The Secrets of a Fire King (24 page)

They set to work. Even the oldest has joined in, pushing her long, wet hair behind one ear. I pour one glass of water and then another, watching my husband, so intent and hardworking, so earnest and industrious, wielding authority and dispensing his ideas with a steady, judicious hand.

Perhaps the only time he abandoned himself completely was on the day he first saw me. I was standing on the beach, water still streaming from my hair, a dark and startling green. My legs were as white as bone against that whiter sand, my feet great weights I had hauled a few inches, then dropped. I remember
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feeling giddy at the pressure of sand between my toes, at the way the wind rushed up the skirt I’d fashioned, touching my thighs, the soft new skin between.

I remember that I stood still, watching. This man had been, for weeks, my great desire. And finally, to satisfy this yearning I had transformed myself, leaving everything behind to follow him. Although he had never seen me before, he knew me, for I had sung to him from where I fl oated on the surface of the water or clung like seaweed to the crevices of rocks. I had seen him turn, startled, searching for the source of my song, as delicate as the wind in his ears, as haunting as light caught inside a jewel. Fire in a stone, a voice in the sea. The songs of sirens burn within, a happiness so great it feels like pain, and when those songs stop, their absence is vast and even more painful, as if you have inhaled a starless sky.

His handsome face grew lean with longing. And so I, still hardly more than a child, decided. I did not, in those days, understand the concept of exile. I was young enough to believe it was possible to discard one’s past. Possible to leave a world, yet keep it alive in the heart. I never imagined longing for what I’d always had, and so when I looked up from my feet, so new and astonishing and pale, to find him watching me, stunned and somewhat repulsed by my rippling green hair, by my walk like a fish thrown on land, I opened my mouth and I sang to him once more.

Now the tide is coming in and the waves pound harder. A new castle rises out of the earth. My oldest pauses, curling her feet into the wet sand, glancing down the beach to the place where the boy stood earlier and beckoned.

She is learning now what it took me years to understand: that there is always a cost, that the past can be transformed but not discarded. I thought it could, for many years. If my last life was gone, well, there were other distractions, the continuing miracle of legs, and with those legs the miracles between them. In those days I could walk across the room to where my husband stood, absorbed, perhaps, by some state business. I could whisper the sea in his ears and dazzle him with the memory of light fl ashing on the surface of the water. One touch of my hand and he would look up at me, his hazel eyes going a deeper green with desire. I
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had not dreamed, never had I imagined, that by giving up the sea I would discover this, that legs were akin to wings, meant to fl utter and to open and to carry me back to what I’d loved and left.

When I woke up later and felt the surf pounding through the house, trembling through my fl esh, I lived in both places, and I was happy.

What changed? I cannot say exactly. Perhaps it began with the birth of my daughters. In a rush of salt and blood each one pushed into the world. I held them in my arms, as slippery as fish, and watched them breathe. And it was in those fi rst moments, seeing how easily they lived in this place, how much they were a part of it, that I realized my own world was something they would never know, my own language a tongue they would not speak. Just days after their births, alone at dusk on the beach, I put my infants into the water to see if they would know what to do. And one by one they did; they swam as they had within me, a reflex as sure as breathing. But one by one they forgot. Each day I would try, and one day they would know and the next day they would not. And then they would learn to walk and run, and they would play a game with the waves, a game whose purpose was to avoid the touch of water.

And so it came to happen that at night I would leave my husband dreaming and lean against the railing of the balcony, lean as far as my body would allow without falling. Or on those bleak days when we fought or when he traveled, I would wander as far as the edge of the water; I would wade in and let the waves lick my ankles, the backs of my knees, the soft skin of my thighs, until my skirts grew damp and I knew that in another step I would never stop. In those moments I would close my eyes and breathe deeply of the salt air. I would imagine my husband, and when his image rose up in anger or in the everyday blankness that must sometimes overcome all humans, no matter how fine or good they are, then I would think quickly and urgently of my daughters, my three small girls with their waves of hair, dark and light, splashing against their necks, with their small, perfect ears in the shapes of shells. My girls who had been born to walk on land.

I thought then that I could never leave them.

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Yet desire creates itself from nothing, out of air. Seeking, we cast a light and the shadows rise up around us, fl ickering, elusive, and yet with cores as round and powerful as iron bars. What we long for defines us, finally. We are caged by our own desires. Until, yearning, we cast our lamps into the black and invisible sand, we open our arms, embracing
loss
, and
never
, and we give ourselves over to that night.

Or so, anyway, it is with me. My husband plants a flag in the tallest turret, my daughters laugh and smile, and on some unseen, distant border, the unthinkable merges with the irrevocable.

I step back into the cool, watery light of the house, where fi sh swim in the walls and where the air is blue, so subdued. I go to the buffet where the crystal is stored and take the glasses out, their sides and edges as thin as paper. One night last week, as I drank glass after glass of water and yet craved more, I grew terrifi ed of my own dark longings, and I began to weep. A tear fell on my tongue, and for an instant my great thirst was quenched. Then I knew. I went to the ocean. Like someone about to die from thirst, I pressed my lips to the surface of the water and I drank. I drank so deeply and for so long that I came up coughing, salt rushing through me like a wind.

I forced myself to stop, of course. A woman cannot live on salt.

But all week I have been dreaming of this decanter with its delicate etchings, which I filled with seawater, just to know that it was near. And now I cannot stop myself, nor do I want do. I fill all of the eight glasses, and I drink from each one, slowly, with great care and deliberation. I imagine salt sifting into my fl esh, crystal-lizing every cell. I imagine my blood growing thick, and then ceasing, until I am a pillar of salt, a woman frozen in the fl esh. I imagine how a touch would shatter me then, and I think of my heart, so complex and multichambered, grown as bleached and hollow as shell.

I drink, and from that moment on I move fluidly through the days, water hidden everywhere. In the cool jars on the buffet, old bottles tucked inside my drawers. I wake in the morning and stumble into the bathroom, turn on both faucets. Screened by the shower of rushing water, I drink from a discarded bottle that holds
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the sea. I slip back into bed before my husband wakes, and when he turns to kiss me, he licks my lips and murmurs that I taste like the ocean. His tongue is muscular, moving like a fish in my mouth, caressing all those dark curves, that wavery cave of flesh with its high, arched roof and stones of coral teeth. I sigh a song across my tongue and rise over him like a wave. And for a time, a little time, my thirst is gone, and his.

He is a very busy man, and he does not notice when, little by little, I begin to change. You look pale, he says one night. Are you wearing too much makeup? My fingers, touched to my lips, come away streaked white. Salt. I lick my fingertips slowly, one by one.

In the bathroom, I squint, studying myself, these fluid waves of hair, the dark green eyes, all familiar and yet strange to me. And then there are footsteps on the stairs and my three daughters burst through the door, clamoring, their tiny fingers moving like anemones, touching me and plucking at my clothes while they chatter.

They have brought me gifts: shells, smooth coral, the bony spines of crabs, the exotic zebra swirls. Their soft hands brush against my flesh, which is so brittle I fear it will crumble at their touch.

Listen, Mama,
they say, and hold the shells to my ears.
Listen to
the sea.

Days pass in this way. Salt begins to drift from my skin. When I walk white crystals scatter, floating to the lawn, burning the grass beneath my feet. Trails appear on the ground, so that anyone looking could follow my path, where I run and where I linger, the wilted flowers I have touched.

It is fearful, what is happening. Yesterday I bit into a piece of bread and two back teeth shattered into dust, the bitter joy of salt.

Yet I do not stop drinking. I cannot.

One night my husband, arriving late, touches my shoulder as he climbs into our bed. By then it hurts to breathe and so I hold my breath. Anything could happen: My lungs might shatter into dust.

I might dissolve beneath the kiss he places on my cheek. But nothing changes. I listen to his soft breathing as he drifts into sleep.

Then I go downstairs and stand before the glowing walls of fi sh.

In the beginning I encompassed him like a wave, I whispered my songs into his ears, I was the sea incarnate. In the beginning he
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could not bear to be without the salt of me, the steady pulse of me.

I pulled tight around him and I spread out flat to let him rest, and my breasts rose like waves against his skin, and fell away, and rose.

In those days this was enough, and our other longings we kept hidden.

But gradually, his eyes drifted to another, so lush and round that she might have been sculpted from the earth. My hair, so green and full of light, was suddenly too familiar. The taste of me grew stale. What he wanted I could not give him: a fl esh that wouldn’t yield, an embrace full of friction and resistance. He craved women with bare feet the color of earth, so fi rmly planted in the ground that the wind moved through their hair as if through leaves. Women with hands like soft branches, women who stood rooted in one place waiting for him to arrive, to stroke the delicate, white bark of their calves and branching thighs, so supple. Again, and yet again, he went to them, yearning for the earth.

I followed him, quiet as rain, as barely visible as mist. And after a time, when I could bear it no longer, I rose right over the ground around these women and embraced them with the sea.

It stunned them, the transformation that ensued. You can see that they are puzzled still, their yellow eyes glinting to all sides of the aquarium, as if they might understand a mystery that eludes them. Their tails flicker, they turn. I touch my fingers to the cool glass and imagine the feel of scales brushing lightly against my skin, the inward rush of seawater. They are beyond his reach, of no interest to him now, but I take no satisfaction from this. I watch them breathe, their rainbow scales moving slowly with each shift of gills, each pulse of water, and I envy them.

I take a small, silver flask back to bed. When I raise it to my lips, it catches the light, little gleams in that darkness. Later, when the pain begins, it is on this light, these shards and sparks, that I focus. The pain is as intense as that of childbirth, but not localized.

It is everywhere and always. It comes in waves and pounds at me, and I clench my fists against it. It lasts all night, pain that pins me motionless in the bed, pain that turns me into molecules of stone.

Sometime, just before dawn, it ceases as quickly as it began.

I sleep and wake to narrow shafts of sunlight on the fl oor, a
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bed full of salt. When I raise my hands, carefully, lest they break off and shatter, I see that my fingers are as rosy and pink as the insides of shells. My husband wakes and touches the crusts of salt in the bed. He looks at me, trying to assess this latest mystery. “Are you all right?” he asks, caressing my arm. “Did you sleep well?” he asks, running his hand through my hair.

“I am all right,” I say, rising to see if this is so. “I am very well.” When I stand my legs are strong and firm and supple and they carry me across the room. My thirst is utterly gone. In the mirror even my hair seems newly alive. Idly, I begin to comb it. The pain was so intense that it seems I should have been transformed in some visible way, but there is nothing. Just the slant of sun in the window, and my husband whistling in the bathroom, and water running. I consider this. What is pain? Something like passing slowly through glass. Excruciating, yet in memory transparent, a clear veil between before and after, yet in itself without substance.

I think of my daughters, sleeping, and I raise my arms to twist my hair in place.

It is then that I notice. The soft flaps of skin, like tiny wings beneath my arms, tensile fl esh that rises and falls and rises again with every breath. I run my fingers from my waist up over the bony ridges of my ribs, until I feel the beveled edge beneath the wing of flesh. I take a deep breath and it flutters. I hook my fi nger over the edge, feel the rush of air. And I know.

The comb clatters on the tiles. I leave my husband splashing in the bathroom, humming his way into the day. It is early. The stairs beneath my feet are still cool. I pass the open doors of my daughters’ rooms, where they lie sleeping quietly, peacefully, their hands outflung, dirt beneath their fingernails. Through the dim foyer, past the yellow-eyed fish swimming in the wall. The floor is cool against my feet, and then the sand, hot. Waves circle my ankles.

Water to my knees, my thighs, licking its way between my sturdy, human legs. And I keep walking. Water lapping between my breasts, a tongue on my neck, running up my earlobes. I fl ing my hair back to float like seaweed, gold and green. Waves in my mouth, my nose, filling my lungs. And why not, I think, for when my daughters grew within me they had gills, first, before anything
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