I

COAST

“The Californian coast was growing smaller and smaller, and it still is,” Brady said. “Water encroaches upon the beaches without machines to create drywalls, eating at the rocks that crowd the coast. The last remaining lighthouse keepers stay in their tall towers, even though few boats grace the Pacific Ocean. The wildlife has grown less and less active, preferring to hibernate to conserve energy. Seagulls crowd around the lighthouse to take advantage of electricity’s warmth.” 

– “Oceanographist Katherine Brady on the future of the seas,” San Francisco Chronicle

My brother’s watch brushes against my elbow. The mercury lining to the hand ticks softly. It no longer works, quivering back and forth between 1 second. When the sun went out and we could no longer tell hour from hour, day from night, he tipped open the glass face of the watch and placed in the body of a firefly, and filled the compartment with formaldehyde, so when he looks, time is suspended, unsure of itself, but glowing, with the firefly’s body still able to release the faintest flicker of light. It is a sight that makes me shiver.

“Are you ready?” I whisper to him. The kitchen counter is illuminated by the light of the lighthouse. We gaze out the window. Compasses and anchors hang on the walls of our kitchen. We gaze downwards, where the ocean looks so small hundreds of feet beneath us, the dark waves barely visible through the glint of the waves beneath the bright searching beams of our lighthouse. The expanse blurs into endless darkness beyond. There is no moon, the horizon obscured beneath shadow, only the sound of waves lapping against the rocky shore, the crashing distant, turned into a soft lapping against the sand, whose color is hidden, too. Well, there is a moon – but it no longer has light. Kerosene sconces flicker against our walls, their oil pearly and tepid.

My brother and I are curled up in blankets, huddled against one another. He eats a chocolate bar and mutters about the peanut taste, while I spoon out apricots from a jar. Uncle enters the room, wheeling himself in until he rests just behind us. He folds his fingers across his lap, the rings clicking. He has filled the baubles of the two rings – his and his sister’s, our mother’s – with moon jellies, their veins just barely visible, turning yellow with time. Together we look out the window. 

Our makeshift radio buzzes with static. I turn up the volume with the remote control. The newscaster from the nearest city speaks: 

And today, we re-synchronize the clocks of the world. We can now sleep and wake at the same time. Take a breath. Listen for it: the sound of the waves. You cannot hear them, of course – only very few hermits live on the coastlines, now. But imagine it, the sound of the waves you heard when you were a child, or if you were born in the last few years, the sound your father or grandfather heard. 

Hold your breath and listen for the sound of the water maintaining a rhythm by the invisible gravity. Send a prayer to the moon. And three – two – one. 

Our clock on the wall, an electric, government-mandated machine, pings from its frozen state to 12:00 a.m. It flashes, blinks, then goes still. I hear a sigh of relief ripple across the state of California. 

My brother pushes my father out of the kitchen, and the two of them are putting on their pajamas. They blow out one kerosene lamp and beckon for me to follow. On the wall hangs the photographs of our grandparents and our great-grandparents in their sailor’s uniforms, and then installing the piano and furnishing the inside of this lighthouse. 

I aimlessly flip through the rest of the channels. There is one playing old classical music; another with sounds of nature from a David Attenborough documentary. The sounds of the bluebirds I heard once when I was in elementary school. On one channel, 67.9, I hear the sound of damp nothingness, as if someone is breathing next to the microphone. I am about to flip away – many strangers take over empty wavelengths to broadcast their preachings – until I hear the sound of a finger tapping out a rhythm against what sounds like damp wood. It starts and then stops, and I hear the breathing again, crackling slowly. There are no rasping sounds of a tongue attempting to make noise. It sounds like Morse code, but the tapping is too jumbled, and the static cuts in and out. I pause, waiting for more, but the tapping fades out. I hear what sounds like ragged breathing and the lapping of icy waves growing closer and closer to the microphone, and the cascade of wind gusting over and knocking the microphone back and forth. The noises of nature swell, prolonged for minutes. 

Finally I shut it off and finish my jar of apricots. The beam of the lighthouse makes one final swing around the ocean. It is the one source of light; it carves out a sine-like circle, illuminating perfectly circular spots of water, as if someone has used a cookie-cutter to take out spheres of black water and turn them lighter blue. It makes everything a little less sinister and a little more theatrical. I sometimes expect and hope that a swimmer or a sailor will appear as the light passes over them, allowing us to see them, to toss down ropes and help them, shivering and soaked wet, into our house. But nobody ever does.

I lie in my top bunk of the bunk bed my brother and I share. There is a chandelier hanging on the top of my house, and it is tipped with frosty crystals that no longer are lit. There are framed photographs of my grandparents on the walls, and a collection of oil paint supplies that lie, no longer used, on the armchair, which I only used when I could see the horizon, and now I am too terrified to paint my memories for fear of corrupting them. It happened so much with my memory of my mother that I have forbidden myself from painting her. When I began the process, I chose the softest shades, rich peach-brown and diamond-green swabs of oil paint, to create the olive-like shadows around her face, which I first sketched shaped like a leaf, with no edges and no flaws. I made her eyes warm and full of inherent kindness, crinkled at the edges, and her mouth pursed with the desire to laugh; everything about her was keen and open-minded, as if somebody tossed a stone into a pond and the pond lifted it back up with gentle, watery hands. But the further I painted, my progress slowed. In the mornings, I sat by the painting, immobilized, unhappy with what I had. She wasn’t real.

So I peeled back the layers of dried paint to my initial drafts, where my earliest pencil sketches revealed her with eyes crinkled with sternness, her face speckled with sun-baked freckles, her nose slanted to the left and vaguely aquiline from a soccer accident from her youth, her eyebrows nearly invisible, having lost much of her hair from treatment for pakophemia, where bacteria cultivated in the darkness proliferated and grew, without heat to counteract it. I painted all of this with a palette of colors that were sharp and flinty, a witch’s hex. I made her hair climb all around her head like vines as it did when she stood up, assured she was correct when she was not always. I was much more satisfied with this, and realized that it was the best way to remember her. I hung it up on the wall and reminded myself of her when I slept. She disappeared into the ocean last year. 

I pull my covers up to my chin. My brother snores below me, curling on his side like a small caterpillar; he looks like he feels easy and safe, and when I peek at his facial expression, it confirms it. I cannot go to sleep unless I take my sleep medication, but tonight, I do not want to; they suppress my dreams. I think about the sound of the tapping, of the ragged breaths, and I shiver, imagining someone who has fumbled together a makeshift radio from miles and miles away, breathing over the microphone, with no words. What kind of a person does that? 

The moon keeps me awake, its bright beams spearing through me, and I realize I need to go back. I creep back to the kitchen and flick it onwards, and I hear the taps growing louder, as if the person has gained more energy. Slowly I piece together: S… O…. S… over and over again, so elongated with mossy breaths in between that take minutes. Entranced, I think about who it might be. 

What if it’s my mother – lost at sea? All her old jewelry pinned up on our walls as memories? 

II

EPIPELAGIC

The epipelagic zone, formerly home to thousands of algae utilizing photosynthesis to power the bottom of the food chain in the ocean, is no longer a photic zone due to the lack of light entering the ocean. These algae have been dying off; no time has yet been given for natural selection to help them adapt, and scientists debate hotly on whether or not they will die off completely before evolutionary pressures push them to adapt. Their only source of food has been destroyed. Figures 3, 6, and 7 show the curves in areas like the Mediterranean Ocean and the polar regions, where small photosynthetic creatures like krill have been experiencing extreme declines in population.

– “Models for epipelagic growth in the Califiornian coast” (Zeffirelli et. al), Marine Biology, Vol. 3.

Two months later, I wake up to nothing but liquid around me. Of course, it is not liquid. It is air. Dark air that swims and pulses around me as if I am underwater. I breathe in, breathe out. I am paralyzed. Beasts could lurk in any corner of this endless world. A shark could tug me into the water – its fin slicing through soundlessly, and then its teeth opening to swallow me. Jellyfish could sting me, bobbing underneath the surface, or rocks could tear my skin to pieces. It is how I have been waking up for three weeks.

My canoe bobs creakily beneath me, and with quivering hands I light my kerosene lamp. Around me, the water is flat. Like ice. I take a breath. I scoop my net beneath. Wriggling fish in the epipelagic zone come up. I slice the silver Mueller’s bristle-mouthed fish with my knife. Blood pools out. Normally, they swim a few hundred meters deeper in the ocean, but I suspect they have come higher, seeking prey that have now disappeared due to starvation from the algae. I roast it in the small fire I have with my last match. I eat it. The flavor crunches.

Around me is nothing. Around me is hundreds of miles of sea. My compass reminds me of the fact that I am still destined for the North Star. I look at my rations, my sack of food and water. The windstorm. It was what did it. The windstorm knocked over many of my portions until all I had left – jars of apricots, jerkies that I sun-dried to minimize weight, bottles of water, oranges. My head is light, spinning. I drink the water carefully, but squeeze it voraciously into my throat, attempting to quell the pounding dehydration that sears through me.

The radio static buzzes. I can hear the sound of my mother growing fainter and fainter. But the Morse code is unmistakable. It’s her. She taps out the word north. It takes her minutes. Perhaps an hour. My watch is unpredictable – an old-fashioned one. I thought it would be better if I didn’t know how much time had passed since I stole from the lighthouse at midnight and boarded the canoe. I swapped my modern watch, synchronized to the tides, with my brother’s analog one. There is nothing in it but a dead firefly. Its eyes are hollow and empty. A corpse. 

I float endlessly. I row with my wooden paddles towards my compass. All we have left is gravity. Magnets. No more light to tell us where to go. Except I close my eyes. I think about the painting of my mother. I continue to paint. With no real art supplies, of course. But her crackled mouth would open to hiss at me. She would be baking a cake, perfectly, and then destroy it all in her fury. Paralyzing darkness. Paralyzing fear. I hear the sound of her voice on the radio. Like spiders dancing softly across cobwebs. Like beads clicking, one after the other, on an abacus. Each rock of the water sends me clutching to the edge of the canoe, yet fearing making too much movement. I think about the sounds I could hear in the water: rattling, hissing, clicking. A word from the deeps, a siren begging me to row back desperately towards the warmth of my family’s lighthouse. My tongue imagines the phantom sweetness of an apricot, sliding down my throat like honey.

Honey. When I was five years old, we used to invite famous musicians to play at our lighthouse and all of our family’s friends. Couples would crowd around the back, elbows looped around each other. They were the friends my mother made when she escaped from her family at the small, all-female liberal arts college she attended on the East Coast, where they skinny-dipped in the lakes at night and gave each other stick-and-pokes of moons and snakes, pressing gauze pads purchased from Target on their raw shoulders to dim the pain. I’d wake up feverish in the mornings, not having been able to sleep all night from the nightmares that tormented me; only years later did they invent a sleeping medicine that my parents felt comfortable with me taking, understanding its minimal side effects. Mom would come to my bedside in the mornings and help me sit up in bed, giving me a mug of hot water with honey and lemon in it, encouraging me to drink it. I’d bat it away at first sluggishly, attempting to sink back into the bed; truthfully I also feared the guests, who pried at me with their badgering hands and wanted me to be vulnerable in ways that they could then use as currency with my parents. We were the exotic family to them, the lighthouse keepers who appeared once in a year. I hated that label. I only wanted to be normal. But Mom loved it. If I refused, she would grow silent, reticent, and frustrated, pursing her lips at me. Her disappointment subconsciously terrified me, and I bent to her will even though I expressed frustration at it, as if I expected her to remember this favor I did her. She never did, even though I convinced myself she remembered inside the concessions I had made for her because I loved her.

Above me the sky lacks a moon. It is as if someone has plugged up the moon’s bright circle with dark, mossy fabric. Only the stars in our galaxy spatter the bowl of the sky, all equally-sized pinpricks. Yet my compass can still sense the magnetic field around Earth. Unwaveringly, it points me north, towards the horizon where my mother must be.

IV

BATHYPELAGIC

During the summers, we take our kids out on the submarine ROVs, and we let them drive it for a few minutes if it’s their birthdays. Our children love bathypelagic species – blobfish, anglerfish, squids, all of the fun ones in the cartoons that are either heroic or evil. It’s the third layer deep in the ocean, and they love descending down there, as if they’re in a big glass elevator. They tend to get scared and thrilled when sharks nose up against the bulletproof windows. It’s a big roller-coaster to them. The fish are sensational. Our neighborhood is a wonderful fit for any parents who love to explore with their children. Most of us have underwater motor vehicles. 

– listing for neighborhood in the Hamptons

When I wake up, I am sitting down on a surface that is both warm and wet. Around me, my arms meet a surface that seems sturdy. There is enough space for me to kneel, but not to stand, unless I walk forwards; beneath me, the surface swells and dips, bumped and ragged, and viscous.

Am I in heaven? As I touch the walls around me, they swell and deflate, and divoted pores upholstered in wet softness gives under my fingers. The last thing I remembered was the wave crashing over me, trying to desperately claw my way to the surface, but the water pushing down upon me, until I finally resigned myself to death. I inhale a surprised breath. Tiny lights flicker up and down the edge of this chamber, pulsing asynchronously with ribbed lavender strips. They hover above my head, and I clutch one, staring at it closely. It’s bioluminescent krill, found especially near the Antarctic regions. There must be hundreds in here, clinging to the walls of this chamber, as if attempting to push themselves out; their whiskered, rod-shaped bodies flutter their legs, producing brilliant blue, like colored electricity. 

The room shifts and groans, and throws us against the right wall. I am tossed against the surface, and it swells beneath me. It is corded and tight, flexing and relaxing. Like muscle. A dark opening constricts and opens at the far end of where I am. Underneath the dazzling sizzle of blue light scattered all around me, I sit down, dazed.  

The chamber around me swells, as if – as if we are still underwater. Yet there is air in this chamber, so that I can breathe. 

I am sitting in the belly of a whale. Wonder fills me. The compass still points directly north, and I realize I have lost my radio. How can I breathe? How will I escape? I push against the walls of the stomach, but they are thick; I estimate the amount of thick muscle separating me from the eternity of the animal. I struggle to wrap my mind around how I passed through its baleen and its digestive systems unfazed. How did I set off to find my mother and lose myself? 

Directionless, I watch the blue krill flicker on and off, each mindlessly floating through the deeps. 

On the floor of the belly before me, there is a chair. A wooden chair. I lurch forwards and sit down. It is solid. Then another object catches my sight, farther away, like a trail of crumbs. A shiny, round object with scratched numbers etched into it – an old-fashioned alarm clock. And beyond that, a few dolls with plasticky eyelashes, and a dish with a piece of cake on it. Its crumbs fall away stickily. As if it is a museum of America atop moving flesh. A detached screen window sits a few feet further from that, with its muslin curtains still limply attached, no wind blowing it alive. Blue cornflowers crisply splatter its surface. They are luring me forwards – a trail of objects.

I take a step. Weaving around. Touching the surfaces of the ghostly artifacts. Swallowed? Inserted? So small I can fit them in a palm. A lampshade, ghostly, shaped like a moth spun of gold silk. My path around them slows, speeds up. Circuitous. I lurch. No control over myself. A spectator. Textures of plastic and metal and paint from another world here. And all around the whale breathes, in and out, the air filling its lungs and expanding the interconnected fabric of its rubber body before exhaling, constricting its tight, streamlined bullet of a body. What a machine I am in. Not a machine at all. The trail leads me forwards and forwards. Until I see a red, old-fashioned telephone before me. And many feet in front of that, a silhouetted figure sitting cross-legged in a chair. 

“Hello?” I call. 

They turn towards me. Somehow I have a sensation of who it is before their face comes into light, but it still sends a jolt of simultaneous joy and sickness crashing through me in a dizzy wave. My mother’s face emerges into the light of the blue krill blinking on and off above, and she brushes a limp lock of hair from her face. With little hesitation, she glides forwards and gives me a hug. I can’t bring myself to move.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, and my voice comes out too high-pitched. I try to control the trembling of my arms. I think the telephone is ringing, but it isn’t. Nothing is moving, but my vision spins.

“I live here,” she says, lip curled into amusement at her own irony. “You found me.” 

“D-did you expect me to?” 

She lifts up the dark object she has been holding in her hand. It is a small radio transmitter. And the sound of breathing – it must have been the whale. “I expected nothing less.” 

“How did you build a home here? All of this. You brought it?” 

“No, I made it with my flesh,” she says, then laughs. “Of course I did. I brought it from our home. The lighthouse. It needed some clearing, don’t you agree? What did you bring with you on your journey?” She is mischievous, and it makes me angry.

“You were completely fine this entire time? And you made me come?”

“I didn’t make you do anything,” she hisses, voice low, and I freeze. Then the anger clears from her face, leaving behind frustration. She cups a krill in her hand, covering it with her fingers so that it makes her fingertips look bright red, then lets it float away. Mesmerized with this, she murmurs, “I thought you would come. You would look for me. Thank you.” She flicks her eyes up at me. 

“Are you coming back?” I say, even though I know I should have said, You’re coming back. Even then, I know her answer, and I resent the bitterness settling in me even before she responds out loud. It is the despair of encountering an immovable object.

She purses her lips. “Why are you even asking me a question like that? Look around. This animal and I are symbiotically attached to each other. It is my greatest achievement. There was only one way for me to survive, to live on. When I found this whale in the deeps, it was already injured. I supplied it with everything. A new fin made of metal, like those plane parts I used to build. Electricity. I knew how to do all of these things already. And that lighthouse wasn’t going to sustain itself.” 

“Why?” I blurt out. “What’s wrong with the lighthouse? We were living there. We were happy.”

“The lighthouse was going to be torn down, sooner or later,” she says. “Each day, we were more and more alone, and your uncle was stubborn that we remain as the keepers of it. Nobody wanted to visit us. We were hermits. What an unhappy, inhuman existence is that? Everyone wants to own something. This as a place of my own. I know it was selfish, but you understand, don’t you?” She is pleading with me now, in her own way, for my understanding. I want so badly to give it to her, but what strikes me then feels like a film of color slipping from my eyes and pooling at my feet. Rather than looking at me, she gazes around at the chamber of the whale’s belly around her, admiring each structure placed there, each artifact glossed and prepared to exist here for her own personal museum. And she wants me to admire her doing it. 

My throat is dry and tight. I don’t respond, despite how strong the magnetism is. I realize that my shoulders are naturally hunched forward with the desire to please her, that I am always on the verge of saying yes. Yes, I understand. 

“This is my own art, in my own museum,” she says. “Look. I use honey. I use coral. I use sand and silt and fish scales. You can join me. You like the ocean; I always know you have.” 

Still speechless, I listen to her persuasion. She left us. 

She left us. 

“You’re one of my best friends, as well as my daughter,” my mother says, reaching out for my hand. “Will you join me?”