water of life

The horror is neither in death nor in what happened.
The horror is in the nature of infinite repetition of
what is happening;
The horror is in not knowing that you are in
an infinite cycle of madness.

When I woke up, with the sun and the sea salt in my eyes, I found myself in a lifeboat adrift on an eerily calm ocean. When my eyes adjusted to the blinding daylight, I looked around to find absolutely nothing in any direction as far as the eye can see. It was as If I was plucked out of space and time, and put here, surrounded by just the sea and the horizon. The fact that my thoughts were fragmented did not help either. My name is Captain Winslow; my own first name evades me. It is as if I was hit in the head. I knew the seas, I have grown up on them. Sailing and adventure were in my blood. I did know that I was a sailor, and a marine biologist; but couldn't remember much else.

  Judging by the position of the sun, I made a guess that it must be somewhere around noon. My marine chronometer, beautiful and intricate machine; Swiss made, by Ulysse Nardin, said a quarter to noon. It was not the ocean that scared me, it never did. T’was me myself. Why was I here? Was there anyone with me? What happened to the ship? There’s no way I sculled all the way to the middle of the high seas. I was mad, yes, but not that mad.

  The first thing I checked for is water. Dehydration can do nasty things to meat sacs like us out in the ocean, especially under the high noon sun. All I found were empty water bottles and food packets from the boat’s emergency supplies. These supplies, if well rationed, could last a man a little less than a month. And by the looks of it, this batch was well rationed. I found eighty-four tally marks carved onto the wood of the boat with a sailor’s knife; my knife. In vain, I hoped that it did not mean what I feared it meant.

  This is no time to give up hope. Today is a new day. I have to strategise. I shall not go down without a fight. Luckily, fish is the only meat humans can consume uncooked. Water is still going to be a problem I have to deal with. I decided to explore my options, and jumped in the water. But even a mile away from the boat, the ocean seemed completely dead, except for the thick kelp-like plants, with large sealed bladders at every internode, and feathery, dull orange fruiting bodies. Their long stems extended down into the murky dark depths of the ocean, leading me to suspect that they are rooted all the way at the seabed. They stood there, thousands upon thousands, like an army of ghosts in the still water; watching, listening.

  I cut off one of the bladders and took it to my boat.Weirdly enough, it was full of water (and most probably some trace enzymes) which was not exactly fresh, but much less salty than the ocean. The plant most probably must have some filtration system that slowly desalinates the ocean water, and collects it in these bladders. I do not know why. But then again, I do not know of any grounded plants that grow this tall in the deep seas. My best guess is that the water collected at the bottom cannot reach these heights, so the plant has devised a way for localised freshwater supply.

  I knew full well of the risks of ingesting strange unidentified plant matter. Plants tend to develop all sorts of weird and quirky adaptations; you never could trust them. With animals, it is just meat, hopes and dreams; more or less the same. There is this joke among the biologists that plants are actually farming us all, and hence are the most sinister creatures on this planet. That thought led somewhere; as if the mind was reaching for a stolen memory.

  And no; poisoning is not what I’m worried about. When you’re out by yourself, there are things worse than poison; there are considerations worse than death. Let’s hope we do not come to it. But it was getting late, and I was getting tired by the minute. I realised that I was running out of options, and decided to take a calculated risk. I brought some the fruiting bodies and bladders onto the boat. I made sure to have as little water as possible. The fruits were oddly fulfilling. I helped myself to a cautious serving.

  I felt uncharacteristically lazy once the thirst and hunger were satiated. It tends to happen; when you’re in a heightened survival state for extended periods of time, and finally get a sip, all that adrenaline that was keeping you going thins out, and the body takes the back seat as it processes the nutrients and gets you back to homeostasis. The physical torpidity paved way for a flood of thoughts. Memories seemed to be fading in, to some capacity. What did I do, o god, to deserve this fate; to be stuck here in the middle of nowhere with no clue of what’s going on?

I was always a man who believed that actions do have consequences. That is how you payback your debt with fate. Hence, I never ran away from the consequences of my actions; In fact, I did go to great lengths to make sure that I faced the consequences of whatever it is that I did. That way, when I come face to face with fate itself, she shall have nothing on me; I shall not be indebted to her. It would be hard for one to understand the strange methods to my madness. Though I do not remember, I have a feeling that I did not have many people to call close. But it had the benefit of me having a level of hardiness that let me survive a lot longer in scenarios others failed at

  Twilight came quicker than anticipated. The haze veiled the sun, denying me the view. A thick layer of uncertainty hung in the air. The oceans lit up under the evening skies, swirling with colour, like the surface of a soap bubble. Oddly enough, the ocean felt shallower; now I was clearly able to see the forest of kelp that grew beneath, which was far too deep to be seen clearly earlier in the day. It must be the tides changing. I cleaned out the boat, and threw the remains of the bladders and the feather of the fruits into the ocean. I felt as if the kelps were staring back. Just then the oddity of the situation hit me. How macabre would it be, if a strange being just rained random mutilated human parts upon a silent standstill crowd of seemingly infinite humans?

  The ocean seemed faintly orange even after nightfall, and seemed to be getting iridescent and murkier. One of my worst fears regarding this endeavour seems to have come true. What bad luck!

 “Shit, the fruits were hallucinogenic. Of course, they were; why wouldn’t they be!”

The still sane part of my mind realised that this was one of the worst outcomes possible from a survival standpoint. I have to do something before the paranoia kicks in 

“Think, I idiot, think, for you cannot for much longer.”

I tried frantically to find something to tie myself down onto the boat so that I wouldn’t jump overboard. Wait, it was a vine that I just grabbed. I remember throwing all of it overboard. Just then, I noticed another kelp vine creeping aboard.

“They are attacking!”

“No, you dimwit, you’re tripping.”

“Must. Fight. The plants.”

  That’s the issue with hallucination. It’s your word against yours. There is not much you can do to take control. I could feel the traces of clarity fading by the minute, as I fell deeper and deeper into myself.

 The vines have firmly anchored the boat down by now, and my frantic attempts to hack away at them, with my knife, seems to make as much difference as a scream in the void. Yes, the panic is kicking in now. My mind finally got a grip on the memory it was searching for. Back when I was teaching a biology class at university, the meme of the plants farming us came up, as it always does. The next day, one of the students came to me with a drawing he made from that discussion. It was eerie illustration of monstrous sea weed growing tall from the depths of the deep ocean, reaching with its tendrils towards you. If you looked closely, you were able to see that, in the darkest parts of the thick pencil sketch, the plants were rooted in a seabed made of compacted human figures in agony. That illustration kept on surfacing in my head, no matter how deep in this vast ocean I tried to drown it. “it’s just the drugs talking”, I told myself. But it was of no help. Things were getting seriously out of hand. The vines started turning warm orange, then red hot. They started smouldering. Did a couple of them catch on fire?

“They have claws now!”

“Just snap out of it! Or else this is it; this is how you’ll go. Brought up on the sea, finally taken by the sea. You’ll just be a tale that nobody ever tells; WAKE UP!”

  If there were anything with eyes, out there watching, I hope for the sake of my sanity that they saw a lone fire blazing upon the calm black sea stretching out every direction. With the last of my sanity, I did the one logical thing I could do at this point; I hit my head hard on the side of the boat and knocked myself out. This is better. Stay down, sleep.

 As vision faded, I remembered the most disturbing lines from the rhyme of the ancient mariner;

“The very deep did rot, o’christ,

that ever this should be!

Yea slimy things did crawl

with legs upon the slimy sea”

  When I woke up, with the sun and the sea salt in my eyes, I found myself in a lifeboat adrift on an eerily calm ocean. When my eyes adjusted to the blinding daylight, I looked around to find absolutely nothing in any direction as far as the eye can see. I was surrounded by just the sea and the horizon. Thoughts were fragmented and washed out. I remembered nothing. What was my name? Why am I here? What is this place? I counted eighty-five markings on the side of the boat. What do they mean?