Aberystwyth remained crouched behind a red pickup truck on the third floor of the Ultramart Parking Garage, breathing quietly through her gills, as the white Honda Civic pulled into the parking spot three cars away. She waited until the driver was in the elevator, then stood and walked to the car. She kept her arms extended, but her steps remained awkward, and she wobbled on her long green legs.
Awkwardly kneeling at the Honda’s back right tire, she reached into the wheel well and slid her hand along the smooth curved metal. Aby had already searched the back right wheel well of every other car, truck and van that had parked in this garage during the last seventy-two hours and found nothing, so her expectations were low. She opened her gills and pushed out a sigh, but then her fingers touched something small and rectangular that was magnetized to the steel. Aby pulled out her arm, and in her hand was a small black box. It took some time before she found the tiny button she needed to push to make the lid open, but when she did she found a key inside.
Aby let out a small cry of victory, her voice reverberating off the concrete walls of the parking garage. With the key in her hand, she approached the driver’s door. The webbing of her fingers made it difficult to push the key into the lock, but it turned easily once she got it in. Opening the door was simple, but getting behind the wheel proved more difficult.
The distance between the front of the seat and the pedals was considerably shorter than the length of her legs. Holding on to the roof of the car, Aby curled her right leg underneath the steering column. She sat down so that her knees were on either side of the wheel. She looked at the dashboard. She ran her fingers down from the steering column until she found the ignition. She inserted the key. She turned the key towards her, remembered that she was supposed to turn it away from her and tried again. The engine started.
Having memorized the difference between the symbols “D” and “R,” Aby successfully put the car into reverse. She reversed two inches and then stopped. Twisting out of the car, she walked to the back to see if everything was fine. It was. She returned to the driver’s seat, curled around the steering wheel and backed up two more inches. She got out to make sure she hadn’t hit anything. She hadn’t. Aby repeated this process until, seventeen minutes later, she had successfully backed out of the parking space.
Pushing the stick from R to D, Aby turned the wheel all the way to the right, moved a few inches forward, then got out and checked the front of the car. She hadn’t collided with anything. She repeated this pattern, gaining confidence as she followed the out signs, but her progress was still punctuated by stops to make sure she hadn’t hit anything. On the down ramp there were no cars to collide with, so she made no stops. By the time she reached P1, she was able to drive the twenty feet to the ticket window without interruption.
As Aby approached the kiosk, she was so focused on keeping the gas and brake pedals straight that she almost forgot to cover her gills. This was something Pabbi had repeatedly and emphatically stressed. Looking around, she found nothing that would suffice and resorted to pulling her T-shirt up and over her mouth. There was little she could do about her green skin. A rectangle of paper, which Pabbi had told her was called a parking stub, was in the left-hand corner of the dash. Rolling down the window, Aby stopped and held out the stub. She kept her eyes down but needn’t have, as the cashier didn’t even look up.
Aby handed him one of the bills Pabbi had given her. The cashier gave her other bills and some coins. A long, skinny barrier in front of her lifted up, and Aby, blinking with excitement, drove forward. It had taken her fifty-seven minutes to exit the parking garage.
Everything Aberystwyth knew about being unwatered she had learnt six weeks earlier, from her father, Pabbi, who lived on the fourteenth floor of an apartment building in an area of town Aby rarely frequented. Late one evening, completely unannounced, Aby had swum to his door and knocked. She felt nervous in the hallway. She knocked again. The door was opened, suddenly and with such force that Aby had to hold onto the door jamb to avoid being pulled inside.
Pabbi wasn’t well dressed. He’d gained weight since she’d last seen him. Several seconds passed during which neither father nor daughter said a word.
“I need your help,” Aby said.
“I’m going to get her.”
Pabbi needed no further explanation to understand who “her” was. “Ah, Aby,” he said. “That’s … that’s big.”
“I know.”
“Are you still Aquatic?”
“I am.”
“Devoutly?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re planning on Returning her?”
“I am.”
“Oh, Aby,” he said.
Pabbi did not move from the door jamb. He looked at the line where the red carpet from his apartment met the grey carpet in the hallway. A window was open in his living room, and the current pushed through the doorway, causing their bodies to sway in unison. The gills in his neck flapped open and he pushed a stream of water through them. Letting go of the door jamb, Pabbi backed into his apartment. “You’d better come in,” he said.
With a quick pull of her arms, Aby swam inside. Pabbi began making a pot of stryim. Neither spoke until it had finished brewing. The kitchen table was cleared of dishes, and Pabbi and Aby bobbed around it.
“Why don’t you come around more?” Pabbi asked.
“I try.”
“Not very hard.”
“Will you help me?”
“It’s best if you just leave her alone.”
“I can’t.”
“Tell me this—are you going because you want to save her? Or to find out why she left us?”
“For you, maybe.”
“So you’ll help me?”
“Have you ever breathed air, Aby?”
“No.”
“Walked on legs?”
“No.”
“Tried to pass?”
“No.”
“It’s too much for you.”
“Not if you help me.”
“Even if I help you.”
“I’ll do it even if you don’t help me,” Aby said. She looked up.
“That’s probably true.”
“Then you’ll help me?”
Pabbi pushed a long stream of water from his gills. “As much as I can,” he said.
Leaving her at the table, Pabbi swam to his bookshelf. He pulled down a volume unlike any Aby had seen before. He set it on the kitchen table. Waiting until she was looking over his shoulder, he opened it. The book looked like an atlas, but it didn’t illustrate the currents of the ocean. Aby realized that it was a map of land. Flipping through the pages, Pabbi came to an illustration of a large country, coloured pink. He put his thumb on Halifax. He dragged it across the shape, stopping at Morris, Manitoba. Even on the page, the distance seemed enormous.
“It will take you days,” Pabbi said.
“Okay.”
“Maybe a week.”
“And that’s only if you manage to steal a car.”
“What’s a car?” Aby asked.
Pabbi flipped open his gills and pushed a stream of water through them.
It is important to understand that, for devout Aquatics, simply being unwatered is a sin. At the core of the religion is a belief in the Finnyfir, or Great Flood. In this way, Aquaticism is not unlike Judaism or Christianity, but with one central difference: where those religions believe God flooded the world in order to start again, Aquatics believe God simply liked water better.
Aquatic scripture teaches that God found the land imperfect. He thought the mountains were messy, the deserts too dry and the fjords a little showy. He didn’t like the way the creatures He’d put on land did nothing but fight amongst themselves. The only thing God liked about His creation was the water. He loved the lakes, rivers and oceans. He loved the way water moved. He loved the colours it came in and the sounds it made. God liked the sorts of creatures that lived in it, and was very proud that it could exist as a solid, a liquid or a gas.
So, after a time, God decided to make it rain for forty days and forty nights, until the world was covered with water. Of course, this killed the majority of the things that lived on land. But as the water rose, a small number of those creatures discovered an ability they hadn’t known they had. After the water spilled from the banks of rivers and over the shorelines, after it rose above the roofs of houses and above the tallest trees, when the creatures’ fingers could no longer hold the flotsam they’d clung to and the jetsam they’d grasped, they fell beneath the surface and their lungs made the decision for them. Pulling in water as an automatic nervous response, some of them discovered they could breathe it. These creatures, Aquatics believe, were God’s chosen. He had given them the ability to breathe the water, leaving all the others to perish.
And perish they did. Land creatures died by the billions. But the Hliðafgoð took up residence below the surface of the water and thrived. Then, after thousands of years, God allowed the waters to recede, exposing the land. God did this to test the Hliðafgoð. Since He had never taken away their ability to breathe air, He wanted to see which of His creatures were worthy of His amphibious gift—and which were not.
God had judged the land to be unworthy; those who were attracted to it, who would return to it, would be revealed as unworthy as well. This is why the Hliðafgoð had decided—or at least most of them had—to suffer as little contact with humans as possible. Humans were called Siðri, which literally translated means “prone to spit in the eye of God.”
While Aquatics believe that it’s a sin to breathe the air, it is a minor sin. Within Aquaticism, there is only one sin that is considered an act so blasphemous it is beyond forgiveness, and this is to die with air-filled lungs. This, Aquatics believe, curses your soul to wander disembodied and alone, unwatered and unforgiven for eternity.
But even worse, these damned souls retain all of their memories. They remember everyone they’ve ever loved and continue to love them just as strongly, if not more so, than when they were alive. Their desire to be with them, to touch them or talk to them, remains eternally unsatisfied. In Gofdeill, the unwatered dead are called the sála-glorsol-tinn, which loosely translates to “famished souls.” It was from this fate that Aby hoped to save her mother.
What Aby had going for her was language. When she was still in public school, her mother had made her learn English. Looking back, Aby realized that her mother must have always suspected that she’d one day live unwatered, and had planned on taking her daughter with her. Although Aby’s accent remained thick, her vowels were pretty clear and the bulk of the language came back to her easily when she studied it.
Much harder for Aby to acquire were the skills needed to drive. It was easy to understand that the right pedal made the car go, the left made it stop, and it would travel in the direction she turned the steering wheel. More difficult to grasp was the idea that all motion would occur on the lateral plane, whether she was driving, walking or running. It was only after Pabbi suggested she imagine that every space she swam through, indoors or out, had a ceiling exactly as tall as she was that Aby began to understand. But it horrified her.
Aby was also skeptical of Pabbi’s advice that she would be able to steal a car by looking for its keys in the wheel well. She did not doubt the existence of cars, or of wheel wells, but the idea that anyone would be so cavalier with their keys seemed ludicrous. Devoted Aquatics, which Aby certainly was, believe that losing your keys not only predicts, but elicits mental illness. To lose one’s keys is the equivalent of losing one’s mind.
Even as she sat behind the wheel of the white Honda Civic, Aby’s keys were close to her, hanging from a string around her neck. As the car straddled Barrington Street, Aby touched her chest, feeling the shape of her keys through the fabric of her T-shirt. She felt comforted. Keeping the left pedal firmly depressed, Aby began searching through her only piece of luggage, a large sharkskin bag resting on the passenger seat.
She rummaged until she found her copy of the Aquatic Bible. Aby flipped through the pages until she found the piece of paper she’d carefully placed between the Book of Doubt and the Book of Endings. Unfolding this paper, Aby scanned it from top to bottom. She turned it over and did the same. Almost every space, front and back, was filled with handwriting. The letters were very small. The words were very close together. These were Aby’s directions. Numbering three hundred and thirteen, they charted a course from the Ultramart Parking Garage in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the Prairie Embassy Hotel in Morris, Manitoba, a distance of 3,487 kilometres.
Aby pushed a large breath through her gills. She took her foot off the brake. She turned right onto Granville Street; three hundred and twelve directions remained.
The controls of the vehicle were simple, but Aby remained nervous about getting the pedals confused. She came to a complete stop at every corner, the cars behind her honking their displeasure. She had much difficulty matching the symbols on the paper to the symbols on the road signs. She found it impossible to judge the speed of oncoming traffic and whether she was getting too close to the car in front of her.
It took her two hours to find Highway 102, although things got easier once she did. Driving on the expressway was just like swimming with a school: Aberystwyth understood the need to maintain a consistent amount of space between her car and the other cars. After two hours of highway driving, her confidence increased. She leaned back in her seat. She drove with one hand. She was practically relaxed. Then the highway turned from four lanes to two, and suddenly a car began driving straight towards her.
The car did not slow down, nor did it veer from its path. Her first instinct was to make her car go up, but this was something it did not do. She did not go left or right since Pabbi had stressed the importance of keeping the car on her part of the pavement. Aby looked over her shoulder and saw that there were no cars behind her. Pausing briefly to make sure her foot was over the left pedal, she pushed it to the floor mat. Her shoulders hunched. Her legs felt weak. Her skin turned a dark forest green, and she gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands.
Closing her eyes, she waited. Several seconds passed, but no impact occurred. Surprised, she opened her eyes just in time to see the oncoming vehicle miss hers by inches. Aby breathed out. Her fingers loosened. She turned her head to see the other car receding into the distance. She did not want to continue, but she reminded herself of what was at stake, and then pushed down on the right pedal.
Aby drove without incident for nine minutes, until another car began driving straight towards her. Again, Aby applied pressure to the left pedal. Her shoulders hunched. She covered her face with her hands and watched through webbed fingers as this car, too, missed hers by inches.
Once again, Aby was forced to find new courage. She continued driving. She drove all night. Her fear that every car travelling towards her in the oncoming lane was going to kill her diminished each time it happened. Nine hours later, just past Edmudston New Brunswick, she no longer had to brake when headlights approached. By the time she reached Rivière-du-Loup, Aberystwyth no longer had to stop at the top of hills to check that the road continued on the other side.