Liminal

The dark-haired cop’s name plate read “Haley.” The other cop, Blondie, was one of those that wouldn’t let a big man get close enough to read his name. Haley crowded past me toward the kitchen table and picked up the photo I’d been looking at. He couldn’t have missed it in the thin winter sunlight leaking through the windows: Marie, sitting on the beach as the sun set behind the broken clouds, closing like Smaug’s eye above the breakwater. The light in that photo, nearly two thousand miles south and ten years on, still hurt the eyes.

The petite stranger sitting on the sand had been staring at the ocean and crying...but the look on her face said whatever had made her cry was going to get goddamn dead shortly. I’d captured that goddamn-dead look in the photo before the sun disappeared. She asked why I’d taken her picture. I replied that it wasn’t often a man as big as me got scared of a woman as small as her. When I shared the photo it made her laugh. I’d been working my ass off every day for ten years since, to hear that laugh as often as I could.

Haley gestured with the photo, his eyebrows raised. “This your wife?”

I took a steadying breath. Blondie twitched. “Yes,” I replied. “I have more recent photos—”

Blondie held up both hands. “We’re not quite to that point yet, sir.”

“Then get to that point,” I said. “My wife is missing.”

Blondie’s hands went down. Despite the bulk of his vest, I could see his shoulders drop as he consciously loosened his muscles. He already assumed I was a physical threat. Once he checked my record, he’d think he had probable cause, too.

Big men aren’t allowed to get angry, I reminded myself. It scares people. I took my seat at the table, and tried to ignore how empty her chair was. Both cops visibly relaxed.

“Let’s go over this again, Mr…”

“Castell,” I reminded him.

“Yes, Mr. Castell. You said you knew your wife was missing because she ‘took her nice car.’ What does that mean?”

I told Haley about the day Marie and I packed the contents of her tiny apartment into the back of my moving truck. We’d been dating for a year, yet I hadn’t known she owned a BMW 3 until I saw her drive it up to the tow bar. My shock came out as anger. That car was worth as much as the house I’d just sold. Why hadn’t she sold the Beamer to help me afford our new place in the mountains? She’d fixed me with that goddamn-dead look and said, “If that car is ever too far away from me, I deserve what’s coming.”

Blondie said, “What the hell does that even mean?”

“It means,” I said, working hard to avoid closing my hands into fists, “that my wife hasn’t worked in ten years, but she bought me that truck you see in the driveway as an anniversary present last year. In cash.”

Haley glanced at the F450 that sat outside, then looked more carefully back at my wife’s expression in the photo. “What did your wife do for a living?”

“Marine salvage. Master diver. She had some ‘interesting’ clients back in the day. She wouldn’t tell me who, or what they found. I only know that she paid a fortune to keep herself and that car in fighting trim. She could afford it.”

Haley crooked an eyebrow. “‘She?’ Not ‘we?’”

“I’m a mechanic. This is my house. She insisted we keep our money separate.”

Haley glanced again at the truck and the photo. Then he spared a meditative look at the only decoration on the kitchen wall: the martial arts belt display, filled from white to second-degree black. I’d argued to hang it in the living room; my wife had argued to throw it in the garbage. We’d compromised and put it in the kitchen, where the cooking oils would eventually destroy it anyway. He said, “Maybe your wife just wanted to leave.”

“She’d have told me to my face.”

He glanced meaningfully at the table in front of me. I looked down to discover my hands had balled themselves into fists, making the tattoos on my forearms squirm. He said, “Maybe she was intimidated. Big guy like you, a martial artist—”

He looked startled when I laughed. “Did you even look at that picture? Those belts are hers. Marie isn’t intimidated by anyone or anything.” Except maybe the ocean.

Haley examined the photo again, visibly reassessing both my wife and me. When he glanced at the belt rack the second time, I knew he’d gotten the message: My wife is into shit that’s way scarier than me.

***

That night I dreamed I was drowning in the quarry lake again. Even the longest shafts of daylight dwindled to nothing in the filthy pea-soup water beneath me. I could see a hint of sun and sky above me, but no matter how hard I kicked or how powerfully I pulled at the water, I never seemed to reach the surface. My lungs burned with blood-hot water. I felt the old terror, that I would be covered over in darkness. I feared I’d fall all the way to a lightless sand, and the things that lived there would pick at my eyes.

For the first time, the dream changed. A massive upwelling of ice-cold water engulfed me from feet to head, moving fast. The burning stopped. I looked down, and immediately wished I hadn’t: titans wallowed at the edges of the sunlight, searching. I knew, with the instinct of prey, that those things were my natural predators. Panic wove bands of steel around my limbs. I stopped swimming.

A much smaller shape welled up directly beneath me. As it came to the edges of the light, I could see it was a human corpse—long red hair and black clothes, rising shoulders-first toward the surface. Before I could look away the body rolled to face me in the current. Even though the hair and face were all wrong I knew it was Marie.

A lifetime of stifled anger thawed my bones and made my blood run like lava. There was no one here but my wife. She knew she had nothing to fear from me. I could be as angry as I wanted. I wasn’t ten years old anymore. This wasn’t the quarry lake. I wasn’t drowning. Even though the face and the hair and the body were wrong, even though that body was a corpse, even though every stroke against that cold water felt like it was trying to crush my joints, I knew that was Marie down there, goddamn it. I was going to help her no matter how scared I was of the water. I fought downward against the current and toward her. All my anger was righteous if it happened in her defense.

I caught her hand. It was like touching a bottom-feeding fish, cold and slimy. Kicking for the surface, I pulled her with me. I willed that blush of blue sky to come closer. I pushed her limp body ahead of me, shoving her by her shoulder blades toward the light and the air. The burning began in my lungs again, then changed to pressure as my dwindling air reserves expanded with the ascent. Bubbles burst from my mouth and nose, tickling my face. Her body suddenly got heavy. It stopped rising, and sagged back into me. I smashed face-first into her back. I tasted rot and salt water, though the lake had been fresh. I pushed her to one side…

...and air! There was air. For the first time since I was ten, I’d made it to the surface. I gagged, and spat the taste of corruption out of my mouth. I tread water and grabbed the corpse by the back of its neck and dragged her closer to me. I looked into her dead face, begging it to change, to live, to be Marie...but it didn’t. Milk-white eyes stared at me from under the half-shut lids. The smell was unbearable.

I towed her all the way to shore by the neck of her shirt, the same way I’d been towed by a stranger in real life. I remembered how much that stranger’s voice had meant to me as I was drowning, so I kept telling Marie between gulps of foul water, “You’re okay! Breathe!”

The more I pulled and the more I called to her, the more the corpse began to look like my wife. The long red hair shortened to a spray of sun-bleached blond. The ears sprouted their piercings. The tattoo of the dive mask with semi-colons reflected in its lenses appeared behind her left ear.

The mud flats smelled exactly as they had when I was ten. The dead fish and empty beer cans and pop bottles glittered in the sun. I pulled her up onto the garbage. Lying there in the filth next to her, I stared as the dead face finished becoming my wife’s. But she still didn’t move, and the eyes remained milk-white.

The heat of my anger died completely. I began to cry. I felt a profound emptiness where my heart used to be, a bottomless cold bigger even than the quarry lake. The sight of Marie dead made all my courage wither. Without her, I felt like just another piece of garbage, empty and discarded and forgotten in the mud.

Something in the neck broke with a rotten crack as the corpse’s face turned to look at me. The jaw moved, twisting under the skin as if it weren’t properly attached anymore. When it spoke, its voice was a gurgle of putrefaction. “Jesse,” it said in a voice that might once have been Marie’s. The corpse smiled suddenly, and for a moment, life blushed into the corrupted face. Marie’s voice came through clear. “Thanks. Now I have to learn how to swim again.”

I woke into the cold howl of a mountain night. Rain pounded at the windows in the dark room. I was frozen through, having thrashed all the bedding off me in my dreams. I shook as I gathered the blankets off the floor and put them back on the bed. I made her side and then pulled the corner back, as if she’d gone to the bathroom for a minute. Behind me, the rain at the window changed to sleet, ticking across the glass like fingernails.

***

The plainclothes cop flashed a badge and waited there on the stoop, as if that should force me to open my door to him. Not even a “hello.”

I would’ve been angry about it, before. But I felt hollowed-out, as if my heart had burned to cold ash. I assuaged myself with the knowledge that if he was here to arrest me on suspicion of disappearing my wife, he’d have come with at least two unis and a paddy wagon; I’d never fit in the back of a cruiser.

I opened the door. He seemed uninterested in his surroundings—unusual for a cop. He also didn’t have a partner. He didn’t look at the truck outside the kitchen windows, the belt display on the kitchen wall, or the photo on the table. He seemed focused on me and, oddly, on the glass of water I’d been drawing from the tap when he knocked. It sat untouched at my seat at the table.

Perhaps he was a little too focused. His unflinching gaze worried me. His irises were disturbingly ocean-blue. His voice was flat, too. “Someone in a stolen car deliberately forced your wife’s car off the road this morning. A bridge over a major body of water isn’t an ideal place to do that. Even in Florida, those railings are built strong, and there are cameras. Unfortunately, we don’t know at this time whether the deceased person at the wheel was her. Identification of the body is...proving difficult.”

I heard him as if from a great distance. I couldn’t meet his gaze anymore as I sagged into my chair and he sat across from me. I focused on the water in the glass—that unruffled surface, unaware that my life was ending. The water contained in that glass had smooth, clear sides and a bottom to contain it. In the winter light, the water’s surface looked as cool, unmarked, and reflective as a pool of mercury. I could see the cop and myself in miniature, upside down in its curvature…

And suddenly, I was gone from the kitchen. No cop, no house, no mountain. In every direction, including up, all I could see was bright blue water lit from within, phosphorescent and alive. I felt no need to breathe, no sense of pressure or panic. I had no sensation of my body. I was nothing more than a consciousness…a speck of light, like all the countless other specks that shared this sea.

I watched a distant patch of lighter blue resolve into a humanoid shape, but longer—like a woman with scuba fins, or a mermaid tail. She swam toward me in the long, full-body sweeps of a dolphin-kick. I knew that I had nothing to fear from her...that, despite her giant size and visible power compared to me, her life was in a literal sense far more complex than mine. She had far larger things on her mind than another speck in the water.

It was Marie...transformed. A mermaid, if a mermaid and an archangel could be combined. Her hair was a corona of light, her piercings a second crown of bone spikes. Her skin and body were human, but impossibly long and lean, curved only with muscle and with lines of blue, softly pulsing light, as if her blood vessels showed through. What I had taken for fins were an extension of that pulsing light, extending past her feet and shaped in a way I couldn’t understand but had to be a form of magic natural to her. Her eyes had become huge. The goddamn-dead expression would finally fit her face if she’d been wearing it.

But she stopped the dolphin kick, and she tread water with her hands until she was upright, and she looked right at me, the tiny speck. She smiled softly. “I see you,” she said, though her mouth didn’t move.

I could have asked a thousand questions, said a thousand things, but really there was only one thing to say: “I love you. I want to be with you.”

The smile fell. “And I love you. But I’ve been discovered. I’ve had to return home. You can’t live where I live.”

“Why not?”

“This world is...built at a different scale.”

I remembered what she’d said in the dream: Now I have to learn how to swim again. “You learned it. Why can’t I?”

Her expression shifted to shame. “You’re a Son of Adam. I never was.”

I heard the capitals. Even though I didn’t understand them, they stuck in my heart like knives. “I’m screwed without you. The cops are on my ass and I have no one to help me.”

She waved one hand in a languid gesture. “Kill the blue-eyed man. He will never be missed.” Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how long and sharp her fingernails had become...like scalpels made of bone.

“Kill him?” If I’d had the capacity to swallow my gorge, I would’ve. I wasn’t going to prison again.

“Either that or allow him to kill you,” she said. “Once he sees you have no hold on me, he will end you. That is the one law that binds both Earth and Sea: Eat or be eaten.” She looked over her shoulder then, as if she’d heard something in the deep that I hadn’t. She began to turn away.

“I can’t do this without you,” I said.

She stopped to look at me. “You must. Stand your ground for one year. See my Earthly affairs through to their end. Then you will have all the gifts of the ocean to keep you comfortable, and for as long as a man may live.”

God. Her bank account. She was talking about her fucking bank account. The one I’d never seen. What the hell was in it? “I don’t want your money.”

“You will need it. I thought the mountains, those...other things…” She visibly disregarded the words that had been so important to her previous life, the money, that car… “I thought they would protect me, Jesse. But the Sea is wherever there is water. As you have seen today: the whole of the ocean can exist in a glass in front of you on the table. As long as that man doesn’t report, you will be safe. You will be merely another Son of Adam. I will close this door between you and me on my way out.”

Pain emptied my chest. I held the memory of our beach close: heard the ocean waves, felt the sand between my toes, and knew again that shock of fear, respect, and curiosity I’d felt the moment I first saw her. “We met at the beach.”

She smiled softly. “We did.”

We paused, seeing each other for what we really were.

“Thank you, Jesse, for everything. Be well. Now go home.” She reached toward me with one claw. My vision went dark.

I woke at my kitchen table, staring at a glass of water, sitting across from the blue-eyed man. His expression told me I hadn’t been gone but a blink of an eye...but it was long enough. He exploded across the table at me. I met him with a smile. If I was going to have to run from water for the rest of my life, I was never going to stifle my anger again.