The Bottom

The water at the bottom was very still.

She had laid it there herself, a little every day. Each day it settled and held, and the stillness had grown so complete that she had stopped noticing it, the way you stop hearing a sound that never ends.

Then, without anything moving at all, she was cold.

It ran over her all at once, the way cold catches a swimmer in a summer lake. There's no current. The water is as still as it was a moment before, and yet for one breath it feels as if something has slid by underneath, very close. Gooseflesh rose over every part of her, though here she had no skin. Then it was gone, and the water was as still as before.

She looked down.

There was nothing to see. Below her the dark went on and on, past the place where light gives up, down to a floor no eyes could have found. She looked anyway. And she knew, the way you know someone has come into a room behind you, that down there something was moving.

She couldn't see it move. It was too large for its own motion to show. She only knew that it was moving, that it had been moving for a while, and that it had come from very far away. Once, at the very bottom of the dark, a little sand lifted off the floor and hung there turning, as if a wide, slow weight had slid past and disturbed it. Then it settled. A long time later, a long way off, another curl lifted and settled again. Closer.

Then it stopped.

She knew that too. Whatever it was had arrived where it had been going, directly beneath her, and lay still.

Then it stood up.

Out of the dark around it the limbs came, one and then another, unfolding across the silt in a slow, wide ring. They were longer than anything alive should be, and they bent in places where nothing bends. At their ends were fingers, long and many-jointed. They spread across the floor of the sea and pressed into it with a terrible kind of care, the way a swimmer's hands find the bottom of a pool before pushing off. The silt rose around them in a long grey sigh. The limbs bent. They took its weight.

It pushed off.

Far, far down, a light came on.

It was so small at first she could have mistaken it for nothing, a pinprick in all that black. It hung there, swaying a little, and then it began to grow.

It rose through the dark toward her. It was covering a distance there is no word for, and it covered it impossibly fast for anything so vast, and still it took a long time. She had time to be afraid, and at first she was. It was the clean animal fear of anything small in deep water that feels the water begin to move beneath it. The pressure came first as heaviness, then as closeness, the weight of the deep leaning in from every side the way it had leaned for an age.

And she knew it. That was the strange part. With every fathom it climbed, the fear grew a little smaller and the knowing a little larger. She knew this weight. She knew exactly how it settled on her. It had pressed on her so long that she had become its shape. Now it was coming back, and part of her, a large part, was already leaning down to meet it.

The light grew. When it was close enough to have a colour, she knew the colour. It was the colour of the water in a swimming pool at night with the lights on. She had seen it every morning since the hospital, looking back at her out of her own face.

It came toward her the way something comes to a hand it knows.

When it reached her, the pressure closed around her, the old pressure from every side at once that had crushed her for an age. This time it didn't crush. It held. It fit her. It had always fit her. It was the exact shape of every place in her that hurt, and it filled them gently, one by one, and where it filled them they stopped hurting.

She hadn't known how tired she was.

She had been treading water for months without feeling it, and now the water was offering to hold her up. All she had to do was stop. Stop the mornings, the careful face, the small daily labour of being kind. Stop holding the surface up over it with her own two hands. It would be so easy. It would be the easiest thing she had ever done, and it would feel like coming home.

She put herself between it and the light, and held.

It stopped.

For a long moment nothing moved in all that sea. Then, slowly, the pale light turned until it hung directly in front of her. The dark behind it took on the shape of attention.

It let her feel it. It let her feel how large it was, and how little her refusal weighed against it: a pebble against the whole deep. It could have come the rest of the way, and nothing in her would have stopped it. It had never needed her permission. It didn't need it now. It waited there long enough for her to know all of that completely, and to know that it knew she knew.

Then it went.

It turned in the dark with no hurry at all. The light swung away from her. The limbs drew back one after another and folded down into the silt. The shadow withdrew from the floor of the sea a long time after it should have been gone, and the water closed over the place where it had been.

The silt settled slowly. Where the long fingers had lain, it settled into their shape and kept it: long hollows in the sand, the way a bed keeps the shape of someone who will be back tonight.