An Ocean of Silence by Nefes Kayra Karabal

 

An Ocean of Silence

Sören and I were on our second month following the survey ship on a mission to find drill spots for oil. Our guard boat was humble, its wooden deck always slick as we did not have much to do so we busied ourselves with cleaning and making up stories to tell each other. We had become really good friends after a few duties out in the sea, spending most of our last years together, alone, two to three months at a time. 

Sören was not much of a talkative guy. Even with me, after years of being alone in small ships together, I was always the one doing the talking. 

He also had a hard time hearing, he was not all deaf, but I had learned to move my mouth more while talking so that when he couldn’t catch my voice he could read me. He knew how irritated I got when asked to repeat myself, so that was our compromise.

When you live on a seventy-year-old diesel work boat, sound is the only thing keeping your mind on the ground and not up there with the Old Man. The vibration of the tin mug against your bunk tells you the ground is still holding together against the endless body of Atlantic.

Sound, including Sören’s rare words, was the single most important thing keeping me sane on the sea.

And it was all taken from me, in a sudden hour of violent silence.

I was humming an old folk song my mother used to sing while I was scraping cold grease off a tin plate. Sören was sharpening a knife against an oil stone. We had just finished having breakfast. We hadn’t eaten much because we were being careful with the survey ship crew’s food supply as well. It was up to us to figure out how to allocate the food between the crews. Sören always wanted to be extra meticulous so he always ate less than what he needed to. Because he cooked the food, I could not intervene. But at times when he lost at cards, I used to make him eat a sandwich bar or two.

That day, in a snapping second when the blade hit the stone, no sound came out. I thought I had stopped humming without realizing until I caught my lips parted in the middle of a silent word. Sören was still moving his wrist. I pressed the cartilage of my ear shut and dropped it a few times. It didn’t work. I tried to sing again, clearly this time. Nothing. I thought maybe some water got into my ears, but I hadn’t got into the water for a week then.

Sören suddenly stopped a few seconds after I did. He tilted his right ear to the ground and harshly tapped the blind side of the knife against the iron table legs. The iron dented and let loose a few pieces of brown rust.

His Adam’s apple bobbed. I tried shouting at him. Shouting until the corners of my mouth exploded like stitches. He looked at me with his brows knitted.

That was the first time in my life where I felt the concrete existence of sound waves through their absolute absence. It wasn’t quite like a library, or snow falling. It was more of a physical subtraction from not only my ears, but from my mouth, my teeth gaps, blood flowing through the smallest of my veins. Every opening I had on my body was giving something out. Something I could not see.

We bolted up the stairs.

Six-foot waves were crashing into our boat. The wind was busy whipping the heavy ropes like wild snakes. But there was no roar. No heavy thump of three thousand tons of displaced seawater slapping our hull.

It felt like a featherbed was laid over the whole world.

I reached out and slammed my palm against the ship’s bronze bell. I watched the clapper strike the lip. The bell swung in a silent, frantic arc.

A mile off our quarter, the survey ship was running its lines along the trench floor. It was a wondrous steel beast, equipped with a seismic air gun array, a battery of compressed-air cannons designed to blast two hundred and forty decibels of sound straight into the ocean bed every ten seconds. A human-designed noise loud enough to rupture the swim bladders of cod twenty miles away, loud enough to turn a sperm whale’s brain into jelly if it surfaces too close. A hard-working, unrelenting hammer tearing open the ocean's crust to provide for the advancement of our great human race.

I saw the white plume erupt from her stern. I saw the water ripple as the air guns fired. All that was supposed to scream was buried in a deafening silence.

The sea was swallowing the sounds. With every sound I made, my body was automatically getting closer to one spot in the ocean. The survey ship was sinking with such momentum that even if I couldn’t hear a thing I felt my brains exploding on the walls of my skull.

The water between our two vessels began to sag. The surface of the ocean stretched thin, pulling downward like grease being sucked into an open drain.

Then I saw the skin rising from the deep. 

A texture like velvet, matte black, absorbing the faint sunlight so completely that looking at it made your eyes cross. And it was breathing. I felt its breathing. The more I got close to it, the more it breathed, the better I felt. Every time its incomprehensible, absurd body surfaced on the pale green ocean, the pain in my ears alleviated, the blood in my veins started flowing toward the ocean, my brain shimmered with epiphany. I could not think but I felt as if I found a God.

Sören held my arm and pulled me back just as I was reaching the edge of the ship rails, my eyes closed with great serenity. Before I got a chance to protest, he started covering my head and ears in some kind of long fabric. He slid two voids on my eyes with a pocketknife. He frantically started making motions of closing his ears and his mouth. Then he held my head and made me look at his nostrils, opened them wide, then performed a sharp motion of “X” with his arms. After repeatedly moving his nostrils very slightly with an exaggerated breathing motion, he gave me a thumbs up.

He was right. It was using the air passages in our heads as straws. Every time my lungs pulled in air to make a noise, the thing was dragging me toward the rim of the trench to feed. I clamped my nostrils nearly shut between two fingers and started taking shallow pinpricks of oxygen. The soundless, seductive call of its breathing snapped like a wire, along with my never found before peace. 

The crew of the survey ship was on the bridge wing. I could see them through my narrow field of vision: men in bright orange suits, their mouths open wide in tearing screams. They were screaming into the void, trying to push sound out, and with every lungful of air they expelled, the vacuum seized them harder, tighter and faster. 

The more of the survey ship vanished, the more I felt soles of my feet getting sucked onto the floor. The thing was slowly turning its attention to us.

The ship listed maybe twenty degrees and caused us to slide toward the rim. Even if we jumped out of the ship, we wouldn’t be able to swim silently enough to get away in time.

I looked at the sky in desperation and lost myself there for a second. An albatross was flying above us smoothly, I saw its beak opening for a second, probably spotting a fish. And it kept flying, utterly steady.

Sören shook me out of my vision, slapped my shoulder and pointed at the engine hatch, making a slashing motion across his throat.

Our ancient diesel was still thumping. The engine block was surely thudding through the hull, sending a consistent 104-decibel pulse straight out into the lost mouth of our part on the ocean. 

We dropped to our knees, crawling along the deck plates toward the engine hatch. The air inside of the fabric creases was getting thick with my own panicked carbon dioxide. My lungs burned, begging for a deep breath, but I kept my muscles pinched tight. 

Sören reached the iron latch first. He threw his weight against it, heaving the heavy hatch cover open. Below us, the twin iron pistons were still punching up and down in their cylinders. Sören reached down into the engine well toward the emergency fuel-cutoff lever. The moment his arm crossed the threshold of the hatch, the air pressure inside the engine bay tried to equalize. His sleeve was sucked downward, pinning his arm against the red-hot exhaust manifold. I saw his flesh sizzle against the iron. He didn't make a sound. 

I leaned over the hatch, grabbed the back of his collar with one hand, and reached past his burning arm with the other. My fingers brushed the cold steel of the fuel lever. I slammed my entire weight onto it, snapping the cast-iron handle clean off in my palm as the valve choked shut. 

The fuel started to starve immediately. The pistons slowed stroke by stroke and then stopped. The ship righted herself with a sickening lurch, sloshing six inches of dead water across the deck plates. 

The pitch-black skin was directly beneath us now, less than twenty feet below our hull. It was so wide I couldn't see the edges. A continent nobody lived on floating in the grey Atlantic. 

It hovered there, waiting. It was listening for us. Sören lay on the deck beside me. We didn't dare breathe, let alone move. We lay on the deck like two corpses while the ocean’s absolute zero pressed against the bottom of our boat. For what felt like an eternity, it held us in its stomach. 

When it finally left, the return of the world was agonizing. 

It started with a pressure wave that hit my eardrums like two thin needles. Then came the taste with a bitter tang of blood from my cracked lips. The sound of a single drop of seawater falling from the rigging and hitting the capstan. It was the loudest thing I had ever heard in my life. I screamed a short bark as the sound tore through my raw ear canals. Sören curled into a ball, clutching his previously healthier ear with his unburned hand, his mouth open in a choking sob as the ambient noise of the Atlantic mercilessly rushed back into the world. The wind returned with a roar. The world was suddenly so violently, hideously loud that I vomited blood and bile onto the deck until my stomach sagged.

We never spoke of it to the authorities back home. When the coast guard asked about the ship, we told them her steering gear failed in the swell, and she went down. They looked at Sören’s burned arm, at my ruptured eardrums and bleeding lips, and they wrote down gross negligence during engine room fire. They gave us hot tea in foam cups that squeaked obnoxiously. We did not correct them. It was terrifying to see people open their mouths, let alone them speaking.

Sören went completely deaf after. He resigned immediately after we were back on land. He moved far from the coast, into a house made of mud brick where the wind doesn't whistle. He doesn't use electricity. He doesn't wear shoes with soles. When I visit him, we sit on a wool rug in his dimly lit room, drinking water from clay jars, moving our hands in silent gestures. We never speak out loud. Even though he is all deaf now, he somehow knows when I make a noise and softly punches my shoulder. 

His peace didn’t comfort me. I loved Sören, but I loved the ocean more. He and I both realized, in agony, I had to leave.

I needed to hear. I needed to know if the thing was real. I needed to know if we were not somehow caught in a sailor psychosis. More than these though, to be frank, I realized I could not stay away from the water like I used to claim before.

I bought a small boat from an ex-sailor who quit the sea after going blind due to an accident he does not talk about. He makes the best wooden boats in town.

I learned how to move across the water without making a ripple. Two years brought nothing back except fish which I shared with Sören when I came back from time to time. Every time he asked where did the fish come from, I said I bought them from the market. I knew that he knew the truth, but we loved each other despite our desires. The fish I caught were an unpriced death if he did not cook them to put on a table we got to share. Even if we were more apart than usual, the fish netted us together.

Then I found it again.

It was on my third year of silent sailing, at the exact coordinates where the survey ship went down, that the water sagged once more and world went mute. I grew entirely still and waited for the deafening silence to take hold of my lungs.

It never arrived in the way I expected it to do. A massive shadow blotted out the pale green depths. A solar eclipse happening beneath the waves. It merely lingered there, just below the keel. I felt as if it was waiting with me.

Then came a pulse. It shuddered through the water and started rocking my small vessel side to side in a carefully managed cradle of currents. 

The surface surrounding my hull began to foam, bubbling with an effervescence. A cluster of silver-scaled mackerel floated upward from the dark, stunned or dead, their gills flared wide and stiff. They bumped gently against the side of my boat, propelled by an upward draft from the monstrous mass below. 

I was not hearing but feeling its pulse, still deep in my jawbone. The unfathomable scale of its movement dictated a new law over my territory. I didn't question if I was losing my mind to the endless isolation of the Atlantic. I reached over the gunwale and pulled a freezing fish from the slick surface. It didn’t feel like a God, it didn’t grant me the violent epiphany. It fed me as if I was its child and let us linger together.

It has been six years, and I have not sailed alone since. We follow each other to everywhere the water reaches.

It does not speak our language, nor does it say much. But it responds. When the isolation of the open water presses too heavily against my chest, it alters the currents, and the dolphins arrive. They break the surface in startling, synchronized arcs, their sleek bodies catch the faint sunlight and send them over my face. I like to think of it as The Silence of the Ocean caressing me.

Sometimes it moves the boat playfully beneath me. And it always listens. I talk to it from the confines of my mind about Sören, and the past lives we led before everything. Once, it offered a sensation that translated into my meek consciousness as a single word: Forgiven. I still do not know if it meant to absolve only me, or both me and Sören. 

I only once saw it feed itself while with me, and it was upon a huge boat of fishers. I watched the commercial trawler get swallowed in the vacuum of death. The men screamed for help, tearing their throats. I felt like the albatross. 

Since the day the Silence accepted me, I have adapted into a soul I am yet to comprehend fully.

The only thing I know is that it granted me a non-human soul, and I accepted it. 

Most times, The Silence wears Sören’s likeness so intensely—with its listening, with its serenity, its undisturbed beauty that it can reveal only (I believe) in my presence. The bluish green where its body rises from winks pale reflections, exactly as Sören’s eyes used to in the early months of his injury, when I was taking care of him, when I sometimes lingered the cream on my finger a breath longer on his burns.

Perhaps, he gave a part of his soul to The Silence that day, and it merely gives back to me. Perhaps I carry both Sören and the ocean in me. 

I will never know, and I will not disrupt Sören’s peace to ask. For now, it only has me. 

 I lay down on the deck, pinching my nostrils shut, the thick wool wrapped securely around my head. It waits beneath my feet, listening, choosing not to devour. I let myself feel the slow rise and fall of the swell, waiting for the silence that isn't silence still. I’ve never tried letting my ears loose. I have a feeling I’d be fine, but I refuse to risk breaking the peace of this new world granted to me just yet.