There was a chasm. It looked unassuming from the surface. It was round and very large. The village’s strongest swimmer took longer to cross it than the divers could hold their breath, though such a test was seldom done, for it was inauspicious for the living to enter its waters. That maw of deep, twilight blue belonged to the dead. It was far, far deeper than it was long—so deep that it was thought to have no bottom. None who had ever tried to reach it had ever returned to the surface. It was a hole in the world.
In the shallow waters of the lagoon from which it gaped, the villagers marched in solemn silence. It was the early evening, and far across the horizon the golden-orange sun sunk into the sea. Its dying light fell upon the water, where the shifting surface caught the gleam of its honeyed rays on transient crests. The white sand was amber now, and the coral, fish, crabs, starfish, urchins, the squid and colorful slugs and eels and anemones, could all still be spotted in the dimming light. The people took care to avoid the reef, not seeking to trample over an urchin or stonefish, and as the warm light of the day ceded to the night’s cool gloam, they lit their torches.
From sconces of crudely shaped metal leapt iridescent flames. Two sinewy old men held them high from the long and slender sills of driftwood they had been fashioned to. The light danced: red, then green, then blue, sometimes orange or yellow or violet. It cast long, shifting shadows over the water, over the procession, over the dead which they dragged quietly behind them upon reed rafts. No one said a word. The water did not splash as they waded through it; the flames did not crackle as they burned; the stars did not chime as they arrived at their perch. There was only a single sound in the entire world: the heavy, shaking, violent cries of a young girl who marched beside the raft where her parents lay shrouded in linen cloth. Trembling, she clutched her mother’s hand. The limp, skeletal fingers did not return her grasp.
Halif listened to her from the middle of the crowd. He did not turn around to look at her with a pained, pitiful expression, as others did. The sobs struck him nonetheless, crashing over him like waves upon the sand, displacing the grains, stirring something, but he could not say what. He did not pity her. Having lost his own parents, he felt that he understood her. But he had not cried when they never returned from Reunion. There was never any dead hand to hold onto, there was never anything to hold onto. He did not pity her; he was disgusted by her. It was an ugly, useless feeling.
The throng arrived at the mouth of the chasm, a black mirror of shimmering stars and prismatic flame. Slowly and in a practiced fashion, the people parted to provide room for the raft. The crying girl, Kaya, had fallen into a sniffling, abyssal quiet. She was ushered away from the corpses by two gentle women, and she did not protest. Halif watched the expression on her face. The light, full of color, flickered in her eyes. They were inhuman, like an animal’s or the chasm’s surface, a deep, dark fuller. The spark of feeling had been poured out.
When the way was clear, a woman stepped forward. A mélange of shells tied together by fishing string adorned her thick, black hair. She trudged to the middle of the divide, just before the raft, and began to beat a drum of sealskin. Small ripples formed atop the water about her, oscillating with the syncopated rhythm. A salty breeze blew across them all, and the torches sputtered.
The woman continued to beat the drum. Thud, thud-ud, thud. A muscular young man cut through the rippling water to the raft, taking it into his strong hands. He pushed it forward. Thud, thud-ud, thud. Every step was metered in perfect sync: a full step on a full beat, a short pause or half step elsewise. The raft glided to meet the hole in the world.
Thud, thud-ud, thud. They all moved again, unfurling to curl themselves along the edge. The muscular man lifted the bodies from the raft and placed them gently upon the surface of the water, where they floated like logs. He was handed a bag of heavy stones to which two ropes were tied to, each one ending in a loop. He secured these around the corpses with deft fingers, nodding along to the beat of the drum. When he was done, he held the bag with both hands, underneath the water.
They sang a song. It was a simple melody with simple words, but the meaning was as significant as the setting sun. It represented the inflection, the passage of light to dark, the end of the journey of life and the beginning of something new. It was a song of farewell.
The melody ended, but the drum continued. One by one, across the line, the villagers shouted their thanks to the deceased. This was a simple task for some, “I thank you for the gift of your life.” Indeed, this is what Halif shouted upon his turn. But for some, particularly those closest to the couple, this was very difficult. Halif’s grandmother, standing beside him, struggled greatly to stay her tears. “Palar, Zuri, you were kind to me when I lost my children and husband both.” Her voice was weak, quivering like the water beneath the drum, but still she shouted, “I thank you for the gift of your life.” Another woman thanked Zuri for helping nurse her child when she fell ill. A man thanked Palar for retrieving a necklace he had dropped into the sea. This continued for some time, and Halif felt rather stupid that he had not said more. Palar and Zuri had been kind to him too.
When at last it was Kaya’s turn to speak, any disgust he had felt toward her had evaporated into shame. Her cleft lip quivered, and tears rolled down her cheeks, ever-changing gemstones in the flames’ thousand hues. “You loved me,” was all she could manage. “I thank you for the gift of your life.”
She was the last. The muscular man rolled the stone into the depths, pulling Palar and Zuri along with it. They whirled around each other as they sank, delicately, like a jellyfish’s tendrils, interwoven in death as in life, a final embrace. The darkness swallowed them, and they were gone.
By the time he was fifteen, Halif was the strongest swimmer in the village. Speed, distance, depth, lung capacity—he was peerless even amongst the adults, who, upon seeing demonstrations of his skills, would warmly regale tales of his father’s exploits in the sea. “No one could swim like Adan,” they would say with a smile and tone of familiarity Halif found disconcerting. “No one except for his son.”
His grandmother had taught him to respond graciously, but he did not like to hear these stories. They were not compliments, as his neighbors surely thought they were, nor did they make him feel closer to his dead father. To draw such a comparison, to him, was to praise a man for his resemblance to his own shadow.
It was different in the water. In the atoll’s shallow shoals, he surged across the beds of coral, over the white sand, amidst shimmering rays of sunlight and schools of fish, unbound by the fetters of social pleasantries, his past, his parentage. Not even gravity could hold him. He was free.
Halif did what most of the men in his village did: spearfish along the reef or forage for sponges. It was important work, providing the village with food and wares to trade at Reunion, and he excelled at both. He could fill two baskets in a day where most could only fill one, but the truth was that he was a much better sponge diver than he was a spearfisherman, though he would never admit such to anyone. Diving was simple, active. He could surge to the seafloor within seconds, and then it was only a matter of finding a sponge and cutting it along its fibrous base with his knife. He was limited only by his body’s need for breath, and that belonged to him.
Spearfishing eluded him. There was nothing complex about the action of it: a spear thrust forward to pierce water and prey alike. But this apparent directness was false, and it was his speed, not his technique, which allowed his strike to find its mark. It was a clumsy victory. The point never landed where he wanted it to, frustrating him immensely.
He wanted to improve his technique, but he was far too prideful to ask any of the other men directly for counsel. And so he opted to learn by secretive observation, measuring the movements—or lack thereof—of the other successful spearfishermen. At first, he focused on the other young men, full of strength and vitality. But they too suffered from the same shortcomings of a misplaced point, only unlike Halif, they sometimes missed their mark entirely. After some fruitless time of this, Halif realized that he could not measure skill by a worker’s output alone. He began to watch the older men—strong for their age but clearly in their waning years, as clumsy and sluggish as their skin was cracked from countless days under the beating sun. One man named Eze, lithe with greying patches of hair, never once missed his mark.
Eze was a quiet man. He spoke little and smiled lots, and his eyes were lined in such a way to suggest this was a lifelong habit, just like Halif’s grandmother. That endeared the man to him.
Halif watched him intensely. Eze was not strong, in fact he was one of the weakest men in the village. His thrust was not quick, not violent, not direct. Spearfishing, to Eze, was contemplative. The old man would wade as gently as swaying seagrass amid the schools of silver fish, and he would wait, wait, wait. When at last he reached his spear into the cloud of scales, it appeared more a question than a declaration—the crimson cloud of freshly spilled blood was its answer.
Halif could not make sense of this. One day, just as the sun set over the sea, he came back to shore with Eze. Swallowing his pride, he asked the old man directly, “where did you learn to spearfish as you do?”
His laughter sounded like cool water rushing through the rocks at low tide. “From watching the women.” This only baffled Halif more, but he listened to the advice of his elder. The very next day, after filling a basket with fresh sponges, he set off back into the village to observe yet again.
Those particularly proficient in their work were left to their own devices except in times of extreme emergency, and so Halif knew very little about the work done outside of the water, nor how it had anything to do with spearfishing. He wondered what it was that Eze meant by “watching the women.” Labor in the village was not strictly divided by sex. Work was agreed upon firstly by consideration of the needs of the community—if a typhoon tore through the thatch or blew a hut straight from its foundation, men and women alike would work together to see the damages repaired. If food grew scarce, they would commit themselves to fishing, be that with spear, or net, or line, or with their bare hands. Necessity made no distinction of sex.
But peaceful times often did. Men typically stayed with men, performing the physically intensive labor; and women typically stayed with women, and the children, and the elderly, performing labor requiring deftness of the hand and gentleness of the spirit. Halif first spotted a group sitting in a circle under the shade of a palm tree. There were young women, old women, mothers, daughters, granddaughters, a husband and a handful of sons, and each of them turned as he approached them, full of smiles and surprised eyes. “Looks like we’re joined by a fish today!” said an old woman who erupted into a fit of airy laughter. “A marlin!” one girl said. “No! A flying fish, with the shimmering wings!” said another. A shark; a barracuda; a dolphin!
“An eel,” said a familiar voice, his grandmother. “A slimy, little, wriggly eel. What brings you out of the water?” She patted the sand beside her, where Halif went to sit.
“Curiosity,” he said. The group was thatching a blanket of dried palm leaves, uninterrupted by the exchange.
“Curiosity certainly befits an eel,” she said with a mischievous grin. “Why else would they poke out of the reef to look at you swim by?” She demonstrated by craning her head forward, slowly opening and closing her mouth and puffing her cheeks. Everyone except for Halif found this delightful, and they giggled while his cheeks burned and he turned away.
“Learn to laugh at yourself, little one,” his grandmother said as he sulked. “Life is more enjoyable when you realize how absurd it is.” Before he could complain, she took his hands into her own and showed him how she held the ends of the fronds. Together, they wove; around and through, around and through. There was a rhythm to it that Halif found soothing. Before he knew it, his grandmother had let go, and the motion was entirely his own. He lacked the dexterity of the others, but nevertheless he made progress on his own little piece and listened to them talk. It was surprisingly lively, some gossip—a young woman complaining about her new husband’s laziness, a stolen shell necklace, an older woman’s alleged collection of desiccated lizards— along with talk of the weather, what they wanted to trade for at Reunion, their children’s amusing habits. There was a controlled chaos to the that Halif found himself so enthralled by that he would forget what he was doing with his hands until his grandmother lightly nudged him back into reality. He worked and listened until the sun began to set, and the group agreed to cease for the day.
“So, how was your visit to the land?” asked his grandmother.
“I’m not very good at thatching,” he said sullenly. It was only to his grandmother that he would ever voice such doubts, but he had underestimated his company’s propensity for listening.
“None of us are,” a middle-aged man said to him. “But your parents especially. I’ve never seen two people more ill-fit for touching leaves.” He patted him on the shoulder with a forcefulness indicative of overfamiliarity. Halif flinched in response, and the group laughed warmly, but not without sparing him the ensuing embarrassment which quickly festered into rage.
“Don’t touch me,” Halif spat. He slapped the man’s hand away and the laughter stopped, which angered him more. He turned to the wide-eyed crowd. “And don’t act like you know anything about me just because I sat with you for a few hours. You don’t.”
He stormed off toward the beach, turning back only once to catch a glimpse of his grandmother looking at him with the same pained expression she always did. Her dark eyes betrayed no hint of anger, only a wincing sadness that forced him to look away. Unwilling to allow the shame to take hold, he quickened his pace into a trot, then a jog, then a sprint which kicked up clouds of sand behind him. He ran aimlessly beneath the cover of palm trees which swayed delicately in the evening breeze, alongside the lapping waves of white foam which stained the sand gold as they swept across it. He ran until he had to pause to catch his breath, his feet finally splashing in the shallow water of a long and narrow sandbar upon which amber-shelled crabs scuttled about unbothered.
Exhaustion did not mollify his anger: it redirected it. Why had Eze suggested to him something so stupid? And furthermore, why had he been so foolish as to think anything could be learned from listening to a group of women babble about nonsense? How did that have anything to do with stabbing at fish?
He regretted what he said back in the village. He thought of the expressions of his neighbors, their wide eyes and gaping mouths, and he knew he had made a fool of himself. He grimaced. The thought was almost unbearable, and the visceral shame which accompanied it conjured images of his violent death—a mangled body dashed against a jagged reef, a bloom of blood in the water. Is that what his parents had looked like before they sank into the sea? If only that man had not brought them up and touched me, he lamented. None of this would have happened.
Crying was what he hated most. He fought the tears, bitter as they were, and wiped the hint of them from the sides of his eyes. He looked toward the horizon, now violet. The sun was a ball of molten metal which spilled over the sea, brilliant, but it was not warm.
It was a strange thought, seeing only an endless stretch of water between himself and the sun, that there was land somewhere further—a great and vast and bountiful land with rivers of fire, piles of stones as tall as the chasm was deep, seafoam that was cold to the touch, endless seas of sand and trees. All of it was there, just out of sight, out of reach. Did it really exist at all?
He stretched out his hand, a shadow against the sun, and curled his splayed fingers around the orb of celestial fire. It vanished in his grasp, and for a transient moment, he felt an overwhelming sense of dread—that if he were to open his hand again, the sun would have been stolen from the sky, and he would never see it again.
If there was one thing Halif had ever truly learned in his short life, it’s that nothing was permanent. Anything and everything could be lost in an instant.
He could not say what it was that compelled him to let go, or why he laughed when he did so. When his hand fell limply to his side, he had already turned back toward the village. Whether or not the sun was still there did not concern him overmuch, for the ocean still roared, the early stars began to shine, the breeze still rushed through his salty hair. And so the world seemed right enough, right enough.
But even so, he felt very weary. He was used to his body being exhausted after a long day in the sea, but this was different. Thought and feeling had become unwelcome burdens, like heavy bags of stone weighing down his mind, dragging it into blue, abyssal darkness. It was the exhaustion of despair; he had poured his essence out and only numb nothingness remained, like Kaya had when…
“There you are!” a girl shouted from across the beach. She waved at him and shouted again, “Halif! That’s you, right?” She lumbered toward him with a labored gait, as fast as her crooked back would let her. He looked at her face. Her dark eyes had a clear expression, and with her cleft lip, her mouth curled into a perpetual snarl. But her voice was soft and light, and it said, “The others asked me to look for you, so here I am. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, refusing to look her in the eye.
“Okay.” She smiled and looked at him in her knowing way which cut straight through him without a hint of pity—the cool, gentle gaze that he hated her for. “Let’s go. Your grandmother is worried about you.”
“Is that what she told you?”
“She didn’t need to.”
Halif did not respond, and Kaya did not press him further. Without a word, she turned back toward the village and began to hobble. She was much slower than him, but Halif followed patiently behind. It was a long way back, and they both looked ahead for most of the journey, but Halif stole occasional glances at his companion. He watched her straight, black hair flutter in the passing wind; the way the nascent moonlight fell upon her dark skin; her serene expression. The other boys in the village called Kaya ugly; the adults did not, but they certainly thought so, and most times so did Halif. But the longer he held his gaze upon her, as he did now, the more beautiful she seemed—not brilliant and perfect like a pearl or iridescent shell, he thought, but something else, something more important, more elemental. But he could not put it into words, and the harder he tried to articulate the elusive idea in his mind, the more absurd it seemed to become. He shook his head and did not look at her again. The sea laughed beside them.
In the following days, nobody brought up Halif’s outburst—at least, not while he was around. He returned to the sea and continued in his work, diving in the reef, cutting sponges, watching the eels. He had learned nothing at all, in fact, his time in the village had marked a regression. Spearfishing was now an impossible task. He had somehow grown clumsy; the spear now felt awkward and unfamiliar; he had trouble tracking the fish darting about the sunlit shallows. There were thrusts where he missed completely, staggering forward. Once, he even fell, the point driving straight into the soft sand where it held firm as his stomach slammed into the butt and knocked the breath straight out of him. He felt a profound, primal fear that he had never known before as he crashed into the water. It was shallow, but deep enough to fully submerge him, and he could barely move. He tried to push himself up, and failing that, he tried to thrash, to do anything, but his body wouldn’t listen, and he panicked. The instinct to inhale was overwhelming, and the breath he could not resist brought with it a lungful of seawater. It was briny and painful, worse than being without it. With his aching muscles, he used all that remained of his vanishing strength to shove his head above water. He hacked up salt water and spittle between the desperate gasps, still on his hands and knees, then vomited before limping out of the sea to collapse onto the sand. The tide nipped at him there, as a chicken pecks at grain. He did not try to move; he knew he could not. And so he drifted off to sleep instead.
His dream was nonsensical: a series of flashing images, nothing concrete. He heard voices, but they were unfamiliar. The words were unintelligible, absurd, but bits and pieces Halif could make out. They were talking about him, but they never used his name. He was Adan and Eshe’s son—the boy who threw a tantrum while weaving a mat; the great swimmer who drowned in the shallowest shoal on the atoll.
There was a time, when he finally awoke from his exhausted dream, where he could not remember his own name. It was as if the bodiless voices had taken it from him and hid it out of reach, like the land across the sea. What had his mother called it? Kalafir?
Halif. “Halif,” a man said. The half-drowned boy opened his salt-crusted eyes. It was Eze. His expression was hard, worried, but his voice held no hint of judgment. “Did you fall?”
Halif tried to lie, but in place of words came an uncontrollable wheezing, watery phlegm that spilled upon his legs. The old man silently helped him sit up. His calloused hands stabilized his shaking shoulders. The episode was violent but short. His head pounded, his muscles ached, but Halif smiled wearily and asked, “How could you tell?”
“You aren’t exactly the type of kid to laze about all day,” Eze said. “Well, and you smell like vomit.”
They said nothing else until Halif’s strength returned enough to stand. It was difficult, and Eze held him as he did so. “I listened to what you said,” Halif muttered as they stood together. “I went to the village and tried to thatch.”
“So I heard.”
He was too tired to feel humiliated, but the remark still cut. Eze looked at him coolly, then continued, “It is of no importance. So tell me instead: did you learn anything?”
“I don’t think so,” Halif said, wincing. “I don’t know if I’m ready to.”
“That is a valuable lesson itself. Have patience, child. With yourself and with others.”
The boy nodded, feeling very much like a boy: agreeing but knowing nothing. “Thank you,” he said.
Eze smiled. “I give this to you freely. Now, shall I collect your spear for you?”
Halif turned back toward the shallows, where his weapon still reached out from the water, its point buried deep in the sand below. His cheeks were hot, but when he spoke it was unclouded by pride. “I think I shall stop spearfishing for some time. But it wouldn’t do to just leave it there, would it?”
“No,” said Eze. “I don’t think it would.” He stepped into the shallows and wrenched it from the earth with effort Halif ascribed to his age. “I shall hold onto it in the meantime, but it remains yours. Speak to me whenever you feel you are ready, and I shall return it to you.”
Halif nodded. With that, Eze set off down the beach, spear in hand. The old man was short of stature, his arms, legs, and back thin from the slow atrophy of time, but watching the way he walked and perhaps grateful for his kindness, Halif realized that he was wrong to think Eze weak. What he recognized as frailty was really an encompassing looseness, as if he lived his life dancing to the rhythm of the melody of time—one which Halif heard glimpses of in his movement, the sound of his voice, the substance of his words. It was a simple, swaying, gentle song.
It sounded like home.
True to his word, Halif stopped spearfishing. It was a strange disruption to a schedule he had otherwise held fast to for three years, and though it afforded him more time to forage for sponges, he was unsure what to do with the rest. It seemed a simple enough matter when he was talking to Eze, but such is the danger of conversing with wise men—they possess the knowledge to prod the misguided into a righted state of mind, to convince them that they alone came to the proper conclusion. Men such as him share their wisdom in such a way that the recipient mistakes it as their own, and Halif was anything but wise. He was a boy who knew nothing save swimming and thrusting with a pointed stick, and now he failed at that.
His proficiency in his work had provided him with purpose and identity. But that was waning. He remained as strong a swimmer as ever, but the work that had once energized him he now found exhausting and miserable. Every night he staggered home to immediately collapse into his bed, speaking to no one, eating very little, and beginning the cycle anew. It seemed that no matter how much he slept, he remained tired and sluggish; and as the days went on, he found himself coming home earlier and earlier, sometimes before the sun had even gone down, and sleeping long past the break of dawn. His dreams were hazy and sometimes distressing, filled with shapeless words and horrors he could not recall afterwards, though his eyes were wet with tears.
He knew something had to change, but he did not know what. For the first time in his life, Halif felt aimless. But he was afraid to ask for help. He felt a responsibility to not return to Eze except to fulfill his promise, and he was afraid of disappointing his grandmother any more than he already had. He saw the way she looked at him when he wordlessly returned home: the desolate wince which marred a face whose contours echoed a lifetime of laughter. A lifetime Halif could not remember and felt singularly responsible for ending.
Nevertheless, she was gentle with him. On nights when Halif was particularly restless, drifting in and out of sleep as the tide reaches and recedes from the land, he heard his grandmother speaking to him. They were simple words, quietly said. “You are my light, my child. Your pain is my own. Rest peacefully.” But by the time he finally awoke, listlessly grateful, she was gone.
In the rare instances where he was not working or sleeping, Halif took to wandering. Alone, he walked around the narrow ring of the atoll, sometimes beside the sea, sometimes beside the lagoon. He did nothing but walk, watch, and listen. He saw the tiny, green anoles scurry across the sand, clambering up the fuzzy bark of the palm trees or rushing to hide under the cover of flowering bushes dotted with long-petaled, colorful blossoms whose names he did not know. He listened to the rush of wind, the single-voiced roar of the sea. Sometimes, he would wade into the water to better watch the world beneath the surface which now seemed so much more brilliant and alive than he had ever seen it before. All of it seemed to entwine together in some great whole, a cosmic pattern which Halif saw glimmers of in brilliant flashes like sunlight on trembling water. As he took a step, a tiny fish darted away from him, its school followed with it. A cuttlefish might follow closely behind it, seeking a meal, and brush up against an anemone which would close in response like a balled fist. A nearby urchin scuttled away. A turtle glided overhead. So continued the cascade across the world, himself only a tiny part, a single droplet amidst the ocean spray. He knew nothing of anything, and yet he felt grateful for it.
One day when returning from a trip to the mouth of the chasm, he spotted Kaya laughing in the shallows alongside two little girls. He watched them from afar as they splashed at one another in the sloping, sun-dappled crests. “Wait, wait,” Kaya said amid a spray of water which shimmered like diamonds in the afternoon sun. “Be still, or you’ll scare them! Don’t you want to see?” The girls, excited as they were, nodded and submerged all but their tiny heads of black hair beneath the waves. “It’s good and well to have fun, of course, but there are things in life which require patience. Do you know what that is?”
They answered with another pair of nods that looked like seaweed floating on the water’s surface. One of them added, “It’s when you wait for things.”
“That’s part of it,” Kaya said in her soft voice. “It is waiting—but it is not aimless waiting. A fisherman must wait for a fish to bite, yes, but then they must reel it in. Patience is knowing the difference between when one must wait, and when one must act. Without that, we’re no different than fish trying to swim on land! Such wasted effort!” She wiggled her body like a fish floundering on the deck of a boat, and the girls erupted into shrill and joyous laughter.
Then, she smiled in her gentle half-grimace. Slowly, she trudged deeper into the shallows, watching something beneath the surface which Halif could not see. She crouched down as far as her back would allow her, eyes still fixed on her mark with the same determination of a spearfisherman poised to strike, but also with a coolness or curiosity to them that reminded Halif of Eze. There, she waited, and waited, and waited, and just as it seemed she had lost sight of her prey, she lurched forward, almost stumbling, and burst from the shining sea with a thin, yellow-blue eel wriggling about in her hands.
The children shrieked, grasping at the eel with their small hands. Kaya let them touch as long as they promised they would be gentle, and so they reached for it as if it were made of fire, cautiously stroking its ribbon-like body and letting out an “ewww!” when trails of slime stuck to their fingers as they withdrew them. “Now say thank you to the eel for letting us bother them,” Kaya said.
“Thank you, mister eel!”
She slowly lowered the dazed animal back into the water, leaving her hands submerged for some time. When at last she drew them out into the warm air, the creature had gone. And though she did not know it, Halif had too.
“Grandmother,” said Halif, half-asleep. The light of the morning sun, red like a lionfish, poured into their hut through the gaps in the thatched roof, warmth against long shadows. The old woman gazed at the son of her son, and he at her. He had staved off exhaustion all night, waiting for his time to act, but he had dozed off at the last moment, only stirring just as she had begun to walk out the door. And so he would ask his question, but not before stumbling over his words, stammering, “I… you know… I wanted to…”
His grandmother smiled in a manner which suited her. Without a word, she stepped back into the hut and sat with Halif, taking his hands into her own. He could not meet her eyes.
“What am I to do?” was all he could ask. Another word would mean losing the tenuous hold over his composure.
“Sleep,” his grandmother said. “And when you wake, look for me. We shall start there.”
He did as he was told. When she stepped back out of the hut into the cool air of the morning, he curled back into the embrace of his father’s linen blanket and drifted into peaceful slumber.
He dreamed he had been wrapped in that same blanket. A leather bag of heavy stones was tied firmly around his waist. The last few weeks he had been sinking without realizing, cast off into abyss of the chasm, half-dead. But now the rope was cut, and he saw the gentle light which played upon the surface far above him.
He woke with his hand outstretched, grasping at golden shafts of sunlight. He withdrew it to his heart as he sat up, his mind blank, at ease. His first thought was of Kaya hunched over in the water, holding onto the wriggling eel; the sound of a child’s bright laughter. He cupped both his hands together and saw the callouses beneath his fingers, the countless wrinkles and grooves etched upon his skin: a story written, unfinished. A veil of dust danced in the rays that fell gently into his palms.
With a single, long, warm exhalation, the whirl dissolved into the light, and Halif stood to find his grandmother.
She was at the cistern. Kaya was with her, and together they stood around the mouth of clay-fired bricks and stared down with puzzled expressions at the water stored below. Halif quickened his pace, quickly coming into earshot of their conversation.
“It’s low,” said his grandmother. “Lower than it should be. Would you agree?”
Kaya strained her neck like an eel poking from a reef, squinting with her clear, brown eyes. “Yes, I would.”
“It hasn’t rained for some time, so I suppose it’s understandable. But I am worried it’s leaking somewhere.” She tapped at her sagging cheek with her fist. “Hmm. Hmm. Saltwater contamination would not be good…”
“I think… I think I can check,” Kaya said, blushing a little.
Halif laughed when he heard that, making his presence known. “Are we to lower you down with the bucket, then?” Kaya jumped at the sound of his voice, her entire face burning red.
“A few more comments like that and I’ll throw you down there with the bucket over your head,” his grandmother grumbled. “But it is nice to see the sleepyhead finally join us. Right, Kaya?”
She took a deep breath and smiled as she faced him, saying, “It’s good to see you well, Halif.”
Her voice was radiant and stunned him into speechlessness, and so it was fortunate that his grandmother continued. “So what were you saying about finding the leak?”
“Oh! Yes. I meant I can find it from up here.”
“By sight?” Halif asked.
“No. Well, sort of. What I mean is, I can feel what’s around me without having to see it. It’s like knowing where your fingers are even when you can’t see them. Does that make sense?”
Not at all, Halif thought, but he knew better than to say it out loud. He looked to his grandmother, who continued to tap her cheek with a furrowed brow. “How long have you been able to do this?”
“A few months, maybe?”
The old woman cackled. “Well, why didn’t you say anything earlier? Zuri, your mother, had a similar talent. Your father used to call her the Finder.”
“Really?” she asked, beaming. Halif’s grandmother nodded.
Halif was less enthused. He could not understand why such a comment would make Kaya happy. She possessed skill herself: why should she have that compared to others? Let alone those who are no longer around. It was nothing more than a shackle to a painful past. Kaya was not pretty, but she was, for her age, very wise. So how was it that she could smile with such joy?
“Will you show us?” Halif asked, letting the ugly thought wash over him.
“I will try.”
She hobbled to the edge of the cistern and placed both her hands upon the uneven, orange brick. She closed her eyes and began to breathe very slowly, her shoulders slowly rising and falling to the rhythm of the world. Having come to know it better, Halif could follow along. It was like the beat of a sealskin drum or the pounding of a living heart; the whistle of a reed flute or the shriek of the wind; the crash of a cymbal or the breaking of a wave upon the shore. And Kaya moved with it, not against it, she waited, letting the melody flow into her hands, and then she acted.
An arc of embers, iridescent like the inside of a shell, surged from where her hands met the wall, meeting in a singular line which shot down into the dark of the cistern. A prismatic ring formed along the edges of the basin as the light swept around its circumference, probing. And then, as quickly as it had come into being, it stopped. All was dark again. The music faded away.
Kaya pointed directly to where the light had last appeared. “There.”
Halif had done nothing—it was Kaya’s feat—and yet he felt overcome with pride. But it was not pride for himself, as he was disastrously accustomed to; it was pride for her. He felt compelled to crystallize it into words, to make his feeling something real, something solid. But nothing in that cloud of emotion precipitated. Is this how the others felt when they saw him swim—why they were compelled to compare him to what they already knew?
His grandmother laughed again, this time deeply, irregularly, like a parrot. “Well, Halif,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It looks you’ll be going down there after all.”
The rope was secured to a nearby slab of stone, the bucket tied off at its end. Humans were seldom lowered or retrieved from the cistern, but it was a simple enough matter to confirm if it could hold Halif’s weight. Taking the end into both hands, he leaned backwards, allowing the tension to catch his fall. It held true.
The bucket was tossed into the hole no differently than it would be to draw water.
Carefully, Halif lifted himself over the wall of bricks. Slack was not a luxury he was afforded, and he was cautious not to crush his fingers against the walls as he swung around the side. With a firm grip, he descended into the dark.
The inside of the cistern was more spacious than it appeared from the surface—about the size of one of the village’s huts in each direction. After no more than a meter, the wall he rappelled along vanished, and he lowered himself into the cold, fresh water below. It was shallower than he expected, only reaching his knees, and he waded toward where he thought Kaya had pointed to and looked along the wall. It was difficult to see anything, and he resorted to groping along the uneven surface of the rock in search of the breach. The surface of the limestone was granular, rough like sharkskin, and it dimly glittered in the light pouring in from above. He brushed his hands over the whole area, but they found nothing save cool friction.
“Are you sure it’s down here?” he asked with an echoing voice.
“Yes.” Kaya shouted directly into the cistern, far louder than she needed to. “Below the water, Halif.”
He crouched down and felt the wall once more. Sure enough, his hands came upon a tiny point of suction. He placed his finger over it, forming a seal, then said, “I found our leak. What do we do with it?”
“Wait.” He heard his grandmother say. “I have to get the oakum.”
“What?”
“The thing to seal it with!” Kaya shouted so loudly that Halif winced. He decided if he saw her head poke over the wall again, he would dunk his own into the water.
His grandmother was gone for what felt like a long time, though perhaps that was because he spent it crouching in water while holding his finger no higher than his shins. His back had only just started to ache by the time she announced her return. “I’m pulling the bucket up!”
“Okay.”
And up it went, jerked skyward at the uneven pace of two pairs of hands pulling together. Its descent proved much smoother, splashing as lightly as a seabird perched on a wave. Halif reached for it and pulled it toward him. Within its wooden walls rested a small bundle of shiny fiber.
“This cost two baskets of sponges at Reunion, so don’t waste it.”
He had seen some of the shipwrights work with the material when caulking the fishing boats, mostly for sealing the joints of the timbers, but he had never touched it himself. It was sticky to the touch, and it took a great deal of effort to tear a small clump off, which he lengthened by rolling it back and forth between his palms. He lacked the tools the shipwrights used, and instead opted for the next best strategy available to him: haphazardly jamming it into the hole and hoping for the best. And so he submerged the oakum under the water and pushed it deep into the tiny hole in the limestone. The tar-like substance lent itself to such an approach, further molding its shape to fit its new container. When it had gone all the way in, he checked the wall again with his hand to feel for suction and found none. It was a success.
“It’s done,” he said. And before he could sit up, another spark shot down into the dark, straight into the hole he had just sealed.
“Just checking,” Kaya said from above.
“And?”
“You can come out now.”
Halif stood and pulled himself up by the rope. The brightness of the sun strained his dark-adjusted eyes.
“Good job,” his grandmother said, patting his back. “But we may have a bigger problem on our hands… we have to figure out how to make our water not taste like Halif.”
Even he chuckled at that. “And what would that taste like?”
Their reply came without hesitation, spoken in unison.
“Eel!”
Time flowed forward as the shark swims: ceaselessly. The warm sun yielded its rule over the heavens to the cold moon, and the days shortened. Rain was more frequent, though this was a blessing. The cistern Halif, his grandmother, and Kaya had repaired held the plentiful fresh water dutifully. The sight of it still made him smile.
In the fall, Halif stopped swimming altogether. The village agreed that, with the solstice so near, the current stores of sponges would be plentiful enough to trade at Reunion, and that it would be wiser to allow the population time to regrow before the coming of the new year. And so it was that Halif went from filling just two baskets a day to filling none at all.
But this time he did not aimlessly fill the time. He woke with his grandmother, ate breakfast with her or the neighbors, and went off to work doing whatever it was the village needed. Or so he told himself, for it was really whatever Kaya happened to be doing. With her bad spine, it was often in stark contrast to the physically intensive labor Halif had grown used to. But he didn’t mind, because he had come to enjoy Kaya’s company more than the labor itself; and through it, he came to enjoy that too. Eze had taught him where to look for the music; Kaya had shown him where to find it.
They thatched together, wove nets together, fished together, gathered shells together, cooked together—Halif found this the most difficult, always overdoing it, and Kaya would remind him in her gentle voice that the objective of cooking was to produce something edible. Even when work was not needed, they were together. Kaya showed him some of the things which her parents had traded at Reunion: a metal stick with glass holes on each end which, depending on the side one looked down, increased or decreased the size of objects on the other side; a vial of yellow oil within which a chunk of metal was submerged that was said to explode on contact with water; and his favorite, a collection of objects shaped like the end of an oar and wrapped in leather, between which contained fragile, thin slices of a smooth material covered in black-lined drawings. Most of these were words in a language other than the one he and Kaya spoke, but there were also pictures, hand-drawn, of unfamiliar plants and creatures that sent Halif’s imagination spinning. Another drawing was of a grouping of strange shapes over which text had been written. When Halif asked what it depicted, Kaya smiled and said, “If those were drawings of living things, then this is a drawing of the land. The blank space is the sea.”
Halif’s eyes widened, and he leaned closer to her to get a better look. There were two large shapes: the larger, placed in the center, appeared like a crescent drawn with a shaky hand, with strange deviations in depth and angle all across its border; the smaller was placed above it and to the right, shaped like a sandbar, but still in possession of rough edges.
He pointed to the sandbar shape. “Is this the atoll?”
Kaya laughed at the question. “No. That’s Kalafir.”
“The place across the sea?!” he asked incredulously.
“Yes. Reunion is held here, beneath the mountains,” she said, and pointed at the bottom edge of the shape.
“Then what is this?” He pointed to the crescent.
“That’s the Continent. It’s the land across the sea from Kalafir.”
“Do… do people live there? But it’s so big! A land the size of the sea? Do you know what it’s like?”
“We don’t know much about it, I’m afraid. But I remember my mother saying something about a place called Veris—that there are very tall rocks there, and that they’re white and glittery like the walls of the chasm.”
“Maybe they’re made from the same type of rock.”
Kaya smiled. “Maybe.”
It began to occur to Halif how small the atoll must really be, and so he asked her to point it out to him.
“Here.” To the right of the sandbar, a single hollow speck, almost imperceptible, represented their world. At the shore ended the universe, what lied beyond it, to him, was only rumor and memories of loss. It was startling, disorienting, humiliating to realize how much larger the world was than he had ever imagined. He was a single grain of sand who had thought himself the beach entire. But no longer.
How amazing the world must be, that his mother and father would be willing to die to see it. Or maybe they had never died at all—their bodies were never recovered to be left to the chasm. Maybe what lied behind the horizon was so incredible, so enchantingly beautiful, that it was worth abandoning their child over. That was an unbearable thought.
“When you go through your parents’ things,” Halif started. “Does it not make you sad?”
Kaya looked at the world she held in her hands with a wistful, serene expression. “Yes,” she said. “It makes me very sad. Sadder than anything. When people call me ugly, it hurts me, but nothing quite hurts like this.”
Halif said nothing. She did not meet his eyes as she spoke.
“But at the same time, it makes me happy. They died when I was very young, so I don’t have many memories of them. But by going through their things, I can see for myself the kind of people they were. I feel closer to them even if they’re no longer here. Do you not feel the same?”
“My grandmother keeps some of my parents’ things, but she never looks at them. Truthfully, I don’t want to either.”
“Because it’s painful?”
“Yes. I suppose that’s it. It’s painful. I don’t like it when people compare me to my mother and father because it’s painful. Because…” his voice trailed off when he realized he was crying, and he was afraid. He needed to withdraw, to run, but when he saw how Kaya now looked at him, without pity, cool and gentle, it stayed him long enough to be caught in the inertia of feeling. He struggled against his tears, which made him feel pathetic, then bitter. “Because they remember them, and I don’t. I don’t remember a single thing. Not their faces, not their voices. Nothing! And yet everyone, everyone, seems to remember everything about them. They tell me I’m just like Adan or just like Eshe as if I’m supposed to know what that means. My own parents are a secret I have been left out of knowing. Can they not see how cruel it is? They never let me be Halif—just Halif. When they speak to me, they speak not to the boy in front of them, but the shadow which stretches behind him. It’s like they hate me!”
She listened to him, adding and denying nothing, only accepting his despair. The silence which hung in the evening air was more eloquent than any spoken word, a medium for reflection. The feelings which had spilled out of him were raw and real, but they were also like a cloud of disturbed sand beneath clear water, smothering, swirling, shrouding. To see the truth which lied within, all one could do was wait until it settled.
And so they waited. The bitterness which had overcome Halif dissolved into a dull, abyssal sadness, without tears. He felt shame for his outburst and even glanced at the door in preparation to leave. But Kaya saw him. She saw him for the desperate, lonely child he really was, and still she reached for his hand, saying, “I don’t hate you, Halif. Nobody does.” He accepted her touch with a weary smile.
“I think…” she started again, speaking slowly. “The others say those things because they love you. When they compare you to Adan and Eshe, it’s because they loved them too.”
“How could anyone love someone like me?” It was not just a lament in self-pity, but also a genuine question he could not answer.
“There’s plenty to love about you, Halif. Why would you think otherwise?”
The cloud had vanished, and its answer, he knew, was that he did not love himself. He needed Kaya’s help, just as he needed his grandmother’s and Eze’s, but he never knew how to ask for it. It always came spilling out of him, ugly and confused, like pus bursting from a festering, neglected, necrotic wound, repulsive. Their kindness helped draw him out from the corner he had hidden in, but in matters concerning himself, that proved all the more reason to hide. They were too precious to him. He could not let them see him for what he really was, or surely, they would hate him too. It was easier to run and never know. And so he looked Kaya in the eye and lied to her. “I don’t know.”
They said nothing more to each other that night, for there was nothing else to say. Beneath a starry sky, Halif sulked back toward the shoal he had almost drowned in, sitting just out of reach of the surf. He pulled his knees to his chest and rested his head upon them. Moonlight fell silver upon the black, roiling expanse which separated him from the rest of the world.
He had been making progress in the village, with his grandmother, with Kaya. Indeed, in the last few months, he had been joyous, he had heard the music. And yet his heart remained closed. He was not dancing, but running.
A wave crashed into the reef, and a column of shadowed spray reached toward the moon like a spear reaching toward a fish. His promise to Eze seemed more a half-remembered dream by now, though he could still picture the silhouette of the old man walking along the beach, carrying his spear. The image made Halif chuckle with a vestige of gratitude.
Halif had never liked sitting still. With nothing for his body to do, his mind had room to wander, and it was unlikely to stumble upon someplace happy. Physicality had been his way of maintaining the balance, and he struggled when that failed him. Companionship had been his new way of fulfilling his need, but alone it was not enough. Such was the value of a promise, unerring, unyielding, an assertion of the past which persists to the present and guides the future. It was something to hold on to, to measure himself against when nothing else availed him. And for that he was grateful.
He would return for his spear one day. It would not be today, nor tomorrow, but he was closer to it than he was yesterday, and perhaps that was enough.
August 31, 2023
Leave a Reply