Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

“Did you have a dream?”

After a silence, she says, “In my sleep now I listen to my body.”

“What does it say?”

She is quiet again, for a long while. Then she says, “What will we do tomorrow?”

“Make love.”

She presses me onto my back and crawls directly on top of me, her chest hovering over my chest, her legs hugging my sides, her face eclipsing the moon. “That is a good answer,” she says.

I can’t see her eyes in the darkness, only the silhouette of her head. I lift my hand and with my fingertips I touch her lips and then trace up her check to her brow to the bridge of her nose, to her eye, feeling her eyelid close for me, I touch her there and her eye moves beneath my finger, the sign of dreaming.

I say, “Are you listening to your body right now?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t answer me the last time, so I move my hand from her face to her hip and I simply wait.

“I am glad I was born,” she says.

“I am too.”

“My father is dead.”

“Yes.”

The moon flares in my eyes. Her head has moved, she slides off me now, and I can see her face, I turn to her and I move to kiss her and I see her eyes shift to me and they are black, black as the empty spaces between the stars, and I close my own eyes with the touch of our lips. We kiss and she gently ends it and I look up into the sky and draw her close.

She says, “I almost was not born. I have always thought, now and then, that it made no difference, really. Now my body tells me that it is very important that I am alive.”

I think of abortion. That her mother almost let Tien go. I want to tell her that I, too, am glad she is alive, but I sense something else running in her. I close my eyes against the brightness of the moon and I wait.

Then she says, “My mother made up a fairy tale for me once. She said it was about my father so I think there was a real story behind it. I loved a certain fairy tale of a dragon when I was a child, so she made it about dragons. In this story my father dies at the end. But it was really about his father, the part where I almost never was born.”

I open my eyes. I turn my face out to the sky over the horizon, away from the moon. I feel a tiny stirring in me, like the flicker of one of the stars out there.

She says, “It happened that he almost died, my father’s father. And if he had, then I never would have been born.”

Something in me says to just keep quiet now But this flicker is actually a distant burning. I say, “What is the story? How did he almost die?”

“It is about a dragon — who turns out to be my grandfather — who goes every day into a fiery hole where he works. . When I start saying this, it sounds silly. I do not know what parts are real and what parts are not.”

“No,” I say, and whatever is driving me to hear this is working on its own. I feel like I’ve floated off a ways down the beach. I’m out taking a smoke while this other part of me does some damn stupid thing. “It’s not silly,” I say. “What’s the story she told?”

Tien adjusts her head into the dip between my shoulder and my chest. She says, “My grandfather’s enemies try to kill him in this fiery hole. A place where he works. But he fights them and kills them instead. And it was after all this that my father is born. So you see, if he had died there instead, my father would not have been born and then he would not have gone to a distant land and met the princess — this was how my mother saw herself, I guess. But then I would not have been horn. And then. .”

She stops abruptly, but there is already a stopping in me. The flicker is gone, the burning is gone, there is only cold now and a shift of gravity, a collapse in my chest. I try to wrench a thought from this place. The story is too familiar. Too familiar. The story my father told me about him going into the B-furnace stove in the Depression and the plant owner’s goons trying to kill him. This was my story, and Tien’s mother told her this thing just like it. Kim. Kim. But I can’t remember ever telling Kim about my father and his fight in the mill. I try now. Try hard to remember. Nothing. This is good, I tell myself. They’re different stories.

Tien finally finishes her thought. “And then I would not have made love to you. I would not be here tonight in my body, which I am very happy for.”

I can say nothing. I think to ask for more details from her fairy tale. But it’s about dragons and fiery holes and princesses — it is suddenly unimaginable that Kim could think of herself as a princess with me. Not even in a made-up story for her child. Never. This was a fairy tale and fairy tales are designed to make you think of your regular life. This fiery hole could be anything. But I am breathing heavily now, gasping for air. I gently untangle from Tien and I sit up.

“What is it?” she says.

I try to catch my breath. There is no reason for panic now. It was a fairy tale. But I realize we have to go on in the morning. We have to find Tien’s mother.

“Ben?”

I finally say, “We have to find our clothes before the moon goes down.”

My hand reaches, expecting his body, my eyes are still closed but I am climbing from the dark hole of sleep and there is just bed and pillow and the South China Sea is roaring and I sit up fast. The door to our room is standing open to the sea and there are breakers and the sun is shattered all over the water. My eyes hurt from the light. I shade them with my hand. “Ben?” I say and there is nothing. I begin to feel a panic in me. “Ben,” I say louder, my feeling wound tight in the sound.

Then a shadow falls over my eyes. Ben is at the doorway. He steps in, moves to me. He is dressed. I look into his face, wait for my eyes to adjust. He stands over me and I can see him clearly now. His eyes arc soft, but something is wrong.

“What is it?” I say.

He takes my hand. “Nothing.”

I rise up on my knees, quickly.

He says, “It’s okay. There’s nothing wrong.”

I try to believe him. I realize it is about his eyes. I am naked here before him, but his eyes stay fixed on mine. I suddenly know what he will have us do. “You want to continue the search for her,” I say. “Am I right?”

“Let’s keep this room. Okay? We’ll be back here by sunset.”

“You are not my father.”

“Of course not,” he says, holding my hand tight. “I know that.”

“I do not ask for a mother.”

“Think of me as the child,” he says. “I’m afraid of the thunder. I know it can’t hurt me, but I hear it and I need to be reassured. That’s what this is.”

It occurs to me that this would be a time to tell him about what I am sure is going on inside my body. There should be no more talk of parents and children except for this real thing. And if I had awakened to find him sleeping beside me and he was naked and we were going no further on this trip, then I would. But I will not let our child be mixed up in this fear of his.

I say to him, “Let’s do this as quickly as we can. I want to make love to you on this beach tonight.”

He should say that this is what he wants, too. But he does not. He nods to me and he moves away, I suppose so he does not have to see me naked as I get up from the bed. I am angry. I feel my face glowing from this like I have been in the sun too long. His back is to me. He is at the door again. “Ben,” I say to him.

He turns. I say, “Do you love me?”

“I’ll show you how much tonight.”

This is a good answer, I think. I am letting my anger go with this answer. He is very troubled. I can tell that. I do not know why this should have come on him again. It had to be out on the beach, after we made love. Perhaps he slept, too, and had a bad dream. I rise up from the bed and he is already turning his back to me once more.