Memory as last conversation: To wait in my chair upon the porch, old and tired, bones aching and eyes heavy, for my now-round wife to return from her gardening behind the house. To allow her to sit down beside me, to take my hand in hers. To smile but to wait for her to speak, then to listen so close to her words, the favorite song of her soft speech, and then to hear her say that it was time for us to leave, to take our child from this place.
My wife then, she was not exactly herself—not the self I had known—but she was some new woman like her and just as easy to love.
My wife, she said: I do not remember the world you spoke of, that you told me was once like this one, but I want to see it, and if I am the reason it was destroyed, then I want to be the method by which it might be rebuilt.
With her hand in my hand, with her eyes on mine, she said, I want our child to have everything we wanted to give a child, and to give her our world together.
Come with me, she said, and for a moment I thought that she knew my plans, but then she continued, and I saw that my latest secret—last of them all—was yet mine alone.
She stood, lifted me from my chair, and then she said, Come with me and help me get ready, for there is much left to do and so little time to do it.
And how she was right, and also wrong, for time was not what she thought it was, in her new youth, nor what I had thought it was in mine, passed so very long ago.
I did not know what my wife would find when she reached the surface, nor truly how well she might weather the journey upward, climbing the great stairs and pushing through the black only to arrive at the terrible truth of the deep house, the rent and ruined rooms of that palace that had held the treasures of her person.
I did not know if the surface above burned or bloomed or if there were any walls remaining of our first house, any chimney still allowing guesses as to where walls once stood, might go again.
Perhaps she would reach the surface to find the way impassible and would not be able to climb out of the earth without more destruction, without carving her way forward, and what then, and what would that do to what unmarked mother she had become?
Perhaps, perhaps, and no answers anyway.
There were just the two of us now, and also the one coming, and most often we were quiet and simple with each other, and in bed that night I laid behind my wife, put my hand atop her belly, and as our baby kicked within I asked her about the song the foundling had sung over me, in the moment after my heart attack. Did she remember that song? Had she taught it to him? Did she still have it to sing?
My wife could not see my face, and I did not permit her to turn around, to face my face while she answered. I did not want her to see my expression, to see what ugly thing hope was doing there, to my twisting lips, my twitching cheeks.
I said, Answer me where you are, or else don’t.
My wife, she pressed back into me, patting my hand on her belly with her hand, and then she said, What if it was the other that restored you? That saved you when you needed him most?
No, I said. It was not him.
And yet! And always, and no matter. All that was ended, and this too.
EARLY STILL, ON THE MORNING of our scheduled departure: I left our bed in the chilled hour before the dawn, careful not to wake my wife. I took one last look at her, at the swelled curves of her body, at her face more precious to me than ever before, except maybe at the very first. When I had seen all I could hope to see, then I slipped out of the house and down to the lake.
At the edge of the dock, I removed my clothes, folded them onto the slats, the sung boards made to resemble the other dock above, the one I had made with my own hands. I felt the dew upon those planks, wiggled my toes against that damp, then shivered at the breeze goosebumping the scarred and folded leather of my skin.
Those scars were my palace as the deep house was my wife’s, as the woods and the cave were the bear’s, as much as any other part of my flesh, another version of my story lashed from my ankle to my back to my shoulder, to my chest and my face and my hands, and now I was leaving all of them behind.
I had told my wife what I had done and what it had made me, and still she took me back.
I believed she loved me again, and because she loved me, I had kept one more secret plan, this tucked-away mercy.
Memory as stretched moment, as elastic time, as always for me the moments have been: To know that I had made all the journeys I could, or would. To believe that my wounds had left me mostly unfit for marriage, for fatherhood, for any world less simple than this one, and my wife and our coming child deserved better, because despite my softening I believed it was better to have no husband than one like me.
To imagine my wife might have said this was not for me to decide.
To agree in principle, while still rejecting her claim, while choosing not to give her the chance to voice it.
When I dared delay no longer, I flexed my body beneath my old skin, felt its sure response despite its many creaks and popping cracks: This man was going to die, but the squid the man could choose to be might live some time longer, at least until the lake was dry, just dust dispersing, blown upon the last wind. In that water awaited the only other I had not forgiven, and before this deep-sunk world was ended I wanted whatever there could be between us, between my last shape and his, even if this thing I would be wanted nothing so grand, needed nothing but what could be provided by instinct, by hunger and rutting. I hoped that within that simplicity was left some space, a slimness where the last of a man might control what a squid would be, what it became—and then I felt the first heat of the morning’s sun—and then I was running for the end of the dock, the last running I would ever do, and as I reached the edge I leaped—and in the air I felt some catch in my throat, a black thread long swallowed, a black hair tugged taut and then snapping—and what an awful relief it was—and after I hit the water, how horrible it was to still be me, how I had hoped that I would not be, and yet still there I was, always me me me, man as trapper and hunter, as bear-bane, as ghost-killer, as husband failed, father-failure, squid and—
—memory as mid-shift, mid-sentence, mid-sound: To be beneath the light-dappled surface but not yet deep. To turn back and see a shape standing on the edge of the platform, tall and heart-proud against the sky, then tumbling forward into the water, a falling pile of bones and skin and regret, what that shape was always going to become, no matter how well it tried to love, no matter how badly it had most often failed to do so, and as it fell it broke the surface of the lake—
—and in the lake there was water and salt and black fish, blacker eels, and more of each every day. How the fish sustained the eels, and the eels the squid. Getting full and staying full. Sated, satisfied. Then the fish moving inside even as they moved without. Then the squid’s body suddenly heavy, until swimming was torture. Then the surface unreachable by any effort, then descending in wide circles, sinking through soundless depths. Then more and more of the black fishes, still each a finger’s length, and then more of the eels, longer and wider and heavier toothed.
Then darkness, then blackness—then what was below the blackness, the second layer of blacker black.
Then realizing the blackness moved, was moving, that the blackness had scales, had fins and tails, had voices, saying FATHER, saying FATHER. Voices hungry, unfooled by new shapes, each speaking memories and prophecies.