Where the City Ends

Who knows why our grandparents built a city beneath the sea. Maybe they woke up one day with saltwater coming out of their ears and eyes. Or maybe when they stood on the shore they felt the city’s glow like a phantom limb, a bubble of honey at the bottom of the sea, and they shed their human skins in search of something as old as instinct. 

I imagine them, wind-whipped and water-logged, clutching the rims of their boats. I imagine them diving into the sea in those old-timey diving suits: orbed, otherworldly, the cords of their throats throbbing silently as they try to remember how their primeval cousins used to breathe underwater and swim across hemispheres. 

Along the slope of a continental shelf, they built the city themselves, an upside-down fishbowl. The entire weight of an ocean seethes above us. Somewhere beneath the pressure the glass ceiling is starting to splinter along faint hairlines, infinite cracks radiating along the top of the sky, and somewhere above the city my dad slips along the slick slope, gumming the seams with a sealant gun. One day we’ll look up and the last thing we’ll see is the sky splitting open and the ocean plunging in to claim us.  

Hameed says I’m a ghoul. He says, You’re kind of obsessed with experiencing death, don’t you think? 

And I say, If you’re not obsessed, then what’s even the point of being alive? 

Usually this is when Ada will go, Jesus, please can we not do this and Hameed turns it into a dumb joke, like, Gertie can’t help it, her parents basically doomed her with a name that sounds like a dead nun’s. And at this point, it’s all I can do not to point out that, if he calls my thing with death an obsession, then what’s his thing with Ada? A one-person cult?

Outside in the electric city, the streetlights have dimmed to a hum. It’s one of those dreamy nights. The kind that swallows you forever, so that in every lovely night in the years to come, you’ll find the smudged imprints of this one. My mother is spread on the bed like a starfished angel, gurgling softly to herself in her sleep. My dad’s out late working again. He comes home at one or two in the morning, his boots filmed with granular ocean silt, as if he’s been walking upon the surface of the moon. Underneath the single flickering bulb in the kitchen, he fixes himself a modest dinner of buttered bread and eggs. I wake up almost every night to it, egg whites bubbling in the pan, fragrant toast crisping in the burner. 

I have another theory about us. It’s that our ancestors never reached the place they were going. That somewhere in the middle of the choppy waters, their boats halved beneath them and the ocean clutched them hard and wouldn’t let go. Dragged down into the deep, their lungs filled with water until they flickered out, one by one, still tangled in each other’s hands. 

My theory is that they drowned, down to the last person, and that we’re not really here in this place that they built, but dreams of the dead, the ghosts of what could have been.  

•••

We meet by the fizzed-out marquee of our high school, the words See you next year! slipping from summertime neglect. I squint at the sky, looking for the ocean. In the lamplight, it’s impossible to see, but you can still hear it, thudding in your ears.

When I think of the summer I think of every summer, in an endless loop: the four of us stuttering through time, from moon-faced adolescents to Frankenstein’s teenagers, all gangle and no manners, selling cheap candy door-to-door back when parents were still charmed by our lispy entrepreneurial spirit, tinkering with bicycles and clocks because one of us thought she was a mechanic, watching any black-and-white movie we could find, whipping tufts of popcorn at each other as if it could hide our own stupid guilelessness. Only this year snags; only this year skips. This year, we did none of those things, and I don’t know how it happened—if it was some petty fight Ada and I had, or something Noam did, or if we had just finally filled up on each other, the way everyone does. It was like we all took a vow of silence and forgot to tell each other.  

Noam shows up first. “Did you get the keys?” he asks. 

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” I say. 

“Let me see.”

I draw away. “No, thanks.”

“What?” He looks at me like he’s this innocent kid, like I don’t know him better than that even if we haven’t seen each other in months, and that yanks at me. “You don’t trust me?”  

“They’re just keys,” I say, tense. 

Then Ada, and, last of all, Hameed. We’re finally back, all of us.   

“Gertie’s having a panic attack about the keys,” Noam says.

“Sounds like Gertie,” Hameed says, but he smiles in a way that means, Just kidding. Over the months his face has become a grown-up’s face. It’s gone angular and whiskery, like someone’s been shapeshifting him into a cat. 

“You look old,” I say, without meaning to. 

Ada laughs. “It hasn’t been that long, Gertie.”

“She’s right,” Noam says. He squints at Hameed. “Can you grow facial hair now?” 

Hameed flames up.

“Well, great,” he mumbles. “I didn’t know I was going to be court-martialed.” 

“Don’t we have someplace to be?” Ada says.

“Thank you, Ada,” Hameed says. “And if you must know, my people are a hairy people.”

We walk down the street, shuffling against each other to feel, briefly, the warmth of another person. Something in this part of town makes us go quiet, maybe the way the brown paper in the storefront windows is peeling away, revealing the smoky, stripped interiors in small triangles, or how the fused-out filaments of streetlamps look like drowning stars, wasted and cut loose.  

Ada says, “Do you think people do this all the time?” 

“What, leave the house?” Hameed says. “Everyone but you.” 

“Hilarious.” She rolls her eyes. The way he looks at her, he’s so obvious. 

“Maybe we’re the first,” Noam says.

“We’re not,” I say. “Sorry. I think they used to send, like, scientists out there.” 

“Let me guess,” Hameed says, “They were looking for a Yeti and that’s how they found Noam.” 

“Yetis don’t live underwater, genius,” Noam says. “Joke’s on you.” 

“You’re the joke,” Hameed says. 

“Good one.” 

“You know,” Ada says, kind of snippy, “I didn’t miss this part.” And we all go quiet. 

Where the sidewalk disappears, we walk on the road. The only sounds in the world are our shoes scuffing the asphalt. Here, the streetlamps have burnt out completely, and when we cast off their glow we walk amongst the corpses of old homes. 

I have a crawling feeling under my skin that, all this time, we’re brushing past our younger selves. Unseen, they are still here, stuck in that endless loop—still hunched over marbled sundae glasses at the ice cream counter in Tony’s, still flying homemade kites in the phantom hours between midnight and morning, still drinking brackish wine out of boxes on the edge of the road, so luminous with laughter they might float to the top of the city and touch the flaws in the warped glass. I wonder if they would be disappointed to see us now, if the laughter would burn up in their throats.

If I look up at the right time, I think I’ll see them, a hundred ghostly visions of ourselves, young Gerties shouldering baby-faced Hameeds, whispering Here they come, here they go. Starved for any glimpse of what they will become, nostalgic already for the future. And I wonder, do normal people think like this, or only when they’re really drunk?

We pass a liquor store, ancient fishing tackle hung in the grimy windows. 

“I could jimmy the lock and get in,” Noam whispers. “No one will ever know.”

Hameed says, “Being arrested is not on my bucket list.”

“That won’t happen,” Noam says. 

“I don’t think that’s your best idea,” I say. 

He exhales. “Didn’t realize you’d become chickenshit.” 

“Well,” I say, “I’m evolving.”

•••

Back then, we are seven, Noam and I. He says, It’s okay, I do this all the time, hauling the wriggling fish onto the kitchen counter with a wet thump. From the window, we can see them on the porch steps, his mother with a cigarette, picking tobacco flecks out of her ambering teeth, and my mother, arms on her knees, like she’s trying to shrink herself.  We dangle from long-necked stools, looking at each other. He says, Are you old enough to use a knife? And I say, We’re the same age, dummy. He says, That’s not what I mean. 

The kitchen counter is grooved deep with scars from years of abuse; the stove is scabbed black with dinners of days past. He cleans the fish with a toothy knife that slips and slides in his hands, leaving slivers of glittering skin in smeared comets on the granite. The fish looks like it’s been scalped by a seven-year-old, because it has. You’re going to get in trouble, I say. 

My mom’s not like yours, he says, sullen, but he drops the knife on the counter. His fingers are slick, oozing. He twists the brown threads of his sweater, working them beneath his scummed fingernails, looking suddenly forlorn under the bare fluorescents. Outside, his mother is talking, flinging her hands. Mine nods: yes, yes, yes. Yes to infinity.

I am seven years old. Who knows why I do the things I do. All I remember is, I grab his lonesome face with the flat heels of my hands and I rock his head back and forth until we’re staring at each other, eye-to-eye. I say, Hello? Hello? Are you even in there? 

And, even then, he looks at me like, Why am I stuck with you? 

•••

Where the city ends, there’s a sealed cabin in the wall. The water-suits are in a shed warped with long turquoise streaks of oxidized metal. I unlock the shed with my dad’s keys, which he leaves on the kitchen counter every night along with sudsy frying pans and greasy plates, like he doesn’t have a teenage delinquent for a daughter.

We slip oxygen masks over our faces and tug gilled rubber over our torsos. Noam’s is the only suit that fits right. He flexes his arms like there’s anything to flex and when he says, “Cool,” his voice crackles with static. 

“Ready?” I say, and I can’t help the way my voice sounds, as if we’re about to invent a cure for cancer or something. 

Hameed’s answering smile is so brilliant, it beams right into my brain.

“Ready,” he says. 

I press my body against the ocean door and water heaves in, swallowing us in its craw. We plunge into the blue. In the ocean, we are pinned. For a moment, we have nothing but the fear and the wonder, the force of an entire aqueous hemisphere dragging us somewhere unfathomable. And then we have each other. Our lungs remember. Our chests shudder. In the ocean, we become something new, older than ourselves. In our suits, gilled like fishes, we swim.

In our old, new, weightless bodies, we see seagreen grenadier fish nosing their way along the ruined shoulder of an extinct volcano, endless kelp forests pulsing along the ocean floor, veiny corals latticing up a seamount’s humped back. The city dwindles behind us, a buried molten globe, glowing like a mirage in an unholy blue desert. We fly. All the way to the shipwreck Hyperion, banked steep on its spine at the bottom of the ocean.

•••

Up close, the unhinged jaw of the Hyperion looms, bearded in barnacles, blurry around its moldering edges. The bristling ruins of the naval steamship look something like a black-boned whale skeleton, sinking into the ocean floor. The lone mossy spire of an ancient gun points at us in impotent fury. 

“Do you think it still works?” Ada whispers nervously as we drift past. 

“Don’t be stupid,” Noam says. 

We clamber aboard the deck, the wood crumbling beneath our fingers. Fish flicker past us like phantoms, striped in azure. We are keenly aware of each other, as if we are the last survivors of the world. If I closed my eyes I would still know where they were, my three luminous friends. We float above the deck, careful not to touch the soft, peeling floor. 

“Do you think they all drowned?” Hameed asks. 

I almost say, At least our ancestors made it where they were going.

And I almost say, Now who’s obsessed with death. 

Instead I swim toward the bridge, away from them. Everywhere the ground is mossy with algae or lichen, but I can imagine the boat slick with water, pitching from wave to wave, men flung from one side to the other. One foot in the water, one foot in the grave. 

“I bet we’ll find their skeletons downstairs,” Noam says.

“You’re being stupid now,” Ada smirks. 

Hameed says, “We’re losing Gertie.” 

“She’s already lost,” I say. Trying to sound spooky, instead sounding morose.  

Noam swims over. 

“Hello, melodrama,” he says. “What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing,” I say. 

He shrugs. “Suit yourself. I’m not your shrink.”

From here, Hameed and Ada look like shadows webbed in the grid of the ship, the water warping the distance between us. What I would give to know they were endless, my beautiful friends. What I would do to keep us all here in this moment.  

I say, “You think we’ll ever do this again?”

Noam looks at me in that incredibly serious way that only he does. He says, “Don’t let yourself ruin this.” 

“I thought you weren’t my shrink,” I say. 

He smiles. “More like your guidance counselor.” 

This close, I can see his features are morphing into an older boy’s. As if he, too, finally got the memo about being a teenager. 

“You know,” I say, “I’m pretty sure you can grow facial hair, too.”

“Oh, yeah.” His smile sprouts into a grin. “But Hameed takes it so hard.”

We watch Ada and Hameed float towards us, a shoal of tiny saffron fish feathering around them like a wandering halo. 

I say, “Why haven’t I seen you this summer?”

He calls out to them, “Hey guys,” and for a moment I think he’s just going to pretend I didn’t ask. 

But when they’re almost close enough to hear, close enough that the yellow fish nip past us, he says, “Are you serious?”

He says, “You know how old people say, It takes two to tango?”

•••

Ada reaches us first. “No skeletons so far.” 

“The night is young,” Noam says.

“This was a good idea, Gertie,” Hameed says. 

Ada nudges him. “What would we do without her?” 

“Fall apart, I guess.” 

“Stop it,” I say. Noam is staring intently at something behind my ear. “Have you tried the cabin?”

“No,” Hameed says. “Let’s team up.” 

We swim over, him and I. This close, the walls of the cabin are scabbed with speckled mollusks that sink into the porous wood. 

“Yuck,” Hameed says. 

“Don’t touch them,” I say, grossed out. 

“Curiosity runs in my blood,” he says. 

He tries the door but it doesn’t give. 

“So,” I say, as we both put our weight into the door. “How’s Ada?”

He makes a grunting noise. “The world doesn’t revolve around Ada, you know.” 

“I know,” I say. We both let go. Before I know what I’m doing, I say, “I’m glad you finally realized that.”

He rattles the doorknob, like that will do anything. I think, when did I become the world’s biggest clown? 

“What do you mean?” he asks. I look at his face, and I know he understands, and that I’ve trapped us both in this. 

“I don’t know,” I say. 

“No, come on.” 

“I’m an idiot,” I mumble. “Never mind.”

“Say it,” he says. “I want to hear.” 

I say, “You used to be like, obsessed with her. It was kind of weird to watch.” 

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” he says, formally, as if he’s aged twenty years in five seconds. If I were him, I wouldn’t want to see me all summer, either. 

“I don’t,” I say. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, that was a stupid thing to say.” 

•••

I take off so that I don’t have to look at whatever his face is doing. I go down below. My heart plastered somewhere against the glassy pane of my chest, thudding to get out. Down here, their voices are muffled. They don’t seem to care that I’ve drifted into the bowels of the ship. A cloud of clownfish swarms past me, the fish fluttering against each other in their haste to avoid me. I know how you feel, fishes, I want to say. The ship moans softly to itself, as if it is remembering older days, a life beyond this one.

And I feel like I am walking amongst ghosts of people who once were. In the watery haze, I can see the ruins: the grey snouts of Bedford army trucks, a gutted traincar, rust blooming in bloodstains along its creased sides, armoured car wrecks. I feel like I am walking backwards in time. 

Ada is calling my name, somewhere above me. Her voice distorted by distance and static. She says to someone beside her, probably Hameed—“Where did she go? Did you see?” 

 I wrench the green, slimed door of an army truck open and crawl in. The hinges groan, leaden. Everything inside is white with age and sediment. Like being on the surface of a snow planet. 

“She’s fine,” Noam says. “She’s probably just sulking.” 

“Do you always have to be such a goon?” Hameed asks. They are coming down, but draped in the extraterrestrial flora of the truck’s interior, I am too entranced to call out. They move like mermaids into the hangar, Noam at the front, the others trailing behind, transforming out from the deep water into those people I have known. 

“Wow,” Noam says, squinting at the war machinery. “Look at this.” 

I am invisible to them in the dark of the truck. I’m also filthy—sitting here, flakes of white rust falling on me. In the window, I can see myself, wild-haired, snowy-faced, the troll under the bridge. 

“These must be worth a lot of money,” Noam is saying outside. 

“Yeah, right,” Hameed says. 

But Noam hasn’t even heard him. He’s wandering off along the gloomy aisles, touching the sides of corroded steel motorbikes and spongy wooden crates.

“Gertie?” Ada calls. “Hello?”

“I’m here,” I say at last, waving a ghostly hand so they can see me. 

Ada and Hameed crowd around the truck. Hameed peels open the door, huffing water bubbles. “What are you doing in here?” We look at each other, and I wish I didn’t look like a goblin. 

“I just wanted to see what it was like inside,” I mumble, hating how stupid that sounds. 

From across the hangar, Noam’s voice rescues me. “Guys? Guys, look.”

In moments of happiness all I can see in him is the boy I’ve known since I was seven, swallowed in his father’s scuffed leather jacket, the sleeves tenting around him, his face so anxious with joy, he is vibrating with light. 

Only now he is sixteen, skinny in all the wrong places, his hair curling wetly around his ears, the grin beneath his mask as dopey and self-serious as ever, paddling towards us. Holding out in his hands a hundreds-year-old musket, and on its end a bayonet.

•••

We are all transfixed in the moment. Each to their own. 

“Noam,” says Ada. “Put it down.” 

He says, “Don’t worry. It’s been in the water too long.” 

“But what if it, you know, explodes?”

He makes a face at her, like, Come on.

And Hameed and I, each in our separate worlds of discovery: Hameed bobbing in the water like a buoyed cork, his hair floating around him, his face doing its own loopy thing. And me, my face still streaked with the fungus from the ancient armoured truck, looking back at him to notice that his hand is clutching Ada’s, that a tributary is formed where their hands meet, the water rippling around their grasped fingers; that he’s holding her hand, that she’s letting him, and that he’s over the moon on his way out of the galaxy. 

And Noam, looking at all of us, the light in his face going out, as if we showed up at his birthday party and stomped all over the cake. 

At first, we don’t even notice it, ensnared as we are in our own private moments. We don’t say anything to each other, we just become aware, gradually, that we are not alone. 

It emerges slowly, curiously, from the cavernous heart of the ship. First a shadow of a wrecked lizard face. Then, unwinding its long sea serpent neck, its squat reptilian body. Like something our ancestors dreamed of until it came true. Its eyes are filmed white with age. A dinosaur of the sea. 

The reptile swivels on its impossible neck. It looks at Noam, and then at us goggling behind him. Hameed whispers something, so quiet it comes out as a spit of static. 

“Maybe we should go,” Ada says slowly, like she’s trying not to spook it, or us. 

But Noam, foolish Noam, drifts closer. Even crouched uncertainly, it’s almost his size.

He says, “I’m not scared.” 

The creature doesn’t move. It watches us with rimy eyes, half-hidden in the dark corner of the ship’s hold. Its body is disintegrating, as if it is shedding its skin or coming apart. 

“Please don’t be a moron,” Hameed says. “Let’s go.” 

Noam waves the musket at the thing. “I bet you know this doesn’t work,” he says. 

“Noam,” I say. He flinches, like I’ve reached across the water and touched him.

The thing, the sea creature, opens its mouth again and retches. Nothing comes out, but the sound is from the bottom of its stomach, like it is trying to vomit out a lung. As if it’s trying to learn to breathe beneath the water, as if it’s trying to become one of us.

Noam lifts the blade of the gun and rams it into the thing. There’s a low, wet thump. For an instant, we’re back in his kitchen and he’s fighting a salmon, but here it is different, here it is awful. Here, we are all separated by something more than a blunted kitchen knife.

Ada makes a quiet, strangled noise like she is crying. 

 “Stop it,” I say. “This is sick.”

Noam yanks out the musket and turns around. He doesn’t even look at me. “I’m done,” he says. “You guys are no fun anymore.” 

Behind him, the sea creature quavers, a thin plume of scarlet seeping from its side. I look at my friends, and they look at me, and we don’t know what to say. Ada’s shoulders convulse.

“Let’s go home,” Hameed says quietly. Their fingers still entangled in each other’s.

We leave it floundering in the belly of the ship and swim up, up to the light. We are all of us silent. Someone has finally reached up into our throats and yanked out our cords. Someone has taken pity on the rest of the world.

On the way home, an ancient, grey-backed baleen whale passes us. It swims far above us, but still, even after everything we’ve seen, it’s as vast as anything we can imagine. We slow down—out of fear or awe, it’s hard to say, only that for a moment we are briefly linked in that eternal way again, banded by an invisible thread that runs all the way through us and down the rest of our lives. The whale is a shimmer of grey against the blue. It looks bigger than our lives, but beautifully slow. Like it is unfolding, moment by moment, clouding into the ocean. 

We are hooked, surrounded by ourselves and the sea. Noam still clutches the gun in his hand. Hameed and Ada still cling to each other. And I, I wish I was back on my own in that alien truck, that desert planet, suspended in time. As far away from them, and this, and everything else, as I can possibly ever be. 

The shadow passes by us and so does the moment. We swim home.

SENAA AHMAD lives in Toronto, where she works in film, fails to improve her Arabic, and tries not to kill all the house plants. Her short fiction appears in Augur Magazine and Strange Horizons. She is working on a short novel. You can find her, sort of, at senaa-ahmad.com.