# Erin Permeated

published: 2020-08-15

The depths have always been terrifying.

Every week in elementary school days, my grandmother would take my cousins and brothers and I to the community center. We sprinted through lobbies, dashed down stairwells, loitered at the row of candy machines downstairs as the adults paid for our wristbands. The changing rooms were a veritable warzone, I remember, banging open and shut like the fins of a fish desperately trying to get away from a predator. We never got lockers. Someone would always stay beached on the concrete and tile shore, tasked with watching over our things.

Sometimes the lap pool would open up, and the staff would flood the crystal-clear waters with all of the inflatables that they usually kept jailed under the waterslide. And all the kids would exodus from the "normie pool" and line up at the edge of the lap pool's deep end, waiting for the sharp bark of a lifeguard to test their swimming ability. There was hardly any swimming to be had during those tests, just spasming from one end to the other and back again without drowning. Come that, a shackle of yellow around one wrist, and a wait until all the tests were done.

Don't look down.

I had never seen the floor of the deep end clearly in all the time we had gone there. Never clearly, just guessed, pieced together from glimpses through the beating waves. The pulsating blue-on-white would coax the primitive part of my mind into believing there was a shark waiting under the waves, waiting to gobble me up if I did not swim that test fast enough.

I took the test wearing goggles once. A wave of curiosity overtook me. And I plunged my face beneath the waters.

All of the pieces I'd gathered over the years stitched themselves up in a second. The floor seemed so far away and so close all at once, like I could just reach down and touch it. But it would shy away just that same amount, always forever out of reach. It was endless, forever, a world without end.

Infinity has a hard time fitting into a child's mind.

I have room in my body now.

Beyond the wall of inky shadows are waters. Body temperature, I almost do not feel them as I continue descending down the ladder. The moment the water passes my hips, the water pushes back on me, like a foam ball dunked under the waters, begging to return to the surface.

Remember those jokes you made with your cat-loving friend all those years ago? About how much fun it would be to be turned into floaty toys, drifting in a pool?

My cheeks start to burn.

I suppose I got my wish in the end.

The ladder does not end at the waters. I take a deep breath- the instincts never stop, do they?- and continue climbing down, buoyed by my feet hooked on each rail. I am lifting reverse weights. I am become weightless myself, and yet also somehow the world's heaviest object, a dumbbell in junior high dumped into a pool, falling down, down, down...

My ears pop. The darkness lifts.

There is no pool. There are no shadows.

There is only an endless sea of white. Flat, bright, yet not blinding. I am a shadowy silhouette against a piece of paper. A single color in a one-bit world.

The ladder ends.

I let go.

The ink vanishes from sight, leaving nothing but the infinite white. I look up. I look down. I twist all around. Nothing changes except for my own body. Whatever small organs there are in my ears tell my brain that I am upright, that down is down, that up is up. But there is nothing to orient myself with. Unless I am now a compass? Unless I am the orienter, directing some person unseen beyond the white?

Am I floating? Am I flying? Am I falling?

"Hello?"

I cover my ears a second before the echo booms too loud. Even then, my eardrums ache.

That's the boy from earlier!

"Are you alright?" he booms again.

I open my mouth to speak. No words come out.

"How did you-"

"Shaver?" another voice asks, cutting him off, softer this time. Still, I do not uncover my ears. "There's someone in the metaclysma. Are you just going to leave her there?"

"I'm keeping an eye on the situation," he explains. "If she doesn't need help, I don't want to make her feel useless or inadequate. And, in any case, you didn't need me to pull you out your first time."

"That has nothing to do with it," she snaps back. "Just fish her out before Horace sees and yells at us."

A shiver ripples through the water, and my body responds in turn, curling up before I even have a chance to think.

One year, at a day camp I always went to every summer, I brought that same pair of goggles to the waterfront. I was obsessed with seeing how far I could swim underwater before my lungs forced me to surface for air. But I would have to plan out my dives every time and be careful where I let my eyes wander, lest I almost swim right into one of the water filters. Obscured by the murky waters polluted by kicked-up sand and the occasional orphaned bandaid, they were always hidden until you were only a foot away from one, and then it would suddenly come into clear view and glare at you with its corroded face.

A flat shadow of a person, formless and without detail, fades into view a few feet away from me, close enough to touch. What could be a tail, or maybe just a random squiggle, juts out from somewhere on its body, anchored to the point right below me, to my own South Pole.

I think to squirm, to swim away. But there is no water, and I have no fins, and there is no air, and I have no wings. Impaled on a single pinpoint in space, unable to escape as the shadow of a person reaches what I assume is an arm out and grabs my own. At least, I assume it is touch, for I feel nothing, and yet I can watch as it pulls me closer and then tugs on the line attached to it.

The line waves. Nothing happens. I try to glance where its eyes would be were I able to see any sort of face. It nods in response, raises a thumbs-up with its free hand.

I wonder what I look like to it.

Nothing happens. We just float there. I open my mouth again. Still, no words come out.

Can it hear me? Can it tell what I'm trying to say?

Nothing happens.

Am I dead? Is this the ending I sought? A world of nothing, of nowhere, of no-one?

I close my eyes. The world is zero-bit. No information at all, just a sea of black.

In junior high, I dove off a diving board for the first time in my life. I'd psyched myself for the experience weeks beforehand. Looking at photos of oceans just beneath the surface, listening to sounds of microphones underwater, reminding myself don't look down, don't look down. The event itself was not nearly as exciting or as terrifying as I'd hoped it to be. But still, the moment I left my feet, the world came rushing up to me- and then I was cradled in the arms of some imprisoned ocean goddess, one of Velouria's children, the bubbles fleeing just as quickly as they'd come.

Everything happens all at once. Feeling comes back to my feet first, then my legs, rushing up through my body. When the line meets my eyes, the world rushes back into color all at once, and my body smacks against a rope net just barely slack, stretched over a pit of foam cubes.

The boy and I bounce a bit as the net resettles. I brush my clothes off. Not a single trace of moisture.

The world feels so cold.

Someone rushes to me, drapes a thick blanket over my shoulders, helps me off the net and onto a side platform and into a little cage. A manual elevator, chains clanking as they guide us down. The sensation of movement coming back throws the world into disarray. I sway. The girl beside me wraps an arm around my back, steadying me.

Was she the voice in the waters?

The world around us is dim. We are in some sort of underground city, descending down a hole I don't want to know how deep. Beyond the scaffolding keeping our elevator in place are tunnels every so often, floors of an infinite building carved out of the earth. The lights seem to go on forever, and yet I know I cannot see them all, the thick branches of an inverse tree.

The elevator slows, halts at one of these openings. An attendant opens the metal doors. The girl helps me out of the cage and onto stable floor.

She escorts me down the tunnel. Left, left, right, left again, then a series of turns so quick I lose track. She pushes open a set of double doors, frosty and opaque. An... infirmary inside, brightly lit, rows upon rows of beds, some with people peacefully sleeping away.

But none of the beds are for me. We pass through the doors and keep walking. The lights dim again. She brings me to a locked door, lets me lean against the wall for support as she fishes a keyring out of her pocket.

I finally get a good glimpse of her. A full head shorter than I am. Long lavender hair, wrangled into a sharp angular braid that sits obediently down her spine without even a single hair astray. A matching dress, lilac bordered with tan on the seams, lace poking out the underside like shy leaves. A long scar across her face, from her right eyebrow, across her nose, to right by the opposite corner of her mouth.

"You're not very talkative. Even for someone's first time in the metaclysma. It's like you carry the silence around with you."

"Am I... supposed to speak?"

"You just did."

The door opens. She ushers me in, closes the door behind us. A mattress on a bedframe, no blankets or frills or anything, faces us. Underneath the bed is a plastic crate.

"Lie down," the girl commands.

And I follow, covering my body up with the blanket. Only then do I notice the thin wires threaded throughout, the subtle hard bulges.

Sensors?

A ghost of a smirk on her face. "I didn't even have to tell you to." She turns to leave. "I'll be right back with the doctor. It's standard routine. A quick check, just in case anything went... missing."

She locks the door behind her.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander