The Waterproof Bible (6 page)

In his mind he rehearsed the conversation he would have with her. He pictured her stretching, her arms over
her head.
You’ll never believe it
, he’d say.
I thought you were dead
. With a small, embarrassed smile on his lips, Lewis opened the bedroom door, but Lisa was still lying in bed. He checked for a pulse. He still couldn’t find one. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he watched daylight brighten the room. He checked once more and then dialled 911. The receiver was still in his hand as he sat down beside her.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, having already begun to believe that his failure to find a pulse had been what killed her.

Lewis looked up from the carpet and tried to smile. She walked over to him, put her hand over his and squeezed, but Lewis did not squeeze back.

“Really?” she asked. With her other hand she lightly touched his face. Lewis looked down and pulled his hand away. “Lewis, I can’t tell you how unique an opportunity this is for you. Can we at least sleep beside each other? That’s always nice.”

Lewis was struck by her use of the word “nice,” which seemed to be without sarcasm or irony. It had been a long time since he’d heard anyone use it that way.

“Yes,” Lewis said. “That would be nice.”

Holding hands, they walked across the carpet and into the bedroom. They undressed. They climbed into the bed and pulled up the white cotton sheet. Lewis enjoyed the stillness, but then she began violently kicking. He sat up. She kicked and kicked and kicked. When the sheet was untucked from the foot of the mattress, she stopped.

“Why do they do that? It just makes my skin crawl,”
she said. She was asleep before Lewis could reply.

The next morning Lewis was woken by the sound of a door opening. Surprising himself with his agility, he leapt from the bed. Pulling off the white cotton sheet, he wrapped it around himself and poked his head out of the bedroom. The woman was dressed and was taking the chain off the door.

“Where are you going?” Lewis asked.

“I gotta get to work.”

“You have a day job?”

“You sound surprised.”

“Being God isn’t a full-time gig?”

“Who would I invoice?”

“What’s your name?”

“There are so many.”

“Tell me.”

“Pick one.”

“Satan?”

“Come on. Take this seriously. Not many people get to do this.”

“Lisa?”

“Not very grand. But okay,” Lisa said. She left.

Lewis closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the door as it shut. He heard the brush as the bottom of the door met the frame. He listened to the ridiculously concise melody of the lock mechanism sliding into place. Then he dropped the sheet. He picked up his pants. He was surprised to find that his wallet was still there, with his money inside it. He checked the inside pocket of his jacket, but the envelope remained, seemingly untouched.

Aberystwyth remained crouched behind a red pickup truck on the third floor of the Ultramart Parking Garage, breathing quietly through her gills, as the white Honda Civic pulled into the parking spot three cars away. She waited until the driver was in the elevator, then stood and walked to the car. She kept her arms extended, but her steps remained awkward, and she wobbled on her long green legs.

Awkwardly kneeling at the Honda’s back right tire, she reached into the wheel well and slid her hand along the smooth curved metal. Aby had already searched the back right wheel well of every other car, truck and van that had parked in this garage during the last seventy-two hours and found nothing, so her expectations were low. She opened her gills and pushed out a sigh, but then her fingers touched something small and rectangular that was magnetized to the steel. Aby pulled out her arm, and in her hand was a small black box. It took some time before she found the tiny button she needed to push to make the lid open, but when she did she found a key inside.

Aby let out a small cry of victory, her voice reverberating off the concrete walls of the parking garage. With the key in her hand, she approached the driver’s door. The webbing of her fingers made it difficult to
push the key into the lock, but it turned easily once she got it in. Opening the door was simple, but getting behind the wheel proved more difficult.

The distance between the front of the seat and the pedals was considerably shorter than the length of her legs. Holding on to the roof of the car, Aby curled her right leg underneath the steering column. She sat down so that her knees were on either side of the wheel. She looked at the dashboard. She ran her fingers down from the steering column until she found the ignition. She inserted the key. She turned the key towards her, remembered that she was supposed to turn it away from her and tried again. The engine started.

Having memorized the difference between the symbols “D” and “R,” Aby successfully put the car into reverse. She reversed two inches and then stopped. Twisting out of the car, she walked to the back to see if everything was fine. It was. She returned to the driver’s seat, curled around the steering wheel and backed up two more inches. She got out to make sure she hadn’t hit anything. She hadn’t. Aby repeated this process until, seventeen minutes later, she had successfully backed out of the parking space.

Pushing the stick from R to D, Aby turned the wheel all the way to the right, moved a few inches forward, then got out and checked the front of the car. She hadn’t collided with anything. She repeated this pattern, gaining confidence as she followed the out signs, but her progress was still punctuated by stops to make sure she hadn’t hit anything. On the down ramp there were no cars to collide with, so she made no stops. By the time she reached P1, she was able to drive the
twenty feet to the ticket window without interruption.

As Aby approached the kiosk, she was so focused on keeping the gas and brake pedals straight that she almost forgot to cover her gills. This was something Pabbi had repeatedly and emphatically stressed. Looking around, she found nothing that would suffice and resorted to pulling her T-shirt up and over her mouth. There was little she could do about her green skin. A rectangle of paper, which Pabbi had told her was called a parking stub, was in the left-hand corner of the dash. Rolling down the window, Aby stopped and held out the stub. She kept her eyes down but needn’t have, as the cashier didn’t even look up.

Aby handed him one of the bills Pabbi had given her. The cashier gave her other bills and some coins. A long, skinny barrier in front of her lifted up, and Aby, blinking with excitement, drove forward. It had taken her fifty-seven minutes to exit the parking garage.

Everything Aberystwyth knew about being unwatered she had learnt six weeks earlier, from her father, Pabbi, who lived on the fourteenth floor of an apartment building in an area of town Aby rarely frequented. Late one evening, completely unannounced, Aby had swum to his door and knocked. She felt nervous in the hallway. She knocked again. The door was opened, suddenly and with such force that Aby had to hold onto the door jamb to avoid being pulled inside.

Pabbi wasn’t well dressed. He’d gained weight since she’d last seen him. Several seconds passed during which neither father nor daughter said a word.

“I need your help,” Aby said.

“Okay.”

“I’m going to get her.”

Pabbi needed no further explanation to understand who “her” was. “Ah, Aby,” he said. “That’s … that’s big.”

“I know.”

“Are you still Aquatic?”

“I am.”

“Devoutly?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re planning on Returning her?”

“I am.”

“Oh, Aby,” he said.

Pabbi did not move from the door jamb. He looked at the line where the red carpet from his apartment met the grey carpet in the hallway. A window was open in his living room, and the current pushed through the doorway, causing their bodies to sway in unison. The gills in his neck flapped open and he pushed a stream of water through them. Letting go of the door jamb, Pabbi backed into his apartment. “You’d better come in,” he said.

With a quick pull of her arms, Aby swam inside. Pabbi began making a pot of stryim. Neither spoke until it had finished brewing. The kitchen table was cleared of dishes, and Pabbi and Aby bobbed around it.

“Why don’t you come around more?” Pabbi asked.

“I try.”

“Not very hard.”

“Will you help me?”

“It’s best if you just leave her alone.”

“I can’t.”

“Tell me this—are you going because you want to save her? Or to find out why she left us?”

“Can’t it be both?”

“For you, maybe.”

“So you’ll help me?”

“Have you ever breathed air, Aby?”

“No.”

“Walked on legs?”

“No.”

“Tried to pass?”

“No.”

“It’s too much for you.”

“Not if you help me.”

“Even if I help you.”

“I’ll do it even if you don’t help me,” Aby said. She looked up.

“That’s probably true.”

“Then you’ll help me?”

Pabbi pushed a long stream of water from his gills. “As much as I can,” he said.

Leaving her at the table, Pabbi swam to his bookshelf. He pulled down a volume unlike any Aby had seen before. He set it on the kitchen table. Waiting until she was looking over his shoulder, he opened it. The book looked like an atlas, but it didn’t illustrate the currents of the ocean. Aby realized that it was a map of land. Flipping through the pages, Pabbi came to an illustration of a large country, coloured pink. He put his thumb on Halifax. He dragged it across the shape, stopping at Morris, Manitoba. Even on the page, the distance seemed enormous.

“It will take you days,” Pabbi said.

“Okay.”

“Maybe a week.”

“Okay.”

“And that’s only if you manage to steal a car.”

“What’s a car?” Aby asked.

Pabbi flipped open his gills and pushed a stream of water through them.

It is important to understand that, for devout Aquatics, simply being unwatered is a sin. At the core of the religion is a belief in the
Finnyfir
, or Great Flood. In this way, Aquaticism is not unlike Judaism or Christianity, but with one central difference: where those religions believe God flooded the world in order to start again, Aquatics believe God simply liked water better.

Aquatic scripture teaches that God found the land imperfect. He thought the mountains were messy, the deserts too dry and the fjords a little showy. He didn’t like the way the creatures He’d put on land did nothing but fight amongst themselves. The only thing God liked about His creation was the water. He loved the lakes, rivers and oceans. He loved the way water moved. He loved the colours it came in and the sounds it made. God liked the sorts of creatures that lived in it, and was very proud that it could exist as a solid, a liquid or a gas.

So, after a time, God decided to make it rain for forty days and forty nights, until the world was covered with water. Of course, this killed the majority of the things that lived on land. But as the water rose, a small number of those creatures discovered an ability they hadn’t known they had. After the water spilled from the banks of rivers and over the shorelines, after it rose above the roofs of houses and above the tallest trees, when the
creatures’ fingers could no longer hold the flotsam they’d clung to and the jetsam they’d grasped, they fell beneath the surface and their lungs made the decision for them. Pulling in water as an automatic nervous response, some of them discovered they could breathe it. These creatures, Aquatics believe, were God’s chosen. He had given them the ability to breathe the water, leaving all the others to perish.

And perish they did. Land creatures died by the billions. But the Hliðafgoð took up residence below the surface of the water and thrived. Then, after thousands of years, God allowed the waters to recede, exposing the land. God did this to test the Hliðafgoð. Since He had never taken away their ability to breathe air, He wanted to see which of His creatures were worthy of His amphibious gift—and which were not.

God had judged the land to be unworthy; those who were attracted to it, who would return to it, would be revealed as unworthy as well. This is why the Hliðafgoð had decided—or at least most of them had—to suffer as little contact with humans as possible. Humans were called
Siðri
, which literally translated means “prone to spit in the eye of God.”

While Aquatics believe that it’s a sin to breathe the air, it is a minor sin. Within Aquaticism, there is only one sin that is considered an act so blasphemous it is beyond forgiveness, and this is to die with air-filled lungs. This, Aquatics believe, curses your soul to wander disembodied and alone, unwatered and unforgiven for eternity.

But even worse, these damned souls retain all of their memories. They remember everyone they’ve ever loved and continue to love them just as strongly, if not
more so, than when they were alive. Their desire to be with them, to touch them or talk to them, remains eternally unsatisfied. In
Gofdeill
, the unwatered dead are called the
sála-glorsol-tinn
, which loosely translates to “famished souls.” It was from this fate that Aby hoped to save her mother.