Kaya is coming in on a wave at her, only his head sticking out of the white water. He stands up near her and points out at his friends. “That’s Pam there, nice left, see that?”
Freya shivers.
“Can we really be out here?” she asks him helplessly. “We won’t get cooked by radiation?”
She’s breathing deeply, she can’t look anywhere near the sun, it’s far too bright for that, she’s squinting, crying a little at the explosion of light coming off the breaking waves.
“Well, that’s a good thought; look at you. Did you put on sunscreen?”
“I did.”
“Your skin is really white.”
“I’ve never done this before,” she says. “My skin has never been in sunlight before.”
He stares at her. “That’s crazy, although I have to say, you have beautiful skin. You can see all your freckles and moles and all. But yeah, if you got the sunscreen on you everywhere, it works really well. Where you missed, your skin will burn.”
“I believe it!”
“Well, yeah. Put it on every couple of hours, you’ll be fine. I’ll help you next time we’re in.”
“Don’t you use it?”
“Oh sometimes, but you know, I’ve got a tan, so I don’t burn anymore. I’ll put some on my nose and lips in the afternoon, especially if I stay out all day.”
“All day?”
“Sure, yeah, that’s the best kind of day.”
“Will you spray me now? I’m scared I’ve missed places or something.”
“Yeah, sure.”
He reaches down and pulls off his fins, walks with her up to her towel, steadying her by the elbow in the soft wet sand. He sprays her everywhere with the sunscreen.
“You have a nice body, so white, you’re like that goddess standing in the shorebreak. Here, let me get your legs and ass too. Can’t miss anywhere, or you’ll burn for sure.”
Burned by the sun! Burned by radiation from a star! She starts to shiver again, tries not to look up. Her shadow stretches toward the water, dark on the light sand. She’s still crying, fist to her mouth. The sand is too bright to look at. There’s just too much light.
He helps her back down into the water. He’s brown and lithe, like some animal not quite human, an aquaman, merman, kelpie, come out of the water to lead her into his element. A water sprite. She’s shivering, but not with cold. Possibly the shock of immersion will keep her from throwing up.
Back ankle deep in the white hissing surge. Here she is, on Earth, walking out into the ocean, in a blast of sunlight. She can hardly believe it. It’s as if she’s living someone else’s life, inside a body she can’t manipulate very well. Kaya helps her keep her feet. He kicks into an onrush of water, which casts an arc of spray back out toward the sea. Bubbles bursting all around, such a liquid sound. She has to shout a little for Kaya to hear her. “It’s not as cold this time!”
“That always happens,” he says with a white grin. “Water’s about twenty-four degrees today, just right. It’ll cool you down after an hour or so, but that’s okay. Here, look, when we get to about thigh deep, the bottom will start going up and down, and when a big enough wave comes in, just let yourself down under it. That’s the best way to get wet. Don’t drag it out too long.”
He holds her hand and they walk over the ripples he mentioned. The waves roll in all broken, hissing, hitting her waist high, then dropping back to thigh high. As a bigger broken wave approaches, Kaya lets go of her hand and with a shout dives under it. She crashes down right after him, the wave pushes her back toward shore, she jumps up shocked by the wetness, crying out at the cold. The water tastes salty but clean, cool in her mouth. It stings her eyes, but not much, and not for long. Kaya is leaning over to drink some of it, then spouts what he’s mouthed into the sky, like a fountain. “Drink a little,” he urges her. “It’s good for you. It’s the same saltiness as in us. We’re getting back in the great mama!” And with another hoot he dives under the next approaching wave and shoots up out of the smoother water behind it. Again she dives too late and is shoved back hard.
He swims in to collect her, swimming around when he could stand. “Pull your fins on your feet. Then dive under the waves. Look, when a wave breaks, some water goes straight to the bottom and then rolls back under, like this,” illustrating with his curling hand. “So if you dive and get in that water, it will pull you under the wave and pop you back up, outside the break. You’ll feel it pull you when you get in that flow.”
She tugs the fins onto her feet as another wave approaches; the waves keep coming one after the next, it’s a perpetual thing, every seven or ten seconds it seems, wave after wave and wave. She dives under the next one, goes down too far and feels the sand of the bottom with her hands, swirling into her face, then she feels the tug of the water back and up, and kicking she feels the fins despite her insensible feet, and shoots back up into the sun. Incredible burst of light in her eyes, salt water in her eyes and nose and mouth, she chokes a little but her eyes barely sting.
“Do you keep your eyes open when you’re under?” she shouts at Kaya.
“Hell yeah,” he says, grinning, all submerged except for his face and shoulders and hair and hands, sliding around her like an otter, taking in a mouthful of foam and shooting it at her playfully.
Then he stands and bobs beside her. “Okay, first game is just to crest the waves as they come in. Stand about chest high; that’s where most of these are breaking. The bigger ones will break farther out, and you have to swim out to the break. The smaller ones won’t break till they’re inside of us here. So, just watch, and as they come to you, jump up into the wave as it rises around you, and let it carry you right up to the break at the top. Let the very top of it break right in your face, crash through that upward, and fall down the back side. That’s already almost as fun as it gets. You’ll feel them lift you. Then, when you’re used to that, and you’ve seen how they tend to break, when a big one has reached you and it’s just about to break, turn when it lifts you and jump in toward the shore. Then it will carry you along, you’ll slide down the front of it on your chest. When you get to the bottom you can stick your head forward and the wave will carry you in a long way, or you can duck and tuck to the side, and fold under the wave and be standing right on your feet again, waist high. Try that for a while.”
She tries it. Waves rise up before her; when they are small and not yet broken she bobs over them, and at the top of her bobbing she can see out to sea, see the incoming waves in lines that keep on coming in one after the next, low and unformed. Sometimes she can see that one will be bigger when it arrives in the shallows, and by the time she sees that, all the other swimmers out there—there are about a dozen now—are swimming hard outward to catch it before it breaks, and if they do, they ride the wave sideways across its face, ahead of the broken part as it moves left or right, their wet faces tilted so their eyes are fixed on the wave rising ahead of their motion. Their bodies are the surfboards, she sees. A few of the wave riders have small foam boards they hold under their chest. They hoot at each other as they ride, and as the break closes over them they disappear into the wave, and the next time she sees them they are already swimming back out to catch another wave.
Up into a wave, lifted by it; crash through the thin translucent sunlit wall of water at the top, crash back down onto her chest on the blue backside. Kaya was right; this is already a great feeling. She is losing her fear, she is casting it away with every jump and fall. Lofted by a wave, fall; then again, over and over. Salt water in her mouth. Hissing and smooshing and crashing all around her, of water onto water. No need to talk to people, no need to think. Sun igniting a whole quadrant of the sky, can’t look up that way. Very obvious that looking at sunlight could blind you. Never look that way! The ocean tastes so good, it’s not like blood, it’s clear and cool and clean, salty, but somehow nicer than salty. As if it is the true water.
She begins to feel herself, her body. She is definitely
more buoyant here than she has ever been in water before, and for a second she is reminded of the weightlessness of the ship’s spine. She casts that aside, but then she reaches out and holds on to it; with a squeeze of her heart she floats over the waves for the ship, for Jochi, for Devi and Euan and everyone else no longer there. Even the memory that comes to her suddenly, of Euan in Aurora’s ocean, is not bad but good. He picked a good end. Ride these waves for him and with him. It’s a kind of communion. She will outswim her fear. She is still shivering.
Finally a wave comes cresting up that seems to want to break and yet hasn’t managed it, a banked slope of water rising up before her in an awesome onrush, and she sees her chance and turns and jumps toward the shore, and the wave picks her up and as she floats up the face she is also sliding down the face, at about the same rate of speed, so that she is both hanging there and flying along: that moment is astonishing, she is still laughing at it when the wave tips more vertically and she slides abruptly down to its bottom and plows into the flat water that is not the wave, the wave catches her as it breaks, flips her in a somersault that shoots water up her nose and into her throat and lungs, she gags but is still in the tumble of the broken wave, she can’t get to the surface, doesn’t even know which way is up, bumps the bottom and finds out, shoves upward, bursts through the surface of hissing bubbles and gasps in, chokes, coughs, snorts, breathes cleanly in, gasps in and out a few breaths, starts to laugh. The whole event has lasted about five seconds, maybe. One has to hold one’s mouth shut when underwater. Obviously.
She tries to convey this to Kaya when he shoots by her, disappears, and then stands next to her chest deep. “You okay?” he asks.
“Yes! I got all tumbled!”
“You wiped out. You got caught in the washing machine.” He laughs.
“I have to hold my breath underwater!”
“Well yeah! And breathe out through your nose when you’re tumbling,” he says. “Then you’ll be fine. It won’t be able to inject its way into you.”
She goes back to cresting the waves. She turns and rides a few more, does better when they crash her down into the still water under the onrushing wave. When her rise and fall equalize and she flies, that puts a no-g spot in her gut, as if she is floating down the spine. She thinks of the ship again and cries out, a laugh of grief for her whole life, ah God that it had to happen this way, so crazy their whole existence, so absurd and stupid. So much death. But here she is, and the ship would be pleased to see her out in these waves, she knows this as surely as she knows anything.
The sun actually feels like it is hurting the skin of her face a little, and also she finds she is shivering between the arrival of one wave and the next; it’s a different kind of shivering than before, she is simply getting cold. The bigger waves come in sets of three, Kaya calls in passing, and she can see how this is roughly true. She can certainly see how they might come to believe it. They see a set coming, and try to get out over the first one before it breaks, then swim to a point where they can get a good takeoff on one of the following two. She wants to ride one across the face ahead of the break, like they do. Hard to arrange. Seems like she would need to be going a little faster for it to work, and Kaya agrees when she says that. “Kick hard with your fins at the moment you need the speed!”
“I’m shivering!”
“Yeah, I’m almost there myself. Go on in and lie in the sun for a while; you’ll warm right back up. I’ll come in in a while.”
She tries to ride a wave all the way in, botches her exit, gets caught up in the tumble of the washing machine, chokes on seawater again, can’t breathe for too long, can’t get to the surface. Suddenly she is grabbed and yanked up, chokes and gasps, coughs up seawater she has swallowed, almost vomiting.
It’s Kaya who has pulled her up, standing chest deep now, staring at her intently. His eyes are a pale blue.
“Hey!” he says. “Be careful out here. This is the ocean, you know. You can blow it pretty fast. You get yourself drowned out here and the ocean won’t care. It’s way stronger than us.”
“Sorry. I didn’t see that coming.”
“Tell you what, maybe just stay in the shallows here for a while. Do what we call grunioning. You just lie here where the shorebreak runs up the beach, you’re floating, but bumping on the ripples of the bottom too, and the waves run you up the beach, then the backwash runs you back down the beach. Just let the water push you around like you’re a piece of driftwood, or a grunion. It’s almost as fun as anything out here.”
She does it and it’s true. No effort involved. Keep her face out of the water, let everything else go. Float like a log. Bump here and there over the wet sand. She sees that the beach is more occupied now, kids up at the high-water mark are building sand castles and screaming. The hissing of the waves is loud, the air is filled with a mist of popped bubbles. Bubbles everywhere, more bubbles than water. Long strands of kelp grunion with her. Their bulbs look like plastic, they pop with a smell. It’s trapped whale breath! a little girl sitting there says to her, seeing her pop and sniff. Freya chews at a leaf of it; it tastes like the kelp they grew in their little salt pond, what a little thing that was, a birdbath. In and out, in and out she floats.
Eventually even here, where the water is warmer, and the sun is on her back and on the backs of her legs, even here she’s cooled down enough to shiver. She takes off her fins, levers herself to her feet, and very carefully walks up to her towel, falling down once. In the wet sand it doesn’t matter.
She lies on the hot dry sand next to her towel, in the sun. Quickly she warms and dries. There is a rime of salt left on her skin that she can taste when she licks it. The sand is warm, it sticks to her wherever she touched it when she was wet; now that it’s dry, she can brush it off with her hand. She can shove her feet and hands under the sand, and feel its sandy heft and give; the warmth extends down a ways, then the sand is cooler. She digs a pit in it, gets the pit down to a level where its bottom suffuses with water. The walls of this pit then fall in from the sides, which collapse into the little pool she has down there. When she scoops up the wet sand and lets it drip between her fingers, the sand hits the rim of her pool and the water in it seeps away and the sand remains in blobs that stack on each other, until they fall over. Once or twice she scoops up little sand crabs that makes her cry “Eek!” as the crabs crawl desperately over her palms, and she drops them back into the pool and they dig their way into the sand at the bottom of the pool and disappear. After a few times she realizes they don’t have any capacity to bite her, their jaws or palps or whatever are too small and soft. Apparently the sand under her is full of these creatures. Possibly they live on bits of seaweed. The beach makers must have put them here, got them started. Down the brilliant wet expanse of strand she sees a flock of shorebirds running up and down over their wet reflections, their knees bending backward. They have long beaks they use to stick in the sand, no doubt going after these same sand crabs. They stop and poke at little bubbles in wet sand, possibly the sand crabs’ exhalations. It makes sense. This beach is alive.
When Kaya comes in he is visibly shivering, skin goose-pimpled, blue under his suntan, lips white, nose purple. He throws himself on his towel, shivers there so violently that for a while he almost bounces off the sand. Slowly the shivers subside, and he lies there on his stomach like a sleeping infant, mouth open, eyes closed. Quickly his skin dries in the sun and she can see the white dusting of salt left on him. His hair is a tangle of curls, he is all muscle and bone, relaxed like a cat. A cat in the sun. A young water god, some child of Poseidon.
She looks around at the beach, squinting hard. It’s way too bright. Always the low grumble of waves breaking, the hiss of bubbles bursting. Haze in the distance, everything seen in a talcum of light.
“Can we really stay out here exposed like this?” she says suddenly, feeling a shaft of alarm spear her again. “The starlight won’t kill us, the radiation?”
He opens his eyes, looks up at
her without moving. “Starlight?”
“From the sun, I mean. It’s got to be a massive dose of radiation, I can feel it.”
He sits up. “Well, sure. Might be time for more sunscreen, you’re so white.” He presses his forefinger into the skin of her upper arm. “Ah yes, see how it’s a little pink now, and goes white when I push there, and takes a little while to turn back to pink? You’re getting a sunburn. Let’s put another coat of sunscreen on you.”
“Will that be enough?”
“It will get you through another hour or so, I think. Especially if you go back in the water. We don’t usually just lie out here in the sun. Just long enough to warm up again and go back out.”
“How many times do you go out?”
“I don’t know. Lots.”
“You must be hungry at the end of the day!”
“Oh yeah.” He laughs. “Surfers are like seagulls, they say. Eat everything in sight.”
He sprays the sunscreen lotion onto her skin. She feels a little salty, a little raw, and the lotion is soothing. His hands when he touches her to spread the lotion behind her ears and up into her hairline are cool and smooth. She can tell by the way he touches her that he has touched before, that young as he is, he would be a good lover. When he lies back down she looks at him candidly. Feeling a little incandescent, stomach unknotted at last, cool but warm, she says, “What about sex on this beach, eh? Right out in the sun? You people must do that!”
“Yes,” he says with a little smile, and rolls over onto his stomach, perhaps modestly. “You have to be sure not to get sand in certain places. But, you know, it’s mostly something we do out here at night.”
“How come? It’s a public beach, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes. But it doesn’t sound like you mean what I mean when you say public.”
“I thought public meant it was yours, that you could do what you want.”
“I guess, yeah. But being public also means you don’t do private things here.”