An Uncertain Grace

by Krissy Kneen

  She nods again.

  ‘And also…’

  When she’s waited for what must be several minutes she puts out her hand and caresses the table as if it might be my arm, calming me by osmosis through the warm wood.

  ‘You should talk about this. You are unique. You’re the first person who’s tried this. We’ve done it with monkeys and dolphins, and hooked cats up to dogs, but a jellyfish colony? This is something new. These are our future, the jellyfish. When everything else is dead there will still be a hundred billion of them drifting about in the water.’

  ‘Lonely,’ I say. ‘I feel lonely. But not like, first week in a new city, gotta write home kind of lonely. Something…else.’

  She sits back suddenly. She turns her attention to the shoe print on the wall. She purses her lips.

  ‘We want to do it one more time, hook you up, you know. We want to try something. We think it might be a cure.’

  ‘What for?’

  She nods to my lap and I feel the colour rising in my cheeks. Of course she knows my history. She would have read about my crimes. The whole sordid tragedy. When she nods towards my groin we both know what she’s talking about.

  The bruises on my cheeks, my ribs, they’ve all healed but there will be more bruises, more broken ribs when the rapes start again. They’re like clockwork. Not every day, not even every week, but eventually they come round again and I just close my eyes and endure because that’s what I deserve. What they all hear about me is true. What they all dish out is what I have coming to me.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Next week?’

  ‘Will you take me out of here to wait? Will you put me someplace safe?’

  She looks around the room. She raps her knuckles on the surface of the table.

  ‘I have the authority to make that happen.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I tell her. I begin to stand. She holds up her hands to stop me, eases them up and down as if she were patting me on my shoulder. I settle back into the chair.

  ‘We need to do a psych assessment first. We need to make sure you’re up to it. I need to bring a psychologist in. Is that okay with you?’

  I nod.

  ‘I want to stay. I don’t have to. I can leave, but I really want to stay and make sure this is not going to hurt you in any way.’

  ‘All right,’ I say. ‘I want you to stay.’

  She smiles. She presses the buzzer that is usually there to protect them from us. She is alerting the guard. When the door opens she nods and it closes again.

  ‘I hope we can help you,’ she says. ‘It would be the least we could do. You volunteered for something that might have gone fairly badly. It didn’t. It worked out fine. I hope we can fix some things for you in return.’

  I can feel my heart beating too fast. I don’t want to hope. Hope has always led to the terrible weight of disappointment. I try not to feel anything as we wait for her psychologist. I concentrate on the footprint on the wall. Someone else’s pain, someone else’s story. Stories never have a happy ending, that’s one thing I’ve learnt. I wonder if that’s what she’s thinking when she looks at it. Stories never turn out well and the boot print is just one more indication of a single tragedy in among the many. She looks back at me and smiles, and I can tell that isn’t what she was thinking at all.

  It was one summer or it was all summers. It seemed to stretch on and on. You could bite into me and it would be like biting into a cheap strawberry-filled chocolate: the rest of my life just a thin wall. My adult life dissolves so quickly, and then there’s nothing but the sweetness of summer, obliterating all the nuances of life with its one note. Watching my family swim away from me, fighting waves, fighting each other: completely oblivious of my existence. My sister’s attention. Her hair tumbling down to fan about my face in the water. The suffocation. Holding my breath till I am dizzy. Her rough hands around my neck. Those hands grabbing at my penis in the water. It’s all so cloyingly sweet that it makes me gag when I think about it. Maybe I was five years old or six or seven and maybe that summer dragged on and on until I shrugged childhood off and dragged myself to high school, university, my first job. I can’t be sure because it is all the one flavour and it is everything that is inside me. I’m empty of all other experiences.

  I avoid the beach now. At least that’s one less thing I have to miss since I was arrested. Even before the arrest I tried hard to avoid the beach where the little girls run to the edge of the surf with their perfect skin and their wide, frightened eyes. Where if they leap in, laughing and stroking the waves as hard as my sister, I know they are not mine. If they hesitate, if they stand with the water tugging the sand out from under their toes; if they hop from foot to foot and goosebumps fan up and over their shoulders, then I know they are of me. My heart feels like a fist in my chest. The clench of all my organs, the clench in my crotch.

  I tell her this because she is here to help me. I tell the stranger and there is Liv, impassive, sitting close behind. I tell them about how I crouch down on one knee and whisper them into the water. See? It’s okay. You just have to trust, and hold my hand and it doesn’t feel so bad. There are waves but I put my back to them and they break over me and the little frightened girl is safe in my shadow.

  Inside me there is only the bright light of summer and my sister laughing at me and the sense that I am drowning. Each of the girls is exactly my age, some indeterminate summer age, still struggling to find her feet when the water is already above her head. Each one of the girls swims with me here, her little churning body bumping up against mine. When they emerge from the water, panting, their small arms aching from the desperate arcs they have made in unfamiliar water, when they run run run up the beach away from the bad man, they have already learnt to swim. Sometimes, my sister tells me as she climbs out onto the sand after me, you need to be dropped in the deep water before you can learn to save yourself.

  All the girls I have saved, hurt, frightened, saved, hurt, saved. All the girls who I have taught to swim.

  Liv looks down at me and she counts back from ten. She is holding my hand. She knows all about me and yet she can meet my eyes with her own and she can hold my gaze. I could love a woman like this. I have never really entertained the idea of love. I wasn’t built for it.

  As she says the word seven I’m watching her lips. Maybe her mouth could save me from this bone-cold engulfing loneliness. She says six. She is counting my birthdays. She is locating me in history. Five. And there’s nothing earlier. We have reached the end of the middle and it’s hot by the beach where we are lying side by side.

  She is wearing a one-piece swimsuit. My sister always wore bikinis. She loved the sun on her tight athlete’s stomach. She loved the way her skin remembered the shape of her swimwear even when she was naked. She could remain in her togs all winter just by taking her clothes off and admiring the fading tan line in the mirror. I know. I saw her do it. It was her way of taking us back to the surf and the sand.

  Liv is so far from being my sister that when I roll over I put out my hand. She takes it. She knows about me but she takes my hand. I could weep or I could hug her, but I do neither of these things. I lie on my side holding her hand and I listen.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  She has a thick waist. Cellulite disfiguring her thighs. Her ankles are thick. Her toes are short and the toenails have the traces of nail polish on them, blue, almost rubbed away. Her upper arms are beginning to sag. She clearly doesn’t work out. She’s so unlike my sister that she might as well be an alien species.

  ‘I feel lonely,’ I tell her. My world has been reduced to this one fact. I am alone. I will always be alone.

  ‘Not for much longer,’ she says. ‘When you walk into the water you’ll be connected again. Are you ready to experience that?’

  I nod.

  She lets go of my hand.

  ‘Okay. Go on.’

  I stand. Sand is clinging to my back and I dust it away. The breeze takes it in her direction and s
he coughs and spits and slaps at her face to remove the grit from her eyes. I don’t know why this detail is necessary. I don’t know why, when I look now, I can see that she hasn’t shaved her bikini line. My attention is taken by a pair of pubic hairs that I can see wiring their way out from the elastic of her swimming costume. A disconcerting detail. I’m staring at her crotch; she twists her body, pulling her knees together and the hairs disappear between her thighs.

  ‘Go on.’

  I walk towards the ocean. My feet in the cold of it. The water is a wall, an impasse. I can’t move forward. I stand and stare out to the horizon. My sister will be there somewhere, my father. Two heads bobbing, two sets of arms cartwheeling easily, joyfully through the surf.

  ‘Here. Come with me.’

  She takes my hand and she is running with me. The water slaps at my crotch. I jump, trying to stay above it. I struggle to swim but she is walking through the waves, she is pulling me down and under.

  Come with me.

  Her head completely submerged. Me gasping, bobbing up above the water. Her hand like the rope on an anchor. I take a deep breath. I let her lead me down.

  Let go. You can breathe. Remember? You did it before. You can breathe.

  I stare down at her. Shorter and thicker than my sister, her body rounded in places where she was tight and firm. She’s pale, too, as if she’s never spent a summer in the sun.

  Take a breath.

  And I do. And I can breathe. I’m not drowning.

  She lets go of my hand and she waves as if I am going on a journey and she walks backwards, back through the waves. She walks away. My sister swims away.

  I can breathe. I’m alive still, but I could die of this hollow inside me. It’s the loneliness that will kill me. I gulp in water like someone with a death wish. Is that what this is?

  Then they spawn.

  That is what it’s like, thousands of them multiplying in my chest. All of them making up one of them, making up me. I’m a person, plural. I am more of myself. It buoys me. I’m floating up to the surface of the water. Bobbing just under the waterline. Somewhere my sister might be swimming towards me. My father will be in her wake or maybe he’ll reach me first, maybe that will change the course of things.

  Hold tight. Know you are safe. I’m watching over you.

  It is Liv’s voice. Liv, swimming towards me, touching the buoy of me. Touching home. I feel her hand on my soft carapace. I feel the disturbance of her presence, and I drift away from her. But she’s following.

  Then a shadow.

  Then teeth.

  Then pain.

  When a Turritopsis dohrnii is attacked it has the unique ability to regress. Her voice, soothing. She is reciting from a textbook or telling me what she has read.

  Teeth.

  My heart beating so fast it might explode, a soft pulsing medusa out of my chest.

  It will change at a genetic level. It will transform back to its juvenile polyp state. Do you understand?

  And all of me arse up and about. My sister swimming away from me. Liv, holding me, whispering to me and my sister, my father, disappearing towards the dorsal fin of a…

  Shark.

  Shark or fish or boat with its motor knifing too close to me, into the flesh of me. Teeth.

  No other creature does this, says Liv. The Turritopsis dohrnii is unique. Because of this we don’t know how old each individual medusa is—perhaps they never die. This is why we call it the immortal jellyfish.

  And my sister’s fingertips breaking the surface of the water. I can see them. She is falling up, into the sky, out of my reach. I reach. I breathe through the pain of it. Breathing water, surviving despite the taste of salt and weed in my throat. I am five and I am learning to swim for the first time. I am four. I am standing at the edge of the ocean. I am stamping my feet in the foam. I am three. I am crying. I have a blue string wrapped around my ankle and the skin turning red where the jellyfish stings. I am two. I’m happy. I’m free of all of it and there is my mother. I had forgotten my mother. She’s wearing a one-piece swimming costume. She’s thick waisted, thick ankled. She is smiling. She’s touching my forehead, touching the jellyfish body of me. Hushing me. And I am safe.

  You are safe. I am still here with you. You’re safe.

  I am safe.

  When the immortal jellyfish is attacked it moves backwards in time, at least on a cellular level. Then, when it’s safe, it is free to grow into an adult again.

  I am free. I am growing.

  I am five. I am seven. I am twelve, thirteen, twenty. There is the relief of adulthood. I am growing out of the body I used to inhabit. I’m not sure who I’ll be when the tide turns, but I know I’m safe.

  You are safe. I have you. It’s okay.

  I am many. I am immortal. I am regrown. I am okay.

  I hear her counting. From two she counts me up. Ten, she says and, reluctantly, I open my eyes. She has her hand on my forehead. She’s meeting my gaze. I am a monster and she is meeting my gaze firmly, solidly with her own.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  And I am still pulsing. I’m moving like a jellyfish moves. No, I’m lying still and only my jellyfish chest is moving, pulsing up and down in an effort to escape. No. It is just the heaving of my lungs as I weep.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘You’re safe with me. How do you feel?’

  ‘Alone. I am so alone.’

  ‘I’m here,’ she says, which is true but it is only her and she is separate from me. I was one and many and now I’m just me. It’s tragic. It is unbearable.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  I try to stop my chest from jellyfishing. I try to breathe without drowning. I nod.

  ‘We are going to take you back to your room.’

  ‘Prison?’

  ‘No. Your room, here in the research facility.’

  I nod. Relieved.

  ‘When you’ve recovered we’re going to run some tests. Is that okay?’

  I nod.

  She stands and I reach out to catch her hand. I don’t want her to go. I really don’t want her to go.

  When she is holding my hand I am still alone.

  When she lets go I am alone.

  This loneliness is all I know. I look out to the horizon and I’m sure my sister is still there somewhere, only there was an attack, a shark or some other fish, and maybe she was taken. Maybe she was all I had and she was taken. When you bite into me I am a hollow, the disappointment of a chocolate rabbit at Easter. Stale and tasteless on the outside; and inside, nothing but a space in the shape of another, absent rabbit.

  I have sat for their tests before. When I take my place in the seat and look away while they put the rubber tubing on my cock I’m filled with a familiar shame. I hate myself. Moving right along. Nothing to see here.

  They start with rabbits humping. A horse with an erection that reaches down to his hooves. Then a woman, naked, posing like a Playboy model. I am unmoved. No. Maybe a little bit moved. I could be persuaded to be moved. I’m sure they’re recording these minuscule changes. A tiny swelling, a movement of the blood. But maybe it’s my fear, not my arousal, nudging the rubber tube outward. They show me a picture of a man, similar pose; boxer shorts, muscles. I really don’t care for this kind of thing. I concentrate on the emptiness, the deep bone-melting ache in the centre of me. I can’t shake it. I can’t sleep for it.

  They show me a picture of an older woman. Clothed, but with a low-cut top. Her hair is pulled back and it’s turning grey. She reminds me of Liv. I wonder where Liv is now. I wish she was the one putting the pictures up on the screen. I wish she was the one measuring the rising and falling of my penis. Rising. I look at the photo which isn’t Liv but might be her sister and my penis is rising. This is a surprise. I am aroused by her. I sit with the pleasant feeling. Wide eyed.

  They take their readings and move on. An older man. A soft deflation. I have never been attracted to men. I think of my father and I can’t even see his face anymore,
just the pistoning of muscles. I see his back and his ropey neck. My erection subsides.

  Boy child. And there is a tiny rush of fear that might or might not affect the readings on their instruments. I am not aroused by the boy child but I am disturbed by the sight of him, shirtless, tiny shorts, tiny Converse shoes.

  Girl child. The warning bells are beating a rhythmic throb in my head. This is my weakness. This is where I will out myself…

  I glance down at the limp hang of my penis. I don’t understand what has happened. This is what betrays me every time I take this test.

  Girl child. Nothing.

  Adolescent girl. Nothing.

  Adolescent boy. Nothing.

  Adult woman. Nothing.

  Adult man. Nothing.

  Liv, or a Liv-ish woman. A little rise. An interest, you might say.

  Older man. Nothing.

  Dog. No.

  Cat. No.

  Horse. No.

  Fish. And I feel a flicker of something.

  Octopus. Is it fear?

  Jellyfish. And I come.

  One minute I am watching the delicate undulations of her mantle, the play of light as she broadcasts her readiness in the currents of the water and then I am ejaculating. I didn’t even have time to register my arousal. I sit in it. This is the heat of my shame rising across my chest and up my neck.

  I am ridiculous.

  The test is over. The assistant takes the rubber sheath off cautiously. What a job to have to do.

  They say nothing, and that’s almost worse. They allow me to dress myself and they walk me back to my room. Soon it will be replaced by the cell I’ve been living in for three years. I open the door myself. The simple pleasures. They lock it behind me.

  I’m lonely.

  I don’t know how long I lie on my bed feeling lonely.

  When Liv knocks and opens the door I swing my legs off the bed and pull the pillow closer. She isn’t beautiful; she isn’t young. And yet she’s a tiny crack in my loneliness. She comes straight over and sits beside me. It’s nice to feel the shift of the bed as it adjusts to her weight. I could make love with her. I know I could, and not the abortive attempts of my university days. I could lie down with her and my body could fit around hers. Her body could fit around mine. We wouldn’t be as one but we would be as close as two people can come. She’s been inside my head. She’s been inside me. If I reached out and touched her thigh now it wouldn’t be as intimate as what we have shared.