I like to bring a bag of apples and tangerines for the break room. My father before me, Othar, used to as well. My crew is ten people. One woman, Tisha. Sometimes we tease her, but Tisha is stronger than half the men and she insists on making the coffee. We need four or five pots a night. You can feel the ghost of all the workers before us — the people who labored under orders from others, the people who built the original structures. The battles over working conditions and wages that happened here, the New Deal, most of which didn’t apply to us. Our well-being has not been part of any story. Some of our family members and fellow workers dug through contaminated trash for years without any protection. Contaminated with asbestos or blood or toxic materials, all of it falling like dust over our bodies, some of it surely taken within, contaminating us in turn.
The stories above us happen in dramatic, televised splashes with international weight. Who lives and who dies underneath the belly of things — well, that doesn’t make the news.
I go to work around eleven at night and I finish around six in the morning. I guess you could say we keep the buildings clean so that others can achieve the great work of the nation… but we’re the ones who take care of all the shit. It’s almost like we’re an entire undercity. No telling what goes on above us. Like another history. Another world.
Tisha’s brother ascended, though. He worked for the Capitol Police. He no longer works there or anywhere. There’s a cost to ascension.
Testudines
Of Time and Water
Tell me the story again.”
Indigo sits under the kitchen table turning an object over in her small hands. Outside the window of their floating habitat, the water sloshes against the platforms. The sky is gray today, the water gray, or she’d be outside helping to plant more rosemary and potatoes and tomatoes in the floating greenhouse nearest their pod.
Miles inland, what was once The Brook has taken a different shape again; buildings have either lost their bearings and collapsed or changed form, like bodies bending and leaning. London plane trees, Norway maples, and Callery pear trees originally from Asia thread through the former streets and alleys, or rest fallen and uprooted with broken limbs becoming detritus or food for worms and insects. Pin oaks, stuck stubbornly in concrete, stand steadfast. Vegetation rewilds everything urban. Animals make their homes.
On water, the floating habitats spread out across the surface, or dip under into the bellies of aquatic dwellings; some bamboo-framed cylindrical structures punch skyward like stubborn thumbs. Crabs, oysters, lobsters, shrimp, northern pipefish, pufferfish, jellyfish, and tiny seahorses thrive in the riverway and ocean. Whales and seals have conversations regarding the stamina of sturgeons.
Mikael unrolls several large sheaths of drafting paper out onto the table in the kitchen. The blue ink of the drawings is almost like a language to him. Rooftop farms. Parks with paths that soak up water and reduce heat. Healing gardens. Education centers powered by environmentally generated electricity. Hydropower stations. Terraced farms that recycle organic waste. Floodplains remade into villages with giant retention ponds to collect rainwater. Indigo emerges from under the table, stands up, and looks at the drawings with him.
“That looks like a starfish,” she says of one.
“The habitats all have names that reflect their forms and inspirations — can you see?” He gently passes his hand over some of the forms. “The Sea Manta, gently undulating across the top of the water like the wings of manta rays, the belly of the structure dipping down into the ocean.”
“Yes! And the same colors — black on top, white on the bottom.”
He points to another. “The Tropos, a series of floating cities that turn and curl like seashells. Sea star habitats that radiate outward and turn. Marine nomad pods secured to shallow sea-floor areas in clusters like coral. Seascrapers diving down below the surface of the water and extending into the sky. Aquaponic hubs for floating food islands.” Every drawing a piece of the emerging Species Cohabitation Project.
“I see,” Indigo says, returning to her spot underneath the table. “Now can you tell me the story again?”
The desire of a child is everything.
He looks underneath the table. “You were pulled from the water by a magical water girl.” He sits. He starts to draw, waits for a response. “Then you grew a mermaid tail in place of legs.”
Indigo smiles beneath the weight of his drawing. “I don’t have a mermaid tail. I’m twelve. I know there’s no such thing as mermaids.” She reaches around to touch the back of her neck, where her name is written in blue ink forever.
“I know. I just wanted to see if you were listening.” He drops his head below the table to see her. “What’s that in your hand?”
She scooches around so that her back is to him.
“You were delivered by a beautiful aquanaut.”
“What’s an aquanaut?” She puts the object into her mouth, rolls her tongue over it, around it: Salt. Copper.
Mikael holds his breath, then pulls a blue pen from his pocket, starts sketching another transportation feature to the bridge. “An aquanaut is any person who remains under the water breathing at the ambient pressure long enough for the concentration of inert components of the breath, as dissolved in the body tissues, to reach equilibrium.”
“Saturation,” Indigo says.
“Yes. From the Latin word aqua and the Greek nautes. Water sailor. Like an astronaut, only in water. Much more phenomenal than a mermaid.”
“So Laisvė is… a water sailor?”
“Yes. Although that’s not exactly accurate. It’s just one translation. She thinks of herself as a carrier.”
Indigo begins to hum between sentences. Some tune of her own design. “Does she always bring people back and forth?”
“No!” Mikael laughs. “It’s kind of weird. Sometimes she brings old rusted things I can’t even understand. She’ll set something on the table, and I won’t even know what it is. One time, she brought up this old object with barnacles and coral and mussels all over it. It was found in the remains of a Roman shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera in 1901. The object dated to around 200 to 90 BC. The Antikythera Mechanism, they called it. It was a machine the ancient Greeks used to predict the positions of the stars and the motion of the sun and moon. It’s the most sophisticated mechanism known from the ancient world; nothing as complex is known for the next thousand years. I used to wonder if she stole it from a museum.”
“She’s a thief?”
“No. Not really. She carries things. It’s like she doesn’t truly care about the difference between people and objects, animals and building materials — treasures, lost things. Like everything has the same value as everything else. Except children. She pulls children from waters all over time.”
“Is something wrong with her?” Indigo’s brows make small wave shapes.
“No,” Mikael says a little too slowly.
“Is Laisvė my mother?” Indigo peers up at Mikael from the underneath of things, something in her mouth making her words a little off.
“That’s a hard question,” Mikael says. “In some ways, you were born of water. We all are, really. But it is true that Laisvė went to find you across time, she brought you here, and she lifted you up out of the water, into my arms.” He crouches down to her level. “Now spit whatever is in your mouth out into my hand, please.” You are something like the broken chain. You are something like an umbilical cord. You are a connection between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, the past and the present and the future. You are beautiful in a way language has not yet named.