The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

  In time, she’d be subsumed. She’d never been this close to annihilation before. It had always pained her to take back the rememberings, her own mind blotted out in favor of those who’d lived before. Those times, though, Yetu had managed to keep an inch of herself. Now she wasn’t sure even a speck would remain.

  The ancestors pulled her deeper and deeper into the abyss of the past with each passing year. How long before she didn’t awaken from their summons at all? How long before, in a confused state and painted in blood, she went to the waters of the great whites like she had done before Amaba had found her? That couldn’t be what they wanted, for her to disappear. Yetu felt the wajinru swarming all around her. Yetu knew what they would do. First, seize her. Next, gut her mind. Last, fill her empty shell with ancestors and pretend they hadn’t just murdered Yetu by forcing her to endure these memories endlessly for another year. The thought of it made her shake. This time, she wouldn’t emerge from it. There would be no Yetu left for the next Remembrance. She’d be dead.

  Yetu wouldn’t let them do it.

  The ancestors were needy but rarely cruel. Surely they would understand why she couldn’t do this again. To let the wajinru put the rememberings back inside of her would be to commit suicide. To live, she must flee. With a last look to her wajinru kin, soaking up their beauteous dance in the mud womb, Yetu left. She swam, and she swam, and she swam, and she forgot, the rememberings becoming more distant with each upward meter gained. They didn’t need her. They were stronger than her, always had been. Where Yetu was sensitive and high-strung, they were free-spirited and happy. The History would not undo them like it had undone her.

  Yetu did not look back, but she felt them in her wake. They were trapped in the memories with no one in the wings to relieve them of the burden. They were in the Remembrance now, one with every wajinru who’d ever lived. She felt them churning the water, even though the womb was supposed to prevent that. She felt them remember. Yetu feared the world would feel it too.

  4

  HOW STRANGE WE WOULD’VE LOOKED to the first mothers: wild, screaming fish creatures, scaled and boneless. What would they have made of our zigzag bodies curling through the water in a spirally streak? Perhaps it is a blessing that because of their deaths they could never look upon us. They never once had to fret over the strangeness they’d wrought.

  What does it mean to be born of the dead? What does it mean to begin?

  First, gray, murky darkness. First, solitude. Each of us is the only one of our kind, for we are spread apart and know not of one another’s existence.

  We die in droves, foodless.

  We live only by the graciousness of the second mothers, the giant water beasts we’ve years and years later come to call skalu, whales, who feed us, bond with us, and drag us down to the deepest depths where we are safer. Sperm whales, blue whales, whales that are now extinct, whales so rare there are only one or two of their kind.

  We live among them, they our only kin, unbeknownst to any one of us that there are others who would come to call themselves the wajinru.

  Until one day—

  We are Zoti.

  * * *

  Babies of all kinds are always wanting more: more touch, more food, more answers, more kindness, more world, more sea, more newness, more knowledge. But none want more than us, a little fish-child whose whale pod dies of grief when its matriarch perishes from a harpoon.

  Another fish-child might’ve died, but we are so hungry that we swim to shallow, unsafe depths where we know food is plentiful. Without the pod to coordinate hunts, and too small to catch anything big, we feast on trout. It is not enough. We are so big now. We go shallower, to where the light stabs our eyes, blinds us.

  It is days until we see food large enough to satiate. Something floating—a sea lion? Out this far from shore?

  Our pod never preferred to feast on carcasses, didn’t like the rot, but sometimes it was necessary. Right now, for us, newly orphaned as we are, it is necessary.

  We swim toward the floating creature, but it is not dead. It is not even sleeping.

  It turns toward us, first with a look of shock, and then with a look of fear.

  It is smaller than it should be. Emaciated. And it cannot swim well. Lashes on its back. It is a surface dweller of some kind. A land animal.

  Despite our hungry belly, we cannot eat this creature, whose face is so captivating, drawing us in. Something familiar and warm circles through us, a memory written in our blood.

  Though it looks like a stranger, we, a small and scaled squirming thing, had come from the belly of a being like this.

  Is it a penguin or another animal who split its time between sea and land? Did we come from a pod of them who all died, making them virtually extinct? Was this thing here the last of its kind? How lonely. We must save it, or at least make sure its last moments are not spent alone.

  It makes noises at us. Nonsense.

  Its brown skin peels and flakes.

  We grab it with our fins and it screams. Swimming on our backs, we move our fins quickly in search of land. The movement of the water means we’re not too far from a small island.

  The creature gurgles as water lands in its mouth, but this is the best thing we can do to keep it above water. We could go faster if we swam on our bellies, carrying it underneath, but with that length of a journey, a land dweller would die.

  This surface-dwelling creature with split fins—two legs—is bigger than us, but near weightless in the water, and we finally are able to drag it to shore.

  It makes noises again, all of them incomprehensible.

  Every day we bring it lobster, shrimp, crab, or fish. It does not eat it how we eat it. It has put three large flat stones together over a little pit where it rubs sticks together until they spark orange like the inside of a glowing fish. Then it lays whatever we’ve caught for it that day over the flat stones until they sizzle white stuff and turn golden brown. The scent of it is divine.

  We begin to understand the things this strange creature says, and the more we do, the more we begin to think of it as her Water means where we live. Land is where she lives. Sky is what’s above. Sand, stone, trees, fire, hungry, hot, cold, sweat, sad.

  She talks and talks, and we listen, captivated by the noises. She is nothing like our pod, friendly and warm, but she gives to us in her own way. She gives us time. She gives us objects to explore. She gives us words.

  Every day, we recognize more of them. Bark. Spice. Cut. Bruise. Scale. Fin. Us. Tomorrow. Yesterday. Light. Dark.

  As we grow, we learn, until we can make sense of almost every noise that comes from the two-legs’s mouth. The fascinating world of the surface dwellers opens up to us. Their technologies and creatures. Their ways of seeing. “You are perplexing,” she says to us, and though we don’t know what perplexing is at first, we begin to as she uses it to describe other things: mysterious tracks in the sand, a washed-up object she can’t identify. Perplexing means a problem she hasn’t solved.

  She is always trying to understand the world. She is like us. Hungry for more. She is curious about how to make plants spring up from the ground, how to make the plants into nets she can use to catch fish.

  Whatever she knows, she shares with us, and we soak up her every word. Not just facts. Not just the names of things. Stories.

  When with our pod of skalu, we only hummed—long, low howls that filled the depths so we might find one another. It’s difficult to achieve at first, but after a time, we try to copy the land creature’s noises and make them our own.

  We want to tell her things the way she tells us things. We want to share everything we know with her. We want to tell her that she’s special. We want to tell her that we’d only been searching for food those months and months and months ago, but instead we’d found—we don’t know the word for her yet. We will invent a new word. Our land creature is worth a new word.

  After copying and copying her, we learn to make sounds with our throat and tongue. T
hey do not sound like the surface dweller, but after a time, she understands. As she looks upon us, we can tell the land dweller still thinks us perplexing. She says she has always known there was a world beyond this world, a world where the unseen happens, but that we surprise her still.

  We like that we surprise her because that sounds like it’s a good thing. Warmth floods us.

  “You did not come from a god,” she says. We don’t think she means this cruelly, but it bothers us still. We know a god is a special thing.

  “Could you be our god?” we ask, words hoarse and croaky.

  We would be content to spend our days basking in her presence, swimming in the water as she fished and told us stories.

  “I am too small to be a god,” she says.

  Indeed, a year has passed and we are her size now.

  “Why do gods have to be big?” we ask.

  “I do not wish to talk about this anymore,” she says.

  The land dweller will no longer engage in conversation about where she came from or how she came to be floating half dead on driftwood in the middle of the sea. We wonder if her god abandoned her.

  When the creature asks us where we came from, we say that we only remember a little. We remember a face like hers. Just like hers. We remember the ocean. We remember chewing the fleshy seaweed that bound us to our first mothers.

  “How can you know all of that?” she asks.

  We don’t understand the question. We just remember. Every moment is a spark, and the spark is there forever.

  We do not speak how she speaks, deep and smooth. Our voice is a raspy, clicky mess, and the two-legs often struggles to parse us.

  But in the water, we make beautiful sounds with our throat, and from the creature, we learn how to name the whole world, the whole sea, using this thing we only had a half idea of. Language.

  Now we have a name for being alone. A name for being anxious. For searching. For fear. For denial. For ugliness. For beauty. For wanting something and someone.

  “I am Waj,” the two-legs says one day.

  We are out in the ocean, she on the shallow, sandy ocean floor, and we just beyond it so we have more room to swim, our head above water. At first we think she means that’s the name of what kind of creature she is. A waj. Soon, it is clear she means that it’s a name just for her, to distinguish her from others.

  “What does it mean?” we ask.

  “Chorus or song,” says Waj.

  “What’s a song?”

  And then she sings for us and we are in love.

  We do not have a name that can be spoken in the way Waj speaks, nor do we have a name at all. A unique pitch, perhaps, that our pod called us by, but that was a different sort of thing.

  “Will you name me?” we ask.

  Waj smiles and laughs. She reaches out to touch our cheek the way the whale did with its jowl when we were but a pup.

  “I will call you Zoti Aleyu,” she says.

  We know those words together mean strange fish.

  There is a gap between us that cannot be bridged. We live in the water, she on the sand. We sleep alone below the surface. She sleeps on the beach. She is tired, angry, and mad with loneliness. We are too.

  She builds a raft from pieces of the island, and we ask her where she will go. “Back home,” she says.

  “Where is that?”

  But she is done talking except to say, “Do not follow me, strange fish. Savior. We must each be where we belong.”

  “What is belonging?” we ask.

  She says, “Where loneliness ends.”

  We do as she asks and do not follow, but when she is out of range of the distance we can feel, we immediately regret it. We swim as fast as we can in the direction she has gone, chasing any trace of either the feel of her paddles in the water or the smooth surge forward of her sails up and catching wind.

  On the third day of searching and finding nothing, we feel a storm working itself into a vortex above us. A giant spiral of doom for anyone on the water or near a shore. We don’t know if the land creature is caught in it, but we must save her if there’s a chance she is. Neglecting food and rest, we look for her.

  Our search is unending, and when the hurricane comes, sweeping the center of the ocean into mad, mixed-up sludge, our search for Waj becomes a search for wreckage. We never find even that.

  The moment we first ever saw Waj all that time ago, a year or two years or maybe more, floating, looking like something good to eat, we could not have known what she’d come to mean to us. Perhaps it would’ve been better never to have understood, to have stayed in that moment full of possibility.

  We’ve lost our pod. We’ve lost our two-legged surface dweller.

  For days, we drift. We are not worried about dying, though we are not yet at the point where we are wishing for death. That time will come. Moons from now.

  Waj had said she was returning to the place where she belonged, and that belonging meant not feeling lonely. We do not have a place to return to, as our pod is dead, and we are alone, the abandoned creature Waj had dubbed us Zoti Aleyu, a suitable name for something singular and alone, but perhaps—

  We dive down to the deep where the second mother once dragged us. The pressure is immense and it squeezes us. We plunge through the cold, through the darkness. The deep will be our sibling, our parent, our relief from endless solitude.

  Down here, we are wrapped up. Down here, we can pretend the dark is the black embrace of another. Down here, we eventually find more of us. A whale, one of the biggest we’ve ever seen, descends like a sunken ship. We tremble as it hums its song. Waj.

  Its dive is right over us, and it swims closer and closer. Soon it will barrel right through us like a torrential wave, bowling us over, likely killing us. We accept this death. It is the very opposite of dying alone. We will perish much like we began, with the second mother heralding our passage between this world and the beyond world.

  We don’t close our eyes. It will be upon us in seconds. We are not afraid. We welcome it. This is belonging.

  The whale, a few measures away, opens its mouth. Inside, there are pups, pups that look like miniature version of us. Little zoti aleyu. Strange fish.

  We gasp. We are outside of our body. We wonder if the blue whale devoured us and we are dead, and this is the afterlife, a world of dreams.

  The whale hums and our whole body shivers and shakes from the force of the vibrations. We don’t understand its beautiful, hoarse moans beyond the most rudimentary levels of communications. It is kind. These little zoti aleyu are not gifts, and this whale did not come looking for us, but it recognizes that we are one kind.

  “Welcome!” we say, gathering the pups, six in all, stretching our fins out to pull them into the fold of our body.

  Having never been with child, we are without milk. How will we feed them?

  “How will I feed them?” we ask the whale, a mix of shriek and song using mouth shapes not dissimilar to what the surface dweller used.

  The whale hums. Again, we do not understand, but it stays with us. We’re not sure how much longer it can lurk in the deep before needing to return to the surface to breathe.

  “Where did you come from, zoti aleyu?” we ask the creatures so much like us.

  We pull them close and nuzzle them. We watch their wobbly attempts to swim and move. Their scaled skin is softer than ours, and their faces are so tender, they’re like the soft meat inside a clam.

  They are different ages, some as many as two or three years. Some just born. The whale has collected them, has been taking care of them, and it plays with them even now. It won’t abandon them. It will continue to give the milk we don’t have to the youngest among them.

  The pups mimic the sounds we make. When we say, “Hush now, sweet thing,” they imitate approximations of the sounds all in unison. A chorus of “ooo”s and “eee”s and “eyeyeyeye.” Their soft, whistling vocalizations are the most noise we’ve heard since our surface dweller left us. It is wo
ndrous and overwhelming, and our skin is alive with the tingles of new waves and vibrations. Our ears are alert, ready to capture every new sound from these remarkable creatures.

  We bring them close. We will not let them leave our side. Not like Waj did.

  We do not cry, though we want to. We cannot ruin this happy moment with tears.

  “There are so many of you,” we say. “There are so many of me. Creatures just like me.”

  We ask the whale if there are more, and when it doesn’t understand, we gesture to the little zoti aleyu and sweep our fins wide to suggest magnitude, volume, quantity.

  The resulting moan of the whale is thunderous and sad. It cries. The pups giggle at the fluctuations in the water making them move and bounce, making their little pointed teeth chatter.

  The cries carry on, and the pang of loss strikes us, too. There had been more at one point, perhaps. But now?

  We mourn for every zoti aleyu, cast away into the ocean, eaten or starved. But we do not mourn long. If there are six right here, then there are more somewhere else. Or there will be more. We’ll swim through every speck of ocean if we must to locate our animal siblings.

  “I am Zoti,” we tell our new pups. They are our pups Ours. They will not know loneliness like we have known. They will have no true knowledge of the concept of abandonment.

  In time, the pups fatten before our very eyes. Anutza, Ketya, Omwela, Erzi, Udu, and Tulo. Their names were words from the language the surface dweller taught us, and meant together, many in one, never alone, family, connected, and kinship. We are not ashamed that we put every hope and dream for them into what we call them.

  To cover more territory, we ride the back of the blue whale to search the seas for more of our fellows. The pups squeal as we rush through the water. They make a lovely melody without even trying. Stuck so long with our own voice, we didn’t know how good zoti aleyu could sound. Every sentence is a gorgeous song and their harmonies rip us in half because we are too full on contentment. Too happy.