The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  [ 47 ]

  Drifting slowly to the surface, past soupy murkiness pressing into her chest and tickling her dry throat. Fighting for breath. Arms pulled her out of the thickness. And when she opened her eyes, the ship captain was grabbing her shoulders, shaking her as she gasped for air. A voice: “You must breathe!” She frowned. She murmured the question she had first asked him: “How did the fire write you?” and then, “What?”

  “Absence,” he whispered his reply.

  “Oh,” she said, recalling a storm, and what it had tried to tell her. Her head dropped onto the pillow, and she returned to the deepest of sleeps. For a long, long time, he stood to watch, willing her never to stop breathing.

  * * *

  —

  It was raining nonstop. Unmoving in the captain’s bunk bed, Ayaana spent hours just looking through a porthole. Lai Jin watched from a camp bed on the other end of the cabin. When she opened her eyes, he was still watching her. She turned to him. That was how they learned each other—through a gaze. Their silence subsumed Teacher Ruolan’s interminable clucking outside the closed door. She still wanted Ayaana to be moved to her cabin.

  * * *

  The thing about falling into the crevices of near death is that veneers and baggage fall away. The shoulds and should-nots are transfigured. Long after midnight, Lai Jin asked Ayaana an odd question, given where they were: “Will you,” he asked, “tell me about your sea?” It was sound he sought, words as a rope to bind this other to life. From behind the inner stone tomb which had been his sanctuary with the ghost of Mei Xing, a slab had smashed and forced fresh air in. The storm had entered the gap and deposited this foreign creature there. Lai Jin contemplated the girl. She was studying him, eyes lit from within. And, oddly, he wanted to be seen by her. When she tried to speak, she suffocated. So he leapt over to prop her up and thump her back until she could breathe again.

  * * *

  —

  In the dawn, when they opened their eyes in their respective ends of the cabin, they saw the traveling golden skimmer dragonflies that had taken refuge on the ship.

  “Qingting”—Dragonflies—Lai Jin said.

  Listening. She would remember this. “From India,” he added, needing her to talk.

  Her eyes wandered into the future. “They won’t stay.” Words in borrowed languages. “Qingting,” she echoed, completing the circuit.

  The silence sizzled. Lai Jin focused on the fading henna lines and whorls on her skin. He had touched that skin already, first to clean and seal and heal its wounds, second to follow the whorls and lines. “They will come back,” he promised.

  Words as alchemy: if he said it, they would stay.

  She turned to him. In her eyes, the pity that comes from older knowledge.

  * * *

  —

  The golden skimmers left just before sunset.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana’s searching gaze had found Lai Jin’s untitled Zao Wou-Ki. He followed her look. He asked, “What do you see?”

  Ayaana stared at the print.

  Lai Jin approached the work, tilting his head at it, touching the part of his face that had been burned.

  Her voice: “Does it hurt?”

  “The painting?”

  “The fire on your skin.”

  Outside, a sea wind’s high-pitched shriek—it scrambled thought. He answered her: “When I remember.”

  * * *

  —

  Morning. The room was under the spell of pointillist pale light. Ayaana’s eyes were on the Zao Wou-Ki. She saw a figure inside gauzelike red brushstrokes. Ayaana watched it until the sun flooded the room and overpowered the view of the painting. In the painting, she imagined she could give meaning to the shock of being drawn to this man, this person so alien to anything she had known or wanted before.

  Lai Jin said, “Shadow picture.” When she looked at him, the storm was prowling in her eyes. Lai Jin’s voice broke as he said, “A copy.” He moved closer to her. He looked down at her. He then turned to the Zao Wou-Ki print reading emotion in color. Lai Jin asked Ayaana, “You see?”

  Ayaana read the violent blue, red, and black brushstroke signals like colored scars on an immense page of light. World and memory cartographies, like those now invisible strokes left on her body by the storm—that she could endure—and a stranger’s brutish touch, which had also marked her soul. Reading wounds. Darkness had insinuated itself inside her. It would not be painted over, even by silence. But she understood now that there was not yet a complete language for shame, as if it was the consequence of some failed test of existence.

  She blinked.

  There! In a streak of yellow-white light on canvas, she saw again the conjuring of the life-offering dance that Delaksha had summoned out of Nioreg. In those colors she was invited in as witness of a sublime revelation.

  Ayaana blinked, turning away from the print to look again at the images from a Thursday evening.

  Hands kneaded her body, a large booze-tinted breath mouth intending to tear, bite, and eat her, fat limbs trying to force openings for an obscene invasion. Her mother had known. That was the sorrow. Munira had known the meaning of the fleshy, perfumed body waiting for her daughter like a vulture, had known why a grown man would whine, “Je veux le bijou.” Her mother’s touch had pre-softened, pre-scented, and scrubbed her skin—soft touch breaking the eggshell of trust. There! Now she could touch fractured portions of self, sullied and fallen, later blending with the salt of the sea. Now she could taste the flotsam of betrayed bits retrieved from a buxom woman’s life story. She was the fluttering in the heart of an ortolan bunting; she was the pursued. That was what an artist’s multi-shaded, fragmented brushstrokes whispered. That was what she found in the fire etching on a ship captain’s face. That was what the storm had come to explain to her.

  * * *

  —

  It was past midnight again. The ship was pitching. Foam on the water. In stowage, containers shuddered, banged, and groaned like many suffering beasts. The girl’s breath was on Lai Jin’s face—not stale, not anything, just warm. She was awake, listening to this and other storms in a self-contained place of dark formlessness. Breach. What had he dared? He had told himself it was to stop her thrashing about lest she hurt herself. He had stooped over her. Then he was curious. Not the otherness but the feminine, the woman-ness. The opposite of him. Then her body in his arms had been soft and malleable and cold. So he had thought to warm her up with his. He was still holding her to him and remembering how it was to press one body against his own. She was as awake as he was, listening to heartbeats as he was. Molded and waiting in stillness, just as he was, and all the hungers Lai Jin had cut up and thrown into the sea emerged now from fathomless depths like a prehistoric entity to stain his skin and set his belly aflame. Rusty whirr of memories of intense, eternal, fleeting bliss. The caress—her hand on the burned side of his face—had reshaped, retextured, and short-circuited his previous intentions. He had planned to maintain a distance. Slow arousal. Sudden fear. Not about the girl, but about the danger of losing again. Gray ghost. He mocked himself. Fungus phantom. Lai Jin told himself, She is young, even as her fingers touched his ears, his jaw, and his mouth. Gathering details. He, too. This skin, this look. She smelled of water, of salt, of elsewhere; she smelled of dust and earth. She smelled of softness and rose, and he learned that the chains to which he had bound his needs had broken.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana’s hands, on their independent journey, traversed Lai Jin’s face—sacrilege, this trespassing. The benefit of laws or the arbitration of prophets, all erased by their post-storm universe—no stockades, no intermediaries. Body possessed, she tasted the texture of this man’s fire scars in a muffled ocean night, suspended in the immensity of her wheres, taking refuge in intimate anonymity. Her body arched into him, graspi
ng for something. And she was startled by the liquid rush of wanting, wanting. Her body unknown. Retreat and curiosity. Who is this? Her, him. And so her questions leapt like crickets from one brush to another. “How do you pray?” she asked, but she had tilted her face to his.

  “I don’t,” he answered. He kissed her mouth.

  “Where is your home?” she moaned.

  He said, “I carry my home.”

  His lips were warm.

  “Tell me about your sea,” she gasped, heated and sweating and thrashing.

  His eyes were dark and unblinking and said one thing; his mouth, almost touching her skin again, another. Then he raised himself from her, with an almost smile. “The best is deep water…or you float like a plastic duck moved by currents.” Lai Jin became silent. Cold fires in memory: “Life”—he retreated to some inside horizon—“nobody knows where it lives.” He glanced down at her, shifted. “Maybe you find out.” He settled beside her, wrestling with his strength. “She is young,” he muttered to himself.

  She was still watching him. Lai Jin leaned back, struggling to rein back what the storm had unshackled within him. “January 1992, in Pacific Ocean, twenty-nine thousand yellow ducks fall from a container ship. Plastic ducks. They float away. They travel across the world.” He added, “Inside the box were also toy frogs and turtles. But the ducks”—here a big laugh—“they go their separate ways.” Her laugh was a reward. So he continued: “Sometimes, on the water, I see things other ships have lost; one day I saw a car, a Volvo…on a floating island in the middle of ocean. Like a crazy ghost.” Another smile.

  Crazy ghost.

  “Ziriyab Raamis,” Ayaana eventually said. “One day the tide came and took him away.”

  Lai Jin nodded just as if he, too, knew Ziriyab Raamis.

  * * *

  Inside the storm-created world that separated her from reality, Ayaana could now contemplate her mother’s and Muhidin’s pursuit of apparitions, recall messages in dreams, the human tumbling and groping, the eclipse that had become Ziriyab, and how it took over their habits and caused other infernal creatures, such as Wa Mashriq, to emerge. Suffocation. Rising from the dead, yet still scalded by her mother’s hot water. Holding her breath, diving freely into silence, drifting with the green-blue warm undertow of memory. Underwater, she did not need to label things in order to contain them. Feeling, sensing, experiencing—that was knowledge. There, in that stillness, its colors evoked for Ayaana a green-feathered, song-bearing creature destined to be stuffed with life’s dense flavors so it could be consumed in darkness in a human’s single bite. Her mother was an ocean, roiling in gales that life delivers, surging as a sea mountain, unsettled and given over to rubbing out boundaries, even the necessary ones. Her mother was one of the storms that existence delivered to the earth, and she loved, yes she loved, but it was a love that singed. And she…Ayaana hesitated, chewing on her lower lip, thinking. Thinking. And she…yes, she had to embrace the fullness of this mother.

  “You know the ortolan bunting bird?” she asked Lai Jin.

  “No,” he answered. Puzzle pieces: Ziriyab Raamis, ortolan bunting. Lai Jin gathered the words as if they were rare visitors from an invisible world.

  * * *

  —

  The ocean’s night entered the captain’s cabin through its open door. Lai Jin had bent his head to kiss her forehead. And then his mouth hovered over hers. In dreams, she thinks, I travel inside stars, on stars. Her arms slipped around Lai Jin’s neck. In dreams I am a tunnel made of darkness, and I know the way. I’m not alone, even when there is nobody with me. She should have known dread, but in the solitude of this uncertain eternity, there was, now, only peace. “Tell me about the sea,” she said.

  Conversion.

  “The sea,” he gasped, “cannot be spoken.”

  She rubbed the backs of her hands against his mouth, his lips, struggling with herself, the draw of the shape and feel of his mouth on her skin. There was another scar there, beneath his lower lip. Roaming thoughts, cascading emotions; fearful forebodings, too. It occurred to Lai Jin then that he could be executed for this choice. But tonight he could live—a smile—with that. The substance was this: a sudden aching-craving-yearning, to decipher the mystery of a woman’s gold-brown body, the shape and feel of breasts, the tumbling dark curls that half veiled her face, the hint-of-rose smell of her, to feel again her weightlessness against his body. From inside the cage of his mind, he heard Mei Xing’s mocking cackle: “Fake, you are a mere man.” “I am,” he answered himself. And the grimness dissipated from his mood. Now he bent to kiss her again and again as he told himself that, should anyone ask, he would say he was helping her breathe. Light sips, tentative tasting, lips, mouth, teeth, tongue, lips again. I need to know, he told himself, and his fingers were on her face, her shoulders, her small waist, and then, so very gently, her breasts. His hands moved lower, to her thighs.

  She waited.

  It was like this whenever she let her body sink in seawater, in pursuit of a summons to experience what inhabited the depths, seeking to press it to herself, feel it on her skin, etching the unreachable into her dreams.

  He watched her. She watched him. Head throb, and then a rush of loneliness, and it covered her body with a chill.

  * * *

  —

  Lai Jin slipped from the bed. He crossed the room to double-lock the cabin door, leaning against it, refusing to clear his head. He looked across the room at Ayaana. Outside, the ship and the sea; inside, only the present. He crossed the room and squeezed in next to the girl. Breach. Acclimating to woman again. Grappling with his own ache to pierce, penetrate, disappear into, and remember the past and its addictions, lose the world, its fetters, its woundedness. This, he thought, this was what he had left behind at the Temple of Mazu the sea goddess. The girl’s bare legs were wrapped around his. He was slipping. Negotiating compromises with himself. He dragged off his shirt. Her fingers were on his chest. Sculpting desire. He could define its limits. She is young, he groaned to himself. A word. A word. “I…youn…” he uttered.

  * * *

  —

  Restless waves rocked the ship, and night creatures stilled their wails. Two souls lying in a dark cabin—the rhythm of the sea became of their bodies. He was thinking that he would drape her body around his and let the ocean move them. Moon-carved intimacy. The night was their empire. She was drifting in sensation while a hand reached over to drive her toward an elsewhere that she had suspected exists. She was in the current, with the current, yielding; his hands directed her way, and then she was gasping. But he stopped. He waited until they found a normal rhyme of breathing, and when they did, he started again.

  * * *

  —

  This was now her body, her feeling, and her wanting. This writhing, twisting, seeking, this was also who she was, and feelings spilling out provoked by this man’s touch, and she saw what had possessed Wa Mashriq in the restraints this man imposed on himself as he moved her body and cried and then pulled away from her and listened for her return to stillness. Lai Jin then arranged her so she was on top of his partially clothed body, and he gripped her, pressing her to him, surrendered to sensation. He vowed he would do nothing more, absolutely nothing more. Savoring now. This he could offer himself, plundering hope. Hours to daylight; they did not yet have to mull over the meanings and words in and of the world.

  [ 48 ]

  The captain’s argument with Teacher Ruolan, who was waving her curriculum notes, had been brief and in terse English.

  Intense and carefully enunciated: “We are slow.” He stared at Teacher Ruolan.

  “Only seventeen words,” she said. “Very slow.”

  “She’s unwell. Weak,” the captain said.

  “She hears, she can learn. No time.” She waved the papers. “Also”—she indicated the cabin—“now she can stay with me.”

&n
bsp; Lai Jin stiffened.

  Shu Ruolan looked him in the eye. “Your cabin, ship leader? It is not proper.”

  “I can watch her.”

  “Where do you sleep?”

  “My bed.”

  Teacher Ruolan said in a soft voice, “Ship leader, you are a man.”

  Lai Jin recoiled, acting offended. “Teacher Ruolan, in what swamp does your mind dwell?” Shu stuttered. Her face turned red. “Teacher Ruolan, remember you are a guest on my ship.”

  “I must report this.”

  Lai Jin nodded. “I shall help you with the story.”

  Teacher Ruolan studied the captain’s face for sarcasm. Nothing. She muttered at her notes before turning to him. “When she is ready?”

  He shrugged.

  Resigned, she said, “I wait in class.”

  Lai Jin walked away. Theater of pretense. If he had not crossed a thousand boundaries last evening, Ayaana would be learning Mandarin nouns today. He paused. What is the matter with me? He leaned against the railing, shielding his eyes from the sun’s light. Thinking about—what was the expression?—“quenching his thirst with poisoned wine.” Sea sprays sprinkled his shirt. He watched the sea. His sea. It rubbed out lines—shadows, light, darkness, passages…and words. On the seas, he was the law. There were no aphorisms to explain the fate of those who had stared into the eyes of death together. He turned away, heading for his cabin. On the way back, he informed the galley cook to leave the food tray outside the cabin; he would bring it in himself.

  * * *