Shark’s Eye

On my lunch breaks at the New York Aquarium, I went to the isolation tank. The sharks, rays, and turtles were fed at around noon every day, in a big gray box of a building that was closed to the public. I’d slurp down whatever I’d brought from home and run to the upper deck to sit on the outer edge of the pool, arriving with the other interns and the trainers, who toted metal buckets smelling of fish blood.

The shark trainer lowered a pole speared with capelin into the water, and the sand tiger sharks started to circle, pulling off fish with big jerks of their heads. To the side, the nurse sharks ate squid and capelin from metal tongs that they long before bent with the rounded portals of their mouths. The loggerhead sea turtles — their names were Red, Yellow, and Blue — and the hawksbill sea turtle, Lucy, snapped their beaks at squid held above their heads. The main event came when several trainers lowered a stretcher, with its metal frame and black, billowing net, to the bottom of the tank. Ray Charles, the southern roughtail ray, nosed up to it before sliding in her whole body, which was several feet in diameter. The keepers pulled her to the surface, and from gloved hands fed her fish, clams, and squid as she splashed in the last few feet of water.

Then the feed was over — my lunch and their lunch. The humans left ISO, as we called it, and returned to their regular jobs. For the trainers, this meant prepping food and teaching the animals new behaviors; for interns like me, it meant scrubbing algae or hosing down the feed room. The animals sunk back into the depths of the tank, like coins to the bottom of a wishing well.

There was another, less trafficked door to the isolation tank on the lower level of the building. On a new assignment, I pushed the door open and it released with juddering squishes into a dark room with no stairs and no windows to the outside. The room felt like a submarine. Most of it was filled by one half-moon of the ISO tank, set in concrete. This huge cylinder of water cooled and moistened the air in the room around it, a balm after hours on the scorching asphalt of New York City summers. A hose was attached to the wall for easy cleanup jobs, next to various knobs and handles painted bright red. There was a drain cut into the floor at a slight dip to avoid standing water. Water heaters and coolers and distillers lined the room, filling the air with mechanical sounds. In the center of the space was a single white plastic lawn chair.

Once the door shut behind me, the only source of light in the room was the giant window cut into the tank, which turned everything blue. The glass was several inches thick and distorted at the sides, but when I pulled the lawn chair right up to the curve of the glass and sat down, I could see straight inside. There were the turtles blowing bubbles at the surface. Ray Charles and the nurse sharks were sleeping in piles, their tails twitching and blowing up puffs