Medusae

Medusae

Unblinking, Julian took a swig from a handle of vodka. Its glass neck bobbed up like the tip of an iceberg from his six-years-retired high school backpack. 

I shook my head. “It’s nine o’clock in the morning,” I said, turning off my car. “And we’re in the parking lot of an aquarium.”

He laughed and pushed his backpack towards me with that familiar, jovial squint in his eyes that somehow betrayed his infinite melancholy. “Still night for me.” Julian had driven from the mountains to the coast overnight to visit me on a whim. I drove him to the aquarium for a day out and to give him a rest from the pedal. 

“Thanks, but one DUI was traumatic enough,” I said. We’d both made our fair share of damning mistakes throughout the twilight of our adolescence. I didn’t want to make many more coming into my mid-20s. 

He twisted the cap back on the half-empty bottle and zipped up his bag with a smile. He was wearing the sweatshirt I gave him—an all-black hoodie with “NASA” in white collegiate font across the chest. 

We came to the aquarium to revisit the inspiration for an abandoned short film project we were planning on shooting in Tokyo. The film’s screenplay was written as an allegory for gender transition. It was about making the choice to embrace change—to live. The aquatic animals in their exhibits, framed in constructed worlds, always reminded me of the aspects of our identities that are imposed upon us.

Before the project died, the film’s pre-production synopsis read: Two young adults attempt to escape their malaise after meeting in Shibuya, but the chemistry between them provokes their depression rather than mending it.

Julian held the lead role. In the story, his dysphoric character ultimately chooses inaction, abandoning his true self. In life, we’d both ended up embodying that choice of retreat, provoking each other’s mental illnesses and sinking into an ocean of ethanol. 

“Shit, my wallet,” he said, stopping and nearly falling over backwards. 

“I’ll get your ticket. You probably shouldn’t be talking at the door anyway,” I said.

“Thanks.” He grinned and put a heavy hand on my shoulder. 

The last time we talked, Julian was training to become an EMT and a seasonal ski instructor where he lived in the San Bernardino mountains. It wasn’t easy to see him without the balance he needed to do what he loved. 

He stopped at the entrance plaza under a towering bronze sculpture of a gray whale and its calf in a bubbling fountain. “Hey, check it out. The Legacy by Randy Puckett,” he read the plaque. “Puck it!” Julian stood in the sculpture’s looming shadow laughing. “Puck everything, anyway.”

We got our tickets and entered the building. The low light and dampened sounds seemed to calm him, and I was reminded of his character from the film—quiet and opaque. 

As he sleepwalked through a mist of vodka, through the dreamy, sunken ambiance of the marine menagerie, I felt the bitter premonition that it would be the last time. 

We walked through dimly lit halls, toward the electric, rainbow glow of the moon jellyfish. Their translucent flesh borrowed the artificial colors of tanklight in mechanical rotation. Any bioluminescence they may have been capable of was shrouded in Technicolor. 

I watched our murky reflections in the glass. Julian seemed lost in his own, like a watered down Narcissus. Our features were hard to make out, echoes of silhouettes blending with the crowd around us. I read the light-up sign above the tank, “Aurelia Aurita Medusae.“

“Medusa,” Julian said like a lazy Lugosi. He turned to me with a wide-eyed stone-gaze, then a disarming smile. 

“Seductive with a sting,” I said, watching the moon jellies. Their silky tentacles didn’t look like snakes to me. 

“What’s Medusae?”

“It’s Latin—their adult stage.”

“Adulthood’s a stage?”

The sounds of muffled conversations, hushed children, and footsteps along the carpet behind us made me think of schools of fish, swimming through a labyrinth of coral. We rejoined that tide-flow of movement, exhibit by exhibit.

A two-story, 70,000 gallon tank in the heart of the aquarium hosted a sprawling southern California kelp-forest. Sunlight cascaded into the tank from above, illuminating the golden, undulating towers of kelp. Wolf eels skulked in shadows while orange Garibaldi shimmered in the light; leering leopard sharks swam wide circles above gravelly groupers blending into rocks and sand.

The viewing room ascended against a back wall to form four wide blocks of carpeted seating. We sat in the back corner. As we gazed into that aquatic theater, it began to feel like it was gazing back. The light filtered down through the water and refracted against the glass, glittering across the walls and our faces like an alien film-strip. 

I shifted my focus to the people in front of us—families, students, functioning members of the living world. Watching the watchers, the glass became invisible, the viewing room an extension of the tank. I looked to Julian, he was lost in a daydream. 

He’d gone through the looking glass, like a star dragged beyond the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. He became that kingdom of kelp. He breathed the brine. 

“Hey,” I said. “Let’s get some air.”

Julian nodded and followed me out.

***

The outdoor tide pool plaza overlooked the Pacific Ocean, catching its salty breeze. A number of waist-high rock formations served as salt water pools that glistened in the sunlight. Patches of algae clung to the rocks, coloring the water a soothing bottle-green. 

Julian started talking with someone in an aquarium uniform, a girl around our age—his own Calypso, and a promise of momentary immortality. He looked happy. She was teaching him about the different animals inhabiting the tide pools: sea anemones, urchins, starfish. I was worried she’d smell the vodka on his breath.

“I love these little guys,” he said, leaning over the rocks and peering down. A gust of wind brushed against the awning overhead. “Slugs are cool.” 

“So, those guys are actually sea cucumbers,” the girl said.

“I didn’t think they would be so spiky.”

“The spikes are just for looks.” She smiled and extended a hand to the water. “You can touch one if you want, see for yourself. Just be gentle.”

Julian dipped his hand in slowly; he glowed with surprise. “I thought it would be colder,” he said. 

“The water warms up when the sun’s out. Animals in tide pools have to deal with changing water temperatures all the time, especially since the tides rise and recede every six hours or so. Life is hard for them.” Her compassion sounded genuine. 

Julian touched the sea cucumber and laughed. “They’re soft.” He pulled his hand out and shook the water off. I wandered away to let them talk.

Coin-operated telescopes dotted the glass barriers on the overlook. I walked over to try one out. I could hear seagulls in the distance and Julian’s conversation behind me. I felt around in my pocket for a quarter.

“Why are those fish marked like that?” he asked her. “The white dots.”

“Oh, those are what we call false-eye spots,” she explained. “Opaleye fish have those on their backs to give off the impression that they’re bigger than they really are.”

“Like those fake spikes on the sea slugs.”

“Right, the sea cucumbers. All these guys are harassed by predators from basically every direction, so they have their tricks,” she said.

“What a bunch of posers,” he said with a grin. 

She laughed.

I found a quarter and slipped it into the slot of a telescope. Its viewfinder clicked open, but it was too scratched and foggy to see through clearly. The ocean appeared as an endless expanse of dead television static. 

“Fun fact about the opaleyes,” she said. “When they’re little, like these ones here, they survive in the tide pool by eating small invertebrates. Then, when they mature, they move out to the kelp-forest community and start to eat algae instead.”

“Like going vegetarian,” Julian said. His words were starting to slur. 

“That’s right.” She laughed again. “Most animals don’t switch from being carnivores to herbivores, but the opaleyes do.”

The smell of salt water suddenly seemed stronger. I let go of the telescope and walked back to my friend. 

The girl was still educating: “A lot of these guys are only starting out here in the tide pools before transitioning to different ecosystems.”

Julian was starting to waver in place; it reminded me of the kelp.

“You know, it can be surprisingly hard for a lot of people to understand that these kinds of animals are alive; they’re so different from the moving fish we’re used to seeing in aquariums. But they are alive, and they’ve all got their little roles to play.”

Julian didn’t respond. He stared into the water where a couple of opaleye fish were swimming around on top of each other. 

I figured it was time to move on.

I smiled at her. “Thank you so much,” I said.

“They’re fucking,” Julian blurted. His voice was uncomfortably loud.

The girl froze. A gust of wind rustled the awning above us. Everyone outside seemed to stop talking at once. 

“Thank you, again,” I said.

“Of course! Enjoy the rest of your day!” she said, bouncing back. 

I nodded at Julian, he smiled and followed me back inside.

 

***

 

“How’s your mom doing?” Julian broke the silence of the car ride back. 

“She’s doing alright, same as always,” I said. 

Julian watched the scenery roll by with his head against the window. “I’d love to catch up with her,” he said. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “She’s cool.” He gazed glassily into space. 

I drove him back to my mom’s place to let him sober up for a while. We parked at the top of the hill, where the San Diego skyline was still visible behind the palms.

I unlocked the door and welcomed him in. My mom stood up from the living room sofa to greet him.

“Oh! Well here’s a surprise!” she said. 

They both grinned. “Hi Eva,” Julian said, giving her a hug—it looked like he needed it.

“Julian, it’s good to see you! What brings you down from the mountains?”

“A beamer and a box of Red Bull.”

She laughed. “I don’t know how you live up there, it’s much too cold for me. Visiting your family?”

“Ahh, I wish,” he said, “They don’t really like to see me anymore.” 

“You’re not staying with them while you’re here?”

“Nah. I don’t think my stepdad would like that. Or my mom.”

They ended up sitting at the kitchen table for a heart-to-heart. Julian was opening up more than usual. It might’ve been the alcohol, but I got the sense this was the first time in a while he had a mom he could talk to. 

“They don’t want me near my little sister,” he said. “I had kind of a… blow-up.”

“Oh, dear.”

“It wasn’t super bad—just, you know, a little bad.” He smiled. “There was a lot going on, I don’t blame them for being uncomfortable around me. They gave me a lot of chances. I fucked up.” 

I never knew the whole truth about his personal life, he wasn’t very talkative about it. But he also wasn’t the most reliable source. He never took his medication, and his manic-depressive episodes made him entirely unpredictable.

The end of his conversation started to sound like a word salad. Was he more unwell than I realized?

“Can I take a shower?” he asked. 

“Of course, please.” she said. 

After he finished, I went into the bathroom to turn the lights off. The floor and shower walls were streaked with muddy soap, and the towels were sticky with what felt like automotive grease. It was as if some of his hardships had melted from him.

I drove him back to his car where we’d met that morning. He wasn’t completely sober, but I could never keep him in one place for long. I parked to let him out, and lit a cigarette as he came around to my window. 

“Hey,” I said. 

Julian put his hand on my shoulder and smiled with his eyes squinting in the sun. “It was good to see you,” he said. 

“Thanks for coming down. Really.”

He laughed. “Long road ahead. I’ll see you next time.” 

“Drive safe, okay?”

“Safe, safe.” He nodded and gave me a thumbs-up. 

I waved. He got in his car. I pulled back into the road, exhaling the cloud of smoke he vanished in.

Back at home, I spilled some vodka over stale ice and warm soda. I looked across the room and saw that he’d left his jacket on the floor. I threw it on and drank myself into my own bathypelagic black hole. When I came to, I’d missed about a dozen texts from him. His car broke down and he’d been asking for help. 

His last message read, “Nevermind. I’m good.” 

I called him back—no response. 

I later learned that he’d stepped into traffic and was struck by a car. Someone told me that the kid who was driving had never seen a dead body before.

I always imagined the NASA sweatshirt Julian was wearing hung in some police evidence locker, like a historic space suit long forgotten in the storage room of a national museum. 

 

***

 

Moon jellyfish are weak swimmers, they’re often swept to shore and rot on the sand. They also don’t fare well in space. In May of 1991, more than two thousand moon jelly polyps were shot into orbit aboard the space shuttle Columbia to study the effects of weightlessness on their development. Upon their return, the mature medusa stage jellies experienced constant vertigo. Their nervous systems struggled to readjust to gravity, and they never fully adapted to their new environment—they became functionally unfit for life on Earth.