The Deep

9

RAIN FELL WITH SUCH FORCE that Yetu half convinced herself that the sky was another ocean. Since Suka’s departure, the precipitation had increased from a steady pulsing to a smothering. Were the surface dwellers to look up, they’d drown.

Yetu worried for Oori and the other surface dwellers, who were likely unprepared for this wrath from the heavens. She worried for her fellow wajinru, too, suffering woefully because of her neglect of duty.

No easy solution presented itself to her, no scenario where Yetu maintained her peace and freedom, and the world survived.

Maybe the sacrifice of a single person was the only path forward. It would result in the fewest amount of deaths. Yetu knew how to contain the rememberings. If she took them back, the uproar in the water causing this storm would calm, saving two-legs lives, including Suka, their people, and Oori. It would save the wajinru from their grief. Yetu hoped that they hadn’t already starved themselves.

The sea rose as rainwater bashed its surface. Waves crashed over the boulders surrounding the tidal pool. Yetu sunk down into it. She couldn’t jump the rocks with so little room to give herself proper leverage, but she could still gather up her strength. She let the salt water cleanse her with its mix of constancy and fluidity. A beautiful reminder of balance.

Yetu tuned in to that essence as she let herself be buried by ocean in the small pool. The burn of salt and the cool flow of water. The warmth she’d felt for Oori and the sadness that had flooded her when she’d chosen to leave. Wanting to see her amaba alive again. Wanting the world to exist, to be more than just a place with a history no one would ever know.

These didn’t have to be contradictions. She let the multiple truths exist inside her as a way of meditating. It was something that she’d learned to do when dealing with the rememberings, to try to find a modicum of quiet and accept the multitudes inside herself. She never reached calm, nor even a steadiness, but she did it anyway. It made her remember that she existed.

She luxuriated in the sloshing water. Tiny fish fluttered past her again, reminding her that she was alive. A crab clicked against the stones above, far from shelter. Water, outside her in the pool, inside her body in the form of life-sustaining blood and wet tissue, both connected. She saw it all move in a circle as real as a remembering. Inside her, outside her, one.

As she felt herself carried away in the rush of feeling, her body seemed to ignite, electric. She’d never felt so synchronized with the ocean before. Her emotions were as dark and tumultuous as the deep. Spurred by her need to leave and leave now, she zeroed in on the water with as much focus as she could, hoping this would work.

“Rise!” Yetu said. If she could generate enough charge in her body, the water would be attracted to her, and she could bend it.

“Rise!” she said again, not to the water, but to herself, demanding her body to focus. “Rise.”

The water moved, but not to her will. Storm and wind jostled it, but she could feel that more was possible, as emotions and sensations kindled her body into sharp awareness. If the wajinru could bring this tempest, she could make the water in the tidal pool carry her to freedom.

Yetu closed her eyes and stopped breathing with her mouth. She visualized the water in the tidal pool going upward to great heights, carrying her over the boulder back to the sea.

There was a stir in the pool, distinct from its normal movement. Yetu reached out to it using the same technique she did when she reached out to the wajinru during the Remembrance. She had to slit herself open and spill herself out. Yetu gave her whole being to the ocean the way the ocean had given all of itself to her, giving the wajinru the spark of life, showing them that if only they knew how, water could be breathed.

With that, the water rose, and Yetu cleared the rocks. As soon as she splashed back into the open sea, she swam toward the center of the coming hurricane, ignoring the pain that still touched every part of her.

The deep embraced her, and oh, how glorious the dark was. Her eyes had been burning for weeks, and she hadn’t realized until the open ocean soothed the ache. Racing as fast as she could, she made it to the wajinru in only three hours. The wajinru were still in the sacred waters, though their flailing had destroyed the thick walls of the womb. Despite the wajinru being cradled in the ocean’s depths, their turmoil had affected the whole sea, extending up to the surface where the storm raged.

Yetu watched them with her ears and skin. Their bodies seized in a thousand different directions. Though individuals quaked to the rhythms of their own bodies, as a whole they moved as one. Together they formed a giant teardrop, but there was no pattern to any single wajinru’s movement.

The wajinru were thin and malnourished. While Yetu had been onshore feasting on Oori’s offerings, they’d lost the ability to hunt, too deep in the trance. Three weeks without food had shrunken their bodies.

Yetu swam closer. It wouldn’t work to shout. Shouting had never woken Yetu from being lost in the History. Instead she channeled her energy into connecting with them, the same way she would’ve done traditionally at the end of a Remembrance before taking the History back. She touched each one of them, figuring out who each wajinru was outside of the oneness the Remembrance brought.

That mattered. Who each of them was mattered as much as who all of them were together. For so long, the wajinru hadn’t felt like living creatures to Yetu. Just a mass that fed off her rememberings for their own benefit. But like Yetu, they were their own people too. They’d not asked for the emptiness any more than Yetu had asked for the History.

Amaba had said it herself before the Remembrance: they were cavities. Oori had felt that way too, robbed of her people’s past.

It shouldn’t be that way, and it wouldn’t have to. Yetu would search every last remembering of the History until she found a way to free her people from this cursed relationship of wajinru to historian, but first she needed to take the rememberings back on.

The water was ripe with electrical energy, and it took her no time at all catch their flow. Their minds plowed hers, knocking her over physically so that she rushed backward in the water.

Desperate, they clawed at her for mental purchase, and Yetu let them. It was like a thousand sets of teeth were biting into her at once, but she relaxed into it. She had to do this: for her amaba and the rest of the wajinru, for Suka and their family, and for Oori, whose homeland was likely already destroyed.

Yetu let her people flow into her, then focused on their thoughts. The rememberings were happening all at once. Millions of memories. Without time.

Yetu recognized each one. A part of her had held on to this, or it had held on to her. She plucked rememberings one by one. With time and distance, their impact had become less visceral, less gutting. She wept as her people wept, but she was able to maintain her focus.

“Yetu!” someone called.

Overwhelmed by the effort necessary to relieve the wajinru of the History, she didn’t recognize the voice at first.

“My Yetu.”

It was Amaba. She’d found her child through the haze of rememberings. “Stop. Stop.”

The voice grew louder. Amaba was coming closer. Yetu couldn’t imagine how she was navigating the waters with all that was happening.

“I will save you,” Yetu said.

“You will not,” shouted Amaba. “Stop!”

Yetu kept plucking rememberings, reabsorbing them into herself. She needed to concentrate, or the accumulation of agonies would undo her.

Then Amaba was on her, holding her tight. “Stop this! Stop!”

Yetu jerked away. She was desperate to prevent the future without the wajinru, without Oori, without any history at all. Even if she was not successful in saving the world, she could save the memories of it. Pain filled her, but so did knowledge, beauty. She felt mighty Basha’s fury turn to softness when in the embrace of his lover. She felt Zoti’s longing for companionship and how it had given her the ambition to make the wajinru into a people, a chorus. All of these things had made Yetu.

It wasn’t all pretty, but it was hers. If it was a choice between the History and emptiness, maybe Yetu wanted the History. She’d always complained that the rememberings erased her, that Yetu didn’t exist because the ancestors took up too much space inside her. That was all still true, but what did it matter whether she existed if she was alone, if all that was around her was abyss?

“Please! There must be another way,” said Amaba. She spoke in the rudimentary language of electric charges. “You don’t have to live with this pain alone. Join us.”

Yetu ignored her amaba, absorbing more memories. She had thrown away her ancestors.

“You didn’t throw them away. You lived. You did what you needed to do to make sure you lived. Our survival honors ancestors more than any tradition,” said Amaba. Her fins were pressed against Yetu’s cheeks. Her face looked hollow, but her dark eyes were vibrant.

Yetu felt the minds of every living wajinru. Their struggles were so familiar to her. “Join us,” said Amaba, begging. “I would sooner die than let you suffer this alone. You begged me to understand, and I never did. I never could. Now I know, my child. I know, and I will not see you bear it without your amaba, without your kindred.”

But maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe, instead of taking the History from them, she could join them as they experienced it. Just like with the Remembrance, she could guide them through the rememberings so it didn’t overtake them with such violence. They could bear it all together.

Usually, after the Remembrance, the historian waited nearby, empty of memories, but what would happen if they stayed? What could happen if someone with experience stayed with the wajinru past the moment of completion? Could she wrangle them back toward consciousness, without taking the memories back? Could they live out their days all sharing the memories together?

Zoti Aleyu wanted the wajinru to be one, together. But they never were. They were two. Historian and her subjects. It was time for the two to be merged.

Yetu let herself feel how the other wajinru felt, flooded by sensation. She welcomed the barrage of thoughts. They subsumed her, the same way they subsumed everyone else.

“I am here,” she said. “Enough.”

“It hurts,” they cried. “We hurt.”

“Yes,” said Yetu, acknowledging their pain in a way it never had been for her.

Yetu ebbed and flowed with them, caught up in the wave of rememberings, but she’d learned over the years how to make an inch for herself.

“How?” someone asked, and it came out as all of them asking it in unison. “How do we make an inch?”

Yetu showed them a picture of the day with the sharks, how lost she’d been, bleeding, seconds away from death before her amaba scooped her up and dragged her to safety. “We must save one another,” said Yetu.

Yetu showed them what she did when she found the History most overwhelming and brutal, projecting images from her own mind into theirs. When the History threatened to end Yetu, she went to one memory in particular: their first caretaker. In this remembering, there is a lone wajinru pup floating, alive and content. It was the ocean who was their first amaba.

It took three days for the storm inside all of them to settle. They each held pieces of the History now, divvied up between them. They shared it and discussed it. They grieved. Sometimes, they wanted to die. But then they would remember, it was done.

Whenever an event triggered a remembering, they spoke those words. “It is done.” Because it was. Yetu thought of life on the surface for Oori. She had lost most things. Knowledge, rituals, prayers, family. Gaps could be survived and made full again, but only if you were still living.

“You look woeful,” said Amaba.

“I am trying to remember something,” Yetu said.

“What?” her amaba asked.

“What it was like to be in the womb.”

She’d always thought the first memory had been the stranded wajinru pups, tethered to their dead first mothers, but if wajinru existed before the birth, inside the bellies, there should be memories of that, too.

Yetu explained her thought to Amaba.

“It is possible you have had a remembering of such a thing, but have forgotten it.”

It was impossible to forget. “What do you mean?”

“Do you have memories of darkness?” asked Amaba.

“Of course.”

“Of loneliness?”

“Yes.”

“All I’m saying,” said Amaba, “is that there is very little difference between a bornt wajinru pup and one still encased in the womb. What if some of your rememberings of dark loneliness as a pup were you inside a belly, and it was hardly distinguishable from floating in the deep? It is all waters.”

Yetu circled her mother slowly. “It is all waters.”

“When I think about the rememberings I’ve had, I believe this to be the case. I remember the womb from the first wajinru. I remember the ocean teaching us to breathe water. Once we were born, it would’ve been too late, but in the womb, it came to us naturally. That is why it changed us then.”

It was strange to be having such a conversation with her amaba, discussing their varied interpretations of the History. What had always seemed certain to Yetu wasn’t so immutable. The living put their own mark on the dead.

Goodness, how had she missed it?

“I need to look for someone,” admitted Yetu. “She is probably dead, but regardless, I would like to at least locate her body. She means a great deal to me.”

“Oh? A wajinru?”

“A two-legs.”

Amaba tried to act neutral but Yetu caught her attempt to smooth down a smile into cold neutrality. “She had markings on her face, these beautiful, intricate tattoos. Some of the symbols were identical to etchings on the comb I received shortly before the last Remembrance. One of the offerings made to me. I’d assumed they were bite marks, but of course, they are not. They were intentional carvings. I misinterpreted.”

“It is easy to do that with the past, even with the blessing of the full visions of the History,” said Amaba.

Yetu showed Amaba the comb. “My Oori comes from the place where this object is from. Does it spark anything for you? A location?”

Amaba held the comb in her front fin and rubbed it with closed eyes. “It’s from a song.”

“What?” asked Yetu.

“A song our amaba used to sing when she was pregnant.” Yetu understood that when Amaba said our amaba, she was speaking in the voice of the Remembrance, when everybody became one.

“You remember such things?” asked Yetu.

Amaba began to sing. “Zoti aleyu, zoti aleyu, watsa tibi m’besha tusa keyu?”

Strange fish, strange fish, why do you jump around in my belly like a fish out of water?

Yetu had heard the song before. She’d just dismissed it as an old conversation with her amaba, something from her own childhood.

She’d taken on the History so young that memories from the past blended with memories of her life. Amaba was old enough that her memories were more distinct.

“I know where she is,” Yetu said, and left her amaba at once to try to find Oori.

Waj, the first surface dweller a wajinru had befriended, had lived on an island called Tosha. It was the wajinru word for belonging. It was also the Tosha word for belonging.

Waj had told Zoti, the first historian, where she was from, where she was heading. Zoti had misinterpreted. Perhaps Waj had deliberately played with her.

It was a small island in the backward C-shaped cradle of the African continent, and it took Yetu a day to swim there. She didn’t know if Oori would even still be there. It had been a while now since the storm had passed.

Yetu swam close to the shore, careful not to beach herself. “Oori!” she screamed, her voice ugly, strange, and coarse. “Oori!”

She called her nonstop for hours, her voice as loud as she could manage. Finally, she gave up, accepting reality. If Oori was here, she was not coming.

Yetu waited days, eyes on the tree line, waiting for Oori to emerge. She did not. Yetu neither ate nor slept. She certainly didn’t leave. A world where a storm she had made killed the two-legs she held so dear was not bearable. Yetu remembered Zoti and Waj, but it was not the same. Oori had asked Yetu to come with her, and Yetu had willingly denied her. She’d never forgive herself.

On the seventh day, Yetu turned back to the open sea, where she saw a sail on the horizon. She squinted, the sun a blight against her eyes. Dazed from lack of food and rest, she wasn’t sure that she wasn’t sleeping. “Oori,” she said quietly, her voice ravaged from the days she’d spent shouting for her. “Please, please, please,” she begged, her heartbeat quickening.

The boat was coming in fast, the winds strong.

When Oori saw Yetu, she did not wave happily, but she did lower her sail so as not to run Yetu over. It was perhaps the closest she’d ever get to a gesture of love.

Then Oori jumped into the water next to Yetu. Her small boat was not anchored and drifted away quickly on the waves.

“Your boat,” said Yetu.

“Hopefully the tide will carry it in. Or it won’t.”

“I have longed for you since you left,” said Yetu. “Were you able to get here in time?”

“No,” said Oori. Neither of them said anything for several moments until Oori added quietly but steadily, “I longed for you, too.” Then she began to cry like she’d been holding it in her whole life. Yetu thought she probably had. Oori had been waiting for someone to bear witness. “I thought I’d never see you again. I thought— I thought what happened to my family, to my nation. I thought that had happened to you.”

“I’m here,” said Yetu. “I will stay with you no matter what.”

“It’s all gone. All of it,” she said.

Yetu nodded. “All but for you,” she said, shivering at the feel of Oori’s legs treading water. “And this.” Yetu showed Oori the comb.

Oori studied it with sharp, serious eyes, her brow pinched tightly together as she bit her lower lip. “Where did you get this?”

“It is from one of the first mothers. The wajinru’s earliest ancestors.”

Oori blinked several times as she processed and wept silently. “When I die, there will be none of us left.”

“Then don’t die,” Yetu said.

A bare shadow of a smile pressed through Oori’s usual glum countenance.

“Stay with me, and we will make a new thing. What’s behind us, it is done.”

“How could I possibly stay with you?”

“Didn’t you know the ocean grants wishes?” asked Yetu.

It wasn’t really that simple. Of course, Yetu didn’t believe that the sea was sentient. But it was where life began. It was where the life of the wajinru began, and reaching backward, the life of the two-legs, too.

“Let me show you something?” asked Yetu.

Oori tried to wipe the tears from her face, but her hands were wet from the water, and finally that was when she laughed, at her own silliness. “Show me anything, everything,” she said, swimming closer so that her thighs brushed against Yetu as her legs moved furiously to keep herself afloat.

“It might be easier if we touch.”

“Touch me, then,” said Oori.

They held each other close until Yetu was able to transfer to Oori the remembering of the womb. Lost in it, Oori stopped treading, and she sank a little. Yetu let her sink, holding her tightly so she could quickly return her to the surface if need be.

But when Oori jolted from the remembering, she was breathing underwater, just as she’d breathed in the womb.

She did not transform in the way wajinru pups transformed in the two-legs’ bellies. She didn’t grow gills or fins, but like Yetu, she could breathe both on land and in the sea. She was a completely new thing.

Yetu beckoned her downward into the dark, into this world of beauty. For most of her life, Yetu had had to shut it out, split between the past and the present, her mind unable to manage even the dullest input. But the world was infinite and magnificent, and she had finally found her place in it.

“Come,” said Yetu. Oori followed. This time, the two-legs venturing into the depths had not been abandoned to the sea, but invited into it.