The Print on the Glass

The tank smelled wrong. Not the water, which Nikos changed every fourth day and which tasted of copper and the plastic of the filter, but the pipe. The pipe ran from the tank’s lower corner through the wall and out into the harbor, and through it came a thread of water that changed every hour, carrying whatever the sea was thinking about. This morning the thread carried crab. Small crab, the kind that lived in the rubble below the south breakwater, the kind whose shells cracked with a particular sound between her beak.

She knew the sound. She had made it before, in the place the pipe led to, and the knowing was in her arms, not in the part of her that was her.

The tank was nine hundred liters. The pipe was forty millimeters. The wall was concrete, and behind it the harbor went down to six meters and then to sand, and beyond the sand the reef began. She could not see any of this. She could taste it. Her suckers tasted the water as a tongue tastes a word, and the word the pipe said was reef, reef, reef, getting stronger toward dusk when the current turned.

She had found the valve on the second night. It sat on the pipe where it left the tank, a ball valve with a yellow handle, and it turned a quarter-turn to open the drain. She had pulled it once by accident, reaching for the filter’s intake, and the water had dropped two centimeters before the handle stopped under its own weight. She had learned the second night that pulling twice worked: the first pull lifted the handle past the detent, the second carried it to open. Two pulls and the tank drained into the harbor at a rate she could feel in her skin, the water level dropping against her mantle like a slow tide.

But the valve was also the only thing keeping the tank’s water from going still. When it was closed, the pump pushed water through the pipe and back, and the oxygen stayed. When it was open, the pump pushed water out and nothing came back. She had learned this the third night, when she pulled twice and the water began to leave and the oxygen began to leave with it, and her skin went pale and her arms went slow, and she had to pull the valve closed again with the last of her strength, and the pump hummed and the water came back and she breathed.

The valve was a door and a lung. She understood doors. She did not understand lungs. She understood that the door took her breath.

Nikos came in at six. She knew him by the vibration of his feet on the floor, by the smell of diesel and the cold of the morning on his jacket, by how the light changed when he opened the door. He was not a large man. He had a beard that was more gray than black and hands that were rough in the places where rope had worn them. He wore the same jacket every day. He came to the tank and put his hand on the glass and she put her arm against the glass where his hand was, and he said something. She did not hear words. She felt the vibration of his voice in the water, and her skin changed color without her deciding it, a darker brown along the mantle, a paler stripe down the arms, and she could not stop it. The display was always on. She could not turn it off. She showed him what she was whether she wanted to or not.

He stayed at the glass for a long time. He talked. The vibration was low and rhythmic, the same pattern every night, a rise and a fall, and she did not know what it meant but she knew the shape of it, as she knew the shape of a current. It was a current that came from him. It meant he was there.

He had begun talking to her in March. She did not know March. She knew the water got colder and his hands got rougher and he came to the tank more often and stayed longer. He talked in a voice she had not felt before March. It was lower than his other voice, slower, and it had a weight to it that pressed against the glass. She did not know what weight meant. She knew that when he used it, the color change in her skin was deeper, and her arms moved toward the glass without her telling them to.

She did not love him. She did not have words.

On the fifth night he added a second latch. It was a small brass hook on the underside of the lid, and he had to reach into the water to fasten it, and his hand was in the tank for seven seconds, and during those seven seconds she tasted him. His skin tasted of salt and diesel and something underneath that she did not have a name for, and her arms moved toward his hand and he pulled it out and closed the lid and fastened the hook.

She watched his hands. She watched them through the glass as he worked the hook, how his fingers found the catch and lifted and turned. She watched the motion. The motion went into her arms, not into the part of her that was her, and her arms held it. She did not plan. Her arms knew the shape of the motion as they knew the shape of a crack in a rock, and the knowing was enough.

Three days later, when he was at the sink, she unhooked it. She did not decide to unhook it. Her arm found the hook and moved how his fingers had moved, and the hook came free, and the lid was loose. She did not open it. She left it loose and watched him come back and see it and fasten it again, and this time he used both hands and he looked at her through the glass for a long time.

She showed him a dark brown. She could not help it.

That night he left the lid cracked. Not open, not closed. A gap of two centimeters at the corner nearest the pipe. She could smell the harbor through the gap, the open harbor, the water that moved and carried things, and the smell was so strong that her skin went pale and her arms went to the gap and pushed, and the lid moved half a centimeter and stopped against the hook.

He had left it cracked on purpose. She did not know purpose. She knew the gap and the smell and the hook and the push.

In the morning he closed it. He came in and looked at the gap and closed it and fastened the hook and stood at the glass. He talked in the low voice. The vibration was the same. But his hands, when they came to the glass, pressed harder than usual, and she felt the warmth through the water, and her skin went dark and pale in stripes she could not control.

He knew she wanted out. She knew he knew. Neither of them had a word for this. It was a fact between them, like the temperature, like the salinity.

The near-miss was a Thursday. She pulled the valve twice at two in the morning, when the house was quiet and the pump was the only sound. The water began to drop. She felt it leave her skin, the level falling against her mantle, and the oxygen began to go with it, and her arms went heavy and her skin went pale, the pale of a thing that is not getting enough. She got to the drain. The drain was forty millimeters. Her mantle was too wide but her arms were not, and her beak was the only hard part of her, and she pushed her beak into the drain and her arms followed, and the water was at her eyes, and she could not breathe.

She pulled the valve closed. She had to use three arms. The handle was stiff and her strength was going, and she pulled and the handle moved and the pump hummed and the water came back, and she breathed, and her skin went from pale to dark in a wave that started at her mantle and moved down her arms, and she sat on the bottom of the tank and was still.

Nikos found her at four. He came in and saw her on the bottom, pale, and he opened the lid. He reached in with both hands and lifted her out of the water and held her in the air, and she was heavy and wet and her arms hung down, and he carried her to the sink and ran water over her, and she breathed the water and her skin came back, and he put her in the tank and closed the lid and sat in the chair by the tank and did not talk.

He sat in the chair for an hour. She watched him through the glass. His hands were in his lap. His face was the face of a man who is holding something and does not know if he should put it down. She did not know faces. She knew the stillness of him, and the stillness was new. He was always moving, always talking, always pressing his hands to the glass. Now he was still, and the stillness was a thing she could taste in the water, and it tasted like the pipe smelled when the current was wrong. It tasted like a direction with no destination.

She did not feel sorry for him. She was hungry, and the tank did not have crabs, and the pipe smelled like crabs.

After that night he left the lid cracked again, and then closed it, and then cracked it, and then closed it. She watched his hands. The hands were the story. When they cracked the lid, they were slow and careful, and when they closed it, they were fast, and the difference was a thing she could read in the water, as she could read the current. He was not ready. She did not know ready. She knew that the gap came and went, and that the gap was not enough, and that the valve was still there.

On the last night he fell asleep in the chair. It was late. The house was quiet. The pump hummed. She could hear his breathing, the slow deep breathing of a man who has stopped talking, and his hands were in his lap and his head was back and his mouth was open.

She pulled the valve. Once. Twice. The water began to drop. She did not wait. She went to the lid and her arms found the hook and moved how his fingers had moved, and the hook came free, and she pushed the lid. It slid. The gap became a hole. She was through it and on the floor, and the floor was dry and wrong, and her skin went pale from the air, and she moved.

She moved toward the pipe. The pipe went through the wall. The drain was at the base of the tank, where the pipe entered the wall, and the drain was forty millimeters and her beak was the only hard part of her, and she pushed her beak into the drain and her arms followed, and the concrete scraped her skin, and she tasted concrete and old water and the inside of the pipe, and then she tasted the harbor.

The harbor tasted of everything. Salt and diesel and crab and the reef and the sand and the current and the night. She pushed through the pipe, and her arms pulled, and the pipe was forty millimeters and she was not, and she left skin on the inside of the pipe, and she did not care. She came out into the harbor and the water was around her and she breathed, and her skin went dark and then pale and then dark again, and the colors moved over her like a thing she could not stop, and the harbor was dark and the water moved, and she went down.

She went toward the crab smell, toward the reef, toward the gradient that the pipe had been promising her for weeks, and the gradient was real, and it was enough.

In the tank, the water was still dropping. The pump hummed. The valve was open. The water would go down to the drain and then stop, and the pump would push air through the pipe, and the tank would be empty by morning.

Nikos woke at five. The house was quiet. The pump was humming. He went to the tank and the water was low, almost to the drain, and the lid was open, and the tank was empty of her. He stood at the glass and looked at the water and the lid and the open valve, and he closed the valve and the pump hummed and the water began to come back.

He looked at the glass. On the inside of the glass, at the level where the water had been when she was there, there was a print. It was the print of one arm, the suckers pressed against the glass in a pattern that was not a pattern, just the shape of an arm that had pushed off. The suckers had left marks, small circles, and between the circles the skin had left a smear of mucus and pigment, a dark brown smear that was drying now in the air.

He put his hand on the glass. His hand was over the print. The glass was cold. He stood there for a long time, and the water came back into the tank, and the pump hummed, and the room was empty of her.

He did not wipe the print off. He left it. He went to the window and opened it, and the harbor air came in, and it smelled of salt and diesel and the reef, and he stood there and breathed it, and the print stayed on the glass behind him, and the tank filled, and the morning came.

Somewhere in the dark water between the breakwater and the sand, an octopus was tasting the first crab of the morning, and the crab cracked between her beak with a sound she knew.