I lost count of the bubbles today.
I don’t have a clear concept of how long that long time has been–only that at this place, where the words “Welcome to Seafood Hut” drop limply from the cook’s lips when the door chimes and a customer enters, there is no other meaningful way to measure the passage of time. Sometimes, the cook’s greeting is timed simultaneously with the lazy gush of the filter, and the smaller bubbles throw themselves against my shell’s edges and cut themselves into seafoam. There’s a claustrophobic rhythm to this, and a rhythm is a duration, and a duration can be counted. But other times, the cook can’t be heard because foot traffic booms, or he’s closed up shop, or he’s in a bad mood, and meanwhile, I can hear the bubbles the tank must create to keep us alive rushing to join the nothingness of the air, again, periodically, and again, for hundreds of thousands of agains.
So today, somewhere between Bubble Number 8,041 and 12, I’m counting the bubbles, and suddenly, I’ve lost count. Numbers flip in my mind, or I question whether I counted in yesterday’s bubbles, or I am distracted by a scuttle between the others; something went wrong. It doesn’t matter. Counting is more muscle memory at this point than anything else. It doesn’t kill time so much as euthanize it.
Allie had been no stranger to rebirth. Change was, at its molecular level, pretty banal. Five years into her second puberty, she’d grown nimble and surgical and bored with the weekly injections, the same way everyone eventually grows to respectfully resent anything they have to do every week for the rest of their lives. She was expert enough at it that she hadn’t seen her own blood in months, until the Uber, when she saw more of her own blood than she’d seen the rest of her life combined. As she closed her eyes, she had just been so mad. She was running late for Support Group, and Jennifer had just bought her this dress.
Allie closed her eyes, and I opened mine. As my eyes adjusted to the light, the warmth and liquid led me to believe that I was in some kind of womb at first, but the water was only black, white, and ultraviolet.
Whatever kind of crab I am, it turns out, cannot see color.
At some point three years ago, or two decades, or twenty minutes, or ninety million bubbles ago, Allie had liked crab well enough, on occasion. Her boss might present her with a birthday gift card, from the whole team, that none of Allie’s coworkers had in any likelihood contributed to. Or Jennifer might take her out once, after a missed anniversary where both had been busy but had spent the entire night texting each other anyway. Cracking through the chitin, I remember, felt to Allie like so much money, so many little cuts on fingers, for so few scraps of meat. No thank you. She’d save the productive, expensive harm for injection days.
Once, when time was measured in seconds and not bubbles, Allie laid down on the rightmost edge of her mattress, over the covers, and scrolled through the outpouring of light she held above her head. Jennifer had sent her a listicle after a mutually teary-eyed phone conversation; Step One out of thirteen for accomplishing some forgotten mental health goal suggested “Healthy Expectations Create Healthy Patterns.” Allie woke up early the next morning, dripped sweat down her exercise bike, ate unsalted chicken-and-cauliflower rice for dinner, did not drink the good stuff, and called Jennifer before bed. Does the routine help? Jennifer asked. I don’t remember whether the routine had actually helped, or hadn’t helped at all, or if it had been a mixed bag–only that, whatever answer Allie had produced, it had been a knowing, but unmalicious, but intentional lie.
I might be two quintillion bubbles distant from Allie. Some details have faded – Allie’s deadname, her first dog’s favorite part of the Thanksgiving turkey, how to play Settlers of Catan. If I still have a name, nobody’s told me yet. But if I am in a Boston fishtank, or a tourist trap on the Santa Monica pier, then it would be customary for customers to name the crab they’ve selected. Jennifer explained this to Allie once, the summer she came to visit before Jennifer tried business school, eighteen trillion bubbles ago, or maybe just eight million. They stood barefoot by one of many crab shacks on the pier, rapping on the glass, from the other side. Name it something, Jennifer had whispered into the freckles on Allie’s shoulder. Like, someone you hate, like an ex, or your dad. Allie had laughed. As sand pressed between her toes, and wisps of Jennifer’s sweaty hair clung to Allie’s own, she had no need for schadenfreude.
I watch the crabs across the tank, from a safe distance. Interactions sometimes turn into courtships, which often turn into severed limbs devoured by the victor, like in real life. But mostly, the other crabs meander along the residual momentum of the tank’s current, feeding on flakes of trash and flesh hidden in fish-gravel on the bottom of the glossy fake seafloor. Maybe they’re reincarnated too. Maybe I knew some of them once. Or, maybe, I’m surrounded by normal, once-born crabs, and my presence here is some kind of fluke.
I would love to rap my claw on a neighbor’s shell and enquire excuse me, good crustacean, but am I trapped in a Twilight Zone lesson? But I can’t discern their language. It’s something to do with clicks, and timed claw snaps, and the prodding of feelers. Allie had only heard crabs make one kind of sound before. She would always wince as the sound was slowly drowned by the roar of a rolling boil, and Jennifer would notice and rub her back. They can’t feel pain, Al, she’d say, fingers tracing Allie’s shoulder blade and kissing the back of the neck she’d once had. It’s just the sound of air leaving their bodies.
“Welcome to Seafood Hut,” the cook gurgles toward the doorway. Three men saunter in the doorway, one tripping and catching himself over the lip of the half-inch metal threshold. His shirt blazes the icon of some cartoon character Allie might have remembered but I do not. My antennae twitch at the airborne scent of rum-sweats, strong enough to gore the water’s surface. He’s more interested in us than the others are. His tall friend in the polo leers at the shrimp the next tank over.
Turning toward the men in a huff, the cook throws a towel over his sunburnt shoulder, oblivious to the shrapnel of meat his gesture launches into the air.
The Drunk Man in the Cartoon T-shirt drums his fingers against the glass of this tank. Jennifer once told Allie God creates earthquakes to get our attentions. Catholics. Allie never believed in that kind of repurposing of the natural world, but as the tremors in the water turn my vision and my other, less familiar senses into a dull strobe, I am reminded of the analogic human experience of migraines, and wonder if maybe they had always just been God tapping the glass.
The Drunk Man in the Cartoon T-shirt swings his head between the tank residents, his eye motion dragging slightly behind. As he pulls them through the water, every crab in the tank inches slightly backward. The man’s eyes are stalkless, but they still seem to pop and raise and extend toward me.
“What’re you gonna name it?” the man in the polo slurs, as the third man, obstructed from view by his comrades, carries out a transactional conversation with the cook.
The Drunk Man in the Cartoon T-shirt hiccups “Jen.”
Jen is a common name.
The friend in the polo is now ordering three pounds of shrimp. They either can’t think of any grudges at the moment, or they’re harboring many smaller, nameless ones.
Jennifer is a common name, and Jennifer is not the same as Jen. Allie never called her “Jen”. She hated it – forming her lips around the word always felt like trying to bite off the end of a toothpick. But now, I do not have lips – only the lost instinct of her name upon them. I am unrecognizable. Uncountable bubbles later, would she be?
How long ago was I Allie? I roll the question over in my head again and again, time and again, time after time, but questions roll differently in the shape of this head than they did when I was Allie, and how many bubbles has it been since I was Allie?
The cook’s been rolling his fingers against the keys of the register. The bubbles continue their fatal pilgrimage up the side of the tank. The cook asks for The Drunk Man in the Cartoon T-shirt’s order. I look for his eyes, but he’s already turned to answer.
“Dungeness.”
Jen is a common name. The hypotheticals inflate themselves. Jennifer is a common name. The Drunk Man in the Cartoon T-shirt doesn’t know Jennifer. When was I last Allie? Jennifer is not the same name as Jen, and this man is just ordering something to soak up: the alcohol in his gut; some memory of a “Jen”; maybe a little butter sauce. Was I even Allie last?
The cook’s hand isn’t gloved as it dips into the water. It is a health code violation, and in this moment, it is not concerning. The intruder sifts through the bubbles lethargically; I never figured out how to writhe out of the rubber bands binding my claws. As the fingers glide toward my shell, I visualize them scraping against my shell, like the smaller, weaker bubbles do, bleeding out into seafoam.
The cook’s hand, unconcerned with the fantasies of a reincarnated Dungeness crab, grips around my side, hamburger-style, and is not cut, and does not dissolve into foam.
I am a doomed passenger in a backseat, again. I am pulled against waterlogged gravity. I am falling, upward, and a stream of smaller bubbles replace my prior position like a cartoon character’s escape, plunging up through the surface of the tank’s water. I count the bubbles and their traces like my eyes can grab hold of them to pull me back.
That many bubbles. I was last Allie that many bubbles ago. I’m dropped slightly, the return of a kind of gravity that makes sense, and my shell clatters against the cold of a stainless steel countertop scale.
I discover that I am still breathing. Still new to the experience of being a crab even near death, I did not know breathing here was possible. The nothing surrounding me feels different than the nothing that had surrounded me moments ago in the tank, where I had not been Allie for a long time.
My leg-spikes scratch against the metal as I stand, and slip, then pull my body against the lack of traction. Every chitinous joint furls, and drags, then unfurls, and slides, and the shiny surface makes it difficult to tell if I’m moving but I feel the pull of the smooth metal along the underside of my thorax and I know that I am closer and closer toward the nothing that exists off the scale’s edge. I furl, then unfurl, and in the blurs of light and moving arm motion reflected by the steel of the countertop, I conjure into focus the backseat of the smashed Uber, and the concept of July, the taste of peanut brittle, and my joints bend in directions they are not supposed to, and then I unfurl, and there were peppermint-striped pillowcases on Jennifer’s bed in her college dorm, and then I smell rum-sweat nearer, and I think about the concept of June, then her eyes were brown and her eyes were not ultraviolet and our first kiss was my first kiss as a girl and it was under a mesquite tree, and the drop off from the counter could shatter me but so could a seafood cracker or a car crash, and I unfurl, and she was Jennifer-not-Jen and I was Allie and when our lips weren’t pressed together, we breathed air, and then I have proven science, and Jennifer, wrong, because as I am lifted up and carried to the boiling water, I am making a loud, high-pitched sound.
It is the sound of the air I breathed in another life leaving my body. It is the sound of Allie, screaming.
Through the roaring, festooning pops of an uncountable, unknowable number of bubbles, I remember the sound of Allie screaming, and I scream it too.
Agatha Attridge is a writer, teacher, researcher, and trans woman. She has worked at East Los Angeles College, California State University, Los Angeles, and Arizona State University, and she’s been published by QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking and the History News Network. She currently teaches performance and writing classes. She and her cat, Peanutbutter, appreciate body horror.
Featured Artwork:
Remnants Remembered
Jim Still-Pepper’s photography captures images that reveal the light of life. And how light is fleeting; it fades; it is easily taken for granted. He tries to shoot while there is still light. Some of his work features the big picture, and others contain just pieces of the puzzle. He urges his audience to catch the light and life in each of his photos. For his “real job,” he is a therapist who works with at-risk families. He is also a national public thinker, consultant, and workshop leader.