The Seas

by Samantha Hunt

  I look again in the rearview mirror, and quite suddenly there is a beautiful blue as though the storm finally broke. It is truly a gorgeous color. This blue is chaotic and changing. I recognize it immediately. “Jude,” I say, and I point into the rearview mirror. “It’s the ocean. It’s coming up behind us,” I say. I watch as the blue rises up like a tidal wave so quickly that I am certain it will catch up with us soon. “It doesn’t want us to leave,” I say. I check the mirror. “At first, I thought it was a bunch of cop cars chasing us with their lights on but now I can see that it is the ocean.” I accelerate. “I don’t think we can outrun the ocean but I’ll try for your sake.”

  I watch the blue in the mirror. It is so beautiful that it is hard to look away. “Jude,” I say. “Fuck the dry land. I am a mermaid.” I turn to look at him, but Jude is not sitting beside me. “Jude?” I ask and stare at the empty vinyl seat where he should be. I reach my hand over to touch the empty seat. But I look too long. I collide and burst through the guardrail and then I am sailing down into a deep ditch beside the road. For a moment I soar through the air in Jude’s truck and I figure that might be it, time for one last thought. And so I sit, holding on to the wheel, waiting for that one last thought to arrive. I wait as the truck’s nose dips and lands like an explosion, followed by a deep silence. The crash is over. After a moment I open my eyes. I look out the smashed windshield and see smoke or fog in the rain. The fog starts to turn blue and finally a thought does arrive. I am still alive. That’s the thought. Just then the truck breaks the silence. It begins to sizzle as though it is angry at the accident.

  “Jude?” I turn and ask, but before I can get any response the water rushes in like a couple of police officers with their blue lights flashing, with their guns drawn. The water rushes in like a couple of police officers would rush in to surround the smashed-up car of some drunk people who are evading the law. The water is like two officers, one on either side of the car both with guns drawn and pointed at me. The first officer opens my door and it creaks after the crash. He points his gun into my neck. His hand trembles so violently that the barrel of his gun shakes, tapping the bone at the bottom of my jaw. We stay together in silence. The engine is ticking, his hand shaking between my neck and chin, until he finally asks me, “Will you get out of the car, please?” He drops the gun back to his side where it continues to shake. I slide out of the car accident.

  “Jude,” I say.

  “Miss,” the policeman says so softly I can barely hear him in the rain, “You are under arrest for the murder of Jude Jones. Anything you say or do—,” the man says and continues, but after the word murder paired with Jude I stopped hearing. The water rushes in and throws me into the back of a patrol car that returns me to town, that passes close by the ocean so that I can smell the shore’s scent of decay. I can hear how the waves sound like breathing or snoring until we drive past and the ocean wakes up and watches the police car go by.

  “We almost escaped,” I tell the sea.

  And the ocean spits what it thinks, like a storm, “Don’t you ever try that again.”

  BACK ON DRY LAND

  In the back of the patrol car the seat is built as a hole. It is very low and dark so that both the outside world and the front seat are obscured. I can only see the back of the policemen’s heads. One, the young one with the soft voice and nervous hands, has cut his hair back so that it rises up and bristles at attention, in the same way one would expect the spines of a porcupine to do. The other man, who is older and rounder, has only a corona of hair, short fibers that circle his pate and leave the wrinkles of pink rolls at the top of his neck exposed. That haircut is like a monk’s. The monk does the driving. “Sorry, I was so nervous,” the young cop says to him. “I never pointed a gun at an actual person before is all. Especially not a girl. But sorry. Now I’ve done it and I’ll be all right,” he says.

  “I know you will,” the monk says. “You’ll be fine,” he tells the young officer and adds as an afterthought, “I’ve been on the force thirty-two years and this is only the fifth homicide I’ve ever even heard of around here,” he says. “You did fine.”

  “A homicide?” I say to the policemen, but they do not answer me. I think they cannot hear me back here in this hole seat. That or else they can’t hear me because they are on the dry land. “Are you guys looking for Jude?” I ask louder. Still they don’t hear me.

  “How’d you know?” the young cop asks the older one.

  “Her mother called us. She was worried.”

  I ask again louder, “A homicide? Jude is dead? My mother?”

  “Miss,” the monk-haired policeman says without turning around. He’s driving, “It would be better for you if you didn’t speak to us. You’re all over his house. You’re all over the body in the living room and, goodness, you’re fleeing the scene in his truck.”

  “The body?” I ask.

  “That’s the part we still can’t figure out,” the young man says, and I have to lean forward to hear him. He turns to look at me and stares, making me feel trapped and awkward. He watches me through the metal grating between the front and back seat as if I were an animal. I can barely make him out. “We’re wondering how—in a bone-dry living room—did you manage to drown the poor guy?”

  So I stop talking.

  REST

  Inside a small cement room with a wall of one-way glass they say, “Tell us what happened.” The one-way glass seems extremely serious, and I find it hard to believe that such a formal room for interrogation would be wasted on me. I didn’t kill anyone.

  “Tell us what happened.” It is the monk and the young one. They have a tape recorder.

  There is quiet for a long time while I think. They want the whole story I guess. OK, the whole story. “Once upon a time,” I begin. “Far, far below the deep blue sea—”

  The monk stands to leave. “I see. You are going to play the crazy card. I’m not buying it. We’ll come back when you are ready to talk.”

  They both stand and stare again. “I don’t like it,” the young guy says. “She’s spooky. Her skin is so pale I feel like I can see through her,” he says. It is the first real thing that has happened today. He can see me. What the young man says works like a door or window opening. It lets the policemen in, for real, and it makes me wonder, “How did you cops get inside my story?” I say it out loud, as a whisper, but out loud.

  “What are you talking about?” the young man asks.

  “Your story?” the monk asks. He smiles. “You are the one writing this story?” he asks, and slowly I nod my head because I can’t tell if he is making fun of me. “If that’s the case then you must know what happened to your friend Jude. You know, if you’re writing this.”

  “He melted,” I say but they stand to leave as if they don’t believe me. “Wait. Wait,” I tell them and then I say, “Jude wrote something, too.”

  “This?” the officer says and takes Jude’s letter from a plastic evidence bag.

  “Yes. The rest of the story. Yes.”

  “Your friend Jude is dead,” the monk says. “Tell us what happened,” he says and I look at his request. It looks like lead that he wants me to turn into gold.

  “I didn’t kill Jude,” I say. “I couldn’t have. Jude was already dead.” And then I pull the letter Jude wrote me from its envelope. I hold it close to my heart.

  I read them Jude’s letter.

  I’ll write it here cause if you have it written you can look back over this ’til the letter falls apart and maybe by then you will believe me.

  At first I felt lucky to be on the hospital ship. I was happy to be out of Iraq and going home. I wouldn’t have been so happy had I known what the ship would be like. There were all manner of men missing arms and legs and eyeballs and noses and even one missing his center. His stomach had been blown out and somehow he had lived. They had replaced his stomach with a plastic bag where the doctors could watch to make sure the mush he ate was being digested. Despite the doctor�
��s orders I wasn’t watched all the time. I wasn’t really watched at all. There were too many other soldiers who needed help. So I was more or less free to walk around the ship. And I did.

  Belowdeck it was easy to become disoriented because the hallways were long and indistinct. It was especially easy to be disoriented since I already was disoriented. The walls in the ship’s hallways were made of iron that met the floor and the ceiling in thick bumpy welds that looked like scars and each time I got lost the iron halls felt like corrals that said, “Behave, soldier, behave.” I was sick. On that ship I thought I’d have a fit from claustrophobia. That and feeling that the reasons why we’d waged a war were loose and shifting daily nearly made me really lose my mind. I tried to think of home but I felt trapped and I felt like the longer I stayed on board the deeper I sank in complicity. Not that I wasn’t already in deep. The only relief I felt was when I could hear the ocean beating the hull and know that the U.S. military did not own the water. Yet. Everywhere there were sick soldiers. There was vomit. There was blood and crying through the night. We were wrecked. All of us. And the only good thing I thought was that the waves could wash it all away.

  I remember striking my elbow on the pointy corner of an iron stair railing and I didn’t feel anything. I puked and I didn’t feel anything. So I cut my arm with a shaver as a test and I still didn’t feel anything. And that feeling—the feeling of having no feeling—is the most terrifying thing I have known. I thought, “I’m dead. I’m already dead,” and so barely, without barely making a decision, I decided. I went up on deck and I jumped overboard.

  It was the coldest ocean I have ever felt, far, far colder than here. The pain it gave me was good at first because I could feel it and feeling something, even freezing cold, battering waves was better than feeling nothing. For one moment of pure fear I forgot the war. The waves were tremendous. My ship was already gone and I floated for a minute or two before realizing what I had done. It crept up on me slowly. Feeling began to return. I thought of you. I thought how I’d never see you and I couldn’t believe how fucking stupid I had been. I couldn’t fucking believe it. I’d survived the fucking war and now I was going to die. From the trough, the very bottom of a fifteen-, maybe an eighteen-foot wave, I changed my mind. I knew even an ocean full of water couldn’t clean away a war. “Help,” I yelled, just as a wave broke on me. Like who the fuck was going to hear me? It took me under.

  And here is what you won’t like or won’t believe or at least you won’t believe that it took me this long to tell you, but your father was there. Your father was the wave that took me under. “Help,” I said again, but I was in the tumble of the salty wave and your father smirked. “I’ll help you,” he said. “You son of a bitch. We’ll make a deal. I’ll save your life; you stay away from my daughter. Forever.” He said it. He didn’t want you to ever marry a mortal like he’d done. He wanted you to come back to the ocean with him. He said you are a mermaid.

  I made a mistake. I agreed because I wanted to come home from the war so badly. I agreed. But then your father said, “I’m going to give you something to make sure you stay away from her.” And he took a curved fishing knife and he cut my chest open. He made me take it. He cracked my ribs apart so I knew I was not only drowned I was dead. And your father left something inside me that was even colder than the water. It was ice.

  It happened. I know you won’t believe me, but sometimes people come back from the ocean. The polar explorer, he was in a wave over 198 feet tall and he came back because he had all those men to rescue. And for some reason I came back, even a coward like me.

  I woke up the next morning in my berth and at first I thought that was the clearest, oddest fever dream I’d ever had until I fingered something on my chest that hadn’t been there before. White scars raised in a scribble across my entire torso.

  He gave me an inside of ice so I’d never love you. But it didn’t work. You are so close. You are sleeping in the next room. You are the only warm thing to me. So warm, I am melting.

  Jude

  UNDINES

  In prison there are guards who speak only as chisels. They say, “No,” or, “No!” or, “It’s too late for that,” or they say nothing. They won’t answer. I quickly see what this type of chiseling can do to a life. One prisoner, a woman from even farther north than me, once was

  a daughter named Edwina

  a son Desmond

  a false panel in the floorboards for hiding money a seamstress

  at night, a recurring dream of eating grass

  a visit, years ago, to Mexico

  certainty

  a leather sofa where she felt safe

  a new mortgage

  something her dead brother once told her

  But the guards go to work on any life deposited in this sedimentary manner. They chisel into your recollection and, even worse, your dreams at night. They chisel into your children. Their purpose is to strip away all other frequencies of reality. They chisel and separate the layers of prisoners’ lives so that all that is left is, “You work for me now. You do as I say.” That is the only reality for many of the women here, to please the guards, to please the law. But I arrived in convolutions, more igneous than sedimentary, that is, mixed up. There was no way for them to strip away my reality without killing me. It was twisted inside me like a fetus.

  Prison is impossible for me to imagine even sitting inside it. It is the poorest place on earth because control attempts to live here like a king. Control paves the yard outside. Control doles out violence and prescription drugs. Control poisons the tiny mice that sometimes run down the alleys between cells. The mice are the only beautiful things that still can live in prison. But control is fixing that problem.

  I’ve seen the ocean once since I’ve been here. It was on TV, in the background of a program filmed in Southern California starring a team of lifeguards. It curled. It advanced and retreated. It tried to kill three children but the lifeguards got in the way. I have never been so sad.

  The word prison shares a root with the word surprise, from the French prendre, pris—to take. I am not at all surprised by this. I think prison has taken Jude because I don’t feel him inside of me anymore. I think prison has taken him. That or else I lost him because I cry all the time here and it tastes like him. I have a Dixie Cup that I harvest my crying into so that later I can drink it, in case Jude is in there.

  Another prisoner here, a woman named Darlene, who is two years older than me and is being held in a cell next to mine for killing her husband, has asked me, “So what’s your defense?”

  “I don’t have one,” I tell her. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “But you need one,” she says. “Everybody here’s got one.”

  “I don’t,” I say and think, “Oh, great. Prison has taken my defense, too.” They take everything.

  My mother comes to visit me. We are allowed to sit at a table together, not touching. There is no glass partition the way there is in the movies or in men’s prisons, but still we are not allowed to touch each other.

  “Why did you call the police?” I ask her first, and she starts crying.

  “I was scared. I was so, so scared. You won’t ever know what being scared is like. Only mothers can really know.” She looks away as though she might even be angry at me if I don’t understand. “You ran out and then you didn’t come home.” She is still looking away and I am afraid she’ll leave me here. I ask her how long I have been here and she says, “Just three days now.” I can’t believe that. It feels like months.

  “I saw the ocean on TV,” I tell her.

  “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she says.

  “I know. I have to get out of here,” I say.

  “Well, what’s your defense?” she asks.

  I look up at her sharply. “I get that question a lot here.”

  “Well?” she says.

  I look away. “Um, I didn’t kill Jude,” I say. “That’s all I’ve got,” I say.
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  “Hmm.” She pulls her hair behind both her ears as if to hear better, as if hearing better will provide us with a greater choice of defense. “Hmm,” she says again, apparently because when she listened she didn’t hear anything.

  “I have an idea,” I say, and so she raises her eyebrows to listen. “You have to tell Dad that I’m here.”

  Her fingers clench, scratching the surface of the table. “Your father’s dead,” she says.

  “On dry land he is dead. On dry land.”

  “Well, on dry land is where you live,” she says.

  “I didn’t kill Jude,” I say again and then start to explain. “In the war, Jude,” I say and tell her the whole story. I even tell her about his letter and the torso made of ice.

  “He said that about the ice?” she asks when I’m done, and I nod yes. “That’s strange,” she says, and reaches her hand forward, in between us as though she can remember what it feels like to touch a torso made of ice. “There is a certain similarity between the two of them,” she says and then lowering her hand and looking away she says, “Maybe it is for the best that they are gone.”

  I don’t say anything.

  She shakes her head as though she is waking up. “Ugh. That’s the dreariest story I’ve ever heard,” she says. “That’s one thing I’ve never liked about Jude,” she says. “Dreary. I’m going to call a lawyer from the dry land,” she says. She watches me while she stands. She hugs the air in front of her and, closing her eyes, she pretends she is squeezing me in her arms. When she leaves I am returned to my cell, and there the door is locked in place by a secret mechanism that I can’t see.

  The cell block where I am kept is extremely loud. The noise seems to be a quality that is built into the architecture. I rest my ear against the cinder block wall and I can hear all frequencies of conversation, sleep talking, chatting, even the sound of humming.