The waves lap tenderly at your ankles like a hungry yet obedient dog as they sweep in ceaselessly from the bay. The water is as warm as always, having been delivered here from the swelter of the waistline of the world through the insistence of complex and arcane mechanisms of the laws of physics upon a torrent of creeping saline a hundred kilometers wide. Clearer than crystal, the water is here. The bay is quiet — Tuesday at dawn is not a typical time for beachgoers and surfing, and there are far more convenient spots closer to the city regardless. You glance over your shoulder at your campsite by the treeline. Your tent sits perched at the edge where the green gives way to cherry-blossom sand — in almost precarious fashion, as if any moment a wave might overstep its bounds at high tide to claim it for the depths. So fragile a thing it seems there, the barest swatch of DayGlo pink polyester clinging to the fiberglass tentpoles like a starving person’s skin to ribs. If the sea does not sweep it away, you think, the unrepentant gusts of sea-wind surely will.
Not to worry. There are no mornings left for you to awaken at the campsite anyway, to the rising sun over the bay, the greedy clamoring of seagulls, and the easy, low honks of the pelicans as they skim the surface of the water on their great arched wings like buttresses of midair cathedrals. Your vacation days have evaporated; you suppose you were fortunate they ever existed to begin with. Tomorrow, your cellular phone will mark the beginning of your day with waveforms meticulously crafted by engineers on laptops to sound as pleasant and rejuvenating as possible while also being completely vacuous, impossible to lodge in the folds of your mind, slipperier than the tops of the jellies buried in the sand at the shore, so nondescript as to be remarkable. You will shower, dress, force protein into your system, drink coffee, open the car door, climb inside, close door, buckle up, turn key. Drive. Do not recall the time you drive; become your own autopilot. Weave your rumbling conveyance through the ever-shifting walls of steel and plastic, observe the speed limits, give yourself the space to maneuver, do not remember it. Awaken a second time as you park. Think to yourself, “How did I arrive here?” The same way you do each day. Take a breath as the caffeine makes a mockery of your blood-brain barrier. Leave car. Walk to door. Open door.
Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job. Do job.
Leave job. Sign paper saying you did job so that you can collect a different paper that gives the exact value of the time you spent not being on the beach as determined by fair market value. Deliver paper to the brick-walled building that owns your home. Forget the drive back to that home. Stumble in. Handfuls of cereal while watching television. Any effort more than that is mighty Himalayan Annapurna cresting the cloudline, 8000 meters high. Change or do not. Sleep or do not. The cellular phone will still play the song, as memorable as your drive.
The phone has been dead for two days in your backpack and you step further into the surf. Further still. There is a coral reef, the people at the gas station back in town told you, out at the mouth of the bay. You have to snorkel out there, they said. Can’t be missed, they said. The waves are at your chest and you push off from the sand under your toes, lapsing into a gentle breaststroke, those years of swim team filling your head like a school of herring. Your legs kick out; your arms pull the sea back and your body forward. The stroke feels as powerful as always; you are electric, a dynamo. Each lap on lap on lap in the sub-Olympic pool culminating in this, a primal return to the vast ocean, the saltwater crusting against your lips. The flip-turns, the dive, the time-clock — poverty. This is wealth.
You pull the straps tight on your mask, fit the snorkel between your teeth, submerge. The silicone J tethers you to the surface. You can taste the salt-air just as it rolls out of the world’s lungs, freshly-baked by a billion invisible plants all around you, the Earth itself giving you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation every second your face is under the waves. Spreading out and down in organic Technicolor spires and archways is the reef, an underwater Sagrada Familia cast from the very bones of forty thousand years worth of minute architects. Shimmering schools of fish split and regroup around the pillars of living stone. Clusters of anemones in magenta, lime, and cobalt mesmerize with their swaying in the current. A massive brown fish roots about in the sand. As it digs up clams and mussels, you can hear the crunching and cracking of their shells between its broad, flat teeth. Neon-tent pink shrimp dance around it, picking off parasites you could not hope to see. They are ostentatious — they are too helpful for anything else to eat. Suddenly, the huge brown fish swims away as a ten-foot-long stretch of seafloor begins to quiver, and a guitarfish like an ironed-flat shark with an arrowhead nose materializes, the sand falling away, cascading like waterfalls off its back. It swims in a lazy arc around you, close enough to touch, and then out to the open ocean, where its single-story body length becomes a speck, and then vanishes altogether.
Can’t be missed.
There are innumerable shapes shifting below on the coral that you cannot make out from this distance. You must be closer. You pop above water, pull the snorkel out of your mouth, wrap the strap around your wrist, breathe deep, and descend. A ghostly facsimile of your form built of bubbles ascends to the surface behind you, a trail that reminds the ocean where you forced it to make way for you. It is not too far to the reef, and soon you are between the corals yourself. The fecundity threatens to overwhelm your senses. Every square inch of the ocean around you is coated in life, a tenacious biofilm clinging to each organic, alien curve. Mussels gape gluttonously in the current and tube worms flick open and shut like camera shutters, snapping up thousands? millions? of invisible creatures in a blink. A sea slug, electric blue, wriggles out of a hole in the nearby coral and undulates sensuously across the seabed. You wonder how it would taste. Sea stars in dozens of shapes, colors, and sizes creep expectantly across the corals, for all the world like five-fingered hands following the contours of a lover’s waist.
Then there it is. The most beautiful creature you have ever seen.
It slowly, almost timidly extends a tentacle from its hiding-space, and then another, and you are enraptured. The vibrant indigo of each gorgeous ring on each golden, sinewy tentacle seems to pulse, to gaze. The creature looks at you with a hundred jet and ultramarine eyes as its body unfolds itself from the space — just the barest crevice in the coral — and it unfurls into a tiny but undeniable presence, a stunning cephalopodal flower, animate and possessed of a clear intelligence. It seems curious of you, almost.
Of course you were warned about this creature. This one is the likes of the box jellyfish and the cone snails; they will kill you. Tourists are frightened of sharks but it is these creatures, with their tiny knives concealed under two cloaks, directly aimed at your ribs at all times, they are the murderers. With sharks, you know where you stand. They are not assassins, they are not diplomats, there is no subterfuge. They will indicate they want to eat you and then do so if they please — there is a certain honor to it. But the box jelly is a phantom adrift in the current, bell an inch long with two-foot tentacles loaded with heart-stopping harpoons. The cone snail hides in its finely-patterned shell, enticing the primal evolutionary nature of humans to hold beauty in the hand, then stabs away with its poison dagger, locking the muscles and squeezing the lungs. And this one…
You cannot help yourself. You reach out. You have heard they are frightened of people but this one has fallen in love with you. Or you with it? Whatever it is, there is a force that brings you together, two planets locked in orbit. It uncurls a tentacle and gently wraps it around your finger. You feel its strength, despite its diminutive size. You could draw back your hand, make a motion, frighten it away from you, but you do not. You feel it snake its tentacles around your hand and crawl up your arm.
There is the tiniest scratch as its beak scrapes across your skin — a spark from a campfire alighting on the hair of your arm and instantly snuffing. It is enough, you know. The octopus presses its body close to you.
The toxin’s work is done quickly. The tingling and numbness start in the feet and hands. Your calves seize, your thighs, your arms. In the twilight eyes of the octopus you can see all of Earth as if you are gazing down from the stars.
Someone has put your chest in a screw press. Your brain wills you to breathe, surrounded by water, you are desperate, drowning, but you cannot even take in a lungful of the sea. Your chest is aflame. Every muscle in your body shrieks at you, swim! Save yourself! Swim upward! The air is only a few feet away!
You drift downward. The snorkel around your wrist floats free and rises to the surface. Your ankles buckle against the seafloor. Your eyes widen. Your vision blurs. Crimson creeps in from the edges. Everything begins to grow dim as the fish swim around you. Every square inch of the ocean around you is coated in life, a tenacious biofilm clinging to each organic, alien curve. Mussels gape gluttonously in the current and tube worms flick open and shut like camera shutters, snapping up thousands? millions? of invisible creatures in a blink. A sea slug, electric blue, wriggles out of a hole in the nearby coral and undulates sensuously across the seabed. You wonder how it would taste. Sea stars in dozens of shapes, colors, and sizes creep expectantly across the corals, for all the world like five-fingered hands following the contours of a lover’s waist.
It is the most beautiful place in the world.
You forget your job, your drive, your bills, and everything else.
The octopus uncurls from your arm.
You are a statue in the aqueous garden of God.