The Ocean Floor

One of us is visiting the other.

Each of us arrived at some point in time, undertipped or overtipped the cab driver, stepped onto the curb, walked through the revolving door, submitted whatever verification of our identity, made our way down the blue corridor to the north wing, pressed an arrow outside the elevator, pressed “9” inside the elevator, stared down at our feet, up at the increasing numbers, up at the crease between wall and ceiling, back down to our feet. The ding. The smell of institutional chicken soup. Our twin gag reflexes. Then, the door, unlocked, and the next door, unlocked, and the next, until finally a hand-painted sign: Welcome to the Ocean Floor!! Cerulean waves, starfish the color of canaries.

How are you? I say. A pile of books sits between us.

How am I? you say. How are you?

Yesterday, or was it last week?, last year?, sometime in the past, or the past if you’re one who ascribes to time as linear, as many people are these days, or were in those days, or will be, but, at some point on the receding line, I’d been on a ferry. I’d worn a hat to keep the sun off me, but had found so much wind that the hat was in my lap, and also squeezed between my legs was a plastic cup filled with coffee and whiskey and cream and sugar and ice, something I’d bought at the place where I thought I’d get chowder, but where I’d gotten this instead. It sweated through my linen pants. A damp crotch, burn in the throat, light off the water.

I’d left my family—my decent, not unkind husband; three sons who were grown enough to be suspicious of me; the oddly attentive cat; the house with its heavy-lidded windows and showy hydrangeas which was a sort of character in its own right (if my family were a story and not bodies and doors)—and driven east in the still dark, then dim grey, and into the puzzling flashes of yellow and orange before the sun finally got high enough that I could lower my visor for relief.

Any chowder yet? I asked the girl behind the counter.

Too early for chowder, she said. She pointed to the chalkboard: BEST COFFEE IN TOWN. ADD A SHOT!

Why not.

The ferry was unexpectedly empty. A young pregnant mother with a big bag of groceries and a toddler. A handful of retirees. Two teenage boys laughing. One throwing a Dr. Pepper can off the side of the ferry. I stared at them, willing the earth to twitch, and the can to somehow magically be flung back onboard.

What are you looking at, bitch?

Me? I said.

Bitch, he said louder. I took a sip of my coffee drink, pulled out my book and pretended to read though mostly I pressed down pages in the wind.

So, you said. The ocean floor.

The ocean floor, I said.

Spawned by the industrial revolution, the rise of institutionalization began in the mid-nineteenth century when the government began taking on roles that were formerly relegated to the private sphere. In these facilities, the feeble-minded, the hysterical, the imbeciles and lunatics could receive cradle-to-grave care.

But it’s 2024, and one of us is only here for a few weeks. Or so we suppose.

Between us, beside the pile of books, is a pair of navy-blue crocs and a take-out container with a cheeseburger—American, medium rare—and onion rings. The nurse confiscated the plastic knife, so the burger will be eaten whole. She also took the plastic bag. Asphyxiation. Did she check behind our ears?

The table is round. The rings are cold but good. We keep our voices low.

I feel like I could be sitting where you are.

And you could be sitting where I am.

I could be doing afternoon crafts.

And I could leave and get a beer.

I could’ve brought you these ugly-ass Crocs.

And I could be refusing to wear them.

If one ferry ride is every ferry ride. It’s not. But if it was. I am eleven on a ferry with a cardboard box in my lap. I am thirty. I am fifty-two. Over the hill. Under. It’s a Tuesday, a Saturday, a Tuesday. Doesn’t everyone want to be buried at sea?

What is contained therein is that which once contained.

And herein is the rub.

Therein.

Therein is the rub.

That the ashes of the brain are nearly indistinguishable from the ashes of the femur, the heart. But that my femur’s ashes are different from your femur’s ashes, though not so different from the ashes of my mother’s femurs which are not so different from the ashes of her heart, her brain.

All aboard.

This is not our first institution.

Nor is it our best.

But it is our most beautifully named!

Our most beautifully named it is!

Our first shared institutionalization commenced in the late twentieth century. The University of the State’s welcome signs served as a bleak reminder: Where You Belong.

Ha, you said. Can’t argue with that.

And maybe we could have argued with it, but I admired your resolve and so was grateful when you agreed to accompany me to the cafeteria where we slid our matching trays along the aluminum. I was from some small place; you were from some other small place. My parents were divorced; yours were married though not particularly happy. But what is happiness?!?! Haha, we laughed, happily. I didn’t know, and neither did you. Rings or fries? Rings all around!

Thus began our friendship, and so I was particularly pleased to discover that you too were taking Professor Jacob Jacobson’s MW 3:30 p.m. Introduction to Creative Writing class. We can be famous writers, we agreed and took the stairs up to the third floor of Gittinger Hall where the westward facing windows let the sun stream in.

Not true. But oh that it were.

Anyway, we did take the stairs and in the mostly windowless room of the University of the State slid into adjacent desks which we’d soon—under the direction of Professor Jacobson; No, he’d said, Just Jacobson. I’m not actually a professor and mister feels weird; and such, under the direction of Jacobson—scramble into a shape that resembled something that resembled a circle.

Welcome to Whale Watching 101, Jacobson said, and everyone sort of laughed except that one confused girl with the black Reeboks. We’d made it. We may not have been on either of the coasts, or at some fancy private school, but we were sitting in a classroom where our intellects were respected enough for the professorish person to crack jokes. We pulled out our Moleskines—black! matching!—and prepared ourselves for notes.  

Show, don’t tell. I underlined show twice.

The passive voice is to be avoided. Hahaha. This guy!

Something about not shooting the bear in your pajamas.

Your characters should not vomit to reflect an emotional state. You drew a picture of a crying face, projectile vomit shooting into the margins.

We were so alive. This was going to be the best class ever, the best year ever.

And finally, Jacobson said, for the love of all that is good on this earth, do not, and I mean, do not, do not EVER have your characters MEET in Creative Writing class. They shouldn’t talk about writing. They shouldn’t think about writing. They certainly shouldn’t BE writers.

It was all very sound advice, and we followed it to a T that semester. Your characters were mostly ne’er do wells who worked at waterparks or gas stations and fanned the flames of unrequited love while I gravitated towards little girls who sucked on seagull feathers and were abandoned by their mothers.

Did you know the ocean floor has the same general character as the land areas of the world? No shit. Mountains, plains, canyons. There are even streams of water like our rivers. Like you could be in the ocean but rolling up your jeans and putting your feet into the river, casting your line, catching a fish at the same time a fish is swimming past your face. It’s not exactly an alternate universe, but isn’t it? What we don’t know about what we don’t know is so much vaster than what we think we don’t know. And what would you do with the fish? Would you carry it up the mountain? What is in your pocket in the alternate universe? How do you clean that deep blue marlin? Do you have a knife? You have a knife!

The floor nurse approaches us. “No weapons. No weapon talk.”

Okay, we say. Sorry.

The rings are gone. We take turns picking the sesame seeds off the burger’s bun.

One need only look so far as Hugh Everett to figure out where this is going. In his 1955

thesis, Everett, then a PhD student at Princeton (notably not The University of the State), put forward an idea about an amoeba that splits into two daughter cells. Here, the daughter cells (if they have minds!) recall an identical history up until the point of splitting at which point they branch into their own worlds thus creating parallel histories. This extends into the universal wave theory which pinpoints the exact location of any particle in the universe at any given time while also describing every possible location of the particle at that instance.

One of us is visiting the other.

Choppy waters. Wind. Whiskey.

Here, my head is in my mother’s lap. Here, the boat’s bottom is glass. My youngest son sits cross-legged staring down into the abyss and counting plastics vs fish. Here, my hat has been carried away. Here, the seagull feather. Here, the rain.

Jacobson loved rain. Even though he warned against using weather to establish what he called mood, he’d get visibly excited when thunder clapped. In this way, it’s easier to pronounce the rules of fiction than to abide by them. Jacobson had plenty of rules. He was, he told us, a master of the fine art, a title bestowed by the University of Another State. I remember there still being hope back then. We weren’t poised for the apocalypse. There were still golden toads and mountain mist frogs. Chinese paddlefish swam up the Yangtze. You could start a story in one place, have some thunder clap, let something happen, and then end it just a little left of where it began.

Back then, I could have probably saved you, or you me, and no one would have questioned it. We were told to suspend our disbelief, and we did.

The nurse brings a little cup. Pills the color of seashells the color of pills the color of seashells. Anything to dull the pain, dull it all.

I liked it more when we were self-medicating. Quarter pints after Jacobson’s class. Pisco Sours at the Golden Chicken. The years like a sieve. That night at The Blue Raincoat. The song we sang on infinite loop. The moments like whatever is opposite a sieve. The boat we took where the River Corrib meets the sea. Who fell in? And the blanket over us after. The alarm going off. How we thought we were in danger. How we stayed very still as the alarm blared. The clipped toenail of God , you called the moon as we stared deep into the dark sky. Can I use that? I said, and I never used it, but I’m using it now. I saved it for this. What’s this. What’s this. Fresh hell; bluebells. A jigger, a jag. Cradle-to-grave. But which of us to save? Before the this and the that. Before and before and before. What’s that about the past being the same as the future. All a matter of which way you’re facing. I lick my finger, hold it up in the air to see from where the wind blows—

The deepest known debris on planet earth is a plastic grocery store bag. Down 6.81 miles beneath sea level, on the ocean floor, it billows like an unknown sea creature. For Chrissakes, Jacobson said, don’t try to turn it into a morality lesson!

I’m not. I won’t.

But what happens when the very world we’ve come to occupy has made us suspend our disbelief, when the wars and viruses, plastic sea creatures and talking machines, the ferry from Manhattan on what would have otherwise been a beautiful Tuesday in September, the cab uptown to visit the one who might as well be us, when these go from works of fiction to embodied experience? Our amoeba daughters gaseous glow.

One of us is visiting the other.