The Body Farm, page 2
Then came a quiet day. She remembered it perfectly, every detail etched into her brain. The sea was clouded with sand after a morning of wind and storms. A few mackerel passed by at a distance. A gelatinous mesh of moon jellies bobbed along the surface above, translucent in the sunlight. The sharks appeared to have left the area entirely. Not even the omnipresent blacktips, four feet long and incurably curious, came to check out the armloads of chum Eloise and Stefan hurled into the water.
So Eloise had decided to go for a swim. It had been a long time since she’d scuba dived just for pleasure. She’d been cooped up in the cage for so long that she felt like a goldfish in a tank. She communicated her intentions to Stefan—they had created their own sign language over the years—and he replied that he would stay in the cage and maintain watch.
At the time, Eloise had only ever seen tiger sharks at a distance. They were solitary creatures, passing by occasionally in the deep ocean, charcoal gray and bulky, the juveniles banded with those trademark stripes. She knew that tiger sharks were the most unpredictable members of their species. Their migrations were irregular, their diets variable. Unlike other sharks, they could be intentionally aggressive toward humans. Eloise had once read about a tiger shark that had solved a murder mystery. After a week in captivity, the beast suddenly went wild, thrashing and vomiting. Finally it coughed up a human arm that had been severed medically at the shoulder and bore a distinct tattoo that matched it with a missing man. Without the tiger shark’s assistance, no one would ever have found the corpse, sliced into pieces and scattered in the sea.
On that lazy afternoon, Eloise kicked toward shore, watching the ocean floor rise slowly to meet her, ridged like the roof of a mouth. Curtains of beige sand drifted idly on the current. She saw a school of grouper moving along the seabed, mouths molded in permanent grimaces. She saw a silver tarpon dart by. She did not see the tiger shark, not until it was too late, a blur on her periphery, a glint of teeth, the inky cave of its mouth opening, the shock of impact. She saw her own blood coiling dark against the water before she felt the pain.
Stefan saved her. He’d watched the whole thing unfold from inside the shark cage. Eloise later heard about how he swam fearlessly into the open water, pulling his dive knife from its holster. The tiger shark did not react to his approach, intent on the kill. Stefan had stabbed it in the eye. Nothing else would have stopped it, and even that might not have deterred it forever; Eloise had seen sharks shake off worse injuries to continue hunting. There was a perpetual debate in the marine biology community about whether sharks felt pain at all.
Stefan never got his dive knife back. The tiger shark had thrashed away from him, the blade jutting out of its flesh like a horn. It let go of Eloise’s body. Stefan folded her in his arms and swam toward the surface, trailing clouds of blood.
○
Around midnight, Eloise called her brother. Rain silvered the air outside. The mumble of someone’s television set penetrated the thin walls. Eloise sat curled in a ball on the bed, holding her phone in both hands like a child.
“Finally,” Noah said by way of greeting.
She closed her eyes. She had not seen her brother in three years, not since the aftermath of the tiger shark. Once her wounds had healed enough for her to leave the hospital, she had recovered at Noah’s house in the suburbs of D.C. It all came flooding back now—her brother’s anxious face, the fog of medication, and the pain, a loop of burning wire in her flesh, electrified every time she inhaled.
“Hello? Are you there?” Noah cried.
Eloise found her voice. “That was a cheap goddamn trick, calling Stefan.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“Well, stop it,” she said. “Stop leaving me messages. Stop texting me. Don’t bother the people I work with. It’s enough.”
Noah sniffed—a sound from childhood, the percussion of his breathing. He suffered from hay fever and sinus infections, constantly congested.
“Where are you?” he said. “You’re not calling from Africa.”
“It doesn’t matter where I am,” she said. “I don’t want to do a memorial. You can mark the ten-year anniversary however you want. Just leave me out of it.”
She heard the creak of Noah’s mattress and pictured him sitting up in bed, fumbling for his glasses. There was a painting of a forest on the wall above his head. Eloise knew it well; she’d spent long hours in a drugged stupor staring at the crudely rendered branches, the leaves that appeared to have been daubed on with a sponge. After the tiger shark had crushed her chest and filled one lung with water, Noah insisted that she take his bed to recover in comfort. He slept on the couch for months as she relearned how to move her arms, how to walk, how to breathe.
“You’re being selfish,” Noah said peevishly. “Everything isn’t about you. A lot of relatives have been asking if I’ll be doing some sort of memorial for Mom. Even some of her old hiking buddies contacted me. You aren’t the only one who loved her.”
“So invite them,” Eloise said. “Invite everybody. Have the biggest, saddest party in the world. But stop badgering me about it. I’ll be busy that day.”
Noah sighed, and she imagined him rubbing the bridge of his nose, where his glasses left tiny indentations at the end of a long workday.
“We both have to cope in our own way,” she said, trying to put some gentleness into her voice.
“I believe this is what Mom would want,” Noah said. “Something in her honor. I know you think you had this special bond with her, but—”
“I did.”
“But you aren’t the only one who misses her,” he continued, his voice rising. “I wish you would listen to me for once.”
“I’m listening. I hear you. You do what you need, and I’ll do what I need.”
“Selfish and hardheaded,” Noah said. “You never change, do you?”
Eloise hung up and hurled her phone against the pillow.
○
Noah hadn’t cried when their mother died. He only grew paler and more cautious. He was alarmed when Eloise dropped out of college. He was apoplectic when she took her first job as a shark tagger, traveling to Alaska with Stefan and José to count the sleeper sharks. Her team visited the Great Barrier Reef and the Indian Ocean. Their work was instrumental in getting angel sharks and great hammerheads declared endangered species. Eloise had never felt so vital, so fulfilled.
At first, Noah insisted that she text him proof of life after each and every dive. But gradually, grudgingly, he seemed to come to terms with the fact that he could not monitor her so closely as to keep her safe. At least he knew exactly how she was risking her life, a small mercy, he told her once. Their mother had done everything—climbing, skiing, mountain biking—while Eloise settled on one thing.
When she dove, she felt the way she used to in her mother’s company—dazzled by the glory and strangeness of nature. When she dove, she felt as though her mother might still be there with her, temporarily out of sight, like the time they’d been separated by a coral reef. Eloise, twelve years old, stayed where she was, kicking in place as she had been taught, waiting patiently until her mother came to find her. She remembered the moment when Ada swam around a bulbous arch of rock and blew her a kiss.
During her convalescence in her brother’s house, Eloise had been troubled by fish, haunted by them. Lying in Noah’s bed, each of her 467 stitches gripping her flesh like a cat’s claw, she felt fish flooding around her. She felt them in her throat when she drank. When she meant to be taking notes or writing letters, jellyfish and whales spread out beneath her pencil. And always, when the bedroom was dark and she was trying to sleep, she heard the swish of giant tails, as though sharks were passing in and out through the open window.
After her recovery, Noah had begged her not to go back to shark tagging. He got down on his knees, eyes filled with tears—the first time she’d seen him cry since childhood. Their mother’s death could not move him to weeping, but this did. He pleaded with her to find another line of work. Something sane.
Eloise explained, as she had done so many times, that her job was the great passion of her life. She assured him that this sort of injury would not happen again. She was wiser now, more savvy. Besides, tiger sharks were vanishingly rare.
The argument escalated. Noah informed her that her risk-taking was a hazard to his health, the source of his high blood pressure. Eloise retorted that she had no choice; her yearning for the ocean while landlocked in her brother’s bed had been more unendurable than the agony of her wounds. Noah screamed that she was just like their mother. Eloise roared back that she couldn’t think of a higher compliment. He accused her of having a death wish. She told him that he had never really learned how to live. Then she banged out of his house and had not seen him since.
○
She spent the next hour pacing her hotel room and having imaginary arguments with Noah, gesticulating furiously at no one. When her phone rang again, she snatched it up and yelled, “What? What now?”
“I didn’t mean to lose my temper,” he said. “I didn’t intend to pick a fight.”
She settled cross-legged on the bed. She knew this was the closest thing she would get to an apology.
“I don’t know why I got so . . .” Noah trailed off. “You bring that out in me. It’s like I’m fourteen years old again. Just trying to win the damn argument. I’m sorry,” he added stiffly.
Eloise was startled into a laugh. “Are pigs flying? Did hell just freeze over?”
“The memorial wasn’t the only reason I was calling,” he went on, ignoring her. “I honestly don’t care if you come. You don’t even have to plan it with me. I just wanted . . . I thought . . .”
She waited, but he did not finish the sentence. The rain had dwindled into mist outside, a damp, chalky gray that erased the world beyond the window.
“I’ve started dreaming about her again,” Noah said. “I see her at the top of that redwood. Or on a mountain. She’s laughing and talking and not paying attention. She starts to fall—it’s the same every time.”
“I have that dream too,” Eloise whispered.
“I watch it happen in slow motion, kind of. You know how dreams are like that sometimes? How everything gets really slow and out of focus?”
“Yeah.”
“I try to grab her arm,” Noah said. “I try to stop her from falling. I never get there in time.”
“Neither do I.”
In the distance, a church bell tolled a single doleful note. One o’clock in the morning.
“What are you doing up so late?” Eloise asked softly. “You never even make it to midnight on New Year’s Eve.”
He blew his nose like a goose’s honk, another nostalgic echo from the past. Poor Noah—antihistamines, nasal sprays, and sinus rinses every night.
“How’s work?” he asked. “I assume you’re still chasing sharks around?”
“I thought you weren’t going to pick a fight.”
“I’m not. I’m having a normal conversation. Work is a normal thing to talk about.”
“Huh.” She adjusted her pose against the bed frame.
“My work is going well,” Noah said. “The business has expanded, and I’ve hired more staff.”
“Nice.”
“It is.”
There was a small, awkward silence. To fill it, Eloise asked, “Do you like the people you work with?”
“They’re great. Solid citizens. This last tax season was like a tsunami. But we banded together and got through it.”
Eloise thought about Stefan and José, who had saved her life from the tiger shark. Stefan carried her out of the ocean. José put pressure on the wound and radioed for a helicopter extraction. She would have bled to death without their swift, skillful intervention. She trusted them, respected them, all the way down to the bone. She intended to work with them until they all retired or died in the field.
But they were not family. They were something else—comrades-in-arms, maybe.
She had not realized how profoundly she missed Noah. It was like putting on corrective glasses after years of a slow drift into astigmatism. You didn’t understand how much you had lost until the world slipped back into focus, every edge crisp and defined.
“Can we just . . .” Noah began, then paused. “Can we chat sometimes? No arguing. Just catching up. I wish you’d answer the phone once in a goddamn while.”
When she did not immediately reply, he went on quickly, “Or we could text. If phone calls are too much, I’d be happy with just—I don’t know—a meme or something. A selfie. You don’t even have to use words.”
Eloise laughed. “Words have never been my strong point, have they? Yes, we can text. I’ll text you tomorrow, okay?”
He exhaled sharply, a crackle down the line. “You promise?”
“I’d pinkie swear if you were here.”
Another silence bloomed, but this time it did not feel strained. Tendrils of mist pooled in through the window like ghostly fingers.
“I wish you understood why I do this,” Eloise said, all in a rush. “I wish you would come diving with me sometime. It would open up your mind in ways you can’t even imagine.”
Noah laughed. “I wish you would get a job where nothing could possibly eat you. But we can’t always get what we want.”
○
In the morning, Stefan saw it first. Eloise was tired from her late-night conversation, thinking about Noah and their mother, not paying attention to her surroundings as her cage drifted downward. Descending into the sea was less perilous than ascending. The former could, at worst, cause sinus pressure and earaches, while the latter could trigger the bends: joint pain, paralysis, brain damage, even death. To be safe, José always winched the cages up and down at a steady thirty feet per minute.
Stefan was filming today from his separate aluminum cube. Eventually Eloise noticed him waving and gleaned from his posture that he had been trying to get her attention for some time. He pointed down.
The ocean beneath them teemed with shadows. It was a school of what appeared to be dozens of fish. The haziness of their forms told Eloise that they were at some distance, so they must be large creatures, bigger than humans. Too thin to be whales, too broad to be tuna, too sluggish to be dolphins. Stefan aimed his camera into the deep. Eloise flattened herself prone on the floor of the cage, peering eagerly down into the gloom.
They were blue sharks. As the cage sank, she could distinguish their whiplike tails and thin backs. At least forty animals swam together in a planar formation, strewn like pockets of afternoon sky across the twilight beneath. Eloise had never seen blues—or any sharks—behave this way. She climbed to her knees on the bottom of the cage and glanced questioningly at Stefan, but he was busy filming.
The cage descended farther. Eloise could see now that there were more sharks beneath the upper layer. Silhouettes beneath silhouettes, shifting like the gemstones in a kaleidoscope, overlapping and eclipsing one another, never still.
There were hundreds of them.
Both cages dipped into the school simultaneously. Sinking through the bodies, Eloise felt a tug of vertigo. The sharks were traveling northward, all cruising at the same languid pace, while she and Stefan fell slowly through their ranks. Everything around her was moving; there was no fixed point to use as reference.
At last the cage stopped, having reached the predetermined depth. Eloise kicked off from the bottom. As far as the eye could see, slender figures swam in synchrony, eerily similar in size and shape, differentiated only by the occasional scar—a torn dorsal fin or the gouged track left by a fishhook. There seemed to be no end to their ranks. Eloise had read about this phenomenon, blue sharks that crossed the sea in massive schools, but nothing could have prepared her for the reality of it. A scrap of manmade orange flashed among the bodies. Some of them sported her tags, but only a few, amazingly few, a tiny fraction, a visual representation of the tenuous connection between the human world and the much wilder world beneath the surface. The ocean brimmed with more life than even Ada could have imagined.
Eloise peeled off her dive glove and held up a pink hand. She had always wished for a lateral line, the sensory organ that allowed fish to detect pressure and vibrations through the water. In this moment, she did not need it. She could feel the sharks on her bare skin. The sea trembled with the weight of their bodies. Except for them, the ocean was absolutely deserted—not a fish or turtle in sight. Every living thing for miles had taken shelter when they felt the bow wave of this monstrous horde.
And the blue! Never had there been such a comprehensive study of a single color. The sharks were turquoise up close, navy in the distance, with every shade from teal to sapphire in between. Only blue was permitted here, erasing any rogue color that dared to interfere. Eloise’s tags shone as brief and bright as signal flares before the density of bodies snuffed them out. White and black were not tolerated either: the sharks blotted out the light above and blanketed the inky depths below. In this moment, blue transcended mere pigmentation to become something more—a statement of intent, a revelation of secret knowledge, a new theory of the universe.
Strangest of all, the sharks swam without urgency or desire. Mouths slightly open. Eyes glassy. Minds unfocused. They were not hunting, not fleeing, not mating, not pupping, not engaged in any behavior Eloise recognized. Sharks were always expressionless, but this was something else: a robotic repetition of manner, an absence of will. Like a swarm of bees or a flock of birds, the blues had sacrificed their individuality to form a blended whole, greater than the sum of its parts, a single organism. But what was its function? That was the question that cracked Eloise’s mind open. Bees pollinated, birds migrated, but here was a school of sharks that consumed an ocean with their numbers, a thousand discrete entities merging into one, a collective entity, an aquatic supremacy, wonderful and terrible, godlike in its power and unknowable in its purpose, beyond human understanding.
