Something Rich and Strange

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “There was weight,” he insisted, astonished. “Something rattled.”

  “A broken shell. Something that went down the drain.”

  “Sure.”

  Her mouth tightened. She unpacked cereal, milk. He went to her, put his hands on her shoulders, felt the tension in her. “What about the sea hare? What does that have to do with a bottle?”

  She shrugged his hands away, swung the cupboard door open, narrowly missing his head. “Nothing, probably. I can’t explain. I saw Adam today. He said you liked his work.”

  He folded his arms, backed against the counter. “You saw him today where?”

  “At the beach. He stopped to watch me work.”

  “You never let anyone watch you work.”

  She shrugged. “I let him. He’s an artist. He knows the sea.”

  “He’s a hustler.”

  She turned to stare at him, stunned. “He’s an artist. He’s nice.”

  “Nice.” He reached past her, pulled a box of crackers out of the bag. “Jenny is nice. Baby llamas are nice. Adam Fin is a barracuda.”

  “You are so critical.” She slammed the cupboard door so hard beer in the bottom of the bag clinked. “It’s a wonder you even like me. If you ever stopped, who would there be left in the world for you to like?” He stood still, blinking, hearing thoughts inside his head clink like the beer bottles. He wondered if he held one against the window, would it reflect another world, or would it simply gather into itself the lights of the world he knew?

  There was something in that bottle, he thought stubbornly. And there is something else in Adam Fin. But he didn’t speak. He moved into her silence, put the milk and the beer away, matching her mute arguments with his own.

  Three

  Megan sat on the floor in Mike’s bookstore, her back against history, surrounded by ocean. It was a slow morning. The bell on the door had rung three times. Rain tapped against the windows, wandered off, came back, tapped again. She was aware of someone circling her now and then, but she refused to look up. No one came to Mike’s for history. The books she heaved onto her knees were massive, colorful, precise. They measured the mountains beneath the sea; they plumbed the abysmal waters. They told what the narwhal ate, how the male seahorse gave birth to its young, how the sea cucumber, which flung its inner organs at its enemies to confuse them, contained a chemical that might combat cancer, and that the homely hagfish had three hearts, and what orchestrated the beat of a hagfish’s hearts could also steady a human heart. They knew, from the great blue whales to the one celled algae, who ate what. They had counted the millions of eggs an oyster might lay in a year, and the number of rhymes in the song of the humpback whale.

  But they hadn’t read the message in the bottle.

  Nor, she decided, surfacing to the gray light, did they know that a sea hare could crawl out of the water and turn itself into ink. Or that an old woman could cast a line into a drawing of the tide and catch a human on her hook.

  She leaned back against the shelves, drew her hair out of her face. She must have sighed: Mike, on his stool, lifted his unkempt head, to which air moss and air snails probably clung, and turned an eye her direction.

  It was a question, his attention. He didn’t care that she was littering his floor with herself and his books, but that she hadn’t found what she wanted in them. No one turned a page or breathed among the stacks; the place was empty but for them.

  She said wearily, hardly expecting Mike to offer much more than a crooked smile, “I keep finding odd things in the tide. But those books don’t say anything about them.” He was motionless, still listening, one finger marking the line he had read. She went on, talking to herself more than to him. “Yesterday I found a bottle with something in it. Something that shifted, something shining… When I broke it open, nothing was there. But there had been something. These books are full of such strange things. Did you know that they made cloth of gold out of a fiber secreted by sea pens, and that sea pens look like long, feathery underwater quills? Maybe you could write a message with them. But these books don’t say anything about what I need to know. They explain everything. They don’t see anything that’s maybe there and maybe not. It’s like Jonah wanting to look for a mystery under his hand lens. It won’t be there. But it was there.”

  She stopped talking. Mike was looking at her with as much expression as an oyster, waiting patiently for her to quit making conversation so that he could get back to his book. Then his backbone straightened a little. He drew in air, a long tidal gathering through his nose. Expression, subtle as color in a kelp leaf, passed through his eyes. “Yeah,” he said, and Megan stared at him in astonishment. “I know.” He set his book down carefully and collapsed a little into his bulk to rummage under the counter. “I found one, too.”

  “One what?” she whispered.

  “One of those things. One of those things that don’t fit.” He lifted it gently off a shelf, set it on the counter, then stilled again, gazing at it, unblinking.

  Megan got to her feet, not easy after being weighted with the cumulative knowledge of the sea. The thing on Mike’s counter looked like a broken roof tile. It was flat, black, square but for a corner bitten off. As she looked more closely, she saw it was latticed with fine and intricate lines that revolved, at the corners, around tiny scallop shells. Latticed, it wasn’t black, she realized, but blue so dark it melted toward black. Then all the lines flowed together; it was flat, black, solid. And then latticed again, the scallop shells a faintly paler blue. And then flat. A piece of black tile.

  “What on earth—”

  “Nothing,” Mike said simply. “That’s what I figure. Nothing on earth.” He touched it gently; lines flowed under his fingers. “I found it washed up in a pile of kelp. Moves like water. Like something opening and closing to water.”

  “Yes,” she said, entranced. “It would, I guess, being underwater.”

  “You figure—” He hesitated, then became expansive. “You look at it maybe from their point of view. For millions of years, the sea was like those books to them. Everything’s explicable, expected. Fishbones, kelp leaves, pearls, what-not. Then odd things start drifting down. They’ve seen wood floating, so they’re not surprised by ships, cloth of gold they can guess at, and pearls they know, and the little octopus can live in porcelain teacups. So they think: This is how humans live, floating on the water, coming apart now and then, and they learn to recognize clothes, and flesh, and then, after the fish feed, they recognize bone. But now… Think if you were living down there, finding beer cans. Barrels of chemicals. Styrofoam coolers. Flashlight batteries. Plastic baggies. Maybe TV sets off sunken fiberglass boats. Refrigerators. Old socks. Tangled-up fishing line. If you didn’t know, if you lived maybe inside a glint of light, what kind of bizarre world would you guess was falling apart and drifting out of the air down into the sea?” He turned his finding; the other side was pale and luminous as pearl. Megan stared at him, mute. “So I look at this and wonder what’s down there, breaking up, washing ashore.” He looked at Megan, shrugged his bulky shoulders a little. “Makes you wonder. At least it does me.” Someone pushed the door open; the bell rang. He slid the finding back under the counter. Megan opened her mouth, closed it. Mike gave her his crooked, one-sided smile, then went back to being a walrus on a stool reading a book.

  Jonah, taking a day off, had driven the truck to a cove north of town, to putter along the cliffs. Worm tubes and the occasional crumbling fossil clam were all he expected to find, though that morning he thought vaguely of shark teeth, or the ancient tracks of rain. Except for a couple from a camper picking through the treasures along the tide line, the cove was empty. He walked around the south arm of the cove, close to the water, where tide pools formed in the sandstone, and the cliffs were sliding shard by shard into the sand. There he picked among the broken pieces, occasionally helping the cliff down by poking into its side. The sandstone yielded easily, revealed little except the unmistakable tracks of other fossil h
unters. Still, he was content in the gray, damp winds, with the roiling sea at his back, and the seagulls crying overhead.

  He and Megan had mumbled back into one another’s good graces; by midnight he had forgotten the color of the sea and remembered only Megan’s eyes, their intentness, their sudden smile. He had been cured of earrings; Adam Fin, from wherever, was not a barracuda but harmless as a harp seal. He crumbled mud around what looked like a brachiopod, whistling. The ghost of the brachiopod itself crumbled away, left him a handful of nothing. He let it fall, still whistling, and eyed the tide. It had moved farther out, giving him a chance to clamber along the edge of the cliff out where it dipped down into deep water, and then over to the other side, which was usually tide bound. He dropped his finds into his windbreaker pocket and began to climb.

  Fifteen minutes later he was picking his way across what looked like giant ribs or backbones, partially submerged in sand, polished by the waves. There was a cave on this side of the cliff; with nothing much in it but the usual barnacles’ starfish, anemones, hanging like some kind of weird living wallpaper down from where the tide stopped rising. But farther back from the water, around the outside of the cave, he had once found a perfect bivalve half the size of his palm. He went back there.

  He heard the whales sing then.

  He recognized them from some old record of Megan’s: a flute player jamming with whales. It sounded more like whooping jungles to him, creaking timbers, demonic foghorns, than song. There were vast, deep notes that blew through him like breath trembling through a reed. I shouldn’t be hearing those notes, he thought, shaken. They move through the deep sea, the leviathan call across hundreds of miles.

  His eyes fell on the backbones and ribs of rock he had walked across. They seemed to be arched in a dive through time, a sea mammoth caught and frozen like a little trilobite in the floor of the ocean. But this isn’t the floor, he thought, then: It was underwater once. I’m at the bottom of a fossil sea, hearing the ghosts of whales. They were all around him, the voices of the sea, whistling, scraping’ ratcheting, whooping, booming He stood stunned by noise, trembling in currents of sound. What is happening? he thought. Something is happening.

  Then there was only one sound: a song so faint he could barely separate it from the gentle splash and sigh of water within the cave.

  It was a human voice; it was the sea’s voice. It flicked away foam, wandered over stones, lingered in the anemone’s tendrils. It turned over a shell, scattered agates. For a moment, as the sea idled, it ranged free, sweet, deep, then impossibly clear and high. He recognized it.

  He took a step toward the cave, feeling his heart beat in his throat, his lips. The cave emitted a breath of brine and guano, then cool, rainy wind. He took another step, another. A wave rolled over his footprint. The voice grew louder. His eyes stung with salt, with sweat. There was no language in his head, only the tide and the voice and the wind. He reached the mouth of the cave.

  Water ran past him, lapped the mossy walls, almost reached the shadows in the back. A gentle note filled the cave; he breathed it like air. Something at the back of the cave moved a little. It was slick, glittering, a mass of green and black, that melted into shadow, into stone. The voice sighed through the cave; tide pushed him forward. Again he smelled brine, guano, salt, death. And then the sweet rain. The shadowy mass stirred; a pale stone took shape, then a long, straight fall of shadow. The tide ran around his knees. He tasted the song, felt it in his throat, in his blood. Water splashed among the stones; he heard a light laugh melting in the foam. The sea wrapped itself around his thighs.

  A gull cried overhead. He blinked, found himself standing at the empty, shallow cave he recognized, one with no depth for shadows. The sand at his feet was barely damp; the tide was still working its way across the tide pools. He listened for the song. Then he realized he was listening, and tears broke like a bone in his chest because he had heard the sound of fossil rain, he had seen the mermaid’s hair.

  A few miles to the south, Megan walked the tide line like a scavenger, head down, ignoring the sea, intent only on what the morning tide had pushed up on the beach. Other dedicated scavengers, who had found plastic bleach bottles or gallon milk jugs washed ashore, had cut holes in them to drop in whole sand dollars, blue agates, bright pieces of mother-of-pearl. Megan, frowning at the sand, narrowly avoided collisions. She had nearly walked into surf fishers’ lines a couple of times; she barely heard their warnings. Now and then she stopped, shifted kelp with her toe, nudged a jellyfish over to see what it might be hiding She was putting a magnifying glass to the mystery, she knew; if she looked at it directly, it would be somewhere else, behind her back, or where her shadow began. Like light flickering on water, it would never be where she had seen it last.

  But still she searched for the pearl in the kelp, the bone made of coral. She filled her pockets as she walked, hardly seeing what she put into them, plastic, metal, cork, Styrofoam, tin, until her jacket swung bulkily at her hips and rattled when it hit her. She was absently trying to shove a wet towel into her bulging pocket when she ran into someone not quick enough to get out of her way.

  It was Adam. He had his hands on her shoulders, steadying her as she raised her head and pulled her mind up from where the clams were blowing bubbles. She pushed her glasses up, and saw him from behind a brine-flecked mist. She pulled them off, began wiping them on the towel.

  “Here,” he said. “Let me.” He took them, wiped them carefully on the underside of his sweatshirt Then he slid them back on her nose, gently adjusted the earpieces under her hair, an oddly intimate gesture that made her aware suddenly of the muscle beneath the sweatshirt, the height and weight of the body blocking the wind. She shifted her own weight a little, backing a half step. He dropped his hands, looked down at the torn, sandy towel she dragged.

  “Going swimming?”

  “No, I was just—I was—” She paused, drawing hair away from her eyes. What had she been just? Trying to stuff a towel into her pocket. His expression changed.

  “Is something wrong?”

  She shook her head, sighing. “No. I was beachcombing. I got a little carried away. There’s so much junk.”

  “Most people,” he pointed out, “pick up shells.”

  “I’m not looking for shells.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know. Secrets. Mysteries. Pearls and ambergris and black coral. But I keep finding garbage instead.”

  He shrugged lightly. There was no expression on his face. “Just leave it. The tide will pick it up again. Anyway, you didn’t put it there.”

  “Right,” she said dourly. “That’s toddler mentality in a nutshell. I didn’t put it there, and anyway, Mom will clean it up.”

  He smiled. “Now you remind me of Dory. Never satisfied with the world. Grumbling and snorting and talking to yourself, trying to stuff all the garbage in the world into a grocery bag.”

  She shook her head. “I’d use a leaf bag. Thirty nine gallons, made of recycled plastic. Drag it behind me down the tide line. Or a shopping cart. I’d wheel that along the wet sand and throw cans in it, and get snarled up in fishing lines and dead kelp.”

  “And then you’ll get annoyed at the kelp. All those untidy piles the sea drags up and leaves lying around like laundry. You’ll throw that into your shopping cart.”

  “And what about the dead jellyfish?” she demanded. “Talk about untidy. And the crab backs from molting crabs? Not to mention all those empty shells. I’ll have to buy a coat with pockets as big as the sea.”

  “What have you got in your pockets?” He prodded one, marveling. “Anything good?”

  “Actually,” she admitted, “I’m not sure. I was looking so hard for something I wasn’t paying attention to what I picked up.”

  He made a dubious sound after a moment, his eyes still smiling a little, the opaque milky green of bottle glass tossed around in the sea for a century. “Then how do you know you haven’t picked up what yo
u were looking for in the first place?”

  She was silent, looking at him. “I don’t know,” she said at last, and laughed a little at the thought. “Maybe I did.”

  “Maybe you should look.”

  She went up to where the sand was dry and sat down. She realized then how far she had walked, almost beyond the boundaries of the town. Great jutting curves of cliff hid the harbor; the houses on them were sparsely scattered. She had left even the fishers and the beachcombers behind; they were alone but for flocks of gulls and sandpipers, and footprints wandering in and out of the tide. Adam sat beside her, watched her pull things out of her pockets. There were beer caps, a sardine tin, a Tinker Toy wheel, a baggie full of wet sand, a Styrofoam bait carton with a couple of dead worms in it, a fishing weight, a wool glove, a baby’s teething toy, a tennis shoe.

  She stopped when she saw the shoe. Adam was stretched out on his side, leaning on one elbow. His eyes, flicking from her face to the shoe, found nothing wonderful in it. She said, her voice sounding oddly high, “There are still things in my pockets.”

  “Take them out.”

  “But there’s not room for a shoe in my pocket.”

  “It was in there,” he said irrefutably. She reached into both pockets at once, pulled out an empty pickle jar, a film canister, a plastic glass with Ronald McDonald on it, the lid of a Ninja Turtle lunch box. She got to her knees, still pulling things out, her eyes wide, incredulous. Adam watched silently. She dropped a piece of a child’s chalk board, a length of picture wire, a diving mask, a bicycle chain, and a fan belt before she stood up. Adam didn’t move, except his head, lifting a little to see her face.