Mariko by Kaylie Saidin

Before Mariko went missing, she liked to swim in the open water of the cove, just beyond the tide pools. On days when there was no surf, waves, or wind when sails hung still on catamarans and the sun soaked into the backs of crabs and fried them, she’d put on her mask and snorkel and slip into the ocean.

I watched her from the tide pools, flat on my stomach with my chin on the rocks. The pools were sheltered and filled with glassy water, but just beyond them was the cove, where the open water was almost forty feet deep. The spot was a local secret: the visibility was strong there, the water clear as a crystal ball.

If it was cold out, Mariko would wriggle into a black wetsuit, and I’d zip it up in the back for her. I’d watch while she lingered on the surface, floating like a seal and watching sea creatures swim. Schools of neon orange fish would surround her like a cloud. Eels would dart below her feet. Octopuses would extend their tentacles upward. Once, I even saw the outline of a juvenile shark swimming below her. I’d called out her name and waved my hands to try and get her attention, but she stayed there, staring down at it.

It wasn’t close to me, she said when she’d returned and stripped from her wetsuit. It was down deep. That’s the cool part about this spot. These things are always there when we swim. And you can see them here.

I wanted to be as unafraid as she was. In the ocean, we were out of our territory, not the apex predators any longer. We were visitors to a foreign world that seduced us. As much as I felt humbled by the sea and its presence, I didn’t find comfort in the knowledge that a shark is always there, even if I can’t see it.

§

After no one had seen Mariko for three days I was getting worried. I told them to check the cove, even though I didn’t want anybody to know about the cove because that was our place.

They found her swim fins there, the pink slip-ons she wore to spearfish. My mother was there, and he said that one of the fins was covered in moon snails and brine, but the other was completely untouched. She said that the fins were placed neatly against the cliffside, like she’d just casually pulled them off before diving in.

The village started to panic. They held a meeting in which we all sat cross-legged in a circle, holding hibiscus flowers and closing our eyes and shaking our heads.

Mariko was always getting into trouble, they said in hushed voices. Remember when she was six and went and hid up in the banyan tree eating bananas, and everyone thought she’d run away?

They vowed to find her. We lived on an island. There were only so many places she could have gone, they said. They said this, and I thought of the great sea that surrounded us, expanding in all directions, an endless universe. The world underneath the surface that we saw only fractals of.

In the circle, they asked me all kinds of questions about Mariko because I had been her best friend.

Makena, you have to tell us the truth. Did she ever carry pork with her? Did she ever leave chopsticks standing straight up in a bowl of rice?

The grass was pokey and pricked the undersides of my thighs, leaving pressed indents. The waves crashed against the black beach behind us. The sand there was black because it was made of disintegrated volcanic rock. One day, I knew, the mauna would erupt again, and the lava would flow back down to this beach and take it over again, and then it would cool and harden and sit there until it crumbled, too.

Did she bunch objects in groups of four? they asked me. Four is the number of doom; it’s kanji identical to the kanji for death.

I thought about how, after her pinky toe was sliced off in an accident at age three, she only had four toes on her left foot.

A search party went out for her in the night. They called her name down the streets and up the mountainsides lined with fog. They carried flashlights and shone them upward into koa trees. The lights beamed like torches. They looked the way I imagined the night marchers, ghosts of ancient warriors who still walk the island. They called Mariko, Mariko, their voices and heavy footsteps in time with one another, sweeping the underbrush like the beating of a war drum.

Did she sleep with her feet facing the door? That is how the night marchers drag you out of your bedroom by your toes.

Did she ever whistle at night? That is how you summon them.

I knew what everyone was thinking. That she was dead, gone for good, her body somewhere in the sloshing ocean being nibbled on by triggerfish. No one would say it out loud; they didn’t want to invite this demon of a thought into the open, but it was there, lingering above us like a hand.

After the meeting, as I sat on the porch with my knees pulled up to my chest, listening to the crickets and myna birds patter about in the evening dew, I saw a long red-headed centipede crawl through the leaves. I wanted to kill it on instinct, but I knew that if I smashed it in its center, it would simply become two. I watched it slither away into the darkness that hung around everything.

The creatures on land were known to us––wild boars that charged through the woods, escaped roosters in the road we swerved to avoid. But the ocean held secrets, held fish the size of our hands that could swim three times faster than us, electric eels with toxic spines, spiky wana nestled into coral beds, long creatures with black eyes and too many teeth. Mariko was mesmerized by the world beneath the surface. She liked it better there.

I got a terrible feeling in my chest when I thought about how she was never afraid of anything. The others said that there is no sorrow in death, that her spirit simply found a jumping-off point. But I wasn’t so sure she was gone. There was something about the wind that drifted through the canyons, the smell of sweet flowers that dipped under my nose then disappeared, that told me otherwise.

§

Something I never told any of the others was that just before she went missing, she made a new friend.

I was there when they met. We were wandering along the beach before dinner as the pink sky was swallowed by the horizon. Our families were smoking meats from the backyards of houses along the water, and everything smelled of chili and sugar ginger. Mariko and I came to the corner of our secret cove, where the cliffside jutted out, and crossed it, wading ankle-deep through the low tide.

On the other side were four boys standing in the circle. Their hair was long and salty, and their eyes were contorted in a jest. They held driftwood, which they raised over their heads as they taunted something in the center of the circle.

Between them all was a honu, a green sea turtle with broad-shoulders and an ancient shell. I had usually seen honus drifting lazily over reefs, their long flipper arms digging into the water like oars. They ate kelp and little crabs that marched along the ocean floor. Sometimes, I spotted one sunning itself on the shore, halfway submerged into warm sand.

But here was a honu on land, and it was surrounded by boys with sticks.

I knew some of these boys from school, recognized them from the humid classrooms we sat in all day, the folded paper footballs they’d flick across the room. Once, one of them had made a tiny origami crane of a post-it. He’d done so quietly and then placed it at the edge of his desk, where he stared at it for the rest of the day. I’d thought it gentle, but I saw him clearly now, standing to the leeward side of the turtle, a snapped piece of bamboo in his hand.

They stopped speaking and turned to face us in unison. Their eyes were blacker than the incoming tide.

I took a step backward and grabbing her arm, said, Mariko, let’s go back the other way.

But she didn’t listen to me. Her thick eyebrows became furled and pushed together in the middle, the way they always did when she became angry.

What are you doing to the honu? she had said.

It’s not your business, said the tallest boy. Go home.

But Mariko wouldn’t listen. She marched to them and stood in front of the turtle. Then, she grabbed one of their sticks and threw it against the rocks.

Leave him alone or I’ll tell, she said.

She cocked her head in the direction of the parents, who were smoking meats just around the corner. The scent of kiawe wood drifted through the air. She stuck her tongue out at the boys and widened her eyes like a warrior.

The boys acted indignant, but they eventually sauntered away from the honu and left it alone. The one who made the origami crane looked behind him, as if to see if she were following. He looked at me and said nothing, but I swear I saw him nod.

I felt grateful that Mariko was there that night with the honu. Because if I were alone, I would have left. I would have turned around and blocked it out of my mind. I would have eaten spoonfuls of shaved ice with condensed milk and let the image of four boys about to beat a turtle melt away.

Mariko knelt beside the honu but didn’t touch it. It seemed like she was speaking to it, her mouth moving quickly and silently. She sat by it and watched as it made its way to the lapping waves. It eyed us as it went, those big glassy eyes with eyelids always at half-mast, always watching with a careful distance. It often looked like honu had animal eyes of black, but if you got up close, they had pupils, and some even had surrounding rings of clear blue. I felt strange looking at those eyes. It seemed like the honu knew something I didn’t. In fact, I was sure of it.

§

In the weeks before she disappeared, Mariko had sometimes talked about the honu.

I was swimming out in the cove, and I saw him again, she told me.

She knew it was him because of the way his head cocked outward at her and the way he swam toward her, like they were old friends. He came up from the depths and to the surface, where she was floating stomach-down with a snorkel. After taking a breath of air through his slatted nose, he swam beneath her body and allowed her to touch his back. It was coarse along the edges of the plates, but smooth in the center, where a rectangular pattern was etched. It looked like a small square within a square, she said, until you looked closer, and then you saw that it was a never-ending geometry, like looking down a hall of mirrors.

Mariko told me the honu’s name was Kilo. I asked how she knew, and she said he had told her. I didn’t know what that meant.

She was always befriending sea creatures. She saved sea stars from being trampled on and tucked them beneath rocks, then claimed each of their thousand suckers had kissed her hand goodbye. I loved the way her deep brown hair floated in the open water, but I took everything she said with a gulp of salt.

§

While she was mashing taro root in the kitchen, my mother told me that my best friend had likely drowned. The cutting board was covered in purple pulp.

She did not say it to comfort me or to hurt me. My mother was a woman who said what everyone was thinking. She had no training in subtleties. She had lived through hurricanes and monsoons. When I was two, the volcano erupted, and our home was almost swallowed by lava flow. And my mother did not cry. She picked me up and put me in her car, and we moved along like snails. My mother was a woman who knew about death and sacrifice.

Have you seen lately a large black moth? she asked me. If I had, it would have been Mariko’s spirit, fluttering by to pay a visit before it departed.

I hadn’t, but I thought of the giant centipede I’d seen twisting through the dirt, how it reared its bulbous head for a moment and then slunk away.

My mother said that Mariko didn’t respect her family when she was alive. She always came home late, and she never listened to her grandparents, who taught her how to tie her hair up in a knot on her scalp and keep her knees from being skinned. She was always out swimming places she shouldn’t be, and my mother reminded me of the time the coast guard found her a mile out to sea and brought her home dripping wet, her smile stretching across her face like the wide moon.

Was she ever the middle person in a photograph? If she was, she would be the first of them to die, my mother told me.

I thought of the photograph that was up in Mariko’s living room of her with her grandparents, their leathery arms looped around her from behind. She stood there in the center of them, the green mountain behind them, grinning at the camera with a twitch in her left eye like she knew something none of the rest of us did.

She never liked to listen, my mother said. If you don’t listen and be careful, you’ll be swept out to sea, too.

I ate the bowl of poi she placed in front of me, the paste sweet and puce and creamy on my tongue. I felt that something was taking me over, something neutrally malevolent and boundless, like a spell being cast.

That night, I put a fishhook made of jade beneath my pillow for strength and began to dream.

§

In the dream, I swam effortlessly through the cool ocean, a simple flip of my ankles enough to propel me. There weren’t feet, though, because I no longer had those: instead, from my waist down were long tentacles, deep purples and blues that trailed behind me like a wedding dress. They extended double the length of my body and were coarse and felt like the frayed ends of a fisherman’s rope. I swam faster and faster, my new body that of a man-of-war jellyfish, poisonous to touch.

My tentacles led me to the cove, where I saw the flash of a green shell moving away from me. I dove deep under the rumbling surf to follow Kilo. He craned his head to eye me, then moved slower and allowed me to catch up.

He led me past the cove deep into the open ocean, where the pressure from the depth would usually have hurt my head. I felt unbuoyed and free with my tentacles. The reef grew sparser and sparser, and then there was nothing but dark sand.

We came to a coral pink palace encapsulated in a bubble, a spotlight from the ocean’s surface shining down on it. In a dream world, and underwater, earthly proportions mean nothing. It was the size of my hand until I got closer, and then it was the size of an entire island. I followed Kilo through the bubble, the film of it enveloping me.

Inside the palace, where everything was dripped in gold and mother of pearl, I saw Mariko, standing at the base of a tall statue. Her underwater face was round and full, and her legs had been replaced by the smooth and leathery end of a monk seal. In her hand she held a small delicate box that was black as obsidian.

Makena! she shouted when she saw me, and her voice escaped from her mouth in a flurry of bubbles. You’re here. Did Kilo show you the way?

Yes, I said. I felt a tension mounting on my forehead suddenly. It began to grow in my ears and nose, my eyes. The old honu looked at me in pity.

I never thought you’d be a man-o-war, she giggled. She swam to me, her seal tail wagging. Then, she held out the box to me, and I saw that it was encrusted with little green jewels of peridot.

What’s inside? I said, closing my eyes to try and fight the growing pain of pressure.

She reached out for my human hand and guided it to the clasp of the box. I opened it, and that was when I saw the Everything.

It turned out that the Everything was mostly Time. I saw the seasons go by in a wheel: the barreling surf and migrating whales of the winter, the trade winds and hurricanes of the fall, the long hot days of summer, the hibiscus blooming in the spring. I saw my mother take her first step as an infant, grow tall, then shrivel and become a skeleton returned to the earth. I saw the volcanoes rise from deep underwater, erupt upward and become islands, erupt again and cover everything, melt it back down into sea. It was all there, inside that box. I saw how small I was, but it did not scare me anymore.

The box snapped shut, and I was back in the palace.

Don’t you see? Mariko said.

I put my hands to my face to feel my new wrinkles. I felt myself growing old when I opened the box, the Time that bound me spilling out. At once I understood: Mariko had found this box of Everything, and if she stayed with it, she would be unbound, never able to return to our village on land.

My chest was tightening and constricting around my lungs. I needed air, and the tentacles that surrounded me like curtains began to suffocate me. I looked at Mariko, her placid face that was faltering as the dream faded.

Mariko, I said, and because I had so much to ask and so little time, I settled on the most important thing: Please come back.

She looked at me and said, Come and get me.

I pushed my way out of the palace, up and out of the bubble, up up up past the rocks, dragging the man-o-war veil behind me. The surface was light and glittering, and the pressure in my head pounded, and as I drew closer and closer to it, I thought about what I knew now. I knew that soon I would awaken, and that if I could only carry into real life the knowledge I’d learned in the dream, this secret thing inside the box, I’d hold the power to change everything. So many times before, I’d felt this way in my childhood dreams, and so many times it had faded, and I’d never learned anything, nothing ever changed.

I woke up sweating, the jade hook beneath my pillow cool against my wrist. A sly smile of moon hung outside my window.

§

In the morning something was different. My mother woke me up and gave me a plate of sausage, eggs, and rice, and I sat there staring into it until it swirled. The myna birds outside sounded their usual squawk. Mariko was still believed drowned at sea, the fate of an irresponsible child. But something was different. I’d succeeded at remembering my dream, and now that I knew what I knew I could not go back.

That evening, when the sun was sinking into the water like a melted yolk, I stepped out of the screen porch of my house, carrying my blue swim fins. My mother was watching TV, and she did not notice me. I said nothing to her, not even a made-up excuse, not even a goodbye. That’s what I regret most, now. That I didn’t say goodbye to her.

I walked along the curve of the beach until I came to the tidepools, their smooth water inviting me in, and I looked at the cove of churning surf just beyond them. I thought I saw the head of Kilo surface for air, his slanting eyes looking at me before descending.

I would find him, I thought. I would find him, and he would lead me to Mariko in her bubble palace, and we would come back to the land, and we would live long lives on land until our hair became silver.

Or, a quieter voice inside me thought, we would share the Everything together. And the Everything would be enough.

The navigating stars were just beginning to peek out, and among them the bright moon glowed like a lantern. I knelt down on the lava rock to slip on my swim fins, and I reached behind me to zip up my wetsuit on my own. Slowly, one flipper after the other, I slipped into the ocean.

The warm water welcomed me in like a hug, then swallowed me.

Kaylie Saidin grew up in California and now lives in North Carolina, where she is an MFA candidate at UNC Wilmington. She is co-fiction editor at Ecotone. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Columbia Review, upstreet #15, Catamaran Literary Reader, Gulf Stream, and elsewhere.