by John Morano
“Since have no gold, why not give Bao labor? Could do that. Bao old and weak. Boy young and strong.”
“It is something I could do, but without food or shelter, how much labor could I provide?” Now it was Kemar’s turn to work Bao.
“If Bao not let boy drown in ocean, would not let boy starve on land. Will provide for you as long as you provide for Bao.”
Kemar nodded. “I will give back, but when will my debt be paid?”
Bao shrugged. “Talk tomorrow.”
With that, Bao threw Kemar the canteen, a crust of bread, a piece of fruit, and a fish from a green bucket. The fish looked more like bait than dinner, but Kemar had eaten much worse before. Then Bao and the boy pulled the boat onto the shore. Together, they flipped it over on the sand.
Kemar asked, “Do you mind if I sleep here under the boat?”
Bao smiled, pleased that he had someone to watch over his property. “Feel free. See boy in morning.”
Kemar propped up the bow with a weathered log and crawled under the boat. Salt water dripped from the sides. The boy smiled to himself—once a boat person, always a boat person. And before he could think another thought, he was in a deep sleep.
Perhaps it was the trickle of water slowly stroking his thin forearm or the sound of the surf sliding across the sand, but while he slept, Kemar dreamed of the sea. He found himself swimming and breathing like a fish, moving through a reef he’d never seen, not realizing that he’d arrived at the other Makoona, the one beneath the surface of the sea.
In his dream, the fish he encountered didn’t flee from him, nor did they attack him. Instead, they greeted the human as though he were a citizen of the reef. Kemar was searching for something, something that he might find in the coral of Makoona. Whatever he found would be the key to the rest of his life, or so his dream led him to believe.
Off on the seaward side of the reef, Kemar spotted a familiar face, someone he’d hoped he’d meet again one day. Son Ba was walking toward him. She grinned, stepping carefully over and around the corals that grew and bloomed everywhere. Although he couldn’t see her clearly, she dredged up little puffs of sediment that caught the moonlight and fell sparkling back to the ocean floor.
Son Ba seemed to be waving him over. She apparently knew that this fish was actually Kemar. Excited to see Son Ba, Kemar swam to her. But as he got closer and saw her more clearly, Kemar hesitated. He became frightened.
Getting closer, he could see that Son Ba wasn’t actually waving at him. She was reaching out to him. She stood in a decimated coral clearing, where the man-tide had dragged nets or dropped scare lines. The colors were faded. The stalks were broken. The corals were bleached. The fish were gone. Son Ba was the only living thing on the barren reef.
On her head, however, she had hair like a Medusa, but in this case, the undulating snakes were replaced with the coiling arms of an octopus. The creature’s eight arms reached out of Son Ba’s head, swaying back and forth like soft coral in a current. And even though he was frightened, Kemar felt compelled to reach out and accept Son Ba’s extended hand.
When he touched her palm with his fingers, she clasped them firmly with both her hands. An octopus arm extended itself from behind Son Ba’s ear. The bright orange limb stretched and wrapped itself around their hands, tightening like a constrictor.
Son Ba leaned over, kissed Kemar’s cheek, and whispered into his ear, “Come with me.”
Kemar shook his head no. “Come with me!” he heard again.
Light struck his eyes. Kemar woke. Bao stood over him, tipping the boat up.
“Come with me,” the fisherman said again. “Time to make money!”
They dragged the boat back to the surf and loaded it up with gear, and while Kemar ate an extremely modest breakfast, Bao gently placed some wooden boxes in a bin near the stern, where he hoped they wouldn’t bounce around too much. The boy took no notice. His thoughts were still swimming in the coral Makoona. He wondered what the dream meant and what Son Ba was about to tell him.
Once again, Kemar was stirred from his thoughts by Bao, who instructed the boy to drop anchor. Neither realized, nor did they care to realize, that when the heavy metal anchor struck bottom, it would crush and destroy a small patch of living coral that had taken tens of thousands of years to form. This destruction, however, would pale when Bao revealed how they were going to fish that day.
Anchored securely, the boat barely bounced on the diminutive swells that tickled the hull. Bao was pleased.
“Won’t it be difficult to net fish if we’re anchored?” Kemar asked.
“Not use nets today.”
A pair of terns began hovering over the boat, anticipating free meals of bait and throw-backs. They were joined by several other birds. Bao didn’t welcome the visitors, knowing that other fishermen always took note of where the birds gathered. He preferred that no one notice where he was or what he was doing.
“Well,” the boy probed, “if we’re not netting, how do you expect to catch anything? Are they supposed to just jump into the boat?”
“Are other, easier, more money ways to fish.” Bao opened a ragged umbrella and handed it to Kemar.
The boy was about to point out that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky until Bao raised his index finger to silence him. The older man reached into the weathered wooden crate near the ancient outboard motor and pulled out a vintage American hand grenade. Kemar had seen them before.
Bao bounced the sphere in hand once or twice, grasped it firmly, and scanned the area. Then he pulled the pin, tossed it overboard, reached out, took the umbrella from the boy, and sat down. Kemar fell to the deck and covered himself.
BOOM! The sea exploded with the same sound Kemar had heard while he stood on his cooler, up to his ears in ocean. Water erupted, fizzed, and fell from above as if they were under attack from Thai pirates. The boat rocked. The birds scattered.
“Ha haaaa,” Bao laughed, clutching his dripping umbrella. “Now get fish.”
Kemar responded like a Labrador retriever. He jumped over the side and began bringing a variety of fish back to the boat. They all rose to the surface, dazed or dead. And then Kemar came across an angelfish that was conscious but floating sideways on the surface.
“Grab fish!” Bao screamed. “Quick, before get away.”
Kemar scooped it up and swam back to the boat. “Why would you want this?” he asked. “We’ve got much better eating fish, and we don’t need this for bait since we’re not using any.”
Bao said quietly, “Understand part of payment from Bao is knowledge. Already show you better way to fish. Now tell you something useful. Is man on Makoona who buy fish from Bao.” He pointed to the stunned angelfish.
“But why?”
“Sell to another man from Philippines, who sell to someone from America or Europe or place people pay lot of money to have swim in tanks in homes.”
“Why?”
“As possession.”
“These fish are colorful, but don’t they have colorful fish in America or Europe?”
Disgusted, Bao said, “Have no time with such question. But always have time take fool’s money. Another lesson for boy. Someone has money to give, you take and not so many question. Otherwise, money go away.”
Kemar nodded. He understood the logic.
“Gather all fish. Small one too. Keep alive and sell as well.”
The boy did as he was told while Bao prepared another blast. Kemar didn’t like the explosives. They seemed out of place on the reef, but more than that, the grenades reminded him of something he was trying to forget.
Chapter Three
An Octopus’s Garden
Binti had worked her way to the outer reaches of the reef, where she busily consumed crustaceans for her morning meal. She would’ve preferred to crawl into her den and nurse her wounds, safe from predators, but wounded or not, the octopus had to eat.
A spider crab had just slipped into a crease between two rocks, thinking that Bint
i wouldn’t see him. The octopus didn’t need to see him. She could feel him, sense him. Binti approached the rock carefully. She shrouded the entrance with her body and felt that the crab was sliding deeper into the crevice.
As the crab hunkered down, Binti cloaked herself in a dusty gray-blue, with bolts of green streaking her body. She’d become the reef. She was imperceptible—not from the crab, who was well aware of the octopus, but from anything else that might take notice of her activity.
Binti slid one of her remaining seven arms around the rear of the rocks and felt for another opening. When she found one, she worked her boneless arm into the crack. Then she reached a second arm around and felt for another opening. When she found it, she wedged her arm into the hole. She used a third arm to search for additional escape routes and found none.
Binti pushed the two arms that were already in cracks deeper into the rock. The crab panicked and rushed out the main entrance, where the octopus waited for her meal, which she quickly engulfed, paralyzed, and carried off to eat.
Reclining under the hull of a coral- and barnacle-encrusted lifeboat, Binti dined. She gave thanks to the spirit-fish for all her blessings; for her escape from the moray eel and for the bounty and beauty of Makoona. The world always seemed better to Binti when she had a crab to eat. It was her favorite food. She could eat it every day, every meal, and be totally happy. It fact, that’s almost what she did.
But Binti also understood that she had just ended another creature’s life in order to continue her own existence. It was a truth that the octopus took no joy in. Surely that crab was also a child of the spirit-fish. It, too, loved and lived Makoona. Binti considered Ebb, the farmer who ate algae, and wondered why she hadn’t been created to live that life instead.
The octopus also pondered how she knew so many hunting and survival skills. She’d never known her mother or father, so how did Binti and other octopuses learn their social and survival skills? Retracing her brief life, Binti concluded that she’d somehow remembered the skills. They’d come to her as memories. But how, she wondered, could she remember something that she hadn’t previously known?
And then Binti made another realization. For her, instinct and memory were related. What other fish might call instincts were actually memories passed on to her from her ancestors. Their collected truths seemed to live somewhere inside the cephalopod. Had her ancestors given her their knowledge, or was it more than that? Were they actually talking to her, she wondered.
Since she could certainly remember survival skills, Binti believed that if she tried hard enough, she could possibly remember aspects of her forerunners’ day-to-day lives. She hoped that these memories might also be stored in some corner of her massive mantle, waiting to be tapped. The octopus had no idea how to call them up but believed if she could access these thoughts of the past, truths would be revealed.
Binti concluded that the spirit-fish could show her how to unlock the thoughts of eternity that lived within her. She finished her meal, and with a full belly, she continued her search for the singular shell that she believed would carry her questions to the sprit-fish.
As she cautiously crawled out from beneath the sunken boat, the ocean erupted. Coral, sand, rock, wood, fish—whole and in pieces—tore through the water in a thousand different directions. Binti was spun, bounced off a canyon wall, and crashed back into the wrecked boat along with a green sea turtle that was hurled on top of her. She took several coral and wood splinters, her flesh ripped by the intensity of the blast.
The agitated sea settled reluctantly. Bubbles, foam, and fizz rose to the surface as if the water itself were looking for a way to escape the mayhem. Everything that was alive and could move had only one purpose—to flee. Sea life raced off in every direction. Injured animals fought to collect themselves, taking toll of the terror.
Many floated to the surface, conscious but paralyzed, joining scores of dead who were already belly up. Others could only flap a single fin and wandered aimlessly in the open water, fighting for control of their bodies. Makoona, Binti’s underwater Eden, had exploded.
Off in the distance, the octopus saw the ominous shadow on the surface. She hadn’t noticed it earlier, the shadow that interrupts the sky and the sea. It was the shadow that carried the man-tide on the water. It was the shadow that enabled the man-tide to wash away the children of the reef. Then Binti saw him. A human was swimming, gathering fish in a small net.
Binti moved toward this human. When she got closer, the octopus knew she’d seen him before. He was the one who’d saved her from the nets a few days earlier. Such difficult creatures to figure out, she thought. They are capable of such extremes. The man-tide can be so wonderful and yet so horrible.
It probably wasn’t a very smart thing to do, but Binti wasn’t in complete control of herself at this point. Still numb from the blast, she wasn’t sure whether she was swimming or merely being carried by a current. Binti had something to say to the human. She wasn’t exactly sure what it was, but the octopus was going to give him a piece of her mantle.
The closer she drifted, the angrier she became. Binti surveyed the carnage, the pain and destruction of a section of reef that had been living in peace for thousands of years. What moments before had been paradise, an untouched example of the spirit-fish’s perfect balance, was now obliterated. It was disgusting, a senseless waste to any creature who could claim the sea as home. The man-tide were invaders, desecrating something they couldn’t comprehend, blind to the boundless beauty of Makoona.
To add insult to injury, one of the barbarians swam around joyously gathering the defiled inhabitants of the reef, who were paying with their lives for this madness. Seeing the pulverized pillars of coral all around her, Binti decided she would show this human, in the only terms he seemed to understand, that the creatures of the water wanted him to leave their sacred reef. The octopus would take up arms—seven of them—against her oppressor.
Swimming completely on her own now, she regained her strength. The man-tide had struck fear into Binti’s three hearts, and she would try her best to return the favor. Even though the octopus was no match for the human, this was one of those times when it didn’t matter. Binti didn’t care that she was risking her life in this foolish attempt.
Her plan was to turn bright molten orange, the color of lava bursting through rock. It was the most intense color she’d ever seen. If she could get close enough, Binti intended to slap an arm or three around any available appendage, sucker down on the human, pull herself close, and try to slip in a quick bite from a beak sharp enough to cut through a clam.
If she could do that, she might even be able to slip a little venom the man-tide’s way. She knew it would devastate a crab or a lobster, but she didn’t know what effect it would have on a human. This seemed like a good time to find out.
Binti was, however, a little unsettled by the idea that this behavior was unthinkable for any creature of the sea who possessed the spirit. She certainly didn’t intend to eat the human, and she made no attempt to flee his aggression. Using her venom for something other than hunting didn’t float so well with her.
Hesitating for a moment, Binti reasoned that this actually was a matter of survival, a case of self-defense. In a larger sense, she was fighting for her life, fending off an attacker. Under those conditions, she believed the spirit-fish would see the need. Once she delivered her bite, Binti would ink him up and jet away. Her point would be made.
Within arms’ length of her target, Binti burst into a searing orange and thrust out four of her arms. They missed the human, who at that instant climbed out of the water onto the floating shadow. But two of her arms managed to grab something . . . the little net. The octopus held fast and pulled it back into the sea.
A second later, something crashed through the surface, reaching down into the water. It had no suckers, no claws. Instead, one long arm with five little ones on the end of it wrapped themselves around the net and began to tug. It was the human. Several
little fish trapped in the mesh escaped. But one unlucky goby still had a gill entangled in the mesh.
The human lifted the net out of the water with an enraged orange octopus still holding on.
Both Kemar and Bao cried out in surprise when the hand net emerged from the sea. They never expected to find an infuriated octopus waving its arms, looking, quite literally, like it wanted to pick a fight with them. Bao, initially shocked, began to laugh at the feistiness of the creature.
Kemar, however, was affected much more deeply. His thoughts immediately went to his dream. He saw, in front of him, the octopus that had seemed a part of Son Ba, just as it appeared the night before. And this octopus before him had also risen from a dead sea, just as the octo-Medusa had done in his dream.
Kemar couldn’t drop the net fast enough, which only caused Bao to laugh even harder. Binti, net and all, returned to the sea in a sloppy splash. This was too much fun for Bao, who’d always found other people’s discomfort amusing. The fisherman’s delight subsided when he realized he’d lost a perfectly good hand net.
The outboard motor sputtered and pinged as the pair moved on to their next fishing site. Bao spent the time lambasting the boy over the loss of the net. Eventually, Kemar made it clear that he wasn’t fishing with hand grenades, nor would he go back into the water to search for the net with that crazy octopus around, so Bao decided to try yet another method of fishing, eventually declaring, “Is fine. You will find way to replace net.”
The suggestion, however, never registered with Kemar, who was deep in thought. The sight of the agitated octopus had thrown him. Why, he wondered, was he crossing paths with so many of these creatures? He’d seen two the day Phan abandoned him. He’d dreamed about an octopus. And now he’d been visited by yet another.
Then it occurred to the boy that it might not be several. Perhaps all the encounters were with one specific octopus. They were all the same size and in roughly the same place. What could it want? No, that wasn’t possible. Kemar convinced himself that it was all merely coincidence.