The One That Went Backward

The exhibit had closed at four. By five the room behind it smelled like salt and bleach, and the only light came from the tanks that were still running.

Soren sat on an overturned bucket because there were no chairs left. His aunt worked here, feeding things and cleaning things, and today she had said he could wait in the back as long as he did not touch the pumps. He was not touching the pumps. He was watching a woman in a gray sweater peer into a tank the size of a shoebox.

She had been peering into it for a long time.

Her name was Dr. Okafor. Soren knew this because it was printed on a lanyard she kept chewing the edge of without seeming to notice. She had a clipboard and she was not writing anything on it.

"You can come look if you want," she said, not turning around. "I know you've been sitting there."

Soren came and looked. The tank held nothing he could see at first. Then his eyes found them. Little bell shapes, smaller than his thumbnail, drifting. One of them was pumping along near the glass, trailing threads like a torn umbrella.

"Jellyfish," he said.

"Turritopsis," she said. "Say it however you like. Everyone does."

On the bottom of the tank there was a smear of something. Not sand. A crust, pale and stringy, stuck to a flat stone.

"What's that part," Soren asked. He pointed.

"That," said Dr. Okafor, "is the part I've been staring at for two hours."

She pulled her sweater sleeve down over her hand. "Three days ago that stone had one adult jellyfish near it. A grown one. Bell fully formed, swimming, doing everything a grown jellyfish does. It looked sick. They look sick before they do the thing."

"What thing?"

She didn't answer. She tapped the glass gently, once, near the crust.

Soren looked at the crust. Then at the little swimming bells. Then back at the crust.

"The grown one died," he said, because that was what happened when things looked sick.

"Look again," she said.

So he looked again. He was good at this part. Not the guessing. The looking. He put his face close to the glass until his own breath fogged it and he had to wipe it with his sleeve.

The crust was not a smear. It was a stalk. A tiny branching stalk, rooted to the stone, with buds along it. And the buds were the same pale color as the swimming bells.

"The little ones came off that," Soren said slowly. "The stalk makes the little jellyfish."

"That's a polyp," said Dr. Okafor. "You're right. Polyps bud off baby jellyfish. That's how it goes. Egg, larva, polyp, then the polyp grows the babies, and the babies grow up into adults. One direction. Everybody's life goes one direction."

She said the last part like she was reading it off a card she had stopped believing.

"So the adult made eggs," Soren said, "and the eggs made the polyp, and the polyp made those."

"That's what I wrote in my notes," she said. "Three days ago. That's the sensible thing to write." She turned the clipboard toward him. There were words on it after all, and most of them had lines through them.

"But?" said Soren.

"But there were no eggs," she said. "There was no larva. There was one sick adult on Monday, and on Wednesday there was no adult and there was that polyp. And I watched the tank. I have cameras on the tank. Nothing came in. Nothing spawned." "The adult didn't die," he said.

"No."

"It didn't make babies and then die."

"No."

"It turned into that." He pointed at the polyp. At the crust that was a stalk that was rooted to the stone. "It turned back into the little starter thing. The polyp. It went backward."

"It went backward," said Dr. Okafor.

Soren felt something happen in his chest, a kind of tilt, like when you lean your chair too far and catch it. He thought about his own life, which he had always pictured as a line. Baby, kid, him now on a bucket, then bigger, then old, then the end of the line. Everyone got a line. You went along it and you did not go back. That was the one rule under all the other rules.

"Its cells," Dr. Okafor said, and now she was talking fast, the way people talk when they have needed someone to talk to for two hours, "a grown-up cell, a bell cell, a swimming cell, it packs itself up and becomes a different kind of cell. A younger kind. A muscle cell becomes a polyp cell. Grown tissue becomes baby tissue. On purpose. Not damage. Not dying. It reads its own instructions in reverse."

"How many times can it do it," Soren asked.

Dr. Okafor stopped.

Her mouth opened and then closed. She looked at the polyp. She looked at the swimming bells, the ones that had budded off it, each of which would grow up, and get sick-looking, and then maybe not die at all.

"That," she said quietly, "is the question nobody has a bottom to."

Soren looked at the small pale bells drifting in the light. One of them was old. He could not tell which one. That was the thing catching in him now. Somewhere in that little tank was a jellyfish that had already been grown once and had made itself young again, and it was swimming next to its own children, exactly the same size, exactly the same age, and there was no way to point at it and say, that one, that one has been alive the longest.

He pressed both hands flat on the cold rim of the tank and leaned in until the bells filled his whole seeing, looking for the one that had gone backward, knowing he would not find it, and looking anyway.