Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  All around him the scavengers began to scatter, crawling over one another in their haste. Jonah, staring upward, found the night falling into the sea. He clambered over the scavengers, sliding on their slick shells, riding them until they bumped him off. Finally the darkness hit. A solid wave of sand roiled over him, blinding him, throwing him down, nearly burying him. Sounds too loud to hear reverberated through him. The sand kept coming, churned up, throwing him when he tried to stand. Something else sagged over him. Trying to flee the sandstorm, he tangled in it and fell. Struggling, he only drew it more tightly around him.

  A net, he realized finally, as cord pulled across his face. He was

  caught in a net along with some writhing, bellowing sea animal who

  was flailing on top of layers of crushed crab and monstrous plankton.

  He could see little in the gritty water, but he guessed from the sound and the fury that he was caught in a net with one of the great whales. He clung to the net to keep it from cutting into his face, and rode out the storm until the wild thrashing eased a little. Trying to grope his way out, he hit something sharp, hard, at his back. He felt along it, recognized it finally as a shard of squashed crab shell. He loosened it, and, bringing his arm up as far as he could in the tight embrace of the net, he began to saw himself free.

  By the time he finished, the whale only shook itself from time to time, thrashed a fluke, stirred up sand; he escaped while the sand wassettling. He had to stumble, half-blind, through cloudy water, tripping against busy crabs and decaying plankton, before he saw the tower again.

  He could make out details by then. The tower walls spiraled with grooves like a narwhal’s horn; a single window glowed, darkly translucent, over an open doorway. Tears stung his eyes at the sight of the open door. He caught them, put them in his pocket, as Dory had done. He sat down to rest a moment, gazing at it, hearing the mournful cries of the whale mingling with the mermaid’s song. Nothing moved between him and the tower except a strand or three of sea grass. The waste was empty, littered with broken shell. He rose, pulled onward, tide-drawn, driven, like a turtle to its island, a whale to its mating ground, a salmon to the river of its birth.

  By the time he reached the tower door, he barely knew what he was: a man swallowed by the sea, who had swallowed the sea. The light, sweet voice drew him up winding stairs inlaid with starfish; walking on them, he hardly knew if they were alive or dead. He had no idea, by this time, which he was, nor did he care, as long as he saw the dark glittering at the top of the stairs, and the long dark hair, and the pale, slender hands reaching out to take him to the peaceful place on the other side of mystery.

  He heard a muffled thud; water spiraling up the stairs pushed against him, jostled him up the last few steps. The door below had shut, he thought, and then reached out to cling to the doorposts at the end of the stairs as the water began to swirl. Or was it the tower revolving, as if it were caught in some vast whirlpool? It shook him loose, flung him across the little chamber at the top of the tower. He hung against the wall, his back to it, his eyes closed, unable to move in the force of the spin. He felt something dragged out of him by the roots, and a hollow where his heart had been.

  The song had stopped.

  “Jonah.”

  He looked into the center of the maelstrom, into the mermaid’s eyes.

  On the cliff, the merman disappeared.

  Then the cliff beneath Megan disappeared. The city below peeled away like wrapping paper; all the human language—mer-lion and goatfish—left the sea. Megan, losing track of her own shape as the water jerked her fourteen ways, pulled hair away from her eyes, looked frantically for Adam. He was beside her, in a streak of light. And then he was gone. And then there again, his eyes of water and light, his skin foam, sand, light. Around her the sea lilies curled into balls, and the giant kelp bowed to the wild currents.

  “What is it?” she cried. “What’s happening?”

  He didn’t answer. She felt an arm drawing her upward; the rest of him was barely a reflection in the water. A school of anchovy darted by, turned molten silver, flashed away the other direction. A kelp tore loose from its mooring, a swirl of leaves and yellow bladders that clung to Megan, laid rubbery leaves against her face. She pushed at it, found a cloud of bubbles where Adam’s face should have been.

  “Adam?”

  They broke the surface. He turned to foam then; spindrift shaped him in the wind, then fell back into the waves. She heard a sound as if the world was being sucked down a drain.

  She saw it then: the end of the world. It was a gigantic maelstrom, the eye of the sea, a vast, revolving hurricane of water that whirled around its own deep funnel. She made a noise on an indrawn breath that scraped her throat.

  “Adam!”

  He found his mouth finally. “It’s my sister.”

  “What do you mean, it’s your sister? That’s your sister?”

  He nodded. The sea around him turned green as his eyes; for a moment all she could see of him was his eyes, and the heave of green water. Then foam shaped his mouth again. “One of her faces.”

  She stared at it, horrified, fascinated. Then she heard the maelstrom’s singing, deep, wild, beautiful, and she felt her heart turn to ice. “Adam!” She tried to grip him, realized that her own hands were foam. She was drawn and shaped like light across the surface of the sea. Her mind remembered a body; the need, answered a moment later, found her fingers again, white as foam, but solid. “The same sister? Jonah’s singer?”

  He developed an ear and a profile; she had a disconcerting feeling that the other half of his face was missing. The profile nodded. Its mouth was set, unamused. “The sea queen. In your words.”

  Her voice vanished; somehow he heard her anyway. “Where is Jonah?”

  “With her, I would guess.”

  She stared at the edge of the world again. Gulls, bits of blown white paper, circled above, as if the deadly current were reflected in the wind. Cold tears of brine struck her face. “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t think that’s what she had in mind.”

  Her voice tore out of her then, shrieking. “Well, what did she have in mind?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  “Where?”

  “Down there,” he said simply. Kelp rope circled her wrist, tugged, and she scattered water and foam and seaweed hair. She felt the relentless tide of the maelstrom.

  Fish rode the maelstrom with them: tuna, whales, octopus. She saw the great white shark so close she looked for her reflection in its eye. It was cold, dead space, that eye, a piece of the abysmal sea. Schools of small fish, clouds of shrimp blew past them like leaves. Soft coral, starfish, sea urchins, an old boat hatch, a smiling figurehead, whatever wasn’t nailed down to the bottom of the sea spun in the current, dredged up to be sucked down again. She felt the current quicken as they grew closer to the funnel. An improbably long, graceful, pearly head followed by an interminable length of legs slid past her for some time: a shy giant harried out of the deepest waters.

  She heard her voice again, rising against the mermaid’s voice. “Why him? Why Jonah? He always had his face in a book or a cliff.”

  “He turned his back to the sea,” Adam answered, out of some configuration of light.

  “So? Why didn’t she take somebody off one of those floating factory ships that can take an entire whale apart and package it before lunch?”

  “Maybe she tried. Maybe they could never hear her singing.”

  Megan was silent. They were spinning near the edge of the funnel; she could see one part of its narrowing wall, things flashing through it too fast to recognize. She said, “I’m going to die.”

  “No.”

  “I can’t survive that.”

  “Give me your wrist,” he said, and wrapped a kelp-leaf hand around it. They skimmed the edge of the mermaid’s song. And then they dropped, whirling so fast down one long note that Megan could barely separate water from light, or her body from her terror, except fo
r the kelp wrapped around what she assumed was a piece of her.

  The world drained into a dark and silent sea.

  Megan, drifting, hit bottom and found her body again. She raised her head, stared through the murky waters. Something crawled here; something thrashed there; a dozen derelict ships bled swamp-gas colors into the water. She felt a touch, found herself eye to eye with a giant crab. Its shell was so thin she could see through it.

  She whispered, “Adam.” The crab veered nervously. There were people in the distance, naked, faceless, their skin glowing odd, sickly colors. They seemed to sense her, but, like the crab, shifted uneasily away from her attention, withdrew behind the oddly shaped mounds rising all around them. Something crawling near the top of one of the mounds near her lost its hold, came down in a wild slide of incongruous and familiar shapes. She watched, motionless, incredulous, as a Formica table with no legs careened to a halt against what looked like an enormous flattened bubble with a broken shell inside. She almost recognized it, decided not to. Coral skeletons, hard and bare, shimmered ghostly white in the eerie light; the stunted kelp, the few blades of sea grass alive in the deadly water, were colorless as the coral.

  Her throat constricted; she heard herself make a little whimpering noise of fear and bewilderment. “What is this place? What is this terrible place? Where did all the bright fish go? Where are all the colors?”

  Nothing answered her but the great thrashing shadow, a deep, tuneless mourning that sounded to her ears like the last voice left in the sea. Turning toward the only sound, she saw the tower beyond it, a delicate spiraling thing, luminous and perfect, all the beauty in the waste.

  She heard the mermaid’s song.

  She felt her eyes grow wide, aching and heavy with pearls. It was the pure voice of the nautilus shell, the sound of limpid water wandering from chamber to glistening chamber. It sang to Jonah, that voice, lovely, husky, haunted with storm and spindrift, but quiet now, the ebb tide, or the full tide idling a moment, at rest before it turned, dragging hard across the sand, flooding back into foam. It was singing to Jonah now, from within the tower, where he listened, in that private world, safe from the dark and ruined sea around him, safe from any human eyes.

  The pearls slid down her face at last; she felt the dark, lifeless waters seep into her heart, into her blood. She brushed the pearls away; more fell. Jonah was inside the narwhal’s horn, among the glinting lights inside the bottle. He had locked her out, left her stranded in a dead sea with only a dying whale to sing to her. She heard her own voice making human noises of grief and desolation. She couldn’t move except to brush at pearls, which drifted slowly to her feet. She would root herself there, she thought, become a skeleton of coral, because there was no path out of this waste; she would carry it in her heart wherever she went, on land or in sea, so it did not matter anymore what she did, where she went. . . .

  The whale stopped singing.

  The heartbeats of silence were so unexpected that she lifted her head, shaking away pearls, to stare at it. It moved again, finally, and made its ratcheting noise, but more weakly. She watched it shudder from fins to flukes, and then call again. There was no blood, that she could see, no reason for its agony. But something made it cry sorrow, or perhaps for help in that bleak water. She moved finally toward it, feeling that if it died of sorrow so would she; alone in this waste, she would dwindle into something pallid and stunted and unrecognizable. Around her, the crabs were feeding on what looked like enormous, decaying plankton. Some circled the whale. Its flukes, driving down hard, scattered them; so did Megan, moving among them on what felt like a layer of broken glass. They were shell fragments, she realized: the broken crabs the whale had crushed in its thrashing. And then she saw the net.

  One corner was torn; the rest was tangled securely around the whale, tightening as it struggled. The whale was huge and had teeth; that much she could make out in the dim sea. It raised clouds of sand as it struggled, but, as far as she could tell, not blood. She edged past its flukes, her hands sliding over broken shell. She nicked her finger on a piece, lifted her head sharply, still, as if her silence could hide what a drop of blood revealed of her presence in the water. But no mutant, glowing shark nosed her out. She tugged at the net; it might as well have been wrapped around a submarine. She picked among the shell fragments, found a razor-edged shard, and began to cut.

  The net, rotten with brine, parted easily. She walked along the whale’s side, slicing her hand sometimes, and the whale’s scarred back at other times, feeling its dull roaring vibrating through her bones. She still dropped pearls, but she didn’t notice them; instead of making the scratchy, reedy sound that had come out of her at first, she whispered, hardly hearing herself, “This can’t be real. Is it the future? Where will you go if I free you? Is there any sea left beyond this place? It’s so dark. So terrible. So dark. . . .”

  She climbed the net up to the whale’s back, to cut above its thrashing flippers. It heaved, feeling the net give; she lost her balance and fell, caught herself in the net. She worked her way back up, kept cutting, clinging to one side of the tearing net so that when the whale broke loose, she might be thrown free. It lay quietly for a few moments. It’s dead, she thought starkly. It finally ran out of air. And then it arched up, tearing at the net, a frenzy that made her lose everything—balance, shell—except her hold of the net. It tore further under her weight. She hung on, her face pushed against the whale’s side, not daring to fall so near its heavy, rolling body. And then she fell, down into a roil of collapsing net.

  There was something softer than crab shell under her. She opened her eyes and found Adam, head and flukes still caught in the net, his face pearl white, his skin grazed by her shell. He opened his eyes. She stared at him, pearls falling silently down her face. He lifted his hand to catch one. And then, as his arms slid gently around her, and she eased against him, she knew that she had lost her heart to the sea.

  Jonah stood inside the mermaid’s song.

  It was wild and bitter and desolate, a song without words, of spindrift whipped from heaving water washed with colors not even Megan would use; of the cries of battered seals, wind-battered birds screaming over great schools of fish, blind and still, sliding like leaves across the surface of the storm; of the voices of whales and porpoises as they fled the relentless stalking shadows above them that tracked their every move. Brine lashed his eyes, his mouth; kelp torn from the sea bottom tangled around his hands; barnacles and starfish struck him, clung. An empty moon shell, tumbled through the water, caught painfully over his ear; even in its pale, lovely hollows he heard the mermaid’s storm.

  He had no idea where he was; now and then he glimpsed, behind a wash of green and foam, the tower’s white wall curving around him, and knew he still stood in the mermaid’s eye. And then the sea would change around him, so that he saw it from the fierce and hungry gull’s eye, as it swooped over the sickly waters, or he would be tossed among the frantic whales, buffeted by their voices. Every fish he saw, dead and alive, seemed to have the mermaid’s eyes.

  He began to hear her speak, perhaps out of the moon shell, or perhaps she stood in front of him, in the tower, while the storm raged through his head.

  “You saw what had killed me. You could have buried it before it killed again.”

  A sea turtle slowly sank through the turbulent waters, a plastic bag twisted around its head. He could not see its eyes, but he knew they would be hers. He whispered to it, “I’m sorry.”

  “You saw what mangled me.”

  The manatee, with its torn flippers, pushed by every wild current, struggled for balance with its tail. He saw the crosshatched scars of propeller blades on its back. It looked at him as it passed, not with the patient, wistful gaze he remembered, but with the sea’s icy foam-washed green.

  “I’m sorry.” His hands were clasped in front of him, bound with kelp; he bowed his head, a prisoner of the storm, the moon shell still caught against one ear. A barnacle clung to one l
ens in his glasses; he dared not lift a finger to move it.

  “You gave the manatee a human face for centuries, and yet when you finally see its true face, you have no pity for it.”

  “It was your face we gave it,” he whispered, remembering her from another life.

  She answered sharply, “Its face is my face. And this was my song.”

  He heard the whale again, crying for help as it struggled in the net. His head sank; the sound reverberated through the moon shell. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. All I thought—all I heard—you put such beauty in front of me, you told me to find you; you were all I could see.”

  “Yes! All!” He glimpsed a curve of wall behind a wave, and then a dark glittering whirling away from him. He watched it numbly until it changed into a fish’s receding tail. “The dead coral, the crabs with their shells grown thin and fragile in those waters, the poisoned grasses and kelp, the jellyfish that died because you kill everything you touch—I am all that you see here, and I am that dark and barren sea.”

  “Yes.” He cleared his throat, found his voice again. “I’m sorry. It was—I didn’t recognize you.”

  “No. Nor did you recognize yourself reflected in the waste.”

  “How could I? I wasn’t looking for myself. I was only looking for you.” He saw her face briefly then, foam white and wild, and beautiful as the secret, inward turnings of a shell. The image turned to foam and swirled away. “Your singing was so beautiful,” he said helplessly. “It made me blind, it made me stupid. You made me hunger for you, and told me how to reach you. How could I have stopped to listen to any other song? I’m no different from all the ancient sailors who flung themselves into the sea, following your song, and drowned. I didn’t drown, and I did find you, but I didn’t know that I was never what you wanted.”