Freshwater(48)
The Ada shrugged and we moved in her shoulders. It was simple how we saw ourself, dresses creeping up the thigh, gashing open at the front to show chest bone—tulle and lace and clouds of clothes. Just like how having long hair weighing down our back made us want to wear buttons up to our throat, men’s sleeves rolled up our biceps, handsome, handsome things. None of this was a new thing. We had been the same since the first birth, through the second naming, the third molting. To make the vessel look a little more like us—that was the extent of our intent. We have understood what we are, the places we are suspended in, between the inaccurate concepts of male and female, between the us and the brothersisters slavering on the other side.
After our first birth, it took only a short time before we realized that time had trapped us in a space where we no longer were what we used to be, but had not yet become what we were going to be. It was a place that always and never moved. The space between the spirits and the alive is death. The space between life and death is resurrection. It has a smell like a broken mango leaf, sharp, sticking to the inner rind of our skin.
The prophecies that came later, from Malena and others, they explained this—the shifting, the quick skinnings and reshapings, the falling and revival of the scales. But by then it was too late for the Ada to do anything except try to keep up with us, try not to be drowned in the liminal fluid we swam in. It tasted sharp as gin, metallic as blood, was soaked in both, down past the red into the deep loam. ?gbanje space. We could rest in it like the inside curve of a calabash; we could turn in on ourself, wind back to our beginning, make those final folds. Sometimes they call this the crossroads, the message point, the hinge. It is also called flux space, the line or the edge—like we said, resurrection.
Chapter Eighteen
My god, my god.
We
There had been, in all of this, some comfort in knowing that we were not the first to pass through and wake up in flesh. Since the baptism, since they called him up from the acid of the sea with prayer, we’d known about Yshwa. He remained throughout the years, drifting by and over, his face shifting, the bones underneath bubbling and moving. We understood As?ghara’s resentment of him, for his refusal to take flesh again for the Ada, but his choice made sense. It has always been obvious that Yshwa, like other gods, is not moved by suffering in the ways humans imagine.
Perhaps he would take flesh one last time, when the world was ending, just to watch it burn. Or he might continue to stay away, despite how many people awaited his glorious redescent. If we were him, we would do that, stay away. Why exist in this realm by choice? Humanity was ugly and cratered; it made sleep a relief, a brief escape where we could slide into another realm. That was as close to death as we could get, as close to the gates, to returning home or anywhere else. If we had been released like Yshwa, no amount of praying or fasting or midnight vigils would bring us back, no matter how much olive oil or blood was spilled in our name. But that was not what happened.
We remained trapped and so As?ghara softened toward Yshwa as he kept visiting the marble for his meetings with the Ada. At first, As?ghara would turn away and pretend not to hear the soft ripple of their conversations, the only form of prayer the Ada was capable of anymore. Ever since Soren, she couldn’t kneel or press her palms together to worship Yshwa the way she used to—it felt false. Too much had been broken. So the Ada simply spoke to him as they took walks along grassed paths and black beaches, where they would sit on sea bones and watch the water.
Yshwa was different every time he manifested. He used variations of his original human form, changing the height, the degree of brown in his skin from mild to deep, the cleanliness of his linens, the kink of his dark hair, the breadth of his nose. His hands would be long fingered with smooth, pearled nails, or broad and stocky with callused palms that he picked splinters out of as they spoke. Sometimes he was tall, thin, with a graceful neck and tired eyes, his skin black as stone. Or he’d be thick, barrel-chested, thighs like foundations, skin like burnt sugar. He was always gentle.
When As?ghara started to turn toward him, slowly and hesitantly, Yshwa called no attention to it. He continued the conversations as if he’d been speaking to both As?ghara and the Ada all along, as if he’d always known the beastself was listening and his words had been meant for everyone. We approved of As?ghara’s change of heart because, after all, Yshwa understood better than anyone what we were going through, having died in his own flesh form, and having him was better than being alone here. Besides, since his embodied days had been so long before ours, we could accept him as an older sibling. It was nice to have another brothersister.
We tried to teach ourself to see humans as he did, with the same grace, to follow his example. After Soren and the loss of her faith, the Ada had decided that her life was better with Yshwa in it after all. It didn’t matter to her if he was real; she believed that the church around him was irrelevant, and she hoped that her afterlife would be one of oblivion. The Ada chose him because she needed a moral code to control us with, one that could protect her and others from our hungers. Yshwa had a good code, a simple one: love. Still, we found it difficult, unnatural even, to embrace his ways. The only vessel we truly cared about was ours: the Ada. Apart from her, we did hold Saachi in some regard for being the container of a universe, and A?uli for being A?uli. The Ada, however, cared about more than those two—she cared about Saul and Chima, about her friends; she had a long list of loved ones. We did not, as the beastself had demonstrated with Itohan’s older brother in Georgia, and were not inclined to—most of what we knew of humans was what the beastself knew, that they were cruel, that their world was cruel, that everyone was, inevitably, going to turn into dust. We could see the logic of the beastself’s philosophy—to hunt and feed on bodies, to use them in wringing out pleasure, to put that before anything, because otherwise, why were we alive and what was the point?