “I love you, Baby I, but right now there is just a lot going on in my life, and it’d be best if you didn’t contact me for a while. I need space.”
“Space is bullshit,” I almost replied. “It’s the sea that matters.”
But I did not reply.
. . . . . .
I chose the school by the ocean.
When I saw the ocean for the first time, I said, “Oh.”
The water that day was a glassy green, and the sky above was cloudless. The waves murmured at me the way Ellie’s voice had murmured at me. I was with a few people from my dorm, and they kept saying, “This is your first time seeing it? Is this really your first time?” We took off our shoes and ran into the surf. After a little while, I found the courage to dive into a wave. That wave cradled me. In the moments before it dissolved into the rest of the sea, Ellie’s vision felt like my vision — I knew for sure my father was out here, bits of him floating beneath me, making me weightless, lifting me up.
That night I called Ellie at the last number I had for her, but it had been disconnected. So I called my mother. I told her I had finally seen the ocean. She said, “Incredible,” but I could tell she was watching TV with her grief — her grief was older and less needy now, but still liked to hang close to home — and so she did not have the energy to share or even to hear my joy.
I signed up for marine biology courses, I studied the sea, I TA’ed classes and wrote questions for pop quizzes. One pop quiz I had to give on my sister’s birthday. I wrote:
If the ocean vanished, what would happen?
A. Nothing good!
B. The water cycle would quickly break down, and cloud cover would shrink severely, leaving much of the earth scorched by the sun.
C. With the world becoming dryer, fires would span continents, pumping even more carbon into the atmosphere and accelerating global warming. Without phytoplankton, oxygen levels on the earth would be drastically reduced, while carbon dioxide levels would become drastically high.
D. The few surviving humans, hunkered in their underground Antarctic bunkers and slowly depleting whatever resources remained, would find themselves, despite their exhaustion, unable to sleep. They would long for a good bedtime story. Because before it disappeared, the ocean told good bedtime stories. It lapped the shore with rhythm. It knew how to create a real arc with a wave, and it knew how to cause a shiver with that wave’s crash. It knew how to deliver a sense of buoyancy and mystery. It knew how to help you escape your immediate sense of self, and it could grant you a glimpse of wide horizon, of history. It knew about whales and how humans had imagined living inside them. Without those stories, the humans feel less. Only keening. Only ache.
E. In time the absence of oceans would cause the weight of the earth itself to shift, throwing it farther out of its orbit around the sun, leading, ultimately, to a freezing-cold planet that could not support life as we understand it.
I read over my question a few times, my face very close to the computer screen. My skin prickled warm. Embarrassment, maybe, or maybe the machine was overheating. I imagined my mother reading my question and saying, “All melodrama.” Anyway, I’m no idiot. I deleted the question before I printed out the pop quiz.
. . . . . .
Now I’m a scientist who creates images of the tiniest, planktoniest things, which are vanishing in great numbers in some waters, multiplying into dangerous acidic blooms in others. I generate visualizations of the shifting populations of these tiny things, tell people these are images of climate change, that the future is happening now, is present and urgent. The visualizations I create feel like images of Ellie, somehow. Or like visions.
Of course, I never have enough time to devote to this work. Mostly I have to lecture to a roomful of students whose parents have the means to pay me to be in that space with their children. I create exams that will test them but not push them too hard. In my opening lecture, I start big, prophesizing about the future effects of climate change, and then I get very small. I define plankton. I describe them as tiny creatures, drifting through the ocean not under their own power but propelled by the prevailing currents. “It’s a process of locomotion that may seem a little inefficient, but actually they can cover great distances that way,” I say to the lecture hall, and then I let my voice find its own soothing rhythms as I move on to discuss the tiny hunting algae that survived the dark period after the asteroids came crashing in and messed up all plans for photosynthesis. It gives me real pleasure to watch as my students themselves drift into sleep or something like sleep. I like knowing that I am the one who has carried them there, into the dark briny doze of their own minds — and toward whatever visions await them.
