The Anemones

I’m at a fringing reef off Biläo looking at the wide array of fish—yellow tangs, black durgons, a small school of blue-striped grunts. A pair of dog snappers, yellow with large lips, hovers beneath the curl of a fan coral, also yellow, and from their partial camouflage they look at me looking at them. They know how to disguise themselves amidst the like-colored fauna. (I know the fans look like plants, as do many of the soft corals, but they’re actually colonial animals made up of many individuals cooperating as one organism.) The sight of them gives me great delight: their large amber eyes, their honey-gold sheen, their sense of security against the similarly colored background of the fan—the science of them, the perfection of their bodies, their evolution. The sight of me makes them wary. From my mouth size they know that I pose no real threat in terms of oral attack. But what am I, exactly, a question I often ask myself, especially on dives: this large, peculiar creature with what appears to be one enormous eye, blowing bubbles out of each side of the oral rictus? The dog snappers hover motionlessly beneath the fan’s curl, but they’re poised to bolt forward or jet backwards in a nanosecond should I make any sudden movement. If I come closer—I am roughly three-feet away—they make imperceptible adjustments to preserve the distance. So the sight of them causes me sadness as well. Why must I be avoided, even feared? Of course, I understand why—humans are not to be trusted. Many humans who dive do so with spear guns. These snappers might very well have been the targets of one, or more. And a good spear gun right now, or even a bad one, could skewer these two in one clean shot through the gills and in under an hour they’d appear on a plate garnished with lemon and a sprig of parsley.

Below me, craggy sheets of fire coral provide shelter for an arrow crab, a creature that resembles eight long narrow jointed sticks extending from the central pillar of a thick, short trunk, and it too is looking at me, registering me, through orange eyes with white horizontal stripes that look like bandwidth on a computer screen. Conscious of me also is a purple tipped anemone. On land, the anemone is a flower, a windflower associated with forsaken love. When Adonis was gored by a wild boar, Aphrodite’s tears mixed with his blood, et voila—six scarlet petals. It symbolizes anticipation, relaxation, and serves as a reminder to enjoy the moment. Undersea, the anemone is an animal, sentient, with a nervous system, but without eyes, ears, or brain. It resembles a bunch of fingers reaching from a soft ottoman. To most sea creatures, these fingers are toxic. But not to the clownfish who live within their tacky toxic caress and serve as the anemone’s eyes and watchdogs. On duty in this clutch of white fingers  is a trio of clownfish, orange with vivid white stripes and black beady eyes that glare at me with great umbrage. I am too close. They rise from the anemone’s fingers and make aggressive gestures. One actually nose-pokes my mask. Another nips a finger on my camera hand. The nip doesn’t hurt, but it’s not a pleasant sensation, either. Unpleasant as it is, it’s also somewhat amusing: the courage of these critters, no larger than the palm of a hand, attacking a strange creature hundreds of times their size—and, it bears noting, getting their way, imposing their will, since I move not closer but back up and away. They have much more courage than I, especially now, at my age, when I wouldn’t attack anything, even if significantly smaller and easily defeated (flies and mosquitoes excepted).

Once, I visited a friend who’d married a painter with whom she had a son. The son was three and he remained in his room during my visit. On several occasions, my friend got up to check on the son’s well-being, leaving me in the company of her husband, whose company I did not care for. I felt that he was non-stop aggression. Geniuses don’t write, he exclaimed upon learning I was a writer. Geniuses paint! I promised to note that in my next story. Further, I suspected, as did others, that he’d had cynical motives for marrying my friend; she was the owner of a highly successful gallery that featured a sizeable roster of thirty-something millionaires, while he was, in the parlance of the business, nobody, a status my friend quickly transformed. The painter began telling me a long story that my friend must have heard before, more than once, about the time he’d confronted his father over abuses the father had inflicted on him. They had taken a drive near the father’s upstate home. It was nighttime and they parked on a hill overlooking the Tappan Zee Bridge, its lights and the traffic a glittering necklace over the flat black water of the Hudson. The father was terminally ill and the painter sensed that he might not get another chance to unload his hurt and his anger. I pictured the father slumped over the steering wheel, and all those glittering lights on the bridge blurring into halos through the gathering pools in his eyes, while the painter recited the index of his father’s failures like a prosecutor summarizing to a jury. Several weeks later, the father died. The painter asked, what would you do, in a similar situation, that is, if you, too, had had an abusive father. And I had. Wildly abusive. He’d left deep wounds. But I told the painter that I didn’t think I’d confront my father the way he’d confronted his even if my father’s health was robust, as his was not. Forgive me, I said, but it seems unkind, and unnecessary. I mean, what difference could it possibly make? Didn’t the painter believe that his father had tried, perhaps not his best but close to? Didn’t the painter appreciate the many complexities involved in the parent-child relationship, and that other factors, both internal and external, and utterly unknowable to a child, play enormous parts in the dynamics of that relationship? And that ultimately, in many cases, no one is to blame? Didn’t any of that occur to him? Didn’t he wonder what kind of father he’d be? Didn’t he know that he’d fail his own son, at least on some level? I said, You get some hollow satisfaction that doesn’t change anything, and you make your father’s miserable last days even more miserable. Honestly, I don’t see the point.

When my friend returned, she found us in a tense silence. She invited me to have a look at their son, whom we found seated on the floor of his bedroom staring at a wall. The wall was painted a deep ocean blue interspersed with images of a coral reef. Angelfish, black durgons, blue tangs. A crazy-colored grouper, all wrong but plausible. Even an anemone, purple tipped, hosting a tomato orange clownfish. I found the effect dizzying, like going beyond a reef’s edge and hanging suspended over the abyss. But the boy appeared still and calm. He studied the wall in front of him as though looking through a window, and he wiped a flat palm across its surface the way the boy in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona palms the glass that separates him from the projected image of his mother.

We’re beginning to worry about him, my friend explained. He’s often like this—unreachable. When she takes him to play dates, she said, or to gatherings of other children, he behaves similarly to the way he was behaving now: he stares at walls or objects, transfixed or perplexed. Or worse, he mirrors behaviors, mumbling things that don’t resemble speech, without musical or linguistic rhythm, or any kind of intelligible syntax. He’s about to undergo tests, she said, and we’re frightened about what the tests might conclude. I told her how sorry I was to hear that. I hoped that it was just a phase. I told her I knew a boy who didn’t speak until he was four, who went on to lead his high school debate club. That was a complete fabrication, but unverifiable, and I thought it might give her some comfort, some hope.

At the sound of my voice, the boy turned. He stood abruptly and walked straight  toward me with his arm outstretched. With surprising force he shoved the palm of his hand into my thigh and shouted, Go home!

At the door my friend apologized. The painter was off somewhere else in the apartment, shouting into a telephone. I’ll tell him you say goodbye, she said. Unless I shouldn’t bother.

I always think of that evening when I get nipped by clownfish. But I understand that their nature is entirely intact. They are not disabled, or differently abled, or challenged, or special, or spectral. They are exactly the way clownfish have always been. They are acting the way clownfish acted centuries, even millennia ago, toward anything, large or small, that they perceived as potentially threatening to themselves or to their sightless, soundless, and mildly toxic hosts, the anemones. And I began to think of that couple, my friend and the painter, as The Anemones. He was Italian-American and his last name was pronounced not terribly unlike the sightless creature I identified as his analog. The analogy held further, I believed, because the anemone feeds and passes waste through the same rictus.

Later I learned what my friend learned once the first—and second, and fourth and fifth—tests were done: the boy was on the spectrum, which level would take time to determine. How terrifying it must be, I thought, to raise a child, knowing that day to day, minute to minute, no matter how much security you provide, how many precautions you take, how much effort you devote to positive parenting, however you understand that, that despite all of that, terrible things can and will happen, and in fact might already be happening, even as you hold the child in your arms and delight in whatever expressions form on its face. The same is true, of course, for the coral reef. No matter how militant the clownfish are, no matter how many large organisms they repel, how many hapless humans, there are other humans they can’t see, humans above the surface, and those humans remain hell-bent on destroying not just them, or their anemone hosts, but every single creature on the coral reef, and then the sea. Remember that old Mothers of Invention song, “Trouble Coming Every Day”? I’m not black, says the singer, but there’s a whole lots of times I wish I could say I’m not white. Oh, to be a fish, an anemone, a dog snapper. Anything but another maniacal human.

Not long after the diagnosis, the couple divorced. The painter blamed my friend for their son’s autism. Against his wishes, she’d had the boy vaccinated. That was, at least, the reason he gave her, and it’s the version she repeated to me. You don’t do that to human bodies, he’d shouted—this, despite being MMR vaccinated himself. And every year, she added, he’s the first fuck on line for a flu shot.

I ascend from my dive off the Biläo reef. At five meters I take the requisite safety stop—three minutes of hovering in the water column to release the nitrogen that diving builds up in the body—and stare down at the reeftop, so precious I don’t want to miss a second of its beauty. And this, typically, is when I offer up my gratitude mantra. I thank my friends the fish for allowing me to spend time with them, for trusting me alongside their bodies. I thank my friends the corals for providing a home for the  splendid array of diversity. And I thank the ocean for providing such a fertile environment in which to reflect on my own deep space, my isolation, and my hostility.