Underjungle, page 17
Did it matter now in the face of so much death that I had my family? Was that supposed to be enough?
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The ocean throbbed and pulsed. Concussed. You had to swim into the farthest, most isolated caves if you didn’t want to feel it—and then squeeze into their smallest nooks. Many of the smaller fish, the herring, snappers, and fusiliers, were disoriented enough they plowed into rocks. You would see them with cuts across their faces, their dumb and unmovable expressions belying their astonishment and quiet humiliation. They’d counted on us to keep the order, so you could sense their disappointment. The larger fish, the jacks and tuna, stayed in deeper, open water, but they’d tumble out of formation when they tried to school. The billfish picked them off, but they had accidents, too. To see a swordfish impaled on another’s bill is unnerving. There’s no way to pull it off, and with the added weight and mass, they both mostly spiral down, in a paroxysm of flailing.
The sea cucumbers were blithe, except when they were hit. Then there was no end to their complaining.
The fighting wore on until it became the ocean’s normal. Our normal. For a while, the Fantaskla held the others off. We teamed together. There was satisfaction in fighting with family by my side. We knew each other’s smells, and we understood them. But we were not invincible. So we learned how each other tasted. I don’t know if I was supposed to care less or more when one of them died, compared to the rest of us. All life seems important.
The land creature’s life must have been important, too. Even if we can’t know how it felt. About itself, or the others it resembled. I don’t know if other creatures in the world are able to experience love, or if they just put on a show until they get the things they want. I suspect many crab species are like that.
I used to think we were different, or even better, but I am less inclined to believe that now. I can’t even figure my own self out.
So I fought. All of us did.
What we lacked as two tribes we found as three. The Akla fought beside us, covered in glyphs—as I was now—their adolescents screeching. The Fantaskla didn’t know what to make of them, but the Fantaskla remained a mystery, too. They didn’t talk much. They watched us intently. They didn’t differentiate between their females and males. They didn’t need to change their genders.
Their adolescents didn’t scream.
Aaa battled by my side. We didn’t speak much either. Sound travels easily in the ocean. I’ve already said there can’t be whispered secrets. Not if others are near.
We didn’t require many words. You don’t need them to fight. They expose your trajectory and location. Your intent.
And maybe, if we are to admit it, intention isn’t always clear. It is grains of sand scooped up from the ocean floor, and when there are too many of them in the water, they block everything else out.
You were never returning. Gola did. Our offspring did. Their offspring, too. Generations can be born in the gaps between teeth. But you wouldn’t. You’ll always be inside these waters, and inside of me. Inside my thoughts and bones and voice. But I know that’s not enough. The ocean is many things, so it will never be a single mineral or a song. Not if it needs to be life-sustaining.
I watched Aaa strike and tear. She’d threatened me the first time we met and never retracted her warning: “If a Gjala mates with an Akla, we’ll kill you all.” But we were all dying now, Gjala, Akla, and Fantaskla, and Banjxa, Caavaju, Dilidi, and Ecdda too, and there weren’t many words present. Maybe words were our past.
Maybe I’ll save my words for you, except for the ones written on my chest. Those you don’t ever have to speak.
One day, perhaps, we’ll have new tribes. But no matter where we go, despite the cultures we create and languages we use, we say the same things, filled with beauty, hope, and mistrust.
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When we found the land creature, it seemed piteous and miraculous. That’s what all of us thought. It was easy to mistake consensus for communality or shared convictions. You can do anything you like in the ocean with a shell or a stone. We know that. But the creature’s discovery pushed us in directions we had never needed to explore. Its body seemed so frail. So ill-suited to living in any realm. Did it need our embrace? We dissected it instead.
The ocean is perfect because it is the only one there is. Maybe our seas aren’t all that exist on earth, but they are all that matter. The rippled underside of the surface is a flimsy sheath, a warning for us to stay away. But there’s no way to prevent others from falling or diving in. The petrels and shearwaters know this. The dolphins and whales flirt with the sky as well, but they always end up coming back. They never talk to us about what they see on land. I don’t think that’s even where they go.
When I pulled the creature from the rift, it had slipped through the last luminescence of the shallow zones to our world. Our ocean had bathed it and softened its skin. It was swaddled by sand. And it was repulsive.
It’s easy to unite around something you despise, or at least that turns your stomach. But the land creature wasn’t our enemy. It was already dead. Plus, the enemy of my enemy may still be something you shouldn’t eat. Hate and nausea are funny things. They don’t make you feel good about anything. Not yourself or one another. You’ll never be able to rely on them to bind you together. There are better glues in the phospho-proteinaceous secretions of sandcastle worms or in the cement that oozes from behind a barnacle’s eyes before adhering to its forehead.
Then there was envy. For what we imagined the creature could do with those limbs. Yes, there were animals among us who could move shells and small pebbles along the ocean floor—shrimp and crabs and fish—but none who could move big ones, or had thought that worth doing. Certainly we never had.
Did we need to now? Even before we started to build, we discovered we could use the stones and shells to make patterns and designs. Just like the white-spotted puffers, who make their nests in the sand. No male would think to copy another’s and then pass those designs off as his own, except as a show of sarcasm. Besides, you find different sediments and topography where you build, so no two constructions can be the same. A lot of that is chance, but the rest is how you react to what’s before you. We’d also always had love, which is the ultimate form of self-expression, even among the Ecdda. And so are songs—my point is we weren’t stymied. But suddenly that wasn’t enough. True, the miserable or unlucky don’t necessarily find love, but they can sing about wanting it instead. That is also a chance for beauty.
But once you decide something’s missing from your world, foundations start to fall apart.
There were many reasons for our rupture. Everything ruptures. Even in the ocean, where water has the tendency to push things together. Even after they’re roiled and tossed apart.
But there was more to it than that. There has always been the ocean, since it is impossible to conceive of existence without the water. But water isn’t all there is. We are surrounded by the remnants of the brilliant corals and fissures and gravity and skeletal life. There are hydrothermal vents hissing sulfur and bubbling with bacteria. There are trenches, and somewhere even deeper inside them there is fire and magma and the planet’s core. There are places where the world is frozen and smoldering at the very same time, separated only by molecules that jump back and forth between them, and somehow there is existence and survival there, half death, half life, something that is neither of those or both. The world has been like that forever, which is as long as any of us can remember. We talk about Ooo, our ur-octopus, but the ocean goes back further.
To the beginning. When atoms mixed and molecules formed, and life on land wasn’t plausible. I don’t know how leaving the ocean ever seemed like something to consider. Our songs begin and re-begin. Each time there are verses, bridges, and refrains. But there is only one end, when you close your mouth. When you clench your teeth.
I don’t think the land creature is new or that it has recently evolved. Maybe it needs to evolve some more. I don’t know what kind of song it is—if it is one or many. The universe is ocean, pouring in all directions. It is possibility, even the most unlikely ones. Without gravity there is nothing to keep the water in place. All the universe is water, but the air above the ocean’s sheath is water that is so diluted it’s become a barrier to reaching the other parts. We see the stars, the luminescence of the creatures there, and maybe also the magma and the fire visible through the depths of its different zones, and the sprays of surf and steam on those planetary surfaces, and perhaps we would be comfortable there and even happy. If only we could get there, find some way to swim to the rest of the aqueous realm. We know the universe isn’t land, or it would be a single ragged sprawl of stone that bubbled and stretched in all directions, and there wouldn’t be room in the universe for anything else. So the land animal ended up where it always would. Among us.
Still, it had those limbs! And all our world’s perfection didn’t have ones like those. The possibilities they brought! Ooo would have moved stones, and giant ones. But it would have known when not to.
Those limbs, those tools—with their clutching, wiggling, grabbing ends, so easily detached from the body with just a tug—must keep the land creatures focused on building and destroying. So much to keep in their minds. So much to distract them. They must have lost their inner lives, and the meaning and understanding of all the things that make us who we are. That’s what happened to us. What were we supposed to do with the vast seas of possibility the creature inspired? If the ocean is perfect, you can’t change it to make it better. You can only make it different, but then you’d become different, too. Of course, the Caavaju already believed they were perfect, so any changes to their world would be a diminution. There was unquantifiable arrogance in believing that, but it didn’t matter either way. They flow between genders, but they mean it as mesmerizing violence.
If the world became better, it meant it had problems that we hadn’t been able to face—and not all of us have faces. Faces are supposed to demonstrate evolution. Do all land animals have faces? I doubt it.
If the world became worse, then shame on us. Because we destroyed it. You can’t put a shell back together. Or a hope.
But the likeliest thing is that the world became better for some and worse for others, and a lot of that depended on what you wanted, your tenacity, and your luck.
We fought about what the creature was and what it meant. Our tribes were irreconcilable. Even those who were convinced the limbs were designed for peaceful and constructive ends were capable of inflicting harm in all the traditional, instinctual ways. So this is when our talk of places that were too cold and deep became trivial, because there was no place for us to go.
And when I talk about what the creature meant, let’s be clear: I mean what it meant to us.
Yes, we were the victors. The Gjala, Akla, and Fantaskla united. In the sense that we united to kill the others.
I think the Fantaskla will always seem strange. Maybe more than any of our tribes, they understand the solitariness of survival. When Gola found them, they’d reproduced and enlarged like a jellyfish, without thoughts of love—neither bogged down nor enriched by it, until their bodies were only the ocean, with all its force and emotionlessness, and maybe that’s why I can’t recognize them, even if I know they’re me.
We stopped visiting the canyon, and we stopped visiting the tomb. How could it be a place of peace? A place of common good, a place of meaning? A place where we celebrated ourselves, amid the streams and currents that had once wrapped around us, until they felt like an all-encompassing embrace? The place where we found the creature. A place of refuge.
Without the free movement promised by the water, the land creature must have felt trapped inside its world. Did it scramble across the stones and mud to scale its peaks, sniff the air for possibility, and jump? Cast itself into whatever openness lay before it and think, I hope this is enough. I’m not sure the Banjxa and the Caavaju didn’t believe in building, as much as they didn’t see a reason to or want to. To be fair, they didn’t claim the appendages were for reaching into other creatures’ mouths and tearing out their tongues, or the endless pounding that had pushed us into the Akla camp. But they showed us how they could be bent around a rock or broken shell, so that the swinging limb could cause even more damage. The first time I saw a sea cucumber severed in half and oozing life, I didn’t need more convincing. It’s hard to imagine they used those limbs just to cut and break things apart, when they could build storehouses, nests, cities, walls. But perhaps they’d use scratches and scores as a way of marking what terrain was theirs, as the Akla mark their bodies. And also mine.
The fighting wouldn’t really ever end among our tribes. Victory is parasitic. Once you take another’s nest, you can always say that once it was yours. You feed on that. It becomes your history and then your future. We live farther apart from one another now, wary that one of us will devise a new strategy and the fighting will become ever fiercer. And it will continue to spread.
All the water is connected. There is a single ocean, even if we have turned it into many. It will take two thousand years for the ocean to return to what it was. Or a hundred. Until then, we will be the scattered schools of the convinced. And unconvinced. But sometimes we wonder: if the creature’s limbs could be used for scratching meanings onto bodies or onto rocks, then perhaps those were markings on the scraps we removed from its body. Because when you rubbed the mournful ribs of the hulk that once served as our temple and moved away the silt, weren’t those symbols on it the same? A broken shell, smaller matching crescents?
If I had those limbs, I think the most important thing would have been to hold on.
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2038: USS Trinidad, a 9,217-ton DDG-139 Arleigh Burke–class Flight III destroyer, transits the Palauan Exclusive Economic Zone in response to an attack on two Japanese patrol boats and an Australian frigate, 90 nautical miles east of Morotai Island, Indonesia. A Chinese-flagged research vessel, which has entered the EEZ without authorization, reports it is conducting storm avoidance, while surrounded by the carcasses of sharks. Seaman Apprentice Robert J. Krucyff, age 20, from Bayonne, New Jersey, is missing from the crew, believed to have fallen overboard in rough seas. He will be remembered for his contribution to this peace-building mission.
And for his love for the ocean.
Acknowledgments
We live on the planet’s skin and look up at the stars. We fly thirty-six thousand feet into the sky, often without a second thought, sometimes several days per week. We imagine life in space.
When we’re by the coast, we look out onto the water’s surface, but it’s only when we see a whale or dolphin breach it, or a fishing vessel chugging back to port with its catch, that there’s any visual proof the ocean descends below us, also to some thirty-six thousand feet. Is the sky empty? Not really. But we know there are at least 240,000 species in our oceans, and likely 500,000 to 10 million more.
I was fortunate to write much of Underjungle in Hawaii, where I could penetrate the ocean’s surface and find inspiration amid the frenetically calming life. I wrote the rest of it in New York City, in an apartment, where the remaining parts seeped and coursed into my mind.
I want to thank those who influenced me as the book’s ideas began to gel, from dive friends in Hawaii (who often showed up with the tanks!) to ones I’ve met on assignments to other coastlines and beyond. Learning to free dive with Kirk Krack and his Performance Freediving International team a decade ago, also in Hawaii, for an article in The Atlantic afforded me new reporting skills, plus a new way to think about being underwater. Two years later, on the Caribbean island of Petit St. Vincent, Richard C. Murphy of Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society introduced me to the idea of coral reefs as cities; then I read his Coral Reefs: Cities Under the Sea, and that idea sank in even more. Likewise, I was impacted and inspired by Jonathan Balcombe’s What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, Eugene H. Kaplan’s Sensuous Seas: Tales of a Marine Biologist, and Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, and by Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us even before that. But my start was with the Sea-Monkeys I had as a boy. It didn’t matter if they were actually brine shrimp and they didn’t resemble the frolicsome creatures from the comic-book advertisements. It was fiction.
Special thanks go to my readers Paula de la Cruz, Caroline Friedman Levy, Sarah Gold, Andreina Himy, Veerendra Lele, Steve Mankoff, and Jeremy Mindich for their sage and surprising comments, which mostly soaked in. Additional thanks to Chris Heiser at the Unnamed Press, who prodded me toward new depths and truths, and to Pamela Malpas of the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency for championing this story. Pamela, you are a splash of wisdom, terry-clothed with keenness.
This is a novel not just about the ocean, but about love, loss, and war. Maybe they are not our planet’s universals, but they are ours. Paula has taught me much of what I know about the first. We all must accept the second and do whatever we can to find solutions to the last. Our world has changed. We must change, too.
Might as well make it sooner.
James Sturz, Underjungle
