pH: A Novel. Nancy Lord

head. Marybeth was trying to hug her. Captain Billy announced, “It never happened,” but he was smiling and posing with the trident like King Neptune. She heard someone else say, “I have no clue, but I liked it.” Helen crept up and took ahold of her sleeve. “I suppose you know that in the mythology, Sedna’s father cut off her fingers, and her fingers became the seals, walrus, and the whales.”

      It was right then—at that perfect and preordained minute—that the porpoises appeared. They were suddenly all around the ship, their splashes catching the ship’s light and making their own fire. The sound of them, breaking the water and blowing their quick and bubbled breaths, rose above the ship’s rumble.

      It was in that same moment that Annabel became aware of Ray and his daughter at the side rail. Aurora stood in front, Ray behind her with his arms wrapped around her shoulders. “Stood” was not the right word. The girl was leaping, springing from her toes, and singing out, “I see them! I see them! I see you!” and her father was trying to hold her, however awkwardly, down to earth.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      On Friday, when they were back in port, they unloaded most of their gear and crates of samples into the warehouse and the vans, and then the whole group walked uptown to the Poopdeck, a notorious fishermen’s bar. They swayed up the street like drunken sailors, their weeklong sea legs stumbling over the unmoving earth, the concrete sidewalk. Their newly awakened phones held to their ears, they shouted to friends and family. “I’m back!” “It was great!” “Tomorrow!” “He said what?” They may or may not have noticed the sun lowering behind the mountains, the colors—the vegetative greens, the roses and golds of summer’s late flowers—popping. Emboldened crows loitered along the roadside. Other people—other people!—passed them, pushing baby strollers, walking a dog the size of a small moose, in rattling pickups with open windows and music blasting.

      At the Poopdeck, they leaned on the bar, tipsy even before the first pitchers were poured, and crowded around a couple of tables to wolf burgers and fries. Aurora waved breadsticks.

      The bar was famous for its sawdust floor smelling of sour beer, its low ceilings, and the probably-thousands of dollar bills tacked all over the walls and signed with names and hometowns. There were, in addition, decorative flourishes consisting of women’s underwear.

      There was the inevitable explanation. “Dude, it has nothing to do with poop,” Tina bellowed. “It’s the back part of the ship, the deck over the cabins in the back. It’s from some French word.”

      Ray went right for a double whiskey, his purification over. He started with the good Jameson and was quickly softening into a soporific repose. The barmaid had just shouted at a very drunk person lighting a cigarette, and Ray observed to Colin beside him, “Only in Alaska. They can serve you ’til you’re falling down drunk, but you betcha we’re gonna keep the air all fresh and healthy for you.” Only in Alaska, too, were you encouraged to bring guns, concealed and otherwise, into bars—because you never knew when you might need to defend your fellow tavern-mates from a mass murderer.

      Ray watched his crew with benign amusement. There was pool playing and music, and then there was dancing. There was drinking and more drinking, beer and tequila shots and some fancy flavored vodkas. The students had worked hard and earned their revelry. They would be hungover tomorrow, but it was a long drive back to Fairbanks and Ray already knew who would share the driving. The others could sleep. They could stop for coffee as often as anyone wanted, at any roadhouse or wilderness espresso stand, and they could stop for roadside barfing. Aurora was the only one he needed to supervise tonight, and he didn’t even care if she, for once, filled up on junk food.

      In most respects, the cruise had been a success. The calm weather had made it all easy. They’d reached all the stations and got what they needed—another CTD data set, the prod, the nutrients, his beloved zooplankton, the OA samples. He’d taken umpteen zooplankton photos, some of which were very good indeed and all of which would occupy him for weeks of early mornings as he reviewed and sorted them. No one had been hurt, or even gotten seriously seasick. There’d been no real drama, not after Mr. Acidification had left. That Annabel woman, he could have done without her. The stuff with the ice and the mashed-up paper she called sculpture—he wouldn’t need to think of it again, beyond putting some bullshit statement in his reports. He had made it through Seahab and met his reward.

      Still, all was not well with the ocean. The surface temperatures had been alarmingly hot—more than a degree warmer than they’d ever found in September, in places up to five degrees above the average. In sixty-degree water, phytoplankton had been spurred to a late bloom. Even with that extra food, zooplankton numbers were low, the usual species seeking deeper, cooler water. The tows were sometimes jammed with jellyfish. Of course, as he was always impressing upon the students, considerable fluctuation in the abundance of different species was expected year to year.

      Some results they’d have to wait for. All those samples to be tested for alkalinity and carbon. Then they’d learn more of the acidification story. He hadn’t seen any obvious damage, but that didn’t mean that the animals weren’t working harder to build their calcium carbonate structures.

      Ray ordered another drink and leaned back against the wall. Compared to the Earth’s destruction and the many mysteries it was his obligation to confront, his personal issues should feel like bug bites on a bear. Still, it was his life. When he’d checked his phone, there was nothing from his wife except a businesslike reminder that she’d be away for the weekend and he should make sure that Sam had what he needed for a school project. He vaguely remembered something about a triathlon Nelda had been training for—this might have been the weekend. There’d also been three increasingly hostile calls from someone in the vast university bureaucracy demanding that he immediately print, sign, scan, and e-mail something called an effort certification statement. There was a garbled message from someone wanting a pteropod photograph. Everyone always wanted to use his photos; no one was ever interested in paying for them.

      Ray didn’t need praise or monetary reward, but he wouldn’t have minded some acknowledgment, from someone, somewhere, of the essential work his team had just performed. Even a simple voice mail or text along the way: thinking of you, hope it’s all going well. He imagined Jackson Oakley wishing him well, apologizing for his absence. That would never happen.

      Annabel, in slingback shoes and a low-cut, thigh-high dress, had found her groove swing dancing. She danced with Tina and Cinda and then with Alex, Robert, and Marybeth in turn, and then back to Robert. Robert turned out to be an excellent swing dancer, capable of lifting, spinning, and flipping her, and the two of them flew around the floor with abandon, only sometimes clobbering someone with an elbow or a heel.

      When they took a break, Robert launched into a long and nostalgic story about a former dance partner in California, a married Latina with two small children. He’d met her at a dance club, and they’d danced so perfectly together, so completely in sync. All the other dancers admired them. They won contests. “Totally innocent,” Robert said. “It was all about the dance.”

      The hot-blooded Latino husband, in any case, had busted Robert’s car’s headlights, and Robert had never gone back to the dance club or attempted to see the woman again. Then he’d moved to Fairbanks.

      Annabel listened to the great unwinding of details about the woman’s body, her outfits, and the gold teeth that glittered when she laughed, and she partially revised her assumption about Robert’s gayness. It seemed to her that Robert had either loved the woman or wanted to be her.

      They danced again, and Annabel shouted above the music, “I’m a cuckoo coccolithophore!” She imagined herself covered in shifting calcium plates, and with extra swings of her hips, she willed crunchy good health toward the Gulf, to all the precious coccolithophores and their brethren.

      Aurora had wanted to come to the bar, of course. She could have stayed on the ship, watching a movie or texting her friends. She had felt in exile during the long week on the ship. She had thought it would be more exciting. Her father had oversold it. There was a lot of water out there, a lot of nothing.