29. The Inland Sea
When I was young, I used to love playing in the bath...
The Inland Sea
When I was young, I used to love playing in the bath. I’d pretend it was a miniature ocean populated with ancient sea creatures — plesiosaurs, megalodons, trilobites, and the like. Soaking in the tub at night, my imagination running free, oblivious to the outside world and feeling a child’s sense of safety in knowing my parents were nearby... those were perhaps the happiest moments of my life.
As an adult, I began playing the stock market, and through a convergence of factors was able to accumulate an almost-comical amount of wealth. Yet in the process of dealing with brokers, entrepreneurs, investors, and all manner of wheelers and dealers, I saw the true face of the world: hardened, cold, pitiless, bearing the scar of some primeval wound.
As I grew older, reaching the age when I should be siring children, I found my mind frequently drifting back to those memories of playing in the bathtub. The comfort, the safety, the sense of boundless possibility I had entertained within the bounds of that minuscule porcelain ocean — I was haunted by what those moments represented. So naturally, having in my possession a sizable amount of discretionary income, I set about fulfilling my childhood vision: I decided to build my own personal sea.
First I hired an architect and, after having her sign a dizzying array of non-disclosure agreements, I set her to work figuring out how to excavate a sufficient space beneath my Thousand Oaks mansion in which to build a massive subterranean pool. I wished to maintain the proportions and appearance of a standard bathtub, yet scale the size up as much as feasibly possible. I envisioned a grand pool within a room styled in Greco-Roman grandeur, a dream upheld with Doric columns and marble arches. While the architect worked on that admittedly Herculean task, I turned my attention to the unique challenge of populating a Lilliputian sea.
Initially, I had envisioned that this saltwater pool would contain an authentic, viable ecosystem of its own, wherein jellyfish and stingrays would swim in waters teeming with protozoa, plankton, and an assortment of microscopic creatures, all of which would constitute a sustainable, albeit rudimentary, food chain. My goal was essentially to create a living diorama of the modern scientific conception of the ancient ocean.
Yet the more I considered this plan, the more I realized it was unsatisfactory. For one, I did not want to slavishly replicate the scientific conception of a prehistoric sea (a vision which, incidentally, would likely become outdated in time). I also wanted this sea to be swimmable; I didn’t want to worry about getting some weird disease from what was essentially a private indoor pool. Lastly, the whole point of the project was to create a timeless, safe space filled with the revenants of my own past — not to stage the survival of the fittest on a modest scale. I had encountered enough “nature, red in tooth and claw” in my business dealings, and did not wish to recreate that brutal theater within my own home.
So instead of striving for accuracy, I decided to focus on simulating the idealized sea of my childhood dreams. I would fill the pool with clear water for the sake of visibility, and keep it at a comfortable 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Upon the bottom of the tank, I wanted the sea floor to contain live coral reefs and large kelp forests, which would dance softly with the mechanically generated tides, all set within a benthic landscape accented by a wrecked pirate ship, the barnacle-clad ruins of a lost city, and the skeletal remains of ancient leviathans.
For those submerged skeletons, I would use casts of fossils I had collected over the years — dinosaurs, proto- whales, and the like, which lay in wait in my personal collection. I hired several theme park engineers to fabricate the shipwreck, studiously keeping them in the dark as to what such an artifact would be used for. For the ruins, I would use casts of arches and columns from antiquity, along with a toppled Egyptian pillar or two.
As for the denizens of this archaic deep, I spent much time in thought, traveling to various aquariums and natural history museums across the world to research and ponder the possibilities.
I visited the coasts of various continents — studying tide pools, perusing maritime institutes, wading in the waters. Many a twilight I stood gazing out at a dusky sea, and many an evening I walked upon moonlit shores, lost deep in thought and memory.
What I came to was this: I would commission the construction of animatronic simulations of a plesiosaur, an ichthyosaur, and a fleet of trilobites for this theater of the deep. To supplement these recreations of the past, I contracted a team of marine biologists to find and capture live coelacanths, oarfish, and megamouth sharks — exceedingly rare creatures all, with the coelacanth thought extinct until its rediscovery off the coast of Africa in 1938. This was a tall order, I realized, but with those creatures secured, I could then begin breeding them in order to keep my personal aquarium well-stocked with living wonders. No doubt there would be much red tape and many government and environmental agencies to deal with, but I was ready for that. Such things are to be expected when one is working on a dream.
However.
The first seeds of doubt were planted one night as I sat in a charter plane gliding above the darkness of the Atlantic, reviewing a report on how construction was progressing. By all indications, things were moving forward smoothly, which was surprising for such an enormous undertaking. Yet just as I was celebrating the fact that my simulated sea was on track to be completed in a mere two years — my lifelong dream finally nearing reality — the unsettling notion arose: what if it was not all I hoped it to be? What if, after all my efforts, the underground sea did not live up to the shimmering, shining image I held within my memory?
The thought rang a deep, discordant note within me. So naturally I did what most of us do when confronted by an unpleasant reality: I dismissed it and plowed ahead. Yet as the months wore on, the seeds of doubt still grew, their roots silently spreading within dark soil. In my actions, I sought to walk boldly forward, while inwardly my thoughts misgave me.
The final blow came as I was researching a name for my underground oceania. I was looking into biblical commentaries describing how, in ancient Near Eastern cultures, the sea was used as a symbol of primeval chaos. The Hebrew Psalms speak of the churning waters as an image of a wild, untamable realm, one that is home to the Leviathan, a monster of immense power and strength.
As I considered this, my mind turned to the potential fate of my private ocean: the mechanical simulacra might break down; the living creatures might all die off; the pumps and jets might malfunction, causing the pool to become stagnant and clogged with algae. Though hidden underground, the sea would still be subject to the forces of entropy that eventually undo all our lives.
And even if everything functioned perfectly for decades, centuries even, inevitably there would still be certain limitations. The pool would always pale in comparison to the idealized miniature sea of my childhood imagination. As a kid, I had dreamt of swimming alongside the great seafaring mammoths of the past; as an adult, even as I swam alongside their recreations, I would always know that they were mere fabrications, pale reflections of an imagined past.
So it was that when the project was finally completed — with the underwater scenery carefully placed and the animatronics fully activated, after fifteen years of hard work and an enormous expenditure of wealth on my part — I had one final specification for my workers: that all access points to the indoor sea be closed up and walled off with concrete. No one was to ever gaze upon this marvel; instead, it would lie dormant below my mansion, unseen by any human eye.
And yet, I derive a strange kind of satisfaction in knowing that even now, as I lie in bed and dictate these words, several floors below me lies a primeval sea populated with immense prehistoric monsters. At night, as I drift off to sleep, I think of those mechanical anachronisms swimming around on their preprogrammed routes as living coelacanths and oarfish weave through shimmering fields of kelp, all while a feigned Atlantis sleeps beneath the waves. For a few moments, I can tell myself that I have indeed recreated the world in miniature — that I have tamed Leviathan, and death cannot touch me.
If you like this newsletter, please do tell a friend. And if you want more, may I humbly recommend to you my first novel, The Forest Museum.
