THE VILLAGE.There was a time before the plantation cleared a road to the village when we were known as the ancestral keepers of the fern grotto. It was a charge borne upon our ancestors by the king, his private spiritual retreat, he proclaimed in a moment of dominion as he clapped the shoulder of the one nearest to him, and thus was born our village.Though the king and the promise of his return were long dead, his decree was ferried from generation to generation until the arrival of the mercantilists with their high white collars and long black coats waving papers of deed and oleaginous promises of stewardship. So we said nothing when they built their sugar mill at water’s edge at the mouth of the cove, stayed silent when they stripped half the grotto’s lee side to build the flumes and winches to bring materials up and down to the mill, and watched the seas while we bided our time.
THE BOY.The night before the boy was born, the mother couldn’t sleep. Whether, she said, it was the discomfort of her firstpregnancy or from her failure to garner for the boy akarmic destiny, she didn’t know.Habit more than thought moved her body to shore’s edge once again this night. There she saw the cobalt-colored sea writhing like a live thing, a serpent splitting itself upon the sand, and when she got close enough,she saw that the waves were not the iridescent reflection of the gibbous moon and her mantle of nightly attendants but swell upon swell of butterfly wings winking like wet sapphires in the water, yielding for a moment on the black sand before returning to the roiling surf. She touched nothing but ingested the vision before her with a concentration fierce enough to pierce the awareness of her unborn son and returned to her hut to give birth.
WINGS AND WAVES.There are those who are eager to jump in at this point to offer the naturalist explanation, namely, that a wreck of cliff-dwelling kittiwakes must have descended upon a kaleidoscope of migrating butterflies and with ruthless efficiency, denuded their prey of their gaudy and undigestible finery for the fat-storing soft bodies within. We wait for them to finish explaining before nodding and secretly side-eyeing each other for the pity we feel for their circumscribed lives.
THE GROTTO.How long the sugar mill remained, whether it was a couple of years as some say or only a couple of months as say others, all agree that the ocean will reclaim what is hers. So when the tsunami punished our island, drawing itself up into the depths of the grotto before retreating with every vestige of structure man-made, everything scrubbed clean down to the concrete piers, we were not surprised. We returned to the grotto, cleaning and replanting, plunging it back into its fecund darkness so the ferns would grace us with their return.
THE CARPENTER.It was at this time the carpenter came to us. He had been abandoned by the company, cast-off, much like their dream of wealth by sugar cane on the shores of our village. So, like the shipwrecked sailors throughout the ages who had found our village by happenstance and luck, the carpenter settled himself on the edge of our village and became the latest curiosity for the boy and the other village children, another gift from the bountiful largess of the sea.
BLESSINGS.Looking back, it is tempting to see these as the salad days, the time just before the events that would mark us forever, like stigmata of our village existence. The village children were growing strong and brown under the tutelage of a watchful ocean and an unyielding sun. The time when the carpenter took it upon himself to build a fence around the area we had been using as a makeshift cemetery, so that now and into the future, our beloved dead could lie free from the scourge of stray dogs. And we, so impressed by this improvement, sent word to have the ground officially consecrated, only to wait several years before an irritated cleric, who must have been diverted from a more important sacred duty elsewhere, arrived in a rattling hackney pulled by the whitest horses we had ever seen, spat out a few perfunctory words in a language we did not understand,and did not even stay for the celebration we had preparedbut left immediately afterward without a word, which fostered a lingering resentment that still poisons that realm and would explain the hodgepodge of memorials strewn across that space without line or reason as if left to the dead to organize themselves.
THE FIRST TIME.When it happened, we were sure it must have been a mistake. It was easy to see why. The boy was not yet a teenager, although the local authorities had declared he was dead, and two days later even the good doctor had come to the village bearing an official certificate with a penned signature in a Continental blue-black ink that was said to contain a kind of iron integrity that would make it permanent for all time. The children pretended to play across from the carpenter’s shop while he silently pieced together the small cabinet that looked less like a casket than a coracle rabbeted with a tightness that made us believe it could have been seaworthy. It displayed the parsimonious dovetailing, which eliminated the need for nails but of a type that you won’t find today even among the most skilled artisans except in the dreams of certain old men with calloused pads on the tips of their fingers and along the fringes of their sunken palms like the underside of a bear paw. The next day we all followed the family through the heat of the dusty flats to the cemetery and stayed to watch our friend be lowered into the dry hole and then withdrew back to our homes that evening to suffer the ministrations of our grandmothers who had resurrected rituals they had learned from their grandmothers when they were children to ward off the evil eye. None of the parents believed them when the children complained late that night of being unable to sleep because of the incessant moaning that apparently only they could hear, like the lamentation of an ancient tree slowly keeling over in repose.
LAZAR.Blinded by frustration and bound together by the injustice of their insensate elders, the children spurned the warmth of their beds and stumbled out into the darkness like dazed homunculi to the source of that sound, pulled like a beacon to the graveside where they had stood earlier that day. The creaking was unbearable here, so they dug with their hands in the fine-grain dirt to expose the coffin of their friend, which bulged and groaned like the leathery egg of some mythical creature about to burst forth.Suddenly branches, torn from nearby trees by the more quick-thinking among them,were passed around and they started to beat that coffin in a wild cadence,less to silence the fulsome creaking than as another improvisation toaccompany this festive event.At some point, their drumming must have cracked the lid, for it broke into several pieces and fell into the coffin. For a moment there was complete silence, a stillnesslike the eye of a hurricane, save for the labored exhalations like a thirstyanimal emanating from the darkness within the coffin.In a slant of moonlight that cleared some cloud cover just at that moment, like a heavenly beam from the eye of God himself,they saw a pair of hands grip the gunwales of the casket, and the boy who had been declared officially dead, certified, and borne to his grave, pushed himself up until he stood looking up at them unblinkingly, his face awash in light.
Drownings are always tricky things, is all the authorities would say.
Children, the doctor was reported to have said with a shrug. Such miraculous healers.
THE CELEBRATION.We all accepted it for what it was: a cosmic mistake,a wrinkle in the timeline of fate, and among the more religious among us, a divine correction and rebuke of the greedy reach of the evil one.The boy’s mother celebrated by pinning the death certificate to the wall of their hut where it could be mocked and insulted by all who entered for their homecoming feast to honor the boy who had escaped from that most unjustified of deaths—drowning—and somehow slipped fate to return to them. The boy, however, seemed mostly unmoved by the festivities as he sat at his place of honor and turned a placid face toward all of us, silently scanning us like a scientist observing thesacred rituals of a heretofore unknown tribe.But what did we expect? Who knew what he must have experienced in the anteroom of the hereafter? Would any of us have acted any different if we had been wrested from the grip of death?
THE GIRL.Then it happened again. This time there were no special sounds, no churning in the minds or bodies of the children; in fact, the most remarkable thing about it was how pedestrian it was, how it lacked any sort of imprimatur, spiritual or otherwise. She just appeared suddenly along the main path of the village, as lost and confused about it as we were. She was grown certainly, but still in the first blush of womanhood, wearing what looked to us like the homemade shift of another era. And yet, when we tried to talk to her, tried to wheedle out a name at least, she looked at us with the mild alarm of one who was hearing only gibberish. It was only the oldest women in the village, those who still retained the vestiges of the indigenous mother tongue spoken in their youth before the advent of Christian education,it was only they who were able to reach the young woman and learn that she indeed did belong to us,but from that earlier time when things in the area were not yet named, and in legend her name had been given to the pali that overlooked our nearby beach, the suicide of a girl who threw herself off the promontory after her inevitable jilting by the sailor who had taken her heart, her body, and in the end, her very reason for living. Apocrypha made manifest in unshod feet.
MORE.They took her in, just as we took in the others who started returning,some like the girl, rambling into the village until they were recognized, and others, like the boy, who needed assistance toescape the confines of what was supposed to be their domicile of eternal rest.At first, the Japanese and those who cremated out of tradition or financial necessity feared they had made an irreversible error, inadvertently choosing an immovable roadblock on the road to restoration, but we found that even the incorporeal ashes of the cremated were enough to generate the return of a loved one or family member.
QUESTIONS WE POSED, ANSWERS WE EARNED.It soon became apparent to all of us that there was no explanation for who came back and who didn’t. Victims of crime or violence, those who, it could be said, to have suffered unjust deaths, did not automatically return. Those who gave their lives for service or principle, what we had been taught were honorable deaths, rarely returned. Suicides, those who might be said to be undeserving of life, were given another chance. Those who perished through accident with surprise in their eyes did sometimes return but arrived with a joyless demeanor. To this day, those of us who were children wonder why none of our pets ever came back. Over the days and weeks, one hard lesson did become clear: Despite what we had been taught, the way one died garnered no judgement. Death, unmoored from the moral reasoning that we had willingly acceptedinto our minds and bodies as smoothly as a knife between the ribs, was as meaningless as the stone guardians that marked our temples. If our final acts on earth were merely the treading of thespians in some forgotten production, then even the one thing we thought was absolute, death’s finality, was just a cawingmockery of the pitiful scaffolding of belief that had shaped our existence.
THE RISEN.Those who returned were different than we had remembered. They arrived with a taciturn demeanor and a deportment of extreme indifference that we previously had ascribed to heartless ranchers or plantation managers. The risen gazed upon us with an inscrutable flatness in their eyes, which belied the overwhelming sense of melancholy in their wake that suffocated us when they left the room. While the chill of death had left their bodies, it seemed that no warmth could be gleaned from them, wives who in previous times remembered reaching for the warmth of their husbands in bed, now complained of heatbeing leeched from their bodies and replaced with aglacial coldness lonelier than theirannulled widowhood. Some reported feeling smothered by a murderous rage if one stood too close to them, while others disagreed and called it a bottomless anguish that constricted their lungs and hearts.No one could disagree that too long in the presence of one of the risen brought on a curious vertigo whose main symptom seemed to be the keen awareness of the lethargy of time, as if the inertia of the past was suddenly made manifest in the moment and we were forced to grievously confront it in the hidden consciences of our souls.
LUCK, THE ONE-EYED BITCH.Superstition kept us from probing too deeply into the ‘why’ of our luck, for surely that would make it cease overnight, but we could not help wondering about the ‘who.’ Who decided who would return? Perhaps if there had been some sort of plan, some discernable method we could have intuited to answer this critical question, maybe we would have been happier. But in the vacuum created by that absence, whispers grew louder that some families got more than others. Abusive husbands returned without invitation, mothers who died in childbirth returned without their babies, even village drunks and a hated overseer came back to remind us of painful memories and other bad times. Some began to claim that all the risen were addled, clearly damaged goods not good enough for heaven nor hardy enough for hell. But that only generated other recriminations.Suddenly, personal insults and buried grudges bloomed in our village to poison neighbors and drench relatives in the bad blood of long dormant feuds, all of which gave jealousy leverage to fray the bonds of our community. A gloom settled itself as tight as a fist in ourvillage. Sparks between neighbors could ignite from mere sideways glances, welcome parties were scarcely attended, and family members shunned each other like carriers of incurable diseases. All might have remained this way with the ruts of hatred and habit growing deeper in our hearts, and envy burrowing itself further under our skins only to erupt later in a froth of anger and accusations, were it not for the quake.
THE QUAKE.The island’s uneasy existence between the crust of its former self where we lived and the nascent flows where lava and sea met to form the wet black husk of new birth produced the occasional rumbling: the restless goddess of earthly creation reminding us of her power. And while the rest of us cowered beneath tables or benches, or braced ourselves in doorways or against walls, the risen, all of them, were outside looking to the heavens watching the passage of birds as they lifted themselves from their aeries and rookeries and took wing away from their volatile surroundings. It only occurred to us then that maybe they hadn’t wanted to return either.That all of us were victims of some cruel cosmic joke, punchlines in an internecine squabble between unfeeling gods, or the detritus of a forgotten divine prank. While the risen were still silently beseeching the heavens, a murmuration swept through the village, and all of us concluded the thing that seemed obvious at the time: we needed to find them a way back.
BLOODISTHICKER.The suggestionthatwekillthem again wasquickly extinguished as less a solution and more ofa genocide.Besides which, the responsibility for each would fall to their family, something no one could contemplate. Subsequent discussions only offered solutions that were no less messy, no less violent, nor any more feasible. The adults were stumped until a child pointed out that weren’t we just trying to bring them all closer to heaven? She then pointed to the highest peak on the island.
STAY OR AWAY.Preparations began immediately for what in earlier days might have seemed like a celebration. Meals were prepared and packed, water was drawn from catchments into flasks, fruit was harvested for snacks on the way up, and eventhe littlest ones grew giddy. Everyone, outfitted and loaded up, filed out of the village with our risen. To say that we were joyous would be an aggrandizement, rather a tendril of hope, something that had been missing among us for a long time, seemed to rope all of us together. As we neared the summit, the children started singing the song that they had pieced together on the way up:
Here we come, here we come, here we come, To the top of the rising sun! We‘ll bring them all the way, For all to stay or away!
FAREWELLS.Nearly everything that had been prepared—the food, the water, the small and sundry gifts we had collected—were all left on the perimeter while we gathered the risen in the middle. We explained to them that the sun will soon set and the moon will soon rise, and then added, in case they had forgotten, the traditional time for farewells. With only the simplest of goodbyes—a touch of the hand, perhaps, or a stroke of the cheek—we turnedto go back down the mountain. Those who dared tolook back saw the gathered look after us for a moment and thenreturn their gaze back up to the heavens,and then we knew that it was time to go.
THAT NIGHT.All through the village, it was a solemn dinner as we tried to restrict our conversation to the barest of necessities and concentrate on the mundane movements of our lives. We carefully avoided any glimpse of the mountains and what might be silhouetted there in the moonlight. That night we slept like the dead, immovable in our guilt, yet freed from the yoke of sorrow that we had borne since their arrival.
THE SUN ALSO RISES.It was with a sense of disappointment, rather than surprise, when we awoke the next morning to see a few of them back in the village, seeming no different than when they had left the day before. Throughout that evening and on into the week, all of them would eventually return to us with no sign of fear, recrimination, or anger in their eyes or in the corners of their mouths. Just a tacit acceptance on both sides, like an indifferent handshake, of the return of the status quo.
A NEW THEOLOGY.We gathered, then, to discuss that perhaps we had been mistaken in our theology. The dogma honed within us by the church, namely, a universal lust for heaven, had been erroneous. What other conclusion could there be from the actions of the risen? We did not need the naïve exhortations of a clergy who were as neophytic as we were in this circumstance. Faced with our bleak rejection of the ascension into heaven, we were left with only with the descent into hell.
HELLWITHOUTFIRE.We immediately recognized the deficiency of our catechism. Our religious education spends a lifetime preparing us for heaven with nary a motion for the preparation of hell. A suggestion of fire was timidly raised, only to be extinguished by the silence of that ghastly imagining. In our bifurcated cosmology, if there is a stairway to heaven, wasn’t there also a pathway to hell? The long silence evoked by that question threatened to transmogrify into grief, when again, a child spoke and reminded us of the forbidden hollows that formed the vascular core of the island.
BASALT.This time, we packed no food, prepared no gifts, and packed only a fiasco of water for each of the risen and a single torch for all as we coursed out of the village and turned toward the black fields ofpāhoehoelava. The eons of magma that slowly passed out of the core to create our islands had cooled over epochs to form spacious voids others called lava tubes. To us, this arterial array was a monolithic account of creation, each ropy wall beneath the surface a testimony to the nascent delivery of our island. We chose the longest tube we knew, a subterranean hollow of singular opening with a deep and lengthy passage within a surround of darkness. We formed a gauntlet and after handing the boy the torch, we ushered him and the rest of the risen into the maw of dead lava, as if welcoming them into their new dwelling. They ambled forward, one following another while we watched from the surface until the torchlight no longer refracted back to us. We turned then to the scree that surrounded us and stacked basalt over the entrance to create a seal and a ward to our problem.
A BEACON.No one is sure if it was the boy who returned first or not, but it was sometime that evening that someone saw the torch braced against the cemetery fence, like a beacon for the prodigal, and, as some of us took it, a fiery admonishment of our lack of imagination. It would be by noon the next day when all the risen had returned and the first raindrops started to fall, sizzling in the flare of the torch before succumbing to the downpour and being snuffed out.
THENCAMEDAYSOFRAIN.The singing of the birds replacedby the incessant keening of male frogs in theirsplendor and libidinous desire. Evacuated graves like neglected basins overflowing. A flourishing of centipedes with weary mothers as sentries over their sleeping children at night. Versicolor scale like mold murals blooming in corners and beside windows. All of us standing in open doorways, brooding on terrestrial desolation. Loneliness like hookworm through the soles of our feet, creeping up our spines into our heads.
THE CARPENTER.For weeks, each raindrop struck us like the ticking of an eternal clock while the earth drowned in ennui. Lulled by this, we failed to notice when the carpenter began, only that at some later point, we realized that he was the only moving thing in the torrent. We watched him move deliberately, stacking the wood, and then racking it to keep it above the continual drift that coursed through the paths in the village. More days were taken up by sawing, measuring, arranging, shaping pieces for a plan visible only in his head. They fit together slowly under the blows of his hammer, first a bulging side like a herniated wall, then a couple of generous platforms, forward and aft, but it wasn’t until he shaped an enormous fin on the underside of his creation, did we realize that he was creating a keel for a vessel with an extraordinary draft.On the day he started applying the pitch, the day we heard the first bird sing and saw a rift in the gloom like the hesitant cracking of a door before a flood of light, we knew it wouldn’t be long before we had to be ready to try again.
SHEPHERDS.Againthistime,therewerenoelaborate preparations, no planning or thoughts of contingencies, just a quiet gathering of the risen by the village women, while the men hauled the boat to the ocean. The children, rather than high-stepping and clowning around like the first time, entered the gathering and silently took the hand of the one they liked best and led them like gentle shepherds, while the risen walked with a relieved acquiescence, toward the beach. Once there, the mother of the boy had only to gesture and the boy climbed up onto the vessel and ascended to the highest point on the prow. The village children then released the hand of their charges and the risen climbed wordlessly into the boat, none of them looking back once they entered the craft, but like the boy, kept their eyes focused forward to the horizon. When the last of them was aboard, the men in the water timed the shore break, and through a wrangling of shoves and precise nudges, they propelled the boat forward where it eventually caught and launched itself out into that enigmatic blue expanse. None of us went home then. Instead, we continued to watch the shadow of the boat against the setting sun until the nadir of the earth’s curvature swallowed them up. In later years, we would remember this moment as the start of an unraveling inside ourselves, a blurring of boundaries in the meaning of time, the notion of sorrow, and the comfort of death, but at that moment, all we understood was that we were suddenly alone again, forsaken in the twilight.
Son of mine, little Borikén, butting Your bloodhead along a blind chute, child who breaks The saltwaters of your mother’s loneliness, Cyclone spawn, spume and fury, with fins sawing Your mother’s vulva, with eyes bulbing and mouth Gawping, with seismic thrashing you push out, Snag your mother’s cord. Your jaws snap And with a flash that blinds her to her pangs— And to me—you leap! into my hands, wriggling, Perilous as sargasso weeds. Is it I who dry your finlet ears, your fine Barbel hairs? Till now I’ve touched nothing As quivery as your skin, a current that drags Me far from shore, closer to my drowning.
ON THE LEFT-HAND SIDEof the Western wall, painted waves roll towards us in swells of green and grayish blue. A lattice lace of foambreaks across the surface, while underneath, the ocean’s inhabitants coexist in harmony. It is the Beginning of Time, a mythological construct which defies logical reason, and yet, despite a lack of evidence, might very well have occurred.
As you can see, the Octopus is relishing a moment of solitude in a kelp forest. The pale green sickle of the Moray Eel, curling around a coral pillar, is joined just underneath by the Smooth-Hound Shark, whose curved gray body is reminiscent of a classic car. The tiger-striped scoop of the Nautilus’s shell drifts in open water above the rest, the big-headed Grouper lumbers at the sandy bottom, and the red bristles of the Rockfish’s fin emerge from behind a convoluted structure of the multicolored reef.All things underwater belong unconditionally to the vast, volatile ocean. They thrive off of its vitality as the ocean thrives from theirs.
Now let’s turn to the right-hand side of the Western wall, which transitions from the left with a change in the sky, a sunset gradient, to indicate a shift in perspective.
A lone woman is perched on the sea cliffs, bent over and draped in a dark blue fabric that shimmers with bronze, like the rust of shipwrecks accenting her clothes. This is the so-called sea witch who lives in caves along the rocky shoreline. There is a degree of self-righteousness in the way she stands alone, although the cliffs look bleak in comparison to the ocean’s abundance and diversity of life. Taken as a whole, the Western wall is a stunningly detailed, panoramic view from ocean to coast. It goes without saying that the artist has done a spectacular job.
During my tours, I am often concerned with the level of appreciation I might expect from all of you, you with your sun-baked faces and bellies full of clams. You are not ocean people. You are beach people. You have spent the better part of the day flat on your backs, roasting, while the hyperactive children currently running figure-eights around your legs were left to drink blue slushie and build their sloppy sandcastles unattended. Still, I hold out faith. I believe in your potential.
If you were familiar with the town and its oral histories, you would know that this wall of the Merari Public Library is actually a one-sided love story. Note how the painted waves fall, the down-curves like greedy and possessive claws.
The ocean is emotional and unpredictable. It is constantly shifting, intricate and deep, glowing aquamarine in the sun. The shore, on the other hand, is rigid and unspontaneous with unlovable rock structures. You might think that, for the shore, the ocean would be a catch. But the land here has always been mysteriously resistant to erosion. The waves pull endlessly at the rocks and beaches, tormented by unrequited feelings, disrupting the natural patterns of tidal movement.
I see that a few of you are chuckling behind your hands. It’s regrettable that I witness such behavior frequently, and yet I am encouraged by the fact that you’re trying to conceal your amusement. Apparently, you understand I take my tours very seriously.
It is no laughing matter that the sea has fallen in love with the land, and that the land does not return the sea’s affections. It has wide-ranging implications for the ecosystem. We will explore this further as we turn the corner, but first, I’d like to pause for questions. Are there any questions regarding this first wall of the mural?
Yes, you.
HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN A TOUR GUIDE?This question has nothing to do with the mural. But I will tell you: seven years. Any more questions?
DO I DO THIS FOR A LIVING?Of course not. I am merely a dedicated volunteer, striving to bring one of the most cherished stories of our community to life for those passing through. Often it seems that I am met at every turn of these library walls with nothing more than the glassy-eyed stares of the tourists who, after barely five minutes of introduction, are curious about little else aside from where their next meal is coming from. I am driven on, nonetheless, by the undying conviction that someone, one day, will step away from my tour and see this place and its people in a different light, just as I did when I first began to investigate historical evidence that speaks to the validity of the legend. Another question?
DO I . . . HAVE ANYrestaurant recommendations? Hahhh. Alessandro’s on Main street is the best. Tell the server that Christopher was your tour guide today, they’ll send out a free appetizer.
Moving on. No more questions, people! Contain yourselves. There will be time later.
The posterior wall of the Merari Public Library is the largest and most eventful section of wall-canvas. On the left-hand side, we see that the sea creatures have absorbed the sea’s yearning and find themselves drawn to the shore. It would be impossible for the fraught land-sea dynamic not to affect marine life, after all.
Octopus leads the way with the vine-like ends of her tentacles outstretched.Nautilus,MorayEel,Rockfish,Smooth-Hound Shark, and Grouper follow behind her. Most of the children (and, indeed, adults) of Merari will claim this section of the mural as their favorite, as the artist has done an exquisite job of depicting the personality of each creature.
Note how Octopus assertively extends her many arms towards the water’s surface, the cerebral yet commanding look in her horizontal-slitted eye. Nautilus speeds after her, a whimsical dream-frill of tentacles propelling it forward. The lines of Moray Eel’s body call to mind a sarcastic smirk, while the bristling of Rockfish’s fins conveys impatience, frustration. Smooth-Hound Shark weaves his way around the others with a dignified and detached expression, while Grouper’s expression is sheepish and slightly hopeful as he drifts at the back of the pack.
Each of our main characters is in the midst of something that they have never before experienced: a relentless desire for a world that is not their own, a world that they cannot even breathe in. They converge at the feet of the sea witch, beneath the wide windows of the Library’s upper floor. She leans forward to address the orange bulb of Octopus’s head as it breaks the surface, her abundant hair falling to hide her face.
The witch, Meraria, is a complicated figure in our town’s history. Some historical accounts go to great descriptive lengths to have us believe she was loved by all, exceptionally talented, tremendously intelligent, the center of attention at every party, and very, um . . . physically . . . well-endowed. But knowing that the author of these accounts is most likely Meraria herself does call their validity into question.
When the aquatic creatures describe their land-longing to Meraria in this section of mural, she offers them a deal. She promises to provide each with a human form capable of walking on land in exchange for their knowledge of the ocean’s riches. It seemed to be a straight-forward transaction: Octopus and the others must have been aware of the value that humans place on certain minerals and various curative or poisonous substances from the sea. But they had no way of knowing what the witch really wanted.
If we take a look at history, witches are not generally popular. Meraria was no exception. Having been cast out of society on account of countless exploitative schemes involving sorcery, she was ultimately forced into a life of solitude on the sea cliffs. What the witch wanted most was not wealth or power, but a community and a sense of belonging. Although she wouldn’t turn down wealth and power either, given the opportunity.
As we turn to the mural’s next scene, a couple years have passed. The town of Merari is in the process of being built, with its first inhabitants setting up their shops and homes.
Take this man, standing outside the establishment that seems to recall the town’s present-day Café Coral. What do you notice about him? Pale green eyes. Something fluid in the painted lines of his arms as he sweeps the entranceway. The trademark smirk, a hint of irony, as if he’s about to make a sarcastic comment. This is the Moray Eel from the previous ocean scenes.
This one is Grouper, with his recognizable hopeful expression, giving out small business loans at the bank. Moray Eel was likely the recipient of one of them, as was Rockfish, with her fiery hair and red-tinged skin, shown here in the process of establishing the town tavern. Here is the dreamy-eyed Nautilus, opening an art gallery. And here is Smooth-Hound Shark, dressed in gray, with new scholarly glasses, establishing the town’s first school.
Octopus is featured prominently at the top of the wall: a woman with long tendrils of hair that curl vine-like at the ends. She is speaking urgently with Meraria, doubtlessly in an endeavor to gain support for her next scientific venture. This relentless pursuit of knowledge and funding is said to have led to the foundation of the Marine Research Center associated with Merari University.
The town on this wall is painted in more subdued tones compared with the rest of the artwork. It looks almost pastoral after the intense, saturated colors we encountered early on. You may be wondering which of our aquatic ancestors established the Merari Public Library—I wish I could tell you. It is lost to history, as is the identity of the artist behind the mural.
In any case, we can see now that each town member has been transformed as Meraria had promised. But the sea witch did more than provide them with legs and lungs to satisfy their longing for the land. She also erased their memories of the ocean. Wiped blank, dependent upon the witch for survival, the sea creatures-turned-humans were pliable servants, susceptible to whatever she told them.
Meraria’s first order of business was to have her subjects build the town, which they named after her. They also built her a castle on the high cliffs, the seat of power during her reign, of which today nothing remains but the wave-battered remnants of old stone walls. According to historical accounts, Meraria was a generous ruler, extremely popular with the people due to festivities she sponsored and hosted. Again, we have to take bias into consideration, owing to the fact that all such accounts originated from her own royal court. But even while reliable evidence of Merari’s economic and political situation during this period can be hard to come by, there is enough to suggest that the townspeople had given rise to a fairly self-sufficient community. It’s possible that they instinctively developed networks of interdependencies that bore similarity to their former, flourishing underwater ecosystem.
Before we move on to the Eastern wall, I’ll pause for questions again. Questions related to the mural. Ok? Yes, you.
WHAT I DO FOR A LIVING. Didn’t I answer this before? I see—all I said was that being a tour guide for the public library mural was not my occupation. In actuality, I teach history at Merari Public High School, where the head of the department has not yet given in to my requests for a unit on the town’s history and legends in the syllabus. Other questions?
I SEE. So Alessandro’s does not have enough five-star reviews for you. And you’re looking for a view of the ocean? In that case, how about the local ferry, headed to one of our neighboring towns? I have been informed that they have food on board.
Moving on.
As we turn the corner to the Eastern-facing wall, the picture darkens. Shadows sweep down from the cliffs against which the tormented ocean repeatedly crashes, forming a circular frame around the image that depicts the untimely death of Meraria. The sea witch is lying on her bed in her castle, bloated to four times her size on the previous two walls. Candied fruits and other delicacies from around the world crowd her room. A huge, deflated wine skin rests in her lap.
How exactly Meraria met her end is unknown, although suspected causes include heart failure and cirrhosis of the liver. Having grown accustomed to a life of deprivation, she hurried to embody the opposite extreme—excess—from the moment her fortunes changed. Accounts from those present at her nightly feasts and twice-monthly festivals are surely just a sampling of what had become commonplace for the witch-ruler.
Due to the lavish lifestyle that decimated her health, Meraria died earlier than might have been expected. From the moment that her eyelids shut and the last of the life energy ebbed from her body, the townspeople began to recall memories of their ocean lives.
The next scene of the mural depicts the sky split open and the town stopped in its tracks. The artist has layered images on top of each other like stripes of sediment. Octopus stands beneath the pouring rain on the cliffs with her long hair drenched and her back turned to the viewer. Underneath, Smooth-Hound Shark and Moray Eel mutely stare into glasses of amber liquor at Rockfish’s tavern, while she leans towards the window, watching rain ricochet off the awning. Grouper is having a smoke outside the door and staring at the pipe in his hands, probably wondering if this is doing irreparable damage to his gills. Below this, Nautilus is in a darkened studio, surrounded by the torn canvases of underwater scenes they always felt so strongly compelled to paint without knowing why, their face pressed into their hands.
It is the scene of a community-wide identity crisis. You can imagine the level of chaos and despair. Are we people? Are we fish? Are we both, or neither? With the death of the sea witch, the spell weakens just enough to allow for some flexibility of form. Here and there, the artist has painted glimpses of people waking up with fins instead of arms. Scales, shells, and spines take the place of skin and hair. When people get tired or lazy, maybe they find themselves reverting back, gills surfacing beneath their clothes.
Ты так далеко, что не доплывают смоленые лодки, и плечи мои от тяжёлой работы натерты, и вёсла мои. И рыба, которая шла за кормою в неравном скитании, однажды вернется домой. Осталась звезда в терновом, далеком созвездии звёзд. Но всюду меня покидали и компас, и кормчий - кто путь этот не перенёс. Ты так далеко, что мир заточенья неважен. Не суть, что в лодках смоленых великое знание, и что эти плечи несут.
War Poem
TRANSLATED BY ANDREW WACHTEL
You’re so far away that the tarred keels can’t reach you and my shoulders and oars are worn out from hard work. The fish that has followed the rudder in its random wanderings will simply return home. Only a star remains, in a thorny far-off constellation. But my compass and the helmsman who couldn’t endure the voyage have abandoned me. You’re so far away that the prison of this world is irrelevant. No one cares that tarred keels are filled with deep knowledge or what these shoulders are carrying.
Predictable to some degree that a man with a red and white striped stick-on umbrella hat
and a portable public address system bullhorn would be working the heart of Bourbon Street
in the name of the Lord. Telling all the jesters, masquers, Red Death revelers, that God
will not be mocked, that His patience is running out, that He sees us all, unblinking.
Predictable as well, perhaps, that his sidekick, his long-suffering Fortunato, would be hauling a life-size cross up the street with him on the Via Dolorosa, the road to the Superdome.
Less predictable the college kid, clean cut, a Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club type,
having to be restrained, pulled away by his friends, physically lifted off the ground,
his feet moving in mysterious ways. Screaming at the Jesusers that they don't belong here,
that this is our holy place, our last sanctuary, that this is where we come for the sole purpose of getting away from Jesus, that this is where we worship, that we should be free to mock God whenever we want, that someone could get hurt tripping over a cross like that in the street,
that we should just be left alone, that we are all being crucified each and every day.
His friends haul him away, John the un-Baptist, God's true warrior in sackcloth and ashes, His burning bush, His voice in the French Quarter wilderness, blessed troublemaker,
not to be mocked, not to be saved, crown of thorns messiah of the way things really are.
