It came to me that this man had once had it and worded an apocalypse. He knew the final finality of it and had given me a heads up, not knowing my name but knowing my will.
I did not tell the others my thought nor, other than the Deacon, had the others told me their thoughts. The revelation was before me but now I had to incorporate into myself the cool intellect of the Deacon, the subliminal knowledge of Manta, and the liberated will of John Henry, while all the time never losing myself in the amalgam of my humanity.
We all noticed the seasonal change. On the shore and on the surface waters, the great coelenterate mating migration had begun under their romantic dark moon. The ocean bubbled and boiled with these jellied beasts, some translucent, some transparent, some bio-luminescent, some floating, some pulsing, some giant, some miniscule, but all poisonous.
27
The ocean was filled with chop. The white chops of the waves went to the horizon. The chops of the jellied bodies went to the horizon. And, the chops of the thoughts of John Henry, Manta, the Deacon, and I went to the horizon, but also to the Deep. Mindless first-evolved organisms millions of years before us were sharing the same space and the same time as we: they were coming up from the Deep and we were going into the Deep. Which are the mindless, they or us?
This was the beginning of the quiet time. With each moment, we became ever more silent. The components, the elements, the bits and pieces of master pieces were assembled, and now all that was left to do was to complete a performance. But, it was not such a simple thing. I was thinking of the dive. The Deacon was thinking of the dive but Manta and John Henry had thought past the dive.
Manta spoke,“You have said that you have no inheritance in it. Is that not so, Deacon?”
The Deacon nodded.
Manta continued, “You, Vaughnie, you wish to assign it to the Deep, is that not so?”
I nodded. Affirmative.
Manta continued, “John Henry, you wish to make it public. Is that not so?”
She nodded also.
Manta continued, “I desire to keep it secret.”
All the positions had been delineated but there was no point of intersection.
Manta again, “It simply seems to me, but I am not very intelligent, that our choices seem to be doing this, doing that, or doing nothing at all. But of our choices, it is not which is the better or best but which choice is the most noble.”
There was no altering or shift in the Deacon’s facial expression. It was as if the statement had never been vocalized. He, the Deacon, had come to his answer.
John Henry’s expression altered and shifted to one of very deep thought. The statement had vocalized consequences and she wanted to respond with a valued answer.
Manta’s expression altered and shifted to one of peacefulness. The statement vocalized values and he was to define the highest value.
I don’t know if my expression changed. I did not know the derived resolution of the three but I did know my final resolution.
The Deacon spoke, “We could dive through this jellyfish bloom but it is better if we wait a bit until the bloom is gone and that will still give us time in excess to dive comfortably. In the meantime you three geniuses will have a chance to generate a whiz-bang answer.”
It came to me and I am sure it came to Manta and John Henry, too. How can one question have three correct solutions?
Manta looked out to sea and spoke a reply, “The Deacon is right. He is one of those people who is not always right but he is right so often that he may as well be right all the time.”
John Henry spoke, “You know, I wish he were more human and less Deacon. His standards are so elevated, perfect, and incorruptible but he cannot be that simple a man. Everyone, even the Deacon, has to have vulnerable, pathetic, and brittle aspects to their human nature.”
There was a moment of silence.
Then I spoke, “It has nothing to do with his humanity or his expertise. The Deacon is fortunate enough, but some may call him unfortunate enough, to hear the score of life.”
“The score of life,” they both said in unison.
Then I continued. “I do not mean the score like an addition or a subtraction score. I do not mean like a winning or a losing score. What I mean has nothing to do with numbers. What I mean has to do with notes. The Deacon hears the music of his life. He hears the melody and he hears the harmony of his life’s music. So he is fortunate because he hears it and he is most unfortunate that he cannot free himself from its beat.”
John Henry thought a moment before replying. “Look out there at all that chop, Vaughnie. Millions and maybe billions of jellyfish are out there riding the meaningless music of their meaningless lives: water temperature, salinity, moon cycles. But they are blobs, no better today than a million or billion yesterdays ago and no better than a million or billion tomorrows from today.
“Vaughnie, we are not to be dictated to by the music of our lives. Are we to dance to a score that we did not compose like those billions of blobs of jelly just pulsating to a no-good end, to either just dry up on the beach or dissolve back into the deep?
“No. I say the score of the music of our lives is to be composed by us so that the millions and billions of tomorrows are liberated, emancipated from the restricted imprisonment of all those past yesterdays.
“The Deacon is today, and he was today yesterday, and he will be today tomorrow. That is the noble beginning and the noble end of jellyfish.
“I am no jellyfish. I am much better than a jellyfish.”
I said nothing and neither did I nod nor shake my head.
Then Manta began. “None of this is the point. To make a better tomorrow is not in our job description. Those jellyfish out there are what they are and that is all they are; not jelly and not fish. They are a couple layers of cell tissue, some gelatin, and a group of unknowing cells performing a unified purpose and that is all they are and it is all they do.
“Somewhere and somehow in the simplicity of the Deep they refused the psychosis of complexity and elected the sanity of unfussiness. Where do you place simplicity on that upward chart of advancement that you carry around in your ego? You know and I know the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Things, all things, go from order to disorder—there is no exception. The world will be no better tomorrow for our efforts and the more we try to make it better, the more we will make it worse. There will be no better tomorrows. The good is today and the better was yesterday.
“The Deacon has no inheritance in tomorrow because he has no birthright in today. I am no jellyfish either but I am no better than a jellyfish.”
I did not nod. I did not move my head side to side.
Each second there were more jellyfish by an exponential amount. The mass of jellyfish exceeded the mass of the sea.
Then I spoke, “Jellyfish. Jellyfish. Tomorrow. Yesterday. It is not about those things. I don’t begin to understand the Deacon nor am I able to understand you. We are one step away from the completion of our task and now the vitality of raw nature dares us. It stands there and dares us. Imagine that—it dares us.
“It says dive now in the midst of cnidoblast and go into the anaphylaxis of Irjukadji Syndrome because our white blood cells release mediators in response to a neurotoxin from nematocysts. Imagine that.
“Then there is this: wait, which could lead to an out-of-season dive and the savage, cruel, and feral winds of the storm. Imagine that, imagine that.
“It has brought suffering, anguish, and grief from the beginning because unlike those jellyfish, in season or out of season, in the deep or on the surface, it knows we may or may not tempt temptation. Destruction and desperation is not given to us, rather we choose to claim ownership of them.