“I’m sorry,” said Yetu. “There’s so much to tell you, yet I never know where to begin. But I am ready now. I can speak. I can tell you why I did what I did, and it has nothing to do with wanting to die.”
Yetu readied herself to reveal all, to go back to those painful moments and relive them yet again for her amaba’s benefit.
“Shhh,” said Amaba, using the sticky webbing at the end of her left front fin to cover Yetu’s mouth. “It is in the past. It is already forgotten. What matters is that you are here now, and we can focus on the present. It is time for you to give the Remembrance.”
The Remembrance—had it really been a year since the last? A year, then, since she’d seen her amaba? It was impossible to keep precise track of the passing of time in the dark of the deep, but she could ascertain the time of year based on currents, animal movement, and mating seasons. None of that mattered, however, if Yetu wasn’t present enough to pay attention to them. The rememberings carried her mind away from the ocean to the past. These days, she was more there than here. This wasn’t a new thought, but she’d never felt it this strongly before. Yetu was becoming an ancestor herself. Like them, she was dead, or very near it.
“I didn’t know that we were already so close to the Remembrance,” said Yetu, unsure she even had the strength to conduct the ceremony.
“Yetu, it is overdue by an entire mating cycle,” said Amaba.
Was Yetu really three months late to the most important event in the wajinru’s life? Had she failed her duty so tremendously? “Is everyone all right?” asked Yetu.
“Alive, yes, but not well, not well at all,” said Amaba.
A historian’s role was to carry the memories so other wajinru wouldn’t have to. Then, when the time came, she’d share them freely until they got their fill of knowing.
Late as Yetu was, the wajinru must be starving for it, consumed with desire for the past that made and defined them. Living without detailed, long-term memories allowed for spontaneity and lack of regret, but after a certain amount of time had passed, they needed more. That was why once a year, Yetu gave them the rememberings, even if only for a few days. It was enough that their bodies retained a sense memory of the past, which could sustain them through the year until the next Remembrance.
“We grow anxious and restless without you, my child. One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities. You don’t know what it’s like, blessed with the rememberings as you are,” said Amaba.
Yetu did know what it was like. After all, wasn’t cavity just another word for vessel? Her own self had been scooped out when she was a child of fourteen years to make room for ancestors, leaving her empty and wandering and ravenous.
“I’ll be taking you to the sacred waters soon. The people will want to offer their thanks and prayers to you. You should be happy, no? You like the Remembrance. It is good for you,” Amaba said.
Yetu disagreed. The Remembrance took more than it gave. It required she remember and relive the wajinru’s entire history all at once. Not just that, she had to put order and meaning to the events, so that the others could understand. She had to help them open their minds so they could relive the past too.
It was a painful process. The reward at the end, that the rememberings left Yetu briefly while the rest of the wajinru absorbed them, was small. If she could skip it, she would, but she couldn’t. That was something her younger, more immature self would’ve done. She’d been appointed to this role according to her people’s traditions, and she balked at the level of self-centeredness it would require to abandon six hundred years of wajinru culture and custom to accommodate her own desires.
“Are you strong enough to swim to the sacred waters without help?” Amaba asked Yetu.
She wasn’t, but she’d make the journey unaided anyway. She didn’t want her amaba carrying her any more than she already had. The memory of Amaba’s fins squeezing around her tail fin, dragging her away from the sharks at nauseating speeds, lingered unpleasantly, the same way all memories did.
She understood why wajinru wanted nothing to do with them but for one time a year.
2
IT WAS NO LONGER SUNG.
For that morsel of mercy, Yetu gave thanks. She understood why all the historians before Basha performed the Remembrance to melody, that impulse to salvage a speck of beauty from tragedy with a dirge, but Yetu wanted people to remember how she remembered. With screams. She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.
Wajinru milled the sacred waters, a mass of bodies warming the deep. Yetu felt them embracing, swimming, sliding against one another in greeting, all of it sending a tide of ripples Yetu’s way. The ocean pulsated. The water moved, animated. The meaning behind their name, wajinru, chorus of the deep, was clear.
Many wajinru lived far apart, alone or with friends or mates in dens of twenty or twenty-five people. The wajinru had settled the whole of the deep but were sparsely populated. While there was the occasional larger group who lived together, up to fifty or one hundred, there was nothing like the cities Yetu had seen in her rememberings.
For a people with little memory, wajinru knew one another despite the year-long absence. They didn’t remember in pictures nor did they recall exact events, but they knew things in their bodies, bits of the past absorbed into them and transformed into instincts. Wajinru knew the faces of lovers they’d once taken, the trajectory of their own lives. They knew that they were wajinru.
Because they tended to live so far apart, when they did gather en masse, it was an occasion of great celebration. Everyone shouted their greetings, swam in excited circles, joined together to dance a spiral. Soon, what had started as something intimate between two or three spread to twenty, then suddenly a hundred, five hundred, then all five thousand or six thousand of them. They moved spontaneously but in unison, a single entity.
It was this same energy Yetu would use to share the History with them.
“I’m relieved you’re here,” said Nnenyo, Yetu’s care-maid during the Remembrance. When Yetu required everyone to hush, he would tell everyone to hush. When she needed stillness, he’d make everyone be still. If words didn’t work, he’d compel them softly with his mind: a little nudge that felt to most like a mild, compulsive urge. A cough. A sneeze.
Few had such power of suggestion, but he was getting on, almost a hundred and fifty years old. The average wajinru lifespan was closer to one hundred, and while it wasn’t impossible to live for so long, Nnenyo was the oldest wajinru in a long time. He’d learned to harness the electrical energy present in all wajinru minds. That was why he’d been elected to oversee the historians. He was the one Yetu was to inform about the next historian when she discovered who might be capable of taking on the task, and he was the one who’d facilitate the harvesting of memories from Yetu to her successor when the time came. If he was unable, one of his many children would take on the task.