Camilo Ramirez, Wave. From the series “The Gulf.”

Growing up in Los Angeles in the early nineties, the mollusk had worried often about acid rain. Spawned in Taiwan, on an island choked with lush, photosynthetic matter, the mollusk had felt most at home among wet, squishy kin. Rain was not yet something to fear; she would play in it alongside the snails and polliwogs who lived in the shallow puddles by her house. But after she moved to LA, there was nothing but cars and smog, which clung in the air like the toxic atmosphere on Venus. Eventually, the mollusk learned that the smog precipitated into acid rain, which—her fourth-grade science teacher said—could sear the hair right off your head. The rain was just as acidic as lemon juice, and it had the power to corrode a car’s expensive paint job! Her teacher always seemed bitterly emphatic on this point, as though he had suffered personal losses. He told his students to construct rain catchers out of liter soda bottles and hang them outside. One dark afternoon, the mollusk heard pitter-patter on the roof. When the rain ceased, she ran out with her packet of pH strips. She watched in high suspense as the water absorbed into the strip, streaking it a dark, insalubrious yellow, just like Venus: acid rain. 

From then on, the young mollusk felt she had to take necessary precautions when exposed to the elements. Humans had made the outdoors unsafe: the sun gave you cancer because there was a hole in the ozone, and particulates from pollution crystallized in your lungs like fiberglass. In middle school, during that period when she and her dad still enjoyed stupefying themselves on bad sci-fi films, she would often be struck by the cold, encapsulated life of the future. Space was the most inhospitable place she could imagine. All adventures took place within the life-preserving bubble of the space suit, but one’s breath was always clouding up the scenery. Gruesome murders were easy to carry out—all you had to do was push the victim out of the air shaft, where, exposed to subzero, gravity-free space, their skin petrified on contact and exploded into shards of ice.

*

These days, the threat of dissolution still worries the mollusk, though she has managed to build a strong-enough shell (and keep all of her hair). But despite her efforts at fastidiousness, somehow the acid has found its way inside. The mollusk sits on the crinkly paper at the doctor’s office while he grills her for answers. Have you had many stressors lately? Do you smoke? Drink coffee? How about hard liquor? Eat a lot of french fries? The mollusk’s face reddens—her mother is there in the room with her—I mean, yes, she confesses, all of the above. The doctor sighs and gruffly presses on the tender spots in her belly. The stomach ailment she’s suffered since November has worsened into gastritis, an inflammation of the lining caused by too much acid. She may also have a gallbladder infection. The doctor orders an ultrasound and tells her not to be too stressed. At the pharmacy, to pick up her acid-reducing medication, the pharmacist hashes out the importance adhering to the BRAT diet. The acronym stands for bananas, rice, something else, and something else. But somehow it sounds like an accusation, a prognosis of her character.

*

November. That was the season every email was framed with an apology. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry about this addled reply.” Not just her; everyone was apologizing for being frazzled, confused, overextended, sad. Bombarded with input. Quitting social media. Going out for a run. Now it’s June. In her headphones, she hears the president: “We’re getting out,” he says. The mollusk is in her room, vigorously plowing the manual floor sweeper around the carpet in a feeble attempt to save electricity. He is talking about the Paris Climate Accords: “Staying in the agreement could also pose serious obstacles for the United States as we begin the process of unlocking the restrictions on America’s abundant energy reserves, which we have started, very strongly … ”

That’s about all she can take. She has to turn off the radio. As though there were an “out” to get out into! Ulcerous pains radiate through her stomach, but she “vacuums” on, doubled over. What else can she do? No action is ever enough. The barrier between her mind and the outside world wears thin. Once upon a time, the mollusk could immerse herself in NPR for hours at a time without any problems. Now she can only dip in for short periods before retracting back into her shell. Each point of contact feels like a bright shock of hurt, like metal scraped against a sore tooth. But the more she hears about walls, borders, barriers, and checkpoints, the more she tries to erect them mentally. One friend has resorted to hiding her phone in a drawer; another has dropped his in the toilet, twice. It is their way of maintaining barriers.

*

There is no longer any safe place to hide. With her phone charging far in another room, the mollusk tries to read. She is reading about mollusks’ natural buffering mechanisms, her favorite subject. She reads how shells are likely made through neural control, secreted through something called the mantle, a fleshy hood that separates the internal organs from the outside. The mantle, filled with nerves that connect to clusters of ganglia, may be the closest thing the mollusk has to a brain. In many ways, the shell is like the mollusk’s story. It licks the edge of the shell as one would the nib of a pen to see where it has left off. Or consider the cuttlefish, which likely thinks with its mantle, a tissue of pure empathy, able to hold, for several seconds, the exact impression of the finger that touches it. This useful, miraculous camouflage is now being studied by the military to develop invisibility suits for soldiers …

And like that, the chapters darken, bit by bit. Chapters on anoxic waters, plastic whirlpools, collapsed island economies, fatal temperatures. Like encountering a WebMD entry about one’s exact symptoms, confirming the inevitability of a precipitous demise, she gets to the part about the acidic seas. For mollusks condemned to the sea, their shells are dissolving into nothing.

Photo by Jakob Owens.

*

It is 110 degrees in Phoenix, Arizona. Aside from the tufts of tumbleweed, jerky-like strips of busted rubber litter the highway from tires that have blown out. The traffic starts and stops, starts and stops. Waves of heat wobble over the asphalt. The temperature feels antiseptic. It doesn’t seem to want to harbor life. The mollusk watches everyone scuttle carefully from air-conditioned space to air-conditioned space.

She is heading south to a place called Oracle to visit Biosphere 2, a scientific research facility run by the University of Arizona. She is going there to learn about ocean acidification. When the mollusk pulls up to the three-acre compound, it feels a little bit like landing in outer space. Glass and steel structures—ziggurats, domes, cubes—rise out of the desert landscape.

It was originally conceived as a space-colonization project. In the late 1980s, eight Biospherians had lived here, when it was still a self-sustaining pod that mimicked several of Earth’s biomes, enclosed under glass like a modern ark. For two years, the Biospherians would grow their own food and live on recycled air and water. But the project was doomed—once the doors were sealed, the Biospherians soon lost control of their atmosphere. The plants were supposed to transform the carbon dioxide into oxygen, but something wasn’t right: oxygen levels kept dropping while carbon-dioxide levels kept rising. Bees died out, and ants and cockroaches took over. The ocean biome collapsed. The eight Biospherians, wheezing with oxygen deprivation, split into factions and wasted away from starvation and exhaustion. Biosphere 2 had inadvertently provided a glimpse into a high-carbon future.

Later, after the original experiment was deemed a failure, Columbia University took over and developed B2 into a credible research facility. It was during this time that Chris Langdon, the scientist tasked with rehabilitating the ocean biome, discovered that the pH of the water was more acidic than usual—as would be expected from a high carbon-dioxide environment.

Ocean acidification is the other, less known consequence of runaway carbon. The ocean, which covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, actually serves as a huge carbon sink, absorbing around 2.5 petagrams of carbon every year. A popular illustration for the immensity of this number: it is equal to a railroad train filled with carbon that stretches across the globe fourteen times.

The ocean is one of Earth’s built-in buffering systems, but when carbon is dissolved in seawater, it creates carbonic acid, which then reacts with carbonate ions, leaving less carbonate available in the water for calcifiers—like corals and certain mollusks—to form their shells. When the saturation is low, marine calcifiers expend more energy to gather the same amount of material, while corrosive waters work simultaneously to dissolve existing shells. The stress often proves too much for these organisms, and they grow sick and die.

Right now, the ocean is more acidic than it has been in the last twenty million years. Oyster hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest have experienced mass die-offs because oyster larvae are literally getting dissolved into nothing. Important marine calcifiers called pteropods, a vital part of several marine food chains, are also dissolving. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration note a marked difference in the quality of some pteropod shells, which now look pocked and scarred. “Imagine trying to build a house when someone keeps stealing your bricks,” Elizabeth Kolbert writes of this process in her book The Sixth Extinction. Visiting volcanic vents where carbon naturally bubbles out of the rock, Kolbert describes what’s left of the tenacious limpet, tough little mollusks that clutch powerfully to rocks and build wave-resistant, armor-like shells. The limpets she saw were marred with gaping, open wounds. “Their shells have wasted away almost to the point of transparency.”

*

The mollusk stands at the shore of the Biosphere’s enclosed sea. Underneath the smudged glass dome, the light looks dreamy. The moist air smells of salt and algae. At the far end, a group of teachers in scuba gear bobs at the surface, their voices garbled by echoes. The mollusk bends down to look at the hermit crabs feeding in the rocky crags, shoveling algae into their mouths. Once in awhile a breeze blows through. B2’s deputy director, John Adams, tells her this seawater was trucked in all those years ago from San Diego, but now they maintain it using a mixture called “Instant Ocean … ”

The mollusk gazes up at the sky above, crosshatched with glass. She imagines she’s in outer space. The boom and whoosh of the wave machine is regular and hypnotic. Imagine if these artificial waves were the only clock, she thinks. Because in outer space, it might be dark all the time, like the city built on train tracks to speed away from the burning sun. Imagine if you knew this swimming pool–size room was all that was left of the sea. Worst of all, imagine knowing you couldn’t leave.

She hears John and A., her traveling companion, quietly discussing the transformation of Biosphere 2 into an open or “flow through” system. Yes! Why not! Let the outside in! An imaginary sci-fi film plays in her head: the astronaut/alien fighter is reaching for that magic button, the one that will break the seal—it’s a move that seems completely suicidal!—and everyone at the control center is screaming, Stop! What are you Doing! but she pushes the button, and the ceiling opens wide like a mouth, and one second passes, two seconds pass, and there is absolute stillness, and everyone waits, until the astronaut throws back her head to laugh—I can breathe!—as the blue yawns in.

*

When the mollusk asks Dr. Julia Cole, the current research director of B2’s ocean biome, if she would lay out the absolute nightmare vision if all marine calcifiers die off, the mollusk knows she has asked a question that no marine lover can answer without anchoring deep into some pool of despair. But Dr. Cole answers gamely. Well, for one, she says, the ocean is going to be slimier, darker. Unquestionably, there will be winners and losers in the new environment. Organisms such as jellyfish and squid might do particularly well in corrosive environments.

Slime and darkness, she thinks. And winning. It’s all about winning. Perhaps the legions of slime have already taken over.

But consider the naked coral hypothesis, Dr. Cole adds. This might work for you as a metaphor: There exist certain species of coral that can tolerate dramatic changes in pH. When placed in an acidic environment, these corals will simply lose the shell and grow large and flexible, like sea ferns. Then, when placed back into a normal, alkaline environment, the coral will calcify once again and regain its normal shape.

Photo by Thierry Meier.

*

“Sealing ourselves off from the dangerous outside appears animated by a yearning to resolve the vulnerability and helplessness produced by myriad global forces and flows coursing through nations today,” the political scientist Wendy Brown writes in her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Confronted with dissolution, “walls—solid, visible walls—are demanded when the constitutive political horizon for the ‘we’ and the ‘I’ is receding.” Driving back to Los Angeles, the mollusk slows to enter a checkpoint at the border between Arizona and California. But since she is a single Asian woman in an unassuming car, they wave her on through. It feels like an elaborate formality, almost deliberately ineffective, as far as function goes. For whose sake are these checkpoints enacted?

She has no doubt that the desire to enclose, to sequester, to clam down, comes from a place of sincere anxiety. She has no doubt that when certain people refuse to acknowledge that the same air and water cycle around the globe, or, especially, that America doesn’t exist in a bubble, it is to protect a sacred and urgent sense of sovereignty. But how will one clam down when the materials for shell building—food security, clean water, breathable air, health care, education, basic tolerance, those things each citizen needs to be protected—are quickly being eroded away, often by the very same methods of exclusion?

Walls and shells, it seems, are erected as a response to painful experiences, but not every organism has the luxury of erecting one. Not every nation can build sea walls to shield them from rising seas, or the destructive storms that will come. Not every person can get on a plane to “get away from it all” or insulate themselves with increasingly elaborate rituals of self-care. For now, walls belong only to the powerful. And rapacious creatures can only expect rapacious behavior in return; they project their nature onto the rest of the world.

*

A future without shells. The mollusk can’t, for the moment, imagine a life without housing, the only defensive mechanism she has known until now. The mollusk waits with arms crossed next to the gas pump, staring at the illuminated red-and-yellow Shell Oil logo. It looms above her like a harbinger of some irrevocable long ago. She understands the absurdity of this situation—agonizing about the fate of the Earth while pumping gas. The origin story of Shell Oil feels romantic and irrelevant, simply one chapter in a bygone saga: In the early 1830s, a shopkeeper named Marcus Samuel built a fortune selling souvenir boxes mounted with beautiful shells from the Far East. With this wealth, his sons built the world’s first oil tanker to haul oil from the Caspian Sea to Japan. The ships bore the names of shells: Murex, Clam, Conch. It’s a cruel twist of irony: What allowed the company to come into existence might soon be made obsolete.

*

“Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create,” the narrator of W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn says. He is looking out from the cliffs of Dunwich in East Anglia, where the once-thriving medieval city has since fallen into the sea. “From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around 18th century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unhealthy glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion.” For Sebald’s narrator, and indeed for Sebald himself, “human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour,” destined to burn to ash or to fall, piece by piece, back into the sea.

Interestingly, amid these meditations on the dissolution of human history, the narrator happens to look down from his perch on the cliff, where he sees a startling sight: a mollusk-like creature wriggling on the shore below, a kind of “two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of its prodigious species, its life ebbing from it with each breath expired through its nostrils.” The narrator stumbles back, aghast, even after he realizes what he is seeing: two entwined people copulating, one on top of the other, their limbs jerking in exertion. At the end of the world, it seems, one returns with a nightmare vision of a dying mollusk—or, the same thing—a vision of people, multiplying.

Catch up with Anelise Chen’s mollusk column here.

Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions, out in August from Kaya Press. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

Crystal Liu, the moon and the tides, “please be gentle” (detail), 2016, gouache, ink, and watercolor on paper, 47″ × 104″. Courtesy Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.

LOS ANGELES BASIN

The mollusk writes this from a state of longing, far from the highland plateau where she had been only two weeks earlier. This sea-level suburb where she’s staying should be a more natural place for a mollusk to be, but now it’s two A.M. and she finds she’s out walking. The terrain unfolds in grids: straight boulevards bordered with tidy squares of lawn. The symmetry oppresses her. She catches herself staring with heightened intensity at garden flagstones and piles of pebbles, at gnarly shrubs vaguely reminiscent of juniper. What she’s looking for is so far away. There are no sandstone outcrops here, no stands of cottonwoods lining a wash, no dots of evergreen on the hills or snow on distant peaks.

Two weeks earlier: the mollusk’s brief stint in New Mexico had come to a compulsory end, so she loaded up the Camry and drove off in a daze, enclosed momentarily with all of her belongings, like a snail. Why did she have to go? Snails hated to go; slow, trepidatious mollusks, once a snail gets settled, she generally prefers to stick around. It’s a desperate snail who crosses the road, and if she does, she is wise to get across as quickly as possible. 

The improvised plan, now that she had to leave, was to detour (briefly) to Utah to see A. It would only add a few extra days to the itinerary, but even so, she felt guilty about it. Having been on vacation from her “real life” for the past several months, here she was, siphoning off even more time. It felt greedy and undeserved; like everyone else, she had deadlines to meet and jobs to resume, money to make.

“I’ll only stay two days,” she told A., more to reassure herself. A. didn’t seem to care either way how long she was staying.

Back on the road, a heady feeling pervaded. She drove the scenic route, northwest along 550, past Jemez, Counselor, and Nageezi. She was entering the Colorado Plateau. In the rain, the slick, iron-rich hillsides looked bloody and alive. Even at eighty miles per hour, the landscape spooled out before her in one tremendous vista after another. It was relentless. She tried to take photos through the windshield—all worthless—but she wanted to remember.

The stated purpose of the detour, she told M. before she left Taos, was to get “brainwashed.” She wanted to justify her trip somehow with an agenda, because she was, above all, a list-oriented fiend of productivity. M. seemed either amused or alarmed that the mollusk was taking this spontaneous detour to visit a man she had only spent forty-eight hours with prior. But, she told M., with A., time passed differently. It was almost spatial: the moments cohered, gained mass, glommed together. Day and night were undifferentiated; the sun set and rose like a smudgy swipe across the sky. One of A.’s favorite things to say was that “time was an illusion.” He said this when she complained that she hadn’t “done anything all day.” As a timeless person, everything he uttered seemed to have universal import. She was a receptive student.

COLORADO PLATEAU

Only someone who had grown up in the Colorado Plateau would be capable of saying things like “time is an illusion” in semi-half-joking tones, she thought now, driving through his terrain. Outsiders, like the early nineteenth-century Euro-American explorers, described the Colorado Plateau in a curiously nebbish manner, characterized mainly by apprehension and horror. The rocky formations were a confrontation with time. Staring down into the Grand Canyon was like staring down two billion years of history—the geology laid bare, with no foliage to hide behind, Earth made its age known. One was forced to acknowledge the sheer amount of time that had transpired to uplift the plateau, while slow erosional forces cut that rock into chasms, mesas, laccoliths, and hoodoos. The expanse of time and space was apparently so immense that it shorted their Euro-American aesthetic synapses.

Exhibit: In the 1860s, an expedition sent out by Brigham Young to survey the Uinta Basin declared the entire territory “a waste.” Clarence Dutton, the first geologist to survey the plateaus of Utah, was more measured, saying that someone trained to appreciate nature in the Alps or the Appalachians of New England might find these rock forms “grotesque.” The naturalist writer Joseph Wood Krutch reacted similarly to the erasure of human time:

Whenever the earth is clothed with vegetation, it makes man feel to some extent at home because things which, like him, change and grow and die, have asserted their importance. But whenever, as in this region of wind-eroded stone, living things are no longer common enough or conspicuous enough to seem more than trivial accidents, he feels something like terror.

The mollusk was sure A. wouldn’t have described his home this way. The first lesson you learn here is human history is nothing in the face of geologic history. And most people don’t like to feel insignificant.

AN UNCONFORMITY

Around Farmington, the mollusk turns on the radio to scan for music stations and stumbles upon a Christian station advertising audiotapes that promise to prove the historicity of Noah’s Flood. Of course, of course! In this seemingly indifferent landscape, man would need extra assurances that there’s some bigger picture that involves him. She is quite familiar with these Flood arguments—she’s come across many such blogs doing her mollusk research. The posts often have suggestive, rhetorical titles like “Seashells in the Desert?” or “Marine Fossils Found in Limestone of Egyptian Pyramids?” that attempt to account for whale skeletons in the Atacama Desert or clam fossils high in the Andes.

Most cultures have some sort of flood myth. According to Hindu legend, Vishnu incarnates into a fish to warn Manu of a coming flood, advising him to collect all the grains of the earth and board an ark. The Epic of Gilgamesh tells a similar story: the gods conspire to flood the world, but one god, Ea, reveals the secret to Utnapishtim, also resulting in a lifesaving boat. Cultures in Siberia and the Caucasus have their own versions.

In China, the goddess Nu Wa saves the world from water after one of the pillars of heaven comes crashing down; in Yoruban myth the goddess Olukun floods nearly everyone in a fit of rage; the Inuit, too, believe the presence of shells high in the mountains is evidence of an ancient flood. Later, A. will tell her that the Navajo emergence myth also involves a flood: after Coyote steals Water Monster’s baby, she floods the third world in her grief. Begochiddy, the creator god, summons a tall reed through which everyone climbs into the fourth, glittering world.

The mollusks finds herself sympathetic to these stories. Encountering seashells far from where they should be does send the mind into contortions. How did these shells get here? It is often said that shells activate the imagination, so the ability to rationalize them suggests high intelligence. If it is true that creativity arises from the linkage of disparate things, shells are particularly effective triggers since their presence suddenly calls forth water—the sea.

Seashells are catalysts for storytelling, linking bygone worlds with the present world, linking land with sea. They are objects that close the distance between time and space. Hold a shell up to your ear: the sea, however faraway, comes near. Perhaps this is why shells are found so often in burial sites and places of worship—they serve as portals into other realms. On the way here, for instance, the mollusk had driven past the turnoff for Chaco Canyon, the site of an ancient Anasazi complex. She read that a new archaeological discovery had been made there, a burial chamber with the remains of three centuries of one woman’s descendants, interred with valuable marine shells that had traveled all the way from the Pacific Ocean.

If shells are objects that testify to a time long past, inferentially, they must also ensure continuation and reincarnation into the future. Shells represent water, and water is the source from which all life emerges. Think how the Aztec creator god Quetzalcoatl is said to have created the world by blowing on a conch, and is depicted wearing the cross section of the same shell. The imagery must be primal in some way, evoking strong emotions. The temple dedicated to Quetzalcoatl in Teotihuacán features wavelike motifs and rows of univalve and bivalve shells, illustrating the creation of the universe from the sea.

And then there is the example of Vishnu again, the Hindu god of preservation, always holding a conch shell, the shankha, in one of his left hands. According to some versions of the myth, a kleptomaniac conch steals the Vedas and takes it down to the bottom of the sea. Vishnu, turning himself into a fish, dives deep underwater to vanquish the mollusk and recapture the sacred texts.

There are several ways to interpret this, this mollusk thinks. If myths are like dreams, revealing through the subconscious what we already know, then one might consider reframing the myth in this way: a mollusk, by some accident, ends up possessing all the wisdom of the world. Humans, desirous of this knowledge, brings the mollusk back up to the surface in hopes of retaining its secrets. By contemplating the mollusk, we repossess some long-forgotten wisdom.

Humanity might benefit once more from looking closely at the mollusk. Mollusks really know a thing or two about longevity. As the mollusk continues her drive past Farmington and Shiprock, past the Four Corners Power Plant chuffing toxic fumes into the haze, past pipelines, oil drums, and refineries, past the only uranium processing mill just a few miles south of Blanding, it’s clear another flood is in the making. These myths reveal that with creation there is always destruction, and often it’s the creator who holds the tools.

*

Thinking again of extinction. The mollusk is waiting in the parking lot of a museum housing dinosaur vertebrae, waiting for A. to finish getting his vertebrae adjusted at the chiropractor’s. The museum isn’t open, as she later learns is often the case in these small towns. Staring at the ridiculous T. rex sculpture out front, she thinks how dinosaurs have really not done much to spur humans into delaying their own extinction. When we look at dinosaurs, they seem so fantastical it’s like they belong to another planet.

Mollusks will likely never inspire the same awe, or star in their own IMAX experience. (Except the giant squid, but that’s another story.) As forms, mollusks can be maddeningly static and recognizable and banal. Describing a reef of 375 million-year-old Devonian clam fossils, John McPhee says they have a “Fulton Market look.” Looking at them is like looking at the aftermath of a summer clambake.

So what is it about these shells that fills her with such longing? The thought ends abruptly there. A. is knocking on the car window, subsuming her back into the present.

RUPTURED LAYERS

It turns out A. has lots of stories to tell during their hike up Comb Ridge. Here is the spot where—, and there is the spot when—. His stories pinpoint a location when certain events and observations occurred in time, transforming the landscape into narrative. After years of returning to the same place, every fold of eroded rock is superimposed with memory, and suddenly she can see it in her mind, all that time. A quote comes to her, unbidden. Oliver La Farge: “Unexpectedly, I saw the sea.”

From the top, they look down toward Cedar Mesa and the road swooping through it. How is it decided where roads go? He tells her that ancient roads often begin as animal paths, which then become game trails. Over time, these well-trod routes are widened into roads.

So the animal decides? He clarifies. The animals follow the water. So it’s the water that decides.

*

What the mollusk is doing is putting things off, lengthening. Despite her best intentions, her two-day detour lengthens into two more days, which lengthens into two more.

One day is spent sifting through A.’s collection of Ni’ihau shells from the Forbidden Island of Hawaii. These sacred shells are the size of a pinhead. They live exclusively off the shores of the island, and the only way to see them is to be invited by one of the few hundred people who live there. Gathering enough of these shells to make a traditional Ni’ihau lei can take years. As a result, the leis are so valuable they come with their own insurance policies. A. says it took him more than a month to collect three small vials. An exercise in patience.

*

Another day is spent at the ceramics studio, where A. is busy making marbelized clay. She is trying to read a geology book. The swirled patterns of the clay remind her of the Vishnu Basement Rocks she’s reading about, and the kneading actions he’s performing seem exactly the same.

“The oldest rocks here, found deep in Grand Canyon’s Inner Gorge, are gneiss and schist nearly two billion years old. Crushed and partly melted, distorted, folded by collision between crustal plates, they were the foot of ancient mountains … ”

*

Yet another day is spent looking for seashell fossils in the hillsides. “Ask and you shall receive,” he says, picking up an unassuming piece of white rock. There’s a brachiopod shape indented in the stone, encrusted with a sparkling mineral that looks like salt. “We used to find so many shell fossils in Jeddito,” he says. “We thought they were magical, these seashells in the desert.” It was a transporting experience. But the adults thought it was cute that the kids cared. The adults had gotten so used to seeing these shells, they no longer held any magic.

*

In quantum physics, there is no distinction between past, present, or future. A month before his own death, Einstein wrote in a condolence letter to a friend’s grieving family that “for those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Rather than describing it as a scroll or a flow, physicists will describe time as a block, a loaf of bread, a room, a sea. Fay Dowker invites us to think of atoms of space-time accreting as though they were layers of sediment laid down on the seafloor.

But our lived experience of time is still very much Newtonian: time feels as though it is unidirectional, thus irreversible. Time is going on all that time, whether we want it to or not. To say “time is an illusion” is to ignore obvious empirical evidence that people age and die, that when you miss an exit on the highway, there are no shortcuts, no rewinding of time. You still have to take the long way around. And when you linger longer in a place than you meant to, time does not stand still.

Some physicists will go on to say that what we experience as time is merely change or the relation between things. Matter changes or entropy increases. A unit of time is simply a convenient but arbitrary placeholder that helps us to describe these relations, and to allow trains to arrive on time. It’s the same idea with money, which is an arbitrary placeholder that helps us to simplify economic transactions.

So why not measure time in units of shell, just as shells were once widely accepted units of currency? It’s not too much of a stretch: we already do it. In 1833, the geologist Charles Lyell subdivided the Cenozoic Era into epochs based on the percentage of mollusk fossils found in different rock strata that were still living into the present. For instance, the Eocene (thirty-four-to-fifty-six million years ago) contains only 9.5 percent of living species, while the Pliocene (two-and-a-half-to-five to million years ago) contains nearly 90 percent of surviving species. Mollusks, in their constancy, serve as a kind of clock, just as rock strata can tell stories for those who know how to look.

INCISED MEANDER

The day before her last day of lingering, the mollusk jokes she will stay “forever.” Her real life can be put on hold indefinitely, she argues, otherwise she can switch lives. This life will become her real life. Think of desert snails—some species can sleep for four to six years, or up to 95 percent of their lives, just waiting for rain. Only when conditions are right do they come out to feed and mate. Are snails capable of saying, “I am putting my life on hold”? Do snails ever differentiate between waking and resting, or grow impatient, or wish that time passed differently?

*

Shells are instruments to alleviate longing; they close the distance between time and space. When the mollusk looks now at the objects on her desk—a brachiopod fossil, a ceramic pot carved with shell motifs, a clam shell, a hair tie A. left in her car—instantaneously, the memories return.

*

On her last day, A. recommends that she take one more detour to Goosenecks State Park, one of the best places to observe an “incised meander.” Since they don’t believe in time, they say goodbye unceremoniously, as though she were going down to the store. She tries not to think too much about it, and listens numbly to a random Spotify playlist without once fast-forwarding.

When she gets to the park, she pulls into the lot and looks down. (Another woman next to her does the same, and vomits into the void.) More than a thousand feet down, the San Juan River winds through the rock in a tight, serpentine coil. She reads from the plaque that the bottom layer is composed of limestone, part of a strata of rock called the Paradox Formation.

Some detours cut deep. It is necessary to let things take their own course, and to do things at the right pace. Time is brutal enough without rushing. The stretch of Los Angeles River near where she grew up has been cut and diverted so many times it is no longer afforded this luxury. The water shoots straight down its concrete banks, with no time to tarry or carry fresh sediment to the shore.

Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions, out in August from Kaya Press. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

Photo: Angela Chen.

Typical of her species, the clam deactivated all of her social-media accounts on her thirtieth birthday and headed to the sea, not wanting anyone to wish her well. She was unable to explain this urge to hide on what most considered a momentous transition—thirty!—a day that’s usually reserved for last-hurrah debauchery. Instead, she Googled cabin rentals in Sag Harbor, where she and her husband would be unlikely to run into anyone they knew. On the drive out, a misty rain cloaked the empty highway. It rained all night, so they stayed in, drank bourbon, and watched The Shining in bed. The next morning, when she went out for a jog along the shore, the liminal space between sea and sky looked fuzzy, indistinct. She searched for something to latch on to. In the city, she tended to look up, searching for scalloped edges and glimpses of figures in lit windows, but by the sea, she looked at the sand. Whatever she picked up she put back down, knowing from experience that these objects would never be as beautiful as they were at first glance, half submerged and luminous in the frayed light.

*

She couldn’t explain it then, the urge to hide on one’s birthday, but recently she read a passage in Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost about the molting behavior of hermit crabs that explained it perfectly. Hermit crabs have soft, vulnerable bodies, so they scavenge for shells left behind by mollusks. Aside from shedding their exoskeletons, this shell-search is the riskiest part of a crab’s life. Between scurrying out of a too-small shell to a better-fitted one, any number of things can happen: she could get eaten, lose her old shell to an opportunist crab, or get dragged off by a male crab for mating. At the cusp of the molt, the last thing she wants to do is call attention to herself, so she buries herself in the sand or waits underneath a rock. 

*

Later, wandering through the Parrish Art Museum on that same trip, the clam came across a painting that she found so amusing she took a picture of it and sent it to her friends. Titled Portrait of Shellfish, it featured an array of clams, mussels, oysters, and a conch, plus two crustaceans—a crab and a lobster—perched on a lighthouse window ledge. The arrangement recalled an awkwardly posed family photo. An opened oyster quivered, fleshy and beige, like a well-fed aristocrat. The closed-lipped shells looked like pouty, uncooperative children. The placard informed the viewer that the painter, Hubbard Latham Fordham, had worked as the head keeper of the nearby Cedar Island Lighthouse in the 1860s. When he made this portrait, he had been “looking for a new direction” in his art.

The clam didn’t know why she found this painting so funny. Perhaps it was the unsettling expressiveness of the shellfish, or perhaps it was simply that phrase, “looking for a new direction”—it seemed a flippant way to describe an existential crisis, no less gut-wrenching in its universality. She imagined that Fordham had been extremely limited in his range of possible subjects, ensconced as he was in the solitude of his lighthouse, but now, writing this, she recalled that even artists with a wide range of possible subjects tended to gravitate towards shelled creatures in times of crisis.

*

Take the example of Rembrandt, who made his well-known etching of The Shell (Conus Marmoreus) the same year he committed his second wife to the “Gouda House of Correction”(1650).  One could only speculate about his psychological state, but tellingly, six years later, he would file for bankruptcy and liquidate all of his assets. Among his personal affects were enormous quantities of shells and coral branches, including a single conch shell for which he paid eleven guilders, more expensive than any other item he possessed except for a print by Raphael. The conch was extremely rare, imported from the Far East—so his determination to acquire it against all good sense can only suggest temporary insanity. It was, perhaps, the seventeenth-century midlife equivalent of buying a sports car.

Rembrandt, The Shell (Conus Marmoreus), 1650.

In retrospect, Rembrandt’s collector’s mania made sense: shells are beautiful, morbid objects, much like skulls. Both are the calcified remains of some long-dead animal. They straddle a boundary between nature and art, necessity and excess, form and function—the coveted ideal for any artist. Perhaps they also represent the possibility of immortality, of living beyond the flesh. Shells and skulls, unsurprisingly, were both used as motifs in Dutch vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, popular still-life compositions of hourglasses, flowers, skulls, and overripe fruit, all meant to remind the viewer of the transience of life. The word vanity comes from latin vanus or “empty,” which may very well apply to the bereft shell.

*

This year, around her thirty-second birthday, the clam decided to drive to Abiquiú to visit the retreat of yet another artist who had briefly succumbed to shellfish: Georgia O’Keeffe.

Admittedly, the clam had never been especially interested in this iconic painter, a dentist’s waiting-room favorite, but now that the clam had spent some time in New Mexico, she found the painter impossible to avoid. Everywhere she went, she was confronted with Georgia anecdotes and Georgia rooms, even Georgia ghosts that lurked in otherwise unremarkable buildings. The entire local economy seemed to be powered by the Georgia nostalgia machine: flower and skull images on gift-store knickknacks, horseback riding tours to stirring Georgia plein air locales with sack lunch included. At first, the clam tried to be cynical about it, but she was starting to admit that there was something singular about Georgia’s vision. After awhile, certain moments began to transform themselves into animate Georgia paintings: the stark late-afternoon shadows; the cow skulls hanging over low casita doorways; the herds of clouds stampeding across New Mexico’s preternaturally blue sky.

*

O’Keeffe began her first clam series in 1926, during a difficult transitional period in her career. Between the late 1920s and early 1930s, O’Keeffe’s relationship to art, marriage, and womanhood would evolve in radical ways. Her career was taking off just as the health of her husband and mentor, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, was in decline. By this time, they had grown disillusioned with one another and possibly with the whole endeavor of marriage: after more than a decade together, she was no longer the naive “woman-child” (or the “little plant” he had “watered and weeded and dug around”) and he was no longer her sole authority. O’Keeffe became increasingly indignant as muse and wife, requiring more and more time alone. That summer, at their country estate in Lake George, she stopped socializing with others, stopped eating, and lost fifteen pounds in two weeks. Then she fled to York Beach, Maine, where she began, once more, to paint.

O’Keeffe’s first clam series is solemn, quiet, and bleached of the ecstatic hues that characterize her earlier flower paintings. While the flowers represent an explosion of fertility and abundance, this clam series is cold, austere, and barren, painted in white, tan, blue-black, and gray. In Slightly Open Clam Shell (1926), the opening of a clean white shell faces the viewer, revealing a tiny ominous black bud. The composition of Closed Clam Shell (1926) is even more forbidding: the hunched dorsal edge of the clam cuts vertically down the center of the painting, reminiscent of a shrouded figure in prayer. O’Keeffe’s biographer Hunter Drohojowska-Philp comments: “If, as suggested, O’Keeffe’s paintings are self-portraits, these offer evidence of a woman who had shut down.”

Georgia O’Keeffe, Slightly Open Clam Shell, 1926.

O’Keeffe knew that these paintings were a departure for her, but she couldn’t quite articulate why. She only knew she was attracted to these forms—shells, shingles—which were calling out from her subconscious. She confessed distractedly:

I do not seem to be crystallizing anything this winter … Much is happening—but it doesn’t take shape … I am not clear—am not steady on my feet … I have come to the end of something—and until I am clear there is no reason why I should talk to anyone.

Despite her own reservations, the clam paintings were well received. The paintings sold—one woman offered the price of a Rolls-Royce for the entire Shell and Shingle series—and garnered a new kind of cultural caché for O’Keeffe: this was “high” art now, and “French.” Critics praised her mature palette and restrained subject matter—one male critic noted that it operated on an “intellectual” rather than “emotional” register, since “emotion would not permit such plodding precision.” Glad for once that the reviewers weren’t belaboring the sexual nature of her paintings, O’Keeffe responded that she was “pleased to have the emotional faucet turned off.” The exhibition also turned out to be a watershed moment, ushering in a new period of financial security. From this exhibition on, she would be able to support herself through painting alone.

However, as O’Keeffe’s career took off, her marriage worsened. Dorothy Norman, a young woman forty years Stieglitz’s junior, appeared at one of O’Keeffe’s exhibitions, asserting herself as Stieglitz’s new lover and muse. O’Keeffe had no control over this affair (she was instructed not to “intrude” on the nude photo sessions Stieglitz conducted with Norman on the bed he shared with O’Keeffe) so she continued on with her shells, returning to York Beach to paint Shell No. 1 (1928), her first nautilus-shaped shell, and another clam, Shell No. 2 (1928), draped with sinister-looking seaweed. For Drohojowska-Philp, this painting symbolizes what O’Keeffe called her “black-hearted” disposition. Strikingly, O’Keeffe constantly chastised herself for not attending to Stieglitz’s needs more thoroughly, describing herself as a “heartless wretch.” She remained a dutiful wife, caring for him even after they stopped speaking to one another. That summer at Lake George, she painted Yellow Leaves with Daisy (1928), a painting easily symbolic of a fading May–December relationship.

In the spring of 1929, O’Keeffe agreed to take a trip to New Mexico with the painter Rebecca Strand, a trip that would change the course of her life. The two women went out West at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan, an art critic and socialite who was trying to set up an artist community in Taos. For the first time in their lives, the two women were free from their controlling husbands, and while they had always regarded one another with suspicion, without the men, their friendship blossomed. They sunbathed nude, went out dancing, drank liquor, learned to drive, and “even smoked a cigarette once in awhile.” The open landscape reminded O’Keeffe of the way she used to be, before she met Stieglitz, when she was still living in West Texas and supporting herself through teaching.

When she returned from the New Mexico trip, O’Keeffe began painting Inside Clam Shell (1930). It had a different kind of composition from the previous clam paintings: rather than showing the half-opened seam, this painting depicted a zoomed-in view of the clam’s interior, a landscape so vast it couldn’t be contained—it spilled off the edges of the canvas, stretched beyond the frame. It was a declaration of her own immense subjectivity. Confident that she contained an entire world, she was eager to show its contours. She might be a clam, but she was a complex one.

Many more difficult events would transpire in that decade, and by the end of it, O’Keeffe had added not only shells but also animal skulls to her visual vocabulary—those iconic images of Southwest Americana. In 1938, she painted Red Hills with White Shell, a monolithic, white nautilus shell securely nestled in the center of a red hill landscape. It seemed she was beginning to feel at home.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Hill and White Shell, 1938.

*

The clam paused here in the biography. This progression from clam to nautilus: the salvation was in the architecture. Why not become a mollusk with propulsion, who could ascend and descend down into the water column as it wished? One didn’t have to be crab either, scavenging for shells.

This is how Solnit concludes that passage about the molting hermit crabs:

Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.

Perhaps she was ready to become some other kind of mollusk.

*

Everyone had instructed the clam, with the hushed reverence reserved for saints, Oh, but you must visit Ghost Ranch in Abiquiú, as though it were a pilgrimage site. This afternoon, as she edged the car up the hill and coasted down into the valley, she finally understood. Her friend M., sitting in the passenger seat, audibly gasped. The landscape was like nothing they had ever seen, striated in pastel pinks and yellows and grays. To their left, Abiquiú Lake shone brightly in the sun.

After their hike up Chimney Rock and an obligatory stroll through the archaeology museum (“Oh my god, they even named a dinosaur after Georgia!” M. said), the mollusk and M. were sunburned, ravenous, but happy. They headed to Abiquiú Lake to see if they could swim. They were told it would be too cold this time of year, but they just wanted to see. The sun was already low in the sky, no longer radiating much warmth. At the swimming beach, they encountered a group of women grilling burgers on a mini cooker, shaded beneath colorful umbrellas. “Is this the best way to get in?” the mollusk asked, and the women nodded. “Good luck,” they said sympathetically—they had braved the frigid water earlier.

By the time the mollusk looked over, M. was already standing shin-deep in the lake, shrieking about the pain. “You just have to go for it!” the women called out from the rocks, laughing. There was no way they could not swim after they had come all this way, and now they had an audience, so the two of them launched pathetically into the water, dog paddling for several minutes before the merciful onset of numb skin. The barbecuing women shouted, “How is it?” and M. shouted back, “Like torture, but so good!” They got out and got in and got out and got in and got out, dripping and goose-pimpled, scrambling for towels. “I’m glad we did that,” M. said, out of breath. “I felt like a powerful woman.” Then they lay out on the rocks for awhile, their limbs outstretched to absorb as much of the waning sun as possible before it finally set.

Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions, out in June from Kaya Press. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

James M. Sommerville, Ocean Life.

She hadn’t meant to become a bivalve mollusk, but it happened. Last fall, after a rib-bruising bike crash caused by momentary inattentiveness and conditions of reduced visibility (sobbing while cycling) the mollusk had briefly succumbed to an episode of hysteria, during which her mother kept texting her to “clam down.” Clam down, she demanded in that sober, no-nonsense way. At first, the clam looked all around her, like, Who, me? Until she realized that her mother was addressing her.

*

It made sense. Since the clam’s separation from her partner, she had been consuming a lot of calcium carbonate. This is what clams and other shell-building animals use to make their shells. She kept rolls of them in her bag, and they got whittled down throughout the day with alarming speed. On her desk, beside her usual writing implements—pen, notepad—was a flip-top container that was more fun to feed off of; it rattled percussively when she shook the tabs out into her palm. These tabs were tropically flavored, in delicate pastel colors. Humans were not supposed to ingest more than ten per day, but clams could eat them as needed. Both species possessed a stomach, and hers hurt most of the time. 

*

Now the clam lived in New Mexico, a landlocked state far from the sea. Upon waking, she would stare at the mute, beige ceiling of her adobe casita until the first words occurred to her, usually something like, How did I end up here? It was like a bird plucked her from the shore, dashed her upon some rocks, then forgot to eat her. She thought it was a fair question, though a friend once chastised her for expressing it. Why not adopt the perspective of a bodysurfer? he suggested. We fall under the fallacy of control when we refuse to be carried along by a certain momentum. She wondered about mollusks that bodysurfed—usually, when the waves came, they clamped down hard, waiting for the nightmare to be over.

*

The clam suspected that phrases like “How did I end up here?” and her other reliable favorite, “I am a bad person,” were the protein matrix upon which she constructed her shell. Her shell was her story; it held her together. But because this shell was her own shell—she lived inside it, it contained her—she couldn’t see beyond it. Contents can’t see outside the parameters of their own packaging; it would be like questioning your mind with your own mind. All she could do was add to her shell, one line at a time, in layers, like writing. If only she could look into a mirror, she thought, to see what she was.

All photos by Angela Chen.

*

The clam sat in a café in Albuquerque, reading a large science textbook called Animals Without Backbones. She wanted to learn all about her evolutionary history, now that she suffered no disillusionment about her true species. Clams belong to the phylum Mollusca which derives from the latin mollis or “soft-bodied.” The molluscan body plan generally consists of a strong, muscular “foot” and a layer of tissue called the mantle that protects the viscera in the main body. Some mollusks, like clams, limpets, and snails, build protective shells out of calcium, while other mollusks, such as octopi, squid, and slugs evolved to lose them. The shell-less mollusks, it should be said, are the intelligent species of the phylum, while she, a clam, “neither flees nor turns on its attacker but lies quiet and defenseless within its hard shell until this is split open, with a rock, to expose the soft, flabby, deliciously edible, bite-sized invertebrate within.”

She flipped the page.

Despite being helpless and delicious, clams have nevertheless managed to persist through time, thanks to their simple, ingenious technology. What clams lack in intelligence they make up for in endurance. Clams are “particularly hardy” creatures, appearing in the fossil records as early as the Cambrian Period some 510 million years ago. Which means that clams had survived through mass extinctions that devastated other, superior creatures, such as dinosaurs and mastodons. Some clams are so tough they manage to dwell 17,400 feet down on the dark sea floor, enduring hydrostatic pressure of almost four tons to the square inch. And down there, they live on and on. The oldest living animal ever discovered was a deep-sea quahog named Ming the Mollusk who was 507 years old when he was dredged up from the ocean floor.

*

As she read, the clam began to feel warm, validated. Perhaps it was the coffee, or the desert sun slanting through the dusty windows. These facts were doing a lot to legitimize her methods. By clamming down, her species had actually done quite well for itself. Hadn’t this clamming down method worked well in her marriage? It was only after she decided to open her big mouth that things got bad. Before, instead of opening her mouth to spew seawater and sand, she kept whatever was bothering her inside, even if it was only a small grain. Over time, the objection became nice and round and pink. Left alone, she would take the object out from under her tongue, evidence of a job well done. Look what I’ve made! Look what I’m capable of! Unsaid feelings could coat the small agitation until it was nothing. Because she was an artist and this was how she felt strong.

*

Consider the example of her mother, the clam from which she descended. Some years ago, the clam’s sister discovered a document in a shared Google drive that turned out to be their mother’s journal. This journal read more like a captain’s log than a confessional text, as it betrayed nothing about how she felt. Which was uncanny because this was a journal she kept during some of the family’s most tumultuous years. In lieu of emotion, the journal was full of exhortatory language, with which she compelled herself to think positive, lose weight, and stay claaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmm.

Either their mother had fallen asleep while typing that sentence, or it was meant as a stage direction: READ WHILE SCREAMING.

*

Oh, her mother’s clam smile. That tight, insistent grimace that stretched from jowl to jowl. With it, she could smile her way out of anything. A few days ago, when the clam called to express her condolences after learning their grandmother had passed away, the clam’s mother came on the phone to say: “Hi! I am okay!” That was all she had to say on the matter.

*

Just then, the clam was interrupted from her reading. The man sitting across from her, previously obscured behind a stack of law books, suddenly wanted to know why she was reading that science book. The clam stammered something—“I am a mollusk”—then pushed the book forward, as though to prove she wasn’t doing anything illegal. He had the air of a suspicious man, and he was reading law books, after all. She pointed in the book to a wavy scallop, to a sea hare shooting ink, to a ribbon of eggs that looked like a badly executed crochet project.

“Did you know you can give clams Prozac to make them spawn at the same time?” she said in a strangely solicitous way. It was something she tended to do around men. “Apparently love is scalable.” The man tilted his head in that characteristic way of perplexed dogs. Then he passed her a piece of paper with his name and phone number on it.

Later, the clam would wish that she could have said something different. After he texted “It was nice to meet you!” and she texted back “Nice to meet you too!” and he texted “I think I’m in love!” and she texted back “Ha” and he texted more and more things to which it became increasingly difficult to respond, she would retreat into her old trick, into silence. Finally, when he texted to ask for more things that were impossible to provide, she would block him without explaining why. If one were to read the conversation, it would not have been obvious that anything wrong had happened. She was cheerful and pliant—then suddenly she disappeared. She imagined his electric pings now deflected by a protective dome, like a bomb shield. But no one could say that she had made herself known, because she had said nothing.

Why was she always adopting the defensive posture of prey, she thought angrily afterward. Why couldn’t she open her mouth to say, Please stop. You are making me uncomfortable. It was easier for the clam to clam down.

Did this make the clam feel calm?

*

There was so much the clam didn’t know, and now it was too late. Her early exposure to sea life had been restricted to the seafood section at 99 Ranch Market, a kind of poor kid’s aquarium. Upon being released from the car, she and her sister would rush over to gently torment the sea creatures. They tapped on their shells with metal utensils and splashed one another with murky brine. Peering over those heaped bins, she had felt a strange sense of calm. It was a moral education; something you could call on to get you through the bad times at home. Whether condemned to the seafloor or condemned as food items to be poked and prodded by children—these creatures still had recourse against pain. If you shut yourself tight enough, nothing would happen to you.

But it was too late to disabuse one’s former self of misguided notions. As a child, she believed that the clams that stayed shut even after their counterparts had been steamed to death were the ones worthy of emulation. When in fact those were the dead ones, the ones you were supposed to throw away. She did not even know that clams spend much of their lives with their mouths slightly ajar, like undersea mouth breathers. Their gills are located in the mantle cavity, through which oxygenated water can flow. Ignorance of this fact is why amateur cooks often suffocate their clams by placing them in cold bowls of water before cooking. Don’t they like being in water? You can’t mitigate your shellfish’s suffering by providing a cheap facsimile of their projected wants. Clams, like humans, need to open their mouths to live.

*

The clam finally turned down her computer, rubbing her eyes. It was dark outside, beyond her yard, a dark so potent the rods in her eyes definitely got the message. Time to sleep! Time to become oblivious! The clam turned out the lights and prepared for bed, thinking about how, over the course of several days, she had changed the subject of her essay from “I” to “she” to “the mollusk.” And from present tense to imperfect to the simple past, the verb tense of children’s tales. Was this yet another manifestation of her clam-like nature? She was trying to grow the distance between herself, saying without saying. Burrowing into these silted layers of grammar. Maybe tomorrow everything would make more sense. She would undo all of this distance and change all the tenses. She would evolve into a different species.

*

Before sleeping, the clam opened up Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a story about another young human who woke to find himself morphed into an invertebrate. She once loved this story—it had seemed a fitting analogue for puberty—but now, reading it again, she felt unsettled. How had she not understood the true meaning behind this story? She recalled that Samsa had been horrified by his transformation, but reading again, it was clear he was actually quite indifferent about it, since turning into a bug was not his real nightmare. Rather, the real nightmare for Samsa was that he was not needed by his family. That the family he thought he was supporting, the family that provided such a convenient excuse for him to suffer another day at a job he despised, was in fact perfectly capable of getting along without him. The debts would somehow get paid; his adoring sister would get married. If this were true, the story seemed to say, that the family didn’t need Samsa (as a bug or otherwise) then what was preventing Samsa—or if one were inclined to read Samsa as a proxy for Kakfa, what was preventing Kafka—from declaring himself to his overbearing, industrialist father? I want to be a writer. I won’t trouble myself with your expectations any longer. You’ll survive without me, even if I do turn into a bug in your eyes. A person incapable of doing this could only be a creature without a backbone—no better than a bug.

The clam closed the book and lay there in the dark.

*

It was late; tomorrow she would wake up groggy for morning practice. She recently joined a swim team, so she spent the first two hours of each weekday submerged in water, moving her limbs in concert with others. It made her happy in a basic, elemental way, boring and not worth commenting on. Only she did have a problem with her breathing pattern, namely, she breathed too much. No sooner had she taken one breath would she need to take another breath, and this made her stroke choppy and inefficient, and each flip turn an agony. She would burst out from the wall like a desperate whale breaching for air. It looked undignified, or perhaps simply alarming from up on deck, so her coach made her do this exercise where she was to swim very calmly with flippers on and kick eight times off each all. Calm down, he said. Take it very, very easy.

At first, she practiced this exercise diligently, kicking and holding her breath, calmly, blowing a steady stream of bubbles out through her nose. The need for breath is an illusion, she told herself, free divers can hold their breath for four whole minutes. As the set progressed and the yardage accumulated, the urgency to breathe would return, and she would kick six, then four, then three times off the wall. But the exercise had its merits. Eventually, the clam learned how to hold her breath beyond the flags without any trouble. With the right kind of training, anything was possible. Yet at the same time, the clam also knew, even as she got better at holding her breath, that for her, there would never be enough breath, and she would always be gasping for air, and it would always be undignified, but as long as she did so, she would not die, and she would not suffocate.

Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions, out in June from Kaya Press. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University.