NO MATTER WHERE SHE GOES, THOUGH—NO MATTER which part of the aquarium’s public spaces occur to her as a refuge—there’s music. Music designed at her own behest. Music meant, if she’s honest with herself, to replicate and revise how it once felt to be inside his lab.
She remembers sitting down with the composer, showing him the blueprints, describing the main exhibits, playing him a few examples of what she had in mind. Bach, of course. A well-known kirtan: “Hay Hari Sundara,” the 1926 Carnegie Hall version. Some Debussy, embarrassingly enough. That part in “Take It on the Run” where the guitar does a high altitude burn. To all of these, he nodded in time to the beat, scribbled down notes. When she reached the last song, however, he stopped writing. It was “Get Ready,” perhaps the Temptations’ strangest offering. To be fair, she knew it was weird. For one thing, it was about a stalker. For another, it didn’t start out like all the other Motown relics, with a jolting, percussive call to arms. Instead, it began with a dirge of horns, persistent and menacing, followed by some violins gasping for breath. Then there was the part with the saxophone, notes stabbing the air in what should have been a solo but instead seemed like the disembowelment of one. On top of it all, the singer: a voice that sounded neither male nor female, neither completely sane nor completely unhinged, neither dangerous nor safe. I don’t want this kind of trouble, the composer’s face seemed to say. Who would? She, however, was sitting there with her eyes half-closed, certain that, had he lived long enough, this song would have either pleased Ricketts greatly or upset him to near madness.
So in addition to her infantile excitement about his messages, there’s also a reaction far worse: the need to prove she’s received them. In a sense, this was why the aquarium was created in the first place, to make his most famous, most accessible theory flesh. Instead of arranging things the traditional way—by species or taxonomic relativity—she’s arranged things by habitat, by place of residence. Things that live together should go together, he once said. And things that live elsewhere should go elsewhere. She’s even taken it one step further. She’s demanded that, with the exception of special temporary exhibits—the one about the Amazon basin, for instance—everything in the aquarium must be indigenous to Monterey Bay. Every animal, every plant, every alga, every fungus. No cheating, except when she permits it.
And it’s not something she will ever question. It’s not a position from which she will ever back down. The problem, however, is that the bay is getting warmer and the skies are getting bluer, and not in a cyclical, El Niño–type way. No, this is something permanent, which means that species from the south—species that would have previously found Monterey unlivably cold—are moving in. The Humboldt squid and the Mola mola: two animals that were once seasonal visitors but now take up year-round aquatic real estate. Accept it, she tells herself. Accept it and move on. But her artist’s eye won’t quite allow it. If everything is embraced, nothing is said. A crowded canvas is proof of an empty mind. There’s a moment at which even the most purehearted tribute becomes an ode not to the person being honored, but to the person doing the honoring. And I’d be honored in return, she tells him, the aquarium’s ambient sound track egging her on, if you’d quote me on that.