Anamnesis 2:1
Read Chapter 1 starting here.
Chapter 2: sin sea man
Verse 1: man’s anise
Vave wakes for another day, his aquamarine eyes blinking open. The sun has already fully embraced the sky, shining brightly down on him from well above the horizon. How had he managed to sleep through the dawn? The gulls are already calling and the reef and tide pools are alive with activity. Vave observes as a small crab scuttles across his legs. A starfish in the pool near his head is halfway through consuming a mussel.
“Good idea,” he says to the starfish. It would be mussels for breakfast, then.
He hops to his feet and begins gathering mussels, checking to be sure they are alive by tapping them open and watching whether they close or not. The dead ones he tosses away.
With a hearty pile of mussels gathered and set in a shaded pool he has cleared for his own use, he goes further out in the water to add some variety. A few large sea urchins and some edible seaweeds complete his breakfast. Today he avoids the stabs of the urchin spines. They still somehow manage to draw his blood at least twice a month, though he has been eating them for as long as he can remember.
“Thank you for sustaining me,” he says to the creatures, as he does with each meal. “Some day, my body will feed your descendants, and the circle will close.”
He sits back against the stone while he eats, dancing his thoughts away from the fixation that is always just around the corner from his conscious mind.
Instead, he considers all the many things he can do around the pools and reef. Fishing is the obvious choice. It’s more time consuming than the various other abundant food sources, but it takes less of a physical toll. At some point, he has to check for driftwood and other detritus from the island or distant mainland that might be of use. His ramshackle shelter could always use patches and extra support. He isn’t exactly an architect. An architect…?
There is always the option of a swim over to the island. Increasingly he craves the sweet fruits that grow in the low trees there. The great white sharks, and the less deadly but much more annoying jellyfish, hadn’t been around for weeks. But they’d been there for months before that, and he isn’t sure if he is still in shape enough to make the swim without exhaustion or cramps. And even with the absence of dangerous creatures, he is wary of going too close to the deep waters.
The buildup of squishy flesh around his waistline would suggest that his concern is justified. But if he can’t even swim to the island and back, how does he possibly think he could—no. He pushes the thought away again. Too dangerous.
He could dive and search for oysters, sponges, whelks, sea cucumbers, and more sea urchins. Sometimes there were other useful or beautiful treasures that could be found down there too. Vave settles for this plan. Down there, he knows exactly how far he can go without getting too close to the shelf’s edge and the dark abyss beyond. He’s even set up stone markers down there.
The most efficient method is to dive in from the platform above the tendon, up the—oh. Well, no avoiding it this time. The best place to dive is from the platform about ten steps up the narrow stairs carved into the knee of the stone titan. The stairs. They have occupied his most intense thoughts since the dawn of his consciousness. And from which he has fallen countless times. Once—the last time—nearly to his death.
He does not know who carved them, or where they go, or why he feels the maddening drive to climb them. Time and water have softened and crumbled them. The stone titan’s body erodes much more slowly than inert stone, but it still erodes.
Now, he constantly evades even the thought of them so that he can circumvent the temptation to try to climb them. But climbing up to the platform is still safe. He wraps the strap of his sealskin satchel around his neck and shoulder and begins the trek.
As far as Vave can tell, the stone titan lost his life as he lunged forward on his left foot, and so he remains, his right leg extending back behind him. Vave’s home is in the false intertidal zone and reef that grew up around the titan’s lower right leg. The once-smooth top of the calf and the curving wall that is the back of the knee rise above the ocean enough that he could lash wood and stack his fragile shelter in the crevice where they meet.
The tendon on the left side leads up to the first set of stairs. Signs of past erosion and the location of the stairs indicate that the water level was once much higher. Vave often marvels at how long the corpse of the titan must have rested here.
He scrambles up the rough rock of the tendon as he has done so many times before, and grasps onto the lip of the first step, pulling himself up the rest of the way. The platform looks as though it once held a wooden railing. The stairs crawling up the titan’s thigh, which Vave avoids looking at, are too narrow to have had any sort of support. For the umpteenth time, he wonders who carved them.
Enough thinking, he chides himself. Time to get to work.
He dives into the clear, shimmering water.
So so good.