“May the boat travel well across time and space,” I say up into the night sky. I think I can see the white whale’s star map.
A small distance away from me, I see a great plume of aquamarine bubbling up on the surface. The gush of water is also a gush of bodies. Some of the bodies are alive; they thrash and squirm and yell. Some are dead; they float facedown with a melancholic serenity. Some of the bodies begin to sink; others are drubbing around to save themselves. I see a man trying to hold a young boy up so that the boy does not drown. I see the man’s gasping and struggling, I see the boy’s fear in his eyes.
Then I see that the man is my father.
As I row toward him, I sing the song my mother and I made up, inventing new words with each stroke. When I reach him, my father is crying amid the salt water, amid the sinking bodies around us. “Svajonė, Svajonė,” he wails. In his drowning, he must see me as my mother.
And then, “Laisvė!”
I can tell his strength is leaving. I can see he is on the verge of drowning. I climb down a rope ladder on the side of the boat. “Kick your legs! Hard,” I yell. My father looks like he is beaten by the water, but he is beating it back with his legs. Once my father is close enough to me, he lifts the baby boy above the water with both arms. With his last breath, he finds the strength to hand me the floating boy. He is right, the boy is heavy.
For a moment, my father and I lock eyes. The water between us calms. I reach out to him. He just stares at me, barely treading water. I say, “Father?”
“Laisvė, my love. My life.” He gurgles barely above the water’s swell, “This is the end of my story. The beginning of yours. I love you. Let me go to her. Svajonė. Let go.”
I remember my mother’s words: You cannot save your father. You cannot save your brother.
I remember the strength of dreams and water and stories, how they move differently: repetitions and associations, images and accumulations, fragmentations and displacements.
I feel Aster surrender to the gentle fall of the water. When I can no longer see him, when the image of Aster’s hands and arms and face are lost to dark water, I look up.
So many stars. Constellations that seem to come apart for a moment, then reunite, then part again. I close my eyes and reopen them. Suddenly, the stars seem to stitch new stories across the sky.
I put the toddler in the hull of a boat. I wrap a blanket around this child and ask the boat to hold it in its belly. I speak a prayer for protection up to the white whale stars in the sky.
Then I dive down after my father.
Motherwaters
Fear is not with me on this journey. For to enter the depths has become a part of living a life. The baby I left on the boat is a floating boy. The descent I make now is toward father. At the bottom of the ocean, mother. Between them, my life, like a language you can endlessly rearrange.
In the ocean, bubbles rise like a second skin around my body. The water goes from dark green, to indigo blue, to midnight. The deeper I go, the more I enter a realm between light and dark. When I reach the floor of sand, tiny flickers of color blink and glide around me. Silver and blue fish make their undulations in huge schools. Underwater hills and valleys rise and fall. A glorious aquamarine and green octopus with hot-pink suckers on her tentacles slithers around coral and disappears into a rock cave. Neon-green anemones and red-stained starfish clutch geoformations, looking like decorations. Purple urchins and tube coral the color of rose blush dot rocks. The bell shapes of orange and blue giant jellyfish dangle their tentacles and oral arms like fluid lace as they pass by me.
What if home is this?
Why wasn’t I born to it? Why was I made to leave the lifewaters? Couldn’t I have been left like a creature from a fairy tale to inhabit a story?
My own hair sways before my face, black seaweed. Something is coming. A shape as big as a man. I part my own hair like a curtain. “Hello, Aster.”
“Hello, my beloved,” my father responds.
Aster does not look drowned. He looks as he did in life, weighted with grief, handsome but lost. The water between us brings him in and out of focus.
“May I bring you back to life?” I ask my father, although I can tell he is already in an afterdrowned place. I don’t know if I can revive him on any surface.
“I want to show you something,” Aster says, and he holds out his hand.
I take his hand underwater, there on the sea floor. We walk slowly. It is not possible for humans to do anything underwater quickly. We’ve lost our tails and skill. Our bipedalism keeps putting us upright. We walk some distance. Two seals tease a playful visit in my periphery, circling each other. Something looms ahead of us. At first, I think it’s a whale, but it is not.
As we approach, I make out the shape: some enormous sunken shipwreck.
“This is the SS Oregon,” Aster says, his voice reverberating. “In March of 1886, just fifteen miles from landing, the ship crashed into a schooner. There were only enough lifeboats for half of its 852 passengers. Another ship arrived shortly after the crash, so the passengers were saved, but the ship sank here. Until that moment, she was the fastest liner on the Atlantic.”
I can see what’s left of the hull and the iron frame of the decks. I can see the engine standing about twelve meters above the ocean floor, I can see several of the ship’s boilers, the propeller, the masts. The iron is covered with ghostly purple, green, and gray anemones. Small striped fish swerve in and around the carcass of her. Sea bass and blue cunners navigate the maze of sea fans and coral. Mussels line the shipwreck’s bones, strange thumb ridges. Limpets and barnacles adorn the spokes of the helm.
“Beautiful.” I sigh, not knowing what else to say. Aster is smiling. I try to remember other times I saw him smiling. With peace. I cannot. I start to ask him a question, but my mother appears, standing next to him, and I think maybe my heart swallows everything about me. Standing there together, they look wed.
Wet, I mean. Beautifully wet.
“There are more than three million shipwrecks spread across the planet,” I add. “They carry history.”
“Hello, Laisvė,” my mother says.
Whatever happens next, I know that I will be leaving the water alone again. This time, truly alone. But I also know that there is a floating boy in a boat above us, and I will not abandon him, even though my heart feels like it is rising up my throat into my mouth.
“Is there a story?” It’s all I know to ask.
“Yes,” my mother says. “My love, listen carefully. A tsunami is coming that will raise the waters even higher—”
“Tsunami — it means ‘harbor wave’ in Japanese,” I say, reaching back into my memory library. “But that’s not entirely accurate. A tsunami has nothing to do with harbors. Some people call them tidal waves, but that’s wrong too. Tsunamis have nothing to do with the tides, or the moon or the sun…” It’s hard to breathe. A world of words and images scrolls through my head: migration histories. The face of Bertrand. The voice of Bal. My brother as a baby. The laughs of worms.