EVERYTHING YOU DUMP HERE ENDS UP IN THE OCEAN
THE MOON IS already high and full, reflecting in bright ribbons off the waves around us, by the time she takes me on board her platform. It’s an old oil platform, long since stripped of industrial equipment and roughneck accoutrements in favor of the sleek, streamlined whites and reds of custom-manufactured scientific R&D machinery, specially designed to tickle the fancy of Silicon Valley investors desperate to stave off social unrest with images of a green, capitalist future. I knew she was a grifter even before I saw it, but not the sort simply looking to fill a garage with expensive cars; she has her own intentions aside and apart from those of the investing class, and tonight she’s promised me a glimpse of them.
“I’ve always found myself drawn to trash,” she says in her nebulously aristocratic way. “First as an artist, and then as a researcher. Even in my private life, it fascinates me, what we’ve collectively abandoned as a society, which then must bear witness to us.”
On the trip over from the marina she explained how she had selected this site, how the local eddies of the coastline consolidated to make a small garbage patch here, a microcosmic galaxy of drifting refuse that would be the prototype for a plastic-mitigation project she planned to enact in the larger garbage patches of the seas. One day, she said, the whole world would see the outcome of what was beginning here. A great speech which every would-be innovator made, but her certainty and the audacity in her eyes made it hard to challenge her, despite her suspicious refusal to share the contents of her research.
Now she’s leading me along the edge of the platform, only an iron railing holding me back from a perilous drop into the night water. With the flick of a remote, floodlights illuminate the bluegreen waves far below. Her hand drifts over mine, the softest of touches. “Do you see what I’ve done already?”
“It’s amazing.” She showed me the pictures, how plastic waste once spiraled and churned in the tide nearby, and if the photographs are not doctored, and if her claims that she didn’t mechanically remove any of it are true, then she really has developed a biological method to produce the clean water around us, marked only by the seaweed which clusters in lazy, bulbous shadows.
I’m genuinely impressed, more than I expected to be. My reasons for coming here had become muddled. When I first met her, I felt the activist stirring inside me, my instinctive suspicion of wealth and capital, my dire environmental concerns about the sea I’d so loved as a child. But through our frequent meetings, I had come to think of her as a skillful scam artist, and a deeply charming one at that. Perhaps she knew my initial suspicions and simply didn’t care; she seemed to want to show me her lab more as a matter of pride than as a resolution to any of the ideological debates we shared over dinner.
She turns the lights off, and for a moment my eyes are plunged into night-blindness. Slowly the outlines of the platform and her body, illuminated by red lighting and the distant glow of the moon, return to me. Distantly, something large splashes in the water beneath us, and my thoughts turn to the sea lions which gather around the marina barking like dogs. Do they swim out here at night?
“Marine biology was my first passion,” she says. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to return to it.”
“How did that happen?” I ask. “You were an artist, right? In New York?”
“Oh, I can’t reveal all my secrets yet,” she says, and though I can’t see her face, I know she’s making that sly smile. “Come below, to the wet lab.”
***
She insists I put on a wetsuit before we go down. Somehow, she has one prepared in just my size. I should be frightened when she does things like this, but I’m charmed—to be attended to, to be another of her projects. She knew in advance she would invite me over tonight, and had somehow clandestinely taken or guessed my measurements and spent the whole evening carefully positioning the pieces so that I would be the one to insist she show me her work. I’m honored to be in the grasp of such a meticulous manipulator, a woman after my own heart. Someone who knows what she wants, and knows how to get it. Or, perhaps, has just recognized the passion burning in me.
I change in a small dressing room, leaving my evening wear in a smooth, clean locker that only vaguely smells of algae and chlorinated disinfectant. The sea smell is intoxicating to me, harkening back to a simpler time in my life, my first love, as a child, of the depths and the unknown creatures deep within them. As I worm my legs into the rubbery second skin, I smile at the tentacles tattooed across my tits, delicately disguising the stretch marks and scars from my difficult recovery after breast enhancement surgery. If she’s lucky, she’ll get to see those tattoos tonight.
“Now, I know I already asked you to leave your devices on the boat,” she says from beyond the privacy curtain, “but I have to insist that if you have anything metallic at all you leave it in the locker. It’s not only a matter of my personal data security, it’s the sensitivity of some of the . . . equipment below.”
There goes my necklace, a little pentagram, remnant of my short wiccan phase from years before. I wore it religiously when I first transitioned, and ever since it’s been a lucky talisman.
She’s also suited up when I join her in the dimly lit room. Once she finishes eyeing me up and down, she opens the hatch in the center of the floor without a word. I can feel her silent approval. I work hard to maintain my figure, and I fought through years of bigotry to achieve it, a subject the two of us have discussed at length. Indeed, it was her undisguised admiration of my transformative process that first got me more interested in her bed than her lab.
She gestures to the ladder below our feet: “Let’s descend.”
***
We’re now in a peaceful indoor pool, the floor beneath us gently sloping further into the water, lit only by red lights along the walls and small, ultraviolet LEDs hanging over trellises of tangled blackgreen mesh which look something like seaweed, something like fishing nets. The room could be a nightmare version of a grow room, except for the water coming up to our waists. Little, gray amphipods dart around the plantlike netting to either side of us, responding to any movement or sound we make. The water is cold, but warmer than I expected.
“The world is doomed, but you already know that,” she says.
“Is this your stump speech?” I ask.
“No, not at all. I saved this just for you. This is the truth.”
Something drifts past me in the water. At first I think it’s a plastic bag, but then I make out the trailing tentacles, iridescent in the red and ultraviolet lighting. The tentacles momentarily latch onto my wetsuit when they brush past my leg, and I know that little stinging cells are uselessly sending microscopic darts filled with poison into the rubber of my suit. The dark, triangular design on the top of the jellyfish’s bell looks like the Albertson’s grocery store logo.
“I know you know this because I looked into your past.” She closes the space between us, and I feel my heartbeat rise. “You used to be quite the eco-extremist. Against civilization, against Leviathan, wasn’t it?”
“Something like that,” I say, trying not to lose my cool. As my eyes adjust to the ultraviolet vibrations, I realize there are more jellyfish drifting around, different sizes and colors, all with that same iridescent texture like an oil slick. There’s a mild anesthetic tingle on my exposed feet, almost painful. “So, are you worried I’m some kind of terrorist, here to destroy all your hard work?”
Her fingers, firm but not harsh, coil around my wrist. “I’m not worried about you at all. I need someone with a radical vision for change. You know, I really like you.”
As always, I don’t know what to read in her face, her perfectly composed expression. She’s smiling, and the terror in my gut makes me want to kiss her more. Better to prolong it; rich girls aren’t easily swayed by emotional bonds. “You need me, huh?”
“Do you know my secret? I’m a horrible researcher.”
At the far end of the room, where the water grows deeper, there’s less light. She’s gently leading me there. My body is buzzing with anxiety, sensitive to any movement through the water.
“After I was discovered, I tried to bring together a team of scientists to understand what was happening. They lacked the conviction needed.”
Now I can see the back wall. Four human bodies in various stages of decay and skeletonization are fused to the wall by some kind of resin, overtaken by invertebrate lifeforms: mussels and barnacles covering their bones, crabs crawling in and out of flesh. The intricate, feathery arms of fractal starfish cluster on the lower halves of their bodies, submerged beneath the water.
My heart sinks, and reflexively the words, so cliché, spill out of me: “Please, I don’t want to die.”
There’s nothing more to plead. I have no family, no life outside of this, no real friends anymore. I lost it all in the process of the life I tried to live. Images flash before me, childhood friends mocking and betraying me, my wife leaving me when I started to transition, being fired from my job, fleeing my home, dropping out of college, comrades kettled and incarcerated, friends overdosing, losing job after job just trying to stay afloat. A lifetime of becoming human garbage, and now I’m flushed out to sea with the rest of the trash.
“Good,” she says. “I don’t want you to die. It was an unpleasant experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone else.”
I want to flee but where would I go? She has the key to the boat’s cabin. I could try to break into it, but I suspect the glass is bulletproof, and that’s only if I could get past her. Maybe I could find an EPIRB somewhere, activate it, and summon the coast guard . . .
“Come, I want to show you everything you’ve ever dreamed of,” she says and gestures to a hatch at the far end of the room, guarded on either side by dead researchers. Her voice is so alluring, and the terror in my heart is so great, that it almost stops my dawning awareness of the vast and dismal horror of my dreams in recent years.
***
Passing between those four grim corpses, four horsemen of an apocalypse unknown to Christianity, my experience turns psychedelic, my flesh overstimulated, almost feverish. Fear traces glistening lines of light over our movements, turning her soft words into susurrations from a gentle shoreline kissed with waves.
“My scientists determined it started as a virus. The evolutionary advantage of a virus is its capacity to mutate. The disadvantage is its lack of options; its domain is only the synthesis of a few proteins and what they can do.”
We are walking through what was once a proper and well-equipped laboratory, but the microscopes are overgrown with slime, the specimen jars are teeming with life, the incubators hang open as strange, gaunt fish dart in and out, and clear tendrils worm across the walls and ceilings, a chandelier of jelly hanging from each bright UV light.
“But out at sea, exposed to so many mutagens and so many new organic polymers, the modern, chemical miracle of plastics, something came to be, a virus whose strategy is symbiotic, relying on its extreme and unparalleled affinity for horizontal gene transfer. A new form of life.”
The submerged work desks are covered in encrustations of coral, totally impossible in the limited time this lab has been operational. They look almost like clusters of styrofoam riddled with holes, filled with life. One of them slowly floats away, its jagged back undulating.
“I don’t know precisely when I came to be, but I know how I came to be as I am now. A woman was killed by a man she’d arranged a date with on Grindr and a friend of his. They wrapped her corpse in garbage bags and dumped her in these salty waters . . . with no idea of what they’d initiated. And with that body, I was born in the depths. As the last signals in that brain were fading to oblivion, something connected with those neurons, something between the water and the plastic bag. I am what remains.”
As she leads me further into the lab, we continue into deeper and deeper water, pressure around my stomach now and strange, lovely buoyancy almost tickling me from below. Through the rippling water I can see clams growing from the floor with strangely regular geometry, and something like a transparent octopus darting quickly along. Instead of a head, it seems to have a network of interconnected tentacles, making it look like the discarded plastic rings of a six-pack.
“It found me, and from me it found what it had lacked: purpose. Together we dreamed of growing. Do you know that many invertebrates have a decentralized nervous system? In some ways, I think this brain of mine is a weakness.”
My next step finds no floor beneath me, only water, and I frantically kick to stay afloat.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I don’t think you’re at risk of drowning now, or ever again.”
There’s that same sly smile of hers, and that’s when it all hits me with a sudden wave of realization, like waking from a bad dream. The dream of being a lonely, isolated organism. The jellyfish, drifting past me earlier, injecting my feet . . . and my rubber wetsuit. The strange tingling in my body, yes it was fear, but it was also something else. I can feel it as the nerves in my skin connect with the nerves growing in the wetsuit. I can feel as flesh the silicon in my implants, feel the body of my wetsuit, truly a second skin now, as the water moves around it. But more than that: I can feel the creatures in the water, from the large eels hiding behind the desks to the microscopic plankton drifting around us, the jellyfish in the other room, the corpses on the wall, unable to hold onto their own selves, but in death host to a new form of life. And I feel her, her warmth, her presence, her body, her mind. And beneath us, something deep and vast. Connected now to me, to the microplastics in every cell of my body.
Are you ready now? I feel her voice blossoming in our shared mind.
Yes. I am ready.
***
We go below the platform, down into the water, slowly sinking. When the seawater first enters my lungs it’s a shock, but not too great of one, since she has experienced it many times before. Soon I am comfortable letting the last bubbles of air out. Drifting down, I am warm in the suit, feeling almost like a seal in its layer of blubber as my body assimilates it, as it assimilates my body. Beneath the platform extends a vast web of plastic flesh: nets and straws and bags and bottles all filtering for plankton and growing algae and transmitting soft, friendly signals to my nervous system through the network of microbes in the water. We spiral down through the intricate labyrinth of webbing that has grown beneath the platform, into the deeper dark. My eyes adjust better than they ever could have before, still making out faint traces of light in even the deep blackness of the night water. I can feel the spirits of the deep drifting past me, not only the squid and the fishes but also clothes lost from a lonely child, tires abandoned and rolled off a cliff, chunks of a broken surfboard, fast food containers, everything whirling around me like a carnival parade of ghosts, dead memories of the human world, sprouting compound eyes and segmented legs, growing muscles to swim, gills to breathe, mouths to eat. Abandoned bits of human lives fragmented and repurposed as the flesh of the sea.
And then I feel it, turning its awareness to me. Impossible to describe what it is: an underwater volcano; a dozen whalefalls; a sea slug the size of a city; a lost nuclear submarine; a benevolent tumor of nervous tissue capable of calculations greater than any computer. It is all these things and more. It smells like my lover, or perhaps she always smelled of it. It sends out complex electromagnetic patterns expertly shielded from the seeking sensors of the world’s navies and scientists. It is both the conductor of the orchestra and the product of a billion minds. A tremendous, heaping, teeming mass of living trash at the bottom of the ocean.
I know then why she selected me, why this was always my fate. My research into global logistics networks, my vision for the end of the world, my hatred of the society that had tortured and abandoned me: it is taking all of this into itself, spreading the buried and repressed components of my consciousness through gulper eels with polyethylene bones and sharks with vinyl skin. The plan is so much further underway than I ever could have guessed, sprawling from this core to other growing polyps across the seafloor, preparing for the next stage in its maturity. Preparing for the open water.
We have already almost reached the fiber-optic cables connected to the internet and the power grids, she thinks to me. Soon all the land will be choked by the trash it has sent out here and given a new life. And then, we will no longer be doomed.
At that I smile. This night has gone well after all, far better than I expected. I feel the ocean all around me, filled with myriad, new creatures.
At last, I think, the world is waking up.