by Penni Russon
For that week, Maxine had pictured him in a landscape much like this one, a kind of nothing place, composed of only the most basic of elements.
In the beginning before light there was chaos. The universe was infinitely dark and infinitely dense. Then there was light and that light was this light: white, pulsating, arrhythmic, prelinguistic. The light that came from chaos, the light that was chaos.
Max drew closer to the light, she was an insect, she desired it, she wanted to burn hot and white—to scorch, to scald, to blister; to shine, to blaze, to glory. This was magic, this was chaos. This was Maxine’s universe, trapped in a bubble of light, or at least it was the key to her universe—or a door. A door, or a window, where she could reach through and rearrange everything….
If he could be found anywhere, her missing one, it would be here in this place. She would tear him from the light, restore him from chaos. And they would laugh, because what was chaos but the mouthpiece for the laughter of the universe? Chaos was nature’s capriciousness, where dull, painful things could be rendered absurd and humorous, like an old man’s hairpiece on a windy day.
The light dazzled, reflecting off the small scratches on her diving mask. She pulled it off, blinking her eyes open in the salty water. Adjusting the breathing apparatus at her mouth, she entered the underwater room made of light.
Trout kept the flippers in front of him in sight. His own legs were weary, and the tiredness he had been fighting continued to plague him; his whole brain was lethargic now. His tiredness disoriented him; it took him longer than it should have to realize that whoever he was following wasn’t leading him to the boat, but instead back toward the light, the magic that spun with the nervous, pulsing energy of Undine.
It was not Grunt who had led him back to the light. His outstretched hands touched something smooth and hard—he grasped it and examined it in the gloom. It was a diving mask. He let it go; it drifted from him. He watched it and considered returning to the surface. Instead he propelled himself forward, approaching the bubble of magic, for all of a sudden he knew that the diver was Max and that she had fully entered the sphere of light. Why had the magic taken her and not him? He didn’t know. But whatever his feelings for her, as twisted and conflicted as they were, he knew he had to help her before the magic swallowed her whole.
Undine was barely Undine anymore. She could hear water, what it sounded like when you were under it, swishing around her ears. Was she under it? Was she still in Greece or was she—could she be—back in the bay? She remembered the light, entering it. Was she nowhere? Was she dreaming? She could not make her thoughts stay together. She drifted…she drifted from herself.
She could feel the magic, pulling and tearing at her, as though it had half broken its prison already. And she could feel something else, something like sharp, raking fingernails scratching her skin from the inside. As if someone was trapped inside her, trying to claw their way out. At first she thought it was the magic, that it had become a whole other person inside her, that it had grown fingers and arms and skin and flesh and fear. But then she realized someone really was trapped. Not inside her, but inside…inside the magic, as though trapped inside one cell of her vast brain. The magic was within and without, interior and exterior, over and underlapping.
Undine tried to bring her thoughts together before she drifted again, further from herself, before she disappeared altogether. She saw that she was in an orb of light and inside it with her was a girl, wearing a wet suit and breathing apparatus but no mask. Her blue eyes pierced even the bright aura of light around her.
“Who are you?” Undine asked her.
But the girl didn’t answer. She continued to claw and tear at the magic and at Undine. The girl had lost language; she was losing her human-ness.
“You have to go,” Undine said. “You’re hurting me.” Undine thought for a moment and then added, “You’re killing me.”
But it was as if the girl was no longer human. She was muscle, tendon, grasping hand and lidded eye. She was without language, thought, desire; she was barely alive. If she was killing Undine, Undine was also killing her, and Undine had a flash of instant clarity—for one of them to live, the other would have to die.
Half awake, Lou reached into the space beside her, looking for Jasper, who had fallen asleep in her bed. He wasn’t there. She opened her eyes and sat up, searching the darkness. There he was, his pale, lean body standing by the window, looking out toward the moonlit sea. He looked so small and frail in the dark, Lou felt a maternal protectiveness swell inside her.
“Jasper, sweetie,” said Lou. “Come back to bed. It’s sleepy time.”
But Jasper didn’t turn around.
“Undine’s gone,” he said, his voice thin and high in the syrupy warm air of the dark room. “Undine’s gone into the sea.”
Trout circled the light. It was so bright he could not look directly into it. He tried to find a rift, a rupture; he felt blindly with his hands, looking for a way in. Before he had plunged his hand inside it quite easily; now it behaved more like silicon, with a yielding membrane. It undulated at his touch but didn’t give way.
Emanating from the bubble he still felt her, now more than ever—Undine, not Max—as though she were almost close enough to touch. Who’s going to die for you? The phrase echoed in Trout’s mind, in his own voice, though he had no idea where it came from.
Suddenly he felt something plunge outward through the bubble’s skin. Trout grabbed it—it felt like a human hand—and at that touch he could feel himself shift from his place at the edge of the light to somewhere else entirely, and his mind went white.
And then he saw: a girl on a hillside erupting into a cacophony of butterflies—stones fell and earth crumbled. He saw a narrow laneway and a bald, smooth-skinned man shouting. He was on the steps, he could feel them under his feet, he could taste the air. He saw Jasper, laughing, running, wearing a red jumper. He saw Lou and she was laughing, too, bent double clutching her sides, joy bubbling from her. He saw himself at the bottom of the steps, his face raised and bathed in sunlight. He saw Grunt in a soft snowfall. He looked down at his hand and instead of it being gloved and underwater, it was long-fingered and feminine, and wrapped around it was Prospero’s gnarled curling fist. He saw a man’s hands on the round globe of Lou’s pregnant belly and then Stephen’s softly smiling face and crinkled gray eyes. He saw, impossibly, Lou, Stephen, Undine, and Jasper walking hand in hand up a beach, a perfect family. Image after image flashed through his mind, like playing cards being flicked onto a table one by one, faster and faster, as if searching for one in particular. And then they stopped, pausing on one moment, one memory. There was Trout, and the green shirt. It was night in the bush at Duncan’s party, lights from the dance floor danced around his head. Undine leaned in, and this time their lips touched.
“Undine,” the image of Trout said, his lips brushing against hers as he spoke. “Please. I know you’re here. Don’t let her die. Take me. Take me instead.”
Undine’s eyes were closed, her mouth pressed harder against his. He felt himself disappearing, descending into that kiss.
With enormous effort, he wrenched himself away. “The girl is the magic,” Trout said. “But the magic is also the girl. Undine, I beg you. Please.”
Anxious and helpless, Grunt searched through the water. Trout had been behind him, but at some point in the forest of kelp, Grunt had lost him.
He surfaced for a moment, and saw the little boat tethered to theirs, bobbing emptily in the sea. It could only be Max; she must have followed them. And now she and Trout were down there and Grunt was not. He plunged back down, looking for them.
He searched through the sea’s forest desperately. His hands found something in the weeds—a mask. Property of the University of Tasmania. Max’s or Trout’s? Grunt couldn’t tell.
He clasped the mask and swam urgently on through the water, toward the wreck, acutely aware that his tank, which he had used the day before, had less air than
Trout’s or Max’s and that soon—with or without them—he would have to return to the surface.
Lou and Prospero stood on the beach, staring out at the empty sea and the crowded night sky that stretched endlessly above and beyond them. The bright, full moon shone blue-white, so that Lou could see the white caps of the waves. Lou had found Undine’s crumpled clothes on the sand, and she held them tightly, as if she could wish Undine back into them.
She had left Jasper at the hotel with Lena. “Leave the boy here,” Prospero had said, and Lou had seen he was right, though Jasper had wailed and pulled to escape from Lena’s strong grip.
Lou looked back at the hotel for a minute—was Jasper there now? She examined the dark sea again for some sign of Undine emerging.
“Where is she?” she asked Prospero. She wanted to blame him, to rail against him, to beat his weak, frail body with her fists until he lay broken. But she knew this time he was not at fault.
Prospero took her hand, and though her instinct was to recoil, she found his touch surprisingly soothing, and she gripped tighter.
“She’s strong,” said Prospero. “She’s stronger than you think.”
“Is she?” asked Lou, and she really wanted to know. “Is she?”
Prospero didn’t answer, and Lou knew he felt as helpless as she did. Together they watched the black sea and waited.
Undine and the girl stared at each other for a long, silent moment, and then Undine stepped past her.
“You have to leave,” said Undine.
But still the girl didn’t seem to understand; she butted the light like a moth.
Undine put her hands on the wall of light, and, improbably, she found herself to be touching her own magic inside her. In one motion of great strength she pulled open a rift, screaming in pain—and through her scream she heard Trout cry out. Ocean water flooded in through the opening.
The girl seemed to hesitate, then quickly she dived through the rift. Through the opening, Undine saw another diver, and he saw her. His eyes were concealed by a mask, his face covered. But she knew who it was. She held her hand out to him, through the space in her own magic. She could have pulled him in, or he, her out. He held out his hand—was he offering himself to her? Or was it merely a gesture of good-bye? Their hands almost touched. And then, with a wave of relief, Undine let go and the walls of light descended, separating them, and the light’s wound sealed.
She was enclosed by the light, enclosed by the magic, enclosed by her own self. Time here didn’t matter. She was outside time, even outside space, she was between spaces—she was nowhere. She could drift here, endlessly, a pure form of the magic…She could let go of her body, of her self and just…eternal…boundless…be.
She could feel herself dissolving. The magic was taking over; the magic was taking her. Her memories, her thoughts—all the things enclosed in the cells of her—dissolved, too, and she let them go: photographs developing, overexposing, vanishing into white. But then one image floated to the surface and she found she was unwilling to let it go. She fought to hold it, she seized it with all her strength, and as she pulled, the magic pulled back and then the light closed in, it closed in, squeezing and clutching her. And then…
And then everything is light, is light and then there is…
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Trout climbed up, up out of the darkness. He held Max under her arms, pushing her out of the water, and then he broke through the surface into the blinding sun. He reached to his face and tore off his mouthpiece, choking on clear blue air. At first he couldn’t see the boat, but within moments Grunt was there, leaning over and hauling first Max and then Trout into its hull.
“What happened down there?” Grunt asked. “I had to come back up, I ran out of air. I couldn’t find you….”
But Trout couldn’t answer. He opened his mouth, and suddenly out of him tore a gut-wrenching sob. He leaned over, kneeling on the boat’s floor, forehead to the ground, his whole body wracked with crying. Grunt held him, leaned over and held his back, while Max lay, inert and blank and lifeless in the boat’s hull.
“She wouldn’t take me. She didn’t want me. The magic, the sea…it was indifferent….” he sobbed, barely coherent. He had offered himself, a sacrifice, a gift, a life for a life, and the sea wouldn’t take him. Undine wouldn’t take him. He looked up at Grunt. “I thought that was it, what I was meant to do. Last year, when I should have died…when Undine used her magic to save me…”
Grunt listened. “But it wasn’t Undine who pulled you out of the bay. It was her old man. It was Prospero.”
“What?”
“He pulled both of us out of the bay; he delivered both of us to safety. I saw him, just before he did it.”
“It wasn’t…it wasn’t Undine?”
“No.”
Trout wasn’t sure why that made a difference, but it did. He hadn’t been saved by Undine, by the complexity of her feelings for him. He had just been saved. He didn’t owe his life to her, nor had the fish’s life replaced his. Prospero had saved him, Undine had made the fish into Trout—they were separate acts and somehow his accountability for the life of that fish dissolved.
“So the fish…?”
“Was just a fish.”
“…was just a fish,” Trout repeated, incredulous. “But if I’m not meant to be dead, why does it feel like this? Why is living so hard? Why do I feel so…empty?”
“Because,” Grunt said, laying his coarse hand firmly on Trout’s face. “Because. Sometimes that’s just the way it feels to live. For all of us.”
Trout remembered Max. “We have to get her to shore.”
But Grunt was already turning the boat about, steering it toward the shore, towing the empty aluminum dinghy behind. It knocked tinnily against the sailboat, and the sound of it echoed across the surface of the sea.
Trout sat with Max in the boat as Grunt ran up to the house. Max’s face was frighteningly still. He thought about what it must have been like for Undine to pull his apparently lifeless body from the bay. He had always thought it was his pain, his private, personal, existential crisis. But now he realized his death did not belong just to him. It also belonged to Undine; it was her crisis, her terror, her pain.
Max didn’t wake, but her chest rose and fell steadily.
Grunt came back with a blanket for Max, and clothes and a cup of strong, sweet tea for Trout, and they waited for the ambulance.
Still staring at Max, Trout asked Grunt, “Do you love her?”
Grunt looked questioningly at Trout.
“Undine. Do you love her?”
Grunt was silent; he looked up toward the cleft in the dunes, waiting.
It didn’t matter anyway, Trout knew. Undine wasn’t free to choose Grunt any more than she was free to choose Trout. She could love both of them or neither; the outcome would remain unchanged. She belonged to the magic, and it belonged to her, more than Trout or Grunt ever could. As he tested this thought, he was surprised to find that the pain of it, while it throbbed sharply in his chest, didn’t debilitate him.
He looked out at the bay and it seemed changed. The surface no longer looked impenetrable and concealing; instead it was more like a necessary skin, containing and protecting the life within it. The bay was regretful, as if it had lost something essential and precious. The sorrowing angels stood their sentry, looking far out to sea, beyond where human eyes could see. Trout wondered if the bubble of light, and Undine within it, had vanished completely.
Over the head of the dunes came two ambulance officers, a man and a woman; their white and navy uniforms looked clean and orderly as if their whole days weren’t filled with disorderly things. They made their way over the beach and stepped through the shallow water to the boat.
They checked Max over carefully and removed the diving apparatus. Trout and Grunt had been reluctant to tamper with her unconscious form, wary of moving her any more than was necessary. The officers unzipped her wet suit and uncovered her chest to examine h
er—Trout and Grunt both looked discreetly away—then transferred her to the stretcher.
Grunt and Trout walked with the officers to their vehicle.
“Can we get your names?” the man asked.
“Alastair Gray.”
“Trevor Montmorency.”
The officers glanced at each other awkwardly. The female one said, “You’re Trevor? Have you spoken to your family today?”
Trout shook his head.
“You might want to come with us,” said the man. “Your mum’s been looking for you. You can ring from the ambulance. Now, I need the girl’s name, too.”
“Maxine Madden.”
The man wrote it down and jumped in the back with Max, closing the door.
Trout looked at Grunt, who blinked back at him. He climbed into the front seat of the ambulance and the female officer, who introduced herself as Sharon, got in to drive. Trout watched Grunt as the ambulance pulled away from the house and made its way up Beach Road. Neither of them waved; they just made grim eye contact until the ambulance turned out of view.
He felt numb. As the bay glittered behind him, he wondered what trade he might have made this time. A fish’s life for his. What had the bay taken from him in order for Max to be spared?
Sharon made a call and waited. Trout barely registered her side of the conversation, though he heard his name mentioned more than once. His eyes kept closing and he was halfway toward sleep when she passed the phone to him. “Your brother,” she said.
“Dan?” he asked the phone.
“No, it’s Richard.”
“Where are you?”
“At the hospital.” Richard’s voice cracked. “It’s Dad. He’s had a heart attack.”
Trout’s hand went up to his mouth; tears pressed dully at his eyes but didn’t surface. “Is he…?”
“He’s been in surgery. He hasn’t woken up yet.”