Page 79 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
The boat grows smaller. The waves grow bigger. Down you sink, hollering in the green. By the time you breach the air for a third time, her little vessel has caught a current and is picking up speed. There is a heaviness in your body; you won’t stay afloat for long.
One last try. “Mami!”
Sung Daiyu doesn’t look back. The last sight you have of her is the curve of those rigid shoulders, forever bowing away, head fixed in another direction.
If she’d loved you more, perhaps she might not have abandoned you.
But her fear was stronger.
You sink for a final time.
That moment. When sound plunges into a muted dullness, when the raw noise of the atmosphere above is softened by the sea.
Reach both hands out, grasping at nothing. A foolish instinct. Mami can’t save you now, even if she wanted to. Terror and trauma have driven her into madness, and away from you. The way despair drove Baba from you, months ago.
Someone else, though, reaches back.
The ghost you call Sea Sister rises from those shadowed ocean depths to catch your wrists in hers. Just like she did the first time you met.
There is no joy or surprise in her face today, only a stark and filthy darkness. She is not here to show kindness. Not anymore. You have joined the ranks of those who abandoned her, and she will not forgive that.
For what it’s worth, I truly believe Sea Sister did love you, in her twisted and warped way. In another life, perhaps she might have even loved you enough to let you live. But in the end, Sea Sister has been too hurt by existence. She cannot bear to slink back to the ocean and watch you depart. She knows that if she saves your life, you will go forever, and she will be alone.
The heart can live with loneliness if it has never known anything better. What it cannot live with is finding companionship, and then losing it again.
I told you, Sea Sister says, but she only sounds sad, not accusing.I told you she would leave. Everyone always abandons us. Everyone always will.
You can’t argue with that. First your father, now your mother. The world at large recedes from you like a tide, impossible to hold. Your fingers are made of water, and life slips through it.
Stay with me, forever, she murmurs, and brushes a kiss across your cheek. Shark teeth leaving a scrape across your skin.You can be just like me, free and strong and swimming endlessly. Isn’t that what you wanted, ghost girl?
It isn’t, not anymore, but it’s too late. One of her claw-like nails stabs into your ribs. The lung deflates, crushing what little air was left out of you. You open your mouth to scream underwater and your throat seizes up, closing reflexively.
She gathers you close amidst the churning currents.Never doubt that I will always love you, she whispers, and she dives.
This time, there is no going up. No return to the surface. There’s a certain strange peace in that knowledge.
At least you won’t be alone, you tell yourself. Even if the only person who stays with you is your murderer, it is still better than dying by yourself.
You do not resist as she bears you down, nor do you cry (no tears beneath the ocean, after all). Instead, you think of Baba, crouched over the kitchen table as he whispers,All things are transient, because now you understand him, so perfectly well.
Darkness encroaches, still and quiet; the storm cannot touch these depths. Pressure compresses your lungs and bursts in your ears and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. Your silence matches Sea Sister’s in this salt-tinged world she inhabits.
Then death arrives like a sudden breeze, and blows your spirit clean away.
25AFTER LIFE
Thirty-three years ago…
Time changes when you die, though not in the way you expect.
It doesn’t slow, so much as expand. You find, in death, that there is more space between each second as transience stretches itself thin. It takes an eternity to finally drown.
Followed by a darkness that lasts forever, and only an instant.
The next thing you recall is opening your eyes in the depths of the ocean, crying out reflexively.
A rush of water floods your throat, but otherwise silence. No speaking, no noises. You feel a great and terrible need for air yet you cannot breathe, the way a rabid dog thirsts for water yet cannot drink. In that moment, you would have torn apart babies for a chestful of oxygen.
