Only the Animals

The mussel Sel first meets Muss after he decides that everything is dead. Sel’s friend Gallos introduces him to Muss; Gallos had taken up residence on Sel’s pier in the Hudson River to write poetry. Supposedly, Muss grew up poor on a farm out west and somehow made it to New York City. It annoys Muss to be told what to do, what to attach to, and when to “secrete threads from his byssus pit.” He left behind a girlfriend because he couldn’t stand to “have his spirit stolen bit by bit.” They were all looking for a new way of being. Muss told them all about his cross-country journey and insisted that this is the end of “untrue knowledge.” Sel agreed.

At first, Muss and Gallos talk for 8 or 10 hours straight. Gallos laps up everything Muss says. Sel listens but usually says nothing when they sit down for chats. Muss and Gallos talk about seeing shoelaces that remind them of seaweed, and of how that reminds them of how sad garbage is. Finally, Muss says that he’s tired, so they must “stop the machine.” Gallos argues until Sel voices his support for Muss—and then, Sel tells them that he thinks they’re maniacs, but he wants to see what happens to them.

Spring arrives. As it gets warmer, Sel knows he has to follow Muss across the country to see how he grew up. They’ll go all the way to San Francisco, where Muss has a girl who will host them. Sel can’t convince his own girl to accompany them, but Muss counsels that Sel can find a girl elsewhere. Though Sel’s girl is unhappy, Sel still moves away. He curses life for being so sad.

Muss, Gallos, and Sel hitch a ride on a cargo ship. Muss says they have to move quickly across the U.S. or they’ll dry out. Soon, as Muss promised, they’re on the road in a crate, watching the stars above them. Midway across the country, they come across zebra mussels that frighten Sel. Gallos reminds him that the zebra mussels are different, and that different is exactly what Sel wants. They attend a party where there will be girls, though they know they can’t stay too long in the fresh water or they’ll die. But they go to the party anyway, because Muss needs girls like most blue mussels need saltwater.

The mussels meet Muss’s cousin on an exposed pipe. They’re shocked that there’s no space, just zebra mussels. They’ve almost covered the bottom of the lakes and there are no native mussels left. At the party, Sel asks some girls about the native pearly mussels. The girls close their shells, but Sel persists. He tries to explain that he grew up hearing about the mussels out West. They supposedly had such beautiful shells that the humans who found them named each one as they pulled them out of the water. When Muss is done with his zebra mussel girl, the mussels get into a box of bait. Sel feels like he’s starting to dry up and thinks about names of native pearly mussels. Gallos works the names into a little poem, which he recites by shouting.

The mussels hit the West Coast pretty far north. Being on the road was great, but they’re not quite ready for it yet with their soft bodies and their unformed philosophies. They hitch a ride to Bremerton, Washington, where Muss grew up. Muss has told stories about his father, who’s been on the farm so long that he’d forgotten he could be free if he’d just let go. But when they get to the farm, they can’t find Muss’s father. Several old mussels say that Muss’s father was harvested, and one says that Muss and his young friends shouldn’t take chances. Muss howls with grief, so Gallos and Sel lead him out into the water and avoid the seagulls at night.

In the morning, they find the battleship. It’s a gorgeous “vessel of adventure,” and it’s exactly what they’re looking for. There’s already a community of mussels on the side, so the Sel and his companions decide to join. The toxic stuff the humans put on the hull doesn’t keep the mussels off; it just keeps them high. Sel and his friends secrete just enough so they can hang on, but not enough to get stuck in a routine. Their goal is to detach. A mussel named Bluey joined the group at the farm. The four talk often about how to practice non-attachment while depending on attaching to the hull for survival.

Bluey feels lonely all the time. He likes to watch his byssal secretions harden and believes that the mussels’ sadness stems from fighting their byssus threads. True bliss, he believes, will come only if they give in and attach. Despite this, Bluey still knows he has to have an adventure before he settles down.

Muss and Gallos aren’t certain about attaching to a U.S. Navy vessel, but Sel doesn’t care. He just wants to be moving somewhere interesting. So when the battleship starts to move and the hull vibrates, it feels great. The seascape changes around the mussels, and Sel notices every new thing he passes. Some days, the mussels starve because the ship is going too fast for them to filter, but on other days, the ship slows down, and the mussels gorge themselves. The other mussels tell stories. One talks about being attached to a life raft with a human shipwreck survivor. The man had given up, jumped off, and drowned.

When the water is very still, the mussels can sense the men above them. They usually only hear the cooks or the engines, but one day they hear a whistle and someone calling everyone to the deck. The mussels wait, but they’re disappointed when the voice dismisses the drill.

Since Sel and his friends are in the middle of the hull, they don’t have a hard time hanging on. A few other mussels fall off when it gets stormy, which always makes Bluey sad. But they lose some and gain others. Blue mussel larvae continually latch on. One grows up into a beautiful girl. Muss loves her, but she’s more interested in Sel. Soon, Sel loves her. He’s glad that Muss lies awake at night and listens to them talk. Sel tries to talk the girl into spawning, but she’s too nervous. When he asks what she wants out of life, she yawns. This offends Sel; she seems too young to be tired. She tells Sel her story, and Sel realizes why this girl is different: she doesn’t want to settle down.

The girl disappears one day when Muss and Sel get into a fight over the nature of reality. Bluey gets sad and Gallos gets jealous, but Muss and Sel forgive each other later. Muss makes Sel repeat, “Experience is all.” Sel wants to climb into Muss’s mind—he’s never felt this way about anyone else.

Some of the other mussels on the hull start to get nervous. They insist there’s a dog whelk trying to invade the mussel bed. They plan to tether it, but Bluey insists it’s wrong to starve another creature. Both Muss and Gallos support the cause, but Sel doesn’t know what he feels. He stays put while Muss and Gallos join the hunt, and he wishes he’d gone too.

Another girl comes along to distract Sel. They become physically intimate, but Sel is too sad to continue. After a while, she asks if Sel thinks it means something that he and his friends are all “on the same boat.” Sel insists the sea is a “great leveler.” He continues that sometimes he hates it here, but he can’t decide if he wants to stay here forever or run away.

In the morning, the girl tells Sel to stay hungry. He’s onto something, living so spontaneously. She assures him that he’ll get there if he can survive, but there’s no virtue in moving quickly toward death. She advises him to live slowly and die old. When Sel insists that he’s just one of millions of mussels, she says that he’s his own little world. The girl moves on and not long after, Muss and Gallos return. They’d tied up the dog whelk and left it to die. Hearing this, Bluey doesn’t talk to them for days, so Sel makes a speech. He insists that they can’t do that sort of thing when they’re sailing. They have to live together, so they have to pitch in and not mess things up for everyone else.

The ship stops in Astoria, Oregon. It’s there for a few weeks, giving the mussels time to get in trouble in the bay. Bluey, though, gets homesick and decides to return to the farm. He misses sharing food with his family and knowing he can latch onto something for good. Sel, Muss, and Gallos don’t understand Bluey’s feelings, but they sadly let him go. After Bluey’s departure, Sel gets restless, but fortunately the ship moves out a few days later. The battleship is moving slowly north and west, though, so the mussels mope. On this ship, they’re never going to get to San Francisco. Sel says something that he’d be happy to die in San Francisco in a soup, but Muss insists there’s no glory in death—just nothingness.

Sel, Gallos, and Muss talk about nothingness. Muss insists they turn bright orange when they’re cooked. He also insists that humans don’t eat mussels’ byssus threads and don’t consider them to be part of a mussel’s body, even though to mussels, the threads are the root of who they are. Gallos says that if they find themselves in a pot, they should keep their shells closed so the humans won’t eat them. Sel thinks this is useless—if they’re dead, they’re dead.

A few weeks later, the battleship slows down in water that’s warm and salty. The ship puts down anchor in a harbor with many other battleships like it. Muss floats around and returns with the news that they’re in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Weirdly, the temperature and salt brings on a mass spawning. Every mussel spews sperm or eggs into the water with wild abandon. They spawn and eat as much as they can, getting fat and happy.

Eventually, the water looks milky from all the larval mussels. After a few months, though, those drifters settle down as juveniles amongst the other mussels. It dawns on Sel, Muss, and Gallos that they’ve wasted their freedom—now, they’re the elders in the colony. The juveniles keep coming up and asking about the search for meaning. Sel finds this ridiculous. Life is about the journey—he can’t fathom that the next generation thinks life should have meaning. Gallos has a nervous breakdown. He moves in with a radical colony, but it doesn’t reinvigorate him. He becomes huge and stops writing poetry, so Muss and Sel stop visiting.

Then, Muss and Sel meet the lobster. The mussels are frightened at first, but once they start talking, they learn that the lobster is on a journey to have experiences, just like them. He’s been around the world, and he doesn’t eat the mussels because he’s fasting. He wants to think more clearly. The lobster insists that the war will arrive here soon, so the mussels should be careful—mussels will be the food of choice once humans start rationing meat.

One morning, the lobster gives Sel and Muss a speck of something that will help them “see beyond the here and now.” Sel hallucinates that he’s stuck in a rainbow. Muss and the lobster talk incessantly as Sel silently watches the colors. He occasionally hears the lobster say that Europeans can only import philosophy to America now. The lobster says he stalked Sartre for a while, hoping Sartre would put him on a leash and take him for walks. Later, Sel starts listening again and hears Muss and the lobster talking about mussels’ poetry. They’re all so high that they laugh when a starfish moves in, hoping to eat a mussel. At the last minute, the lobster scares it away. Then he gives the mussels another speck.

Muss goes silent, Sel’s drug trip becomes grayscale, and the lobster sings something sad as church bells ring on land. Something enters the water and comes toward them fast. The mussels and the lobster admire it until it hits the battleship. The lobster dies instantly; the hull that Muss and Sel are attached to blasts out into the port. The ship shudders as bombs hit it again and again. Suddenly, the water is teeming with things that shouldn’t be there—helmets, legs, and arms.

Sel thinks they should embrace this moment of collapse, but they’re too freaked out. A man with no legs tries to climb onto Sel’s bit of hull, and Sel feels like the force of the bombs is going to make his body implode. The water heats up from the oil fires. Remembering what Gallos said about surviving in boiling water, Sel tries to close his shell. He can’t; half of it is gone. He and Muss know what Muss has to do to survive. He must drop off and sink to the cooler water below. Muss lets go and lands in amongst the mussels they created.

Sel panics, but calms down as he thinks of the sunset over the Hudson River. He used to watch it and think that nobody knows what’s going to happen, aside from that they’ll grow old. He panics again when he thinks that he wasn’t supposed to die like this. Where will Muss be without Sel looking at him? He wishes everyone good luck with the “spawning, living, and the dying.” He thinks of Muss until he dies.