Night Swimming with the Deep Ones

More about Night Swimming with the Deep Ones

The first mistake I made was believing the ocean ended at the shoreline.
The second was believing I had ever been born on dry land.
It was three in the morning when the woman with the yellow eyes came to my window. She had seaweed in her hair and smelled of salt, old pennies, and flowers that had never seen sunlight.
“Come swimming,” she whispered.
“It's October,” I said.
“The ocean doesn't own a calendar.”
This seemed reasonable enough, so I followed her through the sleeping town, past houses whose windows glowed like little aquariums containing human loneliness.
At the beach, the moon had disappeared. Someone had apparently forgotten to put it back after the previous evening.
We walked into the black water.
The cold was astonishing. It entered my bones like a forgotten childhood memory. Then, somewhere beneath my ribs, something opened, and I remembered how to breathe.
Not with lungs.
With something considerably older.
The Deep Ones were waiting beyond the continental shelf, where the sunlight had been extinct for millions of years.
They were beautiful in the way abandoned cathedrals are beautiful. Their bodies shimmered with turquoise and copper. Their faces contained the expressions of people who had waited ten thousand years for someone to return a borrowed book.
One of them recognized me.
“You're late,” she said.
“How late?”
“Three incarnations.”
I apologized.
She waved a translucent hand.
“Time is a disease of the surface.”
They took me down through the drowned architecture of forgotten civilizations. There were staircases leading nowhere, enormous clocks without hands, and bedrooms where people slept inside their own memories.
In one room, a woman sat beside a window overlooking a garden that had never existed.
In another, a man stood beneath a solitary lamp, waiting for someone he had already become.
I recognized them all.
They were the people I might have been if certain dreams had turned left instead of right.
Far below us, a gigantic eye opened in the darkness.
It was not looking at me.
It was looking through me.
Every thought I had ever possessed became a little red fish, swimming out of my skull and disappearing into the blackness.
“What's happening?” I asked.
“You're remembering the ocean before it learned to be water.”
Then the Deep Ones began to sing.
Their language consisted of pressure, temperature, and the movement of enormous invisible animals. Each syllable took a thousand years to pronounce. Each sentence was a geological event.
I understood perfectly.
They were telling me that consciousness was not something the universe had accidentally produced.
Consciousness was the universe remembering that it had forgotten something.
And every creature, from a blue whale to a man drinking coffee in a kitchen, was another attempt to remember what it was.
When I surfaced, dawn was turning the horizon a peculiar shade of pink.
The woman with yellow eyes had vanished.
There was sand in my pockets and a small black pearl beneath my tongue.
I walked home through the sleeping town.
In the bathroom mirror, I noticed two delicate slits opening and closing beneath my ears.
They disappeared when I blinked.
I made coffee.
Somewhere beneath the kitchen floor, thousands of fathoms below the foundations of ordinary reality, somebody was still singing.
And for the first time in my life, I knew all the words.