Submerged

Talia was slow to emerge from the water, as always. Switching from her regulator to her snorkel, it was her custom to spend a few minutes on the surface looking and listening for whoever might be nearby. Fishermen, scavengers, thieves- she’d encountered each, and very few showed a disinterest in what she hauled up from the deep. Hundreds of feet above Yiu Wa Street in Causeway Bay, she quietly unfastened the camouflaged tarp from her skiff and placed her gear onboard. Unmooring the boat from a railing on the thirtieth floor of the building, she remembered adolescent evenings at the popular boba café on the other side of that same banister. She could still vividly recall standing at that railing, sometimes looking down at the athletic complex far beneath to watch boys play football, and other times simply looking at the vast and various glows of the city, wondering what profound future the world had in store for her.

If she could reach out and speak to her younger self, she isn’t quite sure whether she’d warn her of what was to come. Youth was better spent dreaming than knowing. Nobody really wants to know when they’ve reached the high point in their life- nobody wants to know when the downhill begins.

For her, it started when the ocean began to rise. Nine years ago, when the Chinese government unilaterally decided to spread reflective particles across the atmosphere as a solution to global warming. That’s how the politicians sold it, anyway. In truth, the plan only had a chance of success if other developed countries followed suit. And, well, they didn’t. The science of it all was mostly lost on Talia, but she knew that the rebounding effect when the project was abandoned caused sudden and irreversible damage to the polar regions. Within years, over a billion people had been displaced, and coastal cities like Hong Kong became the eternal tombs for people and things that lacked the wherewithal for relocation.

She started up the small motor and began her zigzagging path to her squat in Kowloon. She always loved the way the crepuscular light reflected off the tops of the glassy buildings here near the financial district. During particularly quiet dusks, she would often lay back in the boat and take in the lightshow of prismatic reflections around her. She could almost pretend the city still stood tall and magnificent, and she was gently floating through the air thirty stories above the crowd.

She felt lucky at moments like these to have been raised in a city that still peeked above the new sea level. If she’d been reared in a low-lying coastal town, she would’ve certainly found herself lost in the growing diaspora to unwelcoming inland cities. Here, pieces of the city still persevered, and so she had persevered for it. Her heart remained here, for she had nowhere else to put it.

In truth, nothing remained for her here besides the city itself. Her friends and family had either gotten out, or tried and failed. Those who remained were strangers- all squatters of a sort, refugees making asylum instead of seeking it. A decent population remained and lived humbly, fishing by day and living in apartments that still sat atop the waterline. They knew their abodes would decay and return to nature in time, but they made no plans except to do the same. Others had constructed makeshift flotillas, where some modicum of community still existed, and trade with the outside world still took place. She would venture to one of these every week to get supplies and exchange correspondence with both clients and her surviving family in Nanning. Although he would never understand her reasons for staying, she was grateful that her brother and his wife had safely made it inland when the oceans reclaimed their city.

The water didn’t rise all at once, but it rose fast enough that very few had time to plan a sufficient withdrawal. Those who got out often left things behind, and her expertise lie in retrieving those things which people couldn’t do without. Heirlooms, family photos, the remains of loved ones- she received requests of all kinds from those who had retreated yet sought to reclaim what they’d lost. It wasn’t always easy work, but she was gifted at it.

Her father had taught her about diving from an early age, had personally taught her little else. Single parenthood had been difficult for him, tormented as he was by his wife’s early passing, and the working schedule he maintained to provide for his family. He still made sure, however, that every Sunday was spent taking the bus to Stanley, from which they would boat over to the Poi Toi Islands and explore the depths.

She lay now in the skiff looking up at the azure sky, and a passing formation of herons above took her back to one such dive off Sung Kong Island. She had been admiring a beautiful soapfish in the shallows, when one such heron pierced the surface and plucked the fish clear out of sight. Later, upon telling her father what she’d seen, he responded that it was only natural, but it resembled the very reason why he took her diving.

His next words stuck with her all throughout her childhood. “The ocean has always nurtured the land, but those on the land have ceased to nurture it in return. Nothing is without its limits, even something as vast as this.”

A sharp cracking sound aroused her from her reverie, and she sat up in the boat with a jolt. She’d come to recognize that sound in recent months- some essential component of a building’s skeleton giving in. The sound had seemed to come from all around, echoing from many vectors when she’d heard it. She craned her neck quickly around, scanning to find which building had begun its death-howl.

She squinted to the South just in time to see dozens of windows shattering in unison from an apartment building that was subtly but certainly changing its shape from within. More groans reverberated across the water, as the building’s architectural integrity approached an event horizon.

Then, the top of the building shifted downward about twenty feet in an almost graceful motion, before lilting off to the side and bending downward into the water, forever out of sight. A small group of people motored away in haste, and although Talia wasn’t sure, she thought she could hear weeping.

The buildings were dying off more quickly now. She knew it was something she had to confront, but she hadn’t been willing to face it yet. It was only a matter of time before it happened while she was under, and the items she sought weren’t usually worth a fortune, were never worth her life.

In hindsight, there were a small number of jobs which might’ve been worth the risk. Jewelry, ceramics, jade- things that would’ve gone for much more than she was getting paid if she found someone to fence them for her. At the time she told herself she was building a reputation, that it wasn’t worth the lie. She hadn’t contemplated then that the city would start sinking so soon. She knew she could’ve earned her ticket out of there, but she’d never wanted to leave.

She’d only ever lied about retrieving one item. Two years ago, her brother had asked her to go to their dad’s apartment to retrieve a locket. She had resolved to never go back there, had felt unable to face the impossible weight of memory. When her brother offered to pay her to retrieve it, though, it had given her strength. She told herself it was just a job.

The job was like any other for the most part. Don the rebreather, descend twelve stories, cut through the window, carefully navigate the empty rooms- no problem. She opened the drawer of her father’s nightstand, and there it was- heart-shaped and glistening. Although she’d promised herself she wouldn’t open it, she used her knife to pry through the mild oxidation, and there they were. The pictures of her mother and father had held up very well despite the seawater. It was the first time she’d seen his face since she tried to convince him not to volunteer for the ad-hoc rescue diver unit. It was the first time she’d sobbed while over one hundred feet underwater.

She left without looking around the rest of the apartment. She had to rush back to her boat, having used up far more oxygen than planned during her emotional fit down there. She told her brother she hadn’t seen anything in the drawer. She told herself that by lying she was protecting him from feeling the same way she had. It hadn’t given her closure, but instead had reopened and deepened an old wound. It was her duty to protect him, certainly.

In the present, she was now certain that it was weeping she was hearing. Someone hadn’t made it out of the high-rise. Another life was lost. Senseless and infuriating, the tragic play went on. Why didn’t they just leave as soon as the building started groaning? Surely that happened long before the collapse began, during the softer prelude to that deafening clap which begat desperation. She was surprised to find a gentle stream of tears on her own face.

She hurried home after that- she felt, in her judgment, unreasonably anxious to ensure that her building still stood, that the locket still lay safely by her own bedside. Usually meticulous in how she stowed and locked her diving gear at her makeshift thirtieth-floor moorage, she tied and locked it away tonight in a hurry. She didn’t even relock her door until after she was clutching the locket in her hand. She allowed her torso to heave gently backward against the wall, and she slid to the floor. She dared not open the locket, but sat there, trying desperately not to hyperventilate.

It felt like some self-aware part of her psyche that she’d buried deep under compartmentalized fragments of memories and emotions was sending smoke signals to her brain from her gut. Her throat gasped and her eyes burned as she was taken back to her last moments with her dad. “Because I can, and because I need to,” he’d explained when she asked why he was risking his life for strangers. Maybe he was a hero, or maybe he had a guilt complex. Years of contemplation would never tell her which. She could’ve asked more, but she didn’t. She’d just been angry. At the world, at her brother, and her father for not realizing that she needed him most of all.

Once she regained the ability to breathe, Talia locked the door to her apartment, and she fell on the bed. The day needed to be over. Surely, she thought, she’d feel better in the morning.

Something awoke her long before sunrise. At first she wasn’t sure if she’d heard it, but the wailing of the building’s pipes gently rose in volume until it sounded like a gentle chorus from a bereft dirge. Occasional sounds making their way through the building was nothing new, but viewed through the lens of the day she’d had, she didn’t see how it could be anything but the preemptive death-knell which precedes that deafening crack from below.

The chain of the locket hung lightly across her chest as she sat in bed, gently sweating. The locket itself felt heavy, like an obligation she’d yet to discharge. To herself, to her brother, to her father, she wasn’t sure which. But she sat there with her eyes darting across the decaying walls, and she realized she had an important decision to make.

Maybe returning it to her brother would just feel like the successful completion of another job. That’s what she told herself, anyway, as she resigned herself to forget about sleep and ready the boat.