An Uncertain Grace

by Krissy Kneen

  I am not here at all.

  Nothing here is real, and yet if that’s so, what if nothing in my other, real, world is real either? Do I need to worry about what is really happening? Does anything happen at all? I unhinge my shell and there is water. I open my mouth and there is water.

  I struggle. I am drowning.

  My sister held me down and I knew she was laughing but I couldn’t hear it because she was bobbing at the surface and I was down on the grate of sandy bottom trying not to breathe.

  Breathe, Liv tells me. Breathe normally. It will be okay.

  Liv and my sister in the bright sunshine, holding my head under the water till I know I will die from lack of breath. My sister reaching inside my swim shorts. My sister grabbing hold of me and laughing, laughing.

  And I breathe.

  Everything hurts with water. My head throbs. My lungs ache. I hear the beep, beep, beep of the waves thrashing against me. Waves don’t beep.

  I am in pain.

  Waves hush.

  Shhh, she says. It’s all right. Shhh, shhh, shhh.

  And I hear the waves hushing like a heartbeat, steady, rhythmic, calm now.

  I am under the waves. When I look up they are a churn of light and air above me. If I stand, my head will be back in the air. I don’t want to have to learn to breathe again and so I crawl as the sand dips down, sloping towards deeper water. My hands and knees chafe against the ground. I feel vaguely weightless. I float a little, breathe out. Settle back down onto the ocean floor. One knee after the other, shuffling down, down to the deeper water. At a certain point I can stand up, so that’s what I do. Walking is less effort. I bounce from one step to the next. I never walked underwater when I was a child. I never got to sit on the bottom of the pool.

  My sister would hold her knees to her flat chest, her powerful brown arms tasting of salt because even the hotel pool was a nod to the ocean. I remember tasting the salt on her arms. My sister would open her eyes and stare up at me with her hair like a jellyfish undulating out from her face. I would be at the edge of the pool, not even my feet in the water. If I let my feet down she would lunge up and grab them and pull me down to where I might drown. I sat in the sun and watched her, wanting nothing more than to reach in and feel the waving of her hair.

  I stand in the water and stare around. I am looking for jellyfish. I am looking for the strands of her hair.

  Liv told me I would not see the jellyfish, and of course she’s right, but I feel my body sitting strange in the water. I feel my skin respond to the tug of the tide. I’m tangled in her hair or in the memory of her hair or in the memory of being a jellyfish. I’m not sure which.

  Keep walking. Those were my instructions. Keep walking and the puzzle will present itself to me. To us, because there are two of us solving the conundrum. Me and this strange otherworldly creature. Apparently it will need both of us to solve it.

  I walk underwater and I’m sure I must already be paired with the jellyfish. I thought maybe I would see it, like a halo around me. I would feel a coating of gelatinous stuff cushioning my limbs. But no. It’s just this weightlessness. This bouncing forward through water.

  Liv told me they’d almost made a jellyfish from scratch in the lab. Rat cells, she said. The heart cells of a rat, specifically. Cellulose…or celluloid? Something. And then an electric current to animate the thing like Frankenstein’s monster. The brain is a simple collection of cells so it should have been easy enough to make this robot monster behave just like its aquatic counterparts. But the creature that resulted moved like a jellyfish for maybe a few hours, pumping its jelly body up and down in a tank, until it stopped, sank to the top and floated there, inert, refusing to eat, refusing to reproduce, dead to the world. The jellyfish should have lived but it didn’t. I don’t know why she told me this.

  ‘There was something missing,’ she told me. ‘I was monitoring its robot brain. It felt like something was missing. From the inside of that brain it felt like…’ She shook her head. ‘It felt…Well, we don’t know why it didn’t work. This will be the first time a human is paired with a non-human. You’ll be making history.’

  I’m thinking about this when it happens. I’m thinking about how I could go from drowning on the ocean floor with my sister’s hair jellyfishing around me to being here, making history. I’m wondering why someone like me is chosen to make history.

  And then it happens. A shift. A lurch, and my stomach lurches with it. Even in this virtual space I think I’m going to vomit. I am…propelled. Suddenly. I’m not sure what’s happening but the world shifts. I’ve entered a video game and I am pixelated. Or perhaps something has taken me apart cell by cell and distributed the pieces of my body around the universe.

  I close my eyes, but that’s worse. I am seasick.

  ‘Stop,’ I say. ‘Stop this.’

  It’s okay, she says. This is the pairing.

  It’s clear that what I felt when I first walked into the virtual ocean is not what’s happening now. I can sense something else inside my body. It’s as if an earwig crawled inside my head to chatter in my brain. Or, no, not like that because this feeling isn’t located just in my head. I’m not sure I have an actual head anymore, or if I do I’m not inside it anymore. I’m located elsewhere. I am located in a thousand elsewheres.

  What does it feel like? she asks me. Can you put it into words?

  ‘Like…like I’ve been exploded.’

  I don’t understand.

  ‘Fragments. See? There are fragments of me everywhere.’

  I become used to the feeling incrementally. I am embodied once more. And here it is, a maze, like a hedge maze only made of sand. This is the puzzle I am supposed to solve. Not alone. I am not alone. When I hold out my hand I feel it clasped by another hand. I can’t see anyone there but it feels like someone is holding me. Then…there’s an echo of that feeling. It feels as if I have a hundred hands and each of them is being taken, by more and more hands. I have never felt less alone as I take my first step towards the walls of sand and slip between them. It’s hard for the light to penetrate here, between the sand walls. It’s dark. I move along with my hands outstretched and I can feel the grit against my fingers. I’m leading the way but I feel the slow drag of other people behind me. My sister maybe, my father, their bodies anchored to me. It’s my job to make sure they both drag along behind.

  I feel a corner with my fingertips and I pull us forward towards it. The pleasure of rounding the corner is like an electric shock. I feel my skin buzz and prickle.

  Now the sand walls widen out. It gets darker. I see them disappearing into the void. I feel a momentary panic.

  I can’t see. I can’t hear, I can’t feel. I am lost. There is no body for me to be inside. I open what might be my mouth but instead of voice there’s an electric static. Not a sound, but a feeling. And with this electric jolt I have a sense of my body in the ocean and I know I have to turn to the right to find the plankton.

  Finding the plankton is all-important. I didn’t know that was what I was searching for, but now it seems impossible that I didn’t want it before. The hunger rages through my body, through all of the bodies. All of the bodies. There’s not just me. I am many.

  ‘I am multiplied.’ I didn’t mean to speak and the sound of my voice surprises me.

  What? Liv is still with me.

  I struggle to find the words. ‘I am not one. I am many.’

  I don’t understand.

  ‘I am all of us. I am…plural.’

  Yes. Your mind is hooked up with the jellyfish. You are networked. There are two of you in there.

  ‘No. Not two. I don’t know…Maybe…There is one other I suppose but it’s so large…and it stretches over and across the whole ocean. I can feel the ocean. All of it. I am all the jellyfishes…Networked, that’s the word for it. I’m networked, like the internet, but I’m in all the computers everywhere. Not like I’m paired with one creature. Not exactly. I am all of us; we are…me. I’m one and
all at the same time. It doesn’t make any sense, does it?’

  I wait for her reply but she’s silent. There is only the non-sound of all of me, cell by pulsing cell. Feeling one with the others and feeling one and only at the same time.

  So many of me, and yet only one of me and I’m hungry. I know my place in the water, not because I can see or hear or feel, I know where I am because of my relationship to the other parts of me. I find my way through the maze, sending out electrical impulses, knowing because we are many that I’m heading in the right direction. I navigate the twists and turns so easily and then when I come to the feeding room I reach for the plankton and I’m feeding and somehow the rest of me feels fed by the very act of my eating. I am nourishing the many and the one.

  Gosh that was quick, says Liv.

  I hear her voice and she is so far away from me. Separate from me. My father is separate from me. My sister, separate.

  So you feel like there is more than one consciousness in your head?

  ‘I have more than one head. I am all of them, all at once.’

  She’s quiet. Distant. She is separate from me.

  We’re going to bring you back now. Do you remember how we said it would be?

  I remember.

  My body is empty of plankton. The maze has disappeared. It never existed in the first place. I turn and walk along the surface of the ocean. I will return to myself.

  Soon.

  It has only been a matter of minutes, or maybe hours. It’s hard to tell. All I know is that when I walked into the ocean I was alone, when I walk out I’m one of many. It’s a kind of connection I have never dreamed of making. I’m more than the sum of myself. I walk towards the light, which is streaming in through a soupy mess of kelp. The light touches my skin and I shiver. We’re all shivering. We are walking towards the light and the electric charge of sunlight excites us.

  There are waves up there in the near distance, breaking on gravelly sand. I remember being held underwater. My sister’s head blocking the sun. Trying to breathe. Trying to breathe underwater. I walk towards it all and the ocean churns above me. Too close. I duck, but am sucked up into a rolling wave. I’m turned upside down, I feel the scrape along my back, my arms. And my sister’s face, her strong swimmer’s arms.

  And it hurts. I am rolled, I can’t breathe. I want them to stop me from breathing. I want to stay in the ocean but there is no ocean. There never was any ocean. And I’m awake and my sister is leaning over my bed, her hair hanging down around her face, the light turning it into a halo.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she says, but it isn’t my sister’s voice. It’s Liv. Liv’s voice.

  I’m alone. More alone now because I know what it is to not be alone. I’m crying. I feel the sobbing rack my body. I feel ill with it. I might vomit.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ She touches my forehead. Her fingers connect me to the world.

  I want my sister.

  I don’t want my sister.

  ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘I didn’t know how alone we are until now. I didn’t know,’ I say.

  She takes her fingers off my forehead and there is just me, lying on a hospital bed. I miss my sister more than I ever have but if she were here in the room now I might reach up to her and wrench her head off her broad brown shoulders.

  I pace. The cell seems smaller after my outing to the beach. I am calling it an outing and it feels like I’ve gone on some kind of journey, even if it was in my head. Why can’t they just make a machine and plug in all the long-term prisoners? We could feel like we were out for the day and no one would need to keep an eye on us. We would just be hooked up to the machine. What if they have already made this machine? What if we are hooked up already? What if everyone in the world is hooked up to it and prison is all in our heads, what if we’re just lying on a hospital bed just like everyone else in the world? What if it’s all an illusion, these bars, this small containment, this endless day repeated every time I wake. Isn’t that the plot of a film I once saw? What if we are all in some virtual film and the film within our film is to tease us?

  Of course, there are variations. Today I have therapy to look forward to. They ask me about sex. I don’t feel like sex. I never feel like having sex anymore. They give me monthly injections and there’s no sex left in me after that. But I remember wanting it. In an hour, when they take me to my appointment, we’ll talk about that.

  I sit at my desk and there are books here. At one time I was pretending I was studying, that I was doing a law degree by correspondence. Every second person here long term is doing their law degree by correspondence. I still have some law texts but now there are more history books, books about wars, books about presidents and climbers and, yes, swimmers. I flick through a book about an Olympic swimmer and there are photos of his sister in a swimming costume. I remember my sister in a swimming costume. Only in our story she would be the athlete standing in the next photo with a medal looped around her neck. I would be the brother in his swim trunks, laughing and slapping her on the back.

  *

  Somehow an hour goes by. This has changed since my participation in the experiment. Time. Something odd has happened to it. It has taken on physical form. Time rubs up against me like an invisible film, like Glad Wrap but the whole roll of it goes on and on forever. There is so much plastic wrap stretching out behind me, and in front of me, an age of it. I feel like I am trapped under an invisible film, staring out, perfectly preserved. I am not sure why time feels so different but something has shifted in the way I wait for things.

  The hour passes. They come for me. Cuff me. I am used to all of this, the walk from the cell to the psych room, with its vague smell of piss and disinfectant. Sometimes one of the psychs sees me more than once but mostly there’s someone new in the chair every time I’m led inside.

  This time it’s Liv.

  This genuinely surprises me. I stand in the doorway with my mouth gaping.

  She smiles. She’s in my house—I live here and she doesn’t—but she asks me to sit down. She flattens her hands out on the surface of the table. Heavy, wood, bolted to the floor if you peer underneath it but from above it’s just a table, the kind you might gather your family around to share dinner. A thanksgiving table. She bunches her fingers into a fist and knocks on it, frowns and nods. She crosses her arms on the table and leans her head against them and looks sideways at the wall, which is scuffed and marked, and I see her looking at an actual shoe print that has not been scrubbed away or painted over.

  She stares hard at the footprint and stretches her right hand out along the table as if she is mentally measuring the size of it against her fingers.

  ‘You know,’ Liv says, ‘in our lifetimes there will be nothing large left in the ocean except cephalopods and jellyfish.’

  I nod. I remember my sister and my father, their strong backs, racing. I used to worry about sharks. Maybe one day I would be watching and a shark would take them. I would see one of them rise up, hands flailing, then disappear, tugged under the swell. The other would look back at me standing safely on the beach, startled. Their arms would reach out, pulling their body through the water. They would begin to swim. Then they, too, would be gone.

  She’s been speaking but I’ve been lost to thoughts of an ocean full of sharks. ‘Cockroaches,’ she has said. ‘Weeds.’

  ‘…like coral,’ she’s saying now, ‘attached to the ocean floor. Or they can attach to debris, power plants, rigs, anything made by humans or naturally forming. They attach themselves there, and then, when the conditions are right, they send out the jellyfish parts of themselves. Do you understand?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Maybe I’m not explaining it properly. I don’t really know the science of it that well, but basically each different type of jellyfish is just one big colony. Each individual swimming medusa that we recognise as a jellyfish is one part of a bigger creature. These creatures are so alien to anything we understand that we have made the
wrong assumptions about them for decades. Each colony is over six million years old.’ She makes a small gesture. ‘This is a relatively new understanding of them.’

  ‘So you didn’t hook me up to a jellyfish?’ When she explained the experiment to me the first time I’d imagined them sticking probes into the creature in a big tank.

  ‘We did. But your idea of jellyfish might be a bit different to the reality. Have you heard of quantum entanglement?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Spooky action?’

  Liv can tell she’s losing me. She shrugs. ‘It’s not important. It’s just that we’ve figured some things out using quantum entanglement and when you were hooked up to the jellyfish you were hooked up to a much larger thing. A six-million-year-old collection of interlinked parts. Maybe older. Probably older.’

  She’s quite pretty. I imagine that a dozen years or so ago she would have been quite a looker, as they used to say. She still has all these girlish gestures, drumming her fingers on the table, shifting her body up in the chair and then slumping down again. She seems like a restless child, but she’s firmly middle-aged and her tunic stretches tight at the waist. She has thickened, as women do later in life. This is how I’ve always imagined my mother would be if she were still alive: thick-set but pretty, practical, caring, filled with laughter. I wonder what my sister looks like now. I wonder if she has begun to gentle into plump matronhood. She was always just a block of solid muscle with a will that spurred her body on like a rechargeable battery.

  ‘Are you following any of this?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Do you want to follow any of this?’

  ‘Something feels strange since the thing.’

  She sits up straight for once and stares directly at me, waiting. Listening. It’s a bit unnerving. I feel like the centre of her universe in this moment.

  She says nothing and so I hesitantly continue.

  ‘It feels like I’m in plastic wrap. Like, preserved. Do you know what I mean?’

  She nods, all eyes, all ears.

  ‘I feel like every minute is longer than it used to be but also shorter. I feel like it doesn’t matter how long a day takes anymore.’