Tote bag
An anglerfish tote bag, with a pale green panel and black handles, and the portrait of Naoko Mochizuki printed on the front. The anglerfish is the deep-sea fish that goes around with a light hanging over its head, and Naoko is a marine claims surveyor. She appears in Animal Kinhood, my series of animals living 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.
A three-metre tape measure, a set of hard pencils, two clear plastic bags, a handful of cable ties and a small desk lamp with a dented shade. The bags and the ties are for the personal effects that turn up loose in a cabin: she puts them inside, closes it with a tie and writes the cabin number on the label. The name she does not write.
The first survey she was given on her own was a sand dredger with a flooded hold, at night, on the outer wharf, with the quay floodlight blown for weeks. She was twenty-six. Before leaving the branch she took the lamp off the shelf and put it in her briefcase, and that is how it stayed: twenty years later it is still the office lamp.
