Snorkeler Down, High Adventure in the Yucatan Peninsula

Someone's got to keep an eye on her. You tell her you're right behind her, but by the time you pick up your book and earplugs, she's already made her way down the beach, between the crowded restaurant and the diver's club.
She can't even swim overhand but they rent the equipment to anyone. Besides the reef is shallow. Two hundred yards out and you can still stand up - up against the coral that is, bracing for the waves. They said not to touch the underwater branches so you tried your best. The oils from your skin can kill the micro-life that takes forever to build a reef. Algae and calcium carbonate. Some P-word, the building blocks of living coral. We're talking a few millimeters a year in some cases and very precious. A quarter of the earth's fish lives in reefs that have decreased by twenty percent in the last twenty years. That's what the flyer from the hotel desk said. One percent a year. That's nice, neat attrition. In eighty years the reefs should be about gone.
As she wades out, you sit there reading T. Boyle's eco-novel. He has just killed his hero's wife with a yellow-jacket sting. They were camping high up in the Sierras and she was making him burnt pancakes. She'd never been stung before. They didn't know. Her heart exploded in her chest and he was helpless. He carried her out on his back long dead.
One last swim she said. You've been swimming all morning. You wake up swimming - 7 am out the sliding glass doors across a sidewalk of white sand, adjusting mask and snorkel face down into the aqua velva water dissecting two worlds with your floating body that hasn't even had coffee.
Then you walk up the road to the lagoon and schools of parrotfish glinting like broken glass in the broken sunlight. Silvery gars snap their long jaws just under the surface. It is a cartoon mirror underworld of Fruit Loops between the rock worlds and mangrove roots. You swim up and expect sleeping sharks or crocodiles in the dark corners - there's an uncertain geometry under here. Where does it stop when the tide fluctuates miles into the jungle, in a cave where blind catfish are found, and shrimp glow like nightsticks? What other crack and crevice exist in our knowledge of this world?

************

His stiff Guayabara shirt fills with air and you float in it like a turtle in a bright blue shell. The bubbles surprise you when they trickle out the sleeve. You stop paddling for a moment and turn your neck up at the half-submerged world, sighting the dive beach and the restaurant through the fogged mask that pulls on your face like a plunger.
You see someone in the water, still close to shore, but it's impossible to tell without your glasses. Besides, he said he didn't want to swim. He probably left to pack up the room. He's been in a rush all morning. He's irritable because you are leaving today. There are no more towns or coasts to look forward to, only home and the ongoing torment of each other day and night with very few surprises.
You picture him throwing your things around the room as he gathers his own. You don't want to think about it - not when there are still a few hours left to dream - but tonight, he is right, is very sudden and the next one hundred nights like an empty cell, predictable, waiting only to be filled.
You put your face down into the pillow of the world, pulling the blanket of sky over your head. The land edges in over there, you can feel it, smothering, but you float, detached, over the branches of living coral that reach up to tickle you.

************
In the book the man's wife was killed by her first bee sting, which was also her last. And what about Cassie? What did she say, miles away in her own universe? One last swim. You watch her wade out in your oversized shirt, suddenly like someone's daughter, small like that, and shivering a little, even though it's warm.
Why did she have to say it like that? You remember your friend who took one last run down the icy street on his sled, playing chicken with the cross traffic.
It's always the last shot of dope, the last lap, the last bullet in the chamber, the last curveball sent back to mom's kitchen window in the dying light of a Saturday afternoon pick-up game.
It's always the last one that counts. Last is final, unless of course it's not the last, and then you call it something else. You call it more. One more swim you say, which means one now and another to follow, later. When doesn't matter, just not last. Last is last. You don't say it like that unless you mean it.
You stand up and start walking toward the water. It's only a few feet of sand but you have plenty of time to think about how inconsiderate she is. She knows you don't want to swim. You already turned in your gear and hung up your trunks. And you don't want to go all the way out there - especially without your flippers, because its such a long swim or walk, depending.
As you wade in, something catches your eye - a black something, flickering on the bright surface of the water, in close where you are. You pause. You wait. There, there it is again, briefly, and then it's gone. You were right. It is a fin. A black fin about as big as your hand. You take a few more steps but you're not so sure about them now. What if it's a shark you think, and you have no idea really and you wonder why you haven't seen anything on the subject - in all those nature flyers and eco-brochures - nothing, only fun, lovable, TV fish and turtles. No cause to alarm the average tourist. Even the presence of the nurse shark in that tide pool was unexplained. The Canadians laughed. Oh yep, they said. But there it was, and it was certainly big enough you are thinking now.
You look up and she is still on your radar - that tiny black tube fending off the world - but she's definitely too far out. The waves are rolling under her now and breaking in front of the coral bed. She's even out past the buoy, which is as far as you went together yesterday. She has no idea you say to yourself, none, and she's not a strong swimmer either. You worry about the current behind that break. You don't know of course, but neither does she, and when you are alone and tired and drowning in a man's shirt and not paying attention, that is no time to find out, and that is no time to work your weak overhand stroke to get yourself out of trouble.
Another zigzagging flash gets your attention. Now you have a better angle on it or it on you, and the sun is right and you can see below the shimmering surface for a clear moment and you spot the fish. It's as big as your leg and like nothing else you've seen in the water. It's all body, all craft with a small head - like a blimp - and it ducks into the sea grass to eat - to eat what, you don't know, but not you, not people, nothing larger than a small fish you are reassured. And now you crouch down to appreciate him more. There is a single orange marking, a bar or a dot, on his belly. Otherwise, from tip to tip he is primer black and built like a '57 with sharp fins and long curves. He is not sleek. He does not look fast either. He is more muscle and grace you think, as you pull up next to him.
When the fish swims away you are irritated again. You should be checking out, packing and showering at least, certainly not drifting out to sea oblivious. You worry about the maids who are waiting to clean your room. The clerk said it was ok to stay past checkout but he did not mean this. Why did she have to push everything, like going so far out into the reef by herself?
Why should you have to wade out to tap her on the shoulder, to tell her to come on, that it's over, time to go home? It's not fair, especially since you offered to call the dog sitter and pay the difference for another week. But when something's done, it's done. It feels cheap to squeeze and pinch. It's desperate. You don't linger at the table wishing for scraps, you walk away full, swinging your legs.

The fin crosses your path again and swims away, drawing you out further. The other day, in a book about Mayan legends you read about the charocteles - the messenger spirits that inhabit people and connect them to the dead. It is believed that some of them take on animal forms or naguales, they are called, and frequently when they are shape-shifting they cross in front of you or over you several times. But even here under star and palapa, in the land of sacrificial stiffs and glyphs, the centuries do not collide that much.
You wave off the fish and laugh at your imagination. Right now you want nothing more than to board a bus and put this place behind you; to hoist your heavy pack, pour sweat through your shirt pockets, and dream of the distant blue water. You have had enough. She and this fish have distracted you and now they are working to lure you out against your will.
You locate the black snorkel one more time before you plunge into the water. You swim hard and when you reach the landward edge of the coral garden you are winded. The giant fish has disappeared. You pull your head up to sight the snorkel tube knowing that she is on the other side of this magnificent bed of elk horn but you don't see her. You experience the sudden emptiness like the deaf and blind might on day one.
You widen your search, looking left and right, but the low waves are breaking on the horizon that is even with your forehead so you can't see past them. You swim further out, threading the branches of coral just below the surface. There is a small boat drifting in to shore. You look the two men over, to see if in their faces there is any reason to become alarmed. They have a certain vantage point you think as they concentrate on avoiding the reef, but they continue their calm tack, and even though you are tired and panicked, you are still reluctant to ring the bell.
You stop to tread water and compose, looking back to the beach for your blue shirt, picking out floating birds and shadows that might obscure her black tube when the sea inhales. Nothing. You spin around and check down. How far and how fast could she go? She has to be here somewhere. You swim back and forth, diving between the branches, and several times when you come up a nub of antler fools you. Otherwise nothing breaks the plane of water, no blue shirt, no black tube, no white skin, nothing. You fight off the image of her breathless body caught in the branches by your shirt, her mouth still drawn around the tube, her eyes open and clear behind the oval glass as it fills with water.
Your thoughts struggle for air. All at once you are searching and trying to remain calm; calling for help and trying to assess how long she has been under and how long she might have. You might as well be counting ice caps and sea levels as they whirl under the waiting sun. You are moving so fast that any action you take, any decision, seems foretold, and all at once you are talking to the Mexican authorities, detained at the border, arranging for her body to be sent, on the bus, on the plane, on the phone burying the gruesome details with her bereft mother, answering the guilt that is in your heart and cursing the bad luck that has followed you since before you were born, and all this time, which is no time really but a few seconds, you are calling her name into the answerless blue and waving your arms over your head to draw attention from the shore.
A man has taken notice and has come to the edge of the water for a better look. You wave harder but he seems unsure. He gestures to his table under the palm tree and then over to the boat that is pulling in and tying off. Nothing is happening. The man sits back down and the boat continues to tie off. Meanwhile you are flailing about in six feet of water during siesta.
You stand up with a little help from an arm of coral. Wouldn't she do the same? But what if she took a lung full of water in her snorkel tube? Or got caught up in the branches? Or tumbled into them on a wave and hit her head? What if she has been pulled out on the current and is hanging there over the abyss that must surely start somewhere to the other side of this barrier reef?
One minute you are looking at a beautiful fish and in the next she is floating lifeless to the bottom. You lock on to this idea because it stops right in front of you. There is nowhere to hide in the ocean. She and this vast blue eye have become one. You climb up into the topmost branches of the coral, with the water just covering your ankles, but the sea still pulls you this way and that, and knocks you off twice.
What is he doing now, they are asking each other, looking over the tops of their sunglasses at a man standing on the water as if their eyes can't be trusted? You call out with your hands up to your face. Ayudame! Ayudame! You wave frantically and jump up and down in the rough grip of the sea like a cheerleader. Your legs are bleeding in several places where you scraped against the coral, killing it with each touch, with every toe-hold climbing over it as it crumbles off and clouds the water, erasing decades of growth and survival.
You are the murderer now. You must give a little back to this bloodthirsty sea, and now, when you start killing the ocean, they take you seriously. Now they are up, at least a dozen of them, standing on the beach waving their golden arms, and the two men on the boat are untying and tacking back out to see what has happened.
Now that you have everyone's attention, you turn your back on them and search the surface, and from your vantage point your despair deepens, invisibly, like a thousand bottomless nights, like buried light, and there, at a depth you've never known, you find her and she is calling to you from the water, calling you to join her, and behind her is the black harbinger that the sea sent to lure you out, and in the darkest and most forlorn reaches of your soul, which registers as a pain that will never go away, you find a sudden rationality in the idea of throwing yourself at the ocean, of splitting yourself on the spikes of sharp coral and being vacuumed up along the same channel as her body. At least then you are together, you think, and then too, they will find you because now they are watching.
And now, as you stand there splitting two worlds, high upon the aching shoulders of the void, what is behind you is everything you have ever done, your whole life, and ahead of you, glaring up at you, the abyss in the eye of a fish as big as the world and unknown and futureless and uneaten and unloved and all that other stuff and the difference is her, a few breaths between right now and never again, a few dumb breaths between two worlds, just one last swim she said, and as you stand there a voice reaches over from the dead world behind you and all that's gone before, and asks you if you need some help.
You look up to see the men in the boat following a worn passage through the coral bed. You put your hands up to your mouth and for a few terrible seconds the words climb over one another and pull one another back like mud wrestlers. Drowning, gone, accident, girl float by in a tangle of kelp just in front of you, and when you finally do open your mouth the entire sea rushes in and the blue kool-aid starts pissing out of your ears and nose. Fish scales cover your eyelids and white sand fills your pores. The coral loufahs you inside and out like a washing machine and you manage two words, and you push them out with everything that is in you, and you watch them struggle across the water dragging your bleeding insides, a ragu chum over the surface, seagulls and sandpipers tearing at the trailing organs. And then you hear the two words reach the other end, a little higher than you'd heard in your head but recognizable still - SNORKELER DOWN - you hear yourself say, pulling the boatmen into your solitary idea of the abyss as though it were a boundary.
The men answer that they can't come across the coral. You ask them to go around, indicating with a sweep of your arm and confining her disappearance to half the sea in front of you. As they maneuver, you try to swim out to meet them but it's like trying to run in a dream. You are exhausted. You panic. The future is a still life. They pull her wracked body onto the boat. She is limp and folded over. The water runs out of her and into you like a fountain. One last swim she said, and you keep an eye on her because you said you would.
************
You half-crawl and half-swim over the last one hundred yards to the shore. Finally you feel the sea grass in your toes as the heavy water drains off. The sun carries you across the threshold onto dry sand where you collapse to your knees for a moment. As you get up you wrestle free of the wet anchor on your back. You wring out his blue shirt and hang it on the chair in the sun. You're winded. You cough a little -a wet smoker's cough- and you pound your beating chest. You wonder where he is. The two neighbors who read all day long look up but don't say anything. You shake the water out of your head and slide open the door to the room, calling out his name. You go back outside to dry off in the sun and catch your breath. When you sit down you notice the shouting. You dry off your nose and put on your glasses. It's coming from the boat that almost hit you as you swam in face down between two worlds.