Unreal Time

The hotel was one we had been staying in since I was a kid, a two-story U-shaped hotel built around a central pool. Every room had a partial ocean view. One year during a storm, a ship grounded on the beach in front of the hotel. The hull of the ship stayed for years while they dismantled it for scrap iron, piece by piece. The remnant teamed with ocean life making an artificial reef of colorful sponges and sea anemones and fish. In the golden Sargasso weeds that floated after a storm, you would find sea-horses and crabs and fish with tatters of skin that camouflaged them in the vegetation. It was a wonderland.

One day my father and I were driving around in the afternoon looking for a new place to eat. A few years before, a developer had built a large, upscale shopping plaza, but the businesses had not done well and now it was mostly empty but for some odd, local operations; however, we drove through the parking lot looking at things, and when we came to the back of the complex on the side away from the highway, we found that a university had rented a large part of the building to house their research facilities, part of which was open to the public. My father parked the car, and tentatively, we approached an entrance. No one seemed to be around. We walked into a dimly lit room filled with huge aquariums. There was nothing but that and the sound of air conditioning and filters bubbling and the cool, blue light. We walked from tank to tank looking in. There were rooms and rooms of them, some tanks big enough to hold sharks. As we wandered, a few people walked through the area, but they paid no attention to us. It was like being under water, really, my father and I moving slowly, almost floating.

Having wandered from tank to tank in the indigo light for an unmeasured time, we found ourselves where we began. We stepped back into the heavy heat of the parking lot and returned to the car.

"You want to eat Chinese?" my father asked.

We weren't far from a Chinese restaurant where we had eaten a few times before when my parents were still married, a sort of family joke since it was the only Chinese restaurant at which we had ever eaten and the only thing we knew to order was Chop Suey. We all sipped at the hot green tea we had never tasted before and said that the Egg Drop Soup was pretty good, ravaging the hard dried noodles. And in the car we'd laugh that we'd be hungry in an hour.

"Sure," I said.

Sometimes, I think it all had been a dream, for the next year, there was no sign that a research center had ever been there. It was simply gone.