by Sonya Taaffe
Gorgo opened one hand, fleetingly boneless as anemones. “I brought it with me when I came here. According to your cousin, I didn’t have it, or my clothes, or my duffel bag, when he found me. I didn’t have a room for the night; I didn’t have anything except what I took to the beach with me. So either it’s down by the rocks or the sea’s got it.” Her voice was the cool edge he remembered, daring him to respond with any emotion. “You want to go look for it? Sea air’ll do us both good.”
Anson said instead, “Why did you come here?”
He had wanted to ask her for hours; now that he had, he was thinking of Lelian with his long wrists and his soft natural hair, kneeling at the marshy edge of the Atlantic to touch his fingers to the sky reflecting like faience between stems of cordgrass and say, in a wonderment so close to pain that Anson almost did not want to look at him, It’s singing. Tony in his indefatigable denim jacket, leaning on the rail of the Summer Street Bridge to watch the moon jellies blooming in the cloudy green water, some July past when he still had hair for the harbor breeze to tousle. You can’t imagine what it looked like at its height. I’ve been shown it and I can’t imagine. It was any fishing port at the turn of the century and it was a beacon, like the Windward Islands were before it. Like a bell sounding, Y’ha-nthlei resounding with it. Strong as the scars left where two worlds meet. Meredith murmuring sleepily from the other side of a well-worn feather pillow, Just as well. I’d follow you down and then where would you be?
“What did you think you were going to find? Innsmouth was scattered in 1928—it was camouflaged as a bootlegging bust, but it was a tiny little genocide, right here in the heart of open-minded Massachusetts. They took people away. The government wouldn’t say where, but we know most of them never made it down to the sea. They burned the church. They burned books. Supposedly they even tried to dynamite the reef, though that might just be newspaper exaggerations of the time—it’s not like there are a lot of reliable records between the federal cover-up and the razing of the town, everything but sowing the ground with salt. So whatever there was of a centralized religion of Dagon, it all precipitated out to less-than-half-breeds like my family, who were far enough from the epicenter of Innsmouth that the Bureau of Investigation didn’t come knocking at their doors to ask if it could maybe measure their skulls and borrow their family heirlooms, thank you. Or my cousin Tony, whose great-grandparents got the hell out of town in the middle of the night and never came back in their lifetimes; that was their grandchildren or their children, decades later, banking that there was no one left in Gloucester or Ipswich or Newburyport who would recognize the old look outside of urban legends—and the fish-people’ll get you if you don’t watch out! Generations dying land-stranded to keep the secret, or simply because they didn’t know what to do when they started to change. There are true-bred half-deep now and do you know how old they are? My age, maybe. That’s how long it took to reestablish the old ways with Y’ha-nthlei. Or so my mother told us, before she went down.” Suddenly exhausted, he trailed off, “It’s not like she talks to me these days.” From the way the silence rang in the room, he was afraid he had been shouting.
Gorgo said very tightly, arms crossed in her hoodie and her eyes as black as the benthic zone, “I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I just wanted the sea.”
“I’m sorry,” Anson said, and meant it.
She made a restless half-shrug in response, something like scorn in the movement: flicking off his sympathy. “I do, you know.”
“Do what?”
“Dream of Y’ha-nthlei.” Her eyes closed and opened with the nictitating membrane across them, glaucous as sea-ice. “I dream of cities and they sing like whales. I dream of strangers in a sunken reef and they call me by name. I can drink salt water, I can lie in a cold bath for hours. I just can’t fucking breathe.”
He could see her then, momentary and clear as the dreams he had never shared: a black-haired woman with unbending eyes, her duffel bag over her shoulder and her breath clouding less than it should in the dry freezing air, waiting at train stations and bus stops like a mermaid in winter clothing, hellbent as a salmon on its spawning grounds. The moon lulled her down the tide-road every night in dreams, the sea-doors opened to her from between the lines of her father’s book. Her head already knew the weight of Y’ha-nthlei’s jewelry, undying gold and the living ornament of sea-things that had died from the waters above millennia ago; her hands had learned the writhe and hollow of sculptures that had never seen the sun, fin-flicked for centuries by the passage of suppliants and priests. If she had not yet tasted family blood, she knew its secret tang of salt and iron on her tongue. But she stuck in the sea’s throat: the road broke up like spring ice beneath her, the jewels turned to half-picked cockles and rotting weeds, the doors slammed closed. The only blood she swallowed was her own. It was no leap to imagine her in Trina’s tiny bathroom, running the tap cold until even her siren’s fingers ached testing the water, turning headfirst into its shallow, sufficient sanctuary like a dolphin gathering for the dive. From the other side of the water, she could see the abyss opening for her, even if it was the wrong one.
He said abruptly, “Get your coat,” and after she had stared at him for a moment, “Or find one. You’re right. We’ll both do better with some fresh air.”
**
From the white curl of the tide-line, Gorgo called, “Your cousin’s going to shit when he finds out you let me out of the house.”
They were not the only people on Good Harbor Beach in the dead eye of winter, but at least they were not picking their way between beach towels and folding chairs, children clambering up the massive ledges of granite streaked weed-green and brown as shipwrecked wood. The clouds had turned shale-grey with afternoon, but patches of sunlight brightened and faded as randomly on the strand as the watering in silk. The tide was drawing out, patterning scales into the sand as it ran; it left stones and shells behind like windbreaks. Anson had counted three razor clam shells and the sea-matted feathers of some bird’s outstretched, amputated wing. Gorgo stooped and bent far more often, but he could not see what she was collecting—Codd marbles, dogwinkles, the hairpin bones of a flounder for all he knew. The coat she had found in the bedroom closet was probably Tony’s, a men’s black leather blazer that made her look like a spy in a ’60’s television show so long as she kept her hood back; when she pulled it up, Anson refrained from telling her Meredith’s latest rant about hipster fashion. He called back now, “My cousin has been disagreeing with me ever since I blew off a Splashdown show to make out with the smartest boy in Philosophy of Physics,” and hoped the movement he could see across the pale smudge of her face was a smile. He did not expect it. Careless as she looked with her hands in the blazer’s pockets and the hoodie unzipped—no gloves, no scarf, only the candy-striped Breton shirt between herself and the teeth of February—she had trembled like a hunting cat at the first salt smell on the wind. Past Thatcher Road, she was hardly seeing him at all.
He had left two text messages for Tony and a quick hand-scrawled note, tucked into the mailbox with the keys. There was nothing to be done about the blazer or the black combat boots Gorgo had borrowed from the assortment under the coat rack, but he had washed the dishes and left them drying in a slant of cider-gold light and written another letter for Trina, signed with his own name after all. He had met her maybe twice in the ten years since Tony had introduced them, a college medievalist turned tech writer with a feathery brush of sugar-brown hair and a Greek fisherman’s cap she had plated like a backpack with buttons and pins; he had never seen the old look in her, but then again he had never asked what she saw in him beyond Tony’s vague and all-encompassing cousin. After another look at his thank-you note, he had shelved the rest of the soups from Tedeschi’s in her pantry and restacked all thirty-three issues of National Geographic.
They had found nothing after half an hour, but he had not really imagined they would, not after nearly a day’s worth of high and low tides and beac
hcombers. There were Canada geese in the yellowed saltgrass beyond the boulders, black-and-white mergansers and some rusty-backed waterbird he did not recognize bobbing farther out on the wind-rucked water; he bent to turn over a tumble of seaweed, reddish-olive strings and pods as cold and rubbery as a monster-movie prop, but there was nothing beneath it except more sky-grey sand. He had already passed a pair of well-bundled dog-walkers and a runner in an angelfish’s electric red and black. At the corner of his eye, he saw Gorgo crouched with her fingers in the running tide. She stood with something shining in her hands: when it dripped through her fingers, he saw it was only the sea.
She glanced up only a little when Anson joined her, eyes half-lidded against the wind. “Recess over?”
“Just seeing how you are.”
“Still breathing.” Her voice cocked challengingly. “Why?”
He and Lelian had been the ones to pack out Isobel’s apartment, scarcely a week into his junior year of college when she finally went down to the sea. She had been living out of her studio by then, a high-windowed rough masonry loft in a former warehouse overlooking the Fort Point Channel: light-filled, empty of almost everything else but a futon mattress in a nest of blankets and the necessary paraphernalia of painting, finished canvases stacked against the walls, unfinished ones still on the easel or lying on the broad-beamed floor. Pieces of light-colored clothing looked like shed skins, dropped haphazardly among the stacks of oversized books and CDs. Even her keepsakes were few and scattered, turning up inside boxes of empty paint tubes or hidden in a rack of solvents, fixatives, and rags—the sand-dollar-stoppered green glass jar in which she had kept Gibraltars and Black Jacks, the string of iridescent purple plastic beads Anson had caught at an unexpected parade at the Big E, a blue-and-white T-shirt from the New England Aquarium, the very last time they had all gone together and Isobel spent nearly all her time in front of the electric eel, gloved fingertips pressed to the glass as though caressing the silt-cloud softness of its skin, listening to the crackle of its attention ranging through its artificial river basin. They did not work in silence, but there seemed very little to say: in some ways it was a wonder that she had hung on to anything of the land at all. There were damp marks all across the floorboards, tracked stickily into her sheets. The harbor-smell in the linseed-tinted air was dizzyingly strong.
He had not planned to take any of her paintings, despite the knowledge that she had left them to anyone who cared; he knew Tony had always loved the smear of red pouring into yellow and sea-green called we paint our own doors and that she had painted the heart’s hook tugs home for Lelian, blurring tetra-blue and silver into the warm burnt umber of his skin, but Anson at the end of his sophomore year had fallen headlong into Norman Bel Geddes and the industrial design of the future and felt obscurely overextended taking care of the one painting he owned. All the same, he could not pack them up without knowing they were the last he would ever see of Isobel. She had worked to the end in the deep, vibrating colors she had loved, even as her palette narrowed to a hot-hearted undersea and already abstract forms diffused into an unending tidal roil. The final canvases looked as thickly sculpted as knifework, but she had used her own clawed webs on them, her own milky spit to moisten the oils. Then he found the small paintings, none larger than a page from a hardcover book: she had scratched words through the heavy impasto of each one, a mosaic of fragmentary litanies: come deep-spawning father come mother of endless waves come treasurer breaker of all our salt-bottled hearts. He was not crying when Lelian found him, coming upstairs with more boxes from the car, but he was making sounds he did not realize until his cousin put an arm around him and the embarrassment brought him back to himself. Shaving his head had only made Lelian hotter; it had not made him any more interested in big geeky white boys, especially not ones who had just broken up with their first boyfriends in an argument that began over Brian Molko. But he held Anson through his dry grief, and found him extra garbage bags and packing peanuts to cushion the five small canvases with, and said nothing afterward that made it worse. He locked up the studio behind them and turned in the keys.
None of them, Anson had realized then, were grieving. He could not expect them to. They had not lost anything, not even time.
The wind was skimming sand off the dunes like spray from the crest of a wave, salt-fine and stinging. Beside him, Gorgo had her hands deep in the blazer’s pockets, her hair spilling and her face set toward the sea; he saw her bruised profile, impassive as a coin, but her gills gaped redly beneath her chin. He shrugged, a little helplessly, a little humorously: it was nothing more than the truth.
“If the sea needs a gatekeeper, it should be someone who can swim better than me.”
The tide’s breath broke, one vast exhalation or an endless drawing in. Gorgo stirred and Anson braced himself not to hold her back, but she was only reaching for a pebble from the retreating wave, cormorant-black with a white granite scrawl through its heart. “More weight,” she said, straight-faced. When she dropped it into her pocket, it clacked.
Anson said seriously, “There’s always the sacrifices. At the hinges of the year, like your father wrote: for the mother and the father, for the sun and the moon, for the earth and the sea. And always family. You’d be eligible. They have to be blood of the sea’s blood to work.” He could not imagine her consenting in a crown of kelp and the stinging frills of sea nettle, bowing her head to anything, but he had never put his name in the lottery, either, for the garlands or the knife.
Her grin was as sharp and unexpected as the snap of a moray’s jaws, viperfish-wide. “If I want the sea to have my blood, I’ll do it my own way.”
He laughed suddenly, thinking of the time he had met Tony at Cafe Sushi and his cousin had been waiting for him downstairs, a cigarette flaring between his cupped hands like an informant in a detective film, and Anson who had never seen his cousin smoke anything but weed had blurted, What the hell, Tony? Does nicotine even work on fish? It had been a joke between them for a little while, as long as anything lasted easily with Tony’s evasions and Anson’s impatience. He could more easily imagine a life without loving, long-haul-driving Meredith than without Tony, grappled to one another with genetics and familiarity and exasperation that transcended love; he would have to someday, before it was time to gather at the ruined harbor where the barks and brigantines of Innsmouth had once set sail for the East Indies and the South Seas, kindle the shore fires and chant the litanies and watch for the answer from Devil Reef, from the world beneath the waters of the world. The scattered children of Innsmouth, slowly migrating home. He had not lied to Gorgo: he had never walked into the ocean. He had jumped, drunkenly, and been dragged out retching onto the harborwalk at Rowes Wharf; he smelled the sea in Boston, wild as a gull’s cry on the wind, and it was only distance and salt. If he lived to see the next city shine like a bell between worlds, it would only be another shore to stand on.
In the tarry swirl of seaweed at his feet, a warm color blinked like a lobster buoy. It was the plastic ring and cap off a milk bottle, lying red as a channel light in a soda-froth of foam; it was the sea giving back nothing that was not already the land’s. Anson palmed it anyway and turned to look for Gorgo. The sea wind had already reeled her from him, windblown at the waves’ edge with her hands full of salt and her eyes as huge and black as time.
There was no following his cousin into the sea, any of them; he followed her up the shoreline instead, looking despite himself for drowned books, bottles, hearts rolling on the tide.
THE DEPTH ORACLE
Had she other zealot and lover,
or did he alone worship her?
did she wear a girdle of sea-weed
or a painted crown?
how often did her high breasts meet the spray,
how often dive down?
—H.D., Helen in Egypt
The drowned man bobs at the foot of the jetty, pale as dead fish, splayed like seaweed to the rocking of the tide. In the shallow water, he
does not drift from the sea-wall’s mortared slates; olive clumps of weed float beneath his upturned hands. In a few hours, the tide will pull him back, out to the depths that fall away from the sunlight into cold, and dark, and the backwash intimations of vast shapes passing unseen. The silt beneath him will settle to mud that the waves draw out as fine as silk for terns and herring gulls to mark as they hop and take flight, and the mussels bristle dryly in summer heat. Now he hangs as close to the land as his new element will allow; at the high tide, as near to life.
A crab has gotten at one of his eyes already. It curls its legs inside the tattered socket, jaunts and swivels to the waves like a prickly, makeshift replacement, weed-green and brown where his eye was the creamy, layered grey of ancient shale; no pearls. Fish have sampled his barley hair, the trailing leather laces of his shoes, the cotton of his shirt and the blood-stilled, salt-swollen flesh beneath. The sea will eat him down to the bone and pick the bones apart, sift him down to coral and sand until little more than a jellyfish glaze of memory remains to drift down the endless currents: infinity in a saltwater drop. Even then, the waves will wash him here. As long as she needs him, he will come to her call: as always, as now. Lifeless in the cool, sun-shattered water, the drowned man brushes up against the sea-wall, its stones furred with green weed; kelp loosely wrapped around the fingers of one hand. His name, that the sea swallowed down with the rest of him, lies written in that verdigris snarl. With one eye that was a crab, and one eye filmed full of salt, he looks up through the water to see her.
Between the driftwood and marble bellies of clouds, sunlight runs like ink on wet paper. She blocks out the piecemeal sky. Her hair blown raggedly in the wind off the water, the color of acorns, fallen oak leaves, resolutely earth-toned; strands of grey at her temples, threading sunlight here and there. Even with one foot on the asphalt and the other up on the fence-piece of steel rail, she has still the look of a figurehead, her eyes as impenetrable as painted wood: though her regard kindles, so palely green as to become colorless, the glance of rays over a wave’s edge.
