How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

by Sabrina Imbler

I remember that kids at schools near mine were killing themselves because of all the pressure, enough suicides for the CDC to deem the deaths a “cluster.” I remember that one student’s obituary included his ACT scores. Another student’s obituary listed her number of Facebook friends. I remember I spent late nights on AIM trying to talk my friend out of wanting to die.

I remember lying awake at night, trying to imagine the best possible version of my future, which always assumed a similar form. After college, a vaguely important job where I wore blazers and pencil skirts. A husband (ideally hot) after a respectable number of boyfriends. Finally, clear skin. But when I tried to fantasize about these rote and sensible futures, my mind always wandered to my death. Specifically, I imagined my funeral—what it would look like, who would attend, who I would have my funeral bouncer turn away at the door (I had clearly never been to a funeral before). It wasn’t exactly that I wanted to die but that ceasing to exist (and being reverently mourned) felt more tangible to me than what I had been told I should want.

More than anything I wanted to know why the octopus, with her big and alien brain, did not eat while she brooded her eggs. Surely she must have hungered. Did she have any inkling of the flurry of babies that might not make it if she strayed from her vigil to hunt or eat or stretch her limbs? I knew I was anthropomorphizing, and yet I couldn’t imagine how a creature with a consciousness would starve for four and a half years without something like hope. What I mean to say is: I wanted to know if she ever regretted it.

When my mother was pregnant with me, she gained 40 pounds—more than she had expected or wanted. When she went in for a checkup, all 40 extra pounds plus me, her doctor told her to stop eating all that Chinese food. “That doctor was a bitch,” she said.

During my first year of high school, I overheard a girl named Alex talking to her friend. “I would give anything to be anorexic,” she sighed, taking her burrito out of the cafeteria microwave. “But I just don’t have the discipline.” I felt a pang of agreement, or maybe it was hunger.

I realize now that my mother’s wish for me to be thin was, in its way, an act of love. She wanted me to be skinny so things would be easier. White, so things would be easier. Straight, so things would be easy, easy, easy. So that, unlike her, no one would ever question my right to be here, in America. I just wish I could tell her I’ve been okay without those things, that I’ve actually been better without them.

There is no turning point, no clear moment when I started feeling good in my body. I know that when I started dating people who are not cis men, I learned to revel in queer bodies and the endless and inventive ways we crease into ourselves. When I desired these bodies and the people who inhabit them, I began to see how my own body could be desired, not just by others but also by me. Years later, in a wry twist of queerness, when I begin to wish my chest and hips were smaller, my old hatred burbles back to the surface at a different slant. This time the wish feels tacky, because I know an androgynous body can exist in different sizes, because I know narrow hips are not a universal end goal, and yet my childish envy still seeps out. I predict I will always be in negotiation with my body, what it wants, and what I want of it.

The Chinese sturgeon is dying out, and it is not alone. All but four of the world’s twenty-seven species in the family Acipenseridae hover close to extinction. So the sturgeon are dying, in lakes and rivers and oceans all over the world. These giant fish survived the asteroid and the Ice Age and so much more only to be wiped out by cosmically puny obstacles: our dams, our boats, our chemicals, our taste for caviar.

Over this past year, my grandma’s memory has begun to blot out. My mother was the first to inform me, warning me over the phone that I should not act alarmed if my grandma lost her train of thought, or if she began speaking to me in Mandarin. When I speak with her on the phone, our conversations rarely last over five minutes. My questions seem to strain her, and she has no new questions for me except for when I am coming home, if I am safe, if I have enough to eat. When I do come home, I find her frailer, stubborn, still insistent on driving even though we ask her not to because she no longer remembers to signal. She speaks in Mandarin more and more, and I cannot understand her. Sometimes it feels like she is returning to China, and I wonder if she is also returning to her memories. I am afraid to upset or strain the tether she holds to the present, to America, to the only part of her life where I exist.

At the time, there were fewer than 10,000 blue whales in the oceans, and the unnatural loss of even one blue whale in the western North Atlantic would threaten the population’s recovery. Scientists estimate that we killed 360,000 blue whales in the first six decades of the twentieth century. I cannot begin to understand this loss—what a world with 360,000 blue whales looked like—just as I cannot understand the vastness of the blue whale, whose tongue weighs as much as an elephant, or how any human might believe themselves powerful enough to kill one.

I had applied to take this class for two reasons. The first: I was writing my senior thesis about whales, a sprawling and unfocused project that was more concerned with describing whales—living, eating, breathing, beaching, dying, and dead—than saying anything about them. The second: my first girlfriend, M, was taking it. Before the class, M knew how to draw whales and I did not. After the class, I was in love with M and they were not in love with me.

They x-rayed the fin, revealing that it still held seven of the petal-shaped barbs designed to keep the tag under the skin. The attending pathologist found that Nigel had died when fungi entered his bloodstream through the punctures, worming deep into his lungs, and killing him—a rare outcome of routine tagging. It is nearly impossible to imagine that a healthy whale in the prime of his life would have died from such an infection, but Nigel was not a healthy whale. He was not just hungry when they tagged him; they tagged him because he was hungry. He belonged to a pod of whales debilitated by disappearing salmon and polluted waters and the roaring noise of vessels. There is a way, the scientists realized, to study something to death. But scientists have to study whale death, to understand how and why we cause it—as we almost always do.

Necropsy Report: A Relationship (cont.) External examination: After the breakup, you moved to Seattle for a job. You did not speak to M for six months yet you still thought about them. They had a new girlfriend, and sometimes you thought about her. You scoured the apps and went on dates with people you hoped would remind you of M, and they never did. All this flaccid yearning felt shamefully maudlin—you knew they were not thinking of you—but you didn’t know how to stop. Conclusion: The proximate cause of death is incompatible desires, and the resultant loss of a sex life. Conclusion: The proximate cause of death is a loss of desire on one end and self-sabotage on the other. Conclusion: The proximate cause of death could be anything, and you are beginning to see the futility of this tortuous interrogation.

I moved to Seattle in the fall of 2016, a few months before Trump was elected and the sun left for good. My new neighborhood was more than 80 percent white and yet advertised itself as “the center of the universe.” Fremont’s county council proclaimed this status in 1994, when the city was a haven for artists. But Fremont would be gentrified in a matter of years, taken over by offices belonging to Google and Sporcle, and other tech companies with insidiously charming nonsense names. Recreational marijuana was legal in Washington, and we lived a few blocks away from a pot shop owned by a white man named after the Buddhist term for enlightenment.

I went to party after party thrown by kids my age who worked in tech. At one, hosted by a college classmate who lived in a luxury apartment and worked for Microsoft, I told everyone there how unhappy I was, and how alone I felt. “There’s definitely a ton of colored people here!” a white guy told me, swaying with his Solo cup. “I mean, people of color. That’s what I said, right?”

Hydrothermal vents revolutionized many of science’s core ideas about life, how and where it could exist. It is only logical that scientists assumed the strange creatures living on the seafloor would survive on the flecks of fish that died nearer the surface, the scraps of sun-touched society. But these animals eked out an alternative way of life. I prefer to think of it not as a last resort but as a radical act of choosing what nourishes you. As queer people, we get to choose our families. Vent bacteria, tube worms, and yeti crabs just take it one step further. They choose what nourishes them. They turn away from the sun and toward something more elemental, the inner heat and chemistry of Earth.

The scientists realized then that when the crabs danced, they were farming the bacteria clinging to their bristles. Waving their claws back and forth ensured water with fresh oxygen and sulfides would bathe them, nourishing the bacterial meadow. The crabs were farming their own food at the bottom of the seafloor, miles from the sun. Wouldn’t dancing all day and all night make any creature, crustacean or not, tired? But according to researchers, dancing doesn’t exhaust the crabs. After all, they wouldn’t dance unless it gave them energy.

It is tempting to write against The Question, and advocate for a future in which mixed-race people are no longer intriguing ciphers to be unscrambled on the sidewalk, in which we can simply exist, unbothered. It would be even simpler to dismiss these questioners as random asshats who need to get a life and stop interfering with mine. But I can’t. Because whenever I meet a mixed person who looks something like me, I want to ask them The Question. I want to know what kind of Asian they are. I want to know how their parents met. I want to know what words they use to identify themselves. I want to know how close or distanced they feel to their own whiteness. I want to ask them the questions I don’t want strangers to ask me. In other words, I am also the asshat. I can never abandon The Question because I am endlessly curious about our shared hybridity. Maybe it’s because I grew up longing for role models, surrounded by dozens of white and Asian families like mine but no mixed-Asian adults. We were all children, a new and blurry generation, all of us ogling the oldest of us for some glimpse into our uncertain futures, some idea of who we might grow up to be.

When I was younger and looked more like a girl, people would sometimes mistake my dad and me for a couple. We knew this both indirectly, how eyes would shift between us, reflecting back unease or judgment, and directly, such as the time a hotel clerk tried to sell us a romantic sunset cruise. We developed a knee-jerk dismissal of these charges—both of us laughing—and I told myself that this was just another classic half-Asian experience, and eventually I could write a funny essay about it. When I posted about one of these incidents on Facebook, my half-Asian friend Anna commented, THE WIFE THING ALSO HAPPENS TO ME AND MY DAD!!!!!!!! it feels weird and bad. I always wondered who to blame for these misplaced, unwanted assumptions: the people who made them or the unmissable abundance of older white men around the world who were dating younger Asian women.

Maybe I could blend all these scenes into a montage of T and me coexisting with our mixed community, marveling at how good it feels to carve mixed-race pumpkins, sauté mixed-race vegetables, text mixed-race texts, grill mixed-race pizza, shoot the mixed-race shit. Maybe these moments teach me that this joy does not come from being around people who look like you but from people who are irritated in the same ways. Maybe home is the people who hear your rants and nod, because they know. Maybe complaining to someone who gets it is one of the purest comforts on Earth. Maybe it is less about our shared backgrounds than it is about our shared irritations, obsessions, grievances, fears, resentments. We are still dissecting ourselves and how we came to be, but now we are the ones asking the questions.

I decided to email a park ranger named Dave—supporting my ongoing theory that all park rangers are named Dave

When salps moved alone, they went unnoticed. When they moved in swarms, they posed no great threat, it seemed, only inconvenience. For centuries, only one thing seemed clear: the salps, wherever they went, were unwanted. So there is almost no long-term historical record of the salps in any ocean. Few data sets go back more than twenty years, and the ones that do record salps only in these ephemeral explosions of abundance. Scientists only took notice of them when they gathered in such great masses that they made themselves impossible to ignore.

We often conflate the cuttlefish’s ability to morph with camouflage, assuming they only use it to hide. Nature documentaries call cuttlefish the masters of disguise. This strikes me as the least interesting thing about the cuttlefish, not just because of the dreariness of the backgrounds they most often blend into but also because camouflage is a body language deployed against predators and others that would harm or devour you. Reading a creature through its camouflage seems a misguided attempt to understand its true nature, its whole self. It would be like studying a zebra while it flees from a lion, or a mouse as it cowers in a hollow log. I want to know how cuttlefish morph when there are no sharks around, only other cuttlefish. I want to know what kinds of transformation the cuttlefish is capable of when it is motivated not by fear but by community and sex, and I am not interested in calling it a disguise.

After college I move across the country to Seattle, a city that I thought I would love because my ex loved Seattle and I am still in love with my ex. I can’t stop thinking about them, and caught in that old queer quandary of figuring out whether I want to be with someone or be like them, I wonder if it must be the latter. Theirs is the masculinity I know best, used sweaters and functional windbreakers, like I’m a walking L.L.Bean catalog, and I certainly feel queer, but I also feel white, like I am cosplaying as someone who boulders.

The scientific name for cuttlefish is Sepia, and the cuttlefish gave the color its name, not the other way around. The ancient Greeks used cuttlefish ink to write with, stabbing their nibs in dead cuttlefish’s ink sacs, producing the distinctive, almost translucent brown hue. Sepia has come to describe a color rather than a substance, and it is a color associated with the past, antique films and photographs all beige and discolored. When a cuttlefish’s ink is taken from its body, the resulting drawing or letter will always appear vintage and outdated, no matter how freshly drawn.

Each time I try to write this piece I feel differently about my body, my gender, myself. Each time I conclude that I must not be ready to write it; best to experience the thing and then wait a few years to reflect, the advice generally goes. But if I don’t write it now, how will I trace my own evolution? So I dub this essay a pseudomorph, a gibbous moon, a silhouette in ink of the person I am now and whom I may no longer resemble in the future.

Like millions of other mortal beings, when I learned about the immortal jellyfish, I envied the animal. It wasn’t the immortality itself that I coveted but its mechanism. Our traditional notions of immortality are so languorous and passive: Jesse Tuck, the everlasting teen, sips from a magic spring and stays seventeen for eternity, just like Edward Cullen from Twilight. I grew up thinking of immortality as something won with a drink or a bite or a pill, a static and irreversible state of being. But the immortal jellyfish has no notion of these tepid forevers. Its immortality is active. It is constantly aging in both directions, always reinventing itself, bell shrinking and expanding, tentacles retreating into flesh and wriggling out again. It is not living forever but reliving forever.

I had a trans childhood because it was mine and it’s not over. Each time I learn to protect myself now, I protect myself then. I make space for new versions of myself in the future. A forever expansion and re-creation of my own life.