Mano had tried to have been just as optimistic about them moving from the Middle East to Brazil as she’d been about them having moved from India to the Middle East in the first place. Cephalopods were relentlessly curious creatures, always exploring and looking forward to discovering new things. Of course, some people also believed that this was the reason why they could be lured into octopus traps.
“Look at it,” Eli had said, almost with reverence, as they’d sat on the beach looking out at the ocean from a Brazilian shore after having moved there, “So much saltwater...” It may not have seemed like much, but it had been true that they had missed the ocean when they had been living in the Middle East. You could take the fish out of the ocean, so to speak, but you could never take the ocean out of the fish.
“Sometimes,” she’d started, “I think about saltwater.” It’d sounded like she’d been thinking out loud. “I think, if you have salt, and you have water, two completely different things, and you put them together, you get something else that’s new and different from either of them: saltwater. At first, it might not seem like you can get back either of them, not as they used to be anyway.”
Mano had nodded, encouraging her to continue.
“But then, people talk about how if you use a filter, if you pour saltwater through a filter, you can get your water filtering through... and you can get your salt filtered out. Or if you have like a lab or something, you can make the water evaporate, contain it in vapor form somehow, get your salt, and condense the water right back.” Mano hadn’t been sure of what Eli had been talking about. Did Eli have regrets about their relationship? It’d seemed wrong to ask.
“What does that make you think about?” she’d asked.
“Sometimes,” Eli had answered, “I think back on everything that happened to me, okay, I think about the bad things, and I wonder, could there possibly ever be a way to filter out the harm it did to me, like salt from water, to get back what I was before it did what it did to me? Or have I so irremediably bonded with how it affected me, even bound up with the sympathy that drives me to help others... that it’s a part of me for good, and there’s nothing I can do about it?”
Mano had hugged her.
“We can never know that there’s nothing we can do about something unless we try,” she’d told Eli. “Someone had to be the first person to get salt out of water.” Eli had grunted thoughtfully. “Can I ask you something about reincarnation, Mano?” Mano had nodded. “Do you think, if you and I came back as other people, that we could somehow find each other again? Do you think I could somehow not remember what was done to me in this life, but still remember the good things, the things about you that I liked, on some level? Or do you think that we’d just forget everything, and not care anymore?”
What a loaded question that had been.
“I think,” Mano had answered, “that you would be in great danger of having been a good enough person not to come back at all. But even if I did believe that one lifetime is all I get, Eli... There’s no one I’d rather spend it with than you.” Eli had smiled. Mano had loved to see her smile. Maybe if she’d worked at helping other people with their problems for long enough, she’d have so much to deal with that she’d eventually forget about her own, Eli had tried to tell herself.
Brazil had had its own set of issues to deal with. Poverty had been a big one, and street urchins – often literal urchins – had roamed the favelas in search of something to eat, or anything at all. Slavery as such may have been outlawed, but you couldn’t simply release people who had been enslaved for generations into a society that had no room for them, for which they had no way to be prepared, and expect them to turn out just fine. Many had ended up either starving in the streets or forced to break or at least bend the rules of society simply in order to continue to live.
The discrepancy between the quality of life of fish compared to over-grounders had been more glaring there than anywhere either of them had lived before. There had even been fishing boats that had used nets so carelessly that they had caught fish humanoids as opposed to feral fish that couldn’t talk. Efforts to get them to stop their careless practices through official channels had been going nowhere for a disturbingly long time.
As word about Eli’s had spread, disenfranchised fish, hybrids and transfolk had begun to look up to her, hoping that she could provide them both with a source of inspiration for personal drive to achieve their goals and in terms of serving as their representative to the outside world. Dryads, while they’d been only a small percentage of the population, had become more and more restricted in their movements and access to public life by rampant deforestation of the so-called lung of the world, since they only had the ability to exist in the forest at all.
Eli had come up with a poem inspired by her debates with climate change deniers, fish oppression and her negative experiences with therapy. In it, water, which she’d heard that psychologists believed symbolized emotions in dreams, would overflow to cover the world, just as her own emotions had overflowed from her heart. This way, her overflowing emotions would create a world in which all fish could live and breathe. It became one of her most famous works.
Even though they had moved away from more obvious forms of religious violence, Eli had still been able to see the destructive effects of religious dogma on social structures in the anti-choice legislation and culture that had made many women’s lives there so much harder than they’d needed to be. Some of the other leftist activists who had already worked in Brazil had subscribed to liberation theology, had believed, against the current, that applied progressive politics had been the goal that God had set out for them. Eli hadn’t shared their beliefs but it hadn’t stopped her from working with them. Results in people’s lives had been more important.
The more problems she’d run into in South America that had been caused by Americans somehow, the longer she’d tried to rally the population to resist, the more she’d wondered if her efforts would ever bear concrete fruit, fruit that she could taste. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been up to the people who had been affected by these negative decisions themselves to fix them, she’d thought. Maybe that should’ve been the job of the people who had caused them these problems.
After a couple of years in Brazil, Eli had asked Mano if she’d thought that there had been any chance that she could ever get another transfer from the news organization that she’d worked for from Brazil to America. She’d wanted a chance to go talk to the people who were making the decisions that were damaging the most of the rest of the world themselves, to tell them how the people they’d hurt had been affected by it to their face. When Mano had first asked about it, she’d learned that they had, in fact, been looking for someone else to have work there, and she’d applied for it. As the only applicant at the time, it’d seemed like she’d be a shoe-in.
When Mano had gone to the anti-capitalist protest at which she had first met Klein, during his own trip from America to Brazil, the skunk had been surprised to learn that she had been planning on moving there. He’d wondered if he’d been going to run into her again after his trip to Brazil would have been over. Meeting Klein had cheered her up. She hadn’t had the chance to keep many Indian friends when they’d moved to the Middle East, had made fewer friends in the Middle East, and lost them again when they’d moved to Brazil. Klein had been the only friend that she’d made in Brazil at all. She’d hoped that she could meet him again too.
She hadn’t gardened in so long. Gardening had reminded her of her father. The more she’d thought about it, the more she’d realized that, if she’d been going to live a life in which she’d been going to be moving from India to the Middle East to Brazil to America to gods knew where for gods knew how long, she hadn’t been going to get much of a chance to plant something, and to watch it grow.
She’d supposed that it’d been the world that’d become her plant to tend for, in this life. Maybe if they took good enough care of it, it would grow into something better, something good, that would last for a long time, she’d thought. She’d remembered what it had been like to practice the tree asana with her father in his garden, putting herself into the mind of a tree, what it must have been like to have been able to put down roots somewhere.
Reminded of her own roots, in what little spare time she had from her work and when Eli had been busy working herself – Mano still hadn’t started sleeping as a regular thing back then – Mano had started gathering scrap metal on the beach. Shipwrecks would periodically wind up on the shore and left there for people like her to scavenge spare parts from. With her mother’s engineering training, Mano had started building a small sub from them.
“Oh, this looks pretty cool!” Eli had said. “Do you think we’ll be able to bring it with us when we move?” Mano hadn’t finished it yet, but there had already been enough of it done for it to have been possible to tell how big it had been going to be when it would be done, big enough for about a half-dozen people to fit in with their stuff, if they’d needed to. “I was thinking we could move in it,” Mano had answered. “That might be a good idea,” Eli had agreed.
But the move never came. Another applicant had applied for the job, one who the news organization that Mano had worked for had believed would be more suited for the job than she would have been. They hadn’t really explained why, but she hadn’t really known what to say about that. With no steady source of income to support them in North America, there would be no way for them to move there and to have a way of continuing to exist there.
“Maybe it’s just as well.” But the expression on Eli’s face had belied her statement. “Maybe I was just trying to run away from myself,” she’d said.
It had come as a shock to Mano when she’d discovered that Eli had begun to study yoga. It had been something that people would often recommend that you do when you hated your body and were depressed about your life. ‘You should try yoga!’ All this time, Eli had lived with Mano, and she had never tried yoga. It had seemed vaguely appropriative. What if she didn’t do it right? But the desperation of her situation had led her to reconsider this advice after all. She had gotten really into it. For a while, it had seemed to Mano as though it had been doing her some good after all.
Then Mano had found her dead.
Eli had been lying on her back on the ground with her arms on her sides. There had been no sign of disease or injury anywhere on her, but her heart had stopped beating. Mano had found a note on the table next to her.
‘I’m sorry, my love. I kept reliving it. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It was like it just kept happening to me again and again, over and over on loop, forever. I just had to make it stop, to break the cycle... to find some kind of peace. I wish you could understand how hard I tried to live for you, how much I had to think you were worth it to force myself to suffer from continuing to live for as long as I did. You were the only one who ever really understood me. Forgive me.
Scatter my ashes at the Galapagos.
Your mock turtle,
Elizabeth.’
The autopsy had revealed that Eli had used yoga to stop her own heartbeat. If most people had felt what Mano had felt when she had found her girlfriend dead, they would have died on the spot. The excruciating pain that she’d felt would have killed them outright. For you see, when Mano had found Eli dead, Eli’s heart no longer beating alongside hers, Mano’s empathy for her lost love Eli had been so strong that her own heart had stopped beating as well.
Yet she’d lived.
As an octopus, Mano had been born with three hearts. With only two of them functioning, she’d be a lot weaker for the rest of her life, but at the time she hadn’t cared. All she had been able to think about had been how unfair it had been that she would get to have two more hearts to lose, two more lives to live after having already lost her life, when Eli had only had a single heart to stop, a single life to lose.
‘You see a turtle on its back. What do you do?’
Scattering Eli’s ashes at the Galapagos, a pilgrimage site for all lovers of turtles and Darwin, Mano had remembered their conversation about saltwater, as Eli had forever joined the ocean below her, to always be every bit as much of a part of it as salt and water would be.
Mano had just finished putting the finishing touches of her sub, and had disappeared into it. She had dived underwater in it. She had been so ashamed of having been unable to stop Eli that she hadn’t been able to bear the thought of having the people she had helped, the people who had admired her, or really anyone looking at her face, and confronting her with the fact that she had been the person who had failed at it. She hadn’t wanted to remember herself. She’d understood Eli better than she ever had. She’d wanted to disappear completely herself. But how could she altogether destroy someone Eli had loved, when she’d experienced how much it hurt?
So she’d begun to sleep. Six, nine, twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours in a row at a time.
Dreams had been a new experience for her. But with practice, and with some of her mental training to help her, Mano had become able to master lucid dreaming. She’d begun to dream of Eli, a man in her dream state, every single night, and to talk to him, just as she had used to talk to Eli when she had still been alive. Many believers would say that God is love, but for Mano, it had been her love who had become the goddess who she’d worshipped every night...
