Frankentown (3 page)

They looked at the night sky and rid themselves of the jalapeños, which only Steve ate, by seeing who can throw them the farthest. Melted mozzarella then started sliding down their neck-pipes, clogging up their arteries by the minute. Seeing the whole bay at once,
even Oakland,
which they made the point of avoiding, with all its commotion, looked only peaceful from high up here. Airplanes took off from both Oakland and San Francisco airpots, cutting across the cloudless fall night sky.

 
Frank was reminded of the time they saw the strange light up in Berkeley Hills, when he was a kid, but that was well over three decades ago, long before he was alone.

 
He downed the last few ounces in the scotch bottle. That memory had to be drowned out at this moment, for he had his promotion to Head of Biology, a great academic achievement, to celebrate. He wondered whether he had ever told either Allen or Steve, though they had been friends long, about the incident with the light. He didn’t want to bring up his family with them, because, well, it was always a bummer, and Allen always got the look of a constipated-puppy on his face, as if he felt that Frank might have though they were all shot in front of him just yesterday.
It’s been a long time.

Within minutes, with Berkeley fall weather being what it was, fog rolled in rapidly and visibility plummeted to zero. Fall had indeed fallen like a sack of coal, and they couldn’t see as far as the closed hotdog stand covered in jalapeños, hundred feet below.

“Allen, can you come pick me up at 5?” asked Frank. Although he was thoroughly drunk, he was also well aware of the morning’s advantages.

“PM? A little late to start, don’t you think?” Allen asked with fake hope.
Frank answered Allen only with a look.
He’d need to get home soon to tell his wife what the plan was. After brief goodnights, Allen shared a cab with Steve, both going to turn in early to anticipate tomorrow’s ‘field trip’.

Frank started for the hills on foot, as his house was a mere 20 minute walk from the campus.

It was a straight shot across the campus and then uphill. Back in the 80’s, when the criminality wasn’t as high as it was now, they never used to lock the doors. The worst thing that had happened back then was when Frank was still a kid.
He awoke one night hearing noises from downstairs.
He crept downstairs expecting to find one of his parents down there brewing coffee or something. But the noises were strange. They sounded soft and quick, and there were many of them. When he got to the bottom floor and saw through the opened kitchen door, there was nothing, but few small wet spots on the ground and a few scratches here and there. Frank had trouble with sleeping since, and though he knew why, he’d never share.
In the morning Walter and GraceGrace decided their fridge was left at the mercy of neighborhood raccoons, and ‘that criminality has indeed risen’, so since then the front door was always locked and preferably never used.

In the time it took Frank to get up to the house,
 
the steep hill and frosty night fog sobered him up considerably.
As soon as he got home and took a shower, he went straight to bed, but was unable to rest.
The orange street lamps’ dim haze kept his mind from resting, as it still had something on which to focus.
So for the sake of falling into sleep and dreams,
he got up again just to draw the blinds,
and fall into a black feverish sleep.

Chapter Three

Asea

Saturday early morning, Allen pulled up to what he once knew as Frank's parent’s house. He loved it almost dearer than his own. It was probably the only house he’d ever seen that had a kitchen both downstairs and upstairs. The bottom one was for storing all their groceries and cooking complex dishes and the top was for sandwiches and snacks. It was connected to a living room, so it's always just been the floor on which the family used to entertain guests.

Pleasant room to be in.

Whenever he and his wife were invited over for dinner, and it had been more than once, the house was as important a place to him as to Frank, though for different reasons. The furniture inside breathed whiskey soaked leather and wood, and after dinner the mandatory cigar on the balcony was the only time Allen could smoke without Jen, his freckled redheaded wife, throwing up a fuss about it. Her mother died of cancer,
and even though it was not lung cancer,
she did not like Allen smoking.
Now he was hung over fiercely, which was a fact Jen had entirely missed when she got up to see him off.
 
Entirely due to his late night arrival, Allen could and had to look remarkably sober when the situation required.

The low rumble of Allen’s vintage engine signaled his arrival from around the corner.
He walked up and knocked on the front door,
behind which Frank was already waiting, ready to go.
 

 
After they loaded all of their equipment and bags of snacks, meaning mostly booze and cigars, they made for Steve’s house, down in lower Albany.
Steve too was ready to leave the house, but not yet.
First he had intended to invite them in for eggs and bacon to greet the fading effects of last night’s binge drinking. It was soon decided that they best make their way down to Monterey sooner rather than later, save the 45 minutes of eating breakfast for being already on the boat before it gets busy in the harbor.
 

Afterall, they had planned to sail quite far out, and not unlike on freeways, ship-traffic was better avoided with a head-start. On the way down they would stop at the first drive-through hamburger place, to divert their stomach’s attention from yesterday’s liquored sorrows.

They drove down 880 across the San Mateo bridge to CA-1 through Half-Moon Bay. On the way they noted a string of deserted beaches, far enough from civilization.
“We should stop here.” noted Steve,
 
as they passed a beach with a relatively large parking lot. “That would be a good place to prep the squid,
right Frank?” Steve asked, snickering.
Frank had no idea he was being mocked.

“Right. Let’s do that.” Frank hadn’t felt too much up to talking on most of such mornings. So much so that most of his classes started in the afternoon.
 

The drive was spent in mostly grunts and self pity of their self abuse. The greasy hamburgers were beginning to do their job and their heads felt less like they were being stretched far and wide. Their strength was yet to return. Though both Frank and Allen were professors, neither of them were exactly ‘morning people’, which went double for the weekends. Steve, who was more of a heavy social drinker, was used to getting up at 6 to go for a jog, followed by the choking down of a protein shake. The day hadn’t been much of a departure for him in terms of getting up.

“Okay,” started Frank, then with a significant pause he exhaled.
 

“Let’s find the boat.
 

It’s in the north harbor near Carmel.”

They had a boat dedicated just for such expeditions, and it had all the research equipment locked up on board safely already.

These trips were really mostly led by the three of them, and sometimes a volunteer student.

When they did have a student, they made him carry all the equipment and mocked him, even Steve joined in.

“Hey, we still need to get some supplies.” Said Allen, as they all rendezvoused ashore before going out.
They really didn’t.
Everything they needed was already packed in the car.

It was almost a ritual, in that it was never talked about. They just did it.

“Good Morning,” Steve said in his silly sounding german accent as they entered the bait and tackle shop, certainly not the only one in the neighborhood, but this was the only place around that actually sold squid jigs.
The three of them left the shore briskly, preceding many fishing boats and beating them to the punch.
They got ‘top pick’. It was an unwritten rule the Bay Research made with the fishing boats. Research.
The intent was to get a head start on what would essentially be extreme squid fishing,

for science.

It took nearly hour and half of getting far enough away from the shore, for the radar to pick up large quantities of bleeping dots, slowly moving north.
There must have been thousands,
maybe tens of thousands of Humboldt squid,
swarming beneath their feet.

Allen stopped the motors.

This job wasn’t mandatory. It wasn’t pushed onto them by their superiors or the board of directives at the university - they all wanted to do it.
For their love of the ocean.
The tags themselves were very expensive to make;
state of the art little gadgets.
Once attached, each one had the ability to record the surrounding temperature and depth of each animal.

Only for real ocean-geeks.
With squid tagging, there has never been a protocol, it was all about how many squid they can catch and record, and bring back a live sample. The steps sound easy enough; bait a squid, catch a squid, tag a squid, release.
All that mattered is that they attach all sixteen tags.
The purchased bucket of live squirming shrimp was received with no mercy. No shrimp cries could be heard when the helpless creatures got pierced with sharp hooks, nor when they flew through the air toward their inevitable doom. They also used small fish in combination with a shrimp-like squid jig and bits of bread.
Not one of the guys felt sorry for the shrimp, for they had all eaten something that included shrimp in some way just in the last week and surely, they would again eat some more that very evening to celebrate.
                                     
The cloudy sky quickly turned ominous purples, overcast and rather dark for the time of day.

Sharp rays of light penetrated the shallow areas of the clouds and shone down on the wavy desert-like plain of the ocean waves., bathing their boat with light. Sunglasses were not optional.
Not 10 minutes after they cast their lines, Steve caught the first squid. It was a Humboldt, and just over 92lbs. Big first catch of the day. Fortunately he’d put on his gloves in time for the tentacled beast not to cut his skin and pointed the sea-beast away into the ocean when he squeezed it squirted ink. The tag was then affixed to the squid’s fin from below, like a piercing.
There was no denying what was clearly a flinch of pain in the creature’s body language when the little hooks sunk into its rubbery body, but it did not matter.

The squid hardly felt it and it will be dead in a few months anyway. Just a year long lifespan.
“Is that even enough time to form relationships?
I mean they’re like the ultimate swinger.”

Allen tended to be overly sexual at times, but none of the guys really cared. He’d never dare at home.
Then Steve noticed something odd.
 

“Look at the way it moves its tentacles.”

When he spoke, his silly accent was suddenly not so silly anymore. The frightened cephalopod was soon on its way to abandonment, hopefully forgetting the trauma it had been caused before turning to alcoholism.

What none of them were ever able to appreciate was that any of the squid they tagged were quickly rejected by the rest of the crowd, quickly attacked by other squid and outcast to be loners, forced to seek exile in colder waters with as few predators as possible.
                         
Trying their hardest to survive, against all odds.
The nature didn’t allow for such a drastic force of tampering, and without the slightest sympathy for its victims. Not unlike much of species on earth, the squids perished after the human touch.

The quota for the day was to get the most they could get in the 30 minutes from the first squid they catch. By catching squid for 30 minutes each tagging, the sample sizes would make for fair tests.

The vast numbers of the cephalopods have depleted much of the fish in the ocean and went starving, so they were ‘biting’ indeed. By 4 o’clock they caught over 70 squid, and would have been able to catch more in the last two minutes but they ran out of time. The fishing boats were supposed to start coming out, but neither one of them saw any. It was falling dark.
 

So now,
 
over hundred-grand’s worth of custom-made scientific equipment was floating around the ocean, attached to lonely cephalopods. In a few days the squid bodies will reject the tags, which will then float up to the surface and send statistics to a satellite. Then someone will have to come again to pick up the tags and reapply them to other squid.

The day was a great success. All the animals showed on the radar were headed ahead of the migrating colony towards the north, perhaps leading the way as martyrs in the eyes of the squid, but more accurately, running from the rest of the cloud to avoid being cannibalized. South served nothing for the squid who prefer to live in colder waters, despite marvelously adapting to global warming. The only way to go was to latently head the same way as everybody else and hope for no trouble.

Throughout the day, various things have been discussed to break the monotony of the ocean, perhaps the most notable one of interest that caught Frank’s ears was listening to Steve talk about what he described as “strange, like disco lights I’ve seen oüver the East Bay heels.” The conversation quickly turned to Unidentified Flying Objects, though each one of them had a personal opinion about it, Steve had clearly made up his mind about the topic in the past.

As did Frank.

When he was a kid, on a Saturday, he, his brother Lyle and his parents went to the Lawrence Hall of Science in the Berkeley Hills. After viewing the temporary dinosaur exhibit and raiding the gift shop for useless paraphernalia and freeze-dried ice-cream, the family gathered on the overhanging balcony towards the bay and watched the sunset. Last rays of the setting sun broke through the pollution and cast purple, yellow and orange, causing one of Bay Area’s signature luscious sunsets.
Then, Frank’s mom first saw a strange ball of light travelling south at higher speed than an airplane.
Frank’s father first dismissed it as such, but soon realized a plane it could not be. The ball of light took a 90 degree turn towards space and disappeared into the outer stratosphere. Frank, due to being height-challenged at the time, only saw the end of it after being held up.
The glowing point of light then shot up into orange sky.
He’s never forgotten.