by Sonya Taaffe
“I turn thirty-eight in September,” he said flatly. “I’d be showing by now.”
It was impossible to tell if she was studying him with translucently lidded eyes, but some of the tension had gone out of her hands and shoulders and he thought that her voice sounded for the first time genuinely, if skeptically, curious. “How is that possible?”
Anson shrugged lightly, as if he had not been asking himself the same question since he was old enough to look into a mirror. “Genetics. My great-grandmother came from a junior branch of the Eliots, married into a knowing family in Boston; they changed their name after the raids, just to be sure. She was only half-deep; her daughter married a man she met at college in Iowa and her gift came right down the maternal line to my generation, where it hit an immovable wall of combinatorics. Both of my siblings have the look; they’ll go down to the sea in their time, though my sister keeps saying she’ll come back if they don’t have fast food under Devil Reef. I look like my father and he’s a Reconstructionist Jew who thinks the Esoteric Order of Dagon makes a great D&D setting.”
“You won’t—”
“I don’t even dream of Y’ha-nthlei.” He could not say even that name as it deserved, sinuous as a gleam of silt-silvered light; his mouth was made for dryer words. “And before you ask, no, I’ve never tried walking into the ocean. I passed BU’s swimming test and that’s about as far as it goes. I don’t have even vestigial gills. That’s why Tony called me. The asshole,” he said without rancor. “All who dwell in her waters shall never die, but they need to be able to dwell in the waters first.”
The breath she let out was not a laugh, but it was closer than anything he had heard from her in hours. “There’s not a name for that, is there?”
Meredith would have had something helpful to say, tart and gentle at once; he had held Anson through breakups and layoffs and the aftermath of family reunions, always knowing when to offer suggestions and when to curl himself around his lover’s greater height and say nothing more than oh, love, oh, love, like the nonsense syllables of a lullaby. Anson, confronted with tears or furious silence, always felt himself falling back on practicalities, trying to talk a way through the pain until Meredith had snapped, the one time they really fought, Do I look like I’m in an analytical frame of mind right now, Jesus! It occurred to Anson from time to time that they were still together because Meredith, even then, had never called him cold-blooded.
His tea was still warm between his hands, brackish with mint and bitter licorice root; he drank it slowly, watching the nictitating membrane ease back from Gorgo’s eyes. “There’s not a name for a lot of things,” he said. “Doesn’t mean they don’t still exist.”
Silently, trailing cover stories of standing stones, zombies, the Emperor Nero, she pushed the stack of National Geographic toward him across the damp-scarred table.
**
In the spring of Anson’s first year in Boston, the worst winter storm since ’78 dropped twenty-five inches of snow for April Fool’s Day and his second roommate played Bill Haley and the Comets like they were coming back into style and a woman named Solange Adair wrote to him by post at Danielsen Hall. She had an apartment on Pinckney Street, among the red-brick sidewalks and gaslights of Beacon Hill; he remembered afterward the incongruity of walking past snow-snapped trees still folded with budding green leaves, sweating under a balmy sky as he picked his way through slush-crusted sidewalk drifts and the rutted footpaths of unploughed side streets. White-winged and grey as the late snow, seagulls circled and called over the Charles.
She opened the door for him herself, from her wheelchair. He could not guess her age: into her fifties, by the extent of her metamorphosis, not so far gone that she could not pass at need for postal deliveries and repair calls. Behind their broad-framed sunglasses, her eyes were the flat lidless silver of sequins; she had wreathed her naked skull in scarves of sail-blue and sunset-green, twisted like the turrets of a conch’s shell. Over the warm rosewood of her skin, the faint olive-tinting of her nascent scales shone like the patina on bronze. Everywhere inside was dark wood and books, paintings and sculptures by artistic movements Anson had never heard of. Most of them looked like abstracts to him, churning storm-light colors; any motion fell through freeze-framed angles, multiplied and shattered around corners that were not there. He recognized none of the artists’ signatures. The sitting room and the hallway smelled of baking. She offered him coffee, which he was too much of a college student not to take, and apple cider cookies, which he was too newly a college student to feel comfortable accepting, as if she were a friend’s grandmother inviting him back into childhood. “Families take care of family,” she said mildly after he thanked her for the third self-conscious time. When she met his gaze directly, her eyeshine flared white as a mirror.
She had known his mother, she said, although he never knew if she meant in the flesh or in dreams. For so many of his family, there was so little difference between the two.
For the first six months, he had dreamed of his mother nearly every night. He had known even then that it was not the true communion of his siblings, who could already compare details of never-drowned Y’ha-nthlei, the phosphorescent spires and avenues of the city they would someday inherit. In the last weeks of her life ashore, Leonor Penders had lain most of the day in a claw-footed bathtub filled with cold water and commercial marine salt, the thick carmine fronds of her gills open and pulsing eagerly in the currents stirred by her own restless hands, crescent-clawed and webbed to the last joint. Sometimes she ran the shower, equally cold, adding salt from the steadily depleting bucket on the bathmat; her scales had come in with the slick glisten of wet nori, but all of her family had cut their fingers on them by the end. For days after they had gotten back from the ceremony, the indigo-shingled house on 63rd Street had smelled of standing water and drying salt, the sulfurous funk of decaying seaweed and the sharper iodine of brine. Anson could still remember the one sound she had made as the waters of Ipswich Bay closed over her head.
And over and over, he saw her in dreams as the fantastic mermaid she had never become—never would, so long as the sea endured. She was pearl-bellied, with the deeply cleft tail of a siren, spangled green as a flapper’s glass-beaded dress; she was blue-skinned and orange-scaled, flaunting as a tropical wrasse; she was rayed and spined like a lionfish, carrying in human hands a pair of scallop shells written closely with the laws of the undersea, tiny snail-tracks that glimmered and changed as he tried to read along. She was the young woman he knew best from photographs, laughing in studio apartments, her hair as dark and tousling as bracken. She was cradling the crescent moon in a dripping web of algae to her breast. He woke each time with a hard knot of anger in his chest: fought with his siblings, fought with his father, cut class one morning in early November and walked all the way to Pinole Point, imagining he could feel the fault lines of the continent grating and shifting beneath his feet as he crossed from autumn-dry tall grass to salt-marsh sedge and pickleweed reddening like Indian paintbrush. He watched the water until late afternoon, but only terns and plovers came to meet him at the edge of the mirror-blue waves. The bus to Richmond came late and he took the BART home.
He knew the sacrifices, the scriptures, the rites that marked the year as casually and surely as his father’s side of the calendar had Purim, Pesach, Tisha b’Av, the Days of Awe. He was not sure how much any of them helped. At school, his teachers treated him with uncomfortable sympathy; at home, Ron Penders who had married his wife once with wine and seven blessings and once with cups of seawater and blood refused to sit shiva for a woman who would never die. Beth spent hours in the upstairs bathroom as if something of her mother still resonated there within the pale blue walls and the white cast iron. Garen hoarded her books of marine biology and papered the wall above his bed with painstakingly hand-copied anatomies. Anson told his dreams to none of them.
To Solange Adair, for the first time to anyone, he said, “No. Not for real. I’ve never dream
ed of any of them.”
All that spring and into summer, as he stayed on after the semester’s end with a part-time job at the Boston Book Annex and a jerry-rigged bedroom in a triple-decker firetrap in Brighton, he visited the rowhouse on Pinckney Street with the other sea-strays who came and went in her home as though it were their own: claw-fingered, solitary Isobel Wardie Lau, whose father was older than the destruction of Akrotiri; stargazing Lelian Perry, whose sea-thirst had sprung up halfway through a law scholarship to the University of Chicago; and Tony Woodhouse, a talkative, cagey Tufts student with a night-shift pallor and bottle-brush black hair, dressed perpetually in T-shirts for Boston bands he was just too young to have seen. He was wearing one for Salem 66 the first time Anson saw him, folded like a piece of elastic into the narrow-cushioned window niche with a pamphlet copy of Swinburne’s “By the North Sea.” The night he fell asleep on Anson’s floor, he was advertising Mission of Burma. You’re different, he had pronounced before the three beers and half a bong caught up with him, sprawled like a starfish on carpet the color of the rain-stained walls. One finger pointing at Anson, as though he were making a note for himself in the morning: You don’t hear it calling.
Only slightly less buzzed, Anson had snorted, No, I hear you talking, man, and you’re pretty loud, and the conversation had drifted away with the grey wash of dawn and Anson needing to pull himself piecemeal out of bed in order to shelve pop art and poetry at the Annex. If anyone else at Solange’s agreed with Tony’s observation, they never told him. He liked to think it would not have mattered. There was a sea-smell in the house now, familiar as a shadow.
And then in June it ended, as suddenly and firmly as it had begun. Under the full moon of the solstice, it was Solange Adair’s time to go down to the sea with the blood of fishes and the blood of humanity painted on her brow and her palms, anointing each stickle and barbel and sharp-edged fin as the waves churned against the sea-chewed stubs of piers and spilled between the tumbled granite boulders of Innsmouth’s long-abandoned quarry, paving the tide’s road for the land-sprung soul to follow, and the witch-lights haloed the low black spine of the reef. With one arm around Isobel’s shoulders, Anson felt her claws tensing through his shirt where her arm circled his waist and said nothing, even when she drew blood; he could not tell if she shook with sorrow or eagerness, the moon like mercury in her eyes. Tony was a stranger in a good shirt and a tweed jacket, for once not slouching. In the driftwood light of the shore fires, the bracelet coiling on Lelian’s wrist ran against his dark skin like a meltwater of pearls. She made the same noise as his mother as the waters took her in and he did not know if it was a sound of pain or welcome this time, either.
He went home to Oakland the next summer, carrying among his dorm-room possessions three books from Solange’s library and an oil painting from 1919, a Vorticist’s ocean in harsh malachite and the salt-white of tumbled bone. He did not dream, then or ever, of Solange Adair.
**
“My father,” Gorgo said, into the afternoon quiet. “He left me a book.”
In the shadow of her hood, her face looked alien again, all eyes and curves of colorless shell. Much to Anson’s surprise, Tony had left her clothes after all, in a grocery bag in the bedroom with an illegible note hand-markered on the side. They looked like secondhand potluck, but the label-less black jeans fit well enough and once she had sorted out a red-and-white Breton-striped shirt and a dark hoodie from the wad of T-shirts and underthings, the fierce springiness with which she moved— bathrobe slung over one arm, rejected clothes bequeathed to the already chaotic bed—left him slightly taken aback, as if a barnacled rock on the seafloor had suddenly split a mouth open and lunged for its prey. Her feet were still bare, the bones as visible in them as the rays in a fin. She had disdained the Neighborhoods T-shirt, which made Anson smile. She did not look any more enthused about the situation, resting on the farther arm of the couch with her toes curled into a gap between cushions, but they had drunk enough tea to require heating another kettle and eventually Anson had offered the contents of his backpack to her, mostly a choice of canned soups and the most plausible-looking of the refrigerated sandwiches. Making lunch in an unfamiliar kitchen gave him a moment of postgraduate vertigo, never mind that he had not taken classes since Bush’s first term of office. Tuna salad and tomato soup later, he stacked the plates in the sink and settled into the armchair drawn cater-corner to the couch to read. However closely he was supposed to watch Gorgo, he did not think it extended to ignoring a stranger’s library.
“He died six years ago. A friend of the family had to track me down to tell me. I hadn’t seen him since the divorce. Which wasn’t so much a divorce as my mother finally throwing all his stuff out into the street and screaming that if he said one more thing about taking me down to the sea in my time, she was calling the cops and taking her chances with a restraining order.” Her voice hardened in mimicry of a dialogue she must have heard in too many variations, intractable as oil and sea. “I told you everything when we married. I never lied to you. This flesh, it’s temporary. When the changes of the life to come begin, then you’ll see who I really am. Who I always was all along, underneath. Which was her cue to tell him to call his doctors, until she gave up and started calling his doctors herself, at which point she generally found out he’d never filled any of his prescriptions and usually missed most of his appointments. Rinse, repeat, fuck that shit. A month after she kicked him out, we moved. I never”—sardonically for the cliché, but he saw how her pale throat tightened—“saw him again.”
Toward the end of their time in the charmed space of Pinckney Street, Anson had sat all afternoon on a loft bed with Isobel, neither of them speaking as she rested her head in his lap and played the same track from Rachel’s The Sea and the Bells over and over again. Fabulous as a unicorn, twenty years old and already lashless and browless, the bones of her skull warping beneath her skin like the grinding drift of tectonic plates, her father’s blood nearly bursting her veins in its eagerness to reach the sea. Her mother had gone willingly to a bride-bed of rockweed and clamshells and borne her much-wanted sea-child in a haze of antipsychotics, already dissociating at the smells of salt and blood; her scars had nearly healed in nine months, but they shocked the obstetrician anyway. He thought of his father patiently sponging his wife’s shedding skin with seawater and the herbs she had gathered or bought herself, still human enough that the slowness of the changes maddened where a sudden transformation would have soothed.
Anson closed Merlin’s Mirror and asked gently, “When did he go down?”
“He didn’t.” Gorgo gave him a narrow grey smile. “He died of cancer first. CTCL—cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. First you break out in a rash, then it turns out the rash is malignant, then it metastasizes and then you die. He didn’t see a doctor until it was way too late; he thought it was the changes coming on. He’d been waiting his entire life for the sea to come and cleanse him and take him away and it never did. I’ll never even know if it would have. You can live years with that kind of cancer, but only if you notice that you’ve got it. And he didn’t exactly trust doctors, anyway. He always thought they’d see something strange in him and—I don’t even, dissect him, institutionalize him, whatever you worry about if you’re a fucked-up fish-person. He had a couple of diagnoses, my mother said. He didn’t write about any of that.”
At Anson’s querying look, she explained, “He’d written a journal for me. He started it with the time he was thirteen and dreamed of the moon. I think the oldest parts must have been right after I was born; it was in years of different handwriting and he’d gone back and edited some of it later. He wrote down the litanies, as many of them as he could remember, prayers and observances and even some of the instructions for sacrifice, even though there’s no way he could have participated in one. He was born in Sheboygan—I looked it up after he’d died. Waite was his mother’s name. He changed it sometime before meeting my mother, which was maybe the one unambiguously n
ice thing he did for me. I had a crappy enough childhood without having to deal with Szajewicz.”
She spelled it for him with a notecard and a pen from his backpack: small, neat, hard-pressed handwriting, half-print. Anson shrugged like his father, noncommittally.
“My grandmother’s name was Zychlinsky.”
“Fine, maybe that works in hippie country. The point is, I didn’t know till he was dead. My mother didn’t know. And he just kept fucking being like that. Parts of the book were like a memoir. He worked in a cannery in Alaska, way out on the peninsula by the Aleutian Islands. He had some kind of job on an oil rig off Newfoundland. He never went to Innsmouth, or if he did, he didn’t say anything about it. But he tried once, in 1968 or ’69, to talk to one of the men who’d been part of the original investigation, a retired prohi agent named Julius Harvey. The guy not only wouldn’t let him in, he called the cops and my father spent a night in jail in Queens for getting in a fight with the arresting officer.” Briefly, Gorgo looked away to the window, where gulls were roosting on the asphalt shingles of the house across the street. “After that was a page explaining how to curse an enemy of the deep cities with the hunger of the moon and the indifference of the sun and the desire of the abyss. There was a design on the facing page like a maze or a fishing weir, to be drawn with the entrails of a young shark and the dried egg cases of a whelk and a knife boiled with sea salt—he put an asterisk at the center without saying what it stood for. Then he went back to talking about how much he was looking forward to seeing me in my true form, in the endless days beneath the water. He never dated any of the entries. I don’t know how old I was then.”
Tony had not mentioned a book, or anything other than a woman with a name he recognized. “What happened to it—your father’s journal?”
