Essay |

“The Depths”

The Depths 

When I look at the ocean, I see/a house in various stages of ruin and beginning.

                                                            ― Li-Young Lee, “The Other Hours”

 

At the edge of a sea I call out my son’s name. The moon hovers above me, and tugs the water back and forth in silver sheets. The shore, littered with uncountable shells. I hold a whelk up to my ear. My voice speaks back to me.  “Where have you been?” she asks.

“I don’t know.” I say, breaking into sobs.

“There is so much,” she says, “that I need to show you.”

Two years have passed since my electroconvulsive treatments. No longer eating or sleeping, I had slipped under the ward doors as a ghost. I remember the first ECT treatment — the operating room, the psychiatrist’s masked face, the chill of sleep channeling through my body. In the recovery room, I awoke to garbled whispers, the tide sliding from me.

Thirteen times, I dove down into the whorl, resurfacing in a white room. With each treatment, memories sunk into a sea. The surface, broken only by glints of light.

“What is it like,” my husband asks me. “to lose your memory?”  I dredge my mind trying to recall the months I lost. I think of a biologist’s specimen room:  sea urchin, brain coral, and lady slipper — labeled and tucked away.  In the dark, I rummage through drawers, snagging my hand on glowing fangs.

“I need to know what happened,” I tell my husband as I place an order for my hospital records. I scan them for glimpses of myself flashing between the lines of doctors’ notes.  “Where are you?” I whisper. “Come out, please.”

The ghost shuffles past the nurse’s station. The nurse notes: “The patient is disheveled…withdrawn.”  Closing my eyes, I imagine the ghost’s ache, her leaden arms rocking a pillow. She looks up at me, motions to a deep-blue sea. Within its waves, she’s collapsed on a bed. Tears stream down her face.  A small child is sprawled on a twin bed. His face flushed with fever. Urine trickles from his underwear. He turns and wails softly: “Help me, Mamma.” He waits. Then he closes his eyes again.

Sitting in the hospital ward, the ghost rocks back and forth. The doctor reporting: “The patient has intrusive thoughts of having a birthday cake at home and instead of cutting the cake she sliced her son’s throat … She wants to try electroconvulsive therapy.”  The ghost looks up from the swirling water. Her son glides away, tiny arms extended like wings. The ghost gathers the churning sea. With a sob, she swallows mouthfuls of brine.

The shells twinkle into the distance as I walk down the shore. Waves flicker over the body of the beached sperm whale. I lift a composition notebook from its gray shredded jaw.  My name is inscribed on its cover in looping letters.  Inside, poems and notes I wrote during my treatments.  The wind carries a voice saying: “This is a witness, a light in the darkest place.”  The sky shudders, stars tumbling like shingles. The sea parts its crystal doors.

I wade into a room of blue water. A ghost lies in a hospital bed, her body dissolving then reappearing to the sound of incoming tide. With a face formed of pale sand she gazes at me. She motions to the boat tethered at her side.

I’m circling a sea within a sea, riding the current around a body of deeper blue. I cast the notebook pages onto the water. They glow, quivering their way down past roaming sea turtles. I plunge into the depths.

The chill courses through me as I filter down into the twilight. The ghost appears, beckoning me deeper and deeper. The edges of her hospital gown undulate with rainbows. An image flickers. The ghost enters a small bedroom. She changes the child’s wet clothing. Rocking him, the ghost sings softly, brushing his matted hair into a wave. He looks up, smiling. “Mamma, you came.” He reaches to touch her face with a burning hand.

A snailfish glides in front of me — its pale body, a trail of silver. Sulfur bursts from a rocky vent like a sob. The snailfish turns to me, a star pulses in its mouth.  All around us, the darkness clenches down.

A squid’s tentacle glides along my leg.  It melts into the darkness.  Its blue glow, echoed by pulse after pulse. A hospital bed shimmers into view.  The ghost is bent over a composition notebook. “The ECT treatments are getting more and more difficult,” the ghost says. “I’m paranoid and anxious.” Her reflection splits, then merges. “So many muted faces …” she whispers.

The comb jelly sparkles as I touch it, spewing its luminous particles into darkness.  By its glow I search for my son’s face. The ghost swirls deeper into the abyss. Under the watch of an orderly, the ghost places a starfish in a child’s hand.  It curls gently around his fingers.

Tossing and turning, the ghost mumbles from her bed:  “If you saw the world/like I do, you would scream too… / Darkness wears fangs / around its neck …”  She dredges her hands through her hair again and again. Through the sea — the rattle of a million skeletal teeth.

Unable to sleep, the ghost traces her son’s name over and over.  She places her hand against the black pane of water.  She whispers:  Are you looking for me, son? / Peering through shrouds/of clouds, hospital curtains, behind Plexiglas? / I see you rise, a pale image/ in the corner of my eye. 

Dropping steeply, the sides of the trench narrow into jagged cusps. The flickers of illumination yield to a yawning void. The only light, the trailing hem of the ghost’s hospital robe. Black clouds plume from vents. Luminous tubeworms bloom around the openings with their scarlet-tipped ends. The ghost vanishes, and I tumble into darkness.

I grope in all directions. A light glides towards me, an image of a child in front of a birthday cake, he leans towards it, face incandescent with joy. Sobbing, I draw draught after draught of crushing darkness.  The tubeworms sway.  Red tipped mouths, extended like petals.  Plumes gust upwards, as the tubeworms release their young.

I swim upwards into the warm sea, up into the blue room. The ghost cradles my hand. She places a black whelk in my palm. It sings with the brilliance of a star.  My cracked heart throbs with grief and joy. “Now,” she says. “you’re ready to go.”

Moonlight extends down into the forest. I drive into the countryside. The asphalt ebbs into a dirt road. My car undulates around curves, headlights pulsing in the dusk. Pulling off on the shoulder, I roll down the window. Summer air wafts through. I remember the child, reaching for the cake. A hand gently pulls him away. As cicada chatter, I place my head down on the steering wheel and sob. “I’m so sorry.” I say. “I didn’t mean to leave you.”

Yellow curtains waft upwards as I enter my house. I hear laughter, a child’s racing footsteps. “Mamma!” My son tumbles into my arms. I kiss his dark head and soft cheeks over and over.  In the distance, the blue room crumbles between cloud and wave. The sky, cleaving to the sea.

Contributor
Sayuri Ayers

Sayuri Ayers is a native of Columbus, Ohio.  Her prose and poetry have appeared in The Account, Entropy, SWWIM, Cordella, and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks, Radish Legs, Duck Feet (Green Bottle Press, 2016) and Mother/Wound (Full/Crescent Press). Sayuri is a Kundiman Fellow and VCCA Resident. In 2020, she received the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award for creative nonfiction.

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