The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

  “I meant you’re… you’re like us,” Suka said.

  It was flattering to be thought of in those terms. As similar. As sharing something in common with not just one other, but a whole us. Since she was fourteen, she’d always been marked as different by her role as historian.

  Yetu squeezed her eyes shut, regretting the thought. She wasn’t ready to be swept into the fold of a stranger. She was wajinru, no matter how far away they were from her. Being historian, being different, didn’t change that. “I didn’t mean to startle you so. I only wanted to thank you for the fish,” she said.

  Suka calmed, limbs visibly loosening. “It actually wasn’t me. It’s Oori who’s been catching them for you. I just, I happened to be here.”

  “Oori. Is that one of your siblings?” asked Yetu. “One of the… people… from the other day?” The words were much more fluid in her mind than they were coming from her mouth. It sounded like she was belching them out.

  “No. Oori fishes around here, but she’s not family,” Suka said. “She’s from an island off the northwestern coast. We’re inland mainland folk, and much farther south. I’d say she trades with us, but to be honest, mostly she just gives. I tried to give her a blanket once and she laughed at me and asked if I’d mistaken her for an infant, so. That’s Oori.”

  “Can you tell Oori thank you for me? Then tell her I’d like more?”

  “More?”

  “More fish. Or preferably a seal. Something fatty.”

  “Oori is—she doesn’t take kindly to requests or demands on her time,” said Suka, like it wasn’t something to be wary of about her. Yetu found the quality fascinating. She wanted to be a person who didn’t take kindly to requests, who knew her own mind. Maybe if she’d had a stronger will, she’d have been able to resist the pull of the ancestors, able to carry the History without so much grief.

  “That’s admirable,” said Yetu. “It was only a question. Not a demand. She should do what she wants.”

  “Oh, she does.”

  Despite what Suka warned, Oori did bring bigger loads of fish over the next few days. And fresh seal. Small sharks. King mackerel.

  Yetu swam in tiny circles in the pool in an attempt to keep herself awake for longer hours. She wanted to catch a glimpse of this Oori. The tightness of her temporary resting quarters was stifling, but the border of boulders formed an appealing bubble around her, shutting out the sensations of the ocean. She’d tire of the curious blankness against her skin compared to the open sea eventually; for now, she lapped up the calm, the finiteness of it. As long as she didn’t make a point to tune her skin to the waters beyond the wall, her world ended but a few feet from wherever she was. It was a cage, but also a protective cocoon.

  On the third day of trying to spot Oori, Yetu finally did. She awoke when the sky was only just turning light, a pleasing dark blue shade that reminded Yetu of being underwater where sunlight barely reached.

  “I see you,” Yetu said, using a wajinru greeting.

  Yetu heard a startled splash.

  “So?” Oori said, her voice quiet, deep, and raspy.

  “I was just letting you know,” said Yetu, alert now. It was too dark to properly see her, and sound didn’t travel as well through air. She could neither feel nor hear the shape of this strange woman beyond a vague outline.

  “I suppose now I know,” said Oori.

  “Thank you for the food,” Yetu said, swimming closer to where Oori stood in the pool, slowed down by the shallowness of the water.

  “It’s nothing,” Oori said, the gruffness in her voice showing no signs of retreating.

  “It’s food. It’s helping me get better.”

  “What should I have done instead? Not provide what is necessary? Don’t take it to heart. I fed my mother till the day she died, and I despised her. Good-bye.”

  Their conversations over the next several days continued to be short. Oori had no interest in Yetu, nor in anyone, it seemed. She spent her days out on the water in a wooden sailboat Yetu had spotted, which, given the calm winds of late, had become more of a paddleboat. She spent nights on the water as well, sleeping in her boat, the rope tied to a large boulder. According to the others, she didn’t always tie herself to shore, letting the water carry her wherever it would, living off fish and stores of ocean.

  “I wish there was a way to properly thank her,” Yetu said to Suka one day.

  “Who? Oori?”

  “Yes. Who else?” asked Yetu.

  “She doesn’t like to be thanked. That’s too close to kinship for her, which she doesn’t do.”

  “Well, kinship isn’t inherently a good thing,” said Yetu, beginning to understand Oori more and more. Perhaps for Oori, kinship meant taking care of a mother who’d hurt her. For Yetu, it had meant isolation from her people as she tried to cope with the rememberings. And now? She wasn’t sure what it meant. She would always see herself as wajinru. That was one thing she’d figured out since being in the tidal pool. The sea beckoned her, and it pained her not to join it, to be one with it, to feel it all over her. Even though it often hurt, her skin relished the pressure and the feedback. Above the surface, everything seemed so insubstantial and light. She missed being a part of not just the sea, but the whole world. Without the History, she felt out of place and out of time. She missed being connected to all.

  But connection came with responsibility. Duty choked independence and freedom. If Oori didn’t want kinship, Yetu could understand. Why be beholden to anyone else’s agenda? Oori was obligated to herself and herself alone.

  “I just mean that she’s different, you know? Not like us. She’s not so good with, hm, how do you say, human interaction and any trappings of decorum or rules. I suppose that’s why she prefers animals to people. Most animals don’t exchange hellos and ask how the other is. They just exist next to one another.”

  Yetu’s ears and skin perked at the sound of that. Oori preferred animals, did she?

  “Perfect, then. I’m not human,” said Yetu. Though her foremothers were two-legs, she felt she had very little in common with these strange land walkers, whose teeth were weak and flat. “I am animal.”

  Suka played with their breath in the back of their throat then pushed it through their mouth—a strange habit of the two-legs. It was too thoughtful to be a sigh. Too calm and content to be a groan. Just a sound, meaningless, as they considered what to say.

  “Yes, but only animal-ish?” they said, hedging.

  Yetu didn’t understand what that could mean. She groaned, unable to keep track of it all. Without the vivid images of the rememberings, she was left only with outlines of memories, and even those were waning. Two-legs had specific ways of classifying the world that Yetu didn’t like. She remembered that, at least. They organized the world as two sides of a war, the two-legs in conflict with everything else. The way Suka talked about farming, it was as if they ruled the land and what it produced, as opposed to—they’d just said it themselves—existing alongside it.

  Suka didn’t understand Oori. Yetu did. And what she didn’t understand, she wanted to. Suka had written Oori off. But Yetu was happy to simply exist alongside her whenever Oori made herself available for such things.

  * * *

  The first time Oori stayed longer than a few moments, Yetu got to see her in the sunlight. She had dark skin, darker even than Suka’s, and there were scars and markings cut into her face in elaborate patterns. They were beautiful and strangely familiar. Yetu squinted to get a stronger impression, but she couldn’t place them. Something from the History? That didn’t feel right. The memory felt more present than that, more recent.

  Yetu wanted nothing more than to keep looking at Oori’s face, which was startlingly captivating. Her eyes were dark as the deep. Yetu drew her into a conversation about fish bait so she might keep looking upon her. Oori remained for nearly an hour debating the merits of this and that technique. Yetu felt bereft when she left, and she spent the rest of the day coming up with topics t
hat might bid Oori to stay even longer.

  The next day, Yetu taught Oori how to better read the winds as they related to the currents. For that lesson, Oori remained the whole morning and part of the afternoon. The next day, Yetu opened up about her thoughts on fishing nets, how sometimes, when she was a pup, she’d sneak off and tear all of them to shreds with her teeth. Oori listened, eyes toward the sea but ears toward Yetu, then asked if all nets were the same or were some worse than others. Yetu could talk about this topic at length, and she did, Oori never once standing up to leave. She nodded at random intervals and asked clarifying questions, but was otherwise content to hear what Yetu had to say.

  A week passed, and Yetu ran out of topics, but Oori remained anyway. She told Yetu that despite her comfort on the ocean, she got seasick still. She loved riding waves on her little boat. She loved to swim. She could hold her breath for three minutes, which Yetu understood was supposed to be a significant amount of time for a two-legs.

  When the both of them ran out of things to say and Oori looked like she might be getting up to leave, Yetu convinced her to stay by saying that there was a special sound she could make to attract certain types of fish to her. It was a hiccupping whistle, a gentler, more musical version of a seabird’s call. It had a hypnotizing effect, for one, but also stimulated pleasure centers in many creatures’ brains when combined with an electrical signal that wajinru could project.

  “Like this?” Oori asked, making the sound in the air.

  “Close,” said Yetu, but it wasn’t really, not at all. Her vocal apparatus was too different from a wajinru’s. “Make the sound in the water. See if that works.”

  Oori hesitated, unsure for several moments. She was currently in a full squat on one of the boulders that surrounded the tidal pool, heels to ground, bottom nearly touching the rock.

  “Come,” said Yetu. “Come here now.”

  Yetu relished all the time she got to see Oori in the bright light of day. In addition to the patterned divots and scars, there were black markings inked permanently into her face and neck in similarly elaborate designs. If only Yetu could feel them, she might know what they were. Her eyes did not see as well as her scales did.

  Oori’s voice and manner reminded Yetu of her amaba, stern and insistent. Yetu glanced toward the wide sea. Amaba’s suffering must’ve been so great right now, left for days in the seizing chokehold of the History. Yetu’s breath caught at the thought of it. Even if Amaba and the others had risen from the trance, it would take them some time to carry on life as usual.

  Yetu tried to tune her skin to the water, to feel past the boulders out into the larger ocean. Thousands of sensations brushed up against her, but they were all whisper soft, and she couldn’t distinguish the wajinru from any other living creatures in the deep. Was it wishful thinking to hope that meant they were out of the Remembrance and had moved on now, living quiet, unremarkable lives?

  Yetu returned her eyes to Oori, and Oori sat down on her bottom. She let her legs fall into the tidal pool, swaying her feet back and forth.

  “See, it’s nice, isn’t it? Come in,” Yetu said.

  “It’s cold,” said Oori, but it was just an excuse. Oori was not the sort to be put off by a slight chill. She braved the open sea daily, her boat crashing over waves that sprayed her with buckets of icy water.

  “I don’t believe you have ever felt cold in your life,” said Yetu, gently chiding. “Come now. Get in.”

  Yetu didn’t know what had come over her. She hadn’t had a conversation like this since before she’d taken on the History. She hadn’t teased or been teased since she was thirteen.

  A lonely child, more easily hurt than other wajinru, she’d always tended to keep to herself. But before becoming historian, she could be with people at least, talk to them and confide in them. Once she had taken on the rememberings, she’d lost that ability, too gripped by the past to do more than the bare minimum to interact in the present.

  She’d come to prize solitude over all else, desperate for quiet and a stop to the voices of the past and present alike. Friends she’d held dear disappeared, put off by her emotional distance, her unpredictability.

  “Please?” said Yetu, keeping her voice light, playful. She hoped she was doing it right. She hoped that she didn’t sound too childish, trying to replicate her manner as a child because that was the last time she’d attempted to make conversation with someone she liked so much.

  Oori groaned softly and shortly, but gave no indication that she was truly upset by Yetu’s encouragement. “I was cold once,” she said, “and I didn’t like it. I aim never to feel it again.”

  Yetu tingled all over. She’d never been so content to talk to someone before. In fact, over the last twenty years, she’d avoided talking at all except those times when it was absolutely necessary… and even then. During her earliest Remembrances, she’d stayed silent the entire ceremony, providing no filter for the painful images she had sent her people.

  “It feels wonderful. Come. Please,” Yetu pleaded again. She hoped she wasn’t pushing Oori too far. Yetu knew what it was like to be torn between one’s own wants and the wants of others.

  “Fine,” said Oori, rolling her eyes. She slid into the water but kept her distance from Yetu, who was on the other side of the pool. It hadn’t occurred to Yetu before that Oori might’ve been afraid of her.

  “Do I frighten you?” asked Yetu. She was glad that her voice sounded so strange, croaky, and broken, because it disguised any hurt or bitterness in it. “Scared that even though you’ve been feeding me, talking to me, that I’ll gobble you up? You think so little of me?” She’d meant it to sound like a joke, but she knew it didn’t come out that way.

  Oori didn’t break under Yetu’s questions. Her face was still and calm, like the deep itself. “You are something from the wild. It isn’t a matter of thinking little of you. It’s a matter of common sense and respect. If I were to nurse a shark back to health, I would keep my distance when releasing it. I don’t know anything about you. What if you have an insatiable need to bite anything that is within two meters of you? What if you have the prey drive of a lion?”

  Yetu didn’t know what a lion was. “I don’t. And besides, you look disgusting to eat.”

  Oori caressed the top of the water with her right palm, sending tiny shocks of waves over Yetu’s skin a short distance away in the water. “Still. It remains that I know nothing about you. Would you trust a strange creature so readily? Don’t you harbor some recognition that I might do you harm? If you don’t, you are naive.”

  “I am not naive,” said Yetu. “I know more about the world’s cruelty than you ever will. I know all of it.”

  Except she didn’t anymore. The rememberings were gone, replaced with a ghost. Still, the echoes the History had left told her that the two-legs were capable of savagery.

  “Oh really? What do you know, Yetu the wise?” asked Oori.

  “I know what it feels like to be drowned,” she said, refusing to explain more, because she couldn’t remember more. Her only recollection of it was the sensation in her lungs. “I won’t be able to show you how to make the proper sound if you don’t come closer. Don’t you want to lure all the fish to you?”

  Yetu dipped her head in and hoped Oori would do the same. She did, but it took her a whole minute. “Go like this,” said Yetu in wajinru, before realizing that wouldn’t make sense to Oori. She switched to her language and said the same, then demonstrated the sound. Oori pushed back up through the water to take a breath, then came down again and tried to emulate the sound.

  Yetu shook her head, then gestured for Oori to join her back above the water. “Don’t use your mouth so much. The sounds are through your throat. Try screaming. Or screeching. That will get you closer.” Yetu hoped she wasn’t being too demanding. It felt good to share something freely with another. She could think of all kinds of things she wanted to show Oori. “Come now. Again.”

  This time, the sound Oori made
under the water was half decent, and though it didn’t sound like any word Yetu knew, at least it sounded like it could be a word in wajinru.

  Oori emerged from the water looking very pleased with herself. She wasn’t smiling, but Yetu detected the satisfied smugness there. “Now it’s your turn,” said Yetu.

  “My turn?”

  “To show me something. Isn’t that how it works?” Conversations, shared moments—they were exchanges, were they not? This was what Yetu remembered of them from the time when her life had been a little more social than it was now.

  “I have nothing to show you,” said Oori. “The only thing I know is the water, and I doubt I know anything about it that you don’t know better and more deeply.”

  Yetu didn’t doubt it either. “Well, you could tell me about something else. You could tell me something about yourself.”

  “What do you want to know?” asked Oori, looking more comfortable in the water now. She watched the sea, and birds flying overhead, and crabs in the sand. Her eyes never once met Yetu’s.

  “Where are you from?” Yetu asked, hoping she’d get a chance to ask another question too. If she didn’t, and she’d wasted her question on something as mundane as place of origin, she’d regret it dearly. She wanted to know what Oori wanted more than anything else in the world, and what she was most afraid of, and had she ever been brought to shivers from sadness or anger. Did she like Yetu? Would she have treated any creature who washed up into this pool so gently, or was Yetu special?

  “I am from a dead place,” Oori said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The land is dead. The people are dead.”

  “Your parents?” asked Yetu.

  “Dead.”

  “Siblings?”

  “Dead,” said Oori.

  “Kin?”

  “All dead. I am the last of the Oshuben,” said Oori.

  Yetu looked for traces of sadness on Oori’s face but found none. She was blank.

  “What an unspeakable loss,” said Yetu, not wishing to assume that Oori’s stern countenance revealed anything about how she felt on the matter. According to Amaba, Yetu simply looked “away” and “removed” at times when she was experiencing some of the most violent rememberings.