Darkness suits me
Remarkably Bright Creatures“Darkness suits me” is Marcellus’s declaration of kinship with the deep sea and the phrase that frames both his captivity and his return to freedom. It begins as a preference for the aquarium’s dimmed lights, but its meaning deepens through memories of the open water, the human loss the sea conceals, and Marcellus’s final descent toward the seabed.
Captivity and the Deep
At the beginning of his account, on the 1,299th day of captivity, Marcellus waits each evening for the overhead lights to click off, leaving only the main tank’s glow. The result is not true darkness, but it is close enough to the dimness he associates with the middle depths of the sea. His declaration, “DARKNESS SUITS ME,” makes this preference sound less like a comfort of captivity than a remnant of an earlier life.
Marcellus says he lived in the deep before humans captured and imprisoned him. He cannot remember that life clearly, yet he can still taste the untamed currents of cold open water; darkness, he says, runs through his blood. The phrase thus holds a tension between what captivity has taken from him and what remains instinctively his. The plaque beside his enclosure identifies him as a giant Pacific octopus, while his own recollection points beyond the aquarium’s glass toward a world he can scarcely remember.
The Sea as Memory and Keeper
The expression also resonates with Tova Sullivan’s grief. At the Sowell Bay pier, she sits on her usual bench and studies a round, maroon mark on her wrist, wondering whether it will remain as a silver-dollar scar. Looking across the water, she imagines her lost son, Erik Sullivan, beneath the surface, holding the moonlit reflections for her. The sea appears at once as an immense darkness and as the imagined setting for an intimate connection with the dead.
Marcellus’s own memory gives that connection a material counterpart. As a young octopus, before his capture, he found a copied key on a ring among objects preserved beneath rocks on the seafloor: a rubber sneaker sole, a vinyl shoelace, and plastic shirt buttons. He understands that the collection belonged to the person Tova mourns. Unable to recover the objects he found long ago, he later returns the key, the least he can do for her. The deep is not empty darkness in this account; it holds traces of human lives, preserving what the people left behind can no longer reach.
Return and Reframing
Near the end, Tova takes Marcellus toward the Sowell Bay waterfront in a yellow bucket. Though he is near the end of his life, she brings him to the jetty so he can return to the sea. The journey is slow: a seventy-year-old woman pulling a sixty-pound octopus along the boardwalk, with Marcellus trailing an arm on each side of the bucket. At the water’s edge, the tide is far out, and moonlight lies across the shallow pools like silver coins.
After his release, Marcellus swims away from the rocks, reaches a drop-off, and descends into depths where no light reaches. There, he returns to the place where, as a juvenile, he found the key and where the long-disintegrated bones of Erik Sullivan lie. The phrase that once accompanied a captive’s nightly wait now belongs to a creature back in the vastness of the sea. Marcellus does not pretend that freedom has postponed his death: he expects only a day or two, perhaps, and says he is lucky and grateful to be home. His final return makes “Darkness suits me” both a statement of belonging and a quiet acknowledgment that even a brief freedom matters.
