Water Woman

A short story
by Kyle Hemmings

Jump, he says, and I do.

From a plane that almost skims the surface of water, I tumble into a hoodoo sea, into this brown patina of knotted seaweed and silent vortex. The Sargasso Sea. I am treading through the abyss of deep underwater where light is a memory of sun-drenched hills and early morning promises. A sun soliloquy. I am floating down into this limbo of expanding shapes that could be my own nitrogen-washed out thoughts. Your brain like a sponge— that sponge the liver of an old salty dog. I am sinking; my truncated thoughts can be measured in horse latitudes.

And now spotting the wreckage, I glide towards the ship, perhaps one like the Rosalie, or the Ellen Austin, a schooner or a bark perhaps swirled by an electromagnetic field, weighted down by the entropy of the trapezium, pulled to the floor of the Nares Abyssal Plain that really has no bottom. Like a promise. Like a lie.

Could this ship now host a UFO civilization, as my employer, Dr. Zcharisky, had once joked about? Or a colony of deep-sea divers and mermaids and starfish gazers who were once damned, exiled, for defying land-locked lords and their conventions. Did these ex-patriots cheat on their upright and non-amphibious spouses? Were they lured by a riptide lover whose eyes moved like tiny fish? Those who strayed must have found themselves trapped in a mesh of seaweed, the heavy enormous mat of it called love, where respiration is merely an afterthought.

I am prying each door of the cabins. Swimming through the darkness, undulating and filmy, I breathe slow and deep. My oxygen tanks, my lifelines, are dying mothers. After turning on the flashlight, I am scared and mystified. There is a table of empty plates and rusted copper utensils. Some old boots, tops folded over, lying on the wooden floor. I struggle to wedge myself through another room. There are portholes covered with lichen and plankton. I shift my gaze, starboard. A nautical joke. There is a skeleton lying on a bed of rusted springs. There are bones and parts of bones: a femur, a tibia, a phalanx. I wonder what the owners’ names were and if they died thirsty and homesick.

Another room, another bunk. Through this mask, I can see her. She is sitting on the bed, wearing a white frilly nightgown, hands clasped on her lap; her bare feet tempt me to smile, and at this depth, you could smile forever. Her face is manikin-like, a wax replica of her self from another life. Her eyes sting me. She looks to be no more than twenty, but she is ageless and waterlogged and beautiful. Her hair is waist-long and red, the color of a fire-eater’s dreams. There is a small cameo pinned to her gown. She has been waiting for me for years.

Paddling my flappers that remind me of mermaid tails, employing smooth and half-circling arm strokes, I propel my body towards her. Shine the huge circle of light directly at her. She is looking through me. Her eyes are sea-dream green as only green can be when you mistake water for land, for something solid: pastures and a bloom of hills. She is speaking to me. She is speaking to me in strange codes and fractals. Her thoughts are bubbles lodging themselves into the deepest recesses, the tiny coliseums of my brain that feels like a balloon at this depth. I know who she is.

I know who you are.

I once loved a water-woman. She made me promises and her words turned to dust, to lint that clung to the inner fabric of my clothes, its pockets and cuffs. I thought of her absence and I thought of footprints on the ocean floor. I thought of abandoned ships in the muck, of chipped sculptures and broken statues, of old coins in the swell of a vortex, and my thoughts turned green and dark. She left me for a stranger in a city of solid dimensions. At night, I groped for her but her body had turned to vapor, but before you turn to vapor, you must have been water. I cried and dreamt of a Sargasso Sea.

Does being lovesick mean you never get over the bends?

I wrap one arm around this woman in the cabin, this soul survivor who has not survived. Her body is stiff, but lighter than algae. She smiles past me, and I wonder who I was before I explored this wreckage. A penny for your Spanish galleon thoughts, I wish to say to her. Together, we rise toward the surface where sunlight will dazzle and reflect off the stagnant waves. Where light will refract into pieces and shards of memories only I can put together. I will put us together on land where there are boundaries and maps of known territories. Upon reaching the surface of water, perhaps she will revive, perhaps she will remember my name, perhaps she will forget her stay underwater, in the Sargasso Sea, where she grew strange and forgetful. This life she once had of a sea star or a sea horse—sea-struck woman.

I emerge from the water and throw back my oblong mask, discard my mouthpiece. Sunlight is a piercing shaft that causes me to shut my eyes, to turn away. I wipe my face of all memory of salt and seawater. There is a smell of lemons and brine and I think that is the smell of her hair or the way her hair once smelled to a solipsistic lover. We swim towards shore. I am so grateful for the sun, for the clarifying nature of light and light beams. How it spreads and diffuses its glow.

Upon reaching the beach, I collapse. Am breathless and dizzy. Giddy as a thousand flies in a blaze of noon and over a trail of leftovers. I turn to her, to feel her flesh, to see if she can still speak, to breathe, to recall who I once was, what I had meant to her. She is not there. She is no longer. She is still in the sea. She is still in that sunken ship, becalmed, deserted. She never was.

What did I mean to her?

Grabbing loose sand in my fists, I’m fighting this pull back into the sea, into the madness of a swell; only the bends, I think, and nothing more. I look back at the sea, the lozenge-shaped area, this Devil’s Triangle. I think if that woman could speak, could speak underwater, what her voice would sound like. I think of the slight blips the KA-6 jet once made on a radar scope before it vanished. A radar plot that plotted, turned plot-less. That blank radar screen must have mirrored the stare of star-crossed water lovers. They watched with a dolphin’s smile as their feet turned webbed, their arms to fins, an adaptation, a mutation of love. It was a conspiracy to live forever underwater, to denounce land as a home for vagrant hearts.

Overhead, Dr. Zcharisky’s plane circles, buzzes closer. I imagine the fuzz of his white hair and the sag of his heavy jowl. I anticipate his rushing towards me, as he pants under a pair of eyes that will glitter like sapphire. He will run with his short stumpy legs, so grossly inadequate for locomotion, the thick shafts of bone covered by creased baggy trousers. I anticipate him being armed with a maze of unending questions. “Well, what did you see? Tell me you found the wreck. Yes? Were my coordinates correct? Did we make a discovery? Are you . . . all right?”

You can fight this, I think. No, too dizzy. I keep thinking, tell yourself where you are. Identify your coordinates, man. You are no longer in the Limbo of the Lost. I wanted you. The plane lands and skids across a stretch of white and furrowed beach. Its tires whistle. Coming closer. Where am I? Key West? Bermuda? The nose of the plane humming and spinning. I peer up though the sun-screen of day-burst. Brakes screeching. I am twenty to thirty-five degrees, north latitude. Closer. Her wavering and foggy-eyed face. East by longitude forty degrees north. Her flesh is silky and warm. Thirty to seventy degrees west latitude. She never was. Now a stone in your coffee-hued dreams. The Sargasso Sea and I am a little sailor man smiling absentmindedly in a glass bottle. Coordinates? (0,0). In these parts, an ocean’s loose lips can sink a ship of fools. Am I alright, Captain? Red sky at dawn, mate. Right.

Copyright 2007 by Kyle Hemmings