by Joseph Fink
You inhale.
I inhale.
I inhaled. This was then. I am now.
I breathed deeply the sea.
The pain seared. But only for a moment. Like a sharp knife swiftly slicing open my chest, and in the process cutting loose the iron binds that held my soul.
The cold water warmed. The midnight sun glowed brighter. I soared, even as I sank.
My muscles gave up their argument against gravity. A lifetime of debate finally settled. My body agreed to descend, and I floated down farther into the night sky below me.
I had feared the fall into deep water my entire life, ever since the high rock above our inlet with Albert. Now I realized that the fall was the only direction I wanted to go. Floating is tedious. Sinking is natural.
The moon was gone. The water was gone. I was gone. Everything was blackness and light. I was cold and warm. I was heavy and light. I was falling and flying.
And then I was not. And then I was rocks. I was sand. I was still.
When a whale dies, its corpse bloats with water. It sinks to the ocean floor and is eaten, not by sharks, but by tiny eyeless fish and crustaceans who take their share of fat and flesh, who make homes in jaw bones and who live lives waiting for the watery skies to rain meat upon them.
I was a whale. I was a corpse. What felt like larvae wriggled in my eyes and in my belly. They devoured me in millions of gulps each no larger than a droplet in a fog. I did not feel my body decaying, rather dissipating. Each molecule swallowed and digested and disseminated, millions of me repeatedly broken down and reassembled as a scale of a fish or a tooth of a shark or a branch of swaying coral.
I felt myself spread wide across the globe, my senses growing broader, less acute. It tickled, if I’m honest.
It is a slow process, perhaps years, for the world’s smallest life forms to rend my body completely. But time is meaningless to the dead. It felt not like decomposition but like an explosion, a burst of confetti from a cannon in a victory parade, each slip of festive paper flitting in a different direction.
My life had measured itself in moments, in days, and in months, but my death measured nothing. I, like the universe, was cold, timeless, and ever-expanding.
Along the jagged, hard bottom of the sea, in no light, in no body, I was aware that I still somehow was. I could feel the water around me, dark and heavy, like mourning.
Sadness presses into you like a shaper of clay, sculpting your spirit into the form of a blighted tree, into the form of a dilapidated monastery, into the form of an empty hand. The depths of the sea, too, crushed me, pinned me down until there was nothing left of me for it to press against.
I lay there in the dark, immobilized by density and incorporeality. But, really, the reason I did not move was because I did not want to move. I was immobilized by defeat, by failure, by humiliation.
Like an infant, my memories were only emotions, untethered to narrative. I did not remember murder or betrayal, merely a kaleidoscopic swirl of anger, loss, and resentment. There was vengeance, as well, but I could not piece together its target. I could only feel water, at first upon me, and eventually becoming me.
I was as fluid as my thoughts.
From whence I came so have I returned.
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I heard a name in my ears, but I had no ears. The word sliced me like a blade.
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I felt his throat in my fingers, but he was not there. He was with the living.
I felt my hair waving slowly about my face, enchanting throes of silk billowing around a graceful dancer. But I saw only sea. I saw only sun melting away the wet sky. I saw coral. I saw life I had never seen before, but I had no eyes.
I felt water in my sinuses, but I had no nose.
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I felt myself mouth the name “Edmond,” but I had no lips, tongue, or teeth.
The reef swayed in shallow water. Sunlight unfurling the gauzy pink of its limbs, the gaudy stripes of its inhabitants, schools of fish who climbed and turned and dove in precise formation, like a military band.
My father taught me to fish using a silk string tied to a branch fallen from an orange tree. We caught bugs in the orchard and kept them in a lidded pot, which we carried to a narrow stream. The bugs were mostly beetles, sometimes worms, and occasionally a sluggish dragonfly. He would open the pot, and I would tentatively place my hand into the crunchy stew of bug corpses, but a few were still flickering and squirming, grabbing at my fingers, hoping to climb to freedom from this metal tub of a mass grave.
I would take a scarab and solemnly impale it onto the hook. I pierced the point directly through the middle of the bug. To have the beetle sideways on the hook would fail to look real to the fish, I thought. Best to have it symmetrical and upright, perfectly balanced in the water. Fish were aesthetes in my young mind.
The first few times I had fished, I caught nothing, because I became distracted by the fish themselves, the way they moved, their panicked darts away from sound and splash. My fishing rod lowering slowly as my attention turned toward the study of their movement, their expressionless faces belying their intense hunger and fear.
Now, floating in this reef, amid the schools of brightly colored fish waving like flags, I reached out and grabbed one. It was blue and yellow striped, flat with long, bannerlike fins. It wriggled before me. I could not feel my hands, nor could I see them, but I held the fish. I felt its whipping fright, and I stared into its eyes, hoping to see terror, to see a plea for mercy, to find an iota of emotion.
I saw something worse. I saw nothing. The fish’s face was meaningless, an ornament. I imagined someone looking at me now in the same way I looked at the fish, gripped with fright as they tried to discern any level of humanity. They would find none. I let the fish go, and it did not even look grateful as it darted to another patch of coral.
I was moving now, but not swimming. Like a dream, space and time bled one into the other with no clear transition. There were no doors separating the rooms of my experience. The parlor is the bedroom is the kitchen is the cellar.
I had stopped asking myself if I were dead, if I were a ghost, if I were reanimated somehow. The idea of heaven or hell never appealed to me. What could I do with the peace and prosperity of Lora’s Catholic heaven, or the Garden and Gehenna of Rebekah’s cosmology? Heaven is not heaven if that which you love most is not there. I had come to love my rage the most.
And hell. What is hell but the life I had lived? Life had already taken my childhood, taken my dreams before I could even have them, manipulated and abused me.
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Life infected me with vengeance and it had wasted me away. By the end, I could barely move from sore joints, my weathered countenance, my hunched back, erosion from years of obsession. What could hell do to me besides?
Heaven and hell were one and the same, and perhaps this sea was it. Yet I had held a fish, and now I was touching sand. I was alive.
The gritty squish of beach sand beneath my feet, in my toes, up my calves. The feeling of being unclean until the cool sweep of another wave rinses you off and you glisten and shine like a burnished clay urn.
I was above the water now, standing. My wet hair matted across my brow. My chest heaved and I walked, but it was not the walk of an old woman. Nor that of a young one either. It was fluid, incorporeal. I looked at my hands. They were the hands of an old woman. They were my hands, dark and creased with wrinkles and scars. They were the hands that lunged at Edmond’s face moments before he abandoned me to the fire and then to the sky and then into the sea.
I could not feel the elderly pains of my back or neck anymore. I did not feel good, but I also did not feel bad. I felt nothing.
>
In a blink I was not on a beach but in a patch of tall swamp grass, the sea no longer in sight, though I could smell putrid kelp and salt. I was crouched, close to the earth, and I saw a small brown spider, about the size of my thumbnail. I snapped my palm down quickly, a child gathering bugs for a morning of fishing. I pressed my fingers tightly into my palm around the creature, sealing it into my hand, but it squirmed itself out, squeezing its compact body through my knuckles and skittering down my arm back onto the sod.
My knuckles were as tight as I could make them, yet I was too weak to hold such a small thing. I did not know where I was, or what I was. All I knew was that if Edmond were alive I would find him.
And then do what, I thought. I could not even catch a spider.
What could I do to a man?
But beyond where or what I was, the greater question was when. How long had I been below the sea? How long had I decomposed? I lifted myself from the ground. It was no struggle. I was in a body, yet not bound to a body. The humid grass clung to my toes and stained my knees.
I did not know where or when I was, but I was certain that I would not be treated with gentleness, let alone respect, if anyone saw me.
An entire day passed and I did not move from my spot in the marshy grass. What god makes this awful place? No homes can be built. No crops grown. Perhaps a god of something more than humanity. Perhaps a god of all things, great and terrible. Or perhaps a fool or a maniac.
From east to west, the sun passed behind two long gray wisps of clouds, arced and motionless in the sky. They looked like eyebrows, but painted onto a portrait before the rest of the face. The most expressive parts of the visage, but completely meaningless when removed from the context of eyes, lips, and cheeks.
Feelings came and went, and I did not know how to keep them. At the height of the day, I burned under the tropical sun. Yet moments later I felt nothing, neither cold nor warm, neither humid nor arid. The sun swung smoothly like a trebuchet crashing into the western horizon, destroying nothing but the light.
It would try again tomorrow. I was certain of that, but of little else.
2
I attempted to sleep, but I could not close my eyes. I could not feel tired. I walked but with no sense of where I was going. I tried to mark my path, but it changed constantly. First a sea, next a marsh, then woods, and never a person in sight.
I felt dead. Not dead. I felt nothing. Perhaps nothing is what death feels like, but I believe now that I have never died and may never die. Still, at that moment, I smelled, heard, saw, tasted, and felt nothing, which is to say I lacked all awareness of my own existence. Lucid dreams of a lackluster imagination.
Yet the nothing was eventually subsumed by sensation—the wriggling fish, hot sand on feet, the putrid smell of sea, the soggy marsh grass—I felt alive, living in the real world. No ghost can touch something real. No spirit would deign to put their feet to this rotten, imperfect ground. But where were the people? Was I the only one here?
I could wander until I found other humanity or I could stay still till I found my own.
Sitting atop a small earthen bulge, which dared to think itself a hill, I stared into the sky, as black and soulless as the eyes of that fish. There was no expression to be found. No spiritual meaning in the geometry of distant suns.
In what I now know to be St. Augustine, Florida, I walked from the marsh, through a field, and onto a beach. The full moon lit the sand like snow. Atop the low ridge before me, an orange dome of light, a city’s dying embers. Nighttime had cooled the burning day of the unknown town before me, and I moved in its direction. I followed an invisible path, one I knew was there but could neither see nor comprehend.
I did not walk. I moved. One moment I was on the beach. The next I was in a hotel room. A woman slept alone in a four-post bed, tulle and lace formed a sagging ivory crown atop. I bent over the slumbering stranger.
Young. Distressed. She snored loudly, her face pressed into an eider pillow, each limb escaping in a different direction and angle. Her wardrobe was tidy and full with dresses, gloves, gowns. A perfect stack of matching hat boxes sat atop the armoire, like a pyramid, a religious monument to the doctrine of money and fashion.
Her name was Eleanor. She was American, a grandchild of wealthy English expatriates who had funded the fight for independence from their former motherland. I did not know this woman, yet I knew her. Eleanor’s father owned tobacco farms throughout the Carolinas and Georgia. He was one of the richest men in this young country. He always kept Eleanor close to him, even as he traveled. She was beautiful and stylish, but with a lack of obstreperousness that would have disappointed her royalty-adjacent ancestors. Her refined speech and manners impressed the genteel Southerners who met Eleanor’s father. These things I knew without knowing.
He was proud of his daughter. He was proud of her the way a man is proud of his home or his mustache. Her beauty and charm were his emblem, his flag. Only a man of God, a man of wealth, a man of divine accomplishment could own something so beautiful, so perfect. And only an equal or better man could be allowed to take her from him. This is why Eleanor had always traveled with her father, to be protected as a rare jewel, not left at home to be stolen away.
The year prior, she had finally been married to a suitable match, and was awaiting her husband’s return from a three-month trip to Europe. Eleanor never chose marriage of course, but she also never considered free will a reasonable request. Asking for her own agency would have been akin to asking her father for the ability to fly or move objects with her mind. She did make some choices. She had chosen this hotel in St. Augustine, near the port where her husband would return. And there were other choices she had made that I did not yet realize.
I loved her like I would a sick child. I brushed her troubled head gently as she slept and snored. I could not feel her hair.
I began to wonder again if I was, in fact, a ghost, though I refused to be dead. I had always respectfully fought death. Death does not often play fair, to be sure. The rules of its game are clear yet lopsided. Still I rejected the unjust notion that I should be murdered by the man who killed my father, my aunt, my dear friends, and who raised me on the poison of lies and vindictiveness.
I could feel tears welling but none on my face. I felt my throat swell and breath shorten, even though I had no breaths at all. I whirled my body around toward the mirror atop Eleanor’s vanity. I grabbed at the ornate wooden posts holding the mirror, but I could not feel the wood in my hands. I shook the vanity, hearing my groans of panic and exertion. But the mirror did not move.
Exhausted, I quit. I sat on the mauve velvet stool before the small countertop and I looked at my reflection for several quiet moments. If I were alive, surely I must learn to control my physical self. I did not look dead. I looked old, but alive, and as healthy as I had been before Nulogorsk, before my lifelong dream of revenge came to an end, before I found myself drifting cloudlike through coral.
The lines around my mouth and eyes were deep, but aesthetically so, like the stylistic flourishes of a master sculptor’s rasp. I pulled apart my lips. The teeth I had in that last battle with Edmond were all still intact. My tongue and gums still pink and my eyes dark and large. But when I tried to examine my full visage, it was impossible. I could see each part of my face, but I could not see it as a whole. I was somehow less myself.
I placed my fingertip against its looking glass counterpart. The mirror was cold to the touch. I pressed the rest of my fingers and then palm to the glass. There was a mild chill in my hand, which sent a shuddering chill across the rest of my skin.
I felt . . . something. I was not a ghost, I was certain of that. I grabbed one of the drawers of the vanity and pulled. It opened. I could move things, hold things, although not well, not consistently. (The drawer pull slipped out of my fingers several times, and I had to constantly grab at it to make full contact again.)
Elated by my success, I stood up and kicked the drawer shut. The sudden slam ca
used Eleanor to stir. She sat up in bed, and I stepped backward into a shadowed alcove just beyond the moonlight’s reach. The light was a blue shard across her body and I could see her pupils growing large. She was still breathing heavily, but it was no longer from difficult slumber. She was afraid.
“Eleanor,” I said. “Do not be scared. I’m sorry to have entered your room unannounced—”
“Is someone there?”
“I thought I had died at sea, but I managed to come ashore. I saw your room, and I knew it was your room. I’m certain we have never met, but I know you. How do I know you?”
She did not seem to be listening. She stood up, and it was at that moment I realized I hadn’t known everything about her. Through her nightgown, I could see she was at least six months pregnant. She reached under the pillow and withdrew a single-shot pistol. She pointed it vaguely toward me.
“Whoever is whispering in the dark, if you do not show yourself I will shoot,” she called out. I knew she was bluffing because as long as she could not see me, she could not shoot me. I loved her like an untrained dog. She needed discipline, guidance, not a hand raised in anger.
“Eleanor,” I pleaded, lifting my voice, to let her know I was not a rapist or common thief or murderer. It was becoming clear though that my voice was not full. She only heard faint whispers close to her ears. “Eleanor,” I repeated.
She jerked her body around over her right shoulder.
“Where are you?” she screamed. “Who are you?”
“Eleanor, I was killed, but something kept me alive. I do not understand what, but I believe it has something to do with you. The sea swallowed me only to spit me out here. And I knew everything about you. Your name. Your travels. The birdcage of a life your father keeps you in.”
Eleanor stopped blindly pointing the gun straight out from her body, instead bending her elbows and relaxing the gun, barrel-up against her chest. She closed her eyes in calm concentration, steadying her breath.
I wanted her to think about what I said, to allow me into her world, to speak with me, to help me find out why I came here. She slowly opened her eyes and said coolly, “You know nothing of me nor my father,” and then in a single quick rotation of her body she extended her arms and fired the pistol at me.