The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  Ayaana bit into her inner lip, straining to stop the flow of sudden tears. Her hands clamped over her henna bag. Nauseated, she felt as helpless as the bird. She was being suffocated by an excessively perfumed man with cardamom-and-cloves-fed breath. Delaksha’s shoulders heaved against Nioreg’s chest as she cried. Nioreg soothed her: “Some ortolan buntings escape their cages and do find their way home.”

  [ 43 ]

  Disarrayed. Intoxicated by hope. Fear. Grief. Want. Ache. Doubt, doubt, doubt, what-does-it-mean doubt. The dissolution of trust in absolutes, including the structures and strictures of life—she had been betrayed by ephemerality, had run full-tilt into this wall. Jumbled imageless dreams poured foreign emotions into her heart and created holes in her stomach. In her cabin bed, Ayaana rolled about as if she were fluff. Abeerah. Not a voice, not a sound. Breathing like dry wind, and it filled her world with questions. Something that was also of Ayaana’s being eased from its confines to flutter before her in defiance. When she opened her eyes, it was long after the hour for Fajr. She found that she had lost her appetite for prayer. For the first time in a long time, Ayaana stayed under the covers in the hour of prayer, waiting for her rebellion either to subside or to be discovered. Nothing happened. Lost in the silences of immensities she had taken for granted. So what was life? The words 生活. Sheng huo. To live. Kuishi.

  Ayaana got out of her bunk bed and padded over to the shower. She washed her hair, its black tendrils sticking to her as the water sprayed her body. Disarrayed. Fear and exhilaration: there were no predetermined paths. There were no guarantees. She pinched her scarred thigh, and stroked her face under the water. Feeling. She turned off the water, stepped out, and dried her body. She splashed on the rose water she had made from her mother’s rose attar. She pulled on jeans and a white T-shirt. She seized her buibui to roll and throw toward the low cabin ceiling. She watched as it tumbled back to the floor. She moved her mother’s mat to the side of the cabin. She jogged within the confined space, twisting her fingers. She inhaled and strode into the day.

  Elastic time.

  Crossing timelines.

  Ayaana twisted her hair as she strolled in the direction of the bridge. The captain was on the watch, eyes forward. Ayaana gaped. The man inhabited his solitude fully, and everything else was extraneous: he and his ship and his sea. In that second, if Ayaana had ever craved anything in her life, it was this: to be of this replete mosaic as an elemental component.

  * * *

  —

  “Come.”

  Ayaana turned.

  A crew member, a giant with brutal scars, beckoned to her. He opened a large umbrella. She ducked under it. She followed him up narrow steel stairs to the bridge. Teacher Ruolan was already there. When she saw Ayaana, she narrowed her eyes and looked through her. Ayaana glanced at the equipment coughing out reams of paper with minuscule details: consoles and computers sputtering. Maps, living things that shimmered and beeped and signaled. A uniformed man nodded at her. Lai Jin turned to watch the seas. The giant pointed out the Global Positioning System consoles to Ayaana. Crackling voices from a radio handset, English words, some of which she could make out, transfixed her. Over. Over. Whisperings from beyond-ordinary realms, keys to so many destinations. Knobs and buttons and blinking lights. An electric sense of rightness filled Ayaana. There was the expanse of sea. There was the sky. Here was how to traverse both, the power in the human hand. Clouds hung low in the sky and seemed reachable. Her mouth was dry. Her heart pounded. The 180-degree ocean view, the red-and-orange cargo casing. She whirled and glimpsed the giant compass set in the middle of the room like a hallowed object. She tiptoed toward it, stifling an outpouring of questions. When she again spun around, she saw and leaned over the chart table to look over the positioning systems. “Where are we now?”

  The giant man, amused by her wonderment, now showed her distances that seemed to be the length of her forefinger. He then led Ayaana to the console, where Captain Lai Jin presided over beeping, purring, crackling tools and screens and a multi-spotted radar screen that blinked lights and coordinates.

  Ayaana stood next to the captain, watching the sea. Two birds of prey preened on the cranes as the ship rose and plunged on a swell. A pod of dolphins acted like ship guides, leaping in and out of the waves before they disappeared. Cormorantlike birds roamed the area, staying close to the vessel. Flying fish. The saltwater worlds were replete with life. In a reverie, Ayaana slipped into ship-think, anticipating sea troughs, and for a moment could see the tracks in the sea as clear as light, moving with the boat as if she were guiding its way. She glimpsed the descent of the sun and the first sprinkle of stars. She saw the constellations and forgot to breathe. Silent journeying. Traveling white-and-beige birds descended to roost on the ship’s masthead. Mist on the water, mist in her eyes, until it was fifteen minutes later and darkness had tainted the waters.

  Lai Jin then whispered into her ear, “Ni huxi. Breathe.”

  Ayaana turned to him, bereft of words.

  “I know,” he said, smiling at the water.

  He said, “Starboard: youxian.”

  “Youxian,” she repeated.

  “Weather forecast: tianqi yubao.”

  Ayaana repeated, “Tianqi yubao.”

  Watching them from the corner of her eye, Teacher Ruolan was filled with a weighty sense of unease. She walked over, tutting in Mandarin, “You have so much to read.” Her hands clamped over Ayaana’s shoulders. She told the captain, “Thank you for your kindness.” Her lips were rigid.

  Panic and then resignation replaced revelation in Ayaana’s eyes. Her head swiveled to take in the bridge consoles as Teacher Ruolan hustled her out. The raised portion of the upper deck met the ocean head-on. Jingyu—a whale—a giant blue beauty breached on the port side of the ship.

  [ 44 ]

  The morning had turned dark, and the sky dense and leaden. Ayaana woke up restless. What was that destination she had sensed from the captain’s bridge? She could reimagine herself. The ship dipped and rocked. Ayaana slid open her cabin door. She watched ocean birds roost on the ship’s masts. She heard the pounding of ocean waves. She heard voices and laughter and smelled a rich, earthy scent of what she would later discover was cigar smoke. Yes. She would claim this day for herself.

  * * *

  The monsoon squall raced toward the ship. Ashen-faced, Lai Jin walked along the rain-flecked deck. He had not been able to sleep. Before first light, he had sat in front of his Zao Wou-Ki print, waiting for a vision, a thought, a feeling. He had found a fragrance for this Zao Wou-Ki. It was made of secret roses—musk, warm, sweet, with fluid moods. He watched the sea. Fading orange-red lines in the sky as livid as a healing scar. Distant thunder, a menacing drumroll. The storm had concealed itself from the gadgets of false prophets, those uninspired weathermen. If they had not depended on their own sense of water, the storm might have ambushed them. The chief officer was monitoring its approach. They had started a discussion on how to deal with it. Nothing was certain. He wanted to sneak behind it rather than meet it head-on and ride it out. Lai Jin turned starboard and saw a flash of pink—a flying scarf followed by a ping! There was Ayaana, her body stretching upward toward five thousand fluttering golden dragonflies, soaring, falling, stooping into minuscule pools of water. Her movements were a morning dance, and her face shone. Her contagious laughter swept Lai Jin into the memory of a barefoot boy flying a mad, high-soaring homemade blue dragon kite, chasing and learning wind currents with pure joy. He had chased his dragon kite hill after hill, until he had got lost. He had learned how intoxicating life could be. The shard of a pang: how had he forgotten? Lai Jin watched as an ocean wave reached up to splash Ayaana.

  Ping! She ducked with a giggle, still reaching for the dragonflies, unaware of the danger. A rogue wave could drag her to her death. But a bubble of light had lit up Lai Jin’s mouth. Instead of warning Ayaana, he backed
away. Heart-warmed. It was auspicious that sojourning dragonflies had taken refuge on his ship together with the birds. Nature had confidence in him. Whatever his decision, it would be the right one. The jocund bubble on his mouth spread across his body. With nobody in sight, he allowed himself a pivot. He looked around. Nobody had seen him. He straightened his spine.

  [ 45 ]

  Lightning with jagged edges connected sky to water. Storm scent: a pungent tartness in the air. Cresting swells. Churning froth on blue water; baying, yowling winds that shattered the life of day; the lurching, rolling ship; sky-suffocating clouds. The ship’s bow dipped into the tumult, then rose. The men at the helm engaged the storm head-on. Fog and fifty-five-knot winds, twenty-five-foot waves. The lightning hit the water again. They did not know yet that Ayaana was pinned between pipes in the deck head without a life jacket. When she leaned above-deck to peer at the pipes below, Muhidin’s watch had eased off her wrist and tumbled to the bottom. Without thinking, against the regulations, she had climbed down to retrieve it. She searched for her watch amid a snarl of pipes and tubes. She crawled on the steel floor, becoming more frantic in her search, as if losing this watch were the same as losing home. She could not let that happen.

  * * *

  —

  The wind bayed at Ayaana like a pack of hyenas, encircling her. She looked with awe at the storm. In it was the specter of the loneliness that had hounded her soul in her mother’s house; in it were all the hungers. She scampered upward, abandoning Muhidin’s watch. A three-story wave crashed on the ship. She was soaked, and aware of her smallness. Here was a hunting angel, a grand presence; here was immensity; and she was inside it, and all she could do was wait until the metal pipes among which she was lodged gave way. But they held on. Her open mouth was at once filled with seawater, which she spat out, snatching breath, waiting, her body tilting this way and that with the groaning ship. In that moment there were no prayer words—the moment was the prayer, and then she lost the will to try. The sting of the sea on her skin was new. Its chill was new. And the more she sought to live, the more she understood she would not. The louder she tried to cry, the greater her knowledge that nothing would ever hear her again. The more she knew these things, the more she tried to live and cry. Her hands glued themselves to the pipes. Grief, at the passing of her life. Time slipped into her and roosted, as did outrage at her powerlessness before the eyes of fate.

  Hands on the black-painted pipe. Chipped pink nail polish on low-cut nails—rounded, not squarish, as her mother liked hers. Plunged into stillness and silence, beyond desolation, beyond the clamor and power of the storm waves clobbering her body. Then. Nothing.

  [ 46 ]

  He was in a brilliant yellow heavy-duty waterproof jacket, a bib and a brace over a life jacket. He was stumbling through darkness, screaming, “Haiyan! Haiyan!” He was calling the girl. There was no answer. Not again. He could not be struck with the loss of another human. Not death again. His shouting turned into a bargaining plea. Panicking. He had not asked to be responsible for a human being; it had been imposed on him. An inner retort; but he was the captain. Haiyan! he called. Blurring of rules: a captain should not leave his bridge in a time of crisis, not when the air was thick with electricity and smelled of burning. But as the ship’s prow had plowed into sea troughs, out of the depths a wraith wreathed in fire had emerged with a blood-curdling howl that had penetrated his bones and still echoed in his head. He had seized a life jacket as he handed over the helm to his chief officer and taken off, following the sound, which was Mei Xing. Slipping past time. He reached the lowest deck and saw a pink scarf on the ground. Haiyan!

  * * *

  —

  He saw a huddling lump. He had found her. His torch shed its light on her form. He knew that she was dead, that the storm had crushed her. She was bleeding, the crimson seeping through clothes that stuck to her skin. He dropped the torch and offered the sea his back. Rule: a seaman must never turn his back on the sea. But he used his body to shield hers. Unbeknownst to him, he stopped a wave that had formed itself into a giant receptacle from sucking her into the sea. The seawater battered his body. When he looked over his shoulder at the water, the sea, in revenge, showed him again the departure of a beloved. He watched the silver ghost of his wife recede into the night waves, and in an infinite moment of insanity he perceived that it was she the sea had come to take. The wind howled. He howled back, and his sorrow stirred the girl his body protected, and for another second, he imagined that if he let the sea have her it would return to him his wife. Yet, when he should have let Ayaana go, he could not pry open the arms he had locked around her. Rule: a ship’s captain must be sane and lucid at all times. Existential dread calcified in Lai Jin’s fathomless being. Everything hurt, and cried, and mourned in this watery darkness. He thought he might allow both their bodies to slip over the edge. But Ayaana shivered and coughed, and her eyes opened slightly, and when she saw him, he imagined her smile. Fear twisted his being, as if hope could kill. He lowered his mouth close to hers to give her breath. Praying away the blood on her face. Bargaining with the conflation of despair and, now, desire. Life, life, life. Never again. Never another death under his watch. Heart palpitations, so he unzipped his jacket. He would cover her.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana turned toward the warmth of the presence anchoring her to life. Her extremities had contracted. The ship heaved. Whisperings in a mysterious language wrought by the sea. Ayaana heard from the sea and from a man. She clung to them—all their new promises. Around them the clamorous, wild grandeur of existence, the threat of death as the storm’s waves tried other ways to dislodge and dissolve the sheltering bodies. It pummeled them, one into the other, until there was, as always, only waiting.

  * * *

  The wind speed dropped to twenty-eight knots, and the storm eased an hour before daybreak. Searching crewmen would find Ayaana and their captain more than two hours later, crushed, drenched, and dying of cold. Lai Jin was slurring incoherent words. The chief officer said, “Your clothes, sir.” Lai Jin listened. “They are wet.”

  Exceptional insight, Lai Jin thought, suspended in hoped-for sleep.

  The chief officer continued, “You are shivering. Your lips are blue. You might die. Do you hear me?”

  Is she safe?

  Darkness.

  * * *

  In Captain Lai Jin’s cabin, the only one large enough to accommodate more than two people at a time, a temporary infirmary had been established. Two souls wrapped in thermal blankets, recovered from a tempest. Bandaged. Nothing was broken, it seemed. Through half-closed eyes, Lai Jin watched his men blunder like misdirected ants. He heard Teacher Ruolan’s sharp phrases sniped at the men. A cross cat, he thought. She wanted to sit guard over Ayaana. The chief officer wanted distance from her.

  * * *

  —

  A chronic shivering had seized Ayaana’s body and separated her into three Ayaanas: one was reversing the sea-travel route to look for her mother, another occupied the present brokenness as a refugee might a borrowed shack, and a third, called into being by the storm, was squeezing out of her to step into the world with a keen intent to drink of shadows, to soar in its mists.

  * * *

  —

  Hands on her—hard, rough, worried hands—and more whisperings. Headache. Warm liquid. A cloth rubbing her body. A woman’s low-pitched question. A man’s absolute “Bù.” An ideogram tumbled in her mind. It floated with sluggish suspense inside her skull: 不. Her teeth chattered as someone cleaned wounds that stung. Slipping into sleep worlds where everything was possible, and nothing stayed hidden, and loneliness was only a temporary guest. She met unmet ancestors: grandfather, grandmother, aunties, and uncles who led her through a closed door. She lifted her fist to push it open, because she knew that her birth father stood behind it. The door fell, and Wa Mashriq and Fazul the Egyptian lunged at her. She
struggled into wakefulness, summoning, for this fight, the fury of Muhidin.

  * * *

  Captain Lai Jin swayed with his pitching ship, ignoring the ache of his strained and bruised back, the weakened arm, the throbbing of the fire scar on his face. The Descendant tossed in his bunk bed, and he was wondering in gloom about the beyondness of life. He turned to the girl; the many small cuts on her body were no longer bleeding. She would heal. Light filtered into the space. The roundest, heaviest, bloodiest-shaded moon daubed everything a luminous red; his fate rested on the recovery of a young stranger.

  * * *

  Under the command of the chief officer, the MV Qingrui/Guolong returned to its course. Visibility on the high seas improved after eighteen hours. The chief officer corrected the ship to its easterly course, traveling at twelve knots, avoiding the tangle of human disorder around him, stealing time for his captain—he would claim fuel management—needing Lai Jin to take charge of the ship before their arrival. The captain’s malady, even though storm-created, would be read as a blight on an impeccable record. The officers declined to summon airborne help.

  * * *

  —

  A storm-battered ship. Dents, broken components, straining metal, the silence of threatened humans. Memory as a telescope. In the flotsam on the sea, assorted metaphors to explain the debris of human breaking, of human changing.