Anthropocene

“Can I assume San Nicolas was your doing?”

Mariana was already in her wetsuit, sitting near the bow of the ship and prepping the scuba gear. She was, at that moment, looking over the pea-green scuba light that, when under the murky blue of the Pacific, usually shone out in the same shades of green as its plastic covering. I was still on my second coffee, trying to catch the first rays of morning light peeping over the California mainland to the east, though all I got was a somewhat rusty, smoggy amber color.

“Not entirely,” I said. “We had to stop at the island at some point. Plus, it’s still almost two weeks to Christmas day, so the timeline is a bit off.”

Mariana pulled her hair back in a band, and for a moment I caught her slim profile against the Pacific Ocean and the nearby Channel Islands. I tried to imagine what she would look like transposed against the sunset at evening time, though before I could get a clear image, she was already up and checking the cages hanging over the side of the ship. I took another slurp of my coffee. “But, if you want to assume that San Nicolas is an early Christmas gift, I’ll gladly take credit.”

She shot me a brief smile, as much as she would allow herself in her scientific mood. “Given the state of things, I’ll take whatever gift I can get—though, if I recall the itinerary correctly, Christmas Day itself we’ll be at San Clemente?”

I finished the last sip of my coffee and joined her by the shark cage on the side of the boat. I had, in actuality, much less to prep than she did, but didn’t wish to appear as useless as I normally was. “Ah yes, good ol’ Saint Clemente—I don’t suppose there’s as good a chance of getting a stocking full of gifts from him.

“Well,” she said. “He is the patron saint of mariners, so we might be more thankful spending time on his island rather than his overworked cousin here.”

I, the one of us raised nominally Catholic, had no response, so instead I pretended to inspect the monitoring equipment.

Spending Christmas tracking sharks by the Channel Islands had been the department’s idea, though the idea had initially been developed for Mariana’s own dissertation, rather than mine. She, despite not even getting her Ph.D. yet, had already gotten a reputation as the “Scripps Shark Girl.” Even as early as the previous year, her notoriety had extended beyond the campus itself, as several YouTube videos of her swimming alongside great whites had gone viral, including a profile on various morning shows and below the fold news broadcasts. I had, in fact, come to know her through these mediums before I ever met her personally. It wasn’t until I saw her with some frequency at my preferred La Jolla coffeeshop, sitting in a corner curled in front of her laptop, scanning data entries on great white migration patterns, that I even allowed myself the idea that she could even be someone real in my world. In all honesty, my means of introducing myself could have been a bit less clumsy. As it happened, I elected to “accidentally” knock over her cold brew with my knapsack, and then, in my most elaborate apologetics, insist on purchasing another for her (in my charity even upping the size from grande to venti).

Not my finest moment, admittedly, but even in her justified annoyance she proved as forgiving of awkward human males as she was with apex ocean predators.

So what are you studying, she asked me that afternoon, over the beers we had evolved to from our earlier coffee.

Nothing near as interested as sharks, I said.

Everything in the ocean, as with all life, is interconnected, she told me. So everything is as interesting as everything else.

In my memory I take a cool sip of beer before responding, but most likely just stifled a belch.

Phytoplankton, I said.

And, indeed, Mariana’s “interconnected” thesis proved useful when I had to justify to department advisory committee my presence on her December shark tracking expedition out among the Channel Islands.

There, aboard the ship, as the dawn made itself more and more known to my sleepy eyes, Mariana was already taking a final inventory of her equipment.

“You should start getting your wetsuit on,” she said. “It tends to take a while, as you probably know. I’d like to get in the water before it gets too late.”

“Too late” might be a bit relative here, I though.

But I didn’t say that.

“We going in the cage?” I asked. This was, in fact, quite a stupid question, though she responded with her usual clinical mercy.

“Of course,” she said. With the same breath she removed her earrings and nose ring, handing them off to me with little concern. “Put these somewhere safe, will you?”

“Of course,” I said. Instead I clutched them awkwardly. “But you’ve swam with these sharks freely, right?”

She cast another side smile in my direction. “Yeah…honestly I’d love to do that here, but the faculty kind of frowned on such behavior. Besides, with you here, I thought…well, I mean, I didn’t want to…” she trailed off. I gave a quick wave of my hand to end her train of concern. I myself, in fact, had no particular desire to swim in open water with great whites (or even, in all honesty, get in the cage, though I had given myself little choice in that matter).

The previous night that ship had made its way far enough from the California coastline and its attached light pollution to get a much clearer view of the Milky Way. I found Mariana reclining near the starboard side, curled up in a sweater and watching the sky. She didn’t look away as I approached her.

“Can’t sleep?” I asked.

She didn’t break her gaze. “There was supposed to be a meteor shower tonight,” she said. “But so far I haven’t seen anything.”

“Aren’t we getting up pretty early tomorrow?”

She shrugged. “I can fall into deep sleep pretty quickly,” she said. “What are YOU doing up?”

I gave a nervous chuckle. “Insomnia. But, lest you worry about tomorrow, I’m used to it.”

I saw her smile gently, even in the light of nothing but the stars. “You want to join me then?”

Before I knew it I was sitting down next to her.

“I remember what you told me, before we left,” she said.

“About what?”

“About the phytoplankton.”

“Yes,” I said. I tried to smile, though I realized almost immediately she couldn’t tell in the darkness. “You see those green lights on the shore?” I gestured my hand in the vague direction of the shoreline several kilometers away. Mariana squinted, and I tried to imagine her seeing the thing, nearly invisible whisp of glowing green light that clung to the shoreline.

“That’s a type of phytoplankton,” I said. “They’re bioluminescent. They tend to grow green like that due to a chemical reaction. I always liked to think of them as trying to mirror the stars, though that’s of course not very scientific—”

“They can see a world beyond theirs, and try to make it part of their,” Mariana said. I bit my tongue as I tried to think of a response. But she continued. “You had told me how they, the smallest things in the ocean, are evolving to live off our pollution, all the plastic and shit we dump into the ocean, all of the warmer temperatures and atmospheric changes as we fuck up the climate.”

I blinked at the night sky a few times. “Anthropocene epoch theory,” I said. “Honestly that was just bullshit,” I said. I was too drunk by the stars for anything but honesty. But her tone never changed.

“Everything we do is bullshit,” she said. “In case you haven’t noticed. But everything grows from bullshit as well, at least on land.”

“And in the ocean?”

She was silent for a few seconds. “There’s one shark I’m looking for,” she finally said. I couldn’t tell from her voice if this was supposed to answer my question. “In my lab we call her Amphitrite, one of the Oceanids, or sea nymphs, in Greek mythology. She’s one of the biggest great whites we’ve ever seen, around 20 feet in length when she was first tagged years ago. And she’s travelled farther than any other. By our readings, at least, she’s nearly circumnavigated the world.”

“Looking for what?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be rhetorical or not.

Mariana, evidentially, took it as such. “We picked up her signal nearby the other day,” she said. “White sharks tend not to stay in one place too long, so I wanted to get in the water as soon as possible see her before she leaves.”

“For another ocean?” I asked. I could tell, even in the silence, that she had gotten sad.

“Another world, hopefully,” she said. “She’s been looking for something, in all those oceans. I can feel it, just looking at her movements, even in the dull data sets on the screen. But all she finds is plastic and trash and warming seas, dying fish. A world created by humans that we can’t even live in.”

I had nothing to say. In the sky in front of us a meteor suddenly sparked in a thin sheet of white, streaking across the sky and extinguishing so quickly it might never have existed at all. Or maybe, in its brief life, lived longer than we ever would.

“I hope your phytoplankton have better luck,” she said.

Mariana floated next to me, the two of us suspended in our scuba suits in the clear blue waters of the Pacific. In front of her she shined the green scuba light, breaking through the murk of the Pacific water in a thick cone of its own green light. Brother of the plankton and would-be child of the stars. Through the bars of the shark cage the shape appeared, distant and blurry at first, then coming into focus. The vast, smooth contours of the great white, flowing through the water as if made of the elements herself, rather than physical matter. Bearing scars and wounds, but still flying in the streams of morning sunlight streaking the water.

She didn’t see us, if she even could. She looked straight ahead, her eyes scanning the waters around her and her mouth open, drawing in the water and tasting the contours of her world. Mariana was right. She was searching.

Around us the microscopic phytoplankton swam invisible to our eyes. They would inherit a world built by Mariana and myself, and our fellow humans. A world that Amphitrite is so desperate to escape, and that we encage ourselves in more thoroughly. I wonder what kind of sun they will see when, in eons hence, they finally emerge from this ocean.

The Anthropocene world.

Next to me, Mariana gently takes my hand.