Women's t-shirt
If you are after an anglerfish t-shirt, this one carries Naoko Mochizuki printed on the front, with her black blazer and her satin tie. The anglerfish is the fish of the abyss that goes around with a light burning over its head. Naoko is a marine claims surveyor and part of Animal Kinhood, my series of animals who live like people.
Foto: Emőke Dénes / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)Melanocetus johnsonii
The light a place already has is never any good. I always bring my own.
Meso and bathypelagic zone of tropical and temperate seas worldwide, usually between 200 and 1,500 meters deep, with occasional records a good deal deeper. Permanent darkness, cold and high pressure.
It is the first thing she says when she goes aboard, before writing anything down, and she has said it to skippers, to owners and to her own boss. If they give her a round number, she asks them to repeat it with the minutes. She writes it down, says the figure under her breath and only then opens the briefcase. She does it when she is alone too, with nobody there to confirm anything.
At thirty-three a skipper asked her, in front of two witnesses, to change half an hour in a report, just enough for the damage to fall on the other side of the watch handover. She asked him to repeat the exact time, wrote it down as she had been given it the first time and signed the report that same afternoon. The skipper never spoke to her again, and she went on surveying his ships for another eight years.
