What We Lost At Sea

There had been a rumor, living in perpetuity on the tongues of generations of fishermen and charter captains, that something strange lived on the ocean floor. The brash and flushed old-timers sweating over their pub pints would exchange stories of a salacious mermaid tempting them beneath the surface with the promise of a saltwater kiss, as viscous and everlasting as taffy. The younger guys smoking joints behind the boathouse liked to joke about increasingly ridiculous combinations of creatures, a shark and an electric eel or a giant frog crossed with a sunfish, and they’d push each other off hulls and docks with taunts that they’d better swim to shore before the monsters swallowed them.

“What do you think, Eddy?” they’d ask at the marketplace where he sold his catches at the end of the day. “Pretty li’l thing or an ugly demon down there?” 

“I see one of ’em right in front of me now, and it ain’t the pretty thing, that’s for sure,” Eddy would reply, and the guys would laugh and give him the finger and slap him on the back.

What he wanted to say was: It didn’t matter what lay beneath the barges. Getting beckoned to the bottom of the ocean, whether by a siren or a savage, meant you weren’t coming back up.

One balmy June morning, however, he sees it.

Much of his life has been spent on the water, raking clams and netting fish, and yet each day there is some new interpretation of his life to think about amid the dredging, the years compounding and unfolding until all his alternate lives are spread out like a deck of cards on a magician’s table. Sometimes he is afraid to pick one of the cards up and look at the fate awaiting him on the other side. Sometimes he wants nothing more.

This particular day, he is thinking about appearances. He has had many over the years, the hippie-long hair, the curly beard, the weight gain of fatherhood and the loss of divorce. Yet sometimes, he would look in the mirror, gaze into the pools of algae that were his eyes, and think to himself, I don’t know you. The baubles and clothes and friends and women he adorned himself with on the outside never seemed to align with whatever he was inside.

But out on the water, he doesn’t have a reflection. He can lean over the back of his rowboat and observe how the shape of his face warps and melts in the rollick of the waves, but he finds comfort in knowing that isn’t what he really looks like. He finds comfort in not knowing what he looks like at all, because he knows he now has rings the color of a butterfish beneath his eyes and that years of brutal summers and bone-chilling winters have etched their stories into the surface of his face. 

He would rather detach the idea of himself from a face at all. Eyes and noses and lips could be arranged like the most striking of bouquets, and it still wouldn’t be enough to hide the hornet inside the stems, to forgive all the faults a body belies. It was all an illusion. Humans love to be drawn in by an illusion, he thought one day, as graphite clouds rolled overhead and the pleasure boaters sped to shore. They will gasp at the lake’s surface, crystalline and smooth like an ironed sheet, without thinking of the mud and the crabs’ pincers, the trailblazing current waiting to sweep up its next victim. They will be enchanted by the twinkling lights of a city skyline without noticing they can no longer see the stars standing in solidarity with the moon. They’ll love the sun until it burns, the sea urchin until it stings.

He thinks it is an illusion at first when the water surrounding him rumbles and roils and a face appears amid the bluster. It looks like a woman, painted by Picasso or cobbled together by someone unfamiliar with anatomy; her eyes are asymmetric, her mouth off-center, skin the pale green of avocado flesh. His first instinct is to yank his motor’s pull cord, but she flings out an arm to stop him. Her skin feels waterlogged and sandy against his.

“Please don’t be scared,” she says.

Eddy closes his eyes. He feels incapable of being scared. Nothing feels outlandish enough to be scary anymore. 

“I see your boat every day. The bottom of it. I recognize the scrapes and the barnacle patterns here. I see a lot of your world from underneath. Legs, propellers, oars rising and falling like breaths. I know you catch fish. I try to guide them into your net. Lure them in with little worms.”

“And why would you do that?” Eddy grunts. He thought it was his expertise that had been netting him a profit these past few months.

The woman shrugs. “I watch the people up here a lot. I wait for them to drop things. A lot of the time it’s trash, but sometimes they’ll drop little parts of their lives. You dropped this once.” She drops into his hand a gold wedding ring, as glimmering and promising as it had been when he first saw it.

“Well, gee,” Eddy says, holding it up to the sun, shutting an eye as if to ascertain its authenticity. Then he tosses it back in the water with a dejected plinking sound. The woman’s face is placid.

“If you’re always watching people around here, why haven’t I seen you? I’m out here every day.”

“You weren’t looking for me.”

Eddy sits back. It’s true that despite the vast stretch of seawater, his hours are contained inside this little sphere: the boat, the equipment, the purr of the motor as he glides to the next spot when the catch runs dry. He barely notices the hues of the sky as morning melts into twilight. He looks up occasionally to wave to Jim or Derek or Marlo as they zip by too closely and leave nauseating wakes behind. But he would have noticed a strange woman watching him, he thinks. He’s pretty sure he would have. 

It’s possible this is all a delusion, that his mind has finally betrayed all sense of reality. It’s also possible that those stories the guys told at the bar had some modicum of credibility to them after all. He had learned over the years there was no such thing as actual truth; it was so often entangled with opinion and fiction that to parse fact from fantasy was akin to picking the sand apart grain by grain, before concluding that the shore’s landscape was more beautiful as a whole. Perhaps this was him now seeing the shore for the ever-changing, bewildering thing it was.

“So what do you want now?” he says.

“I need help.”

She tells him the story of a long-lost brother: Their father was a landman, scouring isles and beaches for shards of history to collect in his scrapbooks and notepads journaling the changing landscape of his town. One day he fell into the acquaintance of lotus-eaters who converged on a distant corner of the shore, and their languid nature was enticing to him, a man who had been taught to constantly strive and work and provide. What, the lotus-eaters asked, was the purpose of such a life? Death befalls everyone and does not favor those who blind themselves with the idea of accomplishments.

His duties soon fell by the wayside — work, hobbies, loved ones, until he spent all his days by the seaside, playing games and making music and lying in the sun. But his new wife soon bore twin children, a boy and a girl, and the effort of responsibility flooded back into his veins like muscle memory. He fled shortly after, leaving the wife, who deposited the children into the ocean, unwilling to sacrifice her life of enchanted dalliance.  

“How did you survive?” Eddy asks the woman now.

“I transformed,” she says, and suddenly her nose twists into a beak, feathered wings sprout from her back. She looks like a seagull, though her feathers are pale green. “I was a bird when I needed to fly.” She hunches and shifts into a snake, writhing on the floor of his boat. “I was a threat when I needed to feel powerful.” She springs back into the form of a woman. “I ran, I crawled, I swam. I could never find either of my parents.”

“That’s very sad,” Eddy murmurs.

“All I had was my brother, and this.” She shows Eddy a stone the size of his palm, with four letters crudely carved into it. Eddy reaches out to take it, to examine it closer, but she closes her fingers over it and pockets it in a small pouch. “It’s our initials. He made it. He was happy to live life here in the sea. But after I came back time and time again, each time more dejected than the last, he finally set out to find our father, to put an end to it all. That was many years ago. I haven’t seen him since then. I started transforming into rocks, sitting on the shore, waiting for my brother to dive back in. Into fish, darting from one end of the sea to another. Into women, talking to men like you, hoping someone knows him. But they just wanted to trade my body for empty promises of information. Women were repulsed by me. It’s taken me a long time to learn the forms I can take that others find acceptable and worthy of help.”

“What does he look like?”

The woman squints into the sun. “Isn’t that always the question. He’s like me. He could be anything. Anyone. I wish there were a way for us to recognize the familiarity of someone’s soul.”

Eddy asks how long she has been looking for her brother, and she says she doesn’t know, that she can’t measure it. Those aboveground can look around and recognize the facets of passing time — gray strands of hair and wall calendars and faded photographs — but the only medium she has is the measure of her interiority, to note the ways her perspectives have changed.

“So a long time,” Eddy says, and she agrees.

***

Eddy never finds her brother, but he and the woman spend their days out on the water talking. He had always found it a burden to be around other people. He had to perform responsibility for his father, irresponsibility for his peers, intellect and exuberance for Daisy. Years of isolation have convinced him he is better off a solitary man, but he finds he is relieved to have a reservoir into which he can pour his philosophies.

He tells her about Daisy. She was beautiful, he says. Hair like a golden waterfall and eyes like blades of grass after the first summer rain. He spent years trying to get her attention, asking her to school dances, watching through windows as she held other boys’ hands and got in their cars. In those tumultuous years, with the backdrop of violent family fights and never having enough money, she was the only thing that made him feel happy. He learned what she liked, why she had broken up with the boys before, and he returned to school the first day of senior year full-figured, well-read, and emitting a display of bravado he had learned from mobster movie marathons. Finally, she fell for him.

He was elated, and the years slid by like a montage, highlighting the happy moments: their first kiss, dates on the pier, a set of house keys pressed between their palms, the baby boy. But Eddy’s mask slipped more and more frequently and Daisy didn’t like disguises. He was quite shy, preferred TV to books, could only love in the way he had been taught to love, through backhanded compliments and under the condition of reciprocation. That wasn’t the man she fell in love with. So she left. 

“I never was the same,” Eddy tells the sea woman.

After a minute, she replies, “You know, a lot of men will let algae and mud and barnacles live on the bottom of their boats. It builds up over years and slows the boat down. And yet, instead of cleaning the detritus off, they’re content with their slower boat. Content with never again reaching their potential, content to be eaten away at slowly. Those are the men who are afraid to face the light. Afraid of success, because it makes failure so much more threatening. That’s what made your boat so notable. Only one side was clean. As if you decided halfway through it wasn’t worth it.”

“Could be that they’re content to parade around the boat as it appears above the water, knowing nobody can see what’s underneath.” Eddy is thinking of Jim, who often brags about how much money he spent on his schooner but fails to disclose the crater-size hole in the cabin floor.

“I think you wanted to be with Daisy because you knew it wouldn’t work out. You knew your persona would slip one day, and you liked knowing the ending instead of letting things unfold organically.”

"I did always read the last page of a book first," Eddy says.

She grins. "Exactly."

***

Another day, they talk about whether they believe in past lives. Eddy doesn’t. “This was my one shot,” he concludes.

“I like to think I could be anything in a next life,” she counters. “Maybe my life upgrades every time. Maybe next time I’ll have a family.”

“You will,” Eddy says. “Not that that’s necessarily an upgrade. Family in concept isn’t always so in execution.”

“I think you were an oyster,” the woman concludes. “There was a pearl taking years to shape on your tongue, waiting for someone to pry you open and expose it and take that beauty to share with the world.”

He looks at her. The net thrusts and wobbles, but he hasn’t been concerned about the catch in a while. “What do you really look like?” he asks. “When you’re not shape-shifting or transforming or whatever it is you do to look like how you look now.”

She smiles, drops her gaze and looks over her shoulder into the murky depths below. Pulls a squirming salmon out of the water with her bare hands. “I don’t think you really want to know the answer to that.”

“Maybe I do.”

“What does it matter? You don’t know what I look like, but you know who I am. I know what you look like, but that doesn’t mean I know who you are.”

He takes the salmon from her. He thinks of gutting it, shiny scales giving way to the bare bones beneath. He places it in the bucket instead. “I don’t know who I am either,” he admits. “My father would always bring me out here when I was young, and he told me I’d be better off having no one else to answer to. I always believed that. But then he died alone and when I think of how I can save myself, I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t know if I can trust that lad. Everything I ever thought or felt or did was in service to other people. And now I'm alone and as empty as—” he gestures to the scattered shells she has lined up on the shelf.

"You aren't alone now," she says.

***

It is five years later. The sea woman has been gone for a very long time. Eddy spends many days pondering this; perhaps he was in an extended fugue state of some kind brought on by dehydration. Perhaps he offended her in some way, he thinks, and he combs through every line of their conversations, trying to locate his errors. He hopes she has found her family after all.

The net wobbles precariously, a sign of an excellent catch. “Bingo,” he cheers. The woman had found the explanation of that word very amusing.

He pulls up the net and sees he has captured a dozen haddock and, inexplicably, several oysters, although they have not grown in this section of the ocean in a very long time. He sells everything at the market later that day but for one oyster, which he takes home, thinking he will eat it — he hasn’t allowed himself a delicacy like this in years.

But after he cleans it and shucks it, he finds no meat inside. Just a stone etched with the primitive carvings of four initials. He holds it at last, feeling the weight in his palm, the weight of family, of mysteries, the heavy burdens of bereavement and joy and mistakes. Of the people he's been, the creatures she's been, and how after all that aping of others he has ended up standing in a kitchen holding a rock and she a simple letter in a stone.

He finds he does not like knowing the ending.