Turtle Planet. Yun Rou
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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.
We Choose the Gods that Suit Us Best
There is a Latin culture festival going on in the park today, and people from Central and South America are parading, playing music, and singing songs in Spanish. They’re having so much fun; it’s terribly tempting to watch, but I’m there to meditate. I try using a nearby tree for interference, orienting myself so I’ll be as unobtrusive as possible and so that the tree itself will cut the noise a bit. I finally manage to settle myself, to slow my heart rate and my breathing, and to prepare for what the Turtle Immortals may have in store for me today. While I’m waiting, I notice a foul and fetid odor. It’s faint at first, but it grows stronger and stronger until I suddenly find myself underwater again, this time floating just off a muddy bottom.
“Nobody told me you were bald,” says a stentorian voice.
I look for the source, but the water is turbid and topped with gritty foam, and all I can make out are waterlogged branches, old tires, and the rusted frame of a discarded car door.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” I answer. “You can see me, but I can’t see you.”
“Flint River wasn’t always this dirty. Hundred years ago, I could see the craters on a full moon just by crawlin’ up on the bank for a spell. A year later, the crappin’ it up began. That’s Georgia for you.”
The voice seems to be coming from below, but I still can’t make out the source. I fan my hands to lower myself and take a few shuffling steps in the mud.
“Okay, but where are you, exactly?”
“River starts up by the airport in ‘Lana. That’s where the aviation gas gets in, and the oil. Chemical spills of the stuff used to take the ice off airplane windshields. Hey! You’re about standin’ on my goddamn head. If you weren’t the monk I’ve been waiting for, I’d bite off all your toes. Look. Here’s a fart.”
A few bubbles appear. I look for a source but still don’t see one.
“ ’Fore today, I never did know a man’s brains fall out with his hair,” says the voice.
I’m tiring of the game when the turtle opens an eye. It’s the size of a cup of coffee. I follow the line of his enormous head forward to his snout and then back to his neck and the borders of his shell. He’s an alligator snapping turtle, an armored giant with a long, thick tail, the largest freshwater turtle in North America. Perhaps he weighs two-hundred pounds.
“I shave my head with a safety razor,” I tell him.
“If you say so, Monk. You ever listen to Clifton Chenier?”
“You’re asking me about a musician?” I say, confused. “The King of Zydeco?”
His enormous head comes out of its shell and stretches forward. “There you go! Now you’re talkin’