Come down from there, son. Come and see, I said. Come down from the dune and join us. I knew you would return, for the Sea had told me my boy would be an important part of this story. Come down and I will place The Mark of the Sea upon your face and you will know what it is like to have something to believe in, belong to, cherish. Worship me, your true father, and you will have access to the Sea unlike any other.
At this, some ululated, excited at the possibility of my lineage opening even more doors to salvation. In the ensuing silence of wind and lapping waters, others grumbled, unhappy that I would even suggest that anyone else be placed upon their shoulders or doted upon with absolute reverence. Moaned with jealousy that this flimsy, quaking, weeping boy could possibly be held in higher regard than them.
I held out one crystal hand to him and his weeping face transformed, turned aghast. My hand caught the Light, cast shattered rainbows across the beach, over the faces of my people. It was as if the boy’s face suddenly melted in the desert heat, like so much loose clay, as he screamed, his voice gravelly, his heart wrecked: What are you?
Before I could answer him I witnessed the bullet, in absolute clarity, whistle out of the barrel of his pistol and fly straight for me. I saw it spin and bob upon the air currents, and only once it had hit me in the chest and knocked me from my people’s shoulders did I hear the gun’s second crack.
The People of the Leviathan scattered, leaving me exposed, and the boy fired again and again until his pistol clicked and clicked and he threw it in the sand. Then he turned, hiding his melted face and constant tears, and ran down the other side of the dune, disappearing behind it, my setting son.
twenty-nine
I took four bullets. One in the center of the chest. One in each shoulder. And one in the forehead. I took four bullets and, still, I could speak. With brittle breath, I pushed these words from my lips: Drown me in the Sea. Drown me in Her Light.
Though The People of the Leviathan didn’t immediately take to me, they were my people now, and they did as I ordered. A man and a woman scooped me up under my arms and dragged me across the white bone-sand, a jagged line of red marking our path. My legs limp and useless. Quickly, but ever so gently, they walked me into Her oily waters until they were knee-deep in it. There, they set me down, still cupping my head to keep my mouth and nose above the water.
No no, I told them, but I relished the glare of the sun, the washed-out sky, and the birds swaying through it, fearless, dark, and stupid. No no, please… drown me. Drown me in Her Light.
There were shouts of protest and lots of noise from the crowd now scattered and frantic upon Her beaches, afraid, unsure of what to do. Able only to be a spectator. Men and women wept. Cried out. Asked God rhetorical questions. Some unsteady souls even yelled out that someone should call the police. An ambulance.
I could only shake my head no.
Please, I mouthed with lips whetted with blood. So reduced was I to begging. Then I too began to weep. Slow tears dropped from me into the Sea.
The man and the woman looked at each other, The Mark of the Sea on their faces glowing red. Hesitant at first, they nodded to each other and slowly, slowly, slowly lowered me into the rich Sea. My eyes stung at the salt. The holes in my chest, my shoulders, and my forehead burned. Blistered. The waters around me agitated and rocked. I watched the sun above me, through Her glassy sheen, swirl and waver like a van Gogh painting. The faces of my two helpers dissolved from view. Then my blood began to float, coil and curl in puffy red clouds above me. Next, my air left me in big gulping bubbles, again and again, as if I had breathed in all of the world’s air before sinking to the bottom of the Sea. Bubbles escaped my gaping mouth again and again until the bloody Sea around me boiled and churned, churned and boiled. Frothed and foamed. Foamed and frothed. Something like electricity ran threw me, along with the most excruciating pain, as if the Sea, Herself, had penetrated me to liquefy my bones, evaporate my organs, and remove my skin by burning. I let loose an underwater scream I’m sure could be heard for miles and felt throughout multiple dimensions.
Then everything went silent.
The waters calmed. The sun above me spun and spun like a hypnotic swirl, the Sea bending and manipulating the light. Soon my stinging eyes no longer stung but began to feel heavy. Soon the wounds in my chest, shoulders, and forehead soothed. I watched the sun spin and spin and felt eternal peace within my heart.
Soon, soon, She said and my heart was calmed further. Soon, soon, She said, and my heart slowed. Dark shapes of birds crossed the swirling sky in slow motion. The sun, swirling, leaned over me like a curious patron, getting closer and closer, but ever so slowly. And my heart slowed. It slowed. It slowed until it was no longer pumping. But the sun, it kept coming, getting closer and closer, bigger and bigger, until the water broke, and I was rising toward the sun, my skin searing and smoking from the closeness.
I was floating. Still floating. In the air as if in Her holy waters.
Everything around me glowed, became brighter and brighter. Until all was Light, and I floated in it, weightless, free of corporeal burdens. All was Light. Freedom. Light. Freedom.
Her Light.
thirty
I awoke in streaming waters. No, I awoke as streaming water. I flowed. I gushed. I ran everlasting. A sentient current of water.
Soon I recognized the fish bones beneath me. The frail skulls and ribs. The bleached sand. The sun. The dark birds in the pale sky. And all the saltwater pouring from me, my mouth impossibly wide. Gushing. Evacuating. The Salton Sea spilled from me in an endless cascade of crystal waters. I could not catch a breath or close my eyes against the sight. My stomach clenched and my lungs squeezed as the water streamed from me for minutes on end, until the salt river became a brook, then the brook a brooklet, then a trickle dribbling from my quaking lips.
Then the trickle stopped, allowed me to cough and cough.
Next, a thunderous noise whirred above me.
Thousands cheered or gasped.
A rumbling murmur, not of the Sea.
No songs, no chants, no order. Just the chaos of noise.
I rolled over onto my back and caught my new breath.
I reached out with my crystal hands and caught the Light.
Over the Sea, helicopters whirred and buzzed, dipped and rose like mosquitoes above rancid waters.
The sky was plagued and the ground beneath it was chaos.
Thousands stood upon the shores of the Salton Sea, but not a one attended to me. Not a one payed witness to the miracle of me. Born again, complete and whole, for a third time. The first, my corporeal birth. The second was The Drowning. This third time would be the last, and everlasting.
Bodies scurried past me. News crews ran in all directions, knocking people down. Lawmen on ATVs bumbled by me, obliterating the beach beneath fat tires. Sirens wailed and people shouted and screamed.
Who called these Lawmen to the Sea?
Then the sun went out.
The rising Leviathan blocked it out as it rose to snap fiercely at retreating flocks of birds. The monster was so enormous, the thing seemed to move in slow motion, though its swaying movements were quick and frightening.
Soon, it crashed back down upon the Sea, sent a monstrous wave to eat the beach. Hundreds of people were pulled into the Sea as the wave was drawn back into Her body, while hundreds others ran the opposite way.
The wave, when it hit me there upon the beach, had little effect. I hardly moved. It did not drag me back with it.
It did not drag me back with it, but I watched as bodies slipped past me, pulled into Her depths against their will. I watched as even the dogs along the beach were drawn into the Sea and drowned, the great Light in their eyes fizzling out.
Confused, I stood and felt a glorious stiffness in my limbs. Could not sense a beat beneath my ribs. Had no sense, even, that I was breathing, or had lungs with which to take air in.
I felt cold, too. No, that’s not quite right. I didn’t feel anyth
ing at all.
I was hardened. Hard. Mind, body, and soul.
Then I understood why, perhaps, my people had ignored me as they scattered, ran past me in their feeble attempts to locate safety.
Finally, my body was fully crystalized, and all of me caught the Light. Caught Her Light and held it so deeply that anyone looking at me would only see a glare and be forced to look away.
Before I could call out and explain to the droves rushing past me, full of fear and excitement at their first sighting of the sea monster, the Leviathan again breached Her waters and slammed down, sending an even larger wave to crash upon the beach entirely. The entirety of Her circumference would be left beaten and battered this time. The beast was not only creating a tidal wave, but evacuating the Sea of all Her water, sending it to the desert beyond the beach that would drink it up like a blister-mouthed transient.
I stood there, solid, as the wave rewound into the Salton Sea, unmoved as bodies were sucked backward and floated past me. Unmoved as the Sea sucked the Light out of the eyes of hounds and humans, alike. Those people, wild-eyed, clutched at water as though they might gain purchase, hold on and not be pulled toward the monster.
No such luck in a world suddenly brand new.
That monster rose again and slammed down again, then settled into the raging waters, only its head visible like an alligator’s as its mouth stretched wide to welcome the tide of drowning people streaming into it. People not drowning in Her Light. Drowning only in Her water, never having had the pleasure of knowing the Sea so completely, so totally as me.
I watched as masses of people, again and again, were drawn into the Sea as the waves pulled them in. Helplessly, they floated and flowed swiftly into the open jaws of the beast, swallowed whole. Its head set above the waters, mouth open like the entrance to some terrible carnival ride, steam and sea-spray billowing from its nostrils.
Unlike the Sea, this beastly god had no patience, would create its own sacrifices. Screams flew into its mouth and were quieted. Its dark eyes rolled into the back of its dragon-like head.
Screaming, hysterical people slipped into those massive jaws, over and over. When bodies piled up in the doomed stream flowing into the monster’s throat, I saw people push others under, trying to use them as human rafts, determined to discover the security of the beach once again, only to be sucked down and extinguished, just like the rest.
Somehow this creature that ate screams remained eerily silent throughout all of its violence. Only the chaos of displaced waters announced its movements.
Her waters. It was Her waters it was displacing. It was Her waters that continued to spread out and flood the thirsty desert for miles and miles.
It wasn’t long before I could sense the Sea shrinking, Her waters lapped up by the cracked land beyond Her beaches, that creature expelling Her essence from Her basin. I panicked, but in my glowing crystal body, hardly knew how to move, let alone quickly. I sensed Her urgency, however, and walked, slowly, into the swells and whitewater, guided by some unnamable force.
Again that magnificent and fearsome monster breached the Sea, this time knocking helicopters from the sky with a whip of its hideous head. They whirled and spun and crashed into the water like pelicans. Upturned ATVs and sheriff patrol cars washed past me, carried out to the Sea by the wave’s muscular drawback.
The Sea was shrinking, though it wasn’t happening like the news and Lawmen said, those people who worship and live under The Great Eye. It was happening much more quickly, and taking thousands of lives with it. All those hopeless souls poured right into the Leviathan’s gullet.
Was this punishment? Once again, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had misunderstood Her message.
Again the Leviathan crashed down and all Her water went asunder.
The Leviathan was killing Her. Soon the Sea would be no more.
Please, please… I heard, as if in dying song. It was She, and now it was Her time to be reduced to begging. It hurt me so to hear Her in such pain. I would have cried if I still had the tear ducts to do so.
Instead, I waded out into the quaking Sea, which did not extinguish my glow but held the Light around me in a liquid halo.
Under the blazing desert sky, now free of both birds and helicopters, I walked through the massive waves cresting and crashing over me, again and again, unfazed, their power and their weight unable to knock me over or even slow my pace.
Those waves kept rising before my crystal shape like glass skyscrapers. Each wave crashed down upon me as if my touch was the dynamite that demolished them.
I trudged through the receding waters left behind by the waves and could feel Her pleads of please, please come closer as I drew ever nearer to the fearsome sea monster now flailing and snapping its glistening jaws high above the Sea. Snapping at nothing but air, for all the things of the sky were vanquished or vacated. The sky would be absolutely still if not for that monstrous head shoving clouds aside.
Through massive walls of waves I continued my journey, my crystal feet cutting up the soft seafloor until I came beneath the shadow of the Leviathan. It was there, in that close proximity, that I witnessed the salty Sea steaming off its leathery, scaly body. It was there I could smell the smoke expelled from its mad nostrils. It was there that I could hear the wailing of all the souls tortured within the belly of the beast.
Please, please…
I stood in roiling water made shallow by the retreating waves. It was like standing in the eye of a hurricane. I stood far out in the Sea, somehow not submerged because the monster had repelled Her waters from where it stood. I stretched out my arms and even though I was in the shadow of the Leviathan, I caught all Her Light and became a beam of radiation stretching up into the sky, finally catching the eye of that sea serpent.
It swayed and swung above me, its right eye aimed right at me, the source of the explosion of Light. Then its great jaw dropped and it roared for the first time. For the first time its voice was heard. All the seawater around us rippled and rolled away and we stood in a perfect circle of muddy seafloor, surrounded by a swelling wall of water. It roared again and I could sense its intention. I felt rattled deep within my crystal body. I felt all my illuminated fibers struggle to maintain their shape. Struggle, at the molecular level, to hold my atoms in place. I stood there, quaking and rattling and ringing as the Leviathan attempted to destroy me with its voice. To break up my essence and distribute it to millions of darker dimensions where my Light would go unnoticed.
But that ringing that threatened to crack me turned into song. Song! And when the great beast heard it I saw fear in its eye for the first time. Monstrous and stupid though it be, it only roared again and again until I shook and rang so violently that only the song of my crystal body could be heard.
My song muted the Leviathan’s first words.
Clearly frustrated, and beginning to tire, the sea creature swung its head into me. When it struck me with massive force, my crystal body only sang louder and a great gash opened up on the side of the beast’s face. Torrents of purple blood splashed down into the mud around me, and the Sea, from all the powerful soundwaves, continued to recede around us, leaving us this circular stage on which we battled.
Please, please…
The Leviathan bashed its face against me, again and again, screaming, howling, roaring, unable to decode me and for the first time fearful for its life, which had always been eternal.
Again and again it lashed and battered and lacerated its face against my vibrating crystal body. This monster had no idea that its abuse only made me sing louder.
My body shot Light upward in an agitated, sometimes refracted beam. Again and again, the purple blood dropped but couldn’t douse the Light or silence my song. Again and again, the great beast was cut, a thousand times over, until it finally swayed and toppled to the bloodied mud around us.
Soon after, the ringing slowed, and my song quieted, winding down to a low hum before going silent.
The waters re
turned and filled the battle circle, submerging myself and the slayed monster, which the Sea would eventually turn into sand. I stood, then, under dozens of feet of water. A tomb of liquid crystal. Again the sun a hypnotic swirl above me. My beam of Light doused to a comforting iridescent aura.
All was silent. All was calm. Peace at last.
thirty-one
There were still thousands left, unperished, washed out into the desert by the massive waves. Some even woke under the shadow of the Chocolate Mountains, dozens of miles away.
There were still thousands though She had promised few. Of course, many did not return for fear that the battle was not truly won. Their lack of faith found them alone in the dessert and running away.
The thousands that remained, however, including Jasmine, Angela, Teresa and the boy, and even the Imperial Sheriff, now worshipped me above all others. Even above the Sea. It hurt my crystal heart that they should think me magnificent, when everything I’d become was because of Her.
They lined the beaches, sleeping on bone-sand or in tents or cardboard boxes. There were cars abandoned on the shore by the tidal waves, sunk into the mud, and some people cleaned those out and called those home. The shoreline of the Salton Sea, which had grown after the Devastation of the Leviathan, resembled Slab City now with all the shacks and shanties and lived-in vehicles. Despite the massive waves that desolated the region, these people refused to stray far from me. And I refused to stray far from Her. So, there they were, a tangled mass of limbs stretched out across miles of pulverized fish guts and bone.
There were still thousands.
And all bore The Mark of the Sea.
Were you among them? At what point did you choose to run? Upon my resurrection from the Sea? Or when you found you didn’t have the strength to look directly at me and hear Her Word?
No matter. For She said there would not be many.
And that was true then more than ever.
The God of Salt & Light Page 10
