I threw myself ever lower, tunneled into the water at the fingerling’s command, this swimming motion almost all he knew from his short life, his too-quick float in his mother’s belly. All of me ached now, and still there was farther to go. I begged off, begged to rest, to quit, but then the fingerling spoke again, his heavy words dragging me down, forcing me under.
He said, IN THE WOMB, IF YOU STOPPED SWIMMING, THEN YOU DIED.
He said, ONCE, I THOUGHT THE WOMB WAS THE WORLD, AND THEN WHEN THAT WORLD REJECTED ME WHAT OTHER CHOICE EXISTED EXCEPT DROWNING, EXCEPT HOLDING MY BREATH UNTIL I BURST?
NOW DIVE, he said, and so I dove, swimming until I reached the bottom of the lake, but not the bottom of its center I had expected, only its center’s edge, its near shelf, the drop-off where the safe part of the water ended, the coolness below the burning surface above, where that band of cool fell down into colder darkness. On that shelf I leveraged myself lower, and also I felt the first floating strands of gunked eggs, unfertilized and untended and half gnawed, a thousand wasted babies, food for the silver faces of the lake’s fish, those blank expressions surrounding our dive, our pursuit into the thick black of the cloud below. I kicked deeper, drove our bodies down with the movement of my good leg and then my bad leg and then my good leg again, but despite my effort I did not make it to the center of the lake alone or even alone with the fingerling.
I could not have, not even before my crushed ankle or my other newest injury.
Now I knew that what still lived in the lake had many names and shapes but was then best titled squid, and although the bear thought it dead it was not exactly, and after its long-lashing reach hooked my skin I thought I would drown, but no, I did not die, not then.
HE COMES, said the fingerling, HE COMES AND HE IS YOU AND YOU ARE HIM AND NOW AT LAST YOU ARE BOTH HERE TOGETHER, and the fingerling’s voice was a hissing threat but also quieter than any other time of late, a hush that made me more afraid, and I felt him withdraw into his stomach-pit, and then the lake’s giant squid struck, reached out from the black beneath the lake to wrap me in its rough-puckered tentacles, to slash my skin with their barbed hooks.
I exhaled a scream of bubbled air, struggled to free myself even as the squid bid me to be still, fixing me with one huge eye and then the other. After some time the squid began to speak as the bear spoke, in an old language translated by the fingerling, its tentacle-shrouded beak snapping close to my face, saying that there was more to the making of a child—of a family—than just two bodies, than two bodies and an empty set of rooms.
It said, I AM LIKE YOU, BUT I AM NOT YOU, and when its voice thrashed against the sides of my skull I knew it was no real squid, only a ghost in the shape of a squid, and in my drowning I believed I smiled, and even in my stomach the fingerling laughed, as if ghosts were no danger, as if ghosts and their memories had not been the whole of our undoing.
The squid-ghost circled me in the floating blackness, and as it circled it spoke, and with words barely words, it said, YOU SEEK TO MAKE ONLY A CHILD, ONLY A HANDFUL OF CHILDREN, BUT I WANT MORE.
It said, YOU HAVE SEEN THE EGGS I KEEP, THE EGGS I TOOK FROM MY WIFE WHEN LAST SHE SWAM IN HER FIRST SHAPE.
It said, THEY ARE LESS NOW, BUT THEY ARE STILL MINE, AND STILL THEY ARE IN NEED OF A GOOD FATHER, and then it sprayed wide clouds of useless ghost semen and blackest ink, twin excretions fogging the deep lake.
It said, WHAT YOUR WIFE CANNOT MAKE, MINE ONCE REFUSED ME.
It said, AFTERWARD, I TRIED TO KILL MY WIFE AS YOU TRIED TO KILL YOURS, BUT I COULD NOT SUCCEED AS YOU HAVE, and as it said this I shook, because despite the fall of her moon I did not believe my wife was dead. And then the squid spoke again, said, KILL HER FOR ME, its tentacles drawing me close, the hard shell of its body long against me, and against its grip I shook my head, struggled again to escape.
KILL THE BEAR, the squid said. MAKE FRESH THIS WORLD ONCE AGAIN.
After I refused its offer, the squid opened my skin with its hooks and slammed its snapping beak into my chest, and even though the squid was a ghost, still it was powerful there in the lake-black: With sharp movements, it set to folding back the sheets of my skin, splitting some numbers of ribs and also the tissues between. It pushed forward, and my body bulged to accommodate its entrance, its puke-yellow eyes leading the strange wedge of its alien face, and then I was speared upon its sharp ridges, and then the fingerling was pushing back from all his holdings, and between them or upon them I was caught fast and screaming, thrashing against the squid’s attack, its refusal to accept my declining of its barely bartered truce, and for a while we spiraled deeper into the depths of the lake, a black made of the squid’s ink and also something else, where there was no sound and sight, where even our battle was subsumed into the silence, and where I burst against the cold and the dark until I was reduced to a held breath, a bit of bodily heat, a movement slowed and almost stopped. Still the squid-ghost swam on, not farther down but farther in, into me, trying to squirm its ghost into the spaces I contained, that space that in me was already filled with my own fractured haunts, my cancer-son, and would admit no other.
The squid’s shape was so heavy, so thick with ropes of ink now pushing into me too, and as I dropped through that black I dreamed a squid’s dream: I had not one child but thousands, all same faced as me, all hatching out of the lake at once, from both the egg clutch along the shelf ridge and also somehow from out of my arms, out of my legs, from out of my mouth and ears and nose, all little stars bright with tentacles and sharp black mouths, all floating upward toward the light.
The weight of the squid weighed upon me, and as I watched my dream-children swim off I sank deeper into their making, and in this dream I saw my life did not end with my death but rather went on, spread wide across the face of the world, my children a country of men and squid, so that everywhere there was lake we were there, and everywhere there was dirt there was a man sent to build his house upon it.
Throughout our fall the fingerling fought the squid from every inner space, pushed back with his many tumors, and soon the squid balked, struggled to withdraw, wriggling its barbs backward. Outside my body again, the squid swam long curves around my sinking weight, its angry shape first invisible in the black, its voice now lower than words, untranslatable even by the fingerling, and then again it was upon us, slashing with beak and claw, and as we fell, the depth’s pressure squeezed my lungs until they broke further, filled with ink, burst again.
How tired I was of almost dying, of suffering the sequenced steps without release: Here was the cold, the dark, the black, all around me and inside, and here was my crooked foot and my dented head or neck and all the rest of my hook-scraped and beak-burst body, and still I did not give in, still some part of me scratched forward, succored for life, for even what sorry life I had waiting. I reached into my boot for my blade, my knife dulled with decades of skinning and scaling, and as I drowned deeper I fought back, put the single sharp edge of my blade against the squid’s soft shell, and together we sank through another fathom of struggle before it tried again to whip me toward the crook of its stained beak, before I raked my knife across one tentacle and then the other, before I plunged it toward the squid’s eye—that eyeball alone the size of my head—and in the dark I moved the knife into the black at the center of its glimmering iris, into and then through that ring of light, pushing the knife so deep my wrist disappeared into the shell behind, and somewhere within the knife finally caught, then wrenched from my grip in a wet squelch of ichor—and still I knew I had not ended the squid, what ghost remained of this once-father.