by Nancy Holder
“Well,” she said briskly, getting comfortable again and wiping her hands on her shirt. “What shall we do? Play charades? Sing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’?”
“You are so low class,” Elise spat. “So—”
Phil put a hand on his wife’s arm.
“Let’s just settle back, shall we?” Ruth suggested. “We can sing later.”
The cat warbled plaintively. Matty shifted on John’s lap. Slid between his legs onto the bottom of the boat.
“The kitty’s scared.” He reached toward the shadows beneath the opposite side of the bench. A paw slashed; the cat yowled long and low and hard.
John had a horrible thought:
If the food ran out …
Kittens for breakfast.
His stomach burned as if he’d swallowed a flaming torch. He caught his breath and laid his hand across it.
“It’s okay, dear,” Ruth murmured to him.
Grace under pressure. He admired that.
Envied it.
Needed it.
When does a man have to be more than a man?
Right now, buckwheat.
Right now.
His stomach, a lava bed. He clenched his jaw and nodded at Ruth.
“I’m fine.”
And you’re finer, lady. We get out of this, I’m going to marry you. And Donna, too. Matt and I need as many mommies as we can get.
He looked at Donna through the fog. Her hand was in her purse and her fingers were moving around. He could see the ripples of her knuckles in the leather.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. She was loading her gun.
II
TREADING
WATER
10
On Course:
Damp Bodies
Not alone, not alone, not alone at all, on the wide, wide sea. The sea that is ruled by invitation only; the sea that awaits your RSVPs, a thousand times a thousand.
Yes, you are not alone.
As you sleep in the lifeboat, dear, dear Ruth, with your crew mates; as you drift merrily along (quoth he, a most, heh-heh, inviting man, oh, captain, your captain), as you sleep as I once did, open your heart and let me read it. And listen, me beauty, as I have listened to you. Attend to the message in the bottle that is for you, just for you. The one your fogbound heart has been praying to read. The one I have written just for you, because I heard you first,
oh, my dear Ruth, the one that is just for you:
This is how it will be when you drown:
You won’t inhale any water. That doesn’t always happen.
When you drown dry, your glottis reflexively closes tight—airtight—and, ironically, you can’t breathe at all. No air goes in, nor out. It’s only later, much later, that the water creeps into your lungs,
on little
cat
feet.
Peaceful, and purring, and gentle, it doesn’t hurt at all, my darling. And the undertow doesn’t yank at you. That’s a misconception. You never feel a thing. The water curls around you, fuzzy cattail, a harmless garden snake. As the panic sets in, remember that, Ruth, my love: the snake is a friend.
And the garden is beautiful.
Remember the marshes where … we … went bird-watching? The reeds and the cattails. The fog-gray pussy willows. Remember how you and … I … brought a bag of Fritos and somehow, the Coppertone bottle got uncapped, and we joked about dipping the chips in suntan lotion?
We capsized the boat with our laughter. It tipped right over, and your coat spread over the water like a sodden pair of wings. I called you the yellow-hooded water-treader. And we laughed, though the weight of the coat dragged you under, no matter how hard you treaded. You grabbed the Coppertone bottle as if it were a life ring, and we laughed and laughed—
The boat tipped over, Ruth. That was how he—
How I—
But look, my darling. Look. This is how it will be when you drown:
And suddenly, Ruth was gliding into veils of pale jade and cat’s-eye green and henna that parted as she floated through them, tissues and oval tubes, and flat, silky ropes. The water around her shimmered deep blue, sparkling with golden sun, gilding the backs of her wintry hands, the autumn leaves of kelp.
Beautiful, beautiful.
The sun filtered through the curtains; they lifted, and she gasped. Kaleidoscopes of colors spun in slow motion as she descended toward them: carpets of orange, violet, scarlet, pink, yellow, fans of carnation and white; fuzzy velvet shapes like hands that waved at her, tender crimson, shy, muted lavender. Hello, hello. Hello.
And fish, in riots of color no marsh bird ever sported: parrot-red and forest-green; robin-scarlet; the iridescent cobalt of a peacock; tendril fairy coronets like those of crown cranes. Jellyfish washed with the peach-blush of cockatiels.
Welcome. Welcome, Ruth, who desired.
And desire, being a kind of Spirit, anguished yearning, and prayers made of tears were enough to bring her to this place. It was enough to call him to her side; him—
Ruth shifted, hazily aware of her own confusion. Who? Who, Stephen? Was it Stephen who spoke?
Oh, but see the walls of coral, curving through the water into inlets, coves, and forests; and harems and grottoes, reclining and opening before her. Glossy towns, and cities; and in the center of the universe, shielded by a lacy canopy, nestled on a pillow of rainbow anemones, a green-colored moray eel coiled in repose.
A bottle-green eel.
A glass snake.
The creature’s skin glistened like wet lips as the water caressed it. Waves of light rippled on its scales. As Ruth drew near, it opened its eyes. Rubies, rare and perfect, glittered in the sockets as it sleepily raised its head and watched her. She could see through its body, see the spinal cord, the teeth.
It reached toward her.
The snake is a friend—
A man’s hand moved through the dreamsea beside hers. The wide, flat back, the long, tapering fingers. On the ring finger, a simple gold band—
—inside, inscribed simply, “Forever.” It was his wedding ring.
We will laugh again.
Stephen. Oh, Stephen. Tears rolled from Ruth’s eyes and skinnied down the aqueducts of her heavily lined face. She put her hand in his, warm and wet and hard fingers sliding against her palm. In the world beneath the surface.
Beneath the water.
* * *
And a voice said unto her, in her dream:
Christen the vessel, Ruth.
What?
And everything flashed away from her, in a cloud of dust on the ocean floor.
Give Her a name, and a shape, and a form.
Groggy, she opened her eyes. She lay in the lifeboat, her shipmates sprawled around her. Donna’s curly black head rested on the shoulder of John, the doctor. His glasses had slid to the base of his nose. Elise and Phil sprawled like puppets whose strings had been severed. Ramón, his head drooping over the side of the boat, his chest arched as if for that last, final breath.
Matty, curled against her breast, sucking his thumb in his sleep, and Ruth held him tightly—
No, she didn’t. That was part of another dream. Matty was actually across the boat, too far away to touch.
The world went hazy, as though she were peering through a cloud, a gray mushroom cloud of fog. Like the light the doctor shines in your eyes during an exam, and the world dandelions around the brilliant yellow, as you peer into a black-hole sun.
You’re dreaming, she told herself, but she didn’t think she was. Hallucinating, then, of Stephen, or maybe of someone very like him. It was confused now, and no wonder. The terror of their situation must surely be the cause of it. Incredible to accept, that she was cast adrift on the same sea—that vast mouth of sea, hungry and …
No. No. She blinked, hard. She was so disoriented she didn’t know what was happening, and what she was imagining. As in her cabin that day.
Yes, as in her cabin that first foggy day, when someone had told her to open the p
orthole, and she had seen … what had she seen? She couldn’t remember. But she did remember how the desire—
—even now, something about desire clung to her mind—
—to leave the ship had almost been insurmountable. She could never have told Donna she had been dreaming about jumping off the Morris, could she?
Within the lifeboat, the world swam with dark silhouettes and a shifting gauze of gray; like a bad pair of binoculars or a movie projector lens out of focus. Images shifted fuzzily before her:
In her hand, she saw, but didn’t see, a bottle. It was, but wasn’t, green. And it was, but wasn’t, encrusted with chunks of precious stones around the neck.
And there was a note inside, addressed to her.
Oh, yes, there was. Of that she was suddenly sure; as she looked down at her hand everything shifted into hard, true reality and she saw that she actually did hold the most beautiful of bottles. It must have fallen into the boat, or perhaps one of the others had brought it along—some treasure, an expensive perfume bottle, a champagne bottle for a celebration.
Or to christen a vessel.
She jerked. Why had she thought of that? Why did it sound familiar?
She peeled off the gooey outer coating—wax?—and shook out a piece of thick, yellowed paper. It was decorated with a skull and crossbones, and there were words in an elaborate scroll that read,
The Captain, H.M.S.?
As she puzzled over this, she heard a voice inside her head: We need a name. We need a life.
Then something flapped hard against the back of her head, oozy and ice-cold; she screamed and fell forward; something dug into her skull with a sharp, piercing cut that made her grunt low in her belly. With a limp hand she flailed behind her; but her head was so cold; her brains were freezing; she was losing herself, going
down,
down,
down, into the hazy place; she saw, and couldn’t see; smelled, and couldn’t smell; touched, and couldn’t touch—
—the neck of the bottle as it slipped through her fingers and wound around her waist, spiraling in a slow dance around and around; it raised its head and looked at her with jeweled eyes, opened its mouth. A waxy coating of yellowed white dripped from its teeth—no, its fangs—in large bubbles toward her lap—
The world turned, around and around. The bubbles bounced inches from her face; floated sideways past her nose; stretched down, down, toward her forehead—
And the bubbles popped above her as they reached the surface that glowed above her once more, above her sea-dream world and the man of her dreams. And there he was. There, he was, and she was joyful, in a loose, disconnected way. Her happiness was expended practically before she felt it; it was diluted, dissolving.
But there he was. And as she reached for him, the world rippled and she saw—
Yes, she saw—
But Stephen, what happened to your beautiful hand?
Death and decay, it rotted away.
No. No, no, no. She writhed in horror as the gold band sank into the black and purple and the bloat—
She turned her head and saw his face, a horror of rot, and the lips that chunked from the skull as they spoke, and the purple-black fingers pointed to the bottle in her hand:
Ruth, quick, Ruth, hurry. Christen us. Dip us in the water with the force of your need; baptize us in the name of your Spirit and make it so, make it real—
She looked toward the surface and effortlessly rose to meet it. And then, just as effortlessly she was inside the lifeboat, dry as a bone. Steaming through the fog, the huge carcass of the Morris bleated and bellowed. Layers of mist rose from the water and strangled the ship, smothering the hull and the outside deck and the superstructure—
—And a huge, grinning face dancing in triumph at the top of the bottle, the huge glass bottle that had entrapped the Morris. Gazing down at its wild work, then out at Ruth, with eyes that were whirlpools; and in them, fleets of ships struggled and sank: square-rigged vessels and gray frigates and pleasure yachts, and rafts and kayaks and deep-sea vessels, drowning in a pirate skull and crossbones that tipped its head back, tipped it back to show the emptiness inside it, and laughed and laughed.
The fog gathered and thickened until the ship was invisible. The bottle pitched and rolled, and the sound of something huge battering its sides buffeted Ruth’s ears like the explosions of bombs. Screams and shouts and wails rose like a single membrane of smoke toward the stopper on the bottle, and pushed, and pushed. Cries for help, and prayers, that pushed, and pushed.
The cork popped out. And something streamed out with it, black and grotesque, tentacled and clawed, reeking of the grave; something flew into the fog and spread itself over the horizon. A single howl, like that of a wolf.
A caw of a bird. A dead man’s laugh.
Ruth quailed. Evil, evil. A demon genie had escaped. The ills of the world … an old story popped into her head. That woman, the curious one, the Greek—
Pandora? Done!
Immediately, the bottle shattered. Walls of glass shot into the fog and rained into the sea, churning the depths. Sheets of glass, rods of it, chunks as thick as cars, as sharp as guillotines, plummeted within inches of the lifeboat. The water frothed as pieces like transparent knives pitched headlong beneath the surface. Gulls shrieked like harpies across the rising waves. The ocean boiled with agony.
We will laugh again, Ruth.
And everything vanished.
Ruth—in a dream that had to be real, a delusion that had to be happening—sank into stillness.
And you, Dr. John Fielder? Do you dream of us as well? Can the fog creep inside you and make you set sail for us? Let us see what dreams may bring you bobbing to our harbor:
Beneath the surface, John huddled in the white box. The sides flaked mint-green paint that caught and eddied in the water. The fit was tight; he could hardly move, or breathe. That didn’t matter; he was afraid to do either—although somehow, he could breathe if he wanted.
Something undulated at his temple. He jerked, forced himself to remain motionless. The something crawled along his skin. Inside his head, he managed a weak, sick laugh: the dark brown thing, so threatening, was a lock of his own hair.
Christ, he thought, and then he had no thoughts, only a sliding fear as the light appeared, parallel with his chest. A hundred fathoms away in the water, or maybe just an inch, it glowed dimly in the icy blackness. His stomach clutched and he flattened himself against the frigid, hard surface. He’d prayed he’d be safe there.
He was a fool.
The watery light made a circle. His heart contracted and he held himself rigid. Ice floated around his knees, his belly. His bare skin glistened a pale blue, as if throwing off a reflection of sky and clouds.
But the things that bobbed overhead weren’t clouds; they were icebergs, a field of rock-hard thunderheads. Thousands of sparkling dots rained from them, ocean snow, diffusing the light into a poisonous yellow mist. Moving only his eyes, he watched the things. His hair wafted in the water, and brought images of tentacles, and air hoses, and heavy, weighted chains.
Will this be how I drown? Yet he breathed; he lived.
A stinging jab pricked his shoulder; another, the inside of his elbow. Another, another, another. At the perimeter of his nipple, blood welled into a pin dot. He winced, forcing himself not to squirm. Spots of blood rose on his body like a disease—
like that disease—
—then ran together to crease into long, paper-thin cuts. The sharp-edged things bounced off his arms, his legs, his feet, drifted downward. One landed on his cheek, pinched, swirled in a current. Shards of glass, hundreds of them, razor-sharp.
He flailed at them, and found something jutting from the sides of the box. Handholds. A shelf. He tried to hold on to the outcropping. Beneath his palms, wood splintered and softened. It broke into waterlogged chunks that pirouetted in upward spirals past his shoulders, mingling with the glass and his blood. The bits of wood separated into fibers;
he found himself thinking of tuna and the way it flaked when he made sandwiches for—
for—
The fear slid thickly into his guts, spreading through his veins. Oh, God, where was Matty?
His heart blasted against his spine. His pulse roared. The skin on his face tightened as he pressed his lips together. The hard surface chilled his backbone. Vibrations roiled through the water, sending the bone-soup into a counter-current.
His boy, his boy, where was his boy?
Daddy, here I am!
Matty appeared before him, chubby-cheeked, blooming with health. He stood in the water, and yet he didn’t; he stood on the deck of a ship, a sleek white ship whose deck was varnished wood, and yet he didn’t. Behind him, a rail coursed around tiki torches that cast warm shadows on his face; neon lights set into the deck lit Matt from below.
But the figure beside his child remained shadowed, dark, indistinct. It held Matty’s hand and looked at John.
Matty waved excitedly. Here I am!
Healthy and happy and full of life.
Full.
forever.
Ah, yes, good doctor. A noble desire. A passionate yearning. Yes, that will suffice.
Laughter reverberated over the water.
And you others:
Here, Ramón Diaz. This can be how dying can be for you, if I so desire:
Like a stream, trickling down the center of your heart. Wearing away the earth of your life with a wet, sugar tongue and a gentle tickle; until you cave in from the breastbone, and all the clay that you are mixes with the sea. Your guts, like man-of-war jellyfish, disembodied hearts pulsing along, along, along.
For you, Phil: like a still pond of water, into which you knowingly step, lie down, and cross your arms. Our martyr, our Ophelia. Or will you become a man at the end, and fight?
Or for you, Elise, you who savor your seething discontent like those cigarettes you smoke: a death like the ocean, brutal, fierce, and merciless. Sweeping over you in galvanic fury, flinging into your face your insignificance as you thrash and go under. Your helplessness. The fact that you have no power, that you can be torn into pieces so easily, so wonderfully. Think of it. Think of your arms, wrenched from their sockets. Your eyes, ripped from theirs. Or perhaps your skull will be bashed into a pulp, and the bits of your brain extracted like seeds from an overripe papaya, and fed to the sharks.