WHEN WE LIVED ON LAND,
Amy Benson
We had animals we raised to eat and milk and pilfer their young. We had pets that we fed and sometimes dressed and showered with gifts and with language they didn’t understand. Animals kept our stomachs and hearts full, our mouths and hands busy, scooping shit and shouting their names.
Now we have gulls, bold, bead-eyed. Full of unscoopable shit, unpalatable eggs. When everything else runs out, we may learn to love their eggs, their stringy wings, chewy feet, the tiny nail at the end of each toe. Now they eye us as fools, easy targets. Look away and the contents of your hand are the contents of their gullets. They eat too much plastic, but who doesn’t. We painted our floating town in every color but blue (too much like the sea) and black (holds tight to heat), but it is mostly streaked with buckets of dirty white. Bird shit as heat shield, but it burns.
Children will make friends with anything, though, will torture anything. How can we torture a thing if we can’t get close enough. The gulls with a mangled foot, bent beak, or a dangling wing get close enough, though. We’re not so foolish or easy to them. Rejected by their kind, they fatten on our scraps, follow us around in an imitation of love. Or love in its most legible form.
We love the dolphins that sometimes stitch the water around us. They make us feel favored, their visits a benediction. For now. But we can change the story in case our hunger grows.
They said we would be the same. That, as our city split and some re-treated from the flooded streets into the distant foothills and some moved out on the water, we would still be one, taxed and treated the same. Same name, same people, allowed to move freely, to visit the upland community and vice versa. That we would share the bounty of the sea, and they the bounty of the land.
What lies between us and them, now, is miles of flooded city, murky under the surface and hard to navigate. And then miles of saturated land, a colossal saltwater swamp. Puncture your raft and you might wait days for rescue; it might never come. Governments, international aid organizations, had promised elevated roads or trains, electric seaplanes, when they figured that out, but the money seems to have dried up or flowed down a different current. We do visit, did visit. They were always in tumult at first, blasting bedrock, stone dust thick in the air. They built lifts and trams to climb the stairstep town. There was nowhere to stay, they said, the list for housing long. When the building boom slowed, we tried to attend city council meetings again, but every issue was a land issue, every speaker a land speaker. The 50/50 budget didn’t change, though. Not yet.
Some of us secretly thought we were getting the far better deal. A floating city with cutting-edge technology. High-capacity solar batteries, condensed, efficient desalinization, vertical floating farm for genetically modified salt- philic greens, ocean water cooling system. In our sheltered harbor, the colorful little city rises and falls gently with the tide, connected and stable like a lacy honeycomb. Some of us thought we’d be envied – a model community, a tourist destination, an iconic image, like the white-washed buildings of Mykonos or the labyrinthine alleyways of Marrakesh, or the Georgian townhouses of London. They might study us. Replicate our adaptability, our joyful solutions. We lobbied for a wing of hotel rooms, thinking the other half of the city would visit on the elevated trains that were never built.
The last group that went to the uplands came back looking a little hollowed out. Instead of being hailed as the residents of a technological marvel, the cities of the future, they said people scooted away from them on the sidewalk. They closed their faces and fanned their noses. They were called one of the names we use for seaweed. Maybe this was their imagination? A touch of over-sensitivity? Or maybe their unfamiliarity felt to the uplanders like fur rubbed the wrong way.
A few times a year we exchanged fish, iodine, and fertilizer for grain, wood, and dried fruit. A group took a skiff recently, made it safely through the haunted swamps, the many-legged mangrove, and were turned away, they say, on the outskirts of our upland half. It was suggested with words and smiles and soft hand gestures that they might not be welcomed by some of the residents. For your own safety, you understand. We thought it was possible that the group had misinterpreted them.
But it’s sinking in that we will become less and less familiar to one another. There is no way to insist on fellow feeling if the other fel- lows don’t feel it. Pronunciation is shifting already, and vocabulary. At some point, they will snip the continuum into a land language and a sea language. I’m sorry, so sorry – we can’t understand you. Such a shame, what’s happened.
Stories will fill the chasm between us. Do you remember, our stories start now. There is a way that so much water threatens to wash the memories clean.
Do you remember trees? Each one a score of textures – pollen, sap, root, bark, bud, leaf, needle, seed, stem. Each one an economy unto itself. But interleafed, interlocking with every other tree. Each one deranging and placating the eye. Libraries and galleries were filled with forests that took us in and let us out better than we began. If we made a mistake, it’s a mistake we keep making – that trees were there for our poetry and the paper to write it on.
And for shade. We miss dappled shade, gradations of shade, tinted green. Here, it is inside or outside. And outside, the sun is relentless. With nothing but the narrow-angled shade of our two-story buildings. Sometimes we dive deep for a moment just to feel the sun’s reach slacken. We swim under our structures and tread water in the dim, slapping green. Night has become soft instead of frightening. We sit out on the decks and feel and hear what we can’t with our eyes overfull of sunshine. If it’s a still night, we might take a skiff 200 feet out, throw an anchor, and feel half-tethered, half lost in space. Bodies couple and babies are sometimes conceived on the night rafts, but we don’t wink and gossip about them as we might have when we lived on land. Touch is the perfect match for the night raft – it tethers and releases us.
Do you remember when a star was something you glimpsed between apartment buildings? The stories we told about stars were stories about ourselves. How a being must act to become part of the firmament. Or what the arrangement of stars foretold about the opportunities and dangers coming our way, who we should eschew and like and love. The stories about stars are now about stars and how they got there and what and who might be orbiting them. The incinerating surface, the unrelenting glare times a million trillion. And we tell ourselves we are who we need to be. Our science fiction stories used to imagine alien cultures as fixed, but now we think of how those cultures might be uncertain, flailing, their teacups too small for the tempests they pour into them.
Do you remember potato chips? The thick bubbly kind and the thin crisps sparkling with salt? French fries – the perfect mound slathered in gravy or spicy mayo or cheese or with nothing but salt, maybe a sprinkle of pepper or fish flakes, maybe a shake of vinegar or chili sauce.
And hashbrowns with eggs, potato pancakes with applesauce or sour cream. Or the lump of potato in a stew, a soup, a curry, that didn’t turn to mush and tasted like the best part of every ingredient in the pot.
A sweet potato bubbling with its own sugars. A beet like chewing a tender disc of sweet earth.
Do you remember carrots, onions, garlic, radishes, turnips, celeriac, rutabaga? All the bulbous tubers. The soil that wouldn’t drown them is so far away, an unbreachable distance. Our hydroponic green- houses grow vertical ladders of greens that keep scurvy away and we are grateful for the beet green without the beet.
We are nearly zero waste – a dream achieved. We fertilize with seaweed and our pee. We grow what we need and eat what we grow. But finding berries growing in a ditch was thrilling. Finding a soft and heavy fig with not one beak hole, a little triumph. Walking through an apple orchard taking one bite of every variety and leaving the rest to wasps and scavengers. Profligacy. The unplanned. Even unreliability. We secretly or openly loved them. Would we find berries in this ditch again? Who knew? But there they were in that moment, sun-warm be- hind thorns and nettles. We can grow soybeans but no tree fruits and nuts. Pole beans, but watermelons are too costly. Imagine the barge that could host a forest. It would be like a floating zoo.
Do you remember scents that were not the sea? The sea smells like the sea. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner smell of the sea. Our pillows, blankets, couches, T-shirts, towels smell of the sea. Inside, outside, down in the 11 holds. Our sweat smells of the sea. Our clothes smell of our sweat. Our bathrooms smell of shit and then of the sea. The gulls smell of the sea, taste of the sea.
Once upon a time there was the smell of magnolia blossoms – lemon and a cold-water shower and a drop of pineapple juice. Trying to describe a scent without another scent is like trying to convey an image to a blind person using no images. Once upon a time there was the smell of cedar: hazel with generous pours of moss and silt and the shaggy underside of a moose. Once upon a time there was the smell of jasmine: sugar water and glands. A whiff alone created babies. There was the smell of traffic – tar and scorched rubber and dark gray air that burned on the way down and stuck. And the smell of a summer night – fireworks and frying meat and urine and beer and face powder and chlorine. And the warm, sweet nothingness of clover.
Every year we’ll forget one, maybe more, until we think every-thing smelled like the sea, always. Popcorn and bowling alleys and nail polish and new cars and books and antique shops and wet dogs and horse manure and oolong tea and the bottom of a milk carton. We need a scribe. We need new sacred books to remember.
But why? Remembering on purpose is so hard. Remembering on accident is salty-sweet, the exact taste of a tear. Whoops, we just remembered what it was like to tear apart a spruce cone, scale by scale. The cloudy-sharp scent of resin. Remembered what it was like to walk through curtains of scent on a city sidewalk: curry, anise, rodent, hothouse flowers, frying dough, ozone, dry cleaning solvent. Mark it down! The Book of Lost Scents.
There are memories harder to describe. What it was like to lie down and know that it was earth under you, even if it was many floors down, and not water. We were taught, though it’s hard to remember, that the center of our world is liquid, thick and annihilating. But the surface is firm and cool; we could usually count on it to hold up our soft bodies. Shin-jarring thud of concrete and rock, spongy give of the forest floor, seasonal mud and dust of a city park. On land, when new foundations were excavated and mines blasted, we could touch the geological record with our fingers. We walked on time, over eons of death and the dead fed us.
On land we drilled ourselves into rock, sunk foundations we couldn’t kick away. We held on tight and dreamed of outer space. Gravity was our partner on land. On the water, gravity feels like a witch, something that might wink us to the deeps. Water was very beautiful to visit, to dive into, gasp, paddle, come dripping out of. But water doesn’t build a history. It takes a thing and that thing is gone. Invisible currents and trenches. Trace a face on the surface and there is no face.
Do you remember caves? A doorway into the center of the earth. A cavity. Humanity’s first living room. Remember how the tempera-ture dropped when you stepped inside and you could taste a clammy wind? Can you imagine when a cave might have been a comfort? Shelter, shrine, bedroom, studio; instead of an uncanny chasm, where the hill’s breath picked up scents of urine and bats and oozing miner-als, the earth’s aqueous humors dripping and occasionally pooling? If we returned to land, caves might feel like home again – cave bears vanquished, body surrounded on every side by the hardest stuff on earth. Lie down, way back in the deepest pocket. Don’t panic, just feel the heart of the mountain a foot from your chest.
Here, we are like carousel animals, rising and falling on poles with the tide.
Everything we have we’ve made, which sounds like the story of inge-nuity, but it is actually a world without surprise. Which is not true – there is a surprise when one of us finds a new way to die. Occasion-ally we find surprises in the fishing nets, in a sudden ramming from below, a storm that gives no warning. But to be surprised by geology, by the variety in a square yard of clover, in what someone makes and calls a sleeve or a shoe?
Or in architecture that does not need to be smooth or seaworthy. There are no surprises when your sole goal is prevention: prevent rot, prevent barnacles, prevent capsizing, splitting, or swamping. The only surprises are the new ways it finds to fall apart. And in stories – stories surprise us.
We seem to have become a port of call, occasionally, for even less settled settlements. Giant cruise ship communities that drift through the seas, chasing the best climate, the harvest of the moment: yuzu in Japan, fresh green teas along Sri Lanka, strawberries in New Zealand. They like how we prepare and preserve our kelp, so they stop. We freeze, as if bears have materialized. They are mostly wealthy older people; rumors precede them about what you become when you have a surfeit of money, no permanent address, and no future. We control our breathing, count our children.
There was once a teenager among us who began to board the ships and return a few hours later with money and clothing and, once, a waterproof watch. She claimed she sang songs for them and they paid her what they could. We didn’t believe her. We said no song is worth such money, no money is worth such deeds. She tried to relay stories the passengers had told her – about the weather and business of ports of call around the world. We were desperate for unguarded news but felt we might become tainted if we listened. We forced our eyes and ears to go fuzzy. We disentangled. The next time a cruise ship arrived, she boarded and did not return. We’ve made a rule now: no boarding the ships. They bring skiffs to our anchored community and dis-embark if they want to trade. There are a few apartments, now, that give private concerts, soft singing that we can’t hear. We try, we truly try to withhold our judgment; when we say “we,” we include them. We don’t agree on what happened to her: she’s enslaved for acts with unspeakable people, she’s worked her way up to almost captain by now, she’s organized a performing troupe like the circuses of old. We agree on this one thing: she did have a beautiful voice. People claim they heard her voice above all others during solstice singing.
In fact, her voice was legendary, is legendary. Her story has become a ballad – a song about songs and the voice that carried them.
There was a young man who could dive deeper, stay down longer than anyone. We joked that he had lungs in duplicate, triplicate – lungs front and back, lungs down each leg, a lung in the center of his skull, because there must not be much room for brains. When very young, he dove deep and burst his ear drums, came up shrieking and bleeding down both sides of his neck. After a week, his ears scarred over and immune, he was at it again, but deeper, longer, coming up with spearsful of fish and bags of treasure fallen to the seabed. He was like a little god. A slippery eel of a god.
He shed rules like water down his back. He said what he pleased with a wink. He used silence like his bag and words like his spear. He listened when you thought you were alone. He passed on gossip that made children and grown people cry. People began to think they saw him in their homes at night. They would wake and feel something present – lungs silently churning air, the electricity of open eyes in the darkness, the weight of being watched. Some claimed they saw a shadow darting: out of the bedroom, into the hall; from the kitchen to the front step. And things went missing. One copper and enamel earing from a pair, the hair from a hairbrush, a picture from a man’s vacation to the mountains years before the split. Bites of food from cupboards and coolers. Nothing necessary. He stole nothing neces-sary, did nothing overtly threatening. Until he stole a child’s braid in the night. After which the raids seemed to stop abruptly. Had he become frightened of his potential? Had he made a point legible only to himself?
When he was a teen, he began to recruit younger children to dive. Parents forbade it, remembering his burst eardrums, but, to him, the bleeding was not an accident but the point. Morph yourself to the other side of vulnerability: a generation of eels, beyond the reach of our rules. Rather than breaking into our homes, he broke children out of them at night. The first boy to go was the one who wore his hair, since early childhood, short on one side, braided on the other. We would hear splashes and giggles because, unlike him, his recruits couldn’t help themselves. We’d expect the agony of at least one child come morning, and fever and moaning the following week as the ear-drums scarred over and became impervious. They didn’t understand they could deafen, they could die. Or they understood precisely, in which case, we didn’t know what to say.
We told him he had to leave the children alone or face banishment. We didn’t care where he went – mainland, cruise ship, deserted island – but he wouldn’t have a home here if he damaged one more child. We half-expected him to steal a skiff, but we zero-expected him to steal five children and a skiff for each. That was our failure of imagination. We sing the ballad of the eel god now, each deed more impossible than the last in an effort to stretch our credulity. In the song, we call the eel god Tonai, an old word for loss.
We understand, too, that he was inventing a rite of passage, an ancient necessity gone missing for many years. So we have been auditioning replacements – who can braid the strongest rope from kelp and use it to climb the tallest structure? Who can catch the most fish on the summer solstice? Who can make an audience weep and then laugh?
At the yearly council meeting, sometimes we dream big: we need a floating university to hold what might be facts or knowledge; a floating auditorium to recite the memories and sing the stories. But, for now, forever, we use the school gymnasiums, like every town every-where before the split.
There is the ballad, too, of rending: Robes torn from collar to heel. A rip in the fabric of the sky. Friendships broken by distance. Cities split, and true love, too. Two women, in love, with fraternal twins. The couple didn’t say whose body birthed the girls, and no one asked; it was not our way. The relatives of one woman chose land and the relatives of the other chose water. The couple and their baby girls, each woman, each girl was the completion of the other – one fast, one slow, one soft, one loud, one dark, one light. Floating, the couple began to fight. People could hear the decibel but not the matter.
Now, we try on the reason in verses: An old scar came unstitched and bled without ceasing. A dragging hand, a moment in the shade, a fresh betrayal. A fiery temper, a withering spirit. A too-muchness, a not-enough-ness. The chorus tells the only thing we know: an elemen-tal split. One mother and child headed back for land, one mother and child floated on. When the floating twin turned twenty, she left in the night like a lovelorn suitor in search of her other half. We like to think she made it. Sometimes we end the song that way.
So many years later, we have begun to tell the story of how this happened. There was a time when we thought our desires were gauntlets and the pictures in our minds were templates. A pool on a 12th floor balcony, let it be so! A colony on Mars, here we go! Headsets inside which we might kill, own, build, defy anything we want. We thought it could be hot and we’d never sweat, cold without a shiver. Buildings described themselves as Climate Controlled. We began to think of the Earth as a host rather than a home. We forgot that we had always been a species prone to colony collapse. Our every system was set to “Growth” like a drag race through a city, the lights endlessly green. Our big, hungry brains ate the physical world, the virtual world, and the fuel it took to power them.
We’re working this part out yet: Were we punished by a god? Arrogance, greed, blind ambition, these crimes have always been punished by gods. Of course, some gods have also urged humans into conquest – burn them down and salt the earth, make drums of their skin and cups of their skulls. Prayers still come to our lips, though. Oh God . . . And this is where we stop. What do we ask for? We exist, we’re not starving, we’re not dying of loneliness. But it feels like we’re dying of stasis. Being without building. If we asked for change, we might end up looking back at this time as paradise. If we asked for hope, what would we be hoping for? To live on land again? To be respected and beloved? Or for the peace to accept that every day, year, era, will not be better than the last? Bigness Beyond Ourselves, please help us cherish the starlight, the endless rise and fall of the tide, the memory of scents with-out the bitterness of their absence.
At some point, we began to see what would happen in the future. We would need materials and engineering we did not have – cranes and pylons and fiberglass and aluminum and aero-graphite, and silicon and its many minute manipulations. Everything was built with the assumption that conditions would hold. Everything was built to be replaced, superseded, trashed.
And then the drift. When seaplanes come from our sister city with supplies and technicians, they are dry and perfunctory. This is not a reunion for them; it’s a duty they no longer understand. They pull their lips into their mouths and huff through their nostrils as they work. Last time, one asked if we were even trying to maintain the integrity of the structures. As if half our time weren’t spent scrubbing guano from the roofs and decks and scraping barnacles from the hulls. It’s a game, sometimes, for the children, who breathe through bull kelp stalks and load their pockets with just the right number of rocks so they hover a few feet under the surface. We know that our children have grown when they need to add a rock to their pile. An archaic measuring system, revived in their little buckets.
But the children stop after 30 minutes or so. The adults lacerate their hands and pickle their skin in the brine for hours. We burn our dermis on bird shit since rubber gloves disappeared long ago, and if we ask for gloves, we might not get solar batteries or carbon filters. So, yes, we throw our bodies – literally our skin – into maintenance. But we try not to snap; we try to assume the shape of aerodynamic deference. Make it look like we are absorbing their impatience and scorn, when, really, it skirts the tops of our heads and floats off the ends of our hair. Swoop, gone!
That’s what we tell ourselves. But their scorn has rearranged us. We make each other cringe when they arrive, with our hasty gifts of food, our flattery, the way we clamp down on our children’s joy when the technicians snarl. It’s shameful. And necessary. And not enough.
When will you come next?
We’re not sure.
May we give you a list? Just some items we very much need.
What did you write here?
Sealant.
That’s not how you spell it.
Please forgive us. How will we know when to expect you?
It’s undecided.
Ah. Do you know what will decide it? When? How?
I suppose you want to know where, too?
Please forgive us.
There are political considerations. Financial considerations.
Disagreements about taxation.
Fiduciary obligations. Difficult to explain.
Please take our everlasting gratitude back to the city with you.
If they stop coming – they will stop coming – we’ll need others to come to us to perform repairs, install new wings on our floating town for the next generations. But who would those people be? Why would they come? What would we offer in return? Fish? Seaweed? On land you are worth what you pull from that land – rather, what you make 17 others pull: water, rock, metals, oil, minerals, trees, a hundred forms of carbon. What else do a floating people have to offer but themselves?
In water, slime is a major defense. A predator comes and you goo up your skin and slip away. And spines, spikes. Don’t touch! And clouds of ink. We were never here! Despite the damp paper, we write our stories in ink. A conundrum for our permanent impermanence: here we are who were never here.
Amy Benson is the author of two books of prose: Seven Years to Zero (Dzanc Books, 2017) and The Sparkling-Eyed Boy (Mariner Books, 2004). Her stories and essays have appeared in Agni, BOMB, Boston Review, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly, and Orion.