Deep, Deep Ocean

by Carter Bowman

He’s smarter than you.

  Maybe.

  Something skittered beside me, loud in the silence. I turned towards the noise, desperate for any break in the oppressive loneliness.

  It was small, nearly the same shade of dull violet as the ground. Four legs skittered along the flat surface.

  Tap tap tap.

  It was the shape of a lizard, barely longer than my hand, but without any features or characteristics. It was merely the outline of a living thing, darting in straight lines unlike anything a creature made naturally.

  I had to touch it. Just to know I wasn’t the only thing alive, to experience something that wasn’t the muted ground stretching endlessly in every direction. My hand darted out, trying to grip the lizard shape between my fingers. It squeezed through the space in my hands at the last second. Again, I jumped, pushing my legs forward to spring on the living shape. This time, its cool skin brushed against my palm before escaping. It was like trying to catch a fly out of the air — as impossible to seize as it was to ignore. The shape of the lizard bolted away from my sprawled-out body towards the shadowless arch. It sprung into the air before vanishing out of the world.

  There was only the faintest ripple, a pebble dropping into water where it disappeared. But like morning light peaking through my eyelids, a glimmer of something brighter than dull purples and blacks shone through the dark. It wavered for only a moment as the lizard’s tail slipped through the folds between the worlds — and then was gone.

  Chapter Eight

  I tried to catch the ripple with my finger, desperate to find the fold in the fabric the deep place creature had squeezed through.

  It escaped upward, towards the light, I thought, scratching at the air with my bare hands. The fold had gone, but had left an unmistakable texture remaining in the air. Had this been the parting in the worlds Luffy had used? If I could find it, if I could make a hole for myself, then there was a chance I could get back, that there was hope on the other side.

  Get back to where, though? The monster already has your father, he already took Luffy. You lost. You think that you’ll get them back because you can swim your way from the bottom?

  Thoughts circled my head, but they did not carry the weight they’d held only a moment ago. Something about that glimmer of light stuck in my mind, a hope that could not be so easily extinguished. My fingers traced the air, becoming more impatient when they failed to find the parting in the transparent fabric. In fact, a desperate panic was beginning to creep back into my shaking hands as the texture between the worlds became increasingly difficult to feel.

  I’m going to miss my chance. It’s going to pass me by and then it’ll be gone forever.

  Calm down. It was a new voice in my head, one that sounded like my father’s, but without the confidence his carried. I thought this new voice sounded as though it made things up as it went along. Still, there was something comforting about it, something more grown-up than even the deeper voice, whose job, I concluded, was to doubt any and everything.

  Calm down, it said again, reassuring. The door isn’t the problem — you are.

  I can’t change who I am, I thought, the shaking voice in myself refusing to be sedated.

  But you can decide not to let yourself get in the way, said the voice. Make it simpler. The lizard passes through and doesn’t need think about it. Luffy found his way to you because he needed to.

  I need to.

  Then stop trying. You try so hard, but it’s like falling asleep, isn’t it? It’s always like falling asleep.

  All those nights alone in my room, holding my eyes shut to force rest to come. The more I fought, the more tangible the fear — creating a chain reaction spiraling downwards until I was a mess of tangled sheets.

  I’m scared of what I’ll find on the other side.

  More scared than what you’ll find if you don’t?

  I looked into the deep world through the arch, at the loneliness as safe as it was sad. Even if I could leave here, I didn’t have a plan — no way to save the day and make everything right. This was the page in the story when the hero came bursting back onto the scene, ready to outsmart the villain and save his friends. Only, the friend was already gone, and I was still my weak, childish self.

  The gloom looked back at me.

  Everything here made me feel small. Everything in the outlines of the deep place said that I could try as hard as I wanted only to end up back at the bottom. I was too small, and would fall down the ladder of worlds when it became too much.

  And even if you do, at least you tried.

  Something in these words was warm, growing with a heat that invited me forward. My eyes focused, seeing through the dull darkness of the hollow hill to the other side. The voice’s words didn’t open up a world of hope, not enough to create any real confidence. I wasn’t the hero given all the tools necessary to save the day, but that didn’t mean I could give up either. I couldn’t give up on seeing my family again, going to school, or seeing how the stories I’d grown up with came to an end. I wasn’t ready for that, and the resolution sent another warm breath through my body. I felt a little taller, a little older, and a lot smaller.

  Try again.

  I placed one hand against the fabric between the worlds, forcing my breath to slow. In and out, in and out. I could feel my heart rate easing, the twitching in my hands steadying with each exhale.

  It’s there, you know it is.

  The folds were thicker now. Beneath my fingers, they waved with subtle lavenders and something closer to blue. I tried not to get excited when the colors changed beneath my fingertips. I had to keep them steady. The snag would come at any second.

  There.

  The fold in reality gave under my fingertips, a cool breeze wafting through the parting. A delicious aroma of something briny drifted through the crack. It was the sea, the real sea, with real waves that broke in white foam. I grasped the fabric, heavier than I’d expected, with both hands as light washed over my skin in glorious, perfect warmth. I did not have time to say goodbye to the quiet place at the bottom of the world. I dove through headfirst, relishing the water and noise flooding my ears and nostrils.

  I was back.

  Water surrounded me on every side. Moonlight shone through the surface of the ocean above me. I kicked with both feet, arms pushing towards the surface. The moment my head broke the water, cold wind whipped my exposed cheeks. I had pulled myself through the worlds all the way back into my own. The shoreline, emptied of people in the late hour, lay close by. I kicked off, swimming easily through the cool water. The salt licked at my face, happily stinging the scrape on my cheek.

  As a child, my father had always warned me to keep my mouth closed while swimming, that the taste of the ocean would make me gag. I savored the flavor of the ocean now — all salt and bitterness. It was deep, with a thousand flavors hiding delicately beneath one another, as though I could taste the water my whole life and still never understand how complex it was. It did not scare me like the black ocean, impossibly flat and deep. I welcomed it.

  I pulled my body onto the shore, catching only the attention of a few seagulls that kicked up sand as they abandoned the remnants of a discarded hot dog. A strand of seaweed had become wrapped around my shoulder. I pulled the meaningless weed from me, remembering the brittle grasp of what lay in the deepest recesses of the world.

  How long had it waited for me before giving up so easily? How long would it have to wait again before another living thing stumbled into its ocean?

  I used the short walk back to the casino to concoct something like a strategy, collecting more than a few gazes from nighttime patrons of the town. Finding the parting in the fabric had given me a new sense of purpose, a confidence that I wouldn’t have imagined possible while alone on the silent beach. I had, after all, escaped not one, but two monsters.

  As though my eyes had been readjusted, I was picking up the colors and textures of my old world in a new light. Frays in the fabric that had once
been invisible shimmered under neon bulbs, responding to the passing breezes. I picked at a loose tear tucked into the brick of a restaurant. Using my finger, I wiggled out a small hole that let a dim aura pour from the slot no larger than a drinking straw.

  This one goes only a little ways down, I thought, marveling at the discovery. It was small, only a fraction of the whole puzzle, but it was a piece that lit me from the inside. I was no longer powerless against the monster. I may be alone, but it couldn’t trap me any longer.

  A little taller, and a little smaller.

  The words rattled around in my head, a poem repeating into a melody as I walked. The lights of the restaurants still open blocked the stars overhead, casting a hazy ceiling over the streets as the casino came into view. I knew they were only hiding, but their absence made the world feel a bit smaller.

  The casino itself glowed with even more false light than it had in the early evening, all else fading around its demand for attention. A man in a wide black suit eyed me as I approached the entrance. He did not move, but his massive body and stiff posture said in unspoken words that he would put a saucepan-sized hand in my way if I took one step too close to the entrance. I didn’t remember there being anyone to block our path on entering the casino our first time, or had that been Luffy playing with the layers?

  Luffy isn’t the only one who can be clever, I thought, taking a sharp left turn away from the curious gaze of the doorman. I did my best to keep track of the few eyes still following me along the sidewalk. The bright sign of a bank across the street announced that it was 12:04, just past midnight. Surely someone would stop me, any rational adult looking for some explanation about what parent would let their child wander alone in the middle of the night.

  It’s a question that would have Mom in a panic, I thought.

  A pang of guilt shot through me as Mom’s face passed through my mind for the first time since returning to my world. I’d been gone an entire day — surely Mom had put together that I hadn’t gone over to Trevor’s house. She would have called Trevor’s mother by now and learned that she had been lied to and her son had vanished, literally, right out of this world.

  As though this thought had the power to trigger some literal reaction, a police car slowed to a stop beside me. Its tinted window rolled down slowly. Only the outline of a face poked out from the interior. The bushy mustache of an adult bristled as it spoke.

  “Are you lost?” asked the mustache. It was not mean, or cruel. It was only unfamiliar, but that was enough to put me on edge.

  “No,” I replied, somewhat honestly. I knew that it wasn’t right to lie to an officer.

  “You shouldn’t be out this late. Do you mind telling me what your name is?” asked the voice.

  “I’m going to find my Dad,” I said. Again, not quite a lie.

  “I understand. Well, why don’t you climb in the car and we can find him together?”

  “Nope,” I replied, trying to sound casual. I kept walking. The car kept following, tires crunching pebbles into the pavement. “I can find him just fine. In fact, he’s right down here.”

  An alleyway had opened adjacent to the street, not unlike the one Luffy had taken us down only a few hours ago. Without giving the police officer time to say a word, I picked up my still-sloshy feet and dashed into the dark alley.

  I heard the voice yell behind me, knew it was wrong to run away, but this was not a problem that a police officer could solve. Police officers were good for robberies and shoot-outs. They weren’t good at fighting monsters who stole Dads and turned the world upside down.

  A car door slammed, heavy boots clomped on the ground behind me.

  Maybe you didn’t think this through.

  I needed to find an opening, but without light to show me the ripples in the fabric I was stumbling around looking for a light switch in a dark room. The boots were growing louder. The mustached officer would catch me in seconds, and I would be hauled away to some police station where they would call Mom. She wouldn’t understand that Dad was being held prisoner by a monster from the deepest part of the world. Grown-ups never understood things like that, and even if they could, it would be too late.

  Calm down. It was the same voice from the quiet place, the deep part of myself that invented its own hesitant courage. You let your head start spinning and it’ll be just like back on the beach.

  This time, I listened to the voice.

  Focus.

  The voice was right. I held my eyes shut for one second as I ran, taking a deep breath before opening them to look into the alleyway.

  Right there.

  A parting in the fabric, long and curved, nestled itself into the brick wall at knee height. I sprinted towards it, still ignoring the call of the officer behind me. I wondered what he was about to see as I put all four fingers into the parting and pulled downwards. Would he see a small boy vanish into thin air before his eyes? Or perhaps he, too, would be able to see the doggie-door-sized hole that I created; a dim parting in the wall that I pushed myself through head first.

  The parting in the fabric took me straight through the wall into the casino. It took me a moment to understand I had popped out inside a bustling kitchen. Blurry, outlined people moved around me, preparing food and pushing large trays stacked high with cups and plates through a door that never seemed to properly close. I could see the food, but without the aromas of spices and sizzling meat, the setting felt oddly distant. Pushing past the busy legs rushing this way and that, I followed a waitress buckling under a heavy tray of desserts into the familiar hallway.

  You need to stop and think, I told myself, pausing outside the kitchen in my brief moment of safety.

  I could feel the kindling of an idea, ignited by my escape from the officer, beginning to swirl in my head. Before I put any plan into action, though, I needed to find my father in the circular maze without being seen by the monster. This presented the first problem. I had a general idea of where my father was, but the monster had eyes and ears in every direction.

  She isn’t looking for you, though, I reassured myself.

  This had become a game of cat and mouse, and while I was smaller, there was a reason the game was never completely one-sided. It did not escape me that the scenario had become reversed since only yesterday — that now I was the creature slinking out of sight in another’s home.

  Another waitress pushed open the doors of the kitchen, carrying with her a stack of sandwiches. Her figure caught my attention, being made of something more defined than any of the other bodies. Unsurprisingly, I spotted a blue vein trailing from the small of her back.

  Maybe there’s a way to keep an eye on the monster after all.

  Once the waitress had passed I followed behind her, careful not to step on the coiling blue vein as she walked into the central floor of the casino. The dummy woman seemed completely absorbed by the guests of the casino as she twitched her hips this way and that, now approaching a table of fuzzy men. Looking carefully, I could see that none of the faces in the group belonged to my father, but each looked at her with the same adoration that my Dad had at his own inhuman lure.

  The vein of the woman stretched around the corner, disappearing behind a display of television screens showing dogs chasing a plastic rabbit around a track. I stopped short as a familiar wheezing filled my ears. It had intensified since the last time I had heard it, a dampness beneath the breaths reminding me of Maggie after she had been trapped at home for a week over Christmas break with the flu.

  I poked my face around the corner of the televisions, too curious to not at least catch a glimpse of the creature. The monster was reclining against the end of a long bar, face turned upwards to the blank ceiling. The monster’s form had grown limp, as though its skin was having trouble staying attached to its body. It sagged in all the wrong places, drooping and sliding over itself as it fought to remain propped against the wooden bar.

  Something’s wrong with her, I thought, trying to connect any clues as to what
could have happened to the monster ruling over the casino. From its throne, everything seemed to have remained the same — the blue veins still pulsing droplets of light that wound their way through legs and machines to the sagging monster. It should be absorbing even more hopes and dreams with each spin of the slots or turn of the dice. But the heap against the bar looked so miserable, as though it would give anything to just rest.

  I thought of Maggie over Christmas again, fighting against all reason with Mom and Dad that she wasn’t sick, that she could stay up to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. She had been just as pale as the monster now, and when Dad picked her up and tucked her into bed, she had dropped off to sleep mid-protest.

  The monster coughed, then suddenly its head snapped forward with the alertness of a person woken up forcibly from deep sleep. Eyes spinning in its head, her gash of a mouth creased upwards into a twisted smile. Something warm clasped around my shoulder.

  “It was nice of you to join me, Silas,” said a tall man in a tight black shirt. He smiled down with all the warmth of the black ocean.

  You weren’t careful enough.

  “I came to take my Dad back,” I said, foolishly. I couldn’t think of anything else, as though bursting in like a hero and saying I was going to defeat the great evil would somehow make it so. I was no hero — I was a scared boy who’d been too careless and fallen for the same lure without a second thought. The crisp man put another hand on my shoulder, my knees threatening to collapse my knees under the pressure.

  “Oh did you? Just like you did such a great job saving my precious evening snack? He was delicious, you know,” said the tall man, wiping his lips with his too-long tongue in grotesque satisfaction. Beneath him, the blue vein swirled like a hose expanding against the incoming water of the faucet.

  Red flashed across my vision. An rage that tasted like rust and filled my ears with a whining buzz sent a full tremor ripping through my body. The tall man smiled, tasting my welling anger.

  “His name was Luffy.” The name came out through clenched teeth. I was helpless, but all that was blocked out by the heat boiling up from my stomach.