Rivers Solomon - The Deep

“Tell me a story,” Aj says, fifty years old now. Hard to believe we witnessed his birth from the two-legged surface dweller, cast into the sea. “A happy one. Something that will comfort me in these next coming days, when I am to lose you, Amaba.”

We nod. “I will tell you more than just a story. I will tell you every story. Happy and sad. But you must promise to tell no one else. I do not wish to burden them with these things I have to say. We cannot falter on our mission. Some things… weigh. I fear if they know the truth of everything, they will not be able to carry on, or they’ll swim to the surface to learn things for themselves I do not want them to learn. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you, Amaba,” Aj says.

“When I pass, you must tell them my wish for them,” we say. “That they live lives of togetherness, in the present. That the many of them who started out their lives in loneliness and solitude, they must put it away, and remember where we are now. Together. Safe. Do you promise?”

“I promise,” says Aj. “Now come on. Begin. Before it’s too late.”

“Do not forget any of this,” we say, though our voice is weakening.

Aj touches his fins to ours, lays his cheek to our cheek. We communicate how pups communicate. In electricity, in charges. No need to speak. Aj sees all. Our memories transfer to him as we lived them.

We close our eyes in Aj’s arms, listening to the water, to the noise of the city, to our kindred all around us.

There are so many of us now, we could hardly be called strange fish anymore. We have made a place in this sea. All the fluttering, building, loving, hunting, embracing, mating, we hear it all, our presence unmistakable. A whole chorus of the deep. Wajinru. We are not zoti aleyu. We are more vast and more beauteous than that name implies. We are a song, and we are together.

We remember.

YETU HURTLED THROUGH THE WATER, away from the shadow of her people. Her tail fin jutted left and right to propel her to startlingly fast speeds. Her heart beat so fast, she couldn’t tell one pulse from another. The steady thrum resounded like the hum of a whale.

She’d spent large swaths of time over the last year immobile, floating, lost in rememberings, and her body wasn’t used to this level of performance. Muscle, fat, and cartilage had withered away, leaving behind a faint impression of what a wajinru should look like.

Yetu’s will thrived where her body faltered. The only thought on her mind was go, go, go. Forward, never backward. Flee. The place she’d gone from was a world of pain, and there was no distance she could swim where that past wouldn’t haunt her. Right now the wajinru were lost in the Remembrance, but they wouldn’t always be, would they? Surely one among them would realize it was time to transfer the rememberings back, and that realization would spread. Without Yetu to signal when this was supposed to happen, it might take longer than usual, but not too long.

In such sparsely populated waters, Yetu stood out, her body creating unique patterns of waves that a wajinru tracker would be able to spot. The wajinru would come for her to return the rememberings once they recovered—and they would recover. Most assuredly they would. If Yetu could survive the rememberings intact, weak as she was, they could too.

She didn’t let herself consider the possibility that they would be as lost in the face of it as she’d always been. To think such a thought for even half a moment would be to admit accursing them to immeasurable suffering. What if, like her, they all waned to shadows? Yetu shook her head. That wasn’t going to happen. They would awaken and search for her so they could return the rememberings to their proper place. If she wanted to survive, she couldn’t let that happen. They’d have to learn to adapt to them.

Yetu needed to go where they couldn’t sense her, where they wouldn’t search. She turned her body sharply upward and began her ascent to shallower waters. She was so tired that she put little effort into avoiding predators who could make easy work of her in her weakened, brain-addled state. All that mattered was escape.

She curled her body to make it move faster and faster, and with each swim stroke she became more and more lightheaded. She wasn’t sure she was breathing properly, or at all. Water glided over her gills, but it was different water than what she was used to. Had she risen higher in the ocean waters at a more reasonable rate, her body would’ve naturally adjusted, but she was swimming at top speeds.

The headache threatening at her temples was sharp and prickly. She didn’t know what to do with the decreases in pressure. Her body felt wrong, like it was flying apart. There was nothing in these depths to hold her together, to squeeze her into place. As the light colored the water into a strange shade of dark, greenish blue, she closed her eyes, unused to the burn of sunshine.

This was familiar. She’d been here years and years ago. Words came to mind… hunting… hunting with Amaba. Or perhaps this place was from the History. She had a sense of the rememberings still, though already the details had faded. Whenever she tried to concentrate on anything specific, it slipped through her mind like sand through her webbed fingers. She could feel it still, but she didn’t know it.

She couldn’t say for sure where she’d seen the sunshine before, or this particular shade of blue. Random, meaningless images were all her mind dredged up. Where she’d once carried multitudes, there was sparsity.

Yetu was not so shallow yet that she felt out of danger. Light was only just beginning to penetrate. Some wajinru lived at these depths and would search for her here. She needed to go closer to the surface yet if she wanted to escape her people entirely.

Yetu pumped her body upward in a spiral, unthinkingly, too out of her mind to determine how far she was going. She guessed it had already been miles.

Light burned her eyes as she rose. Her pupils shrank to dots, but it was still too much. She couldn’t focus on navigation with the headache that had spread from her temples to the top of her head all the way down to the base of her neck. Her sense of north, south, east, and west were gone. The currents were a maze. Unfamiliar animals moved in ways she didn’t recognize.

Schools of fish flitted past her, turning her around. Which way was up again?

She followed the light, went toward its blinding whiteness. It was so warm. She’d never been this lost before, never been so unable to orient herself.

But Yetu didn’t need to orient. She just needed to go. That was what mattered most. The goal was to be away from where she was now. The particulars of where she ended up were inconsequential.

She went up, up, and up until there was no up left, her head cracking through the sea’s surface, oxygen from the air—the air!—blitzing her lungs. It made her remember fire and bombs, images of thrashing water tumbling through her mind, but then she couldn’t remember where the fire and bombs came from. A few seconds later, Yetu couldn’t remember what fire and bombs were.

Yetu was still. She let herself float. She’d left the wajinru. That, she could not forget. She’d done the one thing the first historian wanted no wajinru to do. By leaving, Yetu was forcing them to endure the full weight of their History. She’d left them alone. Had abandoned them. They were not one people anymore. Yetu was apart. She squeezed her eyes shut against the light and reminded herself that they’d be okay. Amaba was the strongest wajinru Yetu had ever known. Her will did not bend. Not even the rememberings could ruin her.

Yetu trembled in the water, the physical ache of her desertion catching up to her. After everything, she still might die. She wasn’t sure her body, debilitated from a year of neglect, could take what she’d done to it.