Chapter 21 — The Merging117
@solena.rising
“I kept a piece of myself back my whole life, loves. A hand on the wheel, a foot by the door, something always held in reserve in case the world did what the world does. I’m done with that.
Today I give the tide all of it. Nothing kept dry.
Nothing held out of the water. You cannot merge with one hand still gripping the shore, so I am letting go of the shore, and I am going all the way under, and I have never in my life felt safer. Come down with me. All the way down.”
(draft)
By lunchtime it was as though the morning had never happened.
This is the part people cannot hold when I tell it, because it is not how shock is supposed to work, and that is exactly the point. It was not shock. It was weather. A front had come through at breakfast and now it had blown itself out and the basin had dried off in the sun.
The trestles were wiped. The flowers that survived the rotor were back in their jars.
A hundred rested people moved through the bright rooms breathing their gratitude at the windows, and if you had walked in at noon you would never have guessed that four hours earlier a man had gone the colour of a plum on the floor of it while the room hummed him a lullaby.
I asked after Fathom. I want that on the record, because nobody else did.
“He’s exactly where the tide meant him to be,” Coral said, luminous, and patted my hand, and that was the entire report, then and ever after, because no helicopter was coming back to file one and no phone in that compound was going to ring with news the app hadn’t pre-approved.
He had gone up into the sky and clean off the island, and the basin closed over the gap behind him without a ripple, as smoothly as it closed over everything.
Calla wasn’t at lunch. Resting, someone said, with the soft voice that means sedated, and I thought about going to find her, and I didn’t, because I had nothing to hand her that the room wouldn’t reframe before it landed.
And then, because the day always moved on, the day moved on to the Merging.
I had known it was coming. We had been climbing toward it the whole obscene week, Coral dangling it like a graduation, and now it was due.
The last rung. Deepwater work, the deepest the pairs went, and on the far side of it sat Diver, and on the far side of Diver sat the passports and the ferry and the rest of our lives.
My mother wanted the crown. I wanted the door. The Merging was the toll for both, and it fell due that afternoon, and a man collapsing over breakfast had not moved it by so much as an hour.
There was something almost clarifying about that. The place would not even pause for one of its own carried off the floor on a stretcher. It certainly was not going to pause for my feelings.
“We do it, we make Diver, we’re gone,” I said to her, low, on the path down. The old argument, except there was no argument left in it. “One more. Then we walk onto the next ferry like people.”
“One more,” she said, and didn’t look at me.
She’d been like that since the helicopter, somewhere I couldn’t reach, the brand gone but Deb not quite surfaced in its place, just a quiet white space where one of them usually stood. I told myself it was the morning. I told myself a lot of things on the path down.
They held the Merging in a room I hadn’t been in, deep in the bath house, low and warm and windowless, the walls hung with the everywhere linen and the only light coming off candles in little dishes of seawater, dozens of them, so the whole room moved.
It was, I will give them this, beautiful. Tidewell was always beautiful at the exact moment it was about to cost you the most.
There were stalls around the walls, six or seven of them, three soft walls of hanging linen each and an open front, one to a pair, the advanced ones, the near-Diver couples.
The air was thick and close and warm as blood, and Coral stood at the head of the room in her white, her hands folded and her face soft with occasion.
“The deepest work there is,” she said, when we’d settled. “Most of you have waited a long time to be asked into this room. You’re here because your tides are ready to stop being two.”
Our stall was at the back. An attendant followed us in to take our robes as they came off, brisk and unbothered, the way you’d collect coats at a party, and then she was gone through the open front and it was just the two of us in the moving candlelight, a room full of soft murmur a few feet off through the cloth, undressing, again.
We had done this once before, in the Tasting stall, fast and furtive with our eyes nailed to the middle distance, and I had told myself that time that the not-looking was the decent thing. I knew better now. So, it turned out, did she.
I got my shirt up over my head, and there was no high-minded place left to put my eyes, so I put them on her, and found she had already put hers on me.
Neither of us did the polite flinch this time, the snap back to the candles, the sudden consuming interest in our own folded clothes.
We just looked, and got caught, and kept looking, and I felt the heat go up the back of my neck and watched it go up her chest at the same time.
I am not going to pretend I was above it. We were a foot apart in a cult’s spa room, scheduled and clipboarded and about to be graded on it, and none of that reached me, because she reached down and drew what she slept in up over her head, slower than the job needed, and let me watch her do it.
My mother, bare in the candlelight a foot from me, watching me watch her, not minding, and making sure I could see she did not mind.
Her breasts full and heavy and finally in the open in good light instead of the stolen dark, the soft weight of them, the nipples drawn tight in the warm air.
The dip of her waist and the flare of her hips below it.
The dark between her legs I had lately come to know with more than my eyes.
A flush coming up her chest and her throat that the warm room had nothing to do with.
I was hard before either of us had gone near the oil, and she clocked it, her gaze dropping and snagging and climbing back to my face, and what was in it was not the brand and was not nerves, it was the same thing that was in mine.
The truth of the whole afternoon arrived a good hour early, which was that somewhere on those stairs the two of us had quietly stopped pretending we did not want exactly this.
“The oil is Deepwater,” Coral said, warm, going stall to stall and ladling it into cupped hands.
“Pressed here, blessed here. It’s on your accounts at sixty, but don’t bring the number into the room, the tide doesn’t deal in numbers.
You’ll work it into each other. Everywhere.
Leave nothing dry. The merge can’t happen across skin that’s still holding itself separate. ”
She poured a warm measure into my hands, and a second into my mother’s, and moved on, serene, to oil the next doomed pair, and left the two of us standing there slick-handed and bare and entirely out of excuses.
“Don’t make the face,” my mother breathed.
“I’m not making a face.”
“You’re making the face.”
“This is just my face now. You did this to it.”
So we began, because the alternative was Coral coming back to demonstrate, and we had both learned in this very building where that road went.
I put my oiled hands on my mother and started to work it into her the way the rite asked, her shoulders, her arms, down her back, and she did the same to me, the two of us going at it with the grim efficiency of people assembling furniture against a deadline, not looking, jaws set, professional.
For about a minute it held. For about a minute it was just a chore, two adults oiling each other in a warm room because a cult required it, and I thought, with the last clear thought I would have for some time, that we might actually get through this one on competence alone.
Then my slick hand went down the curve of her and her breath changed, and competence left the building.
Because there is no oiling a body you have spent a week and a half learning in the dark and keeping it a chore.
My hands knew her now. They knew the dip of her waist and the weight of her and the exact place at the small of her back that made her go still, and the oil turned every pass of them into a slow glide with no friction left to hide behind, and I felt her hands on me lose their efficiency at the same moment mine did, slowing, lingering, stopping being a job.
We were very devout about the parts we were not allowed to touch.
I oiled the whole inside of her arm and stopped at the shoulder.
I worked slow circles over her stomach and her ribs and the soft underside of each breast, around them and never quite onto them, thorough as a man detailing a car, leaving the one place my hands actually wanted to be a careful unworshipped island in the middle of all that worship.
She did the same to me, long reverent passes up my thighs that died at the crease and started again somewhere safe, her palms flat on my hips and her thumbs holding an inch from where they were plainly headed, the two of us lavishing attention on the suburbs of the thing and pretending the thing wasn’t there.