Scylla
BY NAY SAYSOURINHO
Samira Abbassy, Eye of the World, collage, gouache and acrylic on card, 8.5 x 11 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
SCYLLA
NAY SAYSOURINHO / APRIL 2021 / ISSUE 7
The first thing they noticed when the body washed ashore were twelve tentacles where two legs should have been. The next thing they noticed was the presence of four breasts on her scarred torso. Finally, the last thing they noticed were the seemingly Asian features of her brown face, framed by long silken hair.
Amused comparisons in the media were made to the Hokusai print, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. But the creature’s slackened mouth, red and fleshy, exuded a carnality that verged too closely on the monstrous to be palatable. And so, she became known as The Hokusai Nightmare, until they could pin her on the evolutionary tree with a scientific name.
A great debate broke immediately as to whether a veterinary pathologist or a regular pathologist should be called in to determine the cause of her death. Her upper half looked human enough, and yet it did not. When a marine biologist examined her mouth, sharp black teeth glinted under the laboratory light. Later analysis would reveal that they were made of chitin, the same biopolymer found in squid beaks, while her hair was made of byssus filaments, the kind that grew out of fan mussels.
They cut her open and found no lungs, but three hearts. Her bones were not bones, but cartilage. Soon, the debate moved on how to best preserve the specimen: embalm the torso, or de-flesh it, keep the torso, or mount the tentacles. In the end, a video conference was arranged between the scientists in San Francisco, who had found her; the people at the Natural History Museum of London, who had dealt with a giant squid before; and Damien Hirst’s team, who had twice embalmed a shark for an art piece.
National Geographic had already immortalized the body as it was found that day –entwined in seaweed, limbs uncoiled like the petals of a crinum flower. The photo quickly saturated every corner of the internet. Stores carried an illustration, printed on shirts, tote bags, fancy water bottles. Streaming services, capitalizing on the audience’s fevered demand for content, delivered movies, documentaries, TV series. Horror film directors and pornography studios surpassed each other in the art of bad dialogue and graphic scenes.
But it was that first photo that Chinami Ogawa thought about constantly. That quiet moment on the beach where she had watched her colleagues turn over the creature, only to be stricken by features similar to her own. The flat nose, the high cheekbones, the small round chin.
“Why breasts though?” asked Loto.
Chinami dipped her hand in the water and ran a finger along the iridescent satin of an abalone shell. It was cold, smooth, and reassuring. The docent in charge of the touch pool smiled at them before turning her attention back to the school children clamoring to feed the starfish. Springtime at the science museum meant Mondays full of kids running amok. Chinami loved that part the most. Chaotic guppy-children fluttering in the morning light.
“You think there’s a male one out there?” he asked again.
She pulled a paper towel from the dispenser with one swift tug and wiped her hands. If not an outright answer, she was at least expected to come up with some theories. Marine invertebrates were supposed to be her doctoral specialty. A Reproductive Strategies of Marine Invertebrates thesis-in-progress specialty. But Chinami had barely been holding it together since the discovery. She was too anxious to sleep, too restless, even with the sedatives that had been prescribed for her. Incomprehensible words and images had been piling up in her frontal lobe like weekend traffic on Highway One.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe there are no males left. Maybe she’s not even female.”
“Breasts are still female, last I checked,” countered Loto.
“I’m saying, it could be parthenogenesis.”
“Maybe they’re vestigial.”
“Four vestigial mammary glands? Really, Lo?”
In all fairness, she admitted, Loto did not study mammals, or even fish or insects. He worked in the geology department. She remembered how, when they first met as colleagues, he had been adamant about not wanting to deal with any kind of pain. Rocks don’t have nerve endings.
“A four-breasted Nightmare,” he laughed. “I’m getting Total Recall vibes, circa Arnold.”
“Don’t call her that.”
“I forget you keep calling her Sophie.”
“London didn’t nickname their giant squid ‘The Lovecraft Nightmare.’ They just said, this is Archie. A full-on squid got the cute anthropomorphic treatment, but Sophie gets the Feejee Mermaid PR team? Really?”
With an exasperated look, she pointed to the blue tangs flitting in and out of the coral like little arrows of neon paint. It was the most popular tank with young children.
“Can it be too much to ask for a definitive acknowledgment that women are at least animals?” quoted Chinami.
“What movie is that from?”
“It’s from a 19th century letter.”
“Never heard of it.”
“The letter?”
“The 19th century.”
“Lo, you dumbass.”
What she did not tell him however, was that she wasn’t sure that Victorian aspirations weren’t still deep-seated in her field. Something about the way conservation efforts were managed gave her pause, though she had a hard time articulating why. And though biologists no longer killed thousands of specimens in their empirical pursuits, Chinami could not deny she still felt the urge to dissect life in search for answers, and beneath that imperative roiled the belief that research was always justified. Surely that was useful for nature as well, not just for humanity. It had to be.
“Why four breasts, but no uterus? There were a few eggs under her tentacles, so she might’ve been carrying a sack of them. Or, maybe she eats them. But beyond breasts—why have two weak human arms in the ocean? It would make more sense to be all tentacles, or fins. What does she do with hands at the bottom of the ocean? She doesn’t collect pearls to put in her hair—”
“You’re rambling, Chi.”
“I’m stressed. I’m supposed to become an expert at this one day, and nothing makes sense. Why does she look Asian? I mean, we agree she looks Asian, right? East, or Southeast.”
“Pacific Islander?”
“Maybe.”
They stopped in front of a banner announcing the next donor event, a nighttime revelry in the museum where members would be granted the privilege of a closer look at the Hokusai Nightmare. But her likeness on the promotional material had been drastically softened by the graphic designer. Her hair, which had been an angry tangle of bronze-colored silk, now fell in waves to cover her four breasts. Her skin, previously dark and uneven like bruised fruit, was now a sunny shade of peach flesh. She was smiling too, making Chinami question whether that was something Sophie even knew how to do, when she lived. Do you need to smile when you hide in the ocean, when you devour the side of a whale, when your teeth grind fish bones?
“There are moments,” confessed Chinami, “when I feel guilty looking at her. Like we’re not letting her rest. And I’m thinking, I would hate it if that was me. And I can almost picture it, because she looks like me.”
“I know the guys say you look like her, but I really don’t think you do. There are similarities, but she’s no doppelgänger.”
He shook his head.
“I heard a theory,” he continued, “She might’ve been the result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. A mutation maybe?”
“That was in 2011. Sophie seems older than that, based on statolith increments. If that’s even the right way to find her age. Keep in mind, the oldest squid I’ve ever come across was only five years old, and she definitely isn’t five.”
Chinami recalled the steps the process had necessitated, the small sectioning of Sophie’s cephalopod parts, its decalcification in a weak acid bath that had released a violent odor that none of them could pinpoint. Mold. Necrosis. Violets. She winced. The stab of a migraine was beginning to throb in her molars. If only she could get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, she would not feel so hollowed out during the day. She was eating less and less. Time devolved in spirals of pacing, overthinking, worrying. Yet, despite weeks of analysis, nothing useful or cogent had emerged. Only migraines and intermittent, vivid dreams she would rather not remember.
“When are you going to Monterey?” asked Loto.
“In a couple of weeks. I’m hitching a ride with Dr. Suzuki.”
“That’s good. Maybe you can sleep in the car. It works with babies.”
Chinami rolled her eyes, finding his hopeful tone irritating. But sensing that he was stung by her moodiness, she gave him her best smile. He smiled back, reassuringly.
“Dr. Suzuki said he found a large ink sac in her body,” she added.
“She can shoot ink? Wow, okay. I don’t know why I think that’s any weirder. It just feels weird.”
“If she could shoot ink, it would be less weird. Sophie probably lived deep in the pelagic zone, where it’s too dark for ink to be useful. At the same time, if she lived where there’s more light, why have we never seen her before? She’s what, over eight feet long from head to tentacle?”
“Squids change colors for camouflage,” he interjected. “YouTube said so.”
“YouTube proves my point. They can be seen and filmed. Why not her? Why an ink sac?”
“Maybe it’s not an ink sac. Maybe it’s another kind of sac you haven’t figured out yet.”
When she groaned in frustration, Loto put his arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head as if her problems were merely adorable. Too exhausted to argue, she allowed herself to slump against him and spitefully used his sweater to muffle a teary yawn.
“You’ll figure it out, Chi. You’re brilliant. Tell you what, meet me outside for lunch. You can nap on the grass while I eat all your avocado rolls.”
As they neared the elevator, her mind circled back to the ink conundrum, but the volume of her thoughts was increasingly deafening—waves crashing against the paper of her eardrums. In pain, she rifled through her bag, looking for ibuprofen. She wanted to tell Loto before the waves overtook her faculties—what if it wasn’t ink that Sophie released to scare her predators? What if it was nightmares, like a net of black gauze unfurling in the water, a film that clung to your skin, tightening around your limbs. Ever since they had brought Sophie to the lab, Chinami had been plagued by them. Nightmares where she straddled men on the table, strangling them to death as she reached orgasm. Nightmares where she was cut up and preserved in jars of alcohol like cuttlefish. But the worst ones of all were the nightmares where her colleagues couldn’t tell her apart from Sophie and drowned her in a tank of formaldehyde—lungs filling up with poison, palms white against glass, eyes burning, burning, burning. You can’t cry in formaldehyde.
Nay Saysourinho is a writer, literary critic and visual artist. She is the 2020 Rona Jaffe Fellow at MacDowell and a Berkeley Fellow at Yale. In addition to having received the Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship from One Story Magazine in its inaugural year, she was awarded fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, The Writers Grotto, The Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and Tin House. She has been published in The Funambulist Magazine, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares Blog, and more. She is currently working on a novel and a series of visual fables based on Lao weaving symbology.
Samira Abbassy was born in Ahwaz, Iran and moved to London as a child. After graduating from Canterbury College of Art, she showed her work in London for ten years before moving to New York in 1998. There, she established and co-founded the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and EFA Studios. She currently has a lifetime tenure at EFA Studios. During her thirty year career, her work has been shown internationally in the UK, Europe, the US, and the Middle East. Her work has been acquired for private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, the British Government Art Collection, the Burger Collection, the Donald Rubin collection (Rubin Museum, NY), the Farjam Collection, Dubai, the Devi Foundation, India, the Omid Foundation, Iran, and NYU’s Grey Art Gallery Collection. In 2013, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired The Eternal War Series #2 for their permanent collection, and in 2015, the 12 panel painting was shown alongside pages from the Shah-Nameh manuscripts to which it refers, in the Kevorkian Room, Islamic Dept. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her exhibitions have been reviewed by numerous publications including by Benjamin Genocchio in the New York Times, Ariella Budek in Newsday, Nisa Qasi in the Financial Times, and the Boston Globe.