The Seas (16 page)

blue – n. Fr. bleu 1. having the color of the clear sky or the deep sea 2. melancholy 3. puritanical 4. obscene 5. faithful 6. said of women, especially those with literary inclinations

If one word can mean so many things at the same time then I don’t see why I can’t.

“Are you going to stay here?” she asks me again.

But I still don’t have an answer. Instead I tell her, “In the Arctic there’s a string anchored to the bottom of the sea at 13,681 feet. Along the string scientists have attached their instruments: sonar to measure ice caps’ thicknesses, vanes to measure current, a conductivity-temperature-depth recorder, and a fluxgate compass since regular compasses don’t work so near to the magnetic pole.” And then I ask her, “How do I know this if I’m not a mermaid, if I don’t belong in the ocean?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe you’re a scientist.”

“Maybe I’m both,” I say.

“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe you’re just good at making things up.”

“Maybe.”

The polar explorer’s shipwrecked men waited and waited for weeks, existing on ice and little else. They had sent their beloved leader off on a rescue mission, but the horizon remained unbroken and some men had secretly given him up for lost. By noon some men felt a surrender set in, a surrender that oddly felt a bit like joy. One man removed his boots so he could feel the packed snow between his toes. One man built a castle of ice and spent the day imagining it was real. One man secretly dragged a knife blade across his arm to make certain he was still alive. He was. Which is how he saw the ship. The steady line between sea and sky had been unbroken for days, days that had begun to pile up and wilt. “I must be getting snow blind,” the man thought and turned his back away from the horizon. But something had lodged in his vision, the blue afterimage of a ship, a rescue ship. He turned back to the sea that he had, just moments before, considered walking into. He turned back to the sea and saw the tiny ship getting larger.

That is how I feel, only there’s no ship, just the sea to rescue me.