><(((°>
Imagine living beneath the water. SCUBA gear and air that refills from the oxygen in the water, power from the electricity you generate through resistance servos connected on the outsides of your knees. Imagine kelp growing on coarse ropes strewn in rows of eight, plucking the kelp berries and pruning them back to eat when you can. Imagine the cyan-white glow of blossoming spores, the bursting of packages of children into the water. Blossoming under the filtered sun, reflected like police investigators’ flashlights off spilled mercury, broken glass, confessional booth blood-red evening light pooled on the floor.
Imagine being down here for eighteen days now. Just over two weeks, marking this down with a penknife now cleaned of iron residue deposited by the saltwater slipping into your full-coverage neoprene wetsuit. Etching little lines in the pile of stones, starfish-kissed anchor-scarred boulders you nylon rope yourself to, rope because it’s rope now not bungee cord, not bungee cord anymore because it won’t bungee and that means it’s mere rope, degraded now in its elastic core, and so you call it as such even when it looks like its former identity.
You’ve never been able to break that habit, have you?
You drift there by night, tied by diving belt and not foot because you never learned the knots that wouldn’t tighten when pulled and you’re afraid to lose circulation in your limbs, would need to amputate and ocean water is so dirty — you’re drifting there at night and the ocean lulls you to sleep before you can even dream. Nyx takes you faster than darkness can hit the horizon, before the sun dips beneath the waves and then deeper still until your world is a blacked out velvet reverie of touch, sound, taste. Nothing more. And then you are gone.
Your wetsuit is the first to show the wear. Turns out all those coaches and diving instructors telling you you needed to wash your suit in the shower after every swim — they were right. Oh, how you complained. Your hair was blond, turned green in summer with chlorine — they were right about that too.
So your suit rips a little. At the knee, the left one. Like how jeans do when the grass stain accumulates too much, rubs straight in and eats away at the fibres until shoddy hotel window blinds are all that remain to shade the paper-pale skin beneath. When you were a kid, it was considered fashionable. Now you are a young adult, or were, and it’s considered ugly, a sign of being poor.
Your skin is taught, roped with muscle, and you admire the moon-smooth, scar-pitted surface of your kneecap through the tear, even as you fumble uselessly with raisinskin fingers in hopes that the seam can be stitched, somehow, but how? Thread? Needle? You have neither, and even though you could manufacture them — you have fishbones, and you have kelp threads — it would never last. You swim so much every day. These wetsuits are made in moulds; they are not meant to last. Not meant to be repaired with anything but a heat gun and time. Your tongue has joined in on faulty living, too — three days ago started a routine of shedding a new layer into your mouth every morning. You’d read up on that, knew to expect it, but you can’t help but worry that your tongue is getting smaller every day from the degloving that ensues after every first meal, sucking on your rebreather between bites of raw fish and seaweed.
You hope you don’t have worms. The books said it wasn’t the season.
You can’t go up, though.
><(((°>
Imagine day twenty-eight, double the last number of tally-marks on the stones that still mark your sleeping cot. Like a betta fish you have looped kelp ropes onto each other, invented knots and cradles to make a hammock for you to sleep in, since the nylon in the ropes has degraded, too, and all you’re left with are the plastic-shielded metal hooks of the former ropes that once were bungee cords. Your suit hasn’t degraded further, thankfully.
It’s beautiful today. The water last night was turbulent, rocking you like a child in a cot, and now you see why: half a mile above you are leagues upon leagues of oranges. Bobbing in the water, pebbling the above like a sunset through glass beads, shading and brilliant as individual eclipses, each and every one of them. It’s gorgeous.
It’s barely been a month, but it feels like you’ve not had oranges in years.
You unfasten yourself from the hooks you have wrapped in kelp ties.The fish throng with you today, a ray couple on the sea floor investigating you as they always do, and your shark pack waits for you just outside the kelp forest you reside in. You staked out this territory on your first — no, third? — day and it has paid off well. You are akin to a seal, with how the fishes and crustaceans treat you. You belong here, have slowly evolved to fit a niche here. You give them protection, and you tend the kelplines — take a tightly-bound ball of nestled kelp and leftover carp, right there with the berries and floating bobbers — from a nook in the boulders you call bed and take out your rebreather with your chest full of oxygen. Your finned legs and feet still moving, pumping not for movement but for stability and so the servos on your knees can draw enough kinetic energy to keep the oxygen machine working, replenishing your air supply from the water around you like you are a fish. Without it, you would die.
Bite down idly through chewy marbled meat, take a breath of air, chew, swallow, breathe, bite. Repeat. It’s a pattern that came unusually to you in your first week or so, often forgetting to breathe through your rancid hunger or not wanting to eat at all, not having the taste for fish and kelp — craving fries, tacos, burgers, fruit so much you could barely stand staying beneath the waves any longer, but you held out. Even as you wasted away, learned and relearned quickly what food means in energy production, learned what caloric intake means for an athlete because every day under the waves is an exercise in endurance: moving alone takes so much power, doing your fishing takes so much to keep going, even continuing oxygen requires you to keep the servos moving. You’re like a shark, in that way. Maybe that’s why they like you.
The sea has extended beyond its usual range. You follow up the beach, past submerged picnic tables, far from home now. You swim up to the surface, not breaking it, and to shallower waters you haven’t visited in weeks. It’s warm here, warmer than you could have imagined, and briefly a recollection shivers through your body, your spinal cord, as you realize that this warmth is what you once considered cold, even freezing when you and your beachgoing friends would dare each other to jump in the sea in summer.
The sand, the beach grass, even a bit of the playing field is covered, in the distance there. You won’t go that far — you’d end up needing to leave the water. You can’t let that happen. It’s tempted you so many times in the past month, and now the temptation is nearly gone — if you let yourself walk again, breathe unfiltered air again, blink without goggles again, you don’t know if you’d ever come back. You don’t know what you’d do with yourself, in that case. There’s so much you wouldn’t have to do every day: hunt, tend the kelp lines, meddle with the whitetip and blacktip shark pack, mend your suit and your hammock every night before sleep, stretch and massage out the aches in your muscles after a particularly strenuous hunt the prior night. Chase the seals, hear the radar pings — more frequent in this time of year — of the U.S. Navy submarines in their live-fire practice drills.
Hope they don’t find you.
No. Now, you gather your whole diver’s net full of ripe, succulent California navel oranges. The whole orchard was flooded, it seems, and washed straight down the estuary river to the brackish zone you are in now, a few miles south of the reef you inhabit. Some are still stuck straight to the branches, and you love that because it means they will keep longer.
You can’t wait to taste sugar again on your tongue. Your body has been so long without it. Sure, your form is lean and ripples with muscle, but there’s a reason no animal in the sea turns its nose up at an extra layer of blubber.
Imagine that.
><(((°>
Now imagine day sixty-seven.
Day sixty-seven is marked with a tally mark on the boulder you sleep locked to, as days always are. You’ve not unkindly wrestled with the idea of not marking the days at this point. Why keep time when you so clearly can stay permanently down here? Just a week ago, you ran out of oranges again after more flooded the surface from another freak sub-hurricaine that blew so many farmers’ annual incomes out to sea. You have learned, now, to pickle them by slitting their peels not quite down to meat but enough that the salt, not the animals, can embed into the fruit and preserve it longer. Now they’re all gone, but the kelp is back and fuller than ever, and the salmon runs are just starting, fat and happy red-and-silver-sided humongous beasts flooding your kelp forest. So yes, you mark the day on the boulder. You nick a little salmon symbol into the stone, too, thinking ahead: what if, next year, you want to estimate when the salmon runs will start again? It would be good to know. You are pleased.
But this day marks another notch in a different calendar, too. Today, you are hunting with the white-tipped black-tipped shark pack. It’s five of them total — you make the sixth member on occasion, though not every day do all of them appear. In your prior life, you would have bragged that you could differentiate the sharks. Would have called them yours, would have made it impossible for you to be anything but cool. It was worth awe over telling the truth. Now, though, you’ll readily admit to yourself: you don’t remember which one is which most days. You even call them by the same name: Cheshire. Chesh, if it’s the one of the white-tipped trio (or all, on different days?) who likes nuzzling the elbow of your wetsuit. Ire, if it’s the black-tipped one (or is it many black-tipped sharks, rotating out by the day so you only ever see two?) of the pair who prefers hanging back rather than forward, and is friendlier with the white-tipped sharks than most. And they are your friends.
Today, you are hunting in the Northeastern reef barrier. It’s about ten or twenty miles downcurrent by your reckoning — it feels like ten when the current is with you, and twenty when it’s against, and somewhere in-between when you leave the hunt early and go home when the current is turning and neither for nor against you. You don’t need to know the actual distance, anyways. What good would it do you? Better to know what actually matters: exertion, time, power.
The sharks are faster than you most days. Sometimes, when you meet up, they swim ahead, far impatient and halfway done by the time you arrive, But then you do, and imagine how your hands, degloved from seawater and overworked from callouses burning on, flaking off as they soak, can reach into fish crannies they can’t even see. Imagine the bounty you and the sharks get, you with your clever hands and nimble arms and deft diving knife, them with their speed and power. You a little slower, but catching your bounty of fish regardless. Putting them into your rewoven diving nets, some made of kelp fiber and others of still yet to biodegrade plastic netting from all sixty eight days and some ago. Imagine.
You are reaching into a moray eel’s den. Chesh looms over your shoulder, ready to pounce, and the Ire and other black-tipped shark hang back, anticipating. You brace yourself against a hard coral and—
Your fin breaks. That’s what you hear, a deafening crack and plastic peeling slippery ripping sound. That is what you tally later, on your boulder, the calendar one that is slowly becoming more pictograms of major life events in the ocean: the salmon spawning, the bacterial blooms that filled the water with haze, the ten-day intervals of the fishing fleet coming back to harbor that marks the start of lower hunting quality for the season and the microseasons within. There are lies, you learn, to seasons: you were taught that there were four, but just look at you. Kelp grows without regard to outside season, only warmth and light, and those things correspond to days and weeks and months, calling on weather and cloudcover and humidity outside. Winter sun is just as strong as summer, here. You’ve learned that, and you’ve learned so many other cycles that follow something so far from years it’s hard to realize why you ever followed what you were told rather than what was around you.
And now, the most present and prominent thing for you is a new season: a season of breakage.
When you go home after the hunt, slowed but completed and with a belly and net full of fish, it is to orange filtered sunlight and thronging schools of rockfish. You weave between the fronds back to your anchor, through the maze you haven’t been keeping up as much of late, to home, where you can see that a chunk of your fin is gone entirely. You had pocketed the ripped piece, back at the hunting reef where only the sharks knew when it was ripe for harvest, but it is sobering to see the damage, to know that you can never have your prior speed and precision back. It’s permanently gone, and you don’t know if or when you can ever get a replacement.
Your thoughts are idle, muddled. You settle for a meandering tangle through the forest, watching the orange kelp berries sway in the yellow-green fronds, tasting the salt for the first time in months — it has become as the smell of home air once was to you. Tiny silver fish dart through the kelp leaves, the seaweed bed, the eelgrass below.
You brood. But the movement clears your mind, and the beauty of the orange-blue-green-silver flashes calms your fluttering mind. Soothes anxieties like a balm — rampant, useless thoughts have no place here.
Eventually, sunset comes. Red and purple streaks fill the forest. It’s a splash studio wall of oilpaint, a rainbow slick in 3D, a Gogh painting beneath the sea. And you are living inside of it. What joy, what fortune, to be in a place like this. Even with your wetsuit ripped and cooling, even with your fin half-ruined and ragged, even with your tongue half-white and soft and chewy, you are glad to be here. It’s worth it. You think about your prior life so infrequently now — no heartache, no decisions, no destinations. No making choices bad or good, no worrying about finances all while buying everything unnecessary until you hit a blast of serotonin, no scrolling endlessly even as you think to yourself, is this really how I want to spend my life?
Now, every action you take has consequences, and every day is busy with things to keep you alive. You are kept fulfilled, fed, watered through your salt extractor hydropack, exercised through the way you hunt for food. This is your life, continued through the actions that you make to sustain yourself rather than work or scrolling or sleeping, actions entirely separated from those that make living happen. And your life is only now. No ex-friends. No endless drudgery. No apologies for your behaviour. Nothing is your fault but what you do now. Tabula rasa, every morning.
You are happy.
><(((°>
On day 147, the realization comes that however long you want to stay here, your oxygen machine won’t last forever.
The etching of the tally on your tally-rock is almost silent under a crunching clak-clak from your pack — something so sudden you almost confuse it for the speech of dolphins you heard so loudly at the peak of the salmon run. Your broken fin trails eddies in the water, spins you and you compensate for its faults, as you have for several stacks of red-silver marks on the tally rock now.
The worry lingers with you through the day. You hunt with a Chesh and two Ires, but you are less motivated, more sluggish than usual. You aren’t conscious, exactly, until evening revisiting the tally-rock, why your muscles seem so tired, why your energy seems so defeated, why your heart feels so weak and small, lost in the vast ocean within your ribcage. You are drifting.
You find yourself staring at the sun, refracted into dazzling shards of orange through the waves. Remembering, slowly, the hurricanes, orange groves knocked asunder into the waves, the sea like dark stained glass, pebble-texture concentrating the light into pinpricks around the soft warmth of sunset. You haven’t thought of them in so long. You remember the taste of oranges, the salt and sweet mashed into one. You realize, remembering the flavour so strongly that you can taste it on your tongue, that you have no sweet-tooth anymore. It’s been too long — you’ve lost your land-sense, one of the strongest. The memory of sweet things is now nauseating. The taste of fish and seaweed, kelp and sea cucumber and urchin dug softly from hard-shelled, gently-spined grasping purple, orange, pink-white, deep night red. The crunch of shell lost inside the meat, the spitting out of the six-fanged teeth.
The one time you caught an octopus. Sharing with Chesh, after the shark bit its deflated balloon of a head ‘till its writhing let you go of suffocating tentacles. The chew, the salt, the tang, the octopus blood rushing from still-squirming arms into your mouth, cold and alive down your throat.
Hard grey nubs of shark skin against warm sweet pink-white yours. Nuzzling, almost, when you signalled that you were able to keep going, after you caught your breath. That you were able to continue the hunt, keep swimming. Like a dog. Like affection, and your chest almost burst from the heat. Fond.
Your eyes are peppered with blue-black stars, staring still through the waves. The current rocks your betta-hammock, tide going out — to you. On land, they’d say the tide was coming in.
You think in terms of the sea, now.
Your oxygen machine gurgles, hisses. You roll over, cold water and all its silt and sand massaging your legs where your suit has become bare, has been stolen by the coral and brazen sharksin and just the simple pattern of usage over time. Your blue swim trunks poke out from beneath the upper tear of your left thigh, sky-coloured. Sky?
Your stomach rumbles, but your muscles are wilted, limp. You’d rather moulder and wash away.
It’s a familiar feeling. One you’d experienced too often in college, in the worst throes of your depression. That you haven’t thought about in so long. Ever since you went under the waves. Heart empty, stomach clenching. Until your oxygen machine started acting up, reminding you: you don’t belong here.
And oh god, you don’t want to go.
Fitfully, then. Don’t sleep — too early, too cold, too hungry — but go. Drift off to uneasy dreams.
><(((°>
Your dreams, when you are in a state like this, look a whole lot like reality. And right now, above the waves, there is a lightningstorm.
The night sky was so dreary in the city, all grey-white static and enough stars to fit into the palm of your hand on a good day. The aurora, when it came down to your latitude, was met with both awe — yours — and horror — tech bros, industry specialists, silicon valley executives. Now, though, you have the world to yourself, and beneath the water the above is so much more than you could have dreamed.
You are up. In the kelp fields, the lines of rope seeded with germinating leaves mingled with tightly-wrapped bullkelp whips, ripe pods marking the ropes where they are ready by lifting them, making gravity look upside-down. In the thickest bunch, leaves stroking your skin like a forest cuddling just for you, you watch the above like a liquid mercury mirror, languid hands plucking kelp berries for later. You drift in the sway of the water, but you are anchored by your hand on a line, and above you is the flooded aftermath of the orange orchard, fruit bobbing. In the rainy season, oranges splash and bob above your grove like a glass pebble sunset. Right now is an untimely arrival of that season — above, the sea thrashes and throes like a storm, waves lashed by lightning that searches the surface in blinding root systems. But below all this warfare of light and violence, the water you are in is still, temperate, moderate, loud yet so quiet, like a city with the power out. The chatter of people with no droning of machines and traffic. Just the nibblings of fishes behind the rocks, the finning scuttles of krill and shrimp hungry for your dead skin flakes. You let them. You’d pay one-hundred-sixty for this on the surface, and you get it here for free. Just by existing, you feed this ecosystem, and it feeds you in turn.
Another flash of lightning bursts the waves, leaving cyanobacteria-blue stains in your vision, and you look back to your hands. Beneath the turmoil above, like a gardener at a rave, you tend to brilliant cyan kelp berries, heavy like eighty pounds of jackfruit weighing down a sapling shorter than a scoliotic five year old’s walking cane. Your heart is slow and strong in your chest, muscle bulging from the exercise daily living is under the waves. Every carangiform flexion of your fins, every anguilliform contraction of your body to slip forward and sideways, every boxfish-mimicking fluttering thrust of your hands alone is an exercise in exhaustion. You used to be vegetarian, when you lived in the city — do you remember that? It kept you fit while your peers scarfed down hamburgers soaked in mayonnaise, pork ribs drenched in gravy, bacon with pearly white fat striations glistening under the summer sun wrapped around hot dogs slathered in oil. You had lentils, beans, broccoli, artichoke, eggs, celery, yogurt on occasion. Not eating for celebration or holiday — saving that money for travelling, the flying trapeze, so on.
And you walked places. Once, in college, you tried using a car. It didn’t suit you — too isolating, too angering, too encaging — after that, you biked. And after that, you swam. And that was fine, except you started to see yourself as superior. Your peers took notice, and so did you, and the subtle differences — and, your dream-calmed, rational mind notices, your pride — drove you apart. Want to come to a barbeque for the 4th of July? What will we do there? Eat the barbeque. Will there be games? Fireworks? No, not really. Our backyard has no good views of any of the big shows. It’s only an hour over to the lake. We could go there after. The barge has the biggest show of the year. It’ll last thirty-five minutes, fill the air with gunpowder smoke that’ll poison the rainclouds and sparks hotter than the surface of the sun. It will light the city two miles away in the colours of the rainbow with the brightness of lightning. Nah, we’ll skip. So, you gonna come? The food will be good. No thanks. I’d rather have the experience of the lake and the fire-in-the-sky. I can cook whenever. The fireworks are only once a year. Suit yourself.
You don’t like remembering those times, much.
But your heart is calm. Normally, you’d escape, think about anything else. But here, you cannot, because the anxiety — the fear — just isn’t there. There’s nothing to avoid. You’re detached, weightless. Above you, lightning splits the sky, and you can feel this: what happened up on the surface? It’s your fault. You were the one who drove the division between you and your peers. You were cynical, judgemental, aggressive, patronizing. When you went beneath the waves, it was to run away from the bridges you burned, extinguish the fires so you didn’t have to see the smoke, so you’d never have to see the people you hurt. Their faces, still in your life even after everything you did to them, feeling like you killed them — but here they are still walking, still breathing, still living. A daily reminder of everything you did to them, and that made you so angry. Made you want to hurt them more.
Never rebuilding what you lost, always keeping those gulfs between you and your people miles long and bottomless.
You don’t like seeing the history of things. You have never been able to break that habit, have you? Like the nylon rope — the former bungee cord. Fine in minutiae, but deadly in large amounts. You can’t handle commitment. Can’t handle compromise. Can’t handle softness, gentleness, being okay with less-than-perfect. Less-than-absolute. And you have a hard time with breaking away from your set patterns of behaviour, the expectations people have of you, once you’ve made them.
That’s why you are down here. To run away. To have nobody, no expectations. A changeable life in every minute. No expectations set by others.
But by god, you’re lonely. If the brush of affection with a Chesh is anything to show. And it’s time to get up, stop running. You’re done, have stopped learning and experiencing the pleasure of staying below, away from your problems. You’ve worked on yourself, and you’ve found that if you lived absolutely the way you wish you could, you’d be exactly as you are now: faintly happy, but vulnerable to any disruption in routine. Productive, but aimless. Healthy, but breaking down faster than ever. Corrosive environment notwithstanding. And what will you do when you get injured? Sick? When the nutritional deficiencies do catch up to you again, when you start eating the sand? When the salmon run comes again, when you get less lucky this time, don’t dodge the bullet, eat the worms inside the fish and end up starving to death, your body used as fuel to glut the worms inside? You’re not ready. You don’t belong here. And you’re full to bursting with memories you’ve done nothing but repress all this time, when you thought you’d be healing, Forgetting.
It’s time to wake up. Face the old faces again. Surface, breathe non-recirculated air.
It’s time to apologize.
It’s time to go home.
><(((°>
Day 148. You did sleep through the night, and you remember it all. It’s been so long since you’ve had dreams, your mind grabbed onto them. Yearning for knowledge. Another sign that you need to go back — you need to be in a more stimulating environment. You used to read all the time, voraciously. Also used to woodcarve, whittle with a single knife — made all the smallest figures: rams, iguanas, snakes, dragons, gryphons. Calloused fingers, tiny nicks and cuts in your skin, woodchips scattered all across the floor and a gorgeous thing in the making in your hands. You haven’t done this in 148 days. And you know what? You miss it. You’ve loved your time down here, but you’re looking forward to the change. Getting back into all which you used to love.
You’re not done down here yet, though — it’s set in stone, after a brief debate in your mind, that you will go back. Dream and waking decisions are so different in that way. The compromise you gave yourself: you need time to say goodbye. Just one day. And tomorrow, you will go.
The grind and chitter of your oxygen machine is whimsical, almost like birdsong. In the kelp fields, you find the small white stones you set as markers so you could find the lanes between the rows when the green became so thick you couldn’t see the gaps in the leaves. Remove the stones, and it becomes a sea of green, no passage — so you do. Plucking them from their place, scattering them where they can be foraged by some other diver. Let them wonder at the kelp field, so far down here.
Your stomach rumbles. You’ve eaten fish and kelp for so long, and you had developed a scorn for sweets — but you remember, now: challah bread, caramelized onions and pig heart, pho, pizza, hearty fettuccine alfredo with strips of chicken more populous than the noodles, creamy sauce. Grilled chicken. Good soft bleu cheese, sauteed mushrooms, brown juices streaming and filling the saucepan inhabitants they share the world with. You remember these things now because you had suppressed them for so long before, and your whole body aches with wanting.
You’re dizzy, tranquilized. But free.
You make the rounds at your home, your kelp forest like petrified fireworks on a barge on the 4th of July, streaming brilliant sparktrails and all. Barely exploded at the top, smoke cloaking the night sky and all the birds — that’s the place you live in, now: streamers of gold ribbon flutter about you, gentle and persuasive in the current. If you swim through the midlayer, the kelp berries of the wild green you live among are there, as are all the little fishes who eat them, and all the fishes who eat them. They are silhouetted by the sun like birds before a church window at dawn. And you are too.
You swim, languid and broken-finned, using your body in a serpentine shape as you have done ever since you learned the trick from a moray fed scraps in return by the reef, when you once caught a dolphin with your diving knife, slit a long, clean cut straight through the blowhole from the snout, down the back like you were filleting a fish, flanks of blubber peeling off, gloopy white foam floating to the mercury-silver waves above. You, the sharks, and the moray ate well that day — the dolphin had used your methods of swimming, undulating only its legs, but the moray? It thrashed inside the twitching grey meat, yellow and brown and green wriggling deep, infusing red blood into the blue seawater like a fork jostling a cranberry-coloured teabag. You copied its movements exactly and found yourself the better for it, like you did at dance class copying the instructor line for line, second for second. Bliss, then, in your aptitude.
Your thoughts keep coming back to the surface, faster and faster, like bees waking at the first shudders of spring in the flowers. Or like paint chips peeling from a building, exposing the old layers almost forgotten. It’s freeing, almost, a weight lifted from your eyes and mind.
You are drifting in the kelp. And then comes noon, and your sharks are there, oblivious that this is your last day. You had considered, at that point, leaving before they arrived — a clean break, just as you had done to your friends and family outside the water — but no, you shouldn’t. Something has changed inside of you now, and you want to give them a goodbye, somehow. And so you do — you go to the reef as usual, but you push yourself, go faster than your shark pod, and they seem to understand when you refuse food, give them more than the share when you flush a grouper from its hole, when you chase down a manta ray. It’s all here. They seem sorrowful, rubbing their skin against yours, and you don’t bleed because your skin has grown rough in the spots where they tend to abrade. Like you are a shark yourself, and there’s the sorrow for you, too, that on the surface your skin, without sharkskin to remind it to be tough, will eventually fade, become soft and clear again, and there will be no evidence of your time down here at all.
But, you reason, you will have the memories. Those are just as important as biomarkers of time.
And slowly, you wind down. The sun goes past noonmark, and your Cheshes and Ires — no, they are leading you away from the current home. Why? You follow them into a deep rift, where they often go after the hunt. Past a forest of purple coral frills like papyrus, through a starfish-studded sunken industrial tunnel, over a field of barnacles each larger than your fist and with tongues longer than your own, lapping at the silt you stir in your wake like a thick pink cornfield of worms. That.
The sharks bring you to another reef, one you have never seen before. Here, the fish are different: faster, dartier, smaller. You gather, now, that this is where the sharks habitually stay, and that the fish here are different because they are the ones the sharks cannot — or are not interested in — catching. Tiny striped cleanerfish stations, too, and ah, that too. One of the Ires goes to a cleanerfish station, and the rest of the Cheshes and Ires disperse.
You stay. The new reef is beautiful, like your own but with unfamiliar architecture, allowing you to see it all again as though for the first time. Cleanerfish nibble at your exposed hands and knees, but you barely feel them: you move slowly, languidly, stomach empty and eyes wide at the beautiful weight of the world. It’s that same oilpainting sensation again, like you are contained in a work of art: the water is so, so blue, nothing like the sky, and the corals are purple and red and yellow and pink. The seaweed drifts in clumps above, ready for the weary otters whose pups have just begun swimming on their own as of the last time you cleared the kelp, and the jade-verdant eelgrass flutters in the cracks like it is swimming where the coral-studded boulders like sticky balls of mixed jewelry gemstones aren’t. You? You are happy.
And you are thinking of tea, scones, scalding-hot blueberry syrup soaking the crumb-bread, staining it purple as your fingers, weary and calloused from papers. The rasp of book leaves, flipping to another page, the smell of good orange zest over salad greens. Cheese, pearskin covering fruit just over the edge of ripeness cracking open under interested fingernails.
Swinging on a swingset. Walking at the university grounds. Watching the sunset through air, not waves. Thinking of shapes when looking at the clouds. By your reckoning, it’s almost Halloween. Autumn, it is, and that means crispy maple leaves in orange-brown-yellow-red piles like solid sheafs of fire, thinly sliced and plated on green grassy ceramic of ground.
You’re ready. You look around the strange reef, and know this to be true. It’s a warmth, not a coldness, in your chest. You have so many regrets of what you did on the surface, but it’s time. You’re ready. You find the current, moved as it is from the hours you spent away. It’s evening now. You’re ready.
Your oxygen machine gurgles, and for once it doesn’t strike a pang into your chest of fear. Of regret, of pain. It’s just warm. Acceptance.
In the words of your dream, now, beautiful and free. It’s time to return home.
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And so you do. You pack your meagre belongings in your diving bag, frayed and repaired through kelp fibres. You wipe your goggles of the ever-crusting brine. You know, partially, that all the reason you have to go back — truly — is because of your machine. That you are breaking down, equipment and body and mind, faster than you can repair yourself, but then that leads you to the other purposes. You’re human. You should, morally, go back. You tried to stay and you couldn’t. This isn’t the place for you.
And goodness, you miss people. Your sharks are companions, but they are not the same as friends.
You pack. Those shards of regret, of loss, in your chest as you tear down your hammock at last, as you scrub the marks from the tally-rock, clean the spaces under boulders that worked as your pantry? You know, deep down, that those are anger, regret, fear. You still don’t truly want to go, and then your oxygen machine whines, not whirrs or clicks or shudders, and lets out a shrill beep-beep-beep.
It echoes in the water. Dark, brownish-blackish-greenish-indigo. Like a sonar ping. You remember, faintly, that it means your time is up. Your allowance of lifespan is over. So, slowly, you unstrap your diving mask, even your goggles, squeezing your eyes tight and holding in the last of your breath. Your hands fumble, find the clasp, and release at last the ties, buckles, velcro, so many knots you had made to keep your diving belt on, that you would be somewhere close to neutrally buoyant. You leave it behind. Your oxygen machine is the last to go, simply unhooked from your arms and shoulders like you’re taking off a backpack. And then, all that gone, there in the dark, you feel yourself rising.
Rising. Through the kelp, through the silt, through the fish — they tickle your skin — through the seaweed-bound krill and the anemone spawn floating in the water columns. Through it all. You know it so well, though you cannot see it now, because it has been yours for almost half a year.
You rise. And to retain oxygen, to calm yourself, you think about what you will do on the surface. You think about warm concrete, hot street food, museums. Architecture, the taste of a penny held in the mouth. The smell of oil in a pan, the sear of clouds marking the horizon at dusk. You think of woolen carpeting, of clothing rubbing against skin. You think of lacing up shoes, of matching socks with socks, the luxurious sense of a laundered blanket taken straight from the dryer and wrapped around yourself on a lonely night with hot cocoa. The wonder of growing plants in cups, seeing little white root-nubs sprouting from stems and crawling at the bottom like worms until transplantation comes and they are potted in soil, sometimes indoors and sometimes outdoors. Cherry tomatoes picked straight off the vine, hot and dry from the sun and drought remediated by sprinkler systems, hoses of water from the reservoir, love, and time. And—.
A head of blunt force blasts into your stomach. You cough, exhale reflexively, inhale, thrash in confusion. The something headbutts your stomach again, stronger this time, and you are black-spotted, white-starred — you open your eyes and there is burning, blurry vision, and you see a Chesh, a white-tipped shark, in front of you and an Ire circling. One slaps you with its caudal fin, long like that of a mako, and you reel, whipped. You aren't rising anymore. You are angry, reeling, breathing hard, and a Chesh whiptails straight for you like a hammer and you rear back and sock her right in the nose — she turns away at the last moment, but your knuckles bloody on her gill-flaps and there’s a low screeching moan you have never heard before in the water from her direction — do sharks make sound? and she’s right in front of you, facing sideways so she can see you, silver-irised cat-slitted eye staring straight into yours.
You’re breathing hard still, saltwater rushing in and out of your lungs. You float ten, maybe fifteen feet from the surface, watching your decompression timer on your watch — good thing she stopped you, else you would have barrelled straight into the bends. Maybe, you think with fuzzy tatters of thought passing for a mind, that is what Chesh is here for, trying to tell you.
And then the adrenaline falls away in a snap, and you realize with choking, coughing spasms: you don’t have your respirator on. You’re without your goggles, with your eyes wide open to the salt of the ocean. You’re without your dive belt, and you’re neutrally buoyant. Your oxygen machine is back on the ocean floor.
You gasp, gag, almost vomit over yourself as you continue to breathe on reflex. You can see your vision going spotty — but no, it isn’t, that’s psychosomatic. Your heart is an expanding vice and your lungs are concrete walls placed outside so it can never fully open. You hang on to Chesh for dear life.
Slowly, your symptoms abate. You are breathing normally. The gush of water in and out of your lungs — it’s not so different from gills, cool and refreshing. You don’t stop to consider how this is possible. The sharkskin is rough under your fingers.
You imagine coming up to the surface, talking to your former friends and family, explaining what had happened here, them yelling over you, never letting you out of their sight again. Calling you foolish, selfish, arrogant. Knowing that they are right.
You imagine days cooped up inside. Imagine getting a job again, the drudgery of a 9-5 workweek. Excel sheets, filing reports to acronyms and initialisms pretending at being people, emails five paragraphs long unread on both sides. There would be no dancing in wheat fields — your legs are too weak for that now, only powerful when used for swimming. Let’s face it, you’d crawl up the beach. Probably be picked up by police, but likely to be seen as a beggar and kicked, shot, or left to starve.
For all your idealisms, you’re not a fool. You rub Chesh’s head, eyes blind with the images flashing before you, and when you come back to yourself Chesh is before you again, eye almost touching yours from how close she is.
You inhale.
Saltwater rushes into your mouth, down your esophagus, into the sacks of your lungs and spreads across your alveoli. The chambers there, the sponge-structure like soft pink bubbly coral. Your lungs fill with the cold of sea and salt, and the breath you took is large, weighty in your chest, and you are dizzy, get white spots like flashbulbs of cameras from it. Then you let it out, exhale, and it is more effort than breathing air but so much more fulfilling than air ever had been. Like breathing at a mountain peak, air full of pine and snow and clean wind and sky, but condensed to sea level. Your exhale takes ages. You inhale again. And exhale, and inhale, and you are still not dead. You are still breathing. Still alive.
Slowly, shakily, you unzip your wetsuit. Peel it away. The cold water is a shock to your skin at first, but then not — your skin is soft and black, spongey at the surface, whole where your wetsuit wasn’t after so long, and blocks the chill of the water better than your neoprene foam ever did. And in a haze, your fins come off too, and from your feet unfurl gossamer extensions of your metacarpals webbed like butterfly wings, or seal’s flippers.
Your dive watch pings. You can ascend now. You’re still searching yourself, numb.
Chesh watches you think. Swims away. She will be there at your reef tomorrow, if you want to join the hunt again. She doesn’t need to say it.
The surface is right there, shining like a mirror. Blindingly bright, nowhere to hide. With all its consequences. All its potential. All its pain. All its humanity.
And it turns out that you never needed to leave.
Y'all have no idea how hard it was to make the ASCII fish look good.