The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook - Lydia Millet (primary phonics .txt) 📗

crowd at his back. They were so close now she could see some of their faces—pitted with scars, mouths of stained and missing teeth, some wearing eye patches like kids in Halloween costumes.

You won’t get my brother. You won’t get either of us, she thought, fighting against the strong desire to close her eyes, no matter how useless it would be.

He was right there. He was so close that he filled her vision. His cold face, the angry eyes.

We are afraid, she thought forcefully, but here we are anyway. See? We won’t run from you. 

And then he was on them. And filtering inside. Leaking in. Through the holes and the skin.

She felt his sour essence move through her mouth and down her throat, through the holes of her nose and ears, through her pores, the follicles of her hair, her fingernails. She felt a sickness in her scalp and lungs and at the pit of her stomach, right through the rubber of the wetsuit, from her hips down her legs all the way to her feet, from her shoulders to her fingertips. She felt it in the very ends of her bones—her skeleton, she guessed, as though he lived in it.

He filled her with his rotting sickness, his creeping paralysis. She couldn’t move.

That was what he did, she understood in a rush—he made it so you couldn’t move, you couldn’t do anything. You were mostly water, after all, and so he could move through you—not just the world, but your body. She remembered it from biology: the human body is up to 78 percent water … and then you had no independence. She didn’t even know if she was holding on to Jax’s hand anymore; nor did she feel the reassuring grain of the sand on the fins. All that was gone, all contact with the outside. It was as though she had no center.

She was pure chaos. The chaos of terror.

And then there were terrible scenes—scenes she called up, scenes she saw, but scenes she also knew were true, that had happened, scenes from actual history. She saw the pirates on their ship, their ship that had once held a cargo of helpless slaves; she saw the vicious fights at sea, the blood and dirt and the violence that was casual for them. She saw them kill, with guns, knives, bare hands; she saw them hurt when they didn’t even need to—people who couldn’t fight back, people without weapons. She saw it when she didn’t want to, and because it was inside her she couldn’t shut it out by closing her eyes….

She was shaking, she knew, but the sensation was far away, someplace she couldn’t quite be right now. She thought to herself: It’s not that it isn’t real. But it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to be the world.

And she forced herself to look hard—so hard she thought her eyes were burning. Was it evil? Was it that people were evil, to do these things to each other?

They called them pirates like it was glamorous or something, almost a joke, really, but they were just gangsters who hurt and killed people. The gangsters of their time. How could she get through to them?

Forgive, she thought. The pirates had done all the worst things, and those worst things bound them to the Pouring Man. But if she could forgive them, maybe they’d listen.

But how to forgive them? How?

And then she saw the pirates when they were kids. She saw, in one long rush like a deep fast-forward, a movie that sped through her in swift flashes of perception, the ugly history of their lives. She saw how they were born and how they were hurt, the dingy spaces they barely lived in, the cruel figures that inhabited those small and stinking rooms. She saw how meanness made them feel alone, how the whole world turned into their enemy slowly because they made the wrong choices. And finally that left them here, the unloved and unloving, the criminals that hovered here as ghosts.

They’d lost themselves, she thought. They’d lost their own souls, if that was what you called it—those pieces of themselves that felt pity for other people. The pieces that could love, the pieces that were kind.

They weren’t strong enough, and they were weak when they were hurt, and they couldn’t say no to any of it.

That’s what it is, she realized. You have to be strong enough to say no.

The viciousness came from being weak.

The scene flashed away for a second, and instead of it there was the face of the Pouring Man. Frowning.

Was that the pressure of Jax’s hand? Maybe. It made her feel better.

You are losing, she told the Pouring Man, and as she thought it she felt an enormous grief flow through her for all the people who never had a chance to be happy, to be who they wanted to be, to live in the world without being made of pain. The grief was almost an ache, so powerful, so glittering and moving like a clean, fast river, that it made her forget to be scared.

I can see past what you want me to see, she thought. I can see what people want to be.

The river kept flowing through her, and then the Pouring Man was a few feet away. He had receded a bit. His frown was angry now, his teeth bared as though he was going to leap forward and tear open her throat.

No, she said, and felt sensation slowly creep back into her arms and legs like the tingle after your foot fell asleep. That was Jax, holding her hand—she was sure of it.

A kid would turn away, she thought. A kid who was too weak to stand up to the bad guys. And some people stayed kids forever, even though they grew old. They grew old but they never grew up. They never got stronger at all.

I want to turn away, she thought. Who wouldn’t?

But I won’t.

This isn’t