The Deep

7

OORI FINALLY DID COME BACK three days later, but Yetu didn’t feel as happy by her return as she thought she would. Left alone to stew in her past—the past Oori insisted was so meaningful and important and good—she felt tender. She was fourteen again, too young a creature to hold so many sorrows.

“Say you’re sorry, or go,” said Yetu, channeling the petulant energy of her recently recalled youth. “I will soon be well enough to clear the boulders on my own. I won’t need you to hunt then.”

“I am sorry,” said Oori, and nothing else.

Yetu nodded. “It’s not right to help nurture something back to health, then abandon it before the task is finished. I’ve come to rely on you,” said Yetu. She wasn’t used to speaking so freely about her wants and needs. She wasn’t used to having wants and needs of her own at all. It had always been a battle between what the wajinru needed, what the ancestors needed, and what she needed. A single lonely girl, her own needs never won.

It was days before Oori and Yetu returned to something approaching their previous level of companionship. Nothing so personal as their earlier discussions, just practical matters. Hunting techniques, currents, winds. Yetu could answer many of Oori’s questions about the sea, and Yetu was happy to be her font of knowledge.

“What is the biggest creature in the sea?” asked Oori next, her face stern. Her drive for knowledge wasn’t gently curious, as one might expect, but ferocious and consuming. A part of Yetu could understand why she would lust after something like the History so much.

“Leviathan. Like you, she’s the last of her kind. Larger than a blue whale by several degrees. She holds air long enough to be underwater for days at a time, and comes up only at night to breathe.”

Oori seemed to perk—as much as she ever perked—as she listened.

“She must be lonely,” Oori said.

“She’s nearly as old as the ocean. It is her companion, as are its many creatures,” said Yetu.

“Still. Who could truly know her when there are no others of her kind?” said Oori.

Some days, Oori discussed the place she came from, how there’d been only a few families left for several decades. Disease took all but her in the end. “When there are so few of you, anything can ravage you in moments. What chance did we ever have at survival?” she asked.

Yetu thought she remembered something about another young woman whose family was wiped out in an instant by disease, but she couldn’t put it together, couldn’t think of who it would be. Another half memory from the rememberings.

“And your husband? Or your wife? Or is it wives? What happened to them?”

Oori snorted. She stood in the water on the other side of the rocks from Yetu, in the shallow part of the open ocean. She had a spear, but she wasn’t fishing.

“I have never had any of those things,” said Oori.

“Friends?”

“No,” Oori said, her voice sad.

“Me neither.”

Though that wasn’t true, of course. It was a long time ago, so distant now that it seemed to have happened to someone else, but it wasn’t someone else. It was Yetu, as a girl, with a small group of peers who tolerated her anxiousnesses. How different might her life have turned out without the History stealing them from her? Would she still love them? Would they have become her lovers or mates? Would they share a den now?

Yetu’s gut twisted as she remembered that those girls she once knew were now locked in an eternal state of memory. With no one there to relieve them of its burden, would all of them die? Would they want to kill themselves? Would all the wajinru writhing together turn the ocean into a frothing pit? Would Yetu sink into the hole they created?

The approaching rough weather had all the markings of a wajinru tempest. The slow, slow brew of it, the uncertain and moving center, the feeling of electricity in the air. Yetu had brought this. Her simple but extraordinary rebellion might drown the world if she didn’t stop it, if she could stop it. Yetu wasn’t sure she’d still be able to gather the rememberings from them, the strength of the wajinru en masse too great for her to overcome. She had always struggled to face the darkness, and the thought of returning to the wajinru choked her with dread. The impossible weight of her responsibility to the world would obliterate her before she had the chance to fix what she’d done.

The sky was pale gray with cloud cover. Yetu smelled the coming rain in the air. She’d never experienced such a thing on the surface before, and she was curious what it might be like. She imagined it like gutting an animal. The sky was the belly. Something sharp would come along and slit it open till all its contents spilled out and filled the sea, nourished it.

“You’re smiling,” said Suka, shaking their head. They didn’t come around often, but they occasionally stopped to chat and see how Yetu was doing. “I didn’t know that you could do that. What’s got you?”

“I’m thinking. I mean, I had a thought. My own thought. My own story.” It still pleased her that she could do that, that it was possible to have her mind to herself. Without the History devouring the whole of her mind, she had an inkling of who she was. She didn’t have answers yet, but she had questions, endless questions. And worries, and concerns. But they were hers.

“What was the thought?”

But Yetu wanted to hold on to it, keep it safe. Who was to say what would happen to it were she to speak it? Suka didn’t seem cruel, but Yetu didn’t feel sure they wouldn’t steal it. They might bring the thought to their people and it would no longer belong to her.

“I haven’t had many thoughts of my own. I’d like to keep this one to myself for a while,” she said.

Suka nodded companionably. “All right, then, strange fish.”

That phrase sparked something, something wonderful and familiar. She wanted to know more, but couldn’t.

Yetu turned her gaze out to the water. Sometimes she could see Oori’s boat, far out in the distance, the white sail visible, looking like a fin, like a giant creature of the deep itself. A harsh wind blew the sail as rain drizzled. Yetu didn’t like it. The patterings against her skin were simultaneously too light and too heavy, and it reminded her of an itch. Water was supposed to exist as a great, singular body.

The tidal pool seemed even smaller now than it had before, and Yetu swam in circles in the shallow, near-pressureless water. It was upsettingly light, warm. She couldn’t stretch. She had been here for about three weeks, she guessed. Now that she was mostly recovered, she needed to stretch, to flex.

The boulders separating her from the deeper water were a barrier. Yetu rubbed her front side against it, preparing to slide over. But it still hurt, cartilage twisted and bruised. Even mostly recovered, her body was still a mess of aching bends and joints.

“It hurts in here,” Yetu said, cognizant of the water in a way she hadn’t been when first swimming to the surface. Her body felt loose, on the verge of falling apart. She might’ve been built for flexibility, to survive in the deep as well as the shallows, but there was no doubt her body had become accustomed to darkness, to weight, and to density. It did not prefer this thin water. It wanted to be out there, where Oori was. Where the wajinru were. She missed them. She missed them more than she’d ever considered possible given that she’d spent the better part of the last two decades shrinking away from them, desperate for solitude. It had only been a few weeks, barely any time at all considering she’d gone a whole year without contact just recently, but this time felt different. It felt like she’d drawn a line and built a wall.

“Can I help you out of there somehow?” Suka asked, a small cloth wrapped around their head and shoulders to stave off the light rain.

“No,” said Yetu. She didn’t think she was yet strong enough to survive on the other side of the boulders. “I’ll heal in time,” she said. A few more days rest, that was all Yetu needed, then she could… She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t even sure if she really needed more time, or if fear of the rememberings and by extension the wajinru still haunted her. If she got out of the tidal pool and went back into the ocean, where would she go, and what would she do? Yetu could feel in the water and the sky that the mud womb was broken. She felt it under the brewing weather, a senseless agony bounding outward and sparking the sea. She could no longer convince herself that the wajinru would shake themselves out of the trance, at least not before it was too late.

Yetu should go to them. Now, preferably, healed or not. But something held her here, something murky and louring she couldn’t define. Fear of the History played a part, but that wasn’t all.

She inhaled sharply through her nose and blew it out through her mouth, the resultant sound whistly and shrill. It was anger. More specifically, resentment. She’d always done what she’d needed to do in service of her people, no matter the cost to herself. To preserve her own life, she’d fled, but now they needed her again, and there she was, willing to sacrifice herself for their benefit.

She’d been denied so much. It was only since escaping, since meeting Oori, that she’d learned what life could be.

Yet emptiness still troubled her. What angered her was the inevitability of it. With the wajinru, she’d been singular and alone. Without them, she’d found Oori and independence, but was cast away from the History and her people. It seemed an impossible choice, and the indecision made her immobile. “Medicine might help heal you faster,” said Suka.

Yetu turned to them, so deep in her own thoughts that she’d briefly forgotten that they were there. “You have medicine here?”

Suka nodded. “Of course we do.”

“What about venom leaves? They’ll help with the swelling and pain.”

“Let me ask my sister. She’ll know,” said Suka. They left, returning not long after with two others, several pouches, and a bowl. “We don’t have anything called venom leaves, but we brought a couple of things to try.”

“They don’t smell appealing,” said Yetu.

The two-legs laughed. “No, they don’t,” said one called Nura. “But you take it, and you’ll feel better. Promise. They’re powerful pain relievers, and they reduce inflammation and infection, too. Drink. Drink up.” Nura pressed the wooden bowl to Yetu’s lips and poured it down her throat, droplets of rain dotting Yetu’s face.

The scene was so familiar, she could feel herself in Amaba’s embrace, taking medicine after her amaba saved her from the sharks.

Yetu choked more of the medicine down, then waved the two-legs away. Like Nura had said, the herbs and tinctures were powerful. A glorious numbness settled over Yetu. She closed her eyes in bliss, then opened them again to stare at the pleasing dark gray of the sky.

With each passing hour, the world darkened yet more. The ocean smelled bloody. Yetu wanted to dive into it and revel in the coming storm.

She didn’t know where she belonged, if returning to the wajinru would mean the death of her. But she wasn’t suited for life here.

And where was here?

“What do you mean?” asked Oori.

“Where are we? In the world? If you tell me a name, I might know it,” Yetu explained.

“Why? What does it matter where any place is, unless you are trying to return to it? It’d do you well not to think of here at all. You’re trying to find yourself, aren’t you? To do that you must go. Thinking of this place will only hold you back,” said Oori.

The storm had arrived and hadn’t stopped. It had been raining on and off for two days, and the worst of it was yet to come. Yetu could tell by the look of the waves. She felt… She felt a shadow in the water. Even in the little tidal pool. She could liken it only to the vague whiff on her skin she used to get as a child when there was a shark nearby, hungry for her organs.

“I’m trying to get oriented,” she said. If she knew where she was in relation to everything else, she could better read the sky and the waves. How big was the land mass they were on? She couldn’t get a sense of it locked away in this tiny cage.

“You need to be worrying about out there. Not here. You have healed. Only fear keeps you locked in this thing. What did you tell me before? That you stopped being a historian or whatever it was so you could be free of all that pain. Not so you could waste away your days in a tidal pool,” said Oori, who was sitting in the pool bathing herself. She’d started doing that now. In addition to her morning visits, she came after supper to bathe in the tidal pool.

Yetu wasn’t sure what the etiquette on these kinds of matters were, but she appreciated seeing more and more of Oori’s body. Two-legs covered every part of themselves with clothing, their bodies held in secret from one another. Yetu had wondered at first if it was something like a clam, a defensive casing to protect the soft flesh.

But their clothes were not protective. They were soft. Little more than a bit of woven kelp.

“Stop staring,” said Oori.

Yetu looked down at the water. “Apologies,” she said. She’d only been curious about the differences between two-legs and wajinru. There were so many. “But may I ask you a question about your body? Well, not yours in particular, but two-legs bodies.”

Oori rubbed her body with a mixture of ashes, beef fat, and numerous different flower petals. She scrubbed it all in with a cloth, rubbing till her dark brown skin turned red in places, revealing the blood underneath, the aliveness of her.

“You may ask. But only if I may ask questions of you, too,” said Oori.

Yetu’s heartbeat quickened when she heard Oori’s proposal, but she told herself to remain calm so as not to scare Oori off. Yetu forced her face into a picture of stillness to hide her excitement. How pleasing to think Oori had questions for her just as Yetu had questions for Oori. Oori wanted to know more about Yetu. She believed there was a Yetu to get to know at all.

“Go on, then, before I change my mind,” said Oori. “Ask.”

Yetu wasn’t sure how to phrase her question, as she sensed such topics were taboo among the two-legs based on some conversations she’d had with Suka.

“Come on. Anything,” said Oori.

Yetu wiggled her tail fin in the water to take in oxygen, a way of breathing she found more calming than sucking air from the sky through her mouth. “Why is it that some two-legs’ genitals hang out such that they are visible through the thin cloth they wear, and why are others’ genitals tucked in, only to come out during coupling, I presume?”

Yetu expected Oori to laugh, the way Suka had when Yetu had asked them about breasts. Oori didn’t laugh, though. At best, she raised a brow. Bit her lip.

“I’m actually not sure where to start with that,” said Oori.

“Is it a choice?” Yetu pressed. Wajinru bodies didn’t tend to have differences along those lines, but like two-legs, there were men, women, both, and neither. Such things were self-determined, and Yetu wondered if two-legs had body self-determination too. “You keep yours inside of you. Is that a protective measure, then?”

The cloth Oori used to clean herself had become brown with dead skin and dirt, so she dipped it into the pool to clean it off. When she was done, she worked more of her ash mixture into it and rubbed it over the parts of her body that gave off odor.

“It is not a choice, really. People have different bodies. Different… configurations. There is nothing tucked up inside of me. Just a vulva, which is, hmm, a passage that connects—”

“I know what it is,” said Yetu. “Does sperm come out of it, then?”

“No,” said Oori, unflustered by the questions, which relieved Yetu. Wajinru discussed bodies openly. They were largely if not always naked in front of one another. Through the water, they could feel and hear private things that happened miles away.

Suka, Nura, and the other two-legs on this piece of land seemed less frank about matters. Yetu only knew the precise details of Oori’s nakedness because she’d taken to bathing here.

“Does sperm come out of yours?” asked Oori.

Yetu shook her head. “Wajinru have a place to envelope, and then there’s something else, and that is what gives sperm. Yet it is always tucked away until the time of mating.”

“You have both?” asked Oori.

“Of course.”

Oori nodded. “That explains your questions, then. Humans aren’t like that. Not everyone is the same. Not everyone can mate with everyone else and expect a child.”

Understanding now, Yetu decided to press further. “When two-legs mate, does it feel good?” she asked, shocked at her own brazenness. Even among wajinru, such questions were considered a personal matter.

“For many,” said Oori, as usual, matter-of-fact. Though she showed no signs of continued interest in this conversation, she showed no signs of annoyance either. “For me personally? Only with someone who is quite special in a specific kind of way.”

“Someone like who?” asked Yetu.

Oori shook her head. “It is my turn to ask a question.”

Smiling, Yetu nodded. “Fair enough. Ask me anything. Please.” Perhaps she was too eager. As Oori requested, she wasn’t looking at her, but she could smell her and feel the shape of her strange two legs, her split fins, in the water. And the contours of her belly, breasts, and shoulders.

“If wajinru all have such similar parts, how do you choose who does what when you couple?” asked Oori.

Couple was an odd word choice, given it could involve any number of wajinru, frequently up to five, but Yetu didn’t inquire further. “What do you mean, who does what?”

“Say you, Yetu, found another wajinru you wanted to be with. Do you… untuck?” asked Oori. It was the first time Yetu heard a hint of nervousness and embarrassment in her voice. “Or do you leave it away so that the other may untuck, and… you know, insert it into you?”

Heat flooded Yetu’s body at Oori’s words. She felt dizzy. There was a tugging at the bottom of her belly, a need.

“It is my understanding that it is most common for everything to be… engaged at once,” said Yetu. “And when not, I suppose it is decided based on the preferences of the wajinru involved in the heat of the moment.”

“It is your understanding? Have you not—?”

“I haven’t,” said Yetu. The urge to avert her gaze overwhelmed her, but it was supplanted by the need to examine every detail of Oori’s face. She saw it with her eyes, but she also felt it against her skin, the shape of the passing breeze painting a picture of it on her scaled flesh.

“Would you like to?” asked Oori, sinking deeper into the water. She was scrubbing her hair now, black thick locs, each at least the width of an inch. They were dark like the deep.

“Yes,” said Yetu, her voice growing weak and stuttery. “But like you, only with someone special in a particular sort of way.” A stranger to these sorts of conversations, she treaded cautiously. It would be too easy to let herself get submerged, to be raptured by the beautiful closeness and say nothing at all, or worse, something foolish.

Oori said nothing, her eyes looking to the sea. She rarely looked Yetu directly in the face. At first, Yetu thought to be offended. Was she really so ugly? So distasteful to the gaze? Yetu often didn’t look people directly in the face, and certainly not the eyes, but for Oori it seemed an aversion. Whenever Oori did catch Yetu’s gaze, she flitted her eyes away then hardened her face.

Yetu understood now that it was a loneliness. Oori had lost everyone, everything. She couldn’t look at another’s face and think of anything but the screams of the last remaining specimens of her people.

“And do you find me special in a particular sort of way?” Oori asked, erupting the silence.

Yetu shivered at the note of tenderness in her voice, her throat and mouth uncomfortably dry. She tried to answer, but couldn’t speak, instead swallowing a lungful of ocean air, thick with moisture and the scent of salt.

Oori’s eyes were still affixed to the sea’s horizon, but Yetu caught the faintest flutter of movement as she went to turn toward Yetu then changed her mind, thinking better of it. “I do,” answered Yetu finally.

Though she could only see Oori in profile, Yetu saw her cheeks twitch and then plump. She was smiling, and that made Yetu’s heart speed up and the pit of her stomach become hot. “And do you find me pleasing to look at?” asked Oori. Just as Yetu’s did, Oori’s heartbeat quickened with each passing second, causing the water to throb against Yetu’s skin.

“Yes. I do,” said Yetu, her confidence growing. It felt so good to speak plainly, to know that the answers she gave would be accepted.

“I want you to know that I feel similarly about you,” said Oori. Yetu trembled as she tried to steady the flow of water coming in and out of her scales. “But I don’t think I can do this.” She stood up then pushed herself up out of the rocks, her naked body fully visible. A consuming desire to be closer to her, to step out of the water even if it killed her, overtook Yetu. She knew not where it came from.

Oori wrapped herself in thick white cloth. “I am going, Yetu.”

Yetu nodded, hoping she hadn’t revealed too much and frightened Oori away. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. Despite her resolve to never alter herself for another again, she found herself worrying that she’d said something wrong, something that had made Oori want to go so suddenly. Yetu had asked too many invasive questions, and her answers to Oori’s questions had been too frank.

“I won’t be back tomorrow,” Oori said.

Yetu nodded again, this time less enthusiastically. Oori sometimes went on lengthy boating trips. Maybe it was time to leave the tidal pool. She could follow her. Everything felt so strained still. Her body protested most movement. She’d gotten used to a constant physical gnawing.

“How long will you be gone for, then?” asked Yetu.

“Uncertain. With this storm, I need to take a pilgrimage back to my homeland before it gets worse. I need to protect some of the fixtures, tend to the grave sites, lest they all vanish and the place I’m from become truly dead. I should’ve gone days ago. Weeks. But I didn’t. I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay for you.”

Yetu pressed her tail fin into the gushing sand below to disrupt her breathing. Her chest tightened, and she attempted to keep her body still. “What is a homeland?” Yetu asked, translating it to home-sea in her head but unable to make any sense of that.

Oori’s face fell, and Yetu searched for all the reasons that might be. Was it a word she was supposed to remember but had forgotten? Had Yetu’s question been insensitive in some way? Yetu retraced the conversational steps, the moment Oori’s face changed from gently hopeful to a mixture of anger and sadness. She had been expecting Yetu to ask something else. What?

“A homeland is just a place,” said Oori, her voice quiet and unsteady. She’d never sounded so defeated. “It’s a place that means something because of its history. I know you have a complicated relationship with the past. I do too. But if I don’t protect what is left of it there, I will have no homeland. It will just be another place,” Oori explained.

Yetu tried to bob her head up and down to nod, but the movement was rigid and forced. “You are leaving me, then?” said Yetu, teeth out, though she hadn’t meant them to be. Yetu could only understand a few words Oori had said, too lost in shocked grief to make sense of much more. “Just like that, you are going?” That was the pertinent information. Yetu would be alone again, like she’d been in the deep.

There was Suka. There were other two-legs and surface dwellers. But they did not compare. With Oori, she always wanted more, desperate for time together, for conversation, for closeness. The depth of want seemed endless.

Yetu batted her front fins against the water and made a hard splash, almost soaking Oori’s cloth coverings. “Stay. You must stay. Please,” she begged, hating herself for it. She’d left the wajinru, seeking out freedom, yet here she was, tethered to another, bending herself toward her. She could not make herself feel nothing for this two-legs, and that was not freedom.

“Come with me,” said Oori.

Yetu sunk herself deeper into the sand. She wanted to bury herself alive in it. “I can’t. I’m stuck here.”

“You and I both know that’s not true,” Oori said. “Your health is not perfect, but you’ll survive, I’ll make sure of it. We can protect each other. What is keeping you from the sea? What kind of deep-sea creature prefers a shallow death pit to the infinite ocean?”

What kind of creature, indeed? One who had abandoned the History and the people to whom it belonged. One afraid. One who could neither bear the weight of the rememberings nor the weight of feeling her people suffer through the churning water.

Yetu shook her head. “You’re the one who’s leaving.”

“No, Yetu. You’re the one who’s not coming with.”

Oori had been gone for a day, and the rain had not ceased. Yetu kept her ears open for any sign of where Oori’s homeland was, but no one knew. All anyone said about the matter was that the place Oori was from wasn’t really a homeland anymore because a homeland needed a people. Without a people, it was just a patch of earth.

That was part of why Oori was going back. This place had meant so much to her, she could not let it become nothing, all traces of it wiped out by storm, a storm Yetu had caused by leaving the wajinru to brood in the rememberings.

Why had she been so stubborn with Oori? Now Oori was on the ocean as the waters grew more and more unsteady. Yetu imagined the brine rising up and filling Oori’s throat, imagined the waves upending her craft. She’d let her fear of going back into the ocean stop her from doing what she’d needed to do to keep Oori safe. But Oori wasn’t the only one who would suffer. The winds were heavy enough that the trees on the beach shook violently. Branches flew from some of the taller ones onto the sand. The ferocity and the tumult of the sea had increased more than tenfold since Oori had left. Yetu should’ve known this was coming, how bad it was going to get.

Suka had come to visit her to see how she was doing. Yetu had yelled at them to go inland and to take as many people as they could with them. They weren’t new to storms, but they’d likely not seen anything like what was coming. An echo of a remembering reverberated through Yetu. The same images she’d seen when she first came here washed over her afresh. Drowning two-legs. War between the wajinru and the surface dwellers. In such a battle, the two-legs would surely lose, for what being on this earth could compete with the might of the ocean? Suka and their family might die, and it would be Yetu’s fault. She’d have to live with that for the rest of her days. Her bid to save herself, to save her life, would have the unintended consequence of killing others.

Oori would die too. Eventually, so would the wajinru; for if they had not found their way out of the trance of remembering by now, it didn’t seem likely to happen. They were so lost in it, they were taking their grief out on the whole world.

Then there would just be Yetu, all alone. There would be quiet. The waters would settle. The winds would slow. The rememberings would perish with the wajinru. The wajinru would have the same fate as Oori’s people. Much of the world would.

Storm waters filled the tidal pool, dark and murky, blotting out Yetu’s view of the teeming life inside. The future, too, was dark, if there was a future at all. The hurt that coursed through Yetu as she imagined a futureless world rivaled the pain of the rememberings. Could it really be that there was a version of the world where everything would be eradicated? Gone? She imagined how it felt when the History left her, the freedom of it, but if freedom only brought loneliness, emptiness, what was the point?

Nothingness was a fate worse than pain. How long would it take for Yetu to become ravenous for something to fill the hole the way other wajinru did? She doubted she could last even a year. She was already aching to see Oori, but also her amaba.

At least with pain there was life, a chance at change and redemption. The rememberings might still kill her, but the wajinru would go on, and so, too, would the rest of the world. The turbulent waves were a chaos of her own making, and it was time to face them.