Underjungle, page 4
And another—punching at the sand with just one of the limbs, before he incorporated the second one as well. Until there was a patchwork of crevices spread out before us, a battery of undulations and cavities in the ground.
To see a thresher shark slap its tail at a school of mackerel is to witness a similar kind of brutality and carnage. A few lucky fish are hurled away, but most are stunned. Some are maimed. Their lifeless bodies are swallowed one by one, with a savagery that turns the thresher sharks’ feeding into a game. Is it better to die when you’re unconscious, or to have the chance to stare your predator in the eye?
The threshers whip their tails like strands of kelp, but they do it with the force of whales. One snap is usually enough. But sometimes they’ll repeat it, and then you hear the percussive beat of violence all around you. If you aren’t careful, you can forget to be alarmed.
8
I grew up in broiling seas that smelled of magnesium carbonate freckled with desire. A spewing vent outside a cave marked the place a thousand of us called home (one thousand and two, counting our doting parents). One thousand and three, counting our guardian, Gola.
Back in those days, he was lithe and quick. He wasn’t a Banjxa. By that I mean you could trust him. But he could dart from one sponge to another, with a reef rat or two tucked beneath his fin, without skipping the swish of his tail.
And so it broke his heart to see us get picked off one by one, swallowed, chewed, crushed, swept away, torn by gnashing teeth, bitten in half, poisoned, impaled. The consolidation of a family is inevitable and terrible. As much as I try, there are certain creatures I will always hate.
It isn’t bias if you have good reasons. There must be creatures who don’t like us, either. Perhaps they’d say they have good reasons, too.
Are all my lost brothers and sisters swimming together in some happy afterlife? That idea isn’t crazier than any other aspect of existence.
And yet I don’t believe it.
I believe we’re born, we’re here, and we have a single chance. Some of those chances last as long as a tide. Some, only as long as it takes a jaw to clamp shut. Some last more than a generation. But there’s no thing as a second chance. There is only one chance, because nothing stops and starts anew. The ocean is continuation.
It was a happy place, our vent, our sea, our home. Diminishing numbers of siblings, true, but there were always still so many of us around. We played! Gola, too! We’d hide. He’d swim, and look for us. And also true, some of us never showed up at the end. That added an element of unpredictability to the game.
Our parents seemed resigned but content. They’d come back with food from hunting expeditions. With fewer mouths in their brood each time, there was always enough. We feasted! We ate until we thought we were going to burst. (It was your own fault if you did.) I remember one time they came home with shrimp, scrambling masses of them, and we marched them toward the vent and popped them into our mouths as soon as they were freshly sizzled.
Yes, shrimp don’t like us much—but I’ve already said what I had to about creatures with pincers.
Gola could gobble an army of them up. Once the rest of us had finished, we’d watch him keep going, shoveling the shrimp past his snout, swallowing even as he’d start to laugh, and then all of us would laugh along with him. Hundreds of us laughing, yes, that’s a happy meal.
Supposedly there are creatures that stop eating once they’ve had enough, but cultivated ones know to keep eating for just a bit longer, so they can concentrate on the flavor and the mouth-feel without the distraction of hunger getting in the way. Sizzling shrimp clawing at your palate, parboiled inside their shells!
I had an idyllic youth.
I swam, sniffed, fed, and was educated. I learned about our world. I learned that not all of us agree about so many things—some of which probably don’t even exist—that the ones we agree on still can’t keep us together, even if they’re floating right before our eyes.
I learned that two creatures who look the same can still be so different that the only thing that unites them is mistrust.
Gola once told me, “We’re all variations. That means we’re all imperfect.” Despite what the Caavaju say.
Every culture is a battle between competing versions of itself, half-formed customs and beliefs vying to be the only one, continually transforming to become more powerful and irresistible, while still maintaining that every previous version was also right.
Every culture is a wave, growing, surging, steepening, and approaching its inevitable crest. As long as land stays out of the way, those waves can keep getting bigger. The amount of energy in a wave is proportional to the number of molecules trapped inside it.
Ask the diatoms about the force of the water: it’s almost impossible to break free.
As if you’d ever want to.
9
Gjila says, “When waging war, first send in your soldiers who can regrow their missing limbs. Next, send the ones whose limbs don’t matter. Last, send the ones without any limbs at all, for only they can move as fluidly as the water.”
Only they can dissolve into the currents and be everywhere in an instant.
Gjila says, “When preparing for battle, never rely on soldiers without faces, because you can’t really trust them. Make peace with your loved ones. Make peace with yourself.”
“Don’t send in your soldiers with ruptured swim bladders,” Gola adds.
“We all have ruptured swim bladders, in one way or another,” Gjila says. “Life is sinking and soaring when we least expect it.”
Brola kept making holes in the sand. The expanse of pocked terrain doubled in size. Groups of Akla, Banjxa, and Ecdda lingered along the edges. Yes, I insist, we are serene. If this was violence, it was only violence to the ground. But even the sea cucumbers knew to get out of the way. You always want to avoid a punch to your anus.
“When making war, there can only be one leader. When making peace, there are many. That’s because peace is more complicated than war.”
And what about love? I knew you grew up in roiling seas, just as I did. Three oceans away. But what is distance compared to taste and scent and chemistry? Currents take you where they want to go. The choice is to enter them, or to stay out of the way.
It’s not as if they come as a surprise. The only surprise is what you find at their ends, where they taper off until they’re just idyllic tremors. You found me.
Or, as you put it, “You found me.”
No, I smelled you coming, so I had time to prepare.
And I tasted you, too. You couldn’t stop me.
When we finally met, you emerged from the current as foam. And then as skin. And then as muscle and movement—liquid flits and undulations that announced your presence as adamantly as the submarining of a whale. You were flesh. You were a song. You were hydroelectric, magnetic, radiant, infrasonic.
All I had to do was let you enter me then.
I opened my skin, my gills, my mouth. I opened the parts of me that can’t ever recover, no matter how much time there is to heal.
You were a chemical explosion inside my body. You were moaning without solid form. You were potential energy, catabolism, plate tectonics.
You were the current, and then you were here.
There wasn’t a single word left for us to say before the first one was uttered, but both of us stuttered nervously. Then the next day was the spawn.
10
We hovered side by side, as the corals opened. A billion polyps all around us. A billion bodies opening themselves and steaming into the hot slushiness of the night.
Neither one of us dared to blink. But I breathed you.
And I saw you opening and closing your mouth, also letting parts of me in.
Some corals are male. Some are female. Some are both. But all choose the same night each year to release themselves into the clouding water. They ooze. They spew. And spurt. They expose their deepest cores and let eggs and sperm and, sometimes, bundles of them both come hurtling out.
So many of us pursue the depths, for the reassuring embrace of the ocean. But the coral let their progeny float up, where they’ll meet and mate and then tumble away to grow and secrete new homes. It is creation myth, without an ounce of invention. The sea becomes a whirl of genetic goo.
It is effervescence, coralline cataclysm, frenzied abundance. A spattering hot mess, and the origin of all life. Gametes swirling toward one another in a flurry of chance and desire. And then all it takes is for two of them to touch for life suddenly, and then miraculously, and then expectedly and inevitably, to begin. It is chaotic certainty, arriving, coming, as a splash.
And so we watched the world having sex all around us, the universe expanding, sprawling, and then returning to itself as a haze of a billion particles of a thousand species finding their singular and astonishingly perfect mates. It was happening in every direction, as far as either of us could see.
We’d only just met ourselves, but what other future was there for us after this? What else but to melt into each other’s breast and skin, and feel the same kinetic blood streaming through us both?
You were my salt. I was your water.
Our hearts darted around our bodies, unable to stay in any place for more than a few seconds.
We existed at six different fathoms. All at once.
I’d like to think the corals also noticed. But they were distracted. We were distracted.
In our world, this is how we begin.
We danced, our bodies intertwining. We kissed, our tongues a pair of tentacles tying knots. Our teeth, rows and rows, and now rows and rows—together, we’d be invincible! Our chests, one chest. Our nether regions, one as well. Throbbing like jellyfish and gently glowing. Radiant, with a seismic tantrum in our breasts.
Every part of me was shreds. Every part of you was shreds. Every part that was us both was raw swollen flesh.
When the spawn occurs, it is synchronous across the reefs. It doesn’t matter your species, gender, or location. You sense it first as an upwelling, an impatient urge to expose every single part of yourself, from each mitochondrial split to every amoebic bulge. As the moment nears, that longing and necessity grow. You feel yourself begin to shudder. When solitary members of our kind come to watch the spawn, there is a sad exuberance at seeing this much euphoria, this much shaking and milky effluence, without being able to join in yourself.
Yes, there’s some self-stimulation. But that’s never the same thing.
Would we have fallen for each other, so head over tails, if we hadn’t met on this particular day? Would we have continued for so long afterward if the corals hadn’t been in the midst of their rapture? Would our world still be lost in that reverie we called peace? Would you still be alive?
We spawn, the corals spawn, we watch them exude calcium carbonate where they land, creating structure. We watch them build, constructing cities, secreting new reefs over thousands of years, so slowly that their method is a secret. The secret is having patience.
They’re nearly gone now, too.
11
Brola kept pounding, breaking any bits of coral, flattening fragments in the sand. Gola shivered and started floating up, but I think he was doing it on purpose. He flicked his tail and started to swim, as fast as he could.
Eat, and don’t get eaten. Break, and don’t get broken.
When there’s no other option, flee.
By now, the creature had started drifting apart. Soft filmy skin had turned to sponge. The outer layers were tattered, while hints of bones shone through. At a basic level, beneath our skin and flesh, we’re all made of coral reef: a lattice of gnarled calcium, with blood vessels and nerves poking through.
This coral lacked our world’s vibrant color.
I wonder how long it took this creature to build its skeleton.
I wonder if it was sad.
Of course, Brola and the Banjxa didn’t care about that. Nor the Akla or the Ecdda. When the Banjxa swim and dart, there’s no time to think. That’s how it was for them now. I could imagine Gola treading away clumsily, weighed down by his thoughts.
His absence wouldn’t be noticed. Except by me.
The thing about holes is they always fill. There are no empty spaces in the ocean, no vacuums. Water sweeps in sand and nearby shells. So you have to keep digging, finning, and pounding. It’s a losing battle, like swimming into a relentless current. Eventually you tire, while the ocean doesn’t even notice.
The water doesn’t know who or what is in it.
Gjila says, “If you’re going to fight, make sure it’s against another living creature. Otherwise, there’s no possible outcome but for you to lose.”
Or even better: choose an opponent who’s already dead. Maybe like the one we’d found. The Banjxa always like to present themselves as victors.
Gjila says, “When digging holes, you can create channels in the silt by shooting water from your anus while others hold you down. But try to avoid it.”
Gjila says, “When digging holes, it’s true that if you bend those clingers together into a point, they work like the end of a cuttlefish beak. But you can also use them individually to form patterns in the sand.”
We watched him tug the limb from Brola’s mouth, the rest of the body still attached and twisting awkwardly in the current. Brola was amazed by Gjila’s fearlessness or daring. I’m not sure any of us knew which one it was. But then he let the limb go, not even showing his teeth. Gjila dragged it across the grains, until he’d drawn the rough outline of a gorgonian in the sand.
Then the current came, as it always does.
12
We live in open spaces. They extend in all directions, including the vastness of up and down, and when any of us needs more room, those spaces can just become larger. We do not crowd.
You do not tread on someone else’s fins.
The coral reefs live by other rules. They live in cities, one on top of another, in a kind of abominable symbiosis that makes it impossible to be alone.
The algae insinuate themselves inside the corals. (I would not like anyone to insinuate himself into me.) They produce food from light and surrender most of it to their lazy hosts. Yes, the corals are lazy, except for once a year when they’re invigorated by having sex. But the reefs are part of a larger scheme of interdependence, where every creature has three roles: to live, to breed, and to provide for the others in their community. When creatures die, they become food. When snails die, their vacant shells become new homes as well. The algae use the coral waste as fertilizer, which helps them grow. Worms and sea cucumbers then forage the reef, scrubbing it clean. Clams and sea squirts filter water, extracting food and expelling water that you can taste is purer. Shrimp and gobies rid turtles and other fish of parasites, pecking them off their skin and the insides of their mouths and gills—tending to hundreds in a day. Some hermit crabs place sponges on their shells, where the sponges can grow free from predators. As those sponges grow, they camouflage the crabs, while the toxins in their cells protect the crabs from any who might want to eat them. Small jacks swim next to larger queen triggerfish, hidden by their trunks until it’s time to surprise their quarry, which they attack together and share. Even large predator species, like sharks and groupers, manage the reef community, making sure there isn’t an imbalance in the population. It’s true, sharks have a role, as much as I hate to admit it.
And we? Sometimes we’re eaten while we’re alive, but mostly we just think about ourselves.
The coral cities expand. We watch them cover mounts and stones. We watch them sprawl. We watch them die.
Cities turn white, and then they crumble and dissolve. Once they were an empire. Once they were something more to behold.
And still the corals insist on building their cities, perhaps because the creatures living inside them wouldn’t survive anywhere else. So it is an act of determination. And of grace.
Grace doesn’t require you to be able to swim. Gola is the most graceful being I know. Wherever he is now.
We sprawl in a different way. In a way that says that all we see in the world is ours. And that we will exist here forever.
We will grow larger and larger, as species do, until we are larger than the whales. And there will always be room for us. The Dilidi say we should not allow ourselves to be caught in an interdependent relationship with other creatures, because if one of them suffers, then we’ll all be affected. They ask, Isn’t that our right, to swim alone?
What does the group consciousness of the corals get you? The convenience of sharing your mortality? The corals were supposed to live forever.
The world is one cosmic ocean inside a galaxy of oceans, stretching out into the watery unknown. Cities won’t exist in the future, because they exist in finite time and space. The only future is to expand, to go new places, to explore. There are still places in this world we don’t know. Just look at this creature, even if he’s already disintegrating, and dissolving, too. If you look at how weak he seems, you can guess he depended on others.
13
I did my best to trace the form of a gorgonian, too. At first I tried with the edge of my tail, and then with one fin, but I didn’t have the proper angle. I’d wait until there was a lull in the current, but my shapes would disappear … before they’d fully taken shape.
I kept thinking of Gjila’s etching and how suddenly there was a sea fan in the sand. It wasn’t a fan, but what else would you call it? Then it was gone. You risk everything the moment you look away.
