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Emotions are different in the ocean. You can feel so many other things when immersed in the salt: the rhythm of the waves in your mind, the sway and shine of the moon pulling the tides, the soft pressure-presence-home of the water around you
holding you close, keeping you safe.
Cody stared at one of the arctic sponges near his head, trying to count the pores, trace the millions of honeycomb ridges with his eyes, maybe feel the little to-and-fro of the current through its shape, or at least imagine it. Counting sheep, counting sponge anatomy. Same thing.
It wasn’t working.
Why won’t it leave me?
He was supposed to be sleeping. This far north, the sun never fully set, so his mother would either judge the time to rest by how dim the light became beneath the surface, or they’d simply pick a time when they both were feeling tired. Sometimes, life in the ocean moved in a night-day pattern, or sometimes it just meant traveling when you felt like it, napping when you wanted to. Jess would surely have some terminology for species that didn’t abide a strict schedule – Cody remembered ‘diurnal,’ ‘nocturnal,’ and…crispy, whatever the twilight one’s called, but wasn’t sure if there were more. Maybe if he could ponder some proper human marine biology stuff, that could lull him to sleep, or at least distract him…but that wasn’t working either.
Underwater, it was actually warmer than the air. Home didn’t have winter, not like this – and ironically, this was Alaska-nearby summer. When he jumped free of the surface, the arctic wind was a sharp, rasping bite on his skin and scales. He didn’t get cold anymore, not in the way he could recall when he was young, but he could still feel the chill in the air, the warmth of the water, the difference between them.
He was supposed to be sleeping.
He was, at least physically, comfortable enough, one hand adhered to the rocks he and his mother had taken shelter in to make sure he did not float away with an errant current, and his body cushioned by the layer of arctic sponges.
He was supposed to be sleeping.
His mother was there by his side, an arm’s reach away, and a warm gentle presence on his mind even as she slept. The currents had been rougher lately, and although she kept a bone comb to keep her hair straight, for tonight her long honey-blonde hair was safely arranged in a braid that drifted idly in the water column.
He was supposed to be sleeping.
Why won’t it leave me!?
It was always there, buzzing in the back of his mind. He was fluent enough – he hoped – not to let it leak out, not to worry his mother, especially when sleeping.
Maybe that was some subconscious thing – if he slept, he couldn’t keep it to himself. Would nightmares flow out from his brain, wake her up, spread all this…not-logical…
Fear.
Fear wasn’t a new concept, not really; even with the ocean stabilizing his moods, feeling right and home and connected with everything…Cody could remember…something like this.
When that shark had mauled him, he hadn’t seen it coming. He could barely remember the attack itself; only vague echoes of pain and an existential terror that was both his own and (he assumed) his mother’s. The fear had come after, when he was healing. Fear that the shark might come back, or something else might stalk him in the little cave his mother was using to shelter them. Fear that he would miss the end of summer promise he had made to his Mom and Dad and Jess and Sam (and Mr. Wheatley, he guessed, but if he was honest that hadn’t been someone on his mind at the time).
It was a dull, thrumming sort of fear – one more easily assuaged. Maybe he was too young, too new and excited about the ocean for something so traumatic to stick.
So it had passed. By the time he was well enough to keep pace with his mother again, the fear was gone. Sharks weren’t evil, or anything like that, and the one that attacked him had probably not even been trying to hunt him. It was just confused, mistaking him for a seal or whatever.
So it just didn’t stick. Like a horror movie you watch, get freaked out by as a kid, then grow out of.
This was different.
This fear was lingering, persistent, leaking back into his mind the moment he lost control and let it. It was waiting, coiled like a spring and ready to pounce. It was a block of metal behind his eyes, a tightening rope around his chest and throat.
The worst part was that Cody could not find out what he was actually afraid of.
If he let himself think about it, he could see something. The harsh surgical lights, the smell of bleach and cleaners.
The toothy grin and colorless eyes without a spark of light in them.
A loud gunshot. The taste of whatever the chemical in the water had been.
The fluorescent hospital lights, the beeps of the dumb machines they’d stuck Jess to.
But that all was gone. Neslund was dead, definitely eaten by crabs and snails and whatever else, and his bones ground down by the seafloor.
He couldn’t hurt anyone. He’d been too…too jealous, selfish, something…to tell anyone else.
Cody hoped, anyway.
Maybe that was the fear?
Sometimes, he’d get weird, almost gritty-movie-type thoughts – if he’d seen Neslund die, if he’d gotten on deck to save Jess and zap the whole crew – then there’d have been a vengeance, a closure, something heroic, something that you could be…ugh, proud of?
But that’s not something Cody could make himself proud of. This was real life.
Giving up on pondering the sponge, he tentatively reached out and gently squished it under his palm.
He could probably zap it. Kill it right here. He killed fish and crabs and stuff to eat them with his lightning.
But he couldn’t do that.
He let it go, watching it slowly expand back into its shape, nonplussed by being completely changed and close to death, should something beyond its comprehension have wanted to.
His mom had a little collection of stress balls and other squishable things. He sometimes used them as a kid, more for the sensation than relieving any kind of anger, but apparently crushing something non-destroyable in your hand was supposed to make you feel better.
This did not do that, and he didn’t feel any closer to sleep, and he no longer felt like lying here and trying.
So, with a twist, Cody released his adhesion to the rock and launched himself toward the surface. The water higher up was faintly pink from the low sun, compared with the black-blue below. The dulled, far-away rumbles of distant glaciers breaking and dropping their huge pieces occasionally rippled through to him, and over Cody’s head were icebergs, upside-down mountains that reached toward the sea-floor. Icebergs above the surface were white and sparkling things; here, they were a deep blue, bluer than the sea itself.
Blue like Jess’s eyes.
Somehow, that normally comforting flit of a thought filled Cody with another wave of that fear.
Jess’s eyes, closed instead, his slow breathing in the hospital, the dull lead in his stomach as he could only sorely hope that the heart monitor would keep beeping, that he’d wake up soon…
Instead of relieving the fear and paralysis from lying down, swimming was only making him feel worse; sparking a new, different, almost-childish pang of worry.
He loved swimming, why wasn’t it comforting right now?
So he sped to the surface, cold water rushing over his cheeks and pushing his hair back, and seconds later, Cody was airborne. He didn’t spin or flip or anything, just a parabola, diving back down.
He didn’t feel better.
So he tried again, twirling through the bubbles his first dive had kicked up, and this time trying a barrel roll, letting his elbows go slightly limp and spin out, kicking up a larger splash as he landed.
Still. He didn’t feel any better.
Another jump, a somersault this time.
Another, tucking his torso down to do a fish-cannonball (really more like a lumpy torpedo, but one’s tail doesn’t bend like knees).
Another, a fluid spiral.
Another, a backflip.
He didn’t feel any better. Instead of tiring him any more, his heart was racing, it was doing nothing for his mind. Cardio on a nightmare-prone brain, apparently, wasn’t going to help.
Even the cold-warm-cold of leaping through the air hadn’t done…anything, really.
The water was, normally, where he could relax.
Maybe it was some messed up version of an opposite day; at least he was willing to try.
Come to think of it, in all his summers away, he’d never tried this before.
He poked his eyes just above the surface, scanning around -
- yeah, that would do.
Undulating his tail quickly, he dashed the short distance to the nearest iceberg…
…even in his distraught state, with a pinch of concentration, he phased back into having legs.
He could have vaulted up onto the icy shelf above, but instead, he rose and planted his palms there, hoisting himself out of the water like he had millions of times before in the pool.
All that dumb stuff with Sean and everyone aside, sometimes he really, really missed racing.
That little blip of nostalgia didn’t do anything for the fear.
At least the sensation was new – he still had his cold-resistance, but the frigid air on his legs, the smooth-freezing surface on his bare feet, the almost-comfortable stretch of having knees again were enough of a distraction.
Well, for about 30 seconds.
A passing thought wondered if he’d get frostburn – or frostbite, whatever it’s called – on his feet if he stood out here too long, but he’d probably notice before that happened.
Cody startled slightly at a strange jostling sound, a couple of gruff grumbles from across the way.
There were several walruses on the berg, Cody noticed now, around the bend from where he’d climbed up. Brown, leathery bodies that looked like partially deflated footballs or almost-overcooked sweet potatoes, draped around the ice. The closest one stared at him with dark, pink rimmed eyes, its great whiskers twitching.
Cody jumped, goosebumps all over, as it suddenly let out a roar, a cloud of mist curling around its pale tusks.
Maybe having legs somehow turned off his usual not-alarming-to-most-sea-creatures aura, but at least the walrus didn’t seem like it was about to charge him.
“Hey, hey, sorry!” he tried to raise his voice, but between the cold and the months of vocal silence, it felt strange and grating in his throat. A puff of steam appeared from his mouth, a weird and novel sensation.
The walrus seemed surprised at the display – this far north, it likely had never seen a person – but not overly so. Instead, it merely narrowed its eyes at him and then turned away, grunting at its fellows like it was making a snide bit of gossip. The other walruses seemed to agree, taking turns glancing over at him with a mix of disgruntled croaks and barks, but otherwise unperturbed.
Feeling weird and hollow, as if talking to the walruses should have done something, he simply walked back around to the other side of the iceberg, and sat down, knees up to his chest, arms hugging around his shins.
The pink low-sky sun didn’t give him any warmth to speak of, but that didn’t really matter. As if he was warming back up on the inside, body going human-warm-blood-mode, the steam from his nostrils was getting more prominent. For a second, he imagined Jess in a cold space like this, how that would surely fog up his glasses.
It was enough for a bit of a chuckle.
And then the fear was back.
He should…he should go back underwater.
Cody was mostly sure he would hear a ship coming…but then again, he’d slept through Neslund’s first pass, when he’d closed the distance and followed the tracker…
Granted, a passing ship would see a teen sitting out on an iceberg, and probably not assume it was an insomniac merman.
So he let himself sit there, putting his chin on his knees and staring at the water.
The breaking of the icebergs was louder up here, closer to a roar. They came at intervals, echoing off each other, echoing on the surface. The pink-tinged-dark of the lapping surface drew his attention.
home / away
The water’s voice was, mercifully, still there.
It wasn’t physical, but the thought tingled down his legs to his toes, body suggesting his tail the way your eyes suggest drooping closed after your alarm clock.
Instead of giving in, Cody slowly dragged his feet back and forth, feeling the smooth-cold on his heel, then toes, then back again.
This didn’t help.
All of these were distractions, but the almost-nightmare spring stayed loaded in the back of his mind.
He flopped backward; there wasn’t snow, so he couldn’t try for a starfish or angel or whatever, but he still went through the motions, the frigid air tingling on his now stretched-out belly and chest, the cold of the berg on his back and arms.
Surely, he hadn’t caused it, but the iceberg towering above let out a concerning shudder.
So he got up, quickly and delicately stepping toward the edge, and jumped in.
Old habits – for a second, it was like he was coming off a starting block, arms up and squeezed around his ears.
He grabbed onto that thought, trying for old instincts, even as the ocean below called him otherwise – instead, he stayed on the surface, starting an inhumanly-fast freestyle.
Body routine coming back, he even took side-breaths.
Arm over arm, thumbs graze up your sides, elbow bend-then-thrust-then-push, flutter kick in time, side-breath quick and crisp, not too deep, face back down.
Shortly, he was at the next-nearest iceberg, so he did a flip-turn, cold and jagged surface on the balls of his feet as he raced away again -
- then stopped suddenly, startled out of whatever weird urge this had been -
The walruses had all jumped off as the iceberg he’d been walking around on broke, a huge side of the mountain dropping into the water with a crash. Much more clumsily than a merman’s freestyle, the walruses made a loose pod to swim in the opposite direction toward a new resting spot.
Cody wouldn’t say he feared icebergs, but he’d been unprepared for the crash, and his mind was still on edge – so, he wasn’t really surprised to find that once he re-focused, he had his tail and arm fins again.
The…nostalgia, thrill, dumb whatever was gone too.
You can’t go back. You’re always this, forever.
Freak of nature.
And he didn’t want to go back.
He wanted to be free of this.
Why won’t it leave?
A moment of reflection as he pencil-dive drifted back underwater, and maybe that little swim-team-humanness had been some dumb attempt at that. If he was human again, even all the way out here, he wasn’t a specimen, a prize, an object to steal and hurt and sell and display.
He hated feeling like that. Maybe that was the fear.
The de….well, not de-humanization. De-personization?
He was underwater now -
- and jolted, terrified in a much more present, immediate way, at a massive dark shape coming in his direction. His first thought was shark, and then with another second, orcas.
Merpeople got along with most sealife, but in the frozen oceans where food was scarce, his mother had warned him that a pod of killer whales could sometimes not care about that bit of deference.
Cody pulled in his arms, and rolled to one side of its oncoming path, realizing that it was no group of killer whales; instead, a single huge creature.
It was a whale, though, but unlike any whales Cody had encountered before. His mother’s friend, the blue whale, was enormous, but sleek and smooth, long and torpedoish. And humpbacks had long, pointed faces, black and splashed with white, ridges down their undersides, their large fins like wings, snouts covered with barnacles.
This whale looked almost like a cartoon character. Although its fins and flukes came to hard, sharp angles, the rest of its body could only be described as rounded. It had a thick tail, a bulbous middle, and a blunt head like the prow of an ice-breaker ship. Its body was black, but the tip of its lower jaw was pale as the ice at the peaks of the bergs above, and from front to back there was a series of black spots forming a straight line back towards its tail.
As it drifted closer, it had turned its body to one side, staring at Cody. Its mouth was a great curve, starting low on the snout before arching high and coming back down again just before the eye, enormous yet beady compared to its massive head.
Cody knew whales could not move their faces or make expressions, but from the curve of its mouth, it gave the impression of a nose wrinkled in distaste.
Cody raised a hand in an apology, a very human gesture that he was still doing out of habit to sea-life. He expected the whale to continue on its way, but it did not.
Instead, it turned around, and drew closer and closer until it was only ten feet away from where Cody idled in the water column. It was not as long as the blue whale, not even close. Cody judged it was about the same length as the humpbacks, but given its roundness, it looked much bigger up close.
It regarded him silently; for a moment, its sheer size and the surprise of its appearance had indeed successfully distracted Cody from the miserable whirlpool of thoughts in his brain.
That all came rushing back in.
So Cody started to turn, briefly nodding at the whale. Might as well go back down to the sponge-bed, before the iceberg crashes woke up his mom and made her worry about where he’d gotten off to.
He cherished these summers with her; that was maybe another source of the ache, the exhaustion – trying to keep from her how hurt and terrified he still could be, hoping his nightmares wouldn’t bleed into her dreams.
So no reason to scare her now.
However, with a low burst of a note, the whale did not move away. A gentle flick of its great flukes brought it even closer, close enough that even in the dimness of twilight, Cody could see the details of its massive eye. He froze in his path – the whale couldn’t properly speak, but it seemed to have taken an interest, and Cody didn’t have it in him to be impolite.
And, to be honest, this was a good distraction.
Like the blue whale, this whale had a ring of pale color on its eye, though this one was a colorless gray. Beyond that and inside it was an iris so dark Cody could not make out the pupil. The sclera (thank you, Jess) was red as the sky at sunset. The eyelids were lined, like the whale had applied eyeliner or mascara or something, and surrounded by a circle of white.
It blinked, once, slowly.
Cody blinked too, slow, before realizing that his eyes were probably too small for the whale to notice he was mirroring the gesture.
The whale’s eye seemed to convey some kind of patient bemusement.
Cody knew whales wouldn’t understand his language, but he tried anyway.
What do you want?
It came out too human, too weird, but he was a weird half human whatever anyway, but he beamed the question toward the whale. Communication with sea life wasn’t so word-based, but the whale’s eye twitched with motion, considering Cody’s fins for a moment, before it began to sing again.
It was a low, thrumming sound, vibrating Cody’s whole body; if he were in a better mood, it might have been interestingly pleasant or something, but for now he just found it irritating.
Fortunately, the song was only a few measures long, but Cody thought he got some impressions.
It seemed…curious.
Maybe there weren’t usually merpeople this far north. Maybe this whale was young, and had never seen one before, but as he looked it over, that seemed to not be the case.
In sixth grade, Todd’s mom had been driving him along to an away meet, and on the way back had to stop at her dad’s (Todd’s grandfather’s) nursing home. Having never met his grandparents in person, Cody had been curious, and Todd had introduced him to his grandfather, a man whose default expression was set to ‘scowl’ and vocabulary was set to ‘short and bitter.’ He hadn’t spoken much – at least, not to Cody or Todd – but Cody had noticed some military-looking medals on his nightstand, the distinct and jagged scarring on one side of his face and slim, age-spotted arm.
On the drive back, Todd had (in the weird not-getting-the-gravity-of-it 12-year-old fashion) bragged that his grandpa had survived a shrapnel bomb in World War II.
Another crackle in the distance – the iceberg Cody had flip-turned off of broke as well. For a second, he felt a pang of guilt, as if that tiny tap had somehow caused it.
If Jess had been here, he’d have reassured him that iceberg calving was a normal thing this time of year.
But Jess wasn’t, so Cody just had his own worried brain and this curious giant and old whale to ponder such a thing with.
The whale rumbled again, not quite a song, only a short burst. Cody thought it might have – somehow – noticed him looking at the scars on its face. That theory only seemed more plausible when it slowly beat its tail and rolled, letting Cody see its back:
A large, crooked divot, surrounded by thick bumps of scar tissue, was right behind the bulge of its head. There was no taste of blood in the water, so it did not appear to be a new wound. In morbid curiosity, Cody swam a little higher, peering down.
And spotting the rusted, almost-buried head of a harpoon in its thick black skin.
The whale groaned again, a slightly-higher pitch this time, as if it noticed what Cody had found. With a sweep of its far pectoral fin, the whale suddenly closed the distance, letting the scarred spot in its back drift close enough for Cody to touch.
History hadn’t been his best subject in school, but Cody was pretty sure harpoons had been, like, illegal for a long time. This whale was extremely old.
And had lived through that.
Cody looked down at his own tail. His super-healing meant there was no mark, but you don’t forget what it feels like to get harpooned. If anything, he was grateful that’d been tranquilizered prior to the actual hit.
The whale definitely hadn’t had that luxury.
It sang again, just two notes, the highest-pitch yet.
Whales didn’t speak language, but Cody got a weird feeling – apology, reassurance, understanding.
Maybe he was bringing too much human – or rather, merman – pattern-looking-for/projecting to that.
The whale, astoundingly gently for its size, closed the distance again, nudging its scar up against Cody’s fluke.
Just doing what felt right, Cody drifted down, arms out, and hugged over the whale’s back.
The rough black skin felt unusual on his stomach and cheek, but he stayed there, gripping it tight, feeling its slow, massive heartbeat through his chest.
Of course, the whale was holding its breath, and Cody didn’t need to breathe air here, but – for both of them, Cody imagined – this felt like a long exhale.
The whale stayed still, silent, just its fins keeping it idle in place, for a long time.
Cody made himself not think of anything else, just feel this huge, also-wounded, also-healed creature that had chosen to take a moment out of its centuries to spend with him. The pressure, the warmth, the roughness of the scar and the memory of the pain.
This whale, almost certainly, had outlived many a loved one. Family members, friends, podmates.
Do whales have love?
After a time, even a whale’s huge lungs need air.
With a deep grumble, as if to warn him, it slowly swept its massive tail and headed toward the surface.
Cody stayed latched on, but opened his eyes just in time for the cold air to greet him.
The sun was higher now, orange in the pink, maybe a degree or two warmer than the non-night before.
A geyser-blast from his friend’s blowhole cast a tingling mist over his back; the whale didn’t need long to take another breath, so the two of them were underwater shortly again.
Cody realized, unfortunately, that he’d stayed up all night. If the sun was rising, his mother would surely be soon behind it.
So he let go, looking once more at the harpoon tip, before letting himself sink back down to the whale’s eye.
It blinked once at him again, its weird baleen-bowed jaw seeming less like a sneer now, and more like a strange smile.
It was odd, and not really logical – but just going off of instinct, Cody leaned forward and kissed below the whale’s eye, the closest thing to a cheek such a huge creature had.
It blinked again, let out a three-note melody that vibrated Cody’s whole face…
…and turned away, off into the lightening darkness.
Another few moments, and it was gone.
Cody took one more look up at the oranging surface.
The fear was there. The scars hadn’t healed.
But maybe he could grow around them.
Or at least he could try.