pH: A Novel. Nancy Lord

on each hand, made chicken-scratch notes in green ink.

      She wanted to make sure Annabel understood that the ocean wasn’t turning to acid, only becoming more acidic, while still being on the alkaline side of the pH scale. “Sea life evolved in a very stable pH situation. We’re asking creatures to live in a different environment now, very suddenly. This is the hard part—we don’t know exactly how individual species will respond—are responding. We know that corals are having a very hard time. And you heard Ray talking about pteropods, the marine snails. They’re very vulnerable. Anything with a carbonate shell is affected.”

      She drew a carbon dioxide molecule on Annabel’s paper, then a water molecule and one for carbonic acid. “This is the thing,” she said. “In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide stays carbon dioxide. The carbon and oxygen atoms stay bonded. In the ocean, CO₂ reacts with seawater. It forms carbonic acid, which releases these hydrogen ions and reduces the pH. The hydrogen ions combine with carbonate ions to form bicarbonates. Then there are fewer carbonate ions left to make calcium carbonate, the major building blocks needed by shell builders.”

      Annabel was studying her crude drawing. Helen hesitated to get into the aragonite versus calcite distinction or to be specific about saturation horizons. She knew how easy it was to pile on too much, to let her passion for the subject overtake another person’s tolerance for it. Keep it simple, Jackson was always saying.

      Annabel looked up. “So you could say that reduced carbonate ions lower the saturation state.”

      Helen tried not to be surprised by the non-third-grade reference. “That’s exactly what we say. We say the water is undersaturated with aragonite, one of the main forms of calcium carbonate.”

      Annabel said, “Ray showed me some pictures. His little animals have to work harder to form the calcium carbonate for their shells, and if it gets too bad, their shells actually start to dissolve.”

      “That’s exactly right. In the Arctic we’re already seeing corrosive water.”

      “We really are fucked.”

      Colin, who’d been noisily poking through the candy drawer, came and stood by them while he unwrapped a Sugar Daddy. “Such language,” he said. He glanced at Annabel’s pad. “What kind of art do you do?”

      Annabel extracted a pair of sunglasses from her purse and put them on. “Just about everything. Drawings, paintings, sculpture, collage, fiber, constructions of various kinds, some printmaking, installations. Sometimes it’s ephemeral. Usually there’s an element of healing.”

      Colin did a funny thing with his eyebrows.

      Helen said, “I imagine you have a particular project with us?”

      “I brought materials,” Annabel said. “Colored pencils, paper, some clay, wire. I have to see what presents itself. I don’t impose anything. Very possibly there’ll be an element of light. I’ll leave you to your studies.” She started to get up. “Sugar Daddy!”

      Colin jumped aside, as though in fear of having his candy ripped from his hands.

      “I would love to have that wrapper. Just the paper.”

      Colin peeled off the paper and handed it over. Then Annabel, in her movie-star glasses, was to and through the doorway, waving the candy wrapper in one hand, flapping her art pad with the other, and calling back to them, “Grazie, grazie, beautiful people!”

      Colin turned to Helen. “Ephemeral art?”

      Ephemeral art was the least of it. Helen wanted to know how a person who seemed to understand saturation horizons could also embrace woo-woo energy fields, and why that person would need to add Italian to her enthusiastic French. People thought she lived in two worlds.

      CHAPTER THREE

      When it was sufficiently dark, Annabel joined the crew to watch them tow for plankton. Robert, the kindly doctoral student in charge, explained the mechanics of a bizarre contraption called a Multinet as three other students, in their float coats and steel-toed rubber boots, danced around the back deck to “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”

      The idea was that, under the cover of darkness, zooplankton and small fish rose through the water column to feed near the surface. The tows, with different fine-meshed nets opening in different parts of the water column, would capture what was present at the various depths. The collections would then be preserved in jars and hauled back to the university for analysis—to determine how they compared to other years and how they related to water temperature and other conditions.

      “It’s mostly plankton,” Robert said, as he jerked on the Multinet’s frame, sliding it another foot toward the stern. He was a tall man with a freckled face and broad hips emphasized by his blousy, bibbed rain pants. Annabel was sure he was gay, not that she cared about such things. “We won’t get many fish,” he was saying. “Fish can outswim the nets, so any fish we collect are usually dead or dying. They also get squished once they’re in the net, from the pressure.”

      The ship slowed, and the nearly full moon that had been trailing them began to make tremendous bounces through the dark sky. They were rolling up and over the swells now, as opposed to plowing straight through. Off the stern, fingerling fish leapt from the water like popcorn, flashing silver as they caught light from the deck.

      Annabel got out of the way while they deployed the Multinet, and then Ray appeared in his slippers and watched with her.

      The cable went out, and where it cut through and disturbed the water a sparkling that was not reflected moonlight surrounded it.

      “OMG,” she said. Her hands flew to the top sides of her head.

      “Dinoflagellates,” Ray said. He looked at her, as if trying to see whether she had any clue about what was happening, or if her head might be coming apart. “These are single-celled, microscopic, major producers in the ocean because they’re photosynthetic—they deliver the sun’s energy to the rest of the food web. Their bioluminescence is a defense mechanism, triggered when a disturbance, like the movement of a potential predator, deforms the cell.” He might have been laughing, amused with what he was saying. “The light flash is meant to attract a secondary predator to attack the one trying to eat the dinoflagellate. What a system, huh?”

      He went on to tell her more about bioluminescence than she could possibly understand—about oxygen, ions, chlorophyll, cysts. Different organisms used it for different, and sometimes multiple, reasons: to evade predators, to attract prey, to communicate with their own species (“Here I am—come mate with me”), to communicate to other species (“Here I am—get the hell away from me”).

      She was stuck on the name. “Terrible whips,” she said.

      “Huh?”

      “From the Greek and Latin. Like dinosaur, terrible lizard.”

      “Actually,” he said, “I think it’s dinos, whirling. Whirling whips. They have the two flagella. Their propulsion—one makes them whirl, the other acts like a rudder.” He went digging in his pocket, pulled out a crinkly packet, held it out to her. “Ginger?”

      She shook her head. She wanted to keep her eyes on the spark-glow, dimmer now, and on the mercuric surface of the moonlit water. All that nearly invisible life was pulsing together in a radiant force, a vital energy. She could feel her Vishuddha chakra heating her throat and spilling into the flow that unites all creation. Her hands took the prayer position over her heart.

      “Tomorrow,” Ray said, “come by the dry lab if it’s not too rough, and we can look at some live zooplankton. I’ll find you some pteropods. We’ll do a ring net tow in the morning and see what we get.”

      “I’d like that,” she said. “Thank you.” Annabel would never mention it—not unless he asked—but the man’s aura was darker and ashier than a healthy person’s should be.

      Very early the next morning,