pH: A Novel. Nancy Lord

waves and collapsed. “A confused sea” was the term she’d heard for this, when individual waves come at one another from different directions. She loved this, the way the waves moved, and the language of confusion. She held her camera out over the rail and pointed it straight down, snapped a picture, then studied the image on the little screen. The focus was as confused as the sea, blues blurred and softened into such beauty that she wondered for two seconds why she even tried being an artist, why it wasn’t enough to simply welcome what nature already provided, to see it clear or squint-eyed or as though through tears.

      But then, it was because she was an artist that she had that aesthetic reaction. And if her personal aesthetic leaned to the blurry, abstracted side of things, that was what she could present to the world: the beauty not of nature itself but of sight. She had written in her last artist statement, “I don’t copy nature; I reveal it.” When Ray had invited her to look at his magnified zooplankton photos, she’d admired them. They were clear, literal, scientific images. The pteropods she was anxious to learn about featured exquisite whirled shells, gossamer wings, buds of antennae like tiny soft nipples. The representations were perfect unto themselves. But they were not art. The most imaginative things about them were what some people saw in them, the common names they’d given the two kinds: sea butterflies and sea angels. So much lovelier than snails and slugs.

      Ray had been kind to take the time to show her his photos and to explain some of the plankton studies. His daughter had been with them, looking more interested in Annabel’s hair than in the photos and the colored graphs that showed what Ray called a time series. “Are you famous?” she’d asked.

      Annabel was used to getting this question from children and had learned that modesty was not her friend. If she said no, children simply wandered off and gave her, and whatever art lessons she might have been teaching, their complete disregard, as though she were no better than a fly, or one of their own parents. But if she said yes, she had their full, admiring attention.

      She was nowhere near famous—how many artists were?—but she did have adequate credentials. She’d once, years ago, won an arts council fellowship, and the Anchorage Museum had purchased one of her light installations. She also had several commissioned projects in and on various public buildings, including a waste-water plant. And she had been to two prestigious artist colonies. A medium-sized fish in a small pond, she knew, but what the heck.

      “Yes, I’m quite famous,” she’d told Aurora, who regarded her with revived interest.

      Annabel liked science and scientists; really, she did. She was always interested in the links between art and science. Both required creative minds, speculation and hypothesizing, experimenting, sometimes-tedious detail work, a willingness to fail and try again. She read about the sciences and did her best to understand them, at least in the broad scope of meaning. She appreciated their importance.

      She could not say the same for the reverse relationship. What was with the raised eyebrows and rolled eyes, the looks of incomprehension? The worst of it had come from that constipated man who was fortunately now gone. When they’d first boarded the ship and she’d struck up what she thought was a cordial conversation about the chemicals used in papermaking and why she made her own art paper, he’d looked around her as though searching for an emergency exit. Although now that she knew he really was looking for a way off the ship, she would cut him some slack. His mind would not have been prepared to consider the ecological shadow of treated paper products and the superiority of hemp paper.

      Annabel snapped another picture as a milky jellyfish floated by. Her past was streaming into memory: water lapping at her perfect small toes, the cries of gulls, the salty taste when she accidentally swallowed a mouthful of ocean. Back there, at the Jersey Shore, the child she was had collected shells, of course, and arranged them carefully on her windowsill at home, inspired by their whorls and polished shapes, by their pink and cream colors. She’d brought home starfish, too, and was aghast when they began to stink and she realized she’d dehydrated and killed living creatures.

      The intricate designs of bird feet in the sand, the patterns the waves and wind made in the same sand, the different colors of the ocean on different days, the shells and the pebbles and the tiny grains of sand themselves—all of that, she was sure, had shaped her as an artist. She was all about seeing the patterns and finding the sequences, this and this and this going together, and then breaking the pattern, with that.

      Naturally, she’d been drawn to Alaska. In addition to having incredible light, it was a good fit for her pioneering, anarchistic bent. She’d lived now for a long time in the Interior, attuned to the curves of oxbow rivers and the lines of birch forests, to feathers of frost and the peach colors of winter days. She’d worked with natural materials like birchbark and branches, always careful to collect only from downed trees and not too much of that. She still had a recurring nightmare that involved writhing starfish, legions of them baking in the sun with all their podia flailing.

      Here she was finally on a ship at sea! Her entire boating career to this point had been one summer sternwheeling down the silty Tanana past dog yards and expensive log homes. Her, a cruise guide! It hadn’t been much money, but more than an artist makes, and the tourists had been agreeable enough, even if they were more interested in the chicken dinner than the river and all began to look alike after awhile, which was a terrible thing for an artist to admit.

      The shoreline now was already far behind them, lost somewhere beyond a bank of fog. The bottom was a long way down. She took another photo of the water, and then of water meeting fog, distance.

      She remembered, from when she was very young, an annoying uncle joking with her: “Why does the ocean roar? Because it has crabs on its bottom!” He had thought it fun to pinch her skinny butt. He would not have known that her own delight came from somewhere else, from within the language. A bottom was one thing, and it was something else compared to that thing. That might have been the beginning, for her, of visualizing possibility.

      Later that morning, when she got to put her eye to the microscope focused on Limicina helicina, the shelled pteropod, she was very excited, until she realized she was looking at the fluttering of her own eyelash. This was not easy work—bouncing in a boat while trying to hold still and peer through a lens at a minuscule something that was sloshing around with a bunch of other teenytinies. It seemed they were in the wrong season to find many mature pteropods, which would be visible to the eye—like a lentil pea, Ray had said. She conjured up the images she’d seen on his computer. In those, brownish snail bodies stretched from their spiraling, translucent shells into the parts that were specialized feet, not made for sliming along trails but for moving—flapping, even—through water. In some of the photos the foot was clearly split in two, exactly like wings. The foot-wings, Ray told her now, with what seemed like excessive pleasure, made a mucous that was cast out like a net to catch algae. “That’s how it feeds.”

      It was good that she had a well-developed imagination, because when Annabel finally thought she could see the little beast she couldn’t see any shell at all, just a tubish body and fuzzy twitching parts that she assumed were the mucousy wings. It was entirely possible she was out of focus or still looking at an eyelash.

      “Especially in the spring, these guys are usually found in swarms in surface waters,” Ray was saying. “Not so much now. The other pteropod we have here, the naked, carnivorous one we were talking about, is larger but much less common.”

      It was a pteropod-eat-pteropod world, that was for sure. Annabel remembered seeing the naked one among Ray’s photos, too. It looked to her like a miniature—very miniature—beluga whale, its long bulbous body flanked by stubby foot-wings that were like the whale’s stubby flippers. It was largely transparent, with a peachy sac in its center. Ray had made a point of telling her that in a well-fed animal, the sac, which was its digestive gland, would be bigger and darker.

      “You are wearing glitter?” the Russian girl asked, with what seemed like alarm.

      “Da,” she said.

      “Da?” The girl’s nostrils flared, horselike.

      “Yes, I am wearing glitter.” Annabel was