Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He spoke her name; a pearl dropped out of his mouth into his hand. He touched her then, took her hand, smiling gently. He laid the pearl on her palm and closed her fingers over it. Light or sea ran between them; when she blinked he was gone.

  The Ancient Mariner was crowded when Jonah walked into it on Friday. The musicians were still setting up. Whoops and crackles and other underwater noises came out of the sound system. In the dim light, faces looked unfamiliar, oddly shadowed. No one had the long dark hair he remembered. He went to the bar, ordered beer. He didn’t recognize the bartender.

  “Where’s Sharon?”

  The bartender, a slender, bearded young man with a shell in his ear, gave him a cheerful smile, but seemed not to hear his question. Jonah swallowed beer, feeling light-headed, edgy. He looked around more carefully. Faces crowded into the shadows, talking, laughing. She would not be laughing, he thought. Her face would be calm, mysterious as the moon, until she sang. But he did not see her.

  He finished the beer quickly; the bronze fixtures along the bar gleamed with a mellower light. The bartender passed him another. A familiar gravelly voice caught his ear; he ducked behind his bottle, upending it.

  He found someone at his elbow; he thought he recognized her, and then didn’t. There were a number of strangers, friends of the band probably, from other little towns along the coast. Here and there, at the candlelit tables, was the well-dressed tourist, wearing a skirt, heels, a tie. The band had changed; instead of being Hell-bent they were the Undertow. There seemed a lot of them, as they moved around the stage, and they all seemed to look alike. Jonah, finishing his second beer, decided that was a trick of the lighting.

  Dory jostled along the bar, moored herself beside him. “So you’ve come,” she said.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’ll be here.” She sipped her briny drink and surveyed herself in the bar mirror. She touched her wild hair approvingly, widened a crepey gray eye, then settled into her normal expression of mingled crankiness and amusement. “She’s looking for Adam.”

  “Last I saw,” he said sourly, “he was feeding my blood to the sharks.”

  She chuckled. “He has his ways.” She touched her glass rim, licked salt off her finger. “He’ll be back.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “He went looking for something, he said, along the tide line. Something he said you gave him.”

  “I didn’t give him anything,” Jonah said shortly, raising his empty bottle at the bartender.

  “You gave him something. You must have. You wouldn’t be here for free.”

  “Oh.” He ran a hand over his face, felt the stubble on it with surprise. He caught a glimpse of his own face in the mirror. It seemed ghostly, unfamiliar, the hair too long and fiery, the face gaunt, chalky. Can’t be mine, he thought. Dory was gazing at the face, too, curiously.

  “What did you give him?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Whatever he wanted.” He turned restively toward the stage. Lights flickered; something else flowed, glittered, just within the door beside the stage. He watched it, thoughtless, entranced. Dory’s voice jarred him again.

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “What?”

  “What you gave him?” He looked at her, wondering what she was talking about. She gave her rumbling, bitter chuckle. “What do you think he wanted from you? A fossil? A pair of earrings?”

  He turned impatiently, seeking the glittering shadow. “What does it matter? What in my life is worth anything to me anymore? Is that her? Is that her in the doorway?” He felt her: the undertow in his thoughts, in his blood. He didn’t hear Dory’s answer.

  He didn’t see anyone as he crossed the room, only the fine, star-shot shadow, shifting between dark green and black. The musicians, tuning, taping cable down, ignored him. He reached the door, stepped into the dark and heard the hollow, crashing boom of the tide.

  Cool, briny wind blew through the passage; an invisible breaker, flooding the shadows, flicked seawater on his lips. The narrow strip of light from the open door slanted across a still, pale face, a single pearl in an earlobe, dark hair falling over a dark fall of glittering fabric spilling open above a foam-white breast.

  He heard his heart pound. He made some noise, some movement; she lifted a hand, long and pale and as delicately jointed as coral.

  “Not yet.” Her voice, light, murmuring, was barely audible above the invisible tide. The hand moved out of the light; he felt it, touching his mouth. He lifted his hands to catch it, his lips parting as her finger traced them. Her hand slipped through his like water; in the light, he saw her eyes smile, an alien, luminous smile.

  He swallowed, his throat parched, lips burning, as if he had drunk seawater. “I don’t know your name,” he whispered.

  “My name is Nereis.” A secret wave gathered and broke; she swayed a little as if it swirled around her; the glittering, tide tugged, parted between her breasts. He didn’t know he had lifted his own hand until he saw it in the light; his fingertips barely grazed cloth before she caught them.

  “When?” he demanded, and didn’t recognize his voice. “You call me and I try to find you, and you vanish, and now I’ve found you, you can touch me, but I can’t touch you—” He felt her tongue slide between his clenched fingers, and his voice broke. He stumbled forward, brought himself up against the blank wall.

  “Jonah.” She spoke from where he had stood near the open door, her face in shadow now. “I am very old. Older than the little fossils you pick out of cliffs. Older than the cliffs themselves. And I am very dangerous.”

  He swallowed again, gazing at her, pushed against the wall as if by some churning onslaught of water. The water loosed him finally, pulled him off balance, a step toward her. He couldn’t see her face, but he saw, where her hair was swept back, the pearl a shade paler than her earlobe, that would be small and hard and silken against his tongue. He closed his eyes against it, pleaded, “Why? Why did you come to me in that cave?”

  “Because you heard my voice. I sang to you and you stood in the ancient seas and listened.” He felt her fingers again, light and quick, a touch of spindrift against his chest, and then the tide rising, flowing around his thighs, idling a moment, soundless and full, before its strong, churning pull away from his body. “You listened,” she said again, as he opened his mouth, drew breath, sagging against the wall. “And you love the forgotten sea. Jonah.”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Do you want me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you must find me.”

  He opened his eyes again. “I have found you.”

  “In your world,” she said, “but you must find me in mine. I cannot stay long on land. I am too ancient, too tide-drawn. You must come to me. If you want me.”

  “I want you,” he whispered, swaying in the invisible tide. “I want you at the oldest place under the sea. The place where fossils and time began. But how can I live under the sea? I’ll drown, loving you. All through history, people have drowned, loving you.” The tide, playing around him, ebbed slowly, pulling him into its long, powerful embrace; he fell to his knees at her feet. He gazed up at her, saw her face in shadow, and then in light as she bent suddenly. Her fingers tangled in his hair; she drew his head back, kissed his open mouth, and he felt her breath flowing into him like tide, full, relentless, endless, until he heard his own blood sing with her voice. Then the tide turned; he felt it drawing back around his face, his groping hands. It dropped him, receded into shadow, into silence. He lay stranded, beached on the floorboards, swallowing the pearl she had left in his mouth.

  Memory burned his lips as he rose; he gripped the door a moment, blind. He made his way out as unobtrusively as possible, clinging to the shadows, looking at no one, until he found the bar and leaned on it. He lifted his eyes then, saw the room behind him in the mirror.

  He stared at it senselessly. It was made of pearl, of glass, of light. Moonshells crawled across t
he floor; bubbles drifted, popped, spoke words. He turned abruptly. On a stage of crystal, the musicians played strands of light. Fish darted in and out of the strands. The musicians’ hair drifted, full of colored snails, brilliant, rippling ribbons of sea slugs. Their faces were so translucent he could almost see the fine bones beneath the skin, as if they were related to the strange, luminous fish in the deep of the sea. Pearls floated from their mouths as they sang, clustered on the rocky ceiling above their heads. The listeners, with hair and beards of sea moss, foam, the gold secretions of pen shells, lifted hands drawn long and fine by endless currents, and sipped from mussel shells as blue-black as their eyes.

  “What?” Jonah whispered; a bubble escaped him, joined the pearls along the cave roof. He felt a touch and whirled. Starfish clung to the bar; a fish swam under his nose. He felt his knees give, and clung to the bar, feeling sea life stir under his grip. Something rippled between his hands, a solitary, shell-less wanderer. He remembered it swimming in and out of Megan’s hair: the little sea hare in her drawing.

  He inhaled a great breath of water as easily as air. “Megan.” Her name choked him, turned his chest to fire. Adam, polishing an abalone shell behind the bar, smiled.

  “Welcome,” he said softly, “to the belly of the whale.”

  FIVE

  Jonah had vanished.

  Megan, white-faced and stunned, searched the town for him; no one had seen him. She went to the Ancient Mariner; no band, she was told, had played there recently. She tracked Hell-bent down in a nearby town: they had never, she was told, had a female singer. No bodies clutching fossils had been dragged to shore by the tide. He was in love with someone; he had run away. That was obvious, she told herself, as she stared, numb and mute with shock, at the blank wall of his absence. Still she looked for some hint of where he had gone, some aberration of his life among his socks, something peculiar among his rocks, a message between the lines of the Compend he had left lying open on his stool in the shop. And even while she searched the obvious, the impossible fact of where he had gone lay stark and clear as the moon in the dark of her mind.

  He had fallen in love with a mermaid and had gone to live in the sea.

  He had, it seemed, taken all the mystery in the world along with him. She could find neither Adam Fin nor Dory. Even Mike had forgotten how to talk. When she asked about the Otherworld, the Land Beneath the Waves, he only grunted, his eyes on his book, and pointed a finger at the shelves. She spent days sketching, hoping that her pen would reveal some message of him, but the sea told her nothing; her sketches remained stubbornly unmysterious.

  So she changed them, sitting for long hours on the sand, drawing feverishly, desperately. She drew roads of light leading to palaces of cloud and glass rising into the morning mists. She drew underwater creatures: angelfish with legs and rippling wings and narrow, delicate fish faces; butterflyfish that flew in great clouds of color above the water; goatfish with slitted yellow eyes and slender, hooved legs that galloped along the sea floor, herded by the damselfish and her dogfish. She drew a seal with Adam’s face; she drew his body with a seal’s face. She drew Jonah, with his long red floating hair and his glasses, and a scaly mer-tail, sitting at the bottom of the sea on a giant clam, reading. She was crying long before she finished it; the lines of his body were starred with tears of sorrow that he had gone, tears of fury that he had left her for another woman, tears of helplessness because the sea showed her only its flat blank face and would not speak to her.

  She left Jenny to run the shop, except at lunchtime. Jenny, worried over Megan’s hollowed, white face, said, “He’d never have just left you, the store, everything. You should call the police.”

  “He left me,” Megan said crossly, “for another woman.”

  “What other woman? You know all the women he knows. You are so close; why would he have left you for someone else?”

  Megan, practicing at the register, which she loathed, banged the drawer shut. “Well, he did. Maybe he’ll be back, maybe not. I’ll just have to keep the store open until we run out of things to sell. Jonah handled all that.”

  “He’ll be back,” Jenny said, with her exasperating optimism. People, Megan decided dourly, existed in different worlds at the same time: the people who inhabited Jenny’s world never ventured farther out to sea than the surf for a little fishing, and if they were lured out of that world into someone else’s less predictable world, they probably did come back. “Anyway, he’d never have left his fossils.”

  Megan’s mouth tightened; a tear fell, in spite of her, among the register keys. He vanished, she thought, into a drop of water. Into light. And Adam Fin knows where he is. And Dory knows. But they won’t tell me. And I don’t know why they took him. She said, punching keys, “He told me he was obsessed by another woman. Some singer. He said it didn’t have anything to do with me. How he figured that, I don’t know.”

  “Who is she?” Jenny asked, startled. “Where does she live?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.”

  “Well,” Jenny said practically after a moment, “he has all his money tied up in the store. He has to come back and deal with it. Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.” She folded her arms against the register, dropped her face against them. The register made a noise; the drawer sprang open against her ribs. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  She walked on the beach later in the dark, dry-eyed, pleading silently for a hook to fly out of nowhere and catch her by the hair. Or for Adam Fin to appear in her path. Maybe he would have taken me where Jonah is, she thought wearily, if I had wanted him. But I didn’t want a mystery. I just want Jonah back, leaving rocks all over the place, and cooking for me, and criticizing my work. I want his bony body and his cobalt eyes behind his glasses, and his mouth nibbling the earrings out of my ears if I forget to take them off. She tripped over something and kicked it irritably into the surf. What could they want with him, anyway? He’s crotchety, he sits around reading all the time, he complains about everything, and he hates meeting people. But he loves me, and he feels like smooth wood in my hands. And he loves my art, and he loves the sea.

  Too much, apparently, she thought, and felt the sting of salt behind her eyes. What if he doesn’t want to come back?

  She sent another bit of something in her way flying into the waves, touched her glasses back up her nose, her eyes wide. He’s human, she thought, not fish. Not whatever they are. He can’t live in their world.

  Seven years, the tales said. Seven years, and even then, some mortals did not want to return to the real world.

  So, she thought, dry-eyed again, her hair wild in the wind, whipping across her mouth. I’ll find him and ask him. I’ll know, then. I’ll know. But how?

  She stopped, staring out at the vast, restless dark. If I find Adam, she thought, maybe we can bargain. If he wants me. But I don’t think that’s what he wants. I don’t think that’s what he wants at all. But maybe, when I see him, he’ll tell me what he wants for Jonah. Or what she wants.

  She.

  A face sketched itself in Megan’s mind: a model’s face, with wide-set, sea-green eyes, hair black as the sea on a moonless night, cheekbones that could cut. She shivered. She wrapped her arms around herself, felt the hollows between her ribs.

  Or me. With my hands colored with washes, my glasses sliding down my nose, my big feet. I can’t sing a note to save my life. Even if I do find him, will he want to come back? But if I don’t find him, I’ll never know. So I’ll find him.

  But how? The waves took up her question, curled it under them, withdrew on long sighs of how? She stood a long time listening, but they never answered.

  Jonah sat against the figurehead of an ancient wreck. Her hair was

  green with moss, her smile was sweet, distant, the only thing visible in a blind, green face. He leaned his head between her breasts, his back against her fishy waist. She was the only mermaid he had seen down here; he found her smile wry and oddly comforti
ng.

  The wreck lay on a shelf of rock that plunged into shadow. Or it lay in a room so vast the ship seemed simply a piece of décor: a graceful pile of worm-eaten wood, out of which a skeletal hand waved now and then. If he looked for it, he saw the structure of the room, great walls of pearl and watery light, windows of thin sheets of mother-of-pearl through which water moved like air. If he looked hard, he saw the people in the room, glints of light forming faces, shimmering garments. They took more human form to look at him, as if he were some kind of mirror; even then their faces, like living fossils, were disturbing. They were immortal, and as old as water; they could resemble what they wanted. They could wear periwinkles for eyes on a kelp-leaf face. When they took human faces, their beauty could be inhuman.

  So far, only Adam had spoken to him. Others brought him things to eat and drink; what, exactly, he refused to guess. Everything tasted strange, briny, wet; he might have been eating jellyfish or sea slugs, for all he knew. Eating was one of the two preoccupations in the sea. If he looked straight into it, huddling close to the figurehead, he saw the lovely anemones turn into mouths surrounded by fingers with which they stung and guided their food. He watched starfish cling to clams, force them open little by little, suck out the helpless inhabitants from their homes. He saw the sea cucumber extend a sticky finger to dredge plankton from the sea floor; the great-eyed, luminous dragonfish jut out its spiky lower jaw to pin and take in prey larger than itself. He watched the squid rise up from the deep waters below the cliff, pass silently as a nightmare on its way to graze the warmer, livelier upper regions. He watched the sperm whale dive past him as silently to search for the leviathan that never showed itself above the dark; he watched sharks eat the whale, leaving him in a cloud of blood that he could taste. Nothing scented him, though; he left no more trace of himself in the water than if he had been a dream.

  Sometimes he would find the entire sea mating around him. Then some undulation of a great fish’s tail would bring him a memory of the curved, darkly glittering mass in the shadows of the cave. He would grow blind and deaf as the figurehead with desire, and find, when the urgency around him faded, only Adam’s mocking face.