I swim in a shark.
The control panel has a joystick, a red baseball bat with six fire buttons. But this submersible does not have weapons. It has screens, one showing where I am going, one where I have been, and a third split-screen that shows both sides.
One time, I surfaced to go about my business. I emerged from the shark and let my insides expel themselves into the salt water. There was a yacht in the distance, black and sleek like a spaceship. People were on the deck, watching me go next to a shark. The yacht turned towards me, a rescue mission. I finished up, got back in, and dove. In the rear camera, I saw the shadow of that spaceship against the sky.
The ocean is deeper than any of our mountains are high, but the only place I cannot go is the trenches. I lie at the edge of them, looking into that blackness, expecting a beautiful creature with glowing tentacles to come out of it, escaping the tedium of its familiar life at the bottom, trying to find its way to the rumor of a sunny day it heard about once.
***
“Dinner is the fifteenth of next month,” says Indira.
“Will there be any wine this time, or should I bring it?”
“You can if you want. Jasjit, a boy is coming.”
My only sibling is three years younger than me. A lawyer at twenty-six, but she does not drink wine. “Is he Brown?”
Silence. I know what that means. She tells me that everything will be fine, that Mama and Papa have accepted. I tell her that I’m surprised, but she laughs and says to bring at least two bottles, because the boy likes wine, too.
I get hungry, so I swim close to the surface. When fish are together, turning in tight patterns for no reason other than to be social, it’s called shoaling. Birds I have seen, when I lived on land, do the same thing, but there’s it’s called a murmuration. I increase speed and use the joystick to open the mouth of the shark. The mechanical jaws pounce. A fish is caught, ripped to pieces. A lever allows me to expel the water in the mouth cavity, and then I open the hatch to retrieve the remains. On a hotplate, I cook the fish until its flesh turns white.
In a cabinet, I keep wine bottles. I used to hate wine when I was young. This is grapes? I used to ask. Grapes that have been exposed to biology, someone told me, as though that made any sense.
***
Mama and Dada took Indira and me to a beach in Costa Rica years ago. We swam, looking for undertows and bull sharks. Every day, I swam further, and once noticed that the sea temperature had cooled. When I looked down through the clear blue water, the bottom of the ocean had disappeared.
I treaded water for a long time in that spot, wondering if I should go further.
In a shark, I swim to a beach of Cinque Terre. These are rocky beaches and concrete constructs at the bottom of cliffs that support every color of house that human beings can imagine. I put up my fin, so that people can see me coming. On the shore, fingers point.
I speed up, so that there’s no illusion.
A couple is on the jagged rocks at the foot of Manarola. She’s wearing sunglasses. He’s got goggles. They are watching me as I speed up. They nod, and jump into the water, the water that is warm with Mediterranean salt, and cooled by the river that flows through a grotto under the village, mixing fresh water with saline, the cold with the warm.
I swim to the couple. At the last moment, I slow. She’s beautiful. He’s tall. I swim next to them, so they can pat me. Their hands are on my skin. Their fingers are tapping my hull. He’s giggling. She’s putting her arm around me, like this is a hug.
Others are jumping into the ocean to gather around. People come towards the shark in which I swim, waiting their turn. A mother pulling a toddler on a blow-up dragon beckons the young girl to touch me. This is not scary, she says, in Italian. The girl pokes me, and when I don’t eat her, she asks her mother to put her on top of me, like I’m an inflatable, too. A fifteen-foot steel inflatable with teeth fiercer than any shark’s.
I circle the cove, the five-year-old on my back. People take photos. They cheer the girl, and maybe they cheer me, too. On the shore, Polizia are waving. Ciao! One is Alfred, the man who responded when I first came to Cinque Terre, his gun drawn until he saw that I was no threat. The ocean is okay, it’s safe, and sharks are not your enemy, Alfred. He has swum with me in the past, his rolling gut planted against the hull as I streaked and darted about the cove. He does not have his gun today, only a cup of gelato and a transparent green spoon, as he waves hello.
***
Mama and Dada live in Toronto, a condominium.
I dock the shark on a decrepit pier stretching from Toronto Island into Lake Ontario and fill the ballast tanks so that the submersible will sink under the surface. I walk the Island, and through the tunnel that connects to the city.
The streets are saturated. Streams of people flow through them, cars and buses too. People jostle me as I walk, intimate but tolerable contacts, like we’re close for a moment and then strangers the next. When I lived here, that was how it worked – intimacy freezing on sewer grates, black ink dripping from concrete towers. In the summers, humidity, oceans of water moving through the thick air, a wonder that anyone could breathe.
“Charlie’s here,” says Indira, on the phone. “Hurry up.”
I have wine. In my head, Charlie is a redheaded Scottish giant who keeps a secret collection of kilts. Indira tells me that Papa is cooking fish, and that they’re going to eat on the balcony. Between the condominium and the Lake is a construction project. It’s only four stories high so far, but Indira says that it is scheduled to be ten times that, and when finished, will block their parents’ view of the water. Rough deal, I tell her, but she laughs and says it’s not like the water isn’t there just because you can’t see it, silly.
A truck jumps a curb and honks its horn to warn pedestrians. A fire truck rumbles down the road, its driver aching to use the sirens. Half the people are walking while staring at their phones. The other half are looking at the ground, batteries dead. Garbage cans overflow, thick with flies, and next to them carts sell hot dogs and layer cakes. I used to live here, next to people that don’t know I’ve left. Ten thousand, a hundred thousand people walk by me, unaware that I’m gone. They crowd against each other and against me, intimate for a moment and then disconnected permanently.
At Mama and Papa’s condo, I stop. A river of people has flooded the sidewalk between me and the doors. It’s thick and mad, and anything that falls into it is carried with the current. At a fire hydrant, it parts and joins again, the molecules mingling. A red light changes, and a wave of laptop bags comes ashore. Indira texts to tell me that dinner is ready. I stand and breathe this air, the smells, the particulates, so different from what I breathe when I swim in the shark. I’m no threat, I tell the river of people walking before me. But the river swells, flooding with a storm that is happening far away from here, the current just reaching me now.
***
I swim down the St. Lawrence, alongside ships. They’re choking the water, so thick, a murmuration or a shoaling, I’m not sure which.
Then south down the coast.
The long line of Maine, a shard of New Hampshire, the jagged outcrop of Massachusetts, and a rumor of Rhode Island. The shelf is shallow, so the water is warmer. There are sailboats and fishing boats, and windmills being built into the shallow sea bottom. One time, I get trapped in a net, but manage to rev my way through it. I leave a hole in it, but there are no fishermen here. No boats for me to nudge against to say I’m sorry.
I raise my fin on the way to Cape Cod Bay, so that everyone can see me coming. There are beaches, and people. There are cottages along the coast, a road cutting through the middle of the land.
I speed up.
People on the shore point. A lifeguard on a tower blows a whistle, and rushes towards the water. Everyone, get out, he says! Get out of the water! They say that life came from the oceans.
A helicopter appears. I can imagine what they see. I’m a shadow against the sandy bottom. I’m long, lean. A biological entity that’s one of the oldest species on the planet, a predator that has on its mind the simple desire to keep on living. Once, I found a tiger shark in the middle of the Atlantic. The pattern on her sides didn’t make her look like a tiger, but she was pretty. A chunk was missing from her fin, as though she’d been in a fight. She came towards me, lazy, as though she was about to fall asleep. We nudged each other. Swam in circles. We were like that for a long time, before our bodies slid together and we faced the sun through the water. We twirled. We spun together and rose towards the sunlight, for so long that I can still feel her now as I did then, when I could hear her heartbeat through the metal of the hull.
The helicopter is close. A man with a rifle is peering out the door. Don’t shoot, I tell him. I’m no threat. I’m here to swim with people, and to let them ride me. They can touch me. If they want, they can twirl with me in circles as we watch the setting sun, and float into a future we haven’t even built yet.
They close the beach and send everyone home, as the most spectacular sunset begins. I can see it on my screen. Boats are converging on me, their bows pointed.
I turn and head away. I go deeper as the boats and the helicopter follow, making sure that I’m going to stay gone. The water is warm but cools as the ocean shelf falls away.
In a cabinet, I keep wine. I open a bottle and drink. I’m tired and let myself sleep. The shark swims. In my dream, I’m in Lake Ontario, floating on an inflatable. It’s a sea dragon with multiple tentacles. Children are clinging to the arms, because this is the future, and in the future, we don’t fear dragons. They are our friends. We swim with them, and invite them onto the land, places they’ve never been.
A man is laughing, so I slide off the inflatable. Towards the shore I swim, and when I reach the redheaded Scottish man, I open my mechanical jaws and swallow him. Have a drink with me, I tell him. There’s barely room enough for two in here, I say, as the jaws rip him to pieces.
When I wake up, I’m in the Caribbean. It’s the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest part of the Atlantic. They say that when the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs hit, it hit here. They all died, those dinosaurs. But not sharks. They were around before the dinosaurs and have survived five global mass extinctions since. Wait until the next one, I think.
Why do you do this, my parents ask me sometimes? This is not a real job. Indira tells me, laughing, that it’s hard to meet a girl this way. She says that I have become such a sadboy. I tell them about the people that put their arms around me, that ride on my hull. I tell them about the people who want to know me.
I turn on the external speaker, start music. Flip on lights and brighten the dark water above the trench. Sound waves follow light waves through water waving, reaching out as though they’re tentacles. I don’t know what the creatures out there hear when they listen to this music or what they think of this bright light above the trench, but it’s no threat, I tell them. We call this music. Human beings created this. Creatures of the land, the rumor of a civilization up there, where you can’t go. But listen to me, and don’t worry. Don’t be scared. Listen for a while. Swim with me if you want, like we’re dancing.
There are hundreds of creatures around me. I can see them on my screens. Blues, greens, pinks, greys. In the current, they flutter as they watch me within this globe of light. They’re pointed at me, like I’m the center of the ocean.
Beneath me is a trench. Down there, a sad sea dragon knits scarves on a boulder. Its world is overcrowded, and too busy. There is no chance, ever, to be alone. The dragon heard a rumor once, of a sunny day above the waves, a place none of its kind has ever seen, and it believes that it’s going to rise. It’s going to grasp the sides of the trench with its tentacles and make the long climb, until sunbeams touch it. It may not be easy, and it may not be today, but it’s going to go there, and play with the children. They’ll hug its tentacles. And when it’s ready, it’s going to pull itself onto a beach and head for the tall buildings to explore, climbing up the concrete. It’ll look through the windows at the shapes huddled inside, and when it gets to the top of the tallest building, it’ll rest for a while, wondering how a place could be so lonely, and so perfect.
Photo by Avery Cocozziello on Unsplash
