Optical Illusions of the Lower Atmosphere Natalie Vestin (bio) Before any sea was the sea, it was the sea over the future. Before any home was a home, it was a seabed, the now-home missing its giant cephalopod and trilobite, dry-home whispering of saline and unicellular precursors of life. It was the autumn of pretending I was under an enormous, ancient ocean. It was the autumn of being reluctant to leave my apartment, of closing myself in. It was the autumn of being very still and very quiet. During the Pre-Cambrian era, an ocean covered Minnesota, which is to say, there was no Minnesota save sedimentary seabed. Though it seems rash to dismiss home so easily as something that might never have been. I carry and cultivate in me a sickness for home that includes its past, its cephalopods, its could-be-life. Is it unreasonable to suspect that the seabed once weighed itself against a sickness for the future, for conifer and erupting cliff and even the red steppes of the taconite mines? The layers of this ocean have names and colors and life they greet with measured opportunity and hostility. Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Cretaceous. Each era had its own ocean, even if ocean were a retreating ghost or patience for the next encroaching sea. During the Cambrian, the ocean over Minnesota brought forth the brachiopods, sea slugs, graptolites, and trilobites, whose fossils still cover the northeastern cliffs. The Ordovician, whose advent the sea creatures may have noticed in the way they register the subtle changes in the day's light or the tides, heralded more complex biology: cephalopods, bryozoans, mollusks, and worms whose circulatory systems promised us our soon-blood and someday-vessels and if-you're-lucky hearts. And then, during the Silurian, the sea over Minnesota, sea full up with life stretching its mistake-laden helical arms into a wealth of descendants, vanished as if it never had been. And then, in the Devonian appeared a sea in the same form but made different for the disappearing. And then, the new sea retreated once more and a newer same sea emerged to haunt its own beds during the Cretaceous, bringing with it ammonoids, oysters, and clams. Imagining the oceans atop and below me during the autumn when I was very still and very quiet allowed a world I couldn't look at directly to be different, false and yet real as a haunting. The ocean became an invisible cloudscape, a before-world saturating the present when summoned and given form by the accumulation of its many names. _______ It was the autumn I started a new job researching the treatment of bacterial infections in critically ill people, though I strayed frequently from documenting research on pathology to studying the behavior of bacteria, the opportunities we give them or the licenses they take that drive our knowledge about them into a trajectory whose aim is extermination. I study the Kingdom of Monera, the mostly microscopic universe composed of one-celled prokaryotes. I study one part of the multiverse. My dad taught me about the possible multiverse when I was a [End Page 134] child, about how many of our lives might be lived in parallel, how a choice or a story can unspool in the fates of multiple selves, though no one can really say how and few wish to think of consequences sown or reaped without choice. When I study bacteria for work, I study them indirectly as the effect they bear on a life. I research treatment, pharmacodynamics, antibiotic troughs, and resistance. And when I learn about bacteria as a part of my ocean only for this autumn, I study the protection they offer each other, their resistance toward destruction, the forms of their communities known through microscopy and light scatter, their bodies and strange breath, their kinship, their homes, and their struggles. Seeking an understanding of Monera means confronting how to define life and how and when to protect or end it. It is a seeking that illuminates the reality that, in this universe, I am never entirely myself but instead a haphazard collection of ocean and microbiota, a form whose...