She has selected six pebbles, and is looking for a seventh (having decided she would choose seven and only seven), when she spots a small, peculiar stone. It’s shaped like a teardrop, and is the color of pea soup. The stone glistens wetly in the dim afternoon light, and she can clearly see that there are markings etched deeply into its smooth surface. One of them looks a bit like a left-facing swastika, and another reminds her of a Greek ichthus. For a moment, the stone strikes her as something repulsive, like coming upon a rotting fish or a discarded prophylactic, and she draws her hand back. But that first impression quickly passes, and soon she’s at a loss even to account for it. It is some manner of remarkable artifact, whether very old or newly crafted, and she adds it to the six pebbles in her hand before turning once more towards the frozen expanse of Trustom Pond.
2.
It’s Friday evening, two days after her trip from Providence to the beach. Usually, she looks forward to Friday’s, because on Friday nights Sammie almost always stops by after work. Saramie is the closest thing she has to a close friend, and, from time to time, they’ve been lovers, as well. The writer, whose name is Edith (though that isn’t the name that appears on the covers of her novels), is not an outgoing person. Crowds make her nervous, and she avoids bars and nightclubs, and even dreads trips to the market. She orders everything she can off the internet—clothing, books, CDs, DVDs, electronics—because she hates malls and shopping centers. She hates the thought of being seen. To her knowledge, psychiatrists have yet to coin a term for people who have a morbid fear of being looked at, but she figures antisocial is accurate enough. However, most times, she enjoys having Sammie around, and Sammie never gets angry when Edith needs to be left alone for a week or two.
They’ve been mistaken for sisters, despite the fact that they really don’t look very much alike. Sammie is two or three inches taller and has striking jet-black hair just beginning to show strands of grey. Edith’s hair in an unremarkable dishwater blonde. Sammie’s eyes are a bright hazel green, and Edith’s are a dull brown. Sammie has delicate hands and the long, tapered fingers of a pianist, and Edith’s hands are thick, her fingers stubby. She keeps her nails chewed down to the quick, and there are nicotine stains on her skin. Sammie quit smoking years ago, before they met.
“Well, it was just lying there on the sand,” Edith says. “And it really doesn’t look all that old.”
“It’s a rock,” Sammie replies, still peering at the peculiar greenish stone, holding it up to the lamp on the table next to Edith’s bed. “What do you mean, it doesn’t look old? All rocks look old to me.”
“The carving, I mean,” Edith replies, trying to decide if she really wants another of the stale madeleines that Sammie brought with her; they taste faintly of lemon extract, and are shaped like scallop shells. “I mean the carving in the rock looks fresh. If it had been rolling around in the ocean for any time at all the edges would be worn smooth by now.”
“I think it’s soapstone,” Sammie says, and turns the pebble over and over, examining the marks on it. “But I don’t think you find soapstone around here.”
“Like I was saying, I figure someone bought it in a shop somewhere and lost it. Maybe it was their lucky charm. Or maybe it didn’t mean anything much to them.”
“It feels funny,” Sammie says, and before Edith can ask her to explain what she means, Sammie adds, “Slippery. Oily. Slick. You know?”
“I haven’t noticed that,” Edith says, although she has. The lie surprises her, and she can’t imagine why she didn’t just admit that she’s also noticed the slithery sensation she gets whenever she holds the stone for more than a minute or two.
“You should show it to someone. A geologist or an archeologist or someone who knows about this stuff.”
“I honestly don’t think it’s very old,” Edith replies, and decides against a fourth madeleine. Instead, she lights a cigarette and thinks about going to the kitchen for a beer. “If I took it to an archeologist, they’d probably tell me the thing was bought for five bucks in a souvenir shop in Misquamicut.”
“I really don’t like the way it feels,” Sammie says.
“Then put it down.”
“Is that supposed to be a Jesus fish?” Sammie asks, pointing to the symbol that reminded Edith of an ichthus.
“Sort of looks like one,” Edith replies.
“And this one, this one right here,” Sammie says and taps the nail of her index finger against the stone. “That looks like astrology, the symbol for Neptune.”
“I thought it was a trident, or a pitchfork,” Edith sighs, wishing Sammie would put the stone away so they could talk about something else, almost anything else at all. The stone makes her uneasy, and three times in two days she’s almost thrown it into the trash, so she wouldn’t have to think about it or look at it anymore. “Can we please talk about something else for a while? You’ve been gawking at that awful thing for half an hour now.”
Sammie turns her head, looking away from the stone, looking over her left shoulder at Edith. She’s frowning slightly, and her neatly waxed eyebrows are furrowed.
“You asked me what I thought of it,” she says, sounding more defensive than annoyed, more confused than angry. “You’re the one who started this.”
“It’s not like I meant to find it, you know.”
“It’s not like you had to bring it home, either.”
Sammie watches her a moment or two longer, then turns back to the tear-shaped stone.
“This one is a sun cross,” she says, indicating another of the symbols. “Here, the cross held inside a circle. It’s something else you see in astrology, the sign for the earth.”
“I never knew you were into horoscopes,” Edith says, and she takes a long drag on her cigarette and holds the smoke in her lungs until she begins to feel dizzy. Then she exhales through her nostrils. “Why does it bother you?” Sammie asks.
“I never said it did.”
“You just called it ‘that awful thing,’ didn’t you?”
“I’m going to get a beer,” Edith tells her. “Do you want one, as long as I’m up.”
“Sure,” Sammie says and nods, not looking away from the stone. “I’d love a beer, as long as you’re up.”
Edith stands and pulls her bathrobe closed, tugging roughly at the terrycloth belt. The robe is a buttery yellow, and has small blue ducks printed on it. “You can have it if you want it,” she tells Sammie, who frowns softly, then sets the stone down on the bedside table.
“No,” she replies. “It’s yours. You found it, so you should keep it. Besides, it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than most of the junk you haul back from the shore. At least this time the house doesn’t smell like dead fish and seaweed. But I still say you should find an archeologist to take a look at it. Might turn out to be something rare.”
“Perhaps,” Edith says. “But I was just thinking, maybe it wasn’t lost. Maybe someone got rid of it on purpose.”
“Anything’s possible.”
“I’m afraid all I have is Heineken,” Edith says, nodding towards the kitchen.
“Heineken’s fine by me. Moocher’s can’t be choosers.”
“I meant to get something else, because I know you don’t like Heineken. But I haven’t been to the store in a few days.”
“The Heineken’s fine, really. I promise.”
Edith manages the ghost of a smile, then goes to the kitchen, leaving Sammie (whose birth name is Samantha, but everyone knows better than to call her that) alone in the bedroom with the peculiar greenish stone. Neither of them mentions it again that night, and later, for the first time in almost three weeks, they make love.
3.
“Well, first off, continents don’t just sink,” Edith says, and she’s beginning to suspect that she might only be dreaming. She’s sitting on the closed toilet lid in her tiny bathroom, and Sammie is standing up in the claw-foot tub. Sammie was the one who started talking about Atlantis, and then Mu, and Madame Blavatsky�
�s Lemuria.
“And I read about another one,” she says. “When I was a kid, I found a book in the library, Mysteries of the Sea, or something like that, maybe one of those Time-Life series. One of the stories was about a ship finding an uncharted island somewhere in the South Pacific, back in the twenties, I think. They found an island, complete with the ruins of a gigantic city, but then the whole thing sank in an earthquake. Islands can sink,right?” she asks.
“Not overnight,” Edith says, more interested in watching Sammie bathe than all this nonsense about lost worlds.
“What about Krakatoa? Or Santorini?”
“Those were both volcanic eruptions. And the islands didn’t sink, they exploded. Boom,” and Edith makes a violent motion in the air with her right hand. “For that matter, neither was completely submerged.”
“Sometimes you talk like a scientist,” Sammie says, and she stares down at the water in the cast-iron tub.
“Are you saying I’m pedantic?”
“No, I’m not saying that. It’s kind of sexy, actually. Big brains get me wet.”
There’s a sudden fluttering noise in the hallway, and Edith looks in that direction. The bathroom door is standing half open, but the hallway’s too dark to see whatever might have made the sound.
“Okay,” Sammie continues, “so maybe, instead, there have been cities that never sank, because the things that built them never lived on land. Or maybe they lived on land a long time ago, but then returned to the water. You know, like whales and dolphins.”
Edith frowns and turns back to the tub. “You’re sort of just making this up as you go along, aren’t you?”
“Does that matter?” Sammie asks her.
“Whales don’t build cities,” Edith says, and there’s a finality in her voice that should have been sufficient to steer the conversation in another direction. But when Sammie’s been drinking and gets something in her head, she can go on about it for hours.
“Whales sing songs,” she says. “And maybe if we were able to understand those songs, we’d know about whoever built the cities.” Edith frowns at her, trying not to think about the fluttering noise from the hall. “If we could understand those songs,” she says, “I suspect we’d mostly hear about horny whales, or which sort of krill tastes the best.”
“Maybe,” Sammie replies, and then she shrugs her narrow shoulders. “But the whales would know about the cities. Especially sperm whales, because they dive so deep and all.”
“You’re still working from an a priori assumption that the cities have ever existed. You’re trying to find evidence to solve an imaginary problem.”
Sammie holds up the greenish stone from the beach, then, as if it offers some refutation, or maybe she thinks Edith has forgotten it. In the light from the fluorescent bulb above the sink, the stone looks greasy. Sammie’s fingers look greasy, too, as if something has seeped out of the rock and stained her hands.
I really don’t like the way it feels.
“It’s just something one of the summer people dropped,” Edith says, wondering why Sammie didn’t leave the stone lying on the table beside the bed, why she’s in the tub with it. “The thing was probably made on an Indian Reservation in Arizona, or in China or something. It’s just a piece of junk.”
“Can’t you hear it?” Sammie asks her. “If you listen very closely, it’s singing. Not the same song that whales sing, but it’s singing, all the same.”
“Stones don’t sing,” Edith says, “no matter what someone’s carved on them. I don’t hear anything at all.”
Sammie looks mildly disappointed, and she shrugs again. “Well, I hear it. I’ve been hearing it all night. It’s almost a lamentation. A dirge. And I don’t just hear it, Edith, I can feel it. In my bones, I can feel it.”
“Really, I don’t know what you mean,” Edith says, and before she can add, and I don’t care, either, Sammie is already talking again.
“My body hears the song. Every cell in my body hears the song, and it’s like they want to answer. It’s a song the ocean sings, that the ocean has always been singing. But, suddenly, my body remembers it, from a very, very longtime ago, I think. Back when there were still only fish, maybe, and nothing had crawled out to live on the land.”
“You were making more sense with Atlantis and the theosophists,” Edith sighs. She sits there on the toilet, staring at the greasy-looking stone in Sammie’s greasy-looking hands. The rock’s surface is iridescent, and it shimmers with a riot of colors, a rainbow film on an oil-slick mud puddle, or the nacreous lining of an abalone shell. Sammie’s hands have become iridescent, as well, and she’s saying something about inherited memories, the collective unconscious, somatic and genetic recollection, and Edith wants to ask her, Now who sounds like a scientist? But she doesn’t.
“We don’t know what’s down there,” Sammie says. “Not really. I read somewhere that we know more about the surface of the moon than about the deep sea. Did you even know that? Do you know about the Marianas Trench? It’s so deep, Edith, that if you were to set Mount Everest at the bottom, there would still be more than a mile of water covering the mountain top.”
“Yes, I know a little about the Marianas Trench,” Edith replies, trying to be patient without trying to sound like she’s having to try to be patient. And that’s when Sammie stops rolling the tear-shaped stone between her fingers and quickly slips it down to the clean-shaven space between her legs and into her vagina. There’s no time for Edith to try to stop her.
“Do you think that was such a good idea?” she asks. Sammie only smiles back, a furtive sort of smile, and doesn’t answer the question. But she finally sits down in the tub, and Edith sees that where only a few moments before the water was clear and clean, now it has become murky, and dark strands of kelp float on the surface. There’s a sharp crust of tiny barnacles clinging to the white enamel, and she opens her mouth to tell Sammie to be careful, that they’re sharp, and she could cut herself. But then the fluttering noise comes from the hallway again, louder than before, and, hearing it, she’s afraid to say anything at all.
“It’s a message in a bottle,” Sammie whispers. “Or those golden phonograph records they sent off on the Voyager probes. Messages like that, no one ever expects to get an answer, but we keep sending them off, anyway.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Edith lies.
“Then I suggest you should try listening more closely. It’s the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard. And it’s taken so terribly long to get here.”
Edith shuts her eyes and smells the ocean, and she smells an evaporating tide pool trapped between rime-scarred boulders, and a salt-marsh mudflat, and all the soft, pale creatures that live in the briny ooze, and, last of all, the sweet hint of pink dog roses in the air. She keeps her eyes shut tightly, straining not to hear the strange, unpleasant commotion in the hallway, which sounds nothing at all like any music she’s ever heard. And, for a hopeful moment, Edith begins to believe she’s waking up, before the dream abruptly drops away beneath her feet, the dream and the tile floor of the bathroom, and she understands that the water’s only getting deeper.
4.
There are dreams that stack in tiers, like a gaily frosted birthday cake, and, too, there are dreams that sit nested snuggly one within the other, the way that Russian matryoshka dolls may be opened to reveal a dizzying regression of inner dolls. Edith cannot say if this dream is falling into itself, or merely progressing from tier to tier, whether up or down. She is sitting on the sand among the cobbles at Moonstone Beach, listening to the surf. Above her, the sky is low and looks like curdled milk. In her right hand, she’s holding a stick that the retreating tide left stranded, and all about her, she’s traced the designs from the peculiar greenish stone. They form a sort of mandala, and she sits at its center. If asked, she could not say whether the circle is meant to contain her, or to protect her. Possibly, it’s meant to do both. Possibly, it is insufficient for either task.
The wind is the half-hea
rd voice of the beach, or the voice of the sea. Behind her, it rattles the dry reeds at the edge of Trustom Pond, and before her, it whips the crests of the breakers into a fine spray.
There is something else therewith her, tucked in amongst the sand and the cobbles and the symbols she’s traced on the shore. Something that desperately needs to be seen, and that would have her gaze upon nothing else. But she doesn’t look at it, not yet. She will not look at it until she can no longer bear the pain that comes from averting her eyes.
Only a few moments ago, Sammie was standing somewhere behind her, standing very near, and talking about the January thirteen winters before, when a tank barge and a tug ran aground here. The barge spilled more than eight hundred thousand gallons of toxic heating oil into the sea and onto the beach. The name of the barge was North Cape, and the tug was named Scandia, and, during a storm, they’d run afoul of the rocks in the shallows just offshore. Both Trustom and Card ponds were contaminated by the spill, and the beach was littered with the corpses of tens of millions of poisoned sea birds, lobsters, surf clams, and starfish.
“It was a massacre,” Sammie said, before she stopped talking. There was an unmistakable trace of bitterness in her voice, Edith thought. “She doesn’t forget these things. Maybe people do. Maybe the birds come back and the lobsters come back, and no one tells tourists what happened here, but the sea remembers.”
Edith asked her if that was why the song from the stone is a dirge, if it laments all the creatures killed in the oil spill. But Sammie said no, that the stone was made to keep the memory of a far more appalling day, one that predated the coining of man and was now otherwise lost to the mind of the world, “Why are we here?” Edith asked.
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Page 25