Water

Nick wiped his brow. A sheen of sweat coated his face; he licked his lips and could taste it, sour. The sun beat down and burned him raw. 

He breathed in the air, the familiar salt smell of the sea, and lifted his head to survey the ocean. There was nothing but blue on all sides, stretching for miles. The only thing that impeded his vision was the gentle curvature of the earth.

The motor chugged away, snarling, and he was carried forward. The further he went, the more he felt himself swallowed by the sea. He was no bigger than any other fish in these waters. That is to say infinitesimal, a speck.

He had set out the morning after his mother died. She was the only thing tying him down. Now she was gone, he was free.

He quit his job to be with her to the end. At first he had taken days off work, but when the boss’ generosity ran out, he quit. He stayed with her in the hospital every day for a month, only going home to sleep and shower. He took his meals at the twenty-four-hour café across the road where the food tasted like ash. By that point he had stopped tasting food.

She lay propped up in bed, a plastic tube dripping fluid into her arm. Her eyes were sunken. She peered out at her son from the bottom of two deep, dank wells, not recognizing him. Her skin sagged. Bones protruded from her cheeks. She was a monolith, unseeing, inhuman. Nick stayed with her, day after day, until the hospital room became his world. Until all he could see when he closed his eyes were pristine white tiles and skeletal women that he knew were his mother but could hardly recognize as such.

Sometimes she spoke. Always the same word: “Water.” She would repeat it, like a parrot imitating human speech, until the word had no meaning. Her voice crackled and rasped like sticks breaking in a forest. “Water,” she repeated. “Water.” No matter how much water they forced into her, her plea remained the same. Right up until the moment she passed. “Water,” she breathed, unseeing, before collapsing into a final, turbulent sleep, her face twisted into strange shapes.

When she died, Nick felt nothing. 

As soon as her heart stopped beating he strode from the hospital with the gait of a prisoner experiencing his first moments outside the prison walls. In the hotel room—he had been evicted from his apartment for failing to pay the rent—he slept for ten hours, and the next morning took his boat out to sea.

The sun was low in the sky now. A deep, spectral twilight enveloped the ocean. “All right,” he said to himself. He set the rudder due north, checked the fuel gauge. “All right,” he said again. 

Then, naturally, casually, as though walking into another room, he stepped off the boat and fell into the ocean.

The water was shockingly cold. It pulled one’s limbs taut like a great puppeteer. Nick had to fight against his body just to stay afloat. As he grew used to the temperature, Nick spun himself round to watch the boat disappear. It was already a speck. The familiar chugging of the engine grew dimmer, faded slowly into nothingness. Then the boat itself disappeared over the horizon. It all happened quicker than he had expected.

He found himself plunged into silence. Just the roaring of the waves kept up a background symphony. Good, he thought, still shivering. Good.

With the silence ringing in his ears, Nick began to swim, front crawl, perpendicular to the way he’d been traveling, the way he’d sent the boat careening due north, launched like a missile. He almost laughed to himself, thinking where it might end up.

Nick swam, feeling the waves rock him up and down. Occasionally he looked up at the sky, tracking the sun’s descent. It wavered among the clouds, still just bright enough to see by; a squat, orange orb burning with futile embarrassment. But it didn’t much matter whether or not he could see, he reasoned. There was no way of telling how much headway he made, nor in which direction he swam: the ocean stretched endlessly and identically outward on all sides. It didn’t matter. It only mattered that he swam. 

Just as the sun was setting, a dull rain started up. The surface of the water reflected a brilliant red; a sea of crimson blood stippled with rain as with a billion silver needles. Nick swam, feeling the rain pound against his face, some of it getting in his eyes so that he had to keep them always closed. He could no longer tell where the ocean ended and the air began.

He flailed forward, cresting wave after wave, feeling his arms pelted with rain each time they came up from the water. He caught a mouthful of saltwater, but the taste barely registered. He no longer felt his body for the cold, no longer felt where skin met sea.

Nick’s limbs grew weaker, the thoughts left his brain, one after the other, a dull procession marching to the sea. His mind and body prepared themselves for sleep.

He was the ocean now. A consciousness detached, traveling aimlessly through the ocean. He was no less, no more than another wave, evanescent, crashing and breaking no sooner than it is born.

He thought of nothing. His mind lay blank and empty and colorless, an enormous desert, a gray waste. The sun receded from view, and he kept swimming, swimming blindly forward. 

And in that moment, swimming through the rain and the sea, existing in another realm where all things were water, where all things lived and died and changed in an instant, he felt somehow free. His heart soared, like a caged bird taking its first nourishing breath of fresh air, finally beating its wings after so long stiff and unmoving.

His arms and legs moved by instinct, unconscious of their own weariness; he felt them no more than one feels the car that transports from place to place, the boat that carries across the sea. He was the entire ocean, moving, undulating all at once, pushed and pulled by the moon. For the first time he felt powerful, felt free. 

The ocean and the rain and the deep blue sky touched him. Everything touched him all at once so that nothing really touched him, so that he felt nothing, so that he glided, drifted, as through the vastness of space. He swam, flew, floated with no goal or direction in mind, pursuing something intangible and ineffable, pursuing freedom, clear and smooth and infinite. A perfect, serene calm came over him. He swam, he swam, he swam… 

*

“Smith! Get over here!”

The ocean rocked the trawler, gently, as a mother rocks her baby to sleep.

“Smith!”

“What?”

“Come look at this!”

A pounding of footsteps across the deck. The boat tilted slightly. The waves rolled in and out over the harbor mouth.

“My God,” cried the man named Smith. “It’s heading straight for the harbor.”

He shaded his eyes and watched the boat. It rushed forward, like an antelope galloping, desperately cresting wave after wave, chasing down a fixed and singular objective; running away, galloping blindly, always forward.

“Hey!” the other man called out, trying to reach the shore with his voice. “Hey!” 

“Hey!” Smith joined him.

The boat rushed on, ever forward, skimming the tops of waves in bursts of dazzling white foam. The boat paid them no heed, its path unshakeable.

In the harbor, vessels shuffled like anxious crowds, fleeing, bracing themselves, preparing for impact. The boat bore forward, shattering that fragile calm of a moment, that inexpressible calm of a life as it winks out.

“Dear God,” said Smith.

“Yes, dear God.”