Читать книгу Turtle Planet - Yun Rou - Страница 13

Be Like Water

Once again, I stand in Daoist meditation. As usual, my arms are out in front of me as if I’m hugging a tree, my elbows and shoulders are down and relaxed, and the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth. Children laugh nearby. Geese squabble. Runners curse what the geese have left behind. I wait for something to happen. I wait some more. Gradually, the park recedes, and I find myself paddling through frigid ocean water, dark blue and forbidding. I take a few strokes and feel the pressure of the water against my hands. My fingers prune. A leatherback sea turtle, mistress of the open ocean, appears beside me. A gargantuan turtle the size of a small car, she has a ridged, teardrop-shaped shell, bulbous at the front and tapering to a point at the back. The head and limbs bear beautiful white snowflake patterns.

“I’m so happy to see you, Monk. I thought you might arrive too late to hear my story. What a shame that would have been.”

“I’m breathing underwater,” I say.

“You’re fine. Daoist magic, remember? I’m the one in trouble.”

It takes me a moment to understand what she means. Then I see it. A piece of fishing line, anchored down into the abyss, is wrapped around one of her front flippers. It oozes blood.

“You’re stuck,” I say.

“I am.”

“So you can’t get up to the surface to breathe.”

“I can’t actually. I have approximately eleven minutes to live. Perhaps a little more if I gentle my mind and drift with the current. If you don’t mind watching me pass, you may stay with me.”

I wonder what kind of immortal drowns caught in fishing line. I ponder the sort of lesson I can expect from spending the next eleven minutes watching a sea turtle drown. The Red-ear, perhaps the chelonian analogue of Lü Dongbin, the immortal leader of that famous gang of eight, informed me that the lessons I would experience would be unique and challenging. Be that as it may, I can think of few things I would rather do than watch this magnificent creature drown.

“Is there no way for me to help?”

“You can try,” she says.

I swim over to the offending fishing line. The water is dense and cold. I ask the turtle where we are.

“In the plastic deathtrap of the North Pacific Gyre,” she says. “Halfway between California and Hawaii.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Hawaii,” I say, trying to get my fingers between the flipper and the line. “The volcanoes are getting angry at all that pollution and overpopulation. It’s not as nice a place to be as it once was.”

“The islanders call the volcanoes by their goddess name, Pele,” says the turtle. “Of course, she’s seeking her revenge, though we Daoists would call it returning to wuji, to balance. Equilibrium. Humans have run amok.”

“It’s not just the eruptions,” I say after clearing a gulp of salty water. I find I can’t break the line with my fingers or gnaw through it with my teeth. “The island spirit of aloha is hard to find among the transplants, and there’s a lot of racism and intolerance and traffic. Violence, too.”

The turtle spins around in the water so she can see what I’m doing. “You’re not going to get through it,” she says. “If it’s too strong for me and shark and tuna, it’s too strong for your little fingers. The only way is spiraling. It’s what galaxies do. It’s nature’s way of dealing with conflict.”

I follow her instructions and by swimming around her trapped fin, begin to loosen the line.

“Speaking of conflict,” the turtle continues, “Violence is one of nature’s favorite ways to cull humans. Everyone knows she uses volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, typhoons, mudslides, droughts, dust storms, and tornadoes, but many people don’t recognize that all those terrible diseases are her work as well, as are religions that make you fight and kill each other, gender variations that reduce your reproductive rate, and, of course, the automobile, which takes so many human lives. She is the mistress of hate as well as the mother of great beauty, this ruler of ours, and mistress, too, of what you call war. Believe me, Monk, nature is ruthless in her campaign to survive you.”

“You see all this from beneath the waves?” I ask, a bit incredulous.

“Oh yes,” she says as I continue to unwind the line. “I see a great deal from the open water and from beachheads I have climbed, but of course I also hear from other turtles. Turtle Immortals band together, you know, and we’ve been watching humans for a long time. My cousins speak to me of your doings from their homes across the globe. We watch you from forests and jungles and rivers and streams, from deserts and mountaintops, too.”

“I never knew,” I say.

Her beak will not curve to her mood, but in the faint crinkling of the skin around her eyes, I detect an indulgent smile. I continue unwinding the countless layers of line that trap her, but she’s made the problem worse with her own spiraling, and I worry she will run out of air before I can get free her.

“I’ve paddled to the Atlantic from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the North Sea, from the Cape of Good Hope to Labrador, she says dreamily. “I’ve greeted young of my kind off the beaches of Suriname and Guyana, Antigua, Barbuda, Tobago, and Gandoca and Parismina in Costa Rica. I’ve crossed to the Pacific and rested on the sands of Papua New Guinea and Gabon. Movie stars have watched me in California. I’ve been churned in the wake of a freighter off Malaysia, where once thousands of my kind gathered at the beach of Rantau Abang before the locals dug our eggs for soup, and kayakers have brushed past me in British Columbia. Once, years ago, I visited kin off the Nicobar Islands, but I never went back because I saw a ghost on a dune and beheld so many young of my kind fall to birds.”

“Do your friends know you’re stuck?” I ask, pushing away the cloud of tangled line I’ve thus far managed to remove.

“Of course. That’s why they sent you.”

As I kick my way around her with the line in my hand, I notice a graveyard of bones on the seafloor beneath me—remains of air-breathing creatures who could not reach the surface to save themselves—primarily the long spines, broad tails, cavernous ribs, bristles, and teeth of whales. Evidently cleaned by scavenger fishes and the scouring of the constant current, they glow white.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“I was 204 last year.”

“You’re so experienced. How could you get caught in this line?”

“The multitude of new challenges in this world tire me, Monk. The search for food in this raped ocean, the drift nets, the long lines, the hooks, satellite tracking, harpoons. All of my kind struggle to survive and meet and mate and breed and survive, but there are only so many times any one of us can escape life’s traps and pitfalls.”

“Weren’t all those bones down there a clue?”

“I dove deep hunting jellyfish because I love the sting of their tentacles on my flesh and the satisfaction as they slide down my gullet. I got caught on the way back up. I indulged my desire as your kind does, and I paid the price as all of us do. In the end it is always our mistakes that kill us.”

“Still,” I say, as my work finally reveals her scaled limb, free of line, “you’re so brilliant and this seems such an amateur’s error.”

“Brilliant,” she scoffs. “Why do humans have such a romance with exceptionalism? The one thing you fear most is to be normal, to be regular, to be just another shell in the crowd. There is so much to celebrate in the very fact that life exists. Why focus on our differences rather than the marvel we share?”

“I see the similarities and differences of expressions of Dao,” I say. “A flexible spine for me, a shell for you; a brain like a cat’s in my belly, a sphincter that keeps out salt water in yours; a pelvic girdle that lets me stand and run, shoulders inside a shell for you; my brain for plotting books, your thousand-meter-dive lungs; smartphones for me, geo-positioning head magnets for you.”

I finally free the line. All that’s left is one of the hooks. I work it out slowly, seeing the pink and white of her flesh as I do, very much aware of how much what I’m doing must hurt her. “Now you don’t have to worry about the killer whale,” I say.

She turns to me, her giant beak not inches from my face. “What do you know of killer whales?” she asks, her voice unfriendly for the first time.

“I saw one chasing you right as you appeared to me,” I say. “I saw his jaw open and I saw you flee in desperation into the nets. I saw him veer off before he, too, became entangled. I saw you choose a lingering death over a quick one.”

She exhales a cloud of bubbles and heads slowly to the surface, her great flippers beating in tandem, the injured one not quite as strong, rendering her progress less than direct. “I refused to be food for him,” she tells me. “I couldn’t let him win after two centuries of eluding his kind in all their warm-blooded, arrogant cunning. They are like humans with tails, thinking they rule the underwater realm, seeking to supersede those of us who were here first, who have seen and understand things they never will.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, working hard to keep up with her ascent. “I meant no disrespect.”

“I remember the first strokes I took after climbing out of my mother’s nest on that beach in Sri Lanka. I remember crawling and stumbling and tumbling into the water and feeling the warm caress of that tropical ocean, back then free of the myriad chemicals humans have flushed into it. I remember what it felt like to fly through that water, and I remember every mile I’ve flown since. Being in the water, I try to be like the water. If your kind could do the same, if all of you could be like water, your lives would be better for it.”

“Some of us have that ambition,” I say. “Some of our great texts talk about it.”

She waves her free forelimb dismissively. “Water gives life far more often than it takes it. If any of your kind actually lived the lessons of those texts—instead of solving mathematical problems and building torpedoes—you would thrive without destroying everything around you. You would yield instead of standing fast. You would roll in and out like the tide, cyclically and without effort. You would understand that all things are the same, not different, and that the rights and wrongs to which you are so addicted are functions of perspective and dogma. All of you, each and every one, need to realize how we are all connected.”

“People can be rigid,” I say. “That much is for sure. Maybe my spirit-writing will help.”

We break water. The wind is high, sending little whitecaps scudding everywhere. The mid-ocean swell is big, and I rise and fall as if in a skyscraper’s elevator. She floats alongside me.

“Thank you for saving my life,” she says. “That wasn’t the best way to go, although in truth I am ready and will go soon.”

I can’t say exactly why, but when she tells me this, I start to weep. Maybe it’s relief at feeling the sun again, strong on my face, maybe it’s something else. She nudges against me with her shell, and I’m surprised to find that she’s nearly as warm as the sun.

“Being like water means no attachment to outcome,” she says. “Do you think each wave celebrates its own forming and then bemoans its return to the surface? Of course not. Instead of holding onto a great collective obsession with seeing your will done and preserving your life, you should follow water’s example and avoid meeting force with force, understanding yourselves to be part of something larger, and accepting your end with equanimity, for there will surely be another beginning. It shouldn’t be so hard. After all, water doesn’t struggle.”

“I’ll pass that along,” I say.

She raises her good flipper in what I suppose is a turtle version of a wave. I raise my hand to respond in kind before she sinks out of sight, but before I can, I find myself on terra firma once more.

I’m in the park and it’s drizzling.