When Aquatics are overwhelmed, they seek out the tallest object in view, lie on their backs, put their heads against it and look up. The ritual is called lítill, and its purpose is to remind believers that they are actually quite small and, therefore, so are their problems.
Craning her neck, Aby looked up to the very top of the pole. While the height of the pole did make her feel small, she had to stare for some time before she began to believe that her problems were also small. She continued to stare. Then, knowing that if she didn’t get back inside the white Honda Civic soon she never would, Aby stood. Her steps were stumbly, but she did not fall on her way back to the car.
Starting the engine, Aby ignored the sick feeling in her stomach, put the car in gear and depressed the accelerator. The white Honda Civic gathered speed on the shoulder. Looking at the side-view mirror, Aby saw a car approaching. She still found it extremely difficult to judge the speed of objects in the distance. The car looked small in the mirror, so she pushed the gas pedal to the floor. The engine made a high whiny noise. The tires spun in the gravel. She found steering difficult. The speedometer told her that she’d reached a speed of 60 kilometres per hour. Aby knew it needed to read 100. In the rear-view mirror, the car behind her continued to approach with great speed. Her speedometer read 80 and she decided this was close enough. She jerked the steering wheel to the left. As the tires grabbed the pavement, the car began to swerve.
The white Honda Civic veered through both lanes, and Aby heard the left wheels go into the gravel. The tires slipped as small rocks hit the inside of the wheel well. Her right wheels remained on the road. A car behind her grew large in her rear-view mirror. She depressed the right pedal, but the white Honda Civic would not go faster. Hunching her shoulders, Aby closed her eyes and heard a horn honk in one long monotone.
There was no impact. Opening her eyes, Aby watched the car, now in the right lane, speed ahead. In her panic, she hadn’t anticipated that the vehicle would simply go around her. Slowing down, Aby steered to the right until all four wheels rolled on the asphalt. Feeling that immediate danger was over, she refocused her eyes on the chip in the windshield. It was at this point that the off-ramp for Exit 168 came up, and Aby, having no idea where it would take her, took it.
This was the first time she had chosen to deviate from Pabbi’s directions. Her fingers ached when she relaxed her grip on the steering wheel. Once off the freeway, she continued to drive without a destination, choosing roads that took her away from any buildings, and at 5:57 p.m. Aby passed a river. She decided that this was where she would spend the night. She pulled over.
Opening the door, Aby turned sideways in the seat. Her legs were so stiff that she had to use her hands to move them. She stretched them outside the car. With the rest of her still inside, she pulled off her pants and her underwear and her shirt. Taking tiny steps, Aby walked towards the river. The ground was uneven. She stepped onto the edge of a rock and was knocked off balance, which forced her to take another step, which caused her to take another, which caused her to fall. But she was close enough to the river that she fell forward into it, and the instant she hit the water, her grace returned.
Aby submerged. She performed a series of somersaults. She swam with the current and built her speed, caressing the rocks as she swam around them. She tacked against the current and then, spinning on her back, hovered just beneath the surface. She opened and closed her gills. She pulled fresh water deep into her lungs for the first time.
Pabbi had said that her biggest challenge wouldn’t be breathing air, or the distance she’d have to travel, or the driving or even her colour (the longer she stayed out of salt water, the more her green would fade). It would be her legs. He warned her to stretch them as much as possible, but not to push them and never to trust them. Aberystwyth had not listened.
As she continued to float just below the surface of the river, Aby’s greatest fear wasn’t for her soul but for her legs. She was overcome with sadness: this was decidedly not how she’d intended to spend her forty-first birthday.
16
Ást
According to the Aquatic Bible, the only holy objects in the unwatered world are clouds. There are three reasons for this: the first is that clouds never touch the ground; the second is that clouds are the source of all water; and the third, and by far the most important, is that when a Hliðafgoð dies, their upplifa, or soul, evaporates and travels as vapour into the clouds. Once inside a cloud, an upplifa begins absorbing its characteristics. When the soul falls back to earth in the form of rain, the life it enters is greatly influenced by the type of cloud the upplifa falls from.
That is why, on the morning of Tuesday, August 23, when Aby woke up in a river she could not name, with fresh water filling her lungs and clouds drifting overhead, she instantly began contemplating her death. Floating just under the surface, she watched the clouds floating slowly above her and thought about what it would be like to be reborn from those clouds. They were small and compact, and Aby thought she’d like that, being a personality drawn to small, compact things. She took a large amount of water into her lungs, then pushed it out through her mouth, breaking the surface and making a fountain of herself.
“Vatn auk tími,” she said. “Vatn auk tími.” This phrase, often repeated by Aquatics, is used in a variety of situations to mean a number of different things. Literally translated, it means “water plus time.” But there is an implied understanding that the phrase “nothing can resist” precedes the statement. So, during times of stress, it can be said to remind the believer that the difficulties they’re having are temporary. It can also be used when beginning a task that appears insurmountable. But by far the most common use of the phrase it to acknowledge that what happens in your life is mainly out of your control, that bigger forces are at work, and resisting their influence is useless.
Aby began climbing out of the river. It was much more difficult than she anticipated. Her legs were too weak to be of much use, and there was little for her hands to grab hold of. Hip-deep in water, Aby waded three hundred metres downstream to a place where the banks were lower. She crawled from the water and sat on the shore, dreading having to take her first breath of air. She held her breath for as long as she could, then her gills opened and contracted, and she felt the dry air inside her.
When she finally got back to the white Honda Civic, she did not feel like she could get inside it. Reaching out, she put her index finger against the chip in the windshield. Its texture remained rough, but from the outside it felt more like coral. This association allowed Aby to persuade herself that the chip couldn’t be that bad, that driving the car would be okay and that death, while still likely, wasn’t certain.
Aby placed a long leg on each side of the steering column. She turned the key towards her, then remembered to turn the key away from her. She began trying to find the highway. After more than forty minutes of random turns, she found a secondary road that led her to an on-ramp. Although she could not bring herself to reach the posted speed limit, Aby drove without incident for hours. Then, forty-five minutes outside of Thunder Bay, eighteen hours away from Toronto, extreme thirst struck her once again.
Seeing a large collection of tractor trailers parked beside a one-storey building very close to the road, Aby left the highway. She parked the white Honda Civic and staggered towards the building. She walked as if she were drunk, although the opposite was true—it was drinking too little that caused her to sway.
Aby became convinced that she had only moments to find water. Having never witnessed dehydration, Aby could not fathom how it happened. She pictured every cell in her body shrivelling, her skin suddenly becoming many sizes too big, then crumbling and blowing across the parking lot. With these thoughts in mind, Aby was understandably anxious as she threw open the glass doors of the building.
Until this moment, Aby had been careful never to interact with large groups of Síðri. Now she felt she had no other choice. She stepped inside. As her ey
es adjusted to the relative darkness, her gills nervously flared open and closed. Her eyes searched for water. She was concentrating so intensely that she was able to ignore how the sound of food cooking was suddenly audible, how all movement within the restaurant had stopped, and how the majority of the patrons, mostly men wearing trucker hats, were staring at her.
She saw bottles of water only three paces to her right, in a box as large as she was. Aby reached her hand through a rectangular hole close to the bottom. She twisted her arm and pushed her hand farther up, but the bottles remained untouchable. Large, square buttons covered the left side of the box. Aby pressed each button, then pushed them in a variety of combinations. This produced no results, which caused her frustration to grow. Ignoring the Síðri, who continued to stare, and curling her hand into a fist, Aby struck the side of the machine. The bottles didn’t fall. She hit the machine again, harder, but the bottles remained standing. Then, remembering the small stone flying through the air and the resulting chip in her windshield, Aby pulled her arm back. She aimed. Using all her force, Aby threw her fist at the front of the machine—but it stopped an inch from the glass.
Initially Aby couldn’t understand why her arm had ceased its forward motion. Seeing the hand holding her wrist only increased her confusion. That a Síðri had more strength than her was impressive. She followed the hand to an arm and the arm to the face of a man slightly taller than her, and much taller than most of them. His eyes were green and his skin had a greenish hue.
Continuing to hold her arm, he deposited a series of coins through a slot that Aby hadn’t noticed. He pressed the upper left square. The machine whirred. A bottle of water fell down into the rectangular hole, and then he let go of her arm.
Aby grabbed the bottle, opened it with her teeth and drank the contents in a single pull. The man put in more coins. He pressed the button again. Another bottle fell. Again she used her teeth to open it, and again she drank it in a single swig. Six bottles later, Aby looked up at him. “I veed mowre,” she said.
“Ég don’t hafa allir fleiri breyting.”
“Ekki a Hliðafgoð?”
With this he took off his scarf and flared his gills. “Ást.”
“Aberystwyth.”
“Við öxl fá út af hér!”
The bluntness Ást had used to describe their situation pulled Aberystwyth out of her joy at seeing another of her kind. She took her first good look around the truck stop. The patrons continued to stare. She sensed that their disbelief would soon turn to fear. Although Aby was standing 210 metres above sea level, breathing air, her skin flaking from the dryness, she was, for the first time in her life, in over her head.
Aby scanned Ást from his feet up to his undeniably handsome face and decided that she could trust him, although in truth there was little else she could do. “Hvaða öxl við gera?” Aby asked.
“Keyra!”
Aby nodded, and they began to run, fleeing the truck stop together.
An Aquatic will never question anything that happens by chance. In fact, the greater the coincidence, the more an Aquatic believes it was meant to be. This concept is called vilja, which translates as “God’s cheat,” the idea being that what appears to be chance is how God influences the plot of your life. If something extremely improbable happens by chance, it wasn’t chance at all, but God’s hand arranging the events of your life to meet the divine will.
The concept of vilja is very closely related to that of tibrt. Literally translated, this means “current-move-time.” A more poetic translation would be “river season,” since at the bottom of the ocean, currents move like rivers.
Aquaticism teaches that there are five seasons. Fins, when things grow, is like the Síðri summer. Gsll, when things wither, is like fall. Virth, when things sleep, is like winter, and zre, when things begin again, is like spring. The fifth season, the one the Síðri don’t believe in, is tibrt, the river season.
The river season is the time when you must enter a current and be taken to some new place, the place you’re supposed to be—the place you’re fated to be. A river season could happen at any moment. You could experience a river season three times a year or not at all for thirty years. It could happen to you but not to whoever is sitting next to you.
But most importantly, a river season will last as long as it takes you to reach your new place. If you get into the river and let it take you where you need to be, your river season will last an afternoon. But if you fear change and struggle and hold on to the rocks, the river season will last and last. It will not end until your body becomes exhausted, your grip weakens, your hands slide off the rocks and the current takes you to your new place.
Aby’s thoughts were not on river seasons, although maybe they should have been, as she untangled herself from Ást’s bedsheets. She was more focused on, and impressed by, her increased ability to walk on land. When they’d fled the truck stop, Aby had run, if not exactly quickly, then without falling and with only small amounts of wobbling. This was a large improvement in just eight days of being unwatered. Aby couldn’t help but feel proud of herself.
Remaining in bed, Aby surveyed the room that she believed vilja had directed her to wake up in. She saw Ást’s wallet on the bedside table and the black shirt he’d been wearing hanging over the back of a wooden chair. There was a small pile of change on his dresser and a half-open drawer that looked to be full of socks. Aby was amazed at how perfectly he was living Síðriin, and how easy it seemed to be. She realized for the first time in her life that it was, at the very least, an option, and this thought made something inside her speak. She had not consciously known she had any desire to live this way. Before this desire could grow, Aby pushed it down and got out of Ást’s bed.
Normally not of easy virtue, Aby had been easily seduced, fuelled by loneliness, propinquity and a fear that the end of her world was near. From the moment Aby had stolen the white Honda Civic, she had been convinced she would die in it. She was so sure a fatal accident lay ahead of her that she thought of each passing kilometre as bringing her not closer to the Prairie Embassy Hotel and her mother, but nearer to the collision that would kill her, a death she believed would transform her soul into a sála-glorsol-tinn.
With these thoughts in her head, Aby felt the need to crawl back into Ást’s bed. She got under the covers, wrapped as much in the feeling of calm and safety as in the cotton sheets. For twenty minutes she felt at peace and without fear, but then at minute twenty-one the guilt set in. Aby did not try to fight it. With a shake of her head, she pushed a small sigh from her gills and began to hunt for her clothes. She had dressed and was opening the front door when Ást, wrapped in the bedsheet, caught her.
“You already want to leave?” Ást said. He spoke in Hliðafgoðian, and for the first time Aby noticed that his pronunciation was perfect, his accent distinctly upper-class.
“I need to keep moving,” Aby responded, suddenly feeling slightly ashamed of her accent.
“Please stay.”
“I can’t.”
“Just for breakfast?”
Aby shook her head.
“Then I’ll take a look at your car, the engine, the brakes, everything. I’ll make sure it’s safe.”
Aby decided she couldn’t leave yet. She closed the door. She promised herself she would only stay three more hours, then get back on the road. She followed Ást, although his path was not towards the kitchen.
Six hours later, Aby could only see Ást’s feet. The rest of him was underneath the white Honda Civic. She could hear the sound of metal on metal, a tight, solid frequency that sat heavily in her ears in a way she found uncomfortable but attractively decisive. She had an impulse to caress the webbing between Ást’s toes, but she resisted, having already stayed too long.
“So, you’re an Aquatic, right?” Ást asked from underneath the car, his voice disembodied from his feet.
“How can you tell?”
“It creates a certain appetite.”
“Oh, it does not.”
“What makes you risk being here?”
“My mother.”
“She lives unwatered?”
“Yes.”
“How old?”
“127.”
“The ryð?”
“It runs early in the family.”
“At?”
“Late 120s.”
“Trying to get your blue light to shine, eh?” Ást said.
Even without being able to see her, Ást sensed that he’d gone too far. Aquatics believe that those who, during their lifetime, reach koma, or sainthood, demonstrate their grace in two different ways, both of which happen when they die. The first is that they flash a brilliant blue light at the moment of their death. The second happens when their upplifa enters the clouds—they absorb not the characteristics of the cloud, but the cloud itself. The koma upplifa doesn’t fall as rain, but uses the strength of the cloud to travel to the next world, the cloud disappearing with them.
“I’m sorry,” Ást said. He remained underneath the white Honda Civic but stopped working on it. “I didn’t mean to be mean.”
“It’s okay.”
“But if she doesn’t want to go back to the water?”
“It’s not an option.”
“You have a plan B, then.”
“I do.”
“You’re willing to use force?”
“I guess I am.”
Ást slid out from under the car. There was grease on his face, and his arms were thick in his T-shirt. “Everything’s fine underneath,” he said. “It should get you … where again?”
“Morris. Manitoba.”
“You’ll be fine. That crack in the windshield’s gonna keep growing, but you’ll be fine.”
“I really appreciate this. The water. Everything.”
“You know, Aby, I’m a bit of an Aquatic as well.”
“You can’t be a bit of an Aquatic.”
“Nonetheless, I know I’m following the trú, my trú,” Ást said. He continued looking Aby in the eyes, even though all he found there was disbelief.
The Waterproof Bible Page 9