The Boat Was Late

The boat was late, and the family was getting restless. Two girls and two moms found themselves in Hawai’i, standing on a dock and staring at the ocean. Their gap-toothed little girl complained that it was too cold. Her lanky older sister assured her that they were lucky because they had forgotten their sunscreen and the day was particularly gloomy. The Pacific was gray, the same color as the sky. Nothing is ever really separate anymore.

One of their mothers, Deep Voice, said, the sun’s rays can still penetrate the clouds. Not as dangerous as a sunny day, but beware! It’s one of the Earth’s many illusions. Her long-legged wife added, Funny how things work, huh?

Gap-Tooth shrieked: The boat’s coming! The boat’s coming!

The boat took them a mile along the coast, stopping at a cove where sand was replaced by muddled rocks and cliffs. They weren’t there for the beach but for a snorkeling trip. The women put on their vests and goggles attached to breathing tubes. Long-Legs was worried. Perhaps the water was too cold for their girls.

I’ll try it out first and see, Deep-Voice said.

The girls were buzzing alarm clocks, repeatedly shushed by their embarrassed mothers while the instructor was instructing.

In the case of an emergency, alert your partner first and then we’ll come and get ya, the instructor said. With a wink for no one in particular, or everyone equally, he added: There are no sharks in the water. Believe me, I’ve checked. So the women stood, and Deep-Voice jumped in. The ocean always made her uneasy, but she gave the okay.

The girls sunk in.

But this story is not about the family of women. It is instead about a man on the boat whom the mothers hadn’t noticed at all. He was there, rest assured. At the dock, his back was to the ocean. His gaze lingered on the infantile rocks of the island of Hawai’i. Oh, how they fascinated him, their coldness and jagged edges. On the boat, he was squished toward the edge, hidden from the family’s peripheral vision. Though he went unnoticed, he couldn’t ignore the two little girls, full of life on this somber day. Weren’t they afraid of the ocean like he was?

The man’s body was like a ticking clock. Could it have been windchill giving him shivers, causing his body to twitch and his leg to shake? Or could it have been the fact that the man had never wanted to go snorkeling at all? He was afraid of the ocean. After all, he didn’t come to Hawai’i to see the fishes but rather to explore the complex formation between volcano and tectonic plates at the Hawai’ian Volcano Observatory.

He had lived along the San Andreas fault all his life and spent years studying it, its earthquakes, and how the Pacific and North American plates scrape alongside each other. Rock against rock. He had become obsessed with geography. His mother said it was because she had given him a globe (now outdated) when he was a child. He’d sit by it all day, staring at how enormous the Pacific Ocean was. After hours spent cycling through oceanic encyclopedias, he discovered a map of tectonic plates, a map that erased the social and physical concept of continents. He often said it was the only map that mattered.

Still, from staring at globes, the Pacific overwhelmed him: how often the Mercator projection had undermined it, how strange for Hawai’i to be at the center of it, how unexplored by oceanographers it was, how strangely the Earth behaved. What terrors did the Earth hide? Though not a marine biologist nor an oceanographer, he had ruled out prehistoric sharks and other common lore. It wasn’t the ancient that scared him but the present-day creatures undiscovered by man.

It’s sooo cold, Gap-Tooth said, swimming alongside her family, a reminder of how silly his thoughts were. How often did people snorkel in the ocean without trouble?

He jumped in, submerging into Earth’s blue jelly. Goggles on, he breathed underwater like a fish and greeted a school who swam near him. He observed them: partially blue and black, small and narrow, tiny compared to him. As if he exerted a gravitational pull, they approached him but made sure not to touch. That was a line not to cross, he assumed. They stared at him, and he felt as though he were the one being studied. It’s rare for the man to be examined the same way he examines the Earth’s crust, he realized. He looked down at the ocean floor. About twenty feet deep, he guessed, but he knew he was wrong. It was likely much deeper. He stayed close to the family for comfort.

A sea turtle had snuck up under him. He thought it was a shark, for all this time he had been keeping an eye out for them. The instructor hadn’t eased his worry either. No matter, his heartbeat slowed. They’re just fish. Orange ones and yellow ones, they couldn’t hurt him.

He assumed the position of a seal—floating on his back, facing the sky, breathing the cold air. His ears traversed above and below water, hearing splashes from under and Gap-Tooth from above. She and her sister were splashing and screaming until she said Stop it, Sissy!

A heavy zoom pulsed through the water. It lasted a second, long enough for the man to register it before something fiery pierced his torso.

Pointed. Sharp. Rough and slimy. Scorching hot glass punctured the bottom of his spine and coiled itself around it. The man’s breath slowed, and heart fastened. Beat! Beat! Beat! His arms flailed upwards and sloshed the water into a soapy white. Burning, he was burning. He thought himself a salmon being cooked on the stove. Yet the ocean cooled him like ice until he was burned once again. Whatever was clinging onto him was stubbornly strong. But he wasn’t worrying about the likelihood of his last breath, that he might die under a grey sky or get cooked alive.

He was enlightened.

*****

About forty feet down, a cephalopod had rested until it attacked the man at the surface. Like everything that had ever existed, it had always been there. Sixty-five million years ago, cephalopods in the Pacific Ocean hovered over a hot spot on the ocean floor where the Earth’s core pulsed heated rock into the mantle plume until islands formed.

The changing habitats caused the octopus to evolve. With each new island, a new feature emerged: with the first island came the abundance of coral reefs and plentiful food—all necessary for growth in size. By the second island, the chromatophores of their skin turned russet and textured as stone. Their tentacles soon became sharp like daggers ready to mince their prey. Of course, by the fourth island, they had become accustomed to the heat, ready for any leaking fissures that came their way. Like photosynthetic plants’ need for sun, the heat became addicting. In the fifth island’s creation, they sank as close to the leaking core as possible. The sixth and seventh blend together: their skin carried stone, and they could withstand the heat of lava, in turn becoming enlightened themselves. Though some native Hawai’ians have seen this molten octopus, some man in the future will claim himself the discoverer of such a species (later they would be called octopus petra).

Scientists of today wouldn’t consider the Earth a living thing. The man hadn’t even considered it to be. Stones lack deoxyribonucleic acid. They’re acellular. Lifeless, the man believed.

But had he considered whether stone or dried lava could hold as much information as his own DNA? The man discovered what the octopus had discovered long ago, that the Earth had its own nervous system. In its early lifetime—when space was in astral chaos, heat flanking every part of the solar system—the Earth was a clump of asteroids, accumulating in high temperatures. At the microscopic level, the atoms were sensitive, teeming for sculpture. At normal temperatures, atoms spin and shake and breathe their histories. But heat excites. At scorching temperatures, the same atoms scream and stomp and dance and tremble and live. It’s impossible to ignore them. Magma is the only substance on Earth capable of replicating such high temperatures. And so  lava becomes the earthly synapses that send information from neuronal atom to atom.

In that puncture of his spleen, what felt like liquid glass was an octopus’s tentacle millions of years in the making—just like him. For all his life, the man had believed that his narrative was the only one to exist. Was it arrogance? Perhaps it was humanity. And in that puncture, he had seen their entire history—islands formations, coevolution, contact with heat. A man is not made of one history, but the infinite clusters of atoms that create him.

He was an atom attached to a boulderous asteroid when the solar system was a competition—when the largest clumps would win. He zoomed past space debris at enormous speeds in microwavable temperatures until he landed on a mountainous asteroid. The impact made him feel as if his bones had cracked. A larger asteroid sandwiched him between the two. Every bone in his body shattered. This repeated for many cycles—being crushed but never terminated.

Then, once the Earth was properly formed, the man was on the crust. A part of the Earth he had studied for so long. He was part of the dirt, carried by a creature that resembled a modern cockroach. This one, though, was slender, slimy, Paleozoic, and deep red. It hissed whenever it stomped on him. Crushed bones, this feeling wouldn’t go away.

The man found himself underwater in an estuary. Naturally turbid, he couldn’t see anything. The water made him feel clean, and he smelled the fresh seaweed around him. A fish, not much different than a catfish, swam over him and he latched on.

He was on the horn of a woolly mammoth until it died. Inside the stomachs of many rapturous birds, which felt like plastic wrap. Under the fur of a Mesozoic sloth that  stank of sulfur. A tropical frog’s sticky skin that  gripped him like glue. He had met his first Neanderthal when he was hidden in a bush. He was a knife made out of an elephant’s tusk.

Then he was inside his first Homo sapien. With so many assumptions about the heart, love and its intoxication, he was surprised to find himself inside one — dark and red and suffocatingly metallic. He was human feces at many points of his lifetimes. He was in bloodstreams and in hair follicles. The body, like the Earth, has so many biomes to explore.

He was on a wooden ship crossing the equatorial border in the Atlantic Ocean. He was part of a dried tobacco leaf and then released as smoke on a Caribbean island. He was a sugar cane stalk where he was crushed by hundreds of men. He was a grain of sugar, lost in its abundance, for several decades, refined and lightened.

Nothing was ever stationary, he quickly learned. He found himself on a metal ship inside a sugar cube. On a spoon, a woman mixed him into her tea and swallowed him. He stayed in her body, traveling through her bloodstream from stomach to uterus until she birthed a child. And he clung onto that child’s spine as he grew. The very spine of the man himself!

One atom, one history. Like zooming through infinite reels of film, he had seen the histories of every atom in his spine, where he and the octopus touched. The man took joy in experiencing millennia in a second. He took joy in knowing that he had been everywhere, a part of the Earth and beyond. He took joy in knowing that to live was to leave remnants of yourself for others to consume and witness and remember.

*****

Gap-Tooth had noticed that the sun had come out and the sky had turned a warm blue. The sun, mommy! she said. I need my sunscreen!

Deep-Voice assured her she was okay. A little heat doesn’t hurt.

Long-Legs had been looking underwater and saw the molten octopus. How could she miss it? Its head was the size of a dumpster bin. Its tentacles, like harpoons, extended up and snatched onto a man. A man!

The instructor yelled to return to the boat and dove into the water. Long-Legs grabbed her gap-toothed little girl. Deep-Voice yelled for Lanky: get over here now!

Lanky had recently started art lessons and had learned basic color theory principles—primary colors, the secondary, the complementary. She knew blue and red made purple, or as her instructor would correct her, violet. When she looked to her side at the growing splashes from the man she had not seen previously, she saw hints of red. Blood, she knew it was blood. And for some reason, she had not thought to see if the man was okay, nor did adrenaline pulse through her body the way her mothers’ did. Instead, she wondered why the color purple was absent. She tried concentrating and squinting but nothing, just ruby and dark blue. This was the first instance when the Earth would prove her wrong.