The Glass Ocean(26)

            Because she does not shrink, she blossoms. In the hothouse tropic atmosphere she darkens with the influence of the sun, and also lightens, golden hair falling softly over tanned brow, teeth like pearls against berry-dark lips, her blue eyes more luminous than ever. In the somnolence of those short nights, when all on board are drunk with the heat, when the ocean, slackened, and relaxed, as if the moon, turning away its face, has released all from its influence, my mother exudes an unmistakable life force all her own, a pull as powerful as the moon’s, and a perfume as intoxicating as any put forth by the orchids in Felix Girard’s collection.

            Wär’ ich so klein wie Schnecken, indeed.

            They’re all there, at her concerts: the insufferable McIntyre, his mouth shut for once, Linus Starling, so pale and sinister, Hugh Blackstone, grudging but present, Harry Owen, calf eyed, my father, still in his suit that he will by no means shed, all there. The moon may have abandoned them, and the tides, but my mother holds them fast in her orbit on those still evenings, when their sighs, it seems, are the only breath upon the sails. A prefiguration in this of what is to come, but all in ignorance still, in their bliss, they are one and all in love with her: not just my father, but all. Though he most of all, sick with it, and sick with the hiding of it. He has been successful in this, the hiding, with everyone but her.

            He shrinks from what he loves. Attraction and repulsion. Fortunately he has hidden the things he really cares about, the things my too-perceptive mother must by no means see.

            • • •

            And his other work, his official work, as ship’s artist, his work sketching those ephemeral creatures brought up in the brimming buckets or captured in Harry Owen’s surface net, goes brilliantly well. Night after night they two haul the net, invert it into their jars and vials of water, releasing a cloud of thrashing, scuttering things, soft, struggling ambiguities that wink, pulse, glow, retort, subside. At the height of it, my father is up all night, drawing by candlelight, his dark head bent over the paper, the pencils, despite Harry Owen’s assertion that he must stop for the night and Go to bed, Leo. No: he will not. This is his obsession.

            His other obsession.

            What does he see, when he looks at them?

            Soft, translucent bodies, electrical sparks, fiery snowflakes, palpitating stars. Ephemera. They will be gone by morning: gone, as if they never existed at all.

            Thus his rush, to draw them as they fall. The brief bright shower, fiery descent.

            For Harry Owen’s creatures, his captives, do not thrive. Some disappear almost immediately, sinking down and away into those vials filled with seawater; others last a few days, throbbing, flailing, floating, dying. Some last a week. A week at most.

            None are brought back alive. Though some will return in formaldehyde. Others, those solid enough, packed in cotton wool. But what will return are mere shadows of the living creatures, simulacra, gestures toward. In a drawer in the museum now, gathering dust. Unrecognizable things, giving rise to distortions, misunderstandings, mistakes in the science, fantasies.

            The ocean has so many. It will not miss a few.

            In my father’s drawings, that is where they really live now.

            He is almost happy, absorbed in the work that progresses, if not to his satisfaction—for this is impossible, he is never satisfied, though he is prevented, by the brief alighting of his subjects, from his usual picking and scratching, doing and re-doing—then, at least, well enough.

            Their brevity aids his contentment.

            • • •

            It is my father’s favorite time, late at night, in the silence and the starlight. The small, guttering flame of Harry Owen’s cigar. Night watch on the booms. Hugh Blackstone at the helm. Sails bellying soundlessly in a night breeze, soft slip-slop beneath the bows the only sound. The dark water a solid thing, viscous membrane. There is a sense of breath held, of anticipation, an immanence, as of something unknown that is about to happen: a planet, rising on the dark horizon, out of the sea, it seems, Venus it is, bright as a flame.