A Tale for the Time Being (17 page)

3.

In the two weeks following the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactors, the global bandwidth was flooded with images and reports from Japan, and for
that brief period of time, we were all experts on radiation exposure and microsieverts and plate tectonics and subduction. But then the uprising in Libya and the tornado in Joplin superseded the
quake, and the keyword cloud shifted to
revolution
and
drought
and
unstable air masses
as the tide of information from Japan receded. Occasionally an article would appear
in
The New York Times
about Tepco’s mismanagement of the meltdown, or the government’s failure to respond and protect its citizens, but this news rarely made the front page
anymore. The Business section carried gloomy reports about the cost of Japan’s cascading disasters, deemed to be the most expensive in history, and dire projections for the future of the
country’s economy.

What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more
durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing. In towns up and down the coast of Japan, stone markers were found on hillsides, engraved with ancient warnings:

Do not build your homes below this point!

Some of the warning stones were more than six centuries old. A few had been shifted by the tsunami, but most had remained safely out of its reach.

“They’re the voices of our ancestors,” said the mayor of a town, destroyed by the wave. “They were speaking to us across time, but we didn’t listen.”

Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories, like geodrift, into its orbit? What is its gyre memory?
How do we measure the half-life of its drift?

The tidal wave, observed, collapses into tiny particles, each one containing a story:

These images, a minuscule few representing the inconceivable many, eddy and grow old, degrading with each orbit around the gyre, slowly breaking down into razor-sharp fragments
and brightly colored shards. Like plastic confetti, they’re drawn into the gyre’s becalmed center, the garbage patch of history and time. The gyre’s memory is all the stuff that
we’ve forgotten.

4.

Ruth’s mind felt like a garbage patch, an undifferentiated mat of becalmed and fractured pixels. She sat back in her chair, away from the glowing screen, and closed her
eyes. The pixels lingered, dancing behind her eyelids in the darkness. She’d spent the afternoon watching clips of bullying and harassment on YouTube and other video-sharing sites in both the
United States and Japan, but the clip she was looking for, “The Tragic and Untimely Death of Transfer Student Nao Yasutani,” which according to Nao had once gone viral, was nowhere to
be found.

She rubbed her hands up and down across her face, kneading her temples and pressing her fingers into her eye sockets. She felt like she’d been trying to suck the girl out of the glowing
screen with the sheer force of her will and the fixity of her eyeballs. Why did it matter so much? But it did. She needed to know if Nao was dead or alive. She was searching for a body.

She stood and stretched, and then wandered downstairs. The house was empty. Oliver had received a large shipment of dawn redwood seedlings, which he was planting over at the NeoEocene clear-cut.
He’d left early that morning, whistling the dwarves’ tune from
Snow White
. Hi ho, Hi ho. Nothing made him happier than planting baby trees. The cat was outside on the porch,
waiting for him to come home.

It was half past four and time to start thinking about dinner. As she passed by the dining room, she caught a whiff of the fishy odor of barnacle death. The smell was stronger now. She walked to
the telephone, picked up the receiver, and dialed Callie’s number.

5.

“They’re goosenecks,” Callie said, examining the barnacles on the freezer bag. “
Pollicipes polymerus
. Order Pedunculata. A gregarious pelagic
species, not really native, but it’s not uncommon to find them on tidewrack that’s drifted in from farther out at sea.”

She glanced across the kitchen at Ruth, who was heating water for tea. “Is this the bag you found below Gudrun and Horst’s place?”

When she spoke with Callie on the phone, Ruth hadn’t mentioned where she’d found the bag, but Callie hadn’t sounded at all surprised to hear from her and had offered to come
right over. It was almost as if she had been expecting the call, but of course Callie was helpful that way. She was a marine biologist and environmental activist who ran the foreshore monitoring
program on the island and did volunteer work for a marine mammal protection agency. She made her living as a naturalist on the massive cruise liners that plied the sheltered waters of the Inland
Passage on their way to and from Alaska.

“The belly of the beast,” Callie said. “Those cruisers are the people we have to reach. They’re the ones who have the resources to make change happen.”

She often told a story about the time she was standing on the deck of a ship bound for Anchorage, pointing out a pod of humpbacks to the excited passengers, who were crowded around the railing,
snapping pictures and shooting video. One elderly man stood apart from the rest. When Callie offered him her place at the rail so he could get a better view, he laughed, derisively.

“They’re just whales.”

Later in the cruise, she gave a lecture about the order Cetacea. She showed video and talked about their complex communities and social behaviors, about their bubble nets and echolocation and
the range of their emotions. She played recordings of their vocalizations, illustrating their clicks and songs. To her surprise, the old man was in the audience, listening.

Later, they spotted another pod, which came closer this time, treating them to a spectacular display of surfacing behaviors, breaching, spy-hopping, lobtailing, and slapping. The old man came up
on deck to watch.

At the end of the cruise, as they were approaching port in Vancouver, the old man sought her out and handed her an envelope.

“For your whales,” he said.

When she thanked him, he shook his head. “Don’t.”

They disembarked, and Callie forgot about the envelope. When she got home, she found it and opened it. Inside was a check made out to her marine mammal protection agency for half a million
dollars. She thought it was a joke. She thought she had miscounted the zeros. She sent it in to the office, and they deposited it. The check cleared.

Using the passenger list, she tracked the old guy down at his home in Bethesda and questioned him. At first, he was reluctant, but finally he explained. He had been a bomber pilot during World
War II, he told her, stationed at an air base in the Aleutians. They used to fly out every day, looking for Japanese targets. Often, when they couldn’t locate an enemy vessel, or the weather
conditions turned bad, they would be forced to abort their mission and fly back to base, but landing with a full payload was dangerous, so they would discharge their bombs into the sea. From the
cockpit of the plane, they could see the large shadows of whales, moving below the surface of the water. From so high up, the whales looked small. They used them for target practice.

“It was fun,” the old man told Callie over the phone. “What did we know?”

“They’re filter feeders,” Callie said, about the barnacles. “But they’re not very good at moving their cirri around, so they rely on a vigorous
movement of water to get their nutrition. That’s why they prefer more exposed shorelines than ours.”

“What’s a cirri?” Ruth asked, putting two mugs of tea down and then pouring a third for Oliver, who had just come back from tree planting. He took off his jacket and hung it
up, and then he joined them, with the cat following hard on his heels.

“Cheers,” Callie said, taking a sip of the tea. “Cirri are the barnacle’s arms and legs. Feathery tendrils they use to pull plankton in.”

“I don’t see any feathery tendrils,” Ruth said. She didn’t like the barnacles. They were ugly and they gave her the creeps.

“They only extend them when they’re underwater,” Oliver said, wrapping his reddened fingers around the warm mug. “And anyway, these guys are dead.”

Ruth inspected the barnacles, which looked pretty much the same as they had when they were alive. They were attached to the freezer bag by long dark stalks that were tough and rubbery and
covered with small bumps. At the free end of each stalk was a hard white cluster of platelike shells that looked like fingernails. Callie used the tip of her pen to point to one of the rubbery
stalks. Pesto jumped up onto the counter to watch.

“This is the foot, or the peduncle,” she said. “And this hard white part is the capitulum, or the head.”

The cat sniffed at the barnacle, and Ruth pushed him away. “Does it have a face?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” Callie said. “But it’s got a dorsal side, which is up, and a ventral side, which is down.”

She took a small plastic box from the pocket of her fishing vest and opened it. Inside was a collection of forensic instruments: a scalpel, a pair of tweezers, forceps, scissors, a small ruler.
She selected the largest barnacle and used the scalpel to slice carefully between the plastic bag and the base of the peduncle. She removed the barnacle and laid it on the counter in front of her.
She took out the ruler and measured the creature from foot to head.

“Can you tell how old it is?” Oliver asked.

“Hard to say. They reach sexual maturity at about a year, and full maturity at five. They can live up to twenty years or more. This fellow, or gal—actually it doesn’t matter
because they’re hermaphroditic—is a mature adult. They can grow up to twenty centimeters, or about eight inches long, but this one’s only just over three inches, which suggests
that the colony is fairly young, or the conditions weren’t great, or both. Hey, Oliver, can I test-drive that scope on your iPhone?”

He had recently hacked his iPhone by attaching a small 45X digital microscope lens onto the case with superglue. Somehow Callie already knew about this, too. She had just gotten back to the
island. How could she know? She held out her hand, and he snapped the case mod onto the phone, opened the app, and passed it over to her. The app activated the iPhone’s light as she aimed the
lens at the barnacle’s head. A close-up image appeared on the small screen. “This is awesome!” she said. “You see these gorgeous calcareous plates?”

Ruth peered over her shoulder at the small screen. The plates looked like toenails on the foot of a prehistoric reptile.

“When they’re first secreted, they’re shiny and pearlescent, but gradually as they’re buffeted about by the waves, they get pitted and dull.”

“Like us,” Ruth said, sitting back down.

“Exactly,” Callie said. “So that’s another clue to age. All in all, I’d say that this colony’s been floating around for at least a couple years, probably more
like three or four.”

“Three years puts it before the tsunami,” Oliver said.

“Well, like I said, it’s hard to be more precise than that. But it seems unlikely that we’d be seeing stuff from the tsunami washing up on our beaches yet. We’re tucked
in pretty far back here.”

She turned off the light on the microscope and admired the lens. “How’d you attach it?”

As Oliver explained the hack, Ruth picked up the severed barnacle between her fingers and studied it. This new information added little support for her tsunami theory. Perhaps Muriel was right
after all. Perhaps the freezer bag had been jettisoned from a ship, although Nao didn’t seem like the type to take an Alaskan cruise. Maybe she had cast it out to sea, like a message in a
bottle, before the tsunami, or maybe it had been in her pocket, along with the rocks, when she walked into the ocean and drowned. Any of these were plausible explanations, but none of them felt
right. Ruth didn’t like the barnacles to begin with, and now she resented them for failing to provide the evidence she was looking for.

“Why are they called goosenecks, anyway?” she asked. “They don’t look anything like geese.”

Callie had returned the iPhone to Oliver and was packing up her kit. “Actually, they do. There’s a kind of goose called a barnacle goose, which has a long black neck and a white
head. Your little friends here were named for it. People used to find these guys attached to a piece of driftwood, which they assumed was a branch from a barnacle tree. They thought the capitula
were eggs laid in the tree, and that the barnacle geese hatched from them. It’s a reasonable chain of assumptions, but of course they were entirely wrong.”

“Assumptions suck,” Ruth said. She put the barnacle down on the counter, and Pesto, who was waiting, promptly snatched it and ran off with it. He carried it to the middle of the
kitchen floor and dropped it, took another sniff, and then turned up his nose. He wouldn’t deign to eat an already dead thing.

“They’re a great delicacy in Spain,” Callie said. “The peduncle is especially tender. You boil it for a couple minutes, peel off the skin, hold it by the shell, put the
foot in your mouth, and . . .
pop!
” She pantomimed this, making the sound with her lips. “Meat slips right out of the shell. Dipped in a little garlic butter and lemon
. . . yum!”

. . . . .

It was just before six, and already quite dark outside. Ruth took a headlamp and they walked Callie to her truck. Looking up, she could see that the clouds had parted and a full moon was
lighting up the sky. In the moonlight, the treetops were threaded with pale tendrils of mist, but below, the boughs of the cedars were dark and heavy with the rain that had been falling all day.
The beam of her headlamp caught a shape in the branches.