“Where is he?” she finally asks.
It takes me a moment to answer because I don’t really know. And in that moment her bottom lip starts to shiver.
“I think he went back to the ocean.”
She nods her head and looks down.
“Do you want to go see?” I ask. “Maybe—” But I am nervous to finish my sentence, to say, maybe he’s there. Her lips tremble so much she begins to cry. She doesn’t answer me but turns our car away from our house. She points us towards the sea.
“What about you then? Are you going there too?” She wipes her tears on her sleeve and shoulder.
I don’t have an answer to that yet.
“Maybe it’s time for both of us to go,” she says. I don’t think she means to New York.
The sun is just coming up and it is turning the sky a beautiful shade of blue. She keeps driving straight down to the ocean. We park and as I climb from the car all the small, dry, yellow flowers that grow like trash by the side of the sandy road touch my ankles. My mother and I walk through the flowers down to the ocean. When we see the sea I jump. I am so happy, because I think, “Jude, there you are.” My mother cocks her head sideways, as though she wants to be happy but forgot how, and is only just now getting some vague recollection of what that felt like.
My mother and I reach the edge of the water and hesitate to shed our clothes for just a moment. We walk towards the water and we continue walking, right into the water. After a short while, we don’t have to walk anymore. The water is quite cold but it feels like a deep breath.
“Woo! That’s cold,” she says and splashes the tears off her face with a handful of seawater. “Look out,” she tells me, and smiles because a wave is building in front of us. The water is filled with words. This wave is
smelly–adj. having or giving off a foul odor
like the sea. We dive under it and the words rumble over our heads. When we surface my mother has caught giving in her hair.
“I didn’t know you could break definitions,” she screams to me but I don’t answer. Another wave is coming.
wait–vt. 1. to stay in one place or remain inactive 2. to remain temporarily undone or neglected 3. to serve food
We dive clear. We don’t want any of that wave. “Of course you can,” I say, and demonstrate as a small wave of hysteria passes.
hysteria–n. Gr. hyster, the uterus 1. a psychiatric condition, anxiety, fits of laughing, crying, simulation of organic disorders such as deafness or blindness
Floating over the wave I pick out laughing and throw it at her. “See,” I say and this does make her laugh.
“How do you do it?” she asks me.
“I think it’s like chemistry. Like the letters are atoms, the words are molecules, and the sentences are elements. You just choose what scale you want to see the world.”
“I get it.” She says. We begin to jump up and down as the next wave grows in front of us. It is large, growing larger as we watch. We swim directly through it.
lady–n. from hlaf: loaf, and -dige from (bread) kneader 1. a woman loved by a man 2. a woman who has rights 3. a title
“Woo!” she shouts. In her hands she has grabbed rights and loved and loaf. She turns to show me the possibilities the definers never thought of. “Ha,” she says, and her eyes widen to read something. “Look around your neck,” she says.
I touch the word. It’s a title.
“Is that what you want?” she asks.
I suppose so. I have been looking for a title. I hold onto the word.
We float on our backs, every choice, every word, every possibility is drifting somewhere nearby us. Somewhere nearby is Jude. Somewhere nearby is my father. Somewhere nearby are all the words the town will say about me. Sad. Stupid. Suicide. In time, my mother might get cold or tired. She might even go home, but for now we are happy right here. We let the waves roll beneath us and forget the dry land and forget the idea of ever going back because the water is
blue–n. Fr. bleu 1. having the color of the clear sky or the deep sea 2. melancholy 3. puritanical 4. obscene 5. faithful 6. said of women, especially those with literary inclinations
If one word can mean so many things at the same time then I don’t see why I can’t.
“Are you going to stay here?” she asks me again. But I still don’t have an answer. Instead I tell her, “In the Arctic there’s a string anchored to the bottom of the sea at 13,681 feet. Along the string scientists have attached their instruments: sonar to measure ice caps’ thicknesses, vanes to measure current, a conductivity-temperature-depth recorder, and a fluxgate compass since regular compasses don’t work so near to the magnetic pole.” And then I ask her, “How do I know this if I’m not a mermaid, if I don’t belong in the ocean?”
“Maybe you’re a scientist.”
“Maybe I’m both.”
“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe you’re just good at making things up.”
“Maybe.”
The polar explorer’s shipwrecked men waited and waited for weeks, existing on ice and little else. They had sent their beloved leader off on a rescue mission, but the horizon remained unbroken and some men had secretly given him up for lost. By noon some men felt a surrender set in, a surrender that oddly felt a bit like joy. One man removed his boots so he could feel the packed snow between his toes. One man built a castle of ice and spent the day imagining it was real. One man secretly dragged a knife blade across his arm to make certain he was still alive. He was. Which is how he saw the ship. The steady line between sea and sky had been unbroken for days, days that had begun to pile up and wilt. “I must be getting snow blind,” the man thought and turned his back away from the horizon. But something had lodged in his vision, the blue afterimage of a ship, a rescue ship. He turned back to the sea that he had, just moments before, considered walking into. He turned back to the sea and saw the tiny ship getting larger.
That is how I feel, only there’s no ship, just the sea to rescue me.
Thank you PJ Mark, Masie Cochran, Maggie Nelson, Joe Hagan, Diane Hunt, Pat Walsh, and David Poindexter. The Story of Dangerose comes from Joseph T. Shipley’s Dictionary of Word Origins.
SAMANTHA HUNT’s debut novel, The Seas, won a National Book Foundation award for writers under thirty-five. She is also the author of The Dark, Dark: Stories, Mr. Splitfoot, and The Invention of Everything Else. Hunt’s writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, McSweeney’s, A Public Space, Tin House, and Cabinet, among others. In 2017, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. She currently teaches at Pratt Institute.
MAGGIE NELSON is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award-winner The Argonauts. In 2016, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She is currently on the faculty of USC and lives in Los Angeles.
PRAISE FOR The Seas
“An aqueous affair, flooded with water themes. It’s the kind of novel in which King Neptune and several mermaids put in appearances, and which leaves no metaphor unrealized—the woman falls on some scattered movable type and is bruised by words. In other hands, this might all feel distinctly soggy, but Hunt’s writing is free of affectation and carries surprising conviction.”
—THE NEW YORKER
“Urgently real and magically unreal . . . A breathy, wonderful holler of a novel, deeply lodged in the ocean’s merciless blue . . . [Hunt] sinks an anchor into the soul of its lost young protagonist.”
—THE VILLAGE VOICE
“To describe Samantha Hunt’s entrancing first novel, The Seas, is to try to interpret a watery dream that pushes the boundaries between fiction and fantasy. . . . Hunt’s nimbleness makes the idea of leaning toward mermaid fantasies enticing.”
—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“Samantha Hunt! Yes. She’s completely original, one of the most distinctive and unforgettable voices I’ve read in years. This book will linger, like something wet and smelly from the sea, in your head for a good long time.
Unlike something wet and smelly, you will like the lingering of this thing.”
—DAVE EGGERS
Copyright © 2004 Samantha Hunt. First published by MacAdam/Cage; Tin House edition ©2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Hunt, Samantha, author.
Title: The seas : a novel / by Samantha Hunt.
Description: Cage Tin House edition. | Portland, OR : Tin House Books, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018003452 | ISBN 9781941040959 (paperback) | ISBN 9781941040966 (ebook)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Love stories. | Sea stories.
Classification: LCC PS3608.U585 S43 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003452
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