"How Far the Light Reaches"

[fiefoe]

Sabrina Imbler is SUCH a good writer. All the essays in this collection are a deft combination of sea creature facts and personal experiences (as a mixed-race, gender-fluid person in their case), my favorite hybrid genre.

• My carefully practiced argument (keeping a goldfish in a bowl was inhumane) devolved into sporadically recalled facts—Goldfish pee themselves to death in bowls! Goldfish can grow up to a foot long! Goldfish can live up to twenty years!
• the land beneath the Petco was once salt marsh in a vast expanse of wetlands wrapping around San Francisco Bay. Today, satellite images of the bay show a sharp divide between green and blue, but hundreds of years ago there was no clear division between land and sea. The bay was an estuary... By the time I was born, San Francisco Bay had lost 95 percent of the wetlands and salt marshes that once had collared the sea.
• goldfish pee with abandon. They unleash more ammonia than other aquarium fish, a toxin that would be diluted in a pond or a river but can kill a fish in a bowl. This is why, I would say to the woman, a bowl makes the conditions of living impossible.
• my middle-school bullies, whose bland, derivative cruelty still managed to make me hate myself.
• “You know, this is a feeder school for Stanford,” and the other mom nodded in agreement. I had never heard the term “feeder” applied to a school before, only to tanks of goldfish and guppies
• It wasn’t exactly that I wanted to die but that ceasing to exist (and being reverently mourned) felt more tangible to me than what I had been told I should want.
• schools of goldfish traveling nearly 1,000 feet per day. One fish covered more than 140 miles in one year. The entire community of feral goldfish migrated seasonally, swimming in vast shoals to a distant wetland during the breeding season.
• A speckled tonguefish, its two swiveling eyes looking directly at me as I measured it. California bat rays, wings flapping toward the rims of the tank as if they knew what flight was and wanted to try it.
• I was always covered in scales after trawls. I would hold my arms up to the light and admire my iridescent, sweat-dewed fish-skin. Deep in the bay, when the sky was clear, I felt like I could peer to the very curve of Earth, imagine it dipping. Like I could see into all of my possible futures.
• I took off my boots and tucked them carefully by the door, because we both have Chinese mothers, and we padded softly to their room.

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• The sub kept returning until it had seen the octopus eighteen times over the course of four and a half years, until one day it arrived to find the octopus gone. She had left behind a silhouette in tattered egg capsules still clinging to the rock like deflated balloons.
• a story in Reuters called her “mother of the year” in the animal kingdom. The previous octopus record holder, Bathypolypus arcticus, was observed in captivity brooding for fourteen months, which seemed shattering at the time.
• which I had decided was my goal weight. The number 110 was so roundly symmetrical, fluffed with an aspirational zero, and I insisted to myself I could do this; after all, I considered myself an overachiever in every other sense.
• I lay back down in the grass but had lost access to my fuzzy dream state. I felt my blood rushing, my heart beating, my shame a new life force. I felt the blades of grass prickling into my skin. My body had become some alive and slippery thing I could not hold.
• Two researchers realized their entire collection of deep-sea gastropods from the western North Atlantic—a trove of more than twenty thousand shells—was so small that all twenty thousand could fit inside a whelk shell the size of a fist.
• When the glands were removed and the octopuses woke up after surgery, most of them abandoned their eggs. All of them began eating again, doubling their body weight from that shrunken, brooding state. Most of the mother octopuses doubled their life spans, living months after the moment the scientists had expected them to die. <> This discovery was accidental. The scientist had removed the gland in a female octopus only because he was practicing for the real thing, the same optic-gland surgery on a male octopus. The scientist wanted to know how male octopuses would behave after these glands, which help control sex and reproduction, were removed. He knew all female octopuses died after brooding their eggs, so, he reasoned, if things went wrong during surgery, it wasn’t like he killed something that would have lived.

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• But a few fought against the surge of the river to take a final, breathtaking leap over the open gate at the head of the waterfall. Before their fins broke the surface of the water on the other side, the fish found their soft, plump bodies transformed into something slithering, and the slick mucus of their scales hardened into jeweled pebbles of skin. That is to say, they became dragons.
• Gradually, like twilight, the river blushed pink. Soon enough the bodies came, rarely intact but always recognizably human. First, an arm or leg. Later, a torso. At one point, unforgettably, a head. They all wore the clothing of farmers, country people. The dead became routine, grisly apples bobbing downstream. They arrived in batches, indicating that the Japanese had just taken another village.
• If we translate two hundred million years into a twenty-four-hour clock, we have taken less than one-tenth of a second in the last minute of the last hour to imperil every single subspecies of sturgeon on the planet. Such is the reach of their history and our power to destroy it.

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• suddenly a second ship, a red tanker called Botany Triumph, hit him. The oblivious tanker continued on its course and carried him on the lip jutting out of its bow, an accidental Viking funeral, his body draped under just two feet of water and his blueish tail waving at the surface.
• But the biggest part of the whale—his skeleton—went to the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts. <> He now hangs near the entrance of the museum, polished bones looking more like a chandelier than a body.
• Abstract charts filled with geometric markings offer clues about the killer. A row of ellipses indicates twisted twine. A series of diamonds, entanglement in a net. Long slashes or short crescents suggest a propeller was involved.
• Though they have a precise application here, the questions sound eerily universal, something you could ask to describe anything: a fruit, a cloud, a bruise; what it is like to fall in love, to be wrong, or to die. The answers could be combined in a seemingly infinite number of ways yet always will result in something dead.
• When you kissed M for the first time, you felt friable, like the contents of your cells had broken free of their membranes and were misting out of you. It was, for you, an infatuation that made time apart unbearable and time together infinite. It was, for M, likely something else.
• Spermaceti burned smokeless and scentless, creating candlelight that seemed plucked from a sunbeam rather than scooped from the bloody hull of a whale’s head. In 1857, New Bedford gave itself a motto in honor of its trade: “Lucem diffundo,” or “I diffuse light.”
• It’s clear Jonston did not exactly draw whales as much as he drew his idea of the whale, the specific iteration of how decay wrought something that used to be almost superlatively alive. Half-imagined drawings like these created enormous confusion in whale taxonomy, leading naturalists at the time to propose more than a dozen living species of sperm whales (there are three).

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• many species new to science and others that were only known from deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Some of the mollusks found on the whale contained chemosynthetic bacteria, which draw energy from chemicals instead of photosynthesis. Entire ecosystems depend on these deaths, creatures whose lives revolve around chance windfalls of blubber, gut, and bone... Dense, glowing meadows of bacteria descend on the skeleton and feed on the fats and oils inside the bones. Feasting like this produces hydrogen sulfide, which sustains chemosynthetic clams and gutless, mouthless bone-eating worms. The worms root themselves in bones like blossoms and feast on the lipids. They have names like bone-eating snot flower. Their red tufted gills cluster into fringe, adorning the skeletons in rosy tapestries as they soak in oxygen from the water.
• You scoured the apps and went on dates with people you hoped would remind you of M, and they never did. All this flaccid yearning felt shamefully maudlin—you knew they were not thinking of you—but you didn’t know how to stop.
• Hydrothermal vents revolutionized many of science’s core ideas about life, how and where it could exist... But these animals eked out an alternative way of life. I prefer to think of it not as a last resort but as a radical act of choosing what nourishes you. As queer people, we get to choose our families. Vent bacteria, tube worms, and yeti crabs just take it one step further. They choose what nourishes them. They turn away from the sun and toward something more elemental, the inner heat and chemistry of Earth.
• Rose Garden, discovered in 1979, was named after the vent area’s dense thickets of giant tube worms, their white, slender, stalk-like bodies swaying below their blood-filled, feathery gills. When scientists first glimpsed the site, they were struck by how the tube worms resembled long-stemmed roses. The worms’ gills course with hemoglobin, capable of transporting oxygen and sulfide at the same time, allowing the worms to create their own energy.
• They realized life here probably took root in the wake of the lava flow that had quenched Rose Garden. They named the site Rosebud. In 2005, Woods Hole researchers returned to Rosebud to find the communities flourishing—mature creatures shimmering in the chemical warmth. The Rosebud site, scientists wrote, highlighted the dynamic nature of deep-sea sites. Oases here, where so few things are certain, inevitably blink on and off. But life always finds a place to begin anew, and communities in need will always find one another and invent new ways to glitter, together, in the dark.

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• The rest is so predictable: him grabbing more and more of me, me saying no, or, rather, no thank you, him smiling and laughing and me figuring things must be okay, this must be a normal back-and-forth, me taking his cue and smiling and laughing too until my shirt and pants are off and he is pressing his dick, the second one I’ve ever seen, a real zero to sixty, into the space between my underwear and my thigh
• Vendors outside sold chocolate penises and hawked a wagon of T-shirts reading MANASSAS, VIRGINIA: A CUT ABOVE THE REST above a bloody knife. The T-shirt vendors would make twenty thousand dollars. The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile passed out cocktail dogs outside the courthouse, and a folk group played covers on the theme of the trial—“50 Ways to Cleave Your Lover.”
• If I stretched out my memory of my life like a ribbon and held it up to the light, whole years would be threadbare: worn patches, rips, holes. In a way, this makes me feel relieved. Whatever happened in those hours of my life is lost to me forever, or, if it still exists, molded into something like instinct.
• So I messaged back—within the hour to ensure nothing would seem weird, so that I could seem impeccably unfazed: “No worries at all!” Seconds later, unsure if my first message implied that something did in fact happen, I messaged again: “I’m sure it was nothing.” If I were a more ruthless detective of my own life, more sure that I could love myself knowing all the things I’ve done and the things done to me while I was not there, perhaps I would have had the courage to ask him what he was talking about. But I am not, so I did not.

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• The essay will not include this scene as evidence that I have earned the right to complain about racism because I, too, have experienced it.
  Although this essay will include none of these things, it once did. All these endings and openings and in-betweens are scenes I wrote and then deleted. The problem was not that the scenes were corny—I am corny—but that they did not feel particularly true. Actually, they felt canned. The scenes, as I had written them, regurgitated back at me a tidy acceptance of myself and my identity that I wasn’t even sure if I agreed with. A final moment of belonging to assuage my years of biracial unbelonging, and written for whom, exactly?
  In high school, if I had read an essay that ended with me folding dumplings, eating dim sum, experiencing my biracial quota of microaggressions, transfixed by my deliriously unreadable face in a mirror, etc., etc., I would have loved it. In high school and college, I gorged myself on these kinds of essays—the first entries in an empty archive that we and many others had been shut out of.
• Looking back, I realize I had written the essay not just for a white editor but also for a white audience. Like a dutiful little trash compactor, I had digested my messy heap of an identity into a manageable lesson for people who were not like me.
• Her irritations are so outsized and misplaced, Ngai writes, that the reader becomes irritated too, not alongside Helga but at her. I worry this essay will resemble one of Helga’s irritations, in which I fixate on something so vain and minor it hardly warrants a whole essay. But what is the other option? Becoming Helga, rattling monstrously at teacups for the rest of my life.
• This × is intangible and, on its own, technically meaningless. But it is not meaningless to me. It is the only thing we know is wholly ours. We will never be caught between worlds, as long as we have ×; it is our world. When I read C. auriga × C. lineolatus, the first thing I see is the ×. <> “What are you?” is an act of taxonomy, even if the asker does not realize it. It is the question the scientists asked of my hybrid butterflyfish.
• Maybe these moments teach me that this joy does not come from being around people who look like you but from people who are irritated in the same ways. Maybe home is the people who hear your rants and nod, because they know. Maybe complaining to someone who gets it is one of the purest comforts on Earth. Maybe it is less about our shared backgrounds than it is about our shared irritations, obsessions, grievances, fears, resentments. We are still dissecting ourselves and how we came to be, but now we are the ones asking the questions.

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• Each clone is a distinct, barrel-shaped individual, yet all together the colony of clones makes up a single salp, attached and moving as one. Many chains can grow as long as 20 feet, drifting through the ocean like giant quartzite bracelets. This is to say that individual identity is confusing for a salp, creatures for whom the notion of selfhood exists in the plural.
• Sometimes you can see the whole stalwart building, sometimes only its fence, sometimes merely its long shadow. It anchors this place. It has seen us all. We queer beachgoers come and go, but the abandoned children’s tuberculosis hospital will always greet us when we return.
• Someone scaled the hospital and painted at the top of one tower QUEER TRANS POWER in marshmallowy all-caps letters, a reminder of the urgency of our softness.

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• Maybe the way I understand myself can accommodate the physical changes that only happen on an evolutionary timescale. Maybe my ideal form is one that would be unsuccessful, a mutant too showy or slow for its own good, snuffed out too soon by a mosasaur. But for now, in the brief splendor of my human life, I don’t have millions of years to let evolution figure it out for me. I have to start morphing on my own.
• Cuttlefish are creatures born to morph. Each one can have up to millions of chromatophores, skin cells that can stretch or squeeze the pouches of pigment they contain. This is how they change color, squinching their mosaic of reds and yellows and browns. Underneath this top layer, cuttlefish have a layer of shimmering organs called iridophores coated with hard plates of chitin, stacked atop one another like felled dominos. When a ray of light strikes a cuttlefish, some of the light reflects back, staggered by each plate of chitin. Iridophores interfere with how certain wavelengths of light are reflected, creating a shimmering rainbow of iridescence. What does not reflect back is absorbed or reflected in the rice-shaped leucophore layer, which takes on the color of whatever light shines upon it.
• Reading a creature through its camouflage seems a misguided attempt to understand its true nature, its whole self. It would be like studying a zebra while it flees from a lion, or a mouse as it cowers in a hollow log. I want to know how cuttlefish morph when there are no sharks around, only other cuttlefish. I want to know what kinds of transformation the cuttlefish is capable of when it is motivated not by fear but by community and sex, and I am not interested in calling it a disguise.
• caught in that old queer quandary of figuring out whether I want to be with someone or be like them, I wonder if it must be the latter. Theirs is the masculinity I know best,
• Cuttlefish have some of the most attuned polarization vision known to any animal. Scientists suggest cuttlefish may depend on polarization the way we depend on color to help us perceive our world. Cuttlefish adorn themselves with patterns of polarization, subtly shuffling their reflecting iridophores while their chromatophores and papillae remain unchanged, likely in order to speak to their kind without alerting predators.
• Cuttlefish can mime texture on sight alone, never needing to physically touch the substance they imitate. Watching a cuttlefish’s papillae extrude and hold stiff feels almost tectonic, like you are witnessing the birth of a volcano or the growth of a forest from a bird’s eye. Each cuttlefish species has a repertoire of various papillae shapes—spikes and spines and mushroomy blobs—allowing the creatures to smooth out on a bed of pebbles or prickle against branches of coral, as though the surface of their skin is dancing and alive. Once the papillae are shaped as the cuttlefish desires, it locks them into place so it can relax the rest of its muscles and swim about with ease.
• The scientific name for cuttlefish is Sepia, and the cuttlefish gave the color its name, not the other way around. The ancient Greeks used cuttlefish ink to write with, stabbing their nibs in dead cuttlefish’s ink sacs, producing the distinctive, almost translucent brown hue.
• Each time I try to write this piece I feel differently about my body, my gender, myself. Each time I conclude that I must not be ready to write it; best to experience the thing and then wait a few years to reflect, the advice generally goes. But if I don’t write it now, how will I trace my own evolution? So I dub this essay a pseudomorph, a gibbous moon, a silhouette in ink of the person I am now and whom I may no longer resemble in the future.

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• It resembles a ghostly tassel, translucent dome topping tentacled fringe. It is tiny, approximately the size of a pea, and when it floats in water, its glassy body winks in and out of visibility as if able to dip parts of itself into other dimensions. It has color only in its gonads—four rusty dots suspended in the goo of its umbrella. The immortal jellyfish
• And now the most mysterious part, the stage we still don’t quite understand. You begin to transform the very nature of your body. You take a wrecking ball to the cells that once distinguished you as an adult with a mature body and reshape them into cells that serve the next iteration of yourself. All your potpourri of nerve cells and ectodermal cells and endodermal cells transform into stolon tissue, building the branchlike body into which you will soon grow. One type of adult cell metamorphosing into another might seem impossible; only stem cells can become anything they want, the rule goes. But somehow you’ve fashioned your own mechanism of reinvention
• I visit an overworked version of myself in 2018 walking to work on West 24th and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan: steamed shirt and depleted optimism.
• it’s here I wish I could regrow from. Plant defiance in my hand like a fragrant pink rose from Abuela’s driveway. Grow a NO so large in my body. Allow it to ripple through timelines and versions of myself. I had a trans childhood because it was mine and it’s not over. Each time I learn to protect myself now, I protect myself then. I make space for new versions of myself in the future. A forever expansion and re-creation of my own life.
• What does violence turn into if I could go back and shrink it? My skin de-bruises. My muscles never know the language of assault. Our recycling bin is now empty of my father’s boxed Franzia. I’m sitting on the grassy banks of the Pasquotank with every friend I once loved, and maybe our hands are touching—or will soon. What’s left of queerness when it’s not defined by violence endured? The carpet is on the floor of the living room. Reflecting off the muddy water, our skin gleams like hope.
• They are one of the best-studied jellyfish in the world, and yet no one noticed the moon jelly’s power of regeneration until someone gave it time and trust that it might grow into itself. Perhaps any jellyfish is capable of such transformation. <> So I have to ask you again. How shall you regrow, and in how many ways?