Microplastic Love

Debra Roach, fifty-four years old and manager of a pub stool cushion re-stuffing franchise back in Ohio, had not planned on spending her Mexican holiday inside a floating laboratory. But here she was, climbing the gangway of a research trawler docked in Villa de Álvarez, Colima, because an old night class classmate had sent her a message that said, and she quoted, "you have to see this, bring your curiosity."

Well. Curiosity was the one thing Debra never left home without.

The lab was up a steep little staircase and through a door that stuck, and when she shouldered it open the first thing she heard was a long, grinding groan from overhead. She looked up in time to see the retractable roof shudder to a halt, jammed halfway open, a narrow slice of humid night sky showing through the gap. Somewhere beyond the dock, waves slapped against the harbor wall.

"Debra!" Jackson Taft stood up from behind a wall of microscopes so fast his stool tipped over. He was fifty-five now, grayer than she remembered, but he still had that same lopsided grin from the adult ed chemistry class they'd both taken when she was twenty-nine and he was thirty. "You made it! God, how long has it been?"

"Twenty-five years, give or take," she said, and he laughed.

"You counted."

"Didn't you?"

He had, apparently, and he admitted it without a bit of shame, which was one of the reasons she'd liked him back then. The other reason was a single kiss behind the community college after the final exam, which they had never talked about since, and which she was absolutely not thinking about right now.

"Here, sit, sit." He cleared a pile of sample bags off a second stool and went to a cooler in the corner. "You want a beer? I've got Mexican beer, which feels redundant, but it's cold."

"I would love a cold redundant beer," Debra said, and he handed her a bottle with condensation already running down it. She took a long pull. The air in the lab was thick enough to chew.

"So," she said. "Microplastics. That's your whole thing now?"

"That's my whole thing now!" He gestured around at the clutter, the beakers, the filtration rigs with their tangled tubes, the microscope stations crowded shoulder to shoulder along both walls. "I identify them. Fibers, fragments, films, pellets. Every sample that comes off this trawler, I look at it and say what kind of plastic it is and roughly how old it is. It's weirder than it sounds."

"It sounds incredibly weird."

"Thank you." He pointed at her like she'd won a prize. "That's what I keep telling people. Nobody believes me that it's weird. And speaking of weird, that's actually why you're here."

"Is it?"

"Sort of." He rubbed his hands together, which was a habit she remembered exactly. "There's a contest going on. Tonight. Right here."

"A contest."

"A contest. Sponsored. There's a prize. A real one, money, enough that I could finally retire and buy that stupid little boat I've always talked about."

Debra raised an eyebrow. "And you're telling me this why?"

"Because the rules are the judge picks two competitors, and Elsa picked me, and I get to pick one more." He paused, bottle halfway to his mouth. "Debra, I want you to compete."

She almost choked on her beer. "Me? Jackson, I stuff cushions for a living. Stool cushions. Pub stools. I know nothing about microplastics."

"You know everything about spotting what doesn't belong," he said. "You've been pulling staples and foam plugs and mystery objects out of old cushions for twenty years. That's pattern recognition. That's exactly what this needs. And honestly, you always had the best eye in that night class. Remember the titration thing?"

"I remember you knocking over the titration thing."

"I remember you catching it before I ruined it." He grinned. "Same skill."

Before she could argue, a young man came in from the back room carrying a tray of little glass dishes. He was maybe twenty-eight, dark haired, careful with the tray the way you'd be careful carrying eggs.

"Ah, Benjamin," Jackson said. "This is Debra. Debra, Benjamin Martins, our lab assistant, born and raised right here in Villa de Álvarez. His family's been connected to this lab since his grandfather helped build the thing."

"Since 1961," Benjamin said, setting the tray down. He had a formal, careful way of talking. "My family takes the work here seriously. Which is why I also take the contest seriously. It must end fairly. That matters to me."

"That's Benjamin's whole speech," Jackson said. "You'll hear it about six times tonight."

"You will hear it until it is understood," Benjamin said, without a trace of a smile, and Debra decided she liked him immediately.

"Okay, show me," she said, pulling her stool up to the nearest microscope. "What am I even looking at?"

Benjamin picked up a pair of tweezers and held one of the glass dishes toward the light. "This is a filtered sample. Seawater, pushed through a membrane. Everything left behind is ours to identify. Watch."

He slid the dish under the microscope and fiddled with the focus, then stepped aside and waved Debra forward. She bent to the eyepieces and there it was, a little landscape of debris, pale specks and threads scattered across a gray field.

"See the blue thread, upper left?" Benjamin said. "That is polyethylene. Fishing line, most likely, decades old. Now the angular shard in the center, that one is polystyrene, you can tell by the crumbled edges. Foam. This one is recent, maybe five years in the water."

"How can you tell how old a piece of plastic is from looking at it?" Debra asked.

"Cracks. Discoloration. Bacterial film. Plastic ages like skin," Benjamin said. "Sun and salt write their dates on it. Jackson taught me, and his teacher taught him."

"And the contest is just, what, whoever identifies the most?"

"Whoever identifies the most unusual one," Jackson said, hopping up to sit on a counter. "That's Elsa's rule. Not the most, the strangest. The single sample that makes the judge say, now how did that get in the ocean? Winner takes the prize money. Benjamin keeps the tally and enforces fairness."

"The tally is kept in my grandfather's ledger," Benjamin said, patting a fat green book on the counter. "And the judging is done by the sponsor. Elsa Archer. She owns a model you may notice."

Debra had already noticed it, actually, because it was very hard not to notice. Sitting on its own little table in the middle of the lab, dead center under the half open roof, was a wooden gallows model. Not big, maybe a foot and a half tall, with a miniature noose hanging from a tiny beam. It was polished and old looking and completely, unbelievably out of place.

"Whose idea was the decorative hanging device?" she asked.

"Elsa's," Jackson said. "It's hers. She calls it a token of the stakes. I think she just likes it."

"Who is Elsa Archer?"

"You'll meet her. She's around. She's always around." He said it lightly, but Debra caught the glance he and Benjamin traded, quick and not entirely comfortable.

She let it go and leaned back into the microscope. Benjamin was loading a second dish now, a fresh sample from the day's trawl, and she swept her eyes across the field the way he'd taught her in the last five minutes, cataloging. Thread, thread, fragment, a round bead, another thread.

Then she stopped.

Near the bottom right of the field, a pale fiber was curled in a question mark shape, and as she watched it, it moved. Not drifted, not wobbled from her breath on the eyepiece. Moved. It uncurled a little, the way a sleeping person shifts under a blanket, then settled again.

Debra sat bolt upright and nearly knocked the stool over backwards.

"Whoa. What?" Jackson was on his feet.

"Move," she said, waving him over. "Both of you, look at this. Bottom right."

Benjamin bent to the scope first, frowning in that precise way of his. "Which fiber? The curled one?"

"Yes. That one. It moved. I swear on my entire franchise it moved."

Benjamin adjusted the focus, watching for a long moment. "It is not moving."

"It was moving."

"Currents in the dish. Thermal drift. Very common," he said, but his voice had gone careful, and he did not look up from the eyepiece right away. And when he finally did look up, he looked at Jackson first, not at her, and that look made the back of Debra's neck prickle.

"Benjamin," she said slowly. "Has that sample done anything strange before?"

Benjamin and Jackson looked at each other again, longer this time, and nobody said anything fast enough. Debra was about to repeat the question when the lab door banged open with a sound like a tambourine in a washing machine, and a woman walked in.

She was forty-two, tall, tanned, wearing a linen blazer over a swimsuit like she'd come from a yacht and intended to return to it. Her hair was the kind of white that doesn't come from age. She carried the wooden gallows model in both hands, like a trophy or a cake.

"Evening, all," the woman said. "And this must be the Ohio contestant."

"That's Elsa," Jackson said quietly. "Elsa Archer."

"Debra Roach," Debra said, standing up and wiping her hands on her shorts out of pure reflex. "You're the sponsor?"

"I'm the everything," Elsa said cheerfully. "Sponsor, judge, owner of the boat, owner of the lab, and owner of this." She swept a stack of beakers off the center table with her forearm, not gently, and set the gallows model down in the exact middle of it, under the jammed half open roof, where the slice of night sky fell right across the little noose. "There. Better position. It likes the light."

"It likes the light?" Debra asked.

"Everything likes the light, dear. Most things just don't say so." Elsa turned and looked Debra up and down with open appraisal, the way you'd check a used car. "Fifty-four, yes? Jackson told me. Manager of a cushion franchise. Pub stools, was it?"

"Pub stool cushions, re-stuffing. It's a niche."

"It's a marvelous niche. I ran a niche once." She smiled, and the smile had a lot of teeth in it. "Now. Business. Since both contestants are present, I'll announce the amendment."

"Amendment?" Jackson said. He had come off the counter and was standing with his arms crossed, and Debra noticed his weight had shifted back onto his heels, as a man expecting a shove would stand. "There was no amendment when we agreed."

"There is now, sweetie, because I just thought of it." Elsa put one hand on the gallows model and gave it a little proud pat. "The winner takes the prize money, as agreed. Enough for a boat and a happy retirement, Jackson, don't pout. But the loser faces the curiosity test."

The room went quiet in a specific way. Even the filtration rigs seemed to stop humming, though Debra knew that was impossible. Benjamin's hand had moved to the green ledger and was resting flat on it, fingers spread, like he was keeping it from escaping.

"The what test?" Debra asked.

"The curiosity test," Elsa repeated, savoring it. "It's a ritual. Very old, very local. Benjamin's grandfather knew it. His grandfather's employer knew it. I know it. Nobody will explain it to you, because explaining it is not part of it."

"Is it dangerous?" Debra asked.

"Is curiosity dangerous?" Elsa looked delighted. "Sometimes. Isn't that the fun?"

"Okay, hold on." Debra looked around the room, from Elsa to Jackson to Benjamin, waiting for someone to laugh. Nobody laughed. "This is a microplastic contest. On a boat. I saw a thread wiggle. And now there's a hanging doll and a test nobody will describe?"

"Nobody will describe it," Elsa agreed pleasantly, "and that should tell you something about it. The contest continues tonight. Samples are due to Benjamin by two in the morning. He logs them, I judge them at dawn, and one of you two walks away rich and the other one gets curious." She checked a slim gold watch. "I'm off to get a drink. Toodles."

And she was gone, heels clacking down the gangway, leaving the gallows model on the table and the whole lab smelling faintly of her perfume.

"She can't just add rules," Debra said. "Can she?"

"She can," Jackson said. "She owns the boat."

"Is the test real? Like, actually real?"

"I don't know," Jackson said, and Debra believed him, because he looked as if he had tried to find out and failed. "Benjamin?"

"My grandfather's ledger has entries about it," Benjamin said carefully. "Dates. Names of losers. No descriptions. The entries stop being in my grandfather's handwriting partway through, which my family does not discuss at dinner."

"That's terrifying, Benjamin."

"Yes," he agreed, and went back to his microscope with the calm of a man who had decided fear was someone else's department tonight.

Debra and Jackson ended up at adjacent scopes, because the contest didn't pause for existential dread. There were four dishes left in the day's trawl and they split them two and two, and for a while the only sounds were the focus knobs clicking and the waves hitting the hull and, once, a distant foghorn that made everyone look up.

It was maybe half past eleven when Debra found hers. Not a wiggling fiber this time. A fragment, small and pale, but with a structure, a repeating honeycomb pattern pressed into it like a maker's mark. She stared at it for a full minute before she said anything.

"Jackson. Come look at mine."

He came around and bent to her scope, and she watched his shoulders while he looked. They went still.

"That's not weathering," he said. "That's manufacture. That pattern was pressed into it. Deliberately."

"Plastic doesn't have a maker's mark, does it?"

"Not like that. Not in miniature. Not woven into the polymer like it grew there." He straightened up and rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. "Show me yours and I'll show you mine."

His find was in the dish on his left, a thread, red, and wound around it in a tight spiral was a second fiber, clear, that had no business existing. Not polypropylene, not nylon, not anything in the reference charts taped to the wall. Under magnification it had a slight translucence, like insect wing, and it was wrapped around the red thread in a perfect even spiral, the way a vine wraps a fence post.

"Grown," Debra said. "You said grown about mine and I'm saying grown about yours."

"Yes."

"Jackson. Twenty-five years ago, behind the community college, after the