You’ll know that I am the same when the light regards me as such and the dark recognizes us as one shape
Their town was beneath the surface, a couple hundred yards out from the coast. I’d never visited — the scuba gear made me uncomfortable and I didn’t like the feeling of being underwater — but a couple of my friends had. It’s about the same as here, they said. They have a school and a post office and everything, it seems like. I don’t know, it’s kinda hard to see down there.
There was a handful of them, about our age, who’d show up in town every now and then. Sometimes at basketball games or at the movies. We never invited them to parties but they’d almost always be there at some point. And outside of a couple interactions and short exchanges here and there, they kept to themselves. Part of the problem was it was difficult for us to make out their shape. If you looked at them straight on they’d appear fuzzy around the edges and it was hard to pin down their physical characteristics, and if you tried too hard you’d get a headache real quick. So they existed almost entirely on the periphery.
I knew that the space they occupied here was somewhere between the living and the dead, though I was never sure exactly how far in either direction they landed. I’d overhear them say things sometimes — things that most people wouldn’t know, or that were hard to decipher but my overall impression was they had an understanding of what was happening to us and why.
I got impulsive at a party one night and offered one of them a swig from a bottle of cheap whisky. He hesitated and gave me a look that was hard to make out, as all their looks usually were. I’ll take it, one of his friends offered, and he grabbed the bottle from me. He just got fired from his job. A couple of them laughed. I laughed too, for some reason. What kind of jobs you guys got down there? I asked. Silence. He handed the bottle back to me and said, It’s all of one hand these days. And they all laughed. They were full of inside jokes like this and references none of us understood. We never got the punchline, not once. It drove us crazy.
When they left the party, I left with them. About 6 or 7 of them. One of me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to follow them all the way back but the walk to the beach would be nice. When we stepped out into the night on the lawn I noticed for the first time their faces were easier to make out here than they were in the light. As we walked together, I asked What do you think’s happening up there? I watched the one who had taken the whisky look up at the shape of the moon through the clouds. He chose his words carefully. The signal comes and goes, depending on our rotation. And theirs. That was all I was going to get. We cut through an alley and someone had spray painted on the brick: You’ll know that I am the same when the light regards me as such and the dark recognizes us as one shape.
We found the beach and just stood there for a while listening to the waves. Time is starting to lose its definition or something, I said to no one in particular. Like, have we done this before? Standing on the beach together at night like this? I suddenly feel as though we’ve done this a thousand times before.
There was a fraction of a second when I understood what the “all of one hand” comment meant, and then just as quickly I lost it. I stayed behind while they made their way to the water together, walked into the waves, and vanished.
I’d sacrificed so much to get here. I stripped and ran into the waves and swam out into the darkness, toward a light in the distance. The light was affixed to a floating platform that marked the edge of their town, and I climbed onto it out of breath and weak. Below me I could see their gentle, murky lights beneath the surface. I knew there were towns above me watching me watching them. I understood the definition of what we’d made together, almost, not completely, not perfectly. I understood as much as I was able to and said I’ll see you soon.
