pH: A Novel. Nancy Lord

“lickable”; she’d just liked the color, and the discount price. It occurred to her now that perhaps the Russian girl was afraid that flecks would fall into her sample and be counted as a new species.

      Annabel was, if nothing else, glad to be in the presence of living, moving, perhaps flailing creatures. The previous night the ones from the Multinet looked, once they were concentrated and “fixed” in jars, like pea soup. “Mostly euphasiids,” Robert had said to her, swirling the contents. The deepest tow had picked up a couple of finger-length lantern fish that everyone had seemed excited about. Lantern fish, one of the girls told her, lived in the deep sea and were bioluminescent—except that particular pair were quite dead and squished, their big eyes popping free. But this was cool: each species had its own pattern of lighting up, and males and females of the same species had different lit parts.

      “And what is your art?” the Russian girl asked now.

      The Project, as she thought of it, was in fact coming together, had all night and all day been forming and reforming in her mind, like a school of fish swimming in circles and grabbing bites of plankton. She hadn’t spoken of it, but now both girls and Ray, smelling of ginger, were staring at her, waiting to hear.

      “I’m building paper sculptures,” she said, although she had not yet begun the actual work of the paper folding and softening she had in mind, nor had she settled on the inscriptions they would carry.

      “Sculptures of what?”

      These very literal, very concrete, very need-to-know people—they couldn’t help themselves.

      “We’ll see,” she said. “Inspired by the sea and its creatures. And by your work,” she added pointedly.

      Ray looked down his somewhat-reddened nose. “Does it have a title?”

      “Titles usually come last for me. You know, given by the work.”

      He didn’t know; that seemed clear. He rearranged his face, a jollier look. “Don’t forget our charismatic microfauna.”

      Huh?

      “The pteropods in particular. We love them.”

      “He is hugging Clione,” the girl added.

      Annabel again visualized the blobby naked one, the one that ripped the others from their shells. Beautiful, in the way that every being was, but the charisma was escaping her. Some people called it a “sea angel?” She would meditate on that. These fine, obsessive people were indulging her, and she would indulge them back.

      For the next few days Annabel worked like a dervish. She was in and out of the dry lab, putting cake pans of water in the big freezer, then popping them free and stacking up her ice floe collection. In her cabin and in the small library where she could spread out, she was cutting, folding, softening, and sculpting her homemade paper. She recruited Aurora to help her massage the paper to softness. Her locker filled with creations. She forgot to attend meals at the scheduled times and lived on fruit and nuts from the bowl in the galley. One day, when she sought the air, she watched an albatross following the ship, its huge long wings scything, and she was so overcome with emotion and exhaustion that she had to lie flat on the deck in the reclining goddess pose until her equilibrium was restored.

      The girls in the lab went about their business, counting copepods and incubating batches of various zooplankton species to calculate their growth rates. They listened to music on their iPods and talked too loudly. Once, squeezing past with pans of fresh water, Annabel bumped into Marybeth and spilled water on the floor.

      “Oh, no!” Marybeth shouted. “I’m so sorry!”

      “No problema,” Annabel reassured her. “But could you open the freezer door for me?”

      Marybeth pulled out her earbuds and opened the door. “You don’t need to remeasure? Is it water?”

      “Yes, water, H₂O, neutral pH of 7. See what I’m learning?”

      “You learn that freshwater freeze?” said Nastiya. “You are brilliant scientist.”

      “It’s for her art,” Marybeth said.

      “What art you make from your frozen Frisbees?”

      Annabel gave Marybeth a big wink. “The art is incubating,” she said.

      An hour later she came back with two inch-high sculptures of paper that she’d rubbed and rolled into tender gray softness. The girls were gone from the lab. She balanced each of the sculptures on the microscopes’ flat plates, as though they were next to be examined. One, she decided, bore a faint resemblance to a coccolithophore, the incredibly ornate soccer ball she’d been studying in books she found in the library. It was only an alga, she’d discovered, and got less love than the little animals, the way a cabbage got less love than a moose. The other—the one she gifted to the sensitive Marybeth—had appendages that might be wings, though, of course, that wasn’t the point—to look like anything. Instead, the sculptures carried an intention. She didn’t want to have to explain the intention but to let it simply emanate from her hands through the material and shaping into the universe—a healing gesture. Each one also carried a manifest symbol, folded inside where it would not be seen but might still be felt, like a heartbeat. She’d written the characters in the seal script she’d taught herself during her Chinese language phase. For Marybeth: sweet and happy. For Nastiya: kindness.

      The right night, their next-to-last on the water, arrived. Annabel made the announcement at dinner. She stood in the front of the galley in her Nepalese robe and a paper headdress decorated with silver stars and announced, “The spontaneous event that will not quite be spontaneous—because I’m telling you about it now—will occur tonight after dark. You may wish to appear on deck.”

      They all just looked at her.

      When she was seated again with her curried rice, Ray slid in next to her.

      “What spontaneous event?”

      “My art.”

      “And what might that be?”

      He didn’t look well. She would have liked to assist him with his diet.

      “The paper sculptures I’ve been making.”

      He seemed to relax then. After a minute he said, “It would probably be a good idea for me to know a little more. Do you require anything from the crew? You’re going to be on deck? Isn’t paper going to blow away? We can’t have anything going in the water.” He added, “Not that you would want to lose it.”

      “I was going to go chat with the captain after dinner, about pausing for the performance.”

      “Now it’s a performance?”

      She really didn’t want to go into detail, especially since the whole room seemed to be silenced (but for the engine noise and the cook’s clattering with the roasting pans), not even chewing now but leaning in, toward her and Ray. “Remember when you asked me for a title?”

      Ray nodded, but she could tell he didn’t remember.

      “Let’s not play games,” he said. “I’m in charge of this cruise, and I really need to know what everyone’s doing. It’s a team effort, even you.”

      “I’m calling it ‘Fire and Ice,’” she said.

      “Well, I trust you’re not going to be lighting anything on fire,” Ray said. “Fire on ships is a pretty big no-no.”

      “Oh,” she said.

      He leaned in closer. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

      “Maybe we should go into the hallway,” she said.

      Even then, she was sure everyone in the galley heard his explosion. It was something like, “Fuck no! You can’t light paper on fire! And you can’t put anything in or on the ocean! That’s completely prohibited by MARPOL!”

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