Underjungle, page 15
We live in water, but somehow I had the image that the blood in his mouth wouldn’t dissolve away.
We continued forward. A giant sphere, and a smaller one circling it, in an orbit. Some things do not exist in nature, but we had started inventing them now.
We headed back to the Akla camp. It would be a four-day journey. We tossed him scraps of fish we caught. He was giddy when he heard the singing at the camp’s border. I’ve never understood if the Akla females sing all the time or just when there is something to say, like now. The Banjxa had given up trying to break through our ring, but those adolescent ululations set him off. He swam circles inside our own, frequently changing directions. If there had been more than one of him, he’d have attempted to school, but he was the lunatic. The loner.
Akla boys and girls watched the spectacle. Their numbers grew as more and more of them arrived, until they’d formed a shoal of their own inside the camp. Shoals are messy things, whether they’re fish or yc gathered together. A mass of unruly creatures moving every which way, in a clump. But when they begin to school, united in the same direction, it becomes a movement. Then they’re worth noticing, because you want to know what they’ll do. Then you observe. Perhaps you spy. When our Gjala started marking themselves just as the Akla did, that was one. Same for when they took their rage out on the octopuses, as horrifying as that was.
The Banjxa attacks were a movement, whether they came at us or at themselves. So was making shapes in the sand with shells and stones. And once, before anyone can remember, an Akla marked his skin. Maybe that was the first.
You might think the ocean is all movement, but a lot of it is ebb and flow, and then it is just muddling around.
Was our prisoner a movement? Confining him, I mean. What if he wasn’t crazy? Would we have done that to him then? No, we would have killed and eaten him, and taken pleasure in the succulence of his flesh. But maybe we also would have played with him, because sometimes it helps to tenderize the older ones first.
He was giddy seeing all the Akla children. We could taste his saliva mixing into the water.
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A movement of limited movement. Call it that. We kept the Banjxa soldier contained. Every once in a while, if he tried to stray, an Akla would swim above and drop a boulder through the water column, confining him or pinning him down. Just as the Caavaju had taught us to do.
He seemed to enjoy this.
He regarded the stones as manna tumbling down to him from above, in giant chunks. So rich and varied is the world we live in. He’d snap at them hungrily. His mouth stayed bloody. If you added a few children to nibble on, he’d have everything he could ever need. Oh, what fun, the game!
The ocean courses and brings you everything. You only need a little patience.
“Children,” he asked, as the Akla sang at him, “which ones of you are here for dinner? I like to plan out my meals.”
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Everything in the ocean comes with salt. How tasteless the food in the land creatures’ world must be. The blandness and monotony of living there. Do they all eventually starve to death, once dissatisfaction overtakes them?
To live where there are no resources. To live where it is dry. Where there’s not enough gravity or buoyancy—no neutrality, so that you can just float. They must all want something better, for themselves. For their kin. But does it exist? Maybe they dream about it. Fever dreams where there’s no water to put them out, fantasies boiling inside their heads, turning their brains into sea urchins, the deliciousness that’s just beneath the spines. Maybe it’s the ones with the best imaginations who are able to stay alive, whose fantasies are sufficient.
And then the Akla adolescents attacked. It was bound to happen. Like I’ve said, the inevitability of what was in the current. They attacked with a song, a guttural riff of vengeance and hunger. Aaa tried to stop them, but her voice only joined theirs. It made it richer and filled the unwhisperable water. Until it was an uncontrollable torrent. The Banjxa soldier resisted, but there were too many mouths. When he saw he couldn’t win, he changed allegiances and started eating himself. He was greedy about getting the choicest parts.
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I had no appetite for him. I don’t know if the Akla youth felt more cheated or repulsed when he began gorging on his own anatomy. It’s hard to know at what point he lost consciousness, but it’s reasonable to say that happened before we found him.
By the time we arrived, only his body was left.
It was a mystery why the Banjxa had destroyed their nests. But we weren’t going to visit them all—as if somehow that had become our responsibility, even while their soldiers kept up their attacks. When you swim from your camp, you head into an abyss. It doesn’t have to be deep. Chasms stretch in every direction. The whole ocean is our home, but it’s not true that we know it. There are creatures in the depths with distensible stomachs that can accommodate your whole body and digest you while you’re still alive. Or dazzle you with a lure until your flesh welcomes the serrations of their teeth. Or call you “cousin” or “brother” before taking your life. When you see these creatures, the idea that you come from the same place as they is nauseating. So you stop and sniff. You tell yourself to fin warily. Or else you decide that speed is the only way to a safer beyond, even if it is into the unknown. Maybe that’s how Gola felt when he swam off. He just got there sooner.
I saw Aaa along the farthest edge of the throng, but she didn’t say a word. She was speechless.
There was more devastation on the journey back to our Gjala camp. Aaa remained at her own camp to lead and protect it. Maybe the Banjxa had grown addicted to attacking, so when they ran out of adversaries they simply turned on themselves. Addicted. Just like the sharks, amid their sprawls of blood. The more there is, the more you want. You swim through it, and it becomes a part of you. You smell and taste it. You can’t pretend it isn’t there.
The Banjxa families in their camps would never have seen their soldiers coming. Never have imagined they’d attack.
This is how I imagine it: the Banjxa soldiers thought, why deny yourself something you enjoy for a single moment longer than you have to? We can feel our camps as we near them. The temptation just grows stronger.
We deny ourselves in love, teasing ourselves with frustration. Every sniff and swallow of ocean water isn’t just a hint, but a promise of what awaits. That’s what makes it delectable and something to prolong. Sometimes our males will wait weeks to culminate their acts of love, until the moment when their partners have turned into sponges and can only absorb them. But in battle, you strike when that striking is unexpected. And then you kill completely, because there is no coming back for more.
As they attacked, the Banjxa thought: this is easy, this is glorious, this is satisfying, this is fun. And they might have said: I like. I like. I want this. If they composed a song, it was a love song to the killing, and it drifted between the molecules. But like the sharks, they could detect every single particle, every note. The song would grow stronger with each camp they reached, until it swept across them like a current, and the only thing better than the memory of killing was killing again.
Maybe I’m making some of this up, but that doesn’t mean I’m not right.
Sometimes things spread.
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That’s the song I sang on the journey back. The song that didn’t exist, which I couldn’t stop singing. A song of death.
Yes, once there were songs about other things. I sang of the ocean, of its tidal forces and warmth and breadth, the way it swept around you and embraced you, fed you, bathed you, brought you everything you needed, and took away what you didn’t. It was all there was—the connectivity, the world, the past, the present, and the future—and the only thing the ocean didn’t promise was love, although if you were lucky it would bring that to you, too. But then it was your job to keep it.
That ocean has disappeared, even if it’s the same water. The whales don’t sing to us anymore.
I don’t want to sing about the future. Or the present. I think I’d be happy to live in the past even more than I already do. Go back. Go back, like the salmon. We all know where we come from. We can taste the minerals, feel the electromagnetic pull, differentiate between minuscule variations in temperatures, telegraph our position with changes in our grammar, and remember the topography of the ocean floor just as specifically as we can a face. But that was supposed to mean we also knew where we were heading.
Your face was a map. I don’t have it anymore. I remember it and see it like an apparition pouring out of my veins, but I don’t know how it would have changed. Across the years we should have had together. I only know the current took it away, particle by particle. It takes away everything that matters. And what doesn’t matter, too.
We love the water and depend on it, but the water is indifferent. We give it everything, but we can’t trust it.
Can the land creatures trust the earth and air? We’ve seen the earth collapse along its edges, skidding down the continental shelves and slopes. Then it becomes a part of you, and the air above us grows fetid and dark, but we’re no experts in that realm.
Of course I wouldn’t live there. I don’t know anybody who would.
Here’s a tale of love: a thousand babies swimming across your skin, bubbles gurgling from their gills. Or another: the ocean swirling with your taste and scent so that I’m with you even when I’m not, or with a hundred of you when we’re together, because you’re everywhere and I’m everywhere, and that’s also a song because I don’t know what else to call it.
Sink to me. Sink to me. Or I’ll sink myself into the abyss, where it’s quiet and nothing ever leaves.
Was I going home, or down? Does it matter? I was descending. We were thousands. And then came the attack, in all its finality and brutality. I’d witnessed the devastation the Banjxa soldiers had brought before, but this was Banjxa, Caavaju, and Ecdda all together. And maybe also Dilidi. It was a swarm. Not the way fish school in a mass, but how algae spreads, mindless and relentless, suffocating. That song. The Banjxa tore into us from the flanks, compressing us as we swam. Then we were as stretched out as a giant eel when the Caavaju assailed us from the front (or were we more like a sea cucumber, defenseless and only able to expel a little fluid from our anuses, along with our digestive tracts?), and the Ecdda came from behind, picking off our swimmers one by one. The moment when you’re turning around is when you’re especially susceptible to a strike. Or to many, which was how the Caavaju had organized their assault. Were there sharks? Now there didn’t need to be. They set on us five against one. We’re not good at math, but even we can figure that one out.
Our tribes had always lived apart. We knew one another, knew each tribe’s territory, its habits, and its smell, but we kept our distance. Sometimes we passed one another in the open ocean, and sometimes we could sense each other’s electromagnetic fields. But this was something else, something new. There were alliances now. Tribes working together. Sure, it sounded nice—but the goal was annihilation. Tribes teamed up to do that faster, in a frenzy of break, kill, pound. Like the waves, relentless.
And, yes, there were also sharks.
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A sea of blood. Our own. As thick as squid ink. They let me live. They saw the markings on my chest.
So there’d be someone left to tell the story. Always one.
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I watched them die. In the moments as I turned. In the split seconds, as the Ecdda launched into their flanks, some with their mouths agape, and others with sprays of stones they spat into the gashes. In the stoniness of the Banjxa eyes, as sharks attacked our swimmers’ dorsal fins and tails, and their broken spines twisted outside of their skin. And in the blood, as it spread through the water—an ocean inundating ocean—so thick I couldn’t separate the individual Gjala anymore.
Sinews and lost consciousness mixed as one.
I ate what I could, because anything less would have been obscene.
We are timeless, and yet there has to be a first. Even a first time the water moves a certain way. But does that mean there’ll be a second, third, or fourth time, eddying into forever? Are there things that happen only once after they’ve been invented? I only loved you once. I only loved once at all, but I didn’t invent the emotion. There was someone who had to be the first. We go on and on about our fantastical octopus, but not about that. If there’s a first, does there also have to be a last?
I was the first and last to love you. That’s my origin story.
We become creatures of action so we don’t have to think. Just because we can, it doesn’t mean it’s worth the effort. Or the discomfort.
Or the pain. Did the Banjxa think? Did the Caavaju or the Ecdda in the moment they attacked? Or the Dilidi, as they lurked at a distance? Or had all of them stopped thinking by then?
We know the truth, but we swim past it. Out of fear that it will slow us down.
And who says love was the first emotion we felt? Maybe it was the last.
I swim past the heads. And the faces. Gjala and Akla heads tumbling through the water, severed from the bodies they were attached to, wriggling with hungry fish, a thousand tails twitching as they feed, so the heads look like giant sea urchins plummeting all around me, and the twitching tails are the only things that aren’t oozing, and I can hear every one of them slapping back and forth, back and forth, pushing the water away.
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Most of the time you try to take an inward look there’s nothing you can see. So many butterflyfish have fake eyes on their flanks, but someone should try connecting a real one to a heart, where it could finally do some good.
Maybe the land creatures’ eyes work differently. Or maybe they eat them when they start to fail. Once you eat the eyes, the sockets can be a good place to store some food.
The Banjxa, Caavaju, Ecdda, and Dilidi left me because of the markings on my chest, but they couldn’t have thought I was an Akla, not up close. It would take a generation of living in their waters for me to smell like them. That’s the only test. Not just to sing their songs, but to exude their stink.
Maybe the other tribes suspected how the markings could be used. To tell the stories of what we saw. To say the impossible. About what they had done. And to do it in a way that lasted longer than any of us. So there would be a messenger.
I sing a song of devastation. I wear it on my chest. It’s a song of destruction. Of decimation.
I’ve seen everyone cascade around me. I chased after them for a closer look. At some point, we’re all heaviness in the water. The currents take us. The ocean sweeps up its mess. Rocks rain through it. You can do anything with the rocks you can conceive of. You can write names in the sand.
It’s a song of love. And commitment.
I’ve seen it with my eyes.
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It would be a three-day swim back to our camp, more depending on the currents. I’d travel it alone, but no one would touch me. I was untouchable now. That doesn’t mean I was protected.
To be touched in a way you don’t want is to feel your whole body stiffen, and nothing in the ocean is like that, where everything is fluid, flexible, curved. Except for the pointiness of teeth. And the fractured edges of bones and stones. I was unmarked, except for the ones Aaa had scored into my skin.
It was a different ocean now. I coursed its seas, some of them so unchanged I thought they belonged to a foreign world. Pastures of rippling sand. Garden eels poking their heads out of them, like sea-grass. Pelagic rays undulating past, as though they were unexpected currents themselves.
And yet, just beyond, there were bodies decomposing, shifting in the surge. Bloated heaps that every nearby creature would wriggle through and fill its belly on. And even those that don’t have bellies. Sometimes it’s easy to dream of a world without consciousness, but you’d need consciousness for that.
I passed ridges. I passed walls, ones that tumbled down to the ocean floor and into trenches, where all you have to do is sink beside them to watch the last evidence of life fade out.
I stopped. I ate. I went after good, clean food. Animals I could eat that weren’t a way of cherishing the remains of our own. You kill, you eat. There’s not supposed to be more of a story.
I passed more scenes of fighting. Of annihilation. Because that’s what it was. Nests that had been built high, from stones and shells—not the little mounds that crabs sometimes push together, but ones tall enough to fit our bodies and even some of our kin. And then others that had been knocked down. More of those. Bloated heaps of those. Rubble nests. Rubble homes. It would be nice to think there was no life trapped inside, but when you see the scavengers approaching, you know that’s not the case. You can smell and taste that life as you swim by, and sometimes even hear it. The feeding and the squealing. The scavengers eating, and others dying.
There’s no way to save a life once half of it has already been digested.
If your eyes were positioned to look inside you, at least you’d be able to see which parts were gone.
I kept swimming, counting the surges and tides, and the trickles of light that made it this far down and signaled when it was day and night.
I swam through storms of the planet’s making and the ones we had made ourselves. I swam through nothing. Open plains of empty water. Da’nāhai. It had never felt like that to me before.
I swam through memories. At least those were full. I shut my mouth tightly so none would spill out. But they do—then you have to snap at them before they drift away. Maybe that’s what’s in the mind of snapping sharks. They’re after blood, but also the memory of it.
