The Twilight Swimmer (16 page)

He could hear it. He could hear her voice.

The hours below the surface, in the safety of the pitch black water, had begun the healing process. His skin, so savaged by the sun, no longer felt ablaze. Now he felt a dull ache across his entire body, from the textured soles of his feet to top of his head. Every inch of him was a reminder of his time at the cabin, of the torture he had endured and the risk he had taken.

Many years earlier, when he was young and reckless, he had strayed from his people and entered the complex underwater landscape of an African port. The manmade bay was a place full of mystery and wonder, its bottom dredged with no regard for its natural shape, its walls sculpted roughly with dynamite, leaving bizarre formations he had never seen in the open sea or the miles of coast he had been allowed to explore before striking out on his own. He swam beneath the rocking vessels moored to the docks, running his hand along the contours of their metallic bellies, tasting the metal that leeched into the water. He heard a symphony of sounds – crashing and scratching and banging – from within the boats, from behind the inches of plating and fiberglass and wood. He tested the strength of nets designed to ensnare fish… and other creatures. And in one of those nets, he found something that purged the joy from his heart and filled him with incalculable dread.

One of his own, trapped. A male. His pale flesh burned vivid pink and swollen soft by long exposure to sunlight in this shallow water.

His arm was dislodged at the shoulder, floating loose within the sheath of his skin. One leg protruded from the netting, thick and muscular, twisted violently at the knee. The flesh of his foot was lacerated, deep ravines of pink that looked carved or scooped out with a blunt instrument. He had used his feet to struggle against the netting, but the coarse nylon was too strong and easily wore away at his delicate flesh until it tore and bled. The injuries ran up his ankles and onto his calves, the flesh in pale ribbons that floated on the gentle bay current. The merman had been dead awhile, and he wasn’t moving, but the muscles of his abdomen and ribs were taught, as if frozen in a moment of struggle. His stomach was bruised and scratched, like his legs, where he scraped himself violently against the net. Above his round shoulder, his gill was torn at one corner and folded in on itself. The white glow of bleached bone was just visible inside the gaping gill. All of these injuries were horrific to the young Swimmer, but it was his eyes that distressed the Swimmer most. They had clouded over, the brilliance of white and black somehow blended together into the milky gray of death. There was no life in the eyes, nor any suggestion that life had ever resided behind them. The translucent lids open wide, the soft tissue gone softer still, there was nothing recognizable to the Swimmer. This creature was no brother of his, no cousin. This creature was nothing like him at all. It looked like him, but it could have been a fish.

And someday, he would be the same. When death at last claimed him and his own eyes clouded over. A dead fish, and nothing more.

In the bowels of the sunken ship, he pictured the poor creature in the net, burned by the sun, eyes devoid of life. The image filled him with terror. But he could hear her voice, and her voice was enough to push the image to the back of his mind.

More important, he could hear her words.

“I need you to come back.”

His body was stiff and sore, but he forced himself into motion. He pushed open the door on the storage closet and crawled through the opening, kicking up a cloud of silt with every small movement. At this depth, where there was no light, the silt had little effect on visibility. He could still make out the dark edges of shapes, could sense the slanted walls of an interior hall, the plane of a table, the levels of an overturned, corrugated shelf. He bent and twisted his body to move past these rusting forms, each contortion amplifying the pain that coursed through him like liquid heat. His joints strained with effort each time he pushed off with an arm or leg to propel himself forward. The muscles of his neck were taut as he clenched his jaw to master the discomfort. He could not allow the pain to take over. He had to focus on the echo of her voice in his mind.

He emerged from the sunken ship at a different place than his point of entry. It was a gaping hole where the hull met the sandy bottom, and he had to shovel away the sediment to make room for himself. He stirred up an octopus that has buried itself to slumber, much as he had done. It spread wide its gelatin arms, to make itself large and imposing, suckers flaring and glowing faintly pink against the black water. He could not see the beak in the center of the flailing arms, but he could hear it clicking as the octopus threatened to relieve him of a finger or toe should he come too close. The Swimmer watched the display patiently, and the octopus grew confident that it could retreat without fear of this predator giving chase. It expelled a stream of water and launched itself down the length of the ship’s hull, disappearing into shadow.

The Swimmer looked up through the dense water, gauging the level of light overhead. There was none to speak of. It was night. He could safely kick to the surface without worsening his poor condition. His burned skin protested as he scissored his legs, but he bit his lower lip and lifted his chin. Streamlined, his long body straight as a board, he pressed his legs together and used them in unison, as a paddle and rudder, rising swiftly. The pressure change was always apparent, his blood pumping through his veins with greater difficulty as it worked to purge the gas bubbles that built up at depth. The sudden change of depth would kill a human man, but the Swimmer’s body was designed for these complex biological adjustments. Like a chameleon changing color effortlessly as it slid from brown branch to green leaf, his body responded automatically to the changing environment.

His ascent half complete, he arrived in an underwater current that wrapped his body and pushed him west, toward the slope of the submerged land and the shore at its summit. He relaxed his tired muscles and allowed the current to carry him, his gills fluttering as the water rushed inside of him and oxygenated his blood. He closed his eyes as he floated along, the image of the dead merman returning to him. What had happened to the creature when his captors hauled him to shore? Had they discarded him like garbage? Had they skinned him and divvied up his flesh? He had never heard of humans consuming his kind as food, but it made sense. Unless they could not stomach the idea of eating something so alike them in form and function. Perhaps they had paraded him into their community, a prize won from the sea, and displayed him like a trophy. He had seen large fish hung up on hooks, still bleeding from gashes in their cheeks, while humans stood beside them, smiling victoriously, strange boxes full of light flashing approval.

Lost in unpleasant fantasy, the Swimmer did not sense the creature plowing through the water to reach him. He did not feel the disturbance of water as it rode the same current that carried him, as it whipped its savage tail with feverish strength to speed it forward. He didn’t hear the gaping jaws widen beneath the cruel, snub nose. He didn’t hear the muscular sheath of its throat telescope, or the rush of water through the fine sieve of layered, yellow teeth. But in the final moment, the moment before the mouth would snap around his torso and begin to tear him apart, the Swimmer opened his eyes.

The shark was already upon him. It was too late to swim away, and he didn’t have the strength to flee. But he was agile, weak though he was, and he managed to twist his body sideways. He threw back his head to avoid the snapping teeth, and brought his fist down on the snub nose with all the force he could muster. It was enough to disturb the animal, enough to force its anvil head to turn away and cause the crash of teeth on teeth to miss his leg by inches. The shark’s momentum carried it swiftly past the stationary Swimmer. It disappeared into dark blue water, but only for a moment. It circled back around, heaving out its fins and drawing them back, whipping its tail with new fury. The mouth opened slowly, and the shark swallowed the murky water tens of gallons at a time, like a black hole devouring stars. As it closed on the Swimmer, ready to strike again at the easy targets of dangling legs and arms... the Swimmer steadied himself and raised one hand, his arm extended and his palm flat…

And then the pale flesh of his palm turned blue. A vivid, fluorescent blend of blue and white. It was the glow of so many deep sea creatures that maneuvered through the darkness with no light source to guide them but the light they produced with their own chemical genius. His fingers were so alive with light they seemed almost on fire, thin lines of cold white flame, the webbing between them icy blue. The lines that etched his skin stood out as well, white on blue, like fine cracks in the hardened black layer of lava as it cools above boiling, igneous fluid.

The shark slammed its jaws shut before it reached the Swimmer, frightened by the light he now emitted from his hand. It tried to adjust its course and swim past him a second time, but it was coming too fast and could not move aside. With all its weight, the shark barreled into the Swimmer and drove him back, out of the current and into open water. Its textured skin scraped against his ribs, scraping off layers of already sensitive flesh. Worse still, the fin on the side of its hulking body slapped against the Swimmer’s chest and raked across him until its tip caught on his gill and penetrated his throat. The moment of contact was so brief, the Swimmer hardly realized what had happened. But the force of the fin’s penetration and the swiftness of its withdrawal left the Swimmer’s gill torn away, hanging on by a flexible bow of cartilage and little else. The shark powered itself away from him, the tail whipping laterally to effect its urgent retreat. In seconds, it was gone.

The Swimmer, already devastated by exposure to the sun, was now left bruised and bleeding, as if a battering ram covered in glass shards had been driven into him. He gagged on the blood that ran from his injured gill into his throat, sputtering to purge it from him before it entered his lungs. He slapped his glowing palm against the injury, to hold the flapping gill in place, and wrapped his other arm around his bruised ribs. They could be broken. He wasn’t sure.

Overwhelmed and frightened by the ordeal, the Swimmer began to sink.

“I need you to come back.”

Her voice again, returning to his mind.

He forgot the pain and began to kick. His legs worked hard, in unison, while he held his arms close to his torso to protect against further injury. He found the current that had carried him into the shark’s path. With great relief, he allowed it to sweep him away a second time and carry him, slowly, toward the shore. He wasn’t far below the surface now, and when he looked up he could see the distorted glow of the moon. It was hidden by clouds, less bright than on other nights, but he recognized its celestial form nonetheless and took comfort in it.

By the time he reached the shore, he had only enough strength to crawl from the surf. The sand and rock beneath his body was rough to the touch, all but torturous. Still, he had reached the land. The moon was high in the sky, still concealed by clouds. He could not afford to lose consciousness here, on the beach, where the moon would give way in a few hours to the scorching sun. But his head was still swimming, a persistent darkness threatening to steal away his clarity and plunge him into a deep sleep. If he passed out here, he would surely die.

Like his nameless brother in the net. Burned pink. Eyes clouded over.

A dead fish.

He crawled farther up the beach, away from the water, and began to dig.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ms. Grace’s office was empty when Brandi arrived. She fidgeted by the door for a few moments, arms crossing her chest, but finally entered the room uninvited.

She wandered first to the bookshelf just inside the door. The top and bottom shelves each held an array of tchotchkes, the kind that littered souvenir shops up and down the New England coast. Objects constructed of shells: a box, a house, a boat. The delicate shells were ostensibly procured at the beach by industrious local artisans. In reality, she had never seen a single shell on the beach in such pristine condition. She suspected the shells were actually imported from warmer climates with gentler surf, where a shell might survive the journey from sea to shore unbroken. Regardless, the fact that Ms. Grace had these objects on prominent display was telling. It suggested to Brandi what the woman’s flat accent should have suggested all along.

Her collection of books included the expected art and poetry volumes, but also a number of textbooks used by Brandi and her classmates. Did Ms. Grace keep the books on hand for easy reference if and when a student complained to her about a particular class? Maybe. Or maybe Ms. Grace actually worked her way through the curriculum to better relate to her students. Brandi surprised herself with such a generous assessment of the woman.

Ms. Grace’s desk featured a single upright photograph in a simple pewter frame. Her hair was different, of a style at least five years out of date. Brandi knew Ms. Grace to be up with current trends, so the photograph must have been five years old as well. In it, Ms. Grace was sitting on a park bench, wearing a pale orange sun dress, cut low in front to show off the freckles on her sun kissed chest. A handsome man stood behind the bench, hunched over, his arms wrapped around her slender shoulders. His dark hair was swept back. His eyes were wrinkled at the corners. Permanently, or by the broad smile he wore as they posed for the camera? Brandi couldn’t tell.

They were happy together. That much was certain.