Nowadays, among those who live linear lives, I’m reminded of the caverns of my memory. In the gloom of my apartment, in the dead of night, I sit at my pheasantwood desk and stare into the tank of boomerang-shaped fish on the wall opposite. While flickering blues from the backlight dance across my barely-inked page, I try my hardest to remember the life that I've lived, over and over again. Moonlight from my half-drawn window slips over brilliant blue scales and I feel the rush hit my heart as my eyes meet a deep bulbous stare. With a net, I fish the wriggling creature from the tank and place it on the desk before me.
If you’ll join me, the fish will take both of us back, to the time and place where I’ve spent all of my life. Had the events been unclouded to my twenty-two-year-old self then this ritual simply wouldn’t be needed. Just imagine! How you’d bathe in my godlike constructions, watch my hands slowly crafting the elusive island of Kirité from mud, dirt, and reed, and believe every detail I’d describe! Do not think of me as the creator, or the narrator of this story: my mind is buried deep beneath a blanket of blue, and I’m unfit to do it justice alone. Watch instead, as I cave to my puppeteers’ whims while they pull on my strings with their fins. Watch now, as they raise their kin to my lips and force my tongue against the rough, spiky scales.
“Get me where I want to be,” I whisper softly.
From the flickering tank, they pull my pen across the page of my notebook, using their lustrous blood as my ink. I seal my eyelids shut and let my mind go adrift in their comforting, omniscient stare. In the darkness, I swim behind the rattling glass and can sense them beginning to encircle me. As my entire world shakes like an ancient ritual, the tank’s water filter crescendos into the sound of an engine, powering through a wild ocean beneath.
…Then I am a welder again, aboard the cargo ship ‘The Maze and Majesty’. I gaze through the porthole to my left and watch the horizon of Mauritius fade into a distant obscurity as my vessel departs. ‘Lunch break can’t come soon enough’, I think to myself, retreating from the onslaught of sparks spitting mercilessly from the hull and lifting my signed safety goggles over my sweat-stained fringe.
“I wonder how Trent and Marquis are holding up, those bludging pricks,” Susilia grumbles to Maya. I watch both of my peers wipe ash from their faces and trudge defeatedly over to where I’m sitting, panting from exhaustion.
“Let’s see how they like it, aye? You down to call in sick with us tomorrow, Red?” Maya proposes through grit teeth.
I agree to their plan, return to my shared dorm, and find Trent in horrendous condition. His face, sickly green, shivers beneath a thick duvet. I’ll have to tell Maya and Susilia to call off the scheme, he hadn’t been bluffing, after all.
“A lady came past, looking for you,” Trent splutters and groans to me. “She said to meet her in the boiler room. Didn’t say why.”
I drop off my toolset backpack and heave through the halls in search of her. The boiler is bound by a heavy, portholed door, and as I open it, my nose fills with a strong sulfuric scent. Its source is a woman entirely suited in tan, at a desk in the room’s bulb-lit corner. She introduces herself as Maddison. She’s odd in appearance – hair a wiry mess, head tiny in comparison to her broad, sweeping shoulders, and her eyes intensely dark and commanding. Their darkness spears my chest; hauls me the length of the room; and then seats me across from her, shaking with nervous curiosity.
“This feels like a job interview,” I jokingly chuckle, before realizing that’s exactly what it is.
“I could use your help, Redwan. I work in substance procurement,”
I tense as the words flick my brain like a trigger switch. I feel my impulses press their scaly fingers against my neck to lead me back towards their graves with a shovel. My skin prickles. My veins start to pulsate and itch. My ears trickle with the whispers of a demon, who croaks;
“... What kind of drugs do you sell?…”
Without answering, Maddison places a silver suitcase on the desk. She flicks the clasps and presents a three-eyed fish to me, proudly.
“This is a Kiritian Flatbed Bluescale.”
“It’s a drug?” I softly seethe, fighting to hide my disappointment.
“The rarest, most expensive drug of all. My buyers are the world's one percent, and I’m the only distributor. One lick of the scales will get you where you want to be.”
Maddison’s eyes swirl as she speaks, a black oil spill. Something swims in their nothingness; something at odds with the otherwise off-putting energy that orbits her. Comfort. Surety. Confidence, perhaps. Whatever it is, it calms me.
“A lick?” I ask unsurely. “Lick the fish?”
Maddison nods patiently. I politely mask my skepticism.
“...But where do I come in, Maddison? I’m a welder. ”
“A rather good one, I’ve heard,” she replies, relighting a half-smoked cigar. “I need a diving tank made: the fish live deep underwater. I’ll pay fifty grand for you to weld one, and you’ll get a cut of the product. However much of it your heart might desire.”
Did my heart desire the wet, alien fish before me? It desired something. A feeling. An escape.
“...We’ll need to reach their habitat,” Maddison declares, “They’re unique to Kirité: a tiny island, not too far from here.”
“I’ve never heard of Kirité,” I admit to her cautiously. “How do we get there from here?”
With a mischievous smirk, Maddison simply replies,
“Tell me. Do you want to get there?”
Lunch has ended. My mind reaches up from the boiler to Maya and Susilia, who’d be returning to their tools, baking alive in the smolder and the sun. As I weigh up the money and the medicinal mysteries promised, the itch expands and prickles across my scalp. I gaze longingly at the suitcase. The fish watches me through fearful, alien eyes as I turn my own upwards, and nod. Maddison picks it from the suitcase and turns on its side. She swipes the scales with her tongue, then she offers it to me. I stare at the long, trailing dorsal fins splaying out between each of her fingers. The creatures’ eyes are hauntingly animated. I flee their argent gaze and meet Maddison’s instead.
“How will it feel?” I ask her; my arm hairs upturned and trembling.
“It will get you exactly where you want to be.”
But where do I want to be? I stop, silence the whispers, and think. I want to be gone. I want to be off this hunk-of-shit ship, high as a kite, released from it all. My blood races; my head pounds; I feel my skin flush with rage. I raise the glimmering creature to my lips. The beastly engine powering on beneath rears up and then fizzles out. Maddison clasps her hand to mine, and in the final seconds, I’m drawn beneath her eyelids to a world turned inky and black…
…I’m now on a beach. The shoreline is partially concealed by upswept sand from ocean winds, and as I scan its miniature horizons, my eyes water and sting. Maddison is nowhere to be seen. Aside from the rocks and the seabirds, Kirité appears to exist as a sole, lonely sandbar of nothingness.
But as the sand settles and fades, so does my confusion. My wandering boots stumble gradually onto more hardened ground and tufts of grass begin shooting up around me. I follow their wiriness to the end of the sandbar, where a towering, sandy grasshill emerges from obscurity. The top is sheer and steep, insurmountable, even. The left is bordered by craggy cliffs, which sail down to a bed of jagged rock. Dried-out dashes of shrubbery cling to the clifftop and sprawl downwards on the right, where I spy a rusted, sheet-metal hut. Behind its door I find Maddison, sipping from a hip flask.
“You made it,” she smiles, seeing me at the door. “Welcome to Kirité.”
Black and white seabirds, which Maddison calls ‘Butlermen’, croak soulfully as she gives me the tour. The two of us shuffle down the precarious hillside, spilling sand down the slopes to be absorbed by the rippling waterline.
“The hill doesn’t stop at the water,” she explains, reaching into her suit pocket, unfolding a pair of sunglasses, and pointing to the ocean’s abyss. “It keeps descending underwater, ‘til it meets a coral seabed. That’s where the bluescales are.”
Then, I’m led to a driftwood structure: my workshop-to-be. The familiar smell of sawdust and charred metals greets me, and I scour the room in amazement. It’s impossibly advanced. Two jerry cans and a petrol generator wire over to a central workbench – littered with power drills, solder guns, and welding irons. A mountain of sheet metal, scrap parts, and glass embrasures lay half-buried in the sandy floor, and behind it, there’s a familiar light-green backpack.
“My toolset!” I exclaim, hauling it up. “How the hell did this get here?”
Maddison shrugs, shoots me a weary half-smile, and hands her answer to me in a plastic bag. I lock eyes with the fish again. It’s the same stare, but less abrasive. The pupils are cold; they’ve lost their glimmer of life.
“Same way we, and everything else, got here," she explains, gesturing to the scrap metal heap. “The details are always missing, Redwan, but that’s how the drug works. Don’t question it, just be glad that it does.”
As Maddison rises to leave, a question erupts from my chest. “Does it ever scare you… all this uncertainty?”
“Of course,” she states firmly, gazing out at the sand. “We all fear what we don’t understand, Redwan, but it’s the same deal every time. No grogginess, no withdrawal, no memory at all. Bluskale gets you where you want to be. ”
Once she leaves, I lick the scales again…
…And return as a shivering mess. The air has chilled, and the skies have greyed, though I don’t recall the seasons changing. The result of all my blood, sweat, and tears lies before me: a metal cylinder with a porthole window, strung to the roof by a chain. I run my weathered hands along its rust and its barnacles, and smile gratefully into the eyes of the bluescale. When I squint, it almost looks like they’re still smiling back. I leave my post to give Maddison the word.
I check her tin shack. I check the beach. I check the rocks and the furthest sandbanks. I scream her name from the top of the hill and let it echo along the cliffs. I scour the sand for footprints. The Butlermen huddle for warmth at the shore. Their backs facing my shivering body. I wish I could join them.
She has left me to die, I think to myself. Or, perhaps, she is just beyond the hill. The slope that I thought was insurmountable. The rocks that look unclimbable. I climb them now, scrabbling for the top. I walk the forbidden line, then slip behind it. I’m beneath the island’s shadow.
Did I wake up too early? I wonder, catching sight of it all. The blackened valley, the toothlike rocks, and The Maze and Majesty: Scuttled, washed ashore, and torn to shreds. I trace its hull, climb its ladder, and there I find my friends. The deluge of seawater floats Trent’s body to the roof of my dorm. I wince at his frozen, bloodless face. On deck, I find the ragdoll corpses of Susilia and Maya; slit necks folded together in a final lover’s embrace, as though trying to seal one another shut. Marquis is in the halls, with a fire-axe in his chest. Someone pulled off the walls as well; ransacked the metal parts, scraps, and sheets which lined them.
There is a tan-suited body in the boiler, but I ignore it. Instead, my fingers frantically dart for the suitcase, flick it open, and trace the morsel of slippery blue. With tears beading at the corners of my eyes, I take the plunge. It will get me where I want to be…
The blueness is a bright blur here. My eyes must have weakened again. On the moonlit pages before me, lustrous, silver cursive settles and fades to black – to the tune of my gurgling water filter. Hunched over, I step from my desk and hobble to the bathroom mirror. My skin is wrinkled and grey.
On the last page of my notebook, there’s a line I’ve addressed to myself. I don’t remember writing it, nor when I would have thought to.
“This is where you wanted to be.”
I see my sunken cheeks, my gruesome wrinkles, my unwashed silver hair. I want to laugh or cry at the suggestion, but back at my desk I feel the strings once again. My eyes swim with the fish I once ripped from the seabed, meeting each of their cavernous stares. I watch the backlight refract from their scales to my pupils and my skin prickles as the whispers return. They cry to me. They beckon me. There are so many of them. Watch again, as I reach for my net.
I have wasted my days, drowned in flickering blues. But this is where I wanted to be.