Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

Before Cal died, Mum would have explained calmly and logically that the universe was all existing matter and space—10 billion light-years in diameter, consisting of galaxies and the solar system, stars, and the planets. All of which simply do not have the capacity to cheat a person of anything.

I can’t remember that first conversation, but I remember other ones: books, the planets, time travel, kissing, sex, the circumference of the moon. It felt as though I knew everything there was to know about Henry. Like just didn’t seem to cover it.

I’ll tell you some things about me. Maybe that would help? I like science. I like math. I like solving problems. I believe in ghosts. I’m particularly interested in time travel and space and the ocean. I haven’t decided what I want to do when I leave school, but I think I’ll either study the ocean or space. Before that, I think I’ll travel. The first place I want to go is the Atacama Desert. It’s 1,000 kilometers, running from Peru’s southern border into Chile. It faces onto the South Pacific Ocean and it’s known as the driest place on earth. There are parts where it has never rained. Things don’t rot without moisture. So if something died in there, it would be preserved forever. You can see on page 50 of the atlas in the Letter Library. (I’ve also marked some other places I want to see in South America.) Will you tell me some things about you?

“If we all gave up on the things we love when it gets hard, it’d be a terrible world.”

“I had a dream where Cal told me he could see the world from above,” I tell Henry. “He said the seconds were pouring off people, tiny glowing dots pouring from their skins, only no one could see them.” “Beautiful dream,” Henry says. “Is it? Wouldn’t it be better if the seconds were adding up? Do we have a set amount of seconds to live when we’re born or an unknowable number?” “An unknowable number,” Henry decides. “How do you know?” “I don’t. I believe.” He rolls over and looks at me. “I believe I am adding up to something.”

Dad introduced me to Borges’s short stories one night in Year 10 when I was looking for something interesting to read. He put a copy into my hands, and told me to read “The Library of Babel.” I read it with the dictionary beside me. I only sort of understood the thing. It was full of mathematical and scientific references that I wanted to discuss with Rachel, but she’d left by then. I decided it was about people needing the answers to the world, to the universe, and going mad trying to find them.

“Sometimes science isn’t enough. Sometimes you need the poets,”

“Words matter, in fact. They’re not pointless, as you’ve suggested. If they were pointless, then they couldn’t start revolutions and they wouldn’t change history. If they were just words, we wouldn’t write songs or listen to them. We wouldn’t beg to be read to as kids. If they were just words, then stories wouldn’t have been around since before we could write. We wouldn’t have learned to write. If they were just words, people wouldn’t fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, and stop aching because of them. If they were just words, then Frederick would not search desperately for the Derek Walcott.”

I could get through quite a bit in life with her holding my hand.

“I love you.” And it’s a small spot of light in the darkness. It’s brilliant, unbelievably brilliant. Life is still shit, but it’s great at the same time.

I say. “I love you.” And then I kiss her. Later, much later, at a time that is unknown to me at this point, I will unbutton Rachel slowly. I will kiss her collarbone, and think of watermelon in summer, explored down to the rind. I will hope and imagine that I can see our lives from above the universe, hope that we are together for the course of our lives. But at this moment, it is a kiss. It is a kiss that continues while we put the “Prufrock” letter back in the book and back in the Library. It is a kiss that continues while I lead her up the stairs for some privacy. It is a kiss that continues through the years. But at this moment, it is just the start.

Love of the things that make you happy is steady too—books, words, music, art—these are lights that reappear in a broken universe.

But I do believe we have choices—how we love and how much, what we read, where we travel. How we live after the person we love has died or left us. Whether or not we decide to take the risk and live again. But what is the point? I imagine you asking. For me it is this. On a night when I could hear the ocean coming in through the window of my room, a woman I would marry and have a child with told me she loved me. Our son was just a hint on our skins. The stars were milk on the darkness. I did not think about losing her. I thought only that she loved me, and we were happy. You say that the ocean is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, and the thing that terrifies you the most. This describes how it was for me to fall in love with Elena. Perhaps all things that are worthwhile are terrifying?

I’ll tell her about the idea that memory can transmigrate, from the dead to the living. I’ll tell her about the beautiful, impossible thought that Cal might have, at the moment of dying, transmigrated. I’ll tell her that I think he had been transmigrating all his life: leaving himself in the things he loved, in the people he loved. He brimmed over the edges of his own life, and escaped.