These are the ways in which we fail the Baltimore Harbor aquarium test: One, we despise children. And on an early Friday evening, tickets half price, the aquarium breathes children. So many cameras pressed to the glass tanks, so many small hands reaching for urchins and jellyfish, so many exclamations of the obvious (that fish is the fastest swimmer, mommy!) They herd, hustling each other and everyone else in their path, up the winding platform that brings us to each new level of claustrophobic awe. Little light, aside from the glow of the tanks, the underwater grotto reflecting our selfish curiosity back at us through the flurry of fins, the one bumbling misanthropic sea turtle who keeps flippering the edge of his confines, his back to Quinn and me. My heart goes out to that turtle. He despises the children too.
The other way we fail the Baltimore Harbor Aquarium test is in how I cling too tightly to Quinn’s arm and refuse to look at many of the exhibits. The circling of the fish, the flow of water, the reflective glass tanks—it makes me dizzy. I clutch his arm harder, afraid the ground will leave. We’ve only been together nine months but I hold on to him like we’re octogenarians, high school sweethearts with our lives linked up in the rearview mirror as far as I can see.
I’m a hair shy of my 38th birthday and I feel 80. For months I’ve been accruing inexplicable aches and pains, feeling flu-ish, losing hair, weight. I get winded easily, disoriented, have trouble walking any significant distance. I break things frequently, my coordination off, my hands stiff. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong. I go from one doctor to the next as my symptoms snowball. They do tests. “Everything looks normal,” they say.
You can only go in one direction in the Baltimore aquarium. You’re funneled up, up, up, and then down, down, down, back the way you came and across a harbor inlet to another wing of the building. On the fourth floor, still on our way up, we escape from the darkness of the aquarium maze and into a large, sunlit room of tables and wall-to-wall windows looking out on the water. From here you can see the purples and oranges of the paddleboats shaped like dragons, rentable by the hour, and farther out—sailboats, ferries, the metal yellow lettering of the Domino Sugars sign protruding above the city skyline.
Already I’m tired so we sit for a few minutes in the waning summer light. A good room for dancing, I think. A ballroom on the sea.
We slow-danced once, when we’d first started dating. It was in a bar fashioned like a bohemian speakeasy, a 3-piece band with an accordion playing something waltz-y in the corner. We were three drinks in and I’d just met some of Quinn’s friends for the first time. It was going well and I felt confident, slightly reckless. I pulled Quinn to the middle of the bar to dance, even though no one else was. My symptoms were only a whisper then. Everything still seemed possible.
I moved to Baltimore from my hometown in North Carolina by way of (briefly) D.C. I hadn’t been in Baltimore long before I started getting truly sick. The move from North Carolina was meant to be a new start. I was a single woman looking for a new dating pool, an adjunct instructor looking for a new college pool. The Baltimore Harbor looks beautiful riding over the interstate bridge into the city. Only up close can you see the plastic bottles and other detritus float along the edges, washed in by the rain.
At the top of the aquarium we emerge into a tropical rainforest, sunlight streaming in overhead—another reprieve from the darkness and murky glass tanks. We wind past waterfalls, through lush green walls. Scarlet Ibis preen in pairs amidst the high grasses like tiny flamingos aflame. In the trees overhead we hear monkeys, parrots. Despite the bright and airy quality, this room has its own maze-like claustrophobia, air thick and path narrow, hemmed in by stone and hanging vines.
“The jungle is full of obscenity,” I say, and Quinn laughs.
“The trees are in misery, the birds are in misery,” he responds in his best German accent. “I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain. It is the same misery that is all around us.”
It’s a Werner Herzog reference, one we make often. Herzog in the South American jungle, giving his quintessential Herzogian view of life. We’re amused by the nihilistic melodrama, of course. But there’s something else, too: an acknowledgement of the darkness in life that we both identify with. An understanding of it as both tragedy and comedy, with perhaps slightly more tragedy. It’s a thing that unites us.
In the coming months, the doctors will do more blood work. They’ll stick mechanical apparatuses down my throat to look around. They’ll take X-rays. Everything looks normal. They’ll say this to me like this is a good thing, like these results indicate I’m actually fine, not that they can’t find the problem. “Your symptoms are nonspecific,” they’ll tell me. “Nonspecific” will sound like an accusation, akin to “all in your head.” Meanwhile, my symptoms will get worse; I’ll develop new ones.
My hand seeks Quinn’s as we walk over a small wooden bridge and back into darkness, another roomful of fish. I’m now decidedly wishing this was over but resigned, as with so much these days, to ride it out. I can see Quinn is still enjoying it. He exclaims excitedly over the Peacock Mantis Shrimp. I always find it charming that he can do this, go in a split second from grumbling curmudgeon to bright-cheeked youth, delighted with some small observation. A nurse in a unit that treats PTSD patients, he’s resilient in ways that I’ve never been. Were it not for me, Quinn might pass the Baltimore Harbor Aquarium test.
It’s no small relief when we finally reach the aquarium’s point of descent—down, down, down we go, back along the aquarium’s winding oceanic walls. So many small bodies around us, jostling and dashing and shrieking, a new level of Dante’s inferno.
We emerge from the spiraling darkness blinking and uncertain. Dolphins or jellyfish? I vote dolphins. The dolphin arena is a series of circular pools surrounded by sparsely populated bleachers. I was hoping in this room of our fellow mammals for a moment of emotional connection, a temporary antidote to my Herzogean state of mind, but the dolphins look listless. They huddle off to one side, every now and then one making a slow lap, a half-hearted leap, then returning to the group. The trees are in misery, the birds are in misery. In misery, we are quick to see misery in the world all around us.
And so we move on to the final dimly lit room of tanks where ethereal pastel forms pulse and shift shape like something interplanetary. Some trail filmy appendages and whisper thin tentacles, each pulse a slow-motion explosion. The Atlantic Sea Nettle, the Moon Jelly. Prehistoric survivors, the placard reads. How did they do it? Bodies brilliant and billowing, engulfed in blue; their bodies are breath, are the water that surrounds them. I am the sweet cold water and the jar that pours, I think, a line from a Rumi poem. My body feels frail and unbearably weighted at the same time. “I’m going outside,” I tell Quinn.
I push open the double doors to thick July heat, sit on the lip of a nearby fountain, slip off my shoes. Back among the landlocked. Around me people walked to and fro—tourists, teens, joggers, buskers. Everything looks normal.
In September the rheumatologist will settle on a name to the collection of symptoms I’m experiencing. It’s a diagnosis largely made in women, a diagnosis that used to mean “It’s all in your head” and now means “You have a particular set of symptoms indicating the dysfunction of multiple systems in your body and we don’t know why or how to fix it.” Once he diagnoses me with this it will mean they can all stop searching for the problem.
Shortly after our visit, I read that the Baltimore aquarium has decided to build a seaside sanctuary for the dolphins in the next few years. Somewhere off the coast of Florida, possibly, or in the Caribbean. In the ocean, dolphins can swim up to 60 miles a day.
All but one of those aquarium dolphins was born in captivity. Imagine: living all your life confined to a concrete pool and suddenly finding yourself in a world you didn’t know existed, a world of coral and fish, of sunlight and rain.
As my symptoms worsen, my world will grow smaller and smaller until it becomes mostly the apartment Quinn and I now share. I’ll teach only from home now, online, a few hours a day, often from bed. We’ll rarely go out. For now, there will be no dancing in speakeasies or seaside ballrooms. Instead there will be this: the daily dance of changing light through our bedroom window; the occasional dancing in our kitchen, on good days, waiting for dinner to cook; the dance of cursor across screen as I search the internet for clues to the mystery of my deteriorating body.
Everything is not normal. Normal is the dolphins returned home to their true bodies, the freedom of sea. How badly I want to be those dolphins. Instead, most days I’m the turtle, flippering the edges of my confinement, my back to the world. But there are times when my body forgets its frail weight, its toxic interior and painful edges, or remembers how to breathe through them. There are moments when I find my own ethereal pulse, feel my body as breath and the air that engulfs it, feel its tumult as a continual, slow-motion explosion. Call it radical acceptance or resilience or transcendence. I’m pretty sure this is how we do it, us modern-day survivors.
STORY IMAGE CREDIT: Flickr Creative Commons/Rob Friesel
