“But babies don’t come from just water. I’ve read all about it. Babies come from their mother’s bellies after a sperm and an egg love each other.”
“We all came from water, if you think about it. We all move through water to get to the world,” Mikael reminds her. “Now spit.” He holds his hand out in front of her face.
“Am I an orphan?” Indigo’s last word warbles as she spits the object — an old coin — into his hand.
“No,” he says, his heartbeat loud in his ears. “There are many meanings to the word mother. Or father. Or family. Other kinds of stories. Other ways of coming into the world. We can learn to tell different stories to ourselves about who we are.” He palms Indigo’s cheek as softly as a whisper.
“Is my mother dead?” Indigo’s eyes are the word for it — this feeling Mikael has, to be lost, to be found, to have to invent the story in between over and over again, to surrender to unnameableness so that new words and sentences and myths might get born. He remembers Vera dying in the street. He remembers the day Laisvė brought him Indigo. The memories live in his hands, his hands making designs for life.
—
The night before Laisvė delivered Indigo to him, Mikael wept an ocean.
He dreamed of the habitats rising from the sea, reaching for the cosmos where the sky platforms were being constructed, then diving back down to the floor of the ocean, where the seascapes were nearing completion. He dreamed a beautiful collection of habitats spreading in all directions. Or it wasn’t a dream at all, it was his boyhood vision coming true in his life with Laisvė, his never-ending dream, turning into his life’s labor. He saw the surface of the ocean and the swell of the sky and the seam of the horizon.
But in the middle of the dream, a great dark mass emerged from the ocean and swallowed all the water away. What seemed impossible changed instantly. Next there was no sky, just the black of space, without stars. He rolled around, naked, in the emptiness. No sound except a kind of rushing in his ears, like when your own blood becomes too loud in your own head. This must be death, he thought. Something catastrophic must have occurred while I was sleeping. Mikael wept. He wept so violently from his floating place in space that his tears became cosmic torrents, like the sky was now the ocean. And then he was back in his bed.
He woke up dreaming that he was in a pool of sweat, only the water was real, it was just lapping outside his window, pushing gently in rhythmic waves against the platforms that made up the habitats. The water the thing between sky living and sea living, between earth and the cosmos, between past and present, between dream and real.
He stepped out onto the platform, felt the night air raise the hairs on his arms and legs. A light rain fell.
The water below him stirred. A kind of green glow drew his attention to the surface. He kneeled down, tried to touch it, and before he could make contact with the wet world, a child was bawling up at him, raised from the waters by a hand, an arm, a shoulder, and then Laisvė’s familiar face. A crying child, impossible to ignore. He dropped to his knees and scooped the infant up in his arms. He held it close to his chest. “Shhhhhhhhhhhh, little creature,” he whispered, patting its back gently.
“Look at the back of her neck,” Laisvė said, treading water, her voice filled with electricity. “I found her.”
As if she’d recovered a sunken treasure.
At first, Mikael didn’t know what Laisvė was talking about, but then the water and the baby and the word neck closed a circuit in his body. Could she…? He gently turned the baby’s head, just enough to see the tattoo.
“But how? How did you find her?” Mikael gasped, cradling the infant in his arms. The child was no longer crying.
“I thought of the color indigo,” Laisvė said, hoisting herself up from the water onto the platform. “There was a dead woman with a flowered dress, and that opened a portal up in the water. You know how I’ve told you — the motherwaters carry me. I found her in your previous time and place, in an orphan house run by women. Artists or lesbians or nuns or something. I knew it was her because of the tattoo,” she answered, as if any of that were possible.
And yet, with Laisvė, any story was possible.
—
“Look.”
Mikael follows Indigo’s outstretched arm all the way to her finger, pointing out the window. There he sees Laisvė, pulling herself up from the water onto the dock. He can’t tell if she looks old or young or neither. More and more, she seems less human and more… something else.
They walk out together to greet her, help her up out of the water.
Laisvė emerges midsentence. “I’m sure you know the first designs for Proteus, don’t you? They were pretty magnificent.” She pulls long wet curls of black hair away from her eyes. “Around the year 2020, Fabien Cousteau and this industrial designer, Yves Béhar, created a four-thousand-square-foot modular lab sixty feet underwater, off the coast of Curaçao. Fabien took after his grandfather Jacques, whose early Conshelf projects were meant to be precursors to future underwater villages. But your creations are much more phenomenal, Mikael.” She gazes out at the collection of habitats. “Look at the beauty. The vision.” Then she continues. “Anyway, this French diver, Henri Cosquer, found prehistoric cave paintings a hundred and twenty feet underwater. Beautiful animals. Bisons, horses, antelope, ibex — and penguins, seals, even jellyfish. There’s even an image that might be the first representation of murder! A human with a seal’s head pierced by a spear.”
Mikael hands Laisvė a towel. Indigo places a pair of sneakers near her feet. They know her stories don’t necessarily have beginnings, middles, or ends. They fragment and accumulate, however they happen to appear in Laisvė’s head. They’ve learned to listen differently.
Laisvė steps into the sneakers and dries her hair, her head tilted sideways, still talking. A few aquanauts in full gear emerge behind her, their oxygen tanks and wetsuits and masks making them look like odd sea creatures. Some are missing an arm or a leg or hand or a foot, but Mikael’s aquaprosthetic designs make them look as if they are really a new species of water creatures.
Laisvė continues her narration, delivering information, objects, ideas: “The habitat power supplies all check out — ocean, sun, wind… But we need to talk about the underwater farms and the pods. The labs and medical bays are solid, but the dormitories are… well, they’re kind of ugly. They can’t be ugly. Living underwater should feel like the dreams children have. We can’t have ugly.” She dries her hair. “The moon pool is perfect, though.”
“Why is it called a moon pool?” Indigo’s question folds into Laisvė’s monologue as they walk back into the habitat, painted indigo, cerulean, aquamarine, and midnight blue.
“Good question. Because, on very calm nights, the water under the rig reflects moonlight. Like the ocean is glowing open,” Laisvė says, “like a perfect portal. You know, portals are everything. Even a single thought can be a portal. A single word. You know, the way poetry moves.”
A Bedtime Story