Breathe

by Penni Russon

  Grunt studied him. Trout continued to stare out to sea, his face unchanged, but Grunt could almost see the hunger and emptiness gnawing in Trout. “You ever dived?” Grunt asked.

  Trout shook his head.

  “I do have spare equipment,” Grunt admitted. “All the uni stuff is in the boat shed. But I don’t know. It’s not an easy dive for a beginner. Visibility’s not great.”

  “But you could guide me. Couldn’t you? And if there’s any trouble…if I can’t handle it, we could just come back up.”

  “But if we both got into trouble…If we got separated…”

  Trout thought about it, alone in the darkness of the bay, under its surface in its internal world. Trout wasn’t afraid. Just him, facing it. This was right, it fit. This was what he needed to do. And if the bay took him, then…that was what was meant to be. He almost hoped it would.

  He set his jaw. “I’m not afraid of being alone.”

  He saw Max standing at the peak of the dunes looking down at them.

  “I’ll do it with your help,” Trout said urgently, “or I’ll do it without you. I can get a wet suit, equipment. I can come back on my own….”

  “You could,” said Grunt, unmoved. “I couldn’t stop you. It doesn’t mean I should help you. You could die down there.”

  “Please,” Trout begged. “You know. Of everyone, everyone in the world, you know…you know her. You know me. You know the magic. Grunt, I need you. I need your help. I have to do this….” Trout could hear his urgency breaking in his voice.

  Grunt looked out to sea. He shook his head, as if arguing with himself. “If I help—if—you have to stay close. You have to come up if I tell you to. First sign of trouble…”

  “I promise. Thank you.”

  “Yeah, well. Rule number one. Don’t die.”

  Trout smiled, but the smile was insubstantial as the thin winter sky.

  He and Grunt watched as Max headed down from the peak of the dunes toward them.

  “What’s going on with you and her?” Grunt asked curiously, while Max was still out of earshot.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you trust her?”

  “Yes!” Trout said defensively, then hesitated. “I mean…why? Do you know her?”

  “Not really. Sort of. She hangs out with a weird crowd. Kind of unpleasant. That girl, the one who gave you drugs at Duncan’s party. She’s one of them.”

  Trout looked hard at Grunt. “They’re friends?”

  Grunt nodded.

  Trout suddenly remembered what Max had said in the car about boys like him. She had known about the drugs, but how? Trout hadn’t told her. Damn it! How could he have been so blind? So stupid? How could he have ever trusted her?

  “What’s going on?” said Max as she approached.

  “I’ll go and…do stuff,” said Grunt, his mistrust of Max clear.

  Max sat down next to Trout. He didn’t look at her.

  “How are you this morning?” Max asked softly. “You disappeared. I woke up and you were gone.”

  “You didn’t tell me you knew Eliza,” Trout said, his voice quiet and flat.

  Max shook her head. “I—”

  “Just don’t,” Trout said. “Don’t lie. I don’t want to hear it.” And he sat staring out at the sea.

  Max sat beside him, waiting.

  “Trout, I—”

  Trout turned to her. “You arranged it. All of it. The drugs. The beating at the pub. It was all you, trying to get to me. There was never anyone following us. Was there?” He laughed, bitterly. “All that stuff about the Chaosphere and a virus—it was all rubbish, wasn’t it? You probably planted the virus yourself, before you let me into the house. I can’t believe you played me…and I let myself…God! You must think I’m so easy. What a walkover. Is that what last night was about to you, too? Getting to me, getting into my head? You disgust me.”

  Max stared out to sea, struck dumb. She didn’t try to deny what Trout was saying. She sat there, her muteness an admission of her guilt.

  Trout stood up. “You should go,” he said bitterly. “Walk up to the road, hitch a ride. I don’t want to see you anymore.”

  Finally, Max said, “I’m not the only one, am I?”

  “What?”

  Max’s voice was hard and splintery. “Keeping secrets. Following. You came to my flat. You were there, the night Johanna and her stupid cronies threw that brick at my door, painted on my driveway. You watched it happen.”

  “You saw me?” Trout’s voice faltered; his moral stance had been so unfailing a moment before, but now he didn’t know.

  Max’s eyes were slanted with anger. “I didn’t know it was you then, but I saw you.”

  “But…I didn’t know you. It was just…I was just there….”

  “It’s not so clear, is it? Nothing’s so clear as you think.”

  Trout remembered the other night, when he had peered in at her through the crack in her curtains. He felt suddenly, hotly, how wrong that had been. Did she know about that night, too?

  “And that night at the pub. You thought you were following me.” Max laughed dryly.

  “Because that’s what you wanted me to think!”

  “Who’s to blame? You came into the pub of your own accord. You wanted to; you wanted me. You wanted me to obliterate her, to wipe her out of your mind.”

  “I didn’t want to be beaten up by a couple of thugs.”

  “Didn’t you? Are you sure? Or is that exactly what you were looking for all those nights you walked the streets? Someone to do for you what you were too weak, too gutless, to do yourself?”

  “I don’t have to listen to this.” Trout turned in disgust—shared equally between himself and Max—and walked away.

  Undine dreams about Trout.

  They sit together on a stone wall at school, overlooking the gray river.

  “The magic,” she remarks. “It isn’t to do things, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s just a side effect.”

  Trout nods. They sit in silence.

  Trout says, “I’m descending.”

  Undine squeezes his hand. “I know you are.”

  Trout looks at Undine, peers right inside her. “Who’s going to die for you?” he asks.

  She looks up at the blue sky and realizes it’s suddenly summer. Birds wheel overhead, tumbling joyfully through the sky. The grass glistens green and bright, the yellow flowers are dizzy as suns.

  But next to her Trout is gray; winter hangs around him like a drab gray coat. Undine leans in, whispers into him, “Never mind. It’s almost spring.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Max watched the boys haul the boat along the sand and into the water.

  At first when Trout had walked up the beach, she thought he was merely escaping her. But Trout had met Grunt at the end of the beach, and they’d gone into the weathered wooden boathouse in the crest of the dunes, emerging dressed in wet suits and carrying an oxygen tank. What were they up to? Grunt was obviously boaty; she recognized the type, with his sun-bleached dreads and his salt-dry skin. But Trout? She hadn’t seen it in him at all—he was baby soft and protected, as if he had suffered from a childhood illness or overmothering or both, as if someone had told him he couldn’t run like the other boys.

  Even from her distant lookout, she could tell he’d never pushed a boat into the water. His body was all overlong, clumsy limbs as he struggled to climb into it once it was seaborne. She felt a rush of affection but was simultaneously annoyed by his weakness, his softness.

  She watched their progress as she walked up the beach to the shed. The billowing sail dropped when they reached the furthest of the stone formations that jutted out of the water, a few kilometers from shore.

  She turned her attention to the boat shed. The padlock swung open on the unbolted lock. She almost laughed. They were so trusting. Well, that wasn’t really true. Trout had trusted her, or had started to, but not anymore. Grunt didn’t
trust her either, but he underestimated her; he believed the only real threat she posed was to Trout’s heart. She felt tears threatening to sting her eyes, and she pinched herself hard on her arm to make it stop. She would not allow herself to care about Trout, to care about his heart—his damaged, pitiable heart. It was not for her anyway, despite last night.

  Her eyes adjusted to the shed’s dim light. There was another boat in there, a small aluminum one with an outboard motor. There was more equipment, too. She held a wet suit up to herself for size. She cleared the mess from around the small boat and dragged it to the open door, piling the diving gear inside.

  On the beach, she wriggled out of her clothes—Undine’s clothes—feeling a fleeting thrill as the cold air hit her naked body. She loved the feel of a wet suit, the sleek rubber casing sliding onto her like a second skin. She had spent whole summers underwater, diving with her father, looking upward at distant fractured surfaces of oceans, or sideways into the glittering eyes of astonished fish. The black rubber suit was like a shark skin, which suited her. She was a shark herself—she had to keep moving to breathe and stay afloat.

  From the raised vantage point of the boat shed door, she watched as first one, then the other distant figure dropped over the side of their sailboat into the bay, and then she hauled the aluminum boat up the beach, past the tide line, and into the sea.

  Trout floated down alongside the bowline gradually, with Grunt behind him. He followed Grunt’s instructions—holding his nose and breathing out through it to maintain his equilibrium. He felt urine trickle out and the layer of water between the wet suit and his bare skin warmed up; the warmth cocooned him. He breathed the tank’s oxygen, and it sounded noisy in his own ears. He kept his breaths regular, not too shallow but avoiding the urge to hyperventilate.

  He looked up. He could see the keel of the boat under the water and beyond it the surface, and suddenly he was hit by an intense surge of claustrophobia, as if the sea’s lid had closed him in. He swallowed air. He fought the urge to kick his way back to the surface and continued down the line.

  He didn’t look up again. Instead, he switched on his torch and looked around him. Kelp dragged itself to and fro like the matted hair of washerwomen beating cloth on rocks. Intermittent fish darted in and out of his peripheral vision. He descended, into the seaweed forest. He kept his breathing regular and his body calm as he entered the thick swathes of it, though his urge to panic, to fight the seaweed away, was strong.

  He held the bowline like a thick, knotted umbilical, holding him to the mother—earth, land, sky. He stopped climbing down and looked around him. The kelp swayed; Trout swayed. Was he an interloper? Did he belong here? Had the bay been waiting for him? If he let go, would the sea be quick to claim him, to turn him into a sea thing, or would it reject him, toss him—spent and broken—onto the shore?

  He closed his eyes and let go. He opened his eyes again.

  Grunt turned to make sure Trout was following and then kicked his way through the thick kelp forest. Trout kept him in his sights, leaving the anchored bowline hanging solemnly behind him. “It’s easy to get disoriented down there,” Grunt had warned. How would he find his way back if he lost Grunt, he wondered, as the bowline disappeared behind a sheath of kelp. At the same time he knew return was not necessarily the imperative of this journey. After all, a life for a life—wasn’t his life forfeit to this sea? Would the sea take him?

  He swam slowly downward, kicking his way toward the sea floor. He saw the wreck, the enormous broken ship, its hull gaping, wounded. The sea had begun to claim it; the life of the sea had taken hold of the dead vessel—things grew and scuttled and swam in places where humans once slept. Trout drifted past the wreck and found he was not interested in disturbing its secrets or raiding its treasures or listening to its groaned myths.

  His eyes searched for light.

  But he heard it before he saw it. It was not hearing like it would be on the surface, in the air, his ears translating vibrations into sound. He seemed to hear it with his breastplate, in the core of him. As Grunt had said, it was the same as it had been standing next to Undine, in the eye of her magical storm.

  He drew closer, the noise expanding inside him, and then his eyes made out the glow. Grunt stopped, letting Trout pass him. As Trout drew closer to the light, his fingers automatically outstretched and he did what Grunt had not been foolish enough to do. He made contact. He touched it. He touched it, and it was the magic itself he touched, as if he had wrested Undine to the ground, torn her skin open, and plunged his hand inside her, beyond viscera to the magic’s very heart.

  Undine woke as if she were on fire. She clutched her burning diaphragm; her bottom ribs were like hot steel knives. Something was happening at the pit of her self, in the depths of her where the magic lived. Someone—someone other, someone outside her—was plundering her, delving inside her as if she were a cupboard and they were looking for lost belongings in her darkest depths.

  (That was what the magic was, she thought, abruptly, irrelevantly—a sea of lost things—whole civilizations submerged, stars and moons and vanished children and kings, spent hearts, moth wings.)

  The pain was unbearable; it tore through her as if it might rip her into pieces.

  And then, as abruptly as it had started, the pain stopped, and she was alone again, her body and the magic intact, the intruder, for the time being, repelled. She gasped, swallowing night air, and felt herself become whole again.

  Max steered the small motorized boat, feeling the engine throbbing her arm. Her father used to take her sailing. He would take his hands off the tiller and hold them in the air.

  “Oh, my god!” he would cry, waggling his fingers. “No one’s driving the boat. It’s out of control!” And she would take over, steering their course. He trusted her, he trusted her not to steer them into troubled waters. And if she lost her way, his hand would fold over hers, guiding them both to safety.

  She shook her head as if to shake him out of her mind. She’d trusted him and in doing so had learned she could trust no one. Who had guided him? He had steered himself into dark, mysterious waters and had left her behind, high and dry, gasping in an alien atmosphere.

  Max eased the dinghy to sit alongside Grunt’s sailboat. She adjusted the borrowed wet suit—it hung a little baggily around her shoulders and waist, but it would do. She checked her equipment again. She felt a momentary sweep of the exhilaration she always experienced just before a dive, then she let herself fall backward into the water and floated. She deflated the buoyancy vest, fitted the regulator into her mouth, and began to descend, ignoring the bowline, trusting to Chaos, delivering herself to the bay.

  When Trout extracted his hand from the globe of light, he was dismayed to find he was still present, intact, unchanged. He hung for a moment, suspended in the black water surrounding the light; his mind felt broken and frayed.

  Grunt signaled to him. Trout gazed blankly before forcing his legs to move, following Grunt through the forest of seaweed. Grunt’s flippers kicked in and out of view. Though Trout himself felt slow down here, at his periphery movement seemed quick and alarming; even the seaweed appeared animate, conscious, breathing. He saw creatures flitting in and out of it—creatures made of seaweed, with long tendriling tails. It was like the world was speeding up while he was slowing down—he belonged less and less to it.

  He closed his eyes, and another wave of sleep almost overcame him. For an absurd moment he felt a desire to remove the mouthpiece for the scuba. He could let himself drown down here, swallow mouthfuls of bitter brackish sea, burn his lungs with salt. His eyes closed again. He was weary. He was weary. Perhaps this was what he’d wanted; this was what he’d come down here for. To sleep, to reside here in darkness in the perpetuity of an underwater night. To shed his human skin and become a creature of seaweed and salt, for his bones to collapse into the seabed like the skeleton of the broken ship.

  When his eyes opened, he stared blearily through the dim green
light that filtered through the seaweed. He searched for Grunt. Something flicked in, then out, at the edge of his vision, flippered feet past his face. He followed, struggling to stay awake.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The domatia was in darkness; Undine’s family slept. She let the door click closed behind her, padded barefoot through the flagstone courtyard and across the sandy road to the beach. The moonless night leaked from the sky into the sea and blackness enveloped Undine; only in the village did the occasional light twinkle.

  In a half dream she let her clothes fall from her body, onto the sand. Cool night air prickled her skin, raising the hair follicles on her arms and legs, but she was barely aware of these ordinary human responses. Where the pain had struck her before, her body still burned, but this was not ordinary or human; this was magic.

  She stepped into the sea, which was neither warm nor cold. The salt and the waves were a salve, soothing the troubled magic within. It sang to the sea and the sea murmured back. Undine closed her eyes and let her own self fade as she listened to the magic’s song. She was scarcely aware that she was walking deeper and deeper into the liquid black.

  Her feet kicked off the sea floor and she found herself familiarly weightless. The sea held her. She swam downward and felt herself change. The magic took over her body and her body became less solid, less permanent, and more like the sea that surrounded it. Her mind drifted as the magic took hold.

  She continued to plunge through the heart of the sea, down far beneath the surface. A light appeared in front of her eyes, and though she’d never seen anything like it, the light was familiar—it felt like home. She didn’t hesitate, she didn’t stop to think about how her human self would survive so far beneath the sea’s surface, she simply swam toward the light, drawn by a power stronger even than her own.

  Once upon a time, in the most ancient of lands, Maxine Madden’s father had driven an FJ Holden up a mountain, gone for a walk, and disappeared. For a week he had been in limbo, neither dead nor alive, just missing.