On The Surface

I'm trying to figure out what actually happened to our relationship. I'd known her for ten years and I'd always thought I knew her, really knew her deep down inside, in those dark caverns where she kept her most precious and vulnerable thoughts. In thinking this all through I have to go back to that day at the Natural Science Building. At the time I couldn't believe she would have pulled a stunt like that. I don't blame security at the aquarium for promptly calling the police.

At first I was confused as to what had happened. I questioned why, puzzled over the motivation. Then I was outraged not so much about the act itself but outraged that she could do this to me, embarrass me in front of all those people, all those gawking tourists who saw her as another attraction, a moment of excitement in their routine sightseeing adventures. As I sit here staring out at the vast expanse of the Pacific, looking back on that initial incident, I suppose my reaction then and afterward was so typically motivated by my male self-centred ego, but I couldn't help myself.

There was concern for her safety although I knew she was an excellent swimmer. We'd met along the beach road, after all, where each day we'd hit the surf early and collapse the day making love among the hidden folds of rock at sunset; idyllic days that forged our relationship into a oneness I thought we had. But after all of that and other memories carved passionately out of the years, maybe I hadn't really known her. Maybe I hadn't really known myself, hadn't evolved past my own dense flesh and bone.

At the aquarium when the concern subsided and they finally got her out of the tank, clothes clinging to the subtle curves of her body like another layer of skin, she appeared magically caught in that moment as she dripped and shivered with the handcuffs on her thin wrists, her body pressed tight against me as in those first days at the beach when she had wrapped her blouse around her waist, borrowed my wide red suspenders and positioned the straps over her tanned shoulders to run down across her erect nipples and then to snap onto the elastic waistband of her jogging shorts. Her image there and frozen into past snapshots holds me now in a shroud of mystery, a mystery that questions reality, my sanity, hers. Mad, I called her, short for Madeleine, and she liked the unique duality.

She called to me, "Croft", as the police tugged her gently by the elbow. "Croft, please understand me." Mad, holding her hand-cuffed arms in front of her, a mute defence against the prying eyes and the occasional flash of the camera, looked sad and cold; her eyes glowing with the determination of a survivor, yet lonely, soft and scared. Her head was ducked down into the back seat of the cruiser; its door closed as I stood on the tiled expanse of the square outside the Natural Science Building, staring at her lost half face sliced by the mercurial-glass glare on the rear window. I followed the cruiser to the closest station figuring on bailing her out quickly but it wasn't necessary. Justice was swift; part of the state's restructuring of the court system to achieve maximum expediency.

The justice of the peace was in, charges were laid, trespassing and public mischief, and Mad pleaded guilty; sentence passed. I paid the fine for her. Once out of custody, we found each other sitting silently in the front seat of our rusting Volkswagen camper van. Mad was wrapped in an ancient grey blanket with brass ring holes punched into it. She was still shivering. I wanted to cuddle her, tell her that everything was all right but something stopped me.

"Mad." I opened with her name hoping she'd just gush with an explanation, but she was tighter than a clam and sat staring straight ahead.

"Come on, Mad, why did you do it?"

"I don't want to talk about it right now."

With self-control I respected her space so I didn't push it; instead I pushed two on the radio and got one of Palo Alto's jazz stations. They were playing Dave Brubeck all the way north along the coast highway and up the canyon road to our home, a small place with a view of the ocean and the hills behind.

I decided to say nothing more, opened the door, climbed the stairs to the loft, stripped off my clothes and slipped into bed without turning on the lights. Mad followed me equally silent and came in beside me; her body still cold, curving around my back and legs. We were like two spoons. Before falling off my last thought was that she'd come around, explain away all my confusion, reaffirm my sanity, convince me of hers, her logic, her plan for coping with the world. She'd come around in the sunshine over coffee on the deck tomorrow. That's what I thought.

***************************

A tiny curled brown leaf caught by the morning Santa Ana wind rolled across the deck, bumping into Madeleine's outstretched foot as she sat at the patio table sipping her morning coffee and admiring the dappled effect of the sun's rays filtering through the trees behind their canyon home. Normally the sky would be overcast so early in the morning but the warm Santa Ana's, rushing down from the hills were in process of sweeping the ubiquitous smog out into the Pacific. She warmed her hands on her coffee mug as the air still had a chill to it and the deep interior of her body remained shivering from the events of yesterday. Closing her eyes she let the sun paint a red glow upon the inner curve of her eyelids, a blank variegated crimson canvas that wobbled as she passed her eyeballs across that surface. She brought the warm smoothness of the outer edge of the cup to her lips, holding the tiny vessel in both hands, still staring at the inner light filtering through her closed eyes. She thought of yesterday, a day like any other day, caught within the design of another creator.

There had been a pull upon her like the moon moving water, drawing her to enter the tank. One moment she was the image of a curious tourist, one more cardboard figure replicated each day staring into the glass cages, admiring the swift flight beneath the water, and then she was flying, crashing through the cold, salt-lipped surface, disappearing into a world of silence, a world that enveloped her with its own protective skin. Her clothes like old foreign wrinkles clung to her now. She wanted to be naked so the water could dress her into its robes of foam, crust her with brine, form her to its own shape, but her blouse and cotton pants resisted under the pressure of the water. Her thoughts were beneath the surface, inside the surface of her own skin, inside the curved bone shelter of her skull where the spiced secret treasures lurked fearful of emerging into the callous air. She drifted, a flying fish, within the tank's cold brine, within the fluids of her memory, within a sanctuary. The fish and dolphins swam with her, speaking their secrets; the scuttling creatures moved unseen among the jagged rocks and ragged branches of coral. For a moment she found her solitude, holding onto it with her lungs squeezing out captured oxygen, pushing the limits of her endurance, and then she surfaced, brutally crashing into the air, sucking it into her body along with the excited sounds of confusion from the spectators; she breached and quickly dived, clawing at the water desperate to bury herself, desperate not to resurface to that other world where secret treasures tarnished, where they became spotted with pain and blood, tears and the unspeakable. At the bottom she held tight to the rocks, watching the blue-green fluid drift about her, listening to the rush of blood screaming for oxygen, wishing to have the capacity to filter out those life sustaining molecules. She waited, defying survival signals; the water crushing and invading her resolve second by second until she released her grip and drove herself toward the silvered surface, breached and felt the coarse cords of the rescue netting cutting into her skin.

***************************

Croft broke the spell by sliding open the door to the sun deck and walking out with his morning coffee.

"I assume you're not going in," he said.

Mad looked up from beneath the red glow on the inner surface of her eyelids and met his eyes as he sat beside her at the patio table. Croft was wearing his customary jogging shorts and tank top, sweat-top draped over his shoulders with the arms tied around his neck. He was ready for a beach walk.

"No, not today; I can't, Croft." She stared out over the railing toward the Pacific. Croft waited, outwardly calm, inwardly growing impatient with the silence, her immobility, the staring.

"Maybe I should call your doctor. We could drive down if he could fit you in."

"I'm not seeing him any more. I don't need to; I can work this through by myself." She was sullen with a hint of perturbed anger in her voice.

"Work what through, I don't understand. There's got to be a reason for this, this irrational behaviour, jumping into a goddam aquarium, sitting here staring off into space. Are you depressed; is it something I've done? Explain it to me so I can help you." Croft showed his anger as a mixture of confusion and personal irritation.

"I don't need your help, I'll work through this by myself.

"But, Mad, I feel so powerless because you won't let me share with you any more, because for the life of me I can't name your problem."

"That's just it, it's not my problem, it's not something wrong with me, it's everything, embedded into everything I touch, that touches me whether I want touching or not. I can't avoid it. Don't you see how trapped I am, we all are, like fish lying on the bottom of a rowboat; I can see their eyes blankly staring up into the light, the creamy-white death of a medium not of their own choosing."

Croft struggled with illusive images of Madeleine as he had known her, scents of mingled earth and honey; her skin nut-brown, beaded with salt spray, smelling rich with the sun as he ran his lips across her neck, holding her secluded behind the juts of headland surrounding the beach. She was so tangible, so solid in his arms, so much a part of him in the mind. But now she was lost, ephemeral, like mist feathering across the hills to meet the sea.

"Let's walk the beach this morning if you're not going in; I'll phone you in sick. No dead lines today?"

"No due dates, you mean. Dead lines are where they pile the bodies; that's a male thing."

"Whatever, you know what I mean. Let's go.

***************************

In the absence of waves the surfers lay on their boards looking like huge floating black birds of prey. Mad and Croft walked the beach ankle deep in the water, holding hands as they talked and approached the next craggy outcropping where they often stopped to sit in solitude and sunbathe. Today was a pensive day not conducive for sun but rather for reaching out to sea for answers to seemingly impossible questions.

"Remember that time, Mad, when we'd first stopped here, after driving down all day from Big Sur; the night was pitch black and we'd set up the pup tent just above the high tide line. Remember that morning waking up to all that racket. I thought an invasion force surrounded us. Frogmen and women crowded the beach as if they'd come up out of the water like turtles to lay their eggs around us. The beach was black with their suits and flippers; the silence of the morning was shattered by their activity, but one by one they disappeared into the surf."

"I could go back into the sea," she quietly offered.

They had moved along the beach to the black jagged outcropping that separated the public beach from the smaller beach designated as nude which they had so frequently visited on crowded days in the past. Two routes led to it; one around the outcropping at low tide with a gentle sea, the other a rigorous climb back toward the cliffs over steep and treacherous terrain. They chose neither but rather climbed up to a sheltered opening where they could watch the sea and lay out flat on a dry smooth rock.

"Go back to the sea?"

"Yes, back to the sea, as the whales did.

"Forgodsake Mad, you're not..."

"No, I mean live there in that medium. Croft, you wouldn't believe the peace and tranquillity I experienced beneath the water in the tank; that's why I did it, to free myself, to enter another world."

"You're not a fish, and you don't have the blowhole on top of your head to survive. This is nonsense, Mad. Now cut it out or I'm going to get angry!"

"Angry, how dare you become angry with me; what right do you have, because you are my lover, my male lover?" She emphasised the descriptive "male" as if it were a disease she had had to live with throughout her life.

She continued. "All my life I've been trapped by men, well-intentioned men and some not so well-intentioned who wouldn't let me live my life the way I wanted; who wouldn't let me decide my own fate; treated me like a child, abused my mind and my body, raped my soul, destroyed those precious places where only I could live. Don't you see that if you get angry with me, you're really just falling into the same pattern that has dominated all of us since the dawn of history."

With the last sentence Madeleine started to cry, bit her lip until she could taste the warm salt of her own blood, in anger at herself that her emotions, those natural emotions were now betraying her, making her appear so weak, so unstable in Croft's eyes. She knew it, had known it all her life; that tears in our society washed away the semblance of resolve, of sanity and logic. She was standing now facing down at Croft who was still sitting on the rock.

"I'm going back to the sea, Croft and you and no one else is going to stop me."

She turned and descended onto the lower rocks close to where the tide was rising up between the two pieces of outcropping. There as each wave crashed up against her feet she quickly took off her clothes leaving her blouse and jogging shorts half way between him and the surf. Before Croft could warn her, she jumped down into the receding foam of the last wave and pushed out toward the next. She had overestimated her own strength to break through its force and the wave carried her back like a piece of drifting wood, and threw her viciously against the jagged notches, pressed her smooth delicate flesh into the wave hollowed crevices with their razor sharp edges. She cried out in a high pitched screech, unlike a human sound, just before the next wave slammed her further up the rocks.

Croft leaped up the instant that she had jumped but stood powerless to help her. With the attack of the second wave he could see the damage, the raw meat hanging where her smooth tight thigh and curved buttock had once complimented her figure. He was able to grab her wrist and pull her back out of the sea leaving her blood trailing into the foam of each receding wave.

Croft carried her unconscious with the pain, over his shoulder up the canyon to the house, phoned for an ambulance that finally took her to the local hospital.

***************************

Mad sensed herself awakening, but kept her eyes closed and listened. The sound of the waves was missing; the air did not smell of the dry canyon; the fabric touching the palms of her hands did not feel like the sheets of her bed. She felt frightened, too frightened to open her eyes. She just listened in her darkness and waited for sounds to penetrate and reveal her whereabouts. One part of her, told her that she was being irrational, being just like Croft often accused her of being, impulsively paranoid, sceptically afraid of her own shadow. Maybe they were off on a vacation, inland away from the sea and their dry canyon home. But she remembered pain, the searing pain of a childhood injury losing balance on her skateboard and sliding across the asphalt on her bare knees. And then she remembered the sounds of an eighteen wheeler, tires humming past her, a wall of air smashing up against her Kawasaki as it spun from the road to the gravel of the shoulder, and then the moment of impact not really remembered, like a blank spot in time, an instant when the mind drugs itself in anticipation of pain, followed by an impact with the gravel and the subsequent tumbling motion over and over again along the shoulder with the crunching sounds of somersaulting metal; her 800cc bike chasing her body down the road. Later she had wakened and heard the pieces of gravel being plucked from her back and dropping into a metal dish on a dolly beside the operating table.

The last image told her where she was, but she was still afraid, unable to really trust the outside world, a world from which she so desperately wanted to escape. She tried to raise her right arm but it was secured. Her left also remained motionless as she tried to raise it. Slowly she parted her eyelids letting the light penetrate through her lashes and she looked out as if viewing the world through a film of a fly's wing. The room was empty and clinically white. Vertical bars cast long shadows on the opposite wall. The door opposite the foot of her bed looked solid and had a small square meshed glass window at head height. Mad saw the leather straps restraining her wrists. These provided her with the last piece of evidence to convince her that she was not recovering from her recent injuries in the local hospital but really trapped this time, not just trapped in a society that was incompatible, but really trapped in one of those institutions for those individuals who don't fit, who are considered a menace to society, or to themselves, those free divergent thinkers who threaten the status quo. She knew where she was and she knew the only way she could have got there was through a direct conspiracy involving Croft, but part of her screamed to herself that this couldn't be true since he loved her despite the awkwardness she brought into his life. He loved her, and she knew that he wouldn't forsake her in the long run. Deep down in her soul she knew that to be true.

Suddenly she heard the sound of keys in the lock and the door swung open. Mad was motionless and her eyes were closed. Two males had entered the room cloaked in white; she smelled their scent as they approached the side of the bed. She heard a hand-held scanning device emitting its signal as one of them passed it over her body.

'' She scans normal now. The scars have healed. I think we can send her home under close supervision of her husband by at least tomorrow when she comes around."

"Scars," she thought, "what scars?" Mad reached back into her memory but the images flickered and floated around like chunks of debris in a warm soup. She could remember walking out into the sea, the waves crashing her against the rocks, but further along in a daisy-chain of thoughts other flashes invaded her - her naked body endlessly flying along the bottom of their swimming pool, Croft invading her privacy dragging her out forcing air into her lungs; her nude form walking into the sunset at the beach, Croft once again pushing himself onto her, pulling her back, pleading with her not to do this. She could feel her skin in the imaging, skin no longer soft, pink, and delicate but toughened by salt water, smooth and streamlined. Then there were images of anger, images of violence and frustration, images of Croft losing his temper, dragging her and throwing her about the bedroom as if she were a stuffed animal or a rag doll at the mercy of a ill-tempered child.

" Look at her, so beautiful, so disturbed. Goes to show you that even if you've got the world by the ass on a downward pull, things can go wrong. I feel sorry for the guy; he's gotta cope with her, once she's home and on therapy. I've seen enough. I'm convinced she's ready. You finish up in here. I'll be down in the lab for lunch."

Mad heard one set of footsteps retreat from the bed, and cross the floor. She heard the door close. She also heard the remaining male breathing more heavily, his footsteps moving toward the door, the key turning in the lock, his footsteps returning to the bed. A flood of sensations thumped to escape her mind; pastrami and dill breath on her wet hair as she emerged from a shower, her father's engorged penis expanding and filling the space between her and him; the towel in his hands drying her young body, his rough hands brushing against her growing breasts and the pulsing hot penis rubbing itself along the outside of her thigh, and then the inside and then inside the secret places that brought the pain and tears that wouldn't wash away, that couldn't be cloaked even beneath the surface of the water.

Mad lay deep within the repeated images of pain, when she felt his hand move along the contour of her instep, across her ankle slowly over her calf to the inside of her knee and up over the soft skin of her inner thigh toward the mound of her sex. His hand was soft and gentle, but his penis was still that hot pulsing instrument of pain that thumped within her deepest hiding place. She was back with the towel and her father, droplets of water squeaking between their flesh, cut glass and vomit caught in her throat, a throat that had no voice, only fear and silence. The doctor's breath was more clinical, more of toothpaste and mouthwash; his face shaved smooth not cutting on her cheek. With eyes closed, and her wrists restrained Mad bobbed limply to his rhythm until he finally spilled himself into her and left.

Later that afternoon Mad officially awoke. That evening a nurse's aid bathed her and Mad was tempted to submerge herself to escape the cruel air where pain, inequality, and emotional injustice lurked in all the corners of society's so-called houses of sanity, but she knew that would be imprudent, even foolish, especially if she were truly going home. She did go home. Croft was waiting in the lobby when they wheeled her down. She could walk of course but the orderly insisted that the chair was part of the hospital policy.

Croft smiled. "C'mon let's get home, it's been a long time."

" A long time?" she thought. "Scars? she thought, but she said nothing, smiled a china doll painted-on smile and nodded her head as if she knew exactly what had been going on in her life for god-knows how long "it's been a long time," meant.

They drove up the highway in silence, turned into the canyon. She could feel the dryness of the hot parching air more than she had ever felt it in the five years they'd owned their home. Somewhere, at some time in the past, water had flowed down along the canyon walls, bringing life, cooling the land, soothing the pain that burned down from the harsh yellow sun. Mad didn't speak even after she'd entered her house and settled into a daily living routine. She wanted to ask Croft about the time she'd spent, the time she couldn't remember; about her job she'd not worked at for god knows when. But she sat in silence either staring out over the horizon to the sea, or down into the turquoise-blue water of the pool.

***************************

At first Croft would not leave the house even on workdays. He remained watching her, keeping her company, trying to talk to her, and to bring her out of the silence that remained since she had returned from the hospital. But Mad observed that he gradually was growing frustrated, would talk to her less, and leave her sitting alone on the deck staring out at the Pacific. Mad was patient and she waited until Croft broke down and returned to work, leaving her alone in the house.

Mad started the transformation in the bathtub, as a cleansing process. She filled the tub to the highest point where she could submerge herself without the water displacement overflowing onto the tiled floor. Beneath the surface of the warm water, she was free from pain, released from the weight that had dominated her throughout her entire life. She practised holding her breath, increasing the duration incrementally. Over time she moved to the pool, wearing her wetsuit and weight belt to hold her down. She had read somewhere that pearl divers could hold their breath for fifteen minutes; her best time however remained three.

The water became addictive, drawing her into it as soon as Croft set off for work, and keeping her in the pool for the entire day. But she wasn't satisfied with the frequent need to surface, to drive her body back to the harsh and painful air. In her dreams however she could remain submerged, encased in the peacefulness of the medium she knew intuitively was her own element. She began extending her escape with her scuba tanks and then added Croft's tanks to the bottom of the pool, but soon that wasn't enough; she wanted to be down under all day and only have to emerge in the late afternoon when she knew that Croft would return. One afternoon Mad called the Malibu Dive Shop and purchased a dozen double tanks and made arrangements for the pickup and delivery of refill tanks. She had just enough in her long-term savings and transferred it via the computer modem link to her charge card account.

Gradually Mad adapted to her life among three worlds, her underwater world by day, the dry evenings of silence with Croft and the watery dream-time where she dwelled deep beneath the waves of the Pacific. During the day she'd remain submerged at the bottom of the pool conserving the oxygen in the day's supply in the tanks by holding her breath and extending the capacity of her lungs. One day it seemed to happen suddenly. She held her breath going through the phases; the early phase where her brain rationalised the absence of breathing and started to yearn for oxygen, through to the building of pressure on the inner walls of her skull, to the thoughts of time duration evaporating into where the water was not just outside herself but everywhere, inner and outer, where her tissues were thin membranes allowing water to pass through her freely, to the phase of suspended tolerance where her brain rebelled and started to command her body to take in air again, where she struggled to push past the barrier, grasping for extra time. But now the brain did not rebel and the time without air stretched infinitely before her. The tanks sat on the floor of the pool untouched, past five minutes, ten, past the pearl divers' longest record. When she did breathe in through her regulator, she did reluctantly as if she were cheating the natural tendencies of her body.

Along with the change in her breathing capacity, Mad felt subtle differences in her body. She remained lithe and slim but her outer skin became harder, thicker, tight across her muscles. She stopped feeling cool at night when a breeze blew up and swirled along the canyon; she lost the sharp edge of sensitivity on her skin when each morning she entered the cooler water of the pool; her skin screamed at her in the sunlight on the weekends when Croft was home preventing her from remaining submerged in the pool. She craved moisture, lathered skin cream on herself at night and kept as wet as possible during the day. The three worlds of Mad's life sustained her until Croft started questioning her finances and how she really spent her time.

***************************

I think I knew that life would never go back to the way it was on that day when we returned from the hospital. I grew up a male in the latter part of the twentieth century, raised in the subtle ways that gave me dominance despite the philosophical jargon spouted by academia and the media. With all that feminist stuff in the air, I felt I was understanding and sensitive, but I know now that I really couldn't penetrate her experience. So much of what I couldn't understand about the complementary part of my species, I lashed out against with a raw primal emotion.

A routine check on our budget via the work terminal interfaced with home produced a few anomalies. The Malibu Dive Shop seemed over-actively involved in our current expenditures in the last two months. I shifted layers in the data bank to Mad's personal finances; we'd never put password protection on our private stuff. She was lead-weight into overdraft and tiny graphic warnings appeared every thirty seconds on the bottom corner of the screen. That afternoon I decided to come home early to discuss the accounts and secretly I guess catch Mad in that other world of hers, the world of silence she was hiding within. But I couldn't find her. The house was deserted; the deck empty; the pool calm and smooth. I called the Malibu Dive Shop and asked about the expenses and then I took a closer look into the pool. In the deep end I could see the tanks, gleaming cylindrical fish sleeping along the sides of one corner. I looked for Madeleine in the blue mottled water that wavered dreamily in the sunlight. I knew she was there lurking beneath the water like a camouflaged sea creature. I lay on my stomach at the corner of the deep end and concentrated on the tanks knowing she would have to eventually come for air. I waited until the horizon of the sea became its familiar dull orange after the mushroom capped sun had burned below the water. Feeling deceived I left the side of the pool and went into the house to search the closets and other hiding places. Finally when the canyon outside was dark, I called the Malibu police, missing persons. They sent a squad car around and they suspiciously took down the details and informed me that they wouldn't start searching until after twenty-four hours.

Around midnight after sitting in the dark on the deck for the rest of the evening, I decided to turn on the pool lights and search the water once again. At first I walked the edge, then near each of the lights I lay flat leaning my head below the water in an effort to catch a glimpse of movement in the pale blue shimmer of the illumination. Nothing moved; nothing wavered in the watery distance, nothing resembling a body. Worry mixed with an acidic anger welled up in my throat. I stripped off my clothes, stood naked for a few moments then plunged into the deep end. I swam for the bottom bringing my chest parallel to the painted concrete and headed for the tanks that winked at me from the corner.

Suddenly, as I drew near, the tanks moved ever so slightly, a sliver of silver cut out at me like a fin slicing the water. A swirl of bubbles brushed past me just as the pain leaped up my thigh and the pale blue-silver light became tarnished by puffs of my own blood. I watched the dark red plumes curl like smoke in the water, mesmerised in a floating world not my own and full of danger. My hands reached the edge, clawed their way over the lip of the pool, and pulled the rest of me onto the dry concrete. Blood flowed down my leg from a four-inch parabolic gash. I rushed toward the deck and the sliding doors to the house, stopping short half way on seeing the dark trail of dripped water leading up the steps to the door. She was in there, in the pool, brushing past me. Anger subdued fear, vanquished concern for Mad's condition, and drove me forward into the dark interior of the house. Still naked and aware of my vulnerability I followed the trail of water across the kitchen tile onto the hardwood flooring, up the stairs to the loft. I left the lights off, letting my eyes remain adjusted to the darkness.

"Mad, I know you are there. We can't go on like this. I'm coming up and I need an explanation; I need a resolution; I need you back."

At the top of the stairs I picked up the ornamental walking stick, a piece of drifted wood found along the beach, that I'd sanded smooth, shellacked and placed along with stalks of pampas grass in a huge amphora. So armed and naked, confused as to my intent, fearful of who really waited for me in the darkness, wishing it were Mad as I'd known her when we'd first met, yet knowing she was lost somehow beyond my reach, beyond my comprehension, I crept across the threshold of the loft.

" Croft, you don't want to see me now." There was a sombre mysticism to her voice as it reached out to me across the room.

"You cut me!" I screamed at her voice in the darkness.

"I'm not of this world any more. I've escaped the penetrating pain, the captivity, the injustice, the stench of maleness I can't wash from my skin."

"Mad, you cannot hide from this insanity."

"Insanity! A wooorld maaad to enslave and aabuse one gender of its spppecies."

I heard the words drawn out like a defective tape stretching the sound into a low groan of agony. She wasn't there now as I'd known but in some other form, large, and looming at me from the darkness. I swung the walking stick and felt the thud of hardened wood on thick skin. I imaged a flash to childhood, clubbing channel catfish that flipped and twisted their spiny fins in the bottom of a rowboat. The bulk of her body hit me, throwing me against the jam. I swung the stick again and again repetitively. I felt it crack on flesh and bone; felt the blood dribble down the handle to my clenched fist. Mad's skin slid across my chest as she fell forward. Sheering pain leaped up my throat and I felt the sticky wetness of my own blood bubbling onto the surface. She was close, touching me with her breasts; her nipples hardened points that pressed into my scraped skin. Her arms wrapped themselves around me as she drew me close. I could smell her, not the natural human perfumed scent of her hair, nor the sweet sweat of past copulation, but an odour of the sea, a foetid foreign stench that encircled me. The stick hung limply in my grasp as she held me with her razor skin against me in the blackness. Her thigh moved slowly between my legs slicing open my upper calf with its abrasion. The pain made me numb. I waited, sensing immanent danger as her thigh moved upward. She stopped as her knee grazed my groin and then released me with a shove that sent me to the floor of the landing.

Her voice drew itself out of its defective groan and I heard her final words.

"I'm going back to the sea. Don't follow me."

The command was cool and deliberate, knowledgeable in its understanding and determination. She brushed past me as I lay on my back, the light from a canyon lamppost illuminating the landing in dappled grey. My skin screamed at the touch as it ripped the flesh across my hip and arm. In the light she was transformed; thick, muscular, hump-backed, skin tight and luminescent green. I tried to squint at her features through the dimness and I thought I saw a face stretched smooth with a nose compressed into tiny holes without cartilage; her eyes flat and bulging, but it could have been only the shadows forcing out my imagination. She left me.

I lay bleeding on the floor until the squad car came again. The patrolmen found the wide open door, and the trails of blood. I went with the ambulance while they called for forensics to gather evidence, scrap tiny blood and hair samples into plastic bags, haul away discarded wet-suits with pieces of DNA mutated human skin, wet-suits that looked as if they had been torn apart by wild beasts, Weeks later, after Madeleine failed to reappeared they called me down to the station for a grill session, threatening to arrest me for her murder. I called my lawyer who advised me to say nothing, which I had done already since to blow the story wide open with the truth would have sent me away for an eternity. Without the body they let me go but now every day I know they are out there following me, searching the canyon, dragging the shoreline of the beach, watching and listening for a mistake, a tiny slip-up. What slip-up? Do they see me as a ruined man, struggling to hold onto my day job, sitting alone in an empty house, venturing down the canyon at dusk to the beach to watch the sunset over the steel-grey sea? Do they see me so lonely that I wish for the sea to leap over the rocks to claim me, to take a blue bruised body out with the tide to meet her?

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I have the tanks filled and resting on the bottom of the reef, but over time I've found I do not need them as I have evolved into a mammal of the sea. From that last day the salt water that enveloped me cleansed my bruised skin split and bleeding. My soul was washed clean of the pain that made me weak. My body, a shelter of changing bone and skin, flew and soared beneath the watery surface tension of the sea. I joined the others like me, travelling in small protective schools, mating as hermaphrodites. Occasionally I return to the beach at the end of our canyon to find Croft there at sunset. I play in the waves in front of him but his mind can't see past the framework that entraps him. Sometimes on bright moon lit nights I prowl the shore waiting for a male stranger in the surf; a male to hold tight and press my hard nipples up against, forcing him with my desire to erupt inside of me in the dark waters where after he has spilled his seeds, he floats away like a piece of bait.

David Fraser likes to balance his life among a variety of activities in the areas of writing, education and sports. When he is not formally working as an educator, he is either writing and researching or involved in one of the following sports: alpine skiing, ski teaching as a full time professional ski instructor at Mt. Washington, BC http://www.mtwashington.bc.ca/winter/default.cfm , windsurfing, tennis, golf, cycling, hiking. In addition he likes to garden, listen to the blues, and search for his way through Taoism. He has built his second water garden which has become his new daily sanctuary. His is learning and refining his Spanish fluency and will travel back to Central and South America in the near future. He lives among the flora and fauna of the British Columbia West Coast.

Email: David Fraser

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