Nautiluses have witnessed countless forms of life emerging on this planet; they have even survived every single mass extinction.

“Look at the thorns in front of you, one stands straight, the other curves like a hook. See? If you pull from one side, the opposite thorn pierces you. Whichever way you tug, one of them gets you. When their fruits dry, they turn brown.”

“Is that a fruit, professor?”

“These are fruits. If you pick one, this winged fruit, and remove this little fin, then break it open, you’ll see the seeds inside are black. People once used these seeds for lining their eyes—completely natural and harmless. The seeds are black. In the past, women rubbed them around the eyes to make them appear darker.”

As Yeliz asked which ones were the woody plants, I absentmindedly bit into the fruit I was holding.

I opened the small notebook in my hand and showed the yellowed page, where tree and shrub were written, but as he began to read, his voice was swallowed by the wind’s rustle, and the words dissolved into the hissing language of the leaves.

“Could you pass me the binoculars?”

“You know,” I said as I chewed the fruit, “Mother knows every one of these plants. There isn’t a single species she doesn’t recognize.”

The professor was introducing flowers just then. “This flower is called the Kilyos purple, such a beautiful plant. We can’t grow it anywhere else—it’s impossible to uproot and take it along. They tried many times; sometimes it seemed to work, sometimes not. Even if you take it with its sand, it refuses to grow elsewhere. It’s actually rarer than the sand lily. But in a place like this, you don’t need to do anything.”

“What are you collecting?” he asked, slipping his arm through mine; his skin was scorching.

“Snails, seashells, stones...”

“What for?”

“I’m keeping them.”

“These are the Kilyos cornflowers. Their roots are wide; they cling and grip the dunes and build a world for themselves. Sand-holders, they keep the dunes from drifting.”

“Is that how that hill turned into soil?”

“Once plants take root,” she murmured, pointing to the few lucky trees on the barren hilltop. Their crowns swayed in gentle harmony with the wind, weaving a melody only they could understand. Her voice wavered, its unfamiliar accent blending with the rustle of fan-shaped leaves. “Years ago, a vast afforestation was carried out on the dunes with intensive human effort. First, they planted the rush broom, then built terraces, and planted pine trees there.” Though my body was present, all my senses were mobilized to grasp this foreign tongue. “When the pines were torn out by the wind, they planted them again, and again, until a small pine forest took shape here.”

We lingered, gazing at the rush broom beneath the stone pines the professor had pointed out. At that moment, we were no longer looking; what we looked at was seeing us.

“When these plants fully matured, their leaves formed a great covering,” he added. “With that cover, organic matter began to accumulate, and as the soil enriched, grasses returned, greenery reappeared.”

Yeliz snapped her fingers and asked, “What is this called, professor?” My attention drifted once again.

“Eryngium maritimum, the sea holly,” said the professor. Untouched by the drudgery of her career, still idealistic, she was a rare treasure for a state university, answering every question with tirelessness and zeal. Yeliz, meanwhile, with a bandana tied over her head, seemed to be searching the dunes for something she had lost. Her naive attentiveness made me think of my own position.

At that moment, the professor’s muffled voice passed over my thoughts like a warm wind. “They call it star-thistle too, but that’s different; it blooms blue. This one is Pancratium maritimum, the sea daffodil.”

“May I look as well? What a beautiful being you are.”

“The fine for picking it is eighty thousand,” Selim shouted from below, kneeling and trying to capture the pure white flower through the fence wires. “Professor, I wish they’d given this one a blessed name too, then no one would dare harm it.”

I leaned out from under the umbrella and objected, “Names often divide.” Everyone looked at me in surprise. “Why do we keep circling around names?” I could feel the soft down on Yeliz’s arm brushing mine; Selim looked deflated. “Haven’t we had enough of being possessed by everything we declare untouchable? Every being, from seven to seventy, holds their own worth, don’t they?” The books I had read over the summer came to mind. In the ones I had picked at random, the protagonists longed for another climate, as though the world’s oxygen stifled their breathing. Antigone, Edna Pontellier, Seymour, and Naoji had reclaimed their own deaths, defying the rotten order. Zooey and Franny still lingered at the threshold.

Professor Mine shifted the subject before I could say more. “There are large bulbs at its base, see?” she said. “Its blossoms withstand fierce winds. Don’t let its delicacy deceive you; it’s a remarkably resilient plant, sprouting on salty, scorched sands. Its roots grow downward in search of fresh water. There is more behind that hill. We can climb up next time if you wish.”

Salty beads of sweat had gathered at my temples.

“This one is a spiny burnet. It belongs to the same family as the globe thistle; its floral structure is similar. Toward the lower parts of its shoots, you’ll see the sections related to flower and fruit, and at the tips, forked spines. Those spines covering the upper surface are the plant’s way of protecting itself. Against grazing, against being eaten... and when it touches skin, it cuts immediately—hence its name.”

Selim’s dry lips asked in an inaudible voice, “What happens if the plant is small?”

“And what happens when the plant is smaller?”

“If its leaves are small, it means it grows in arid conditions,” the professor replied, gently holding her hat so the wind wouldn’t carry it off. “The leaves shift from dark green toward grey. And if you look closely along the spines, you’ll notice a thin white line; that hardened edge helps prevent water loss. The greyish color comes from a waxy layer that forms a barrier, reducing the passage of water.”

“You know, professor,” Selim added, “apples used to have such a layer too. Even left by the window, they’d stay the same for days, but once peeled, they’d wilt immediately.”

“Yes, that same wax layer, the fruit protected itself that way.”

While they were chatting in small groups, Yeliz called out, “Where are you going?”

“We had a break, didn’t we? I’ll check if I can find anything along the shore.”

“I’ll come with you,” she said. “I have my swimsuit on. If I don’t get into the water, I’ll evaporate. And you know what? I’m so happy you came; I could die from happiness.”

“I’m not going into the water,” I snapped, pulling my arm away. “I hate when water gets in my ears.” Selim was following us as well.

“Bringing an umbrella was clever. If it weren’t for the wind, we couldn’t bear this heat. Let’s see what you’ve collected.”

*

A little later, I called from the shore, careful not to let water touch my feet, “Is it warm?”

“It’s like a bath!” Yeliz shouted as she vanished into the waves, and a moment later, she surfaced: “You can’t sink, it’s impossible. Elif, look, it gets cooler as you go farther out.”

“Thanks, I’ll pass. And don’t rely on the salt too much either.”

Leaving them behind, I walked for a while along the tide line, steady on my feet, then pushed inland, wading through the sand toward the dune ridges and insect graveyards. At last, I would follow the things that had been troubling my mind all day. The grasshoppers leaping ahead of me were showing the way, and I felt a quickening excitement. This area lay outside the protected zone, and on the beach, there was no one but those who had come from the sea. Far off, nylon tarps creaked faintly in the hot wind, flapping in the air like taut sheets. The slender bracing rods crackled, and as the nylon shifted, small, dull knocks rattled against the metal frame.

The first time I brought an insect home, Mother made an uproar.

“This might be a cockroach,” she’d said, “how do we know?” Undefinable and dangerous, I heard those words for the first time that day. Then I began sneaking them inside.

Now and then, Yeliz and Selim would appear and disappear among the foam, while the pile of their belongings on the beach stood like a monument conversing with the waves. She had once bought me a rose from a boy selling flowers; it was the first flower I had ever received. Even though they were still within sight, I drifted away from the shore and into myself. By the time I looked back, they had disappeared completely, and a sudden sense of distance enveloped me. Above, on the far side of the fence, the shoots of flowers that grow only in a climate of forgetting stretched forward. As the wind whispered its long, slender song, my steps sank softly into the sand; warmth rose to my ankles. Yet I did not want to forget anything about her. As I reached the bend of the dune, the sounds shifted; the cries of gulls fell behind, and the wind blew softly, like breath through a horn. Her silhouette flickered in and out, trembling as though it didn’t belong to time, dazzling my eyes. We were like trees that could never grow side by side; one of us was bound to suffer. I turned my gaze back to the desert before me, to its offerings. The farther I walked, the more the path curled, drawing me slowly into its depths.

Between the folds of the dune, I gathered a few dried insects, a severed limb or two, and some shells. Just as I was about to turn back, an unusual glimmer caught my eye. At first, I thought it was a stone, perhaps a fossilized shell stealing a spark from the sun. I squinted; I was dizzy from the heat. Though covered by a thin layer of sand, it resembled a vein of ore revealed at the precise angle of the sun. As I looked closer, I sensed it shifting slightly on its own, as if it were breathing, and my heart began to race. I bent down and reached my hand into the circle of my shadow.

It was a shell—not an ordinary seashell, but one marked along its surface with spiraling lines. As I moved closer, a wave of warmth spread through me, and everything fell silent. I felt as though I had lost my sense of scale. When I turned my head back, Yeliz’s head had disappeared again. The wind shook the poles; the unclaimed air grew heavy, slapping at the emptiness. After wiping my glasses, I saw her head floating on the surface like the head of a pin, diving and resurfacing like a cormorant. Though the waves battered her, she righted herself like a roly-poly. I sank to the ground and curled around the find like a snail around its shell. When I touched it, I felt a current—an old, slow breath—and immediately pulled back. I reached for the shell again and didn’t let go this time. I carried it to the shore and dipped it into the water, watching its color come alive in the shimmering light. Soon after, I heard a faint moan.

“Are you ready to move inward?” it said. It wasn’t a voice, yet I sensed it the way I sensed the trees. The question was addressed to my being, not to my consciousness, not to my ears, but somewhere deeper.

“What are you?” The answer rose again not from outside, but from within me.

“I am the spiral, and at my center lies a forgotten circle. Remember, we have met before.”

The rings of memory began to turn before my eyes. I once had a book, an encyclopedia of marine life from the twenty-first century. There were such creatures in it, and among all those creatures was one whose cross-section drawings cast a spell on me from the moment I saw them. In those days, I would draw the inner parts of its shell—the delicate chambers—in the margins of books and notebooks. I used to draw baby figures, cut them out, and use them as templates to create outfits for my paper dolls. I would fold their outfits into place and then attach the shoes with double-sided tape. But after encountering the Nautilus, I lost interest in everything else.

Everything trembled its way back into the present. I knew it grew from within, advancing through the chambers of its spiral shell; its home thrilled me. I had compared it to the house of Mother’s father: a multi-roomed house with wooden reliefs. I had no siblings; there had never been the chance. As the Nautilus grew, it added new chambers and used the older ones to control its movement and balance underwater. I couldn’t understand, not with a child’s mind, how it lived only in the final chamber despite having so many rooms. Its eyes were simple, without lenses. I had worn glasses for as long as I could remember. When I recalled how the rooms in our house had emptied one by one, how Mother locked the unused rooms, sadness washed over me again. We, too, like the Nautilus, had slowly withdrawn into the attic of the old stone house. Since Father had been taken away suddenly one night when I was small, Mother neither rented out nor let us use the empty rooms. I scolded myself for forgetting all this, and felt a burn flare in my chest. My chest tightened, my heart beat as if it would shatter my rib cage.

*

As I returned home, I did what I always did: I pressed my ear against the door and listened inside. Hearing the sewing machine’s steady clatter resume after a brief pause, I felt relieved. I tapped my shoes together to shake off the sand and salt, shook them at the doorstep, then pulled down the pest-control flyer pinned to the doorframe and shut the door in the brazen, whistling face of the wind. Before Mother could see it, I crumpled the flyer and threw it away. My umbrella had changed color from the dust; climbing the slope had left me breathless, and licking the salt dried on my skin had only made me thirstier. I could drink a liter of water in one go; every time I lowered my head, it throbbed. The breadcrumbs I had left by the window were gone; Mother must have wiped everything with vinegar water again. Once, she had turned the sight of a slightly oversized spider into melodrama, yet she tended her cactuses as if they were newborns. My whole body was burning; I wanted to rinse off, but instead of water, a hollow, muffled emptiness echoed from the bathroom pipe. Then I remembered it was Tuesday. The plastic bottles lined up along the bathroom wall were coated in a thin layer of moss. I wiped my glasses with a damp cloth and dried them, yet nothing came into focus. A crack had split through me like a rock; the shell I had built layer by layer over the years had torn, and I felt dazed. Through that tear, the Nautilus had slipped in. I went to my room and took it out of the tissue paper, placing it in the second drawer of the nightstand beside my other valuables.

When I returned to the living room, Mother looked even more worn down. And yet nothing had happened. The closely set half-moon lines on her forehead had deepened. They were deep but precise, as if each had formed by the repeated insistence of the same gesture, the same thought. As if with every pass of the needle, the stitch settled more firmly in place. The lines, shaped by swallowed anger or an identity long forced into forgetting, left behind a kind of stubborn knot. At that moment, her face seemed to me like a map of years spent in silence. And yet, outwardly, she was merely hemming fabric. I wondered whether Mother had ever torn her own veil willingly. The television was on, technically, but even it seemed to speak inwardly. Some nights, I would wake feverish and check whether she was still breathing. From the sewing-machine spool, a thin thread drifted slowly downward as she nudged the edge of the fabric, folded it, and pressed the pedal. I, on the other hand, was afraid of waking up to a morning without her. Half-finished dresses, the memory of spools dangling beneath the table, trouser hems, and frills had slowly filled the room over the years, fattening the elephant sitting in the center. Each time I needed to reach the kitchen, I had to walk around it.

Today I learned that to understand a creature, one must look at its shape, but the world seemed blurred, as if I were looking through a pane filmed with salt. Just as I was about to lose myself inside a shape, my stomach growled. I opened the fridge and set the bulgur wheat on the counter. When the cold struck my face, I felt as though I were in two places at once, an unpleasant sensation, and my heart began to pound. I drank a glass of water standing up; Mother glanced at me sideways and gave a slight nod, as if ordering me to sit. My thirst didn’t pass, yet I set the glass down before finishing it. She came into the kitchen as I warmed the food. Muttering at the tea boiling on the stove, she lowered the heat. The water wasn’t bubbling, only releasing small, patient bubbles to the surface. I couldn’t catch them as they rose. I sank into the chair, spoon in hand, staring at the glass in the corner of the table and the small amount of water inside it. My arm was dry and flaking. As the pan sizzled, Mother opened the cupboard doors and closed them forcefully. When they failed to close properly, she pushed them again, harder this time. Her lips thinned, but she said nothing. Then she reached for the drawer and shoved it shut.

“If you’re looking for the rock candy, it’s where you hid it,” I called out. Reaching behind the canned goods, I brought down the New Year’s cookie tin and set it on the counter. Mother kept filling her tea glass. It crossed my mind that I had forgotten to return the library books.

“How was the trip? Want some tea?”

“No, let me eat something first, my stomach’s growling.”

“As you wish, add some water to the bottom pot. How can October be this warm? Is your teacher mad, taking you on a thousand-day journey in this heat? Couldn’t she show it on the screen? There’s some tzatziki in the fridge.”

“Is that the same thing - showing it on the screen?”

“It’s my stipend that suffers.”

Over her shoulder, I looked at the yellowed, dusty photos covering the fridge door. The wind battered the doors, forcing the windows open. Salt stones pattered against the roof; a hot draft blew from a vent. The heat tightened my stomach; the smell of burning stung my throat. The rice had scorched. At that moment, the television grew louder; when I turned, I found myself eye to eye with a photograph of one of my grandfather’s hunts on the wall. Why Mother still kept it, I had no idea. I opened the fridge and grabbed the cold margarine.

“I am your mother, whether you want me to be or not!” shouted the voice from the television box. I couldn’t resist anymore, so I spread the margarine on a slice of bread and opened my mouth wide.

Before long, we were sunk into the sofa, staring blankly at the television. In the series, people shouted, cried, loved, and separated again, yet her face showed no expression; she watched purely out of habit. She hadn’t touched the packet of salted sunflower seeds; now and then, she gave an anxious glance at the clock, feeding on feelings. Was it this morning? Was it she or I who saw that black-and-white, scrawny cat on the street with a baby snake in its mouth? At that moment, bubbles rose from the teapot’s spout, and its whistle sounded like a thin breath. Mother got up and turned off the heat. When she returned, she changed the channel; apparently, there had been some kind of accident at sea, and they were questioning the migrants living on the beach. When nothing else worked, she would swallow a sedative alongside her allergy pills. Yet on some nights, if she was in good spirits, she would place the fruit plate between us. That evening, I too could not focus; I watched her more than the screen. The fine skin gathered under her chin folded like a sheer fabric; her cheeks were hollow, and shadows had settled beneath her cheekbones.

Cramps gripped my muscles, and the pain left my body numb.

“Are my eyes throbbing from the heat? My head feels like it’s splitting,” I said to Mother. But the Nautilus spoke with urgency: “You must return me to the water; death is not the end.”

Of course, it wasn’t actually speaking, yet I wasn’t ready to let it go so quickly. “Tell me about death; I’ve been studying it for years,” I said.

“They tell you that you must forget in order to live, though with plants it’s much quieter.”

“You can’t distract me with the river of forgetting,” I said. “I don’t want to forget anything.” Even so, I devoted myself to its service.

*

Once, I barely left the computer for days; I sketched a rough map, filled my waterproof bag with breadcrumbs, and charged my phone, just in case. I packed whatever I had saved, unsure whether I would need it where I was going. The only way to know was to get there. Once, I also stuffed a ball of twine and a headlight into my bag, again just in case. We took the tram to Balat; the passage I sought lay in the holy spring of a church. The tram was cool; in the carriage, there were a few cracked heels heading toward Eyüp Cemetery, and nothing but the shrill cries of children in woven baskets. We got off at the stop and hurried across the lights. I was tired of both the prey and the hunter; why keep denying death? Mother’s father had kept postponing his own death through sacrifice, and doctors, too, kept postponing death with their medicines. The animal’s resistance, the warmth of its blood, or the sound of frozen pain... As we passed through the iron gate of Panayia Vlaherna and passed beneath the pale market vines, the monstrosity of the world slipped beside me like my own shadow.

Two uniformed men were smoking under a canopy. The garden was scorched, the leaves brittle, the soil hard. The pool was empty; the water, like time, had retreated. A turtle was straining, with painstaking care, to reach the green inside a moss-covered cap. One of the men paused to inhale and looked us over like routine suspects. Mother didn’t let go of my hand, and without lingering, we stepped through the cross-marked door. No-camera signs hung on the walls. She lit a candle from another and pressed it into the sand. After making a quick wish, she descended a few marble steps toward the sound of running water. Inside was much cooler than outside, yet I still struggled to keep up with her long strides. A fan spun within the stone walls; an elderly woman dusted the candlesticks and precious metals with a long-handled brush. A young woman translated the inscription above the fountain for curious tourists. To my right, small plastic water bottles and a donation box rested on the fountain. When Mother reached for a bottle, the fountain stood taller than I did. To the left was the true source, trickling with blue-green light. The mouth of the Virgin Mary was only two steps away; I couldn’t take my eyes off it, but apparently my excitement unsettled the others, because a dull silence fell. The three fish swimming there—the three-legged love—were enough to send a thrill through me. As my knees touched the red line, my hand crossed into the forbidden zone. I had to be quick before the attendant warned me away; there would be no third chance. As if fighting for my life, I bent forward, slipping my head past the ring, and at that moment, noticed a point of deviation, a point that broke the true line. Only then did I remember the paper the Nautilus clenched in my hand. The moment the paper met the cool water, I stopped wondering what would happen to me. My whole body seemed to fold inward, and time ceased to be a straight line.

Meanwhile, it drew the water in by flexing its muscles, channeling the water through the chambers of its shell and expelling it from behind. In a mockingbird-like tone, it called out, “Ready? Hold tight!”

As the chambers filled and emptied with gas and liquid, it could rise and sink in the water, but could I trust a living fossil? Drifting inside a tube filled with cerebrospinal fluid, defying gravity, was stranger than I had imagined. Once, despite being firmly anchored, I had passed through that place called the birth canal. The nurses had shouted at Mother, “There’s no turning back now, push,” but I was busy kneading my own existence into her fluid, salting myself into being. Yes, Mother birthed my temporary body; the other was a birth into myself. No life begins with its own birth; each inherits from the one before. This time, the descent was steady and balanced. I adjusted quickly to the weight pressing on my chest. My shoulders tightened and released sharply, yet I did not panic. As my body adapted to an unfamiliar pattern, it lost its sense of direction, but I was no longer separate from Mother; we were one.

As if hearing me, it said, “My hard shell protects us from the high pressure.”

“How will you change direction?” I asked. “According to the map, we need to turn southeast.”

“Wherever I wish to go, I turn my body and my shell toward it. Don’t worry; I’ll curve slightly—my posture determines my course.” And so it was. The surface of the sea had become an unlivable wasteland; the remaining crumbs of nourishment were too little for a long journey, and as the sun scorched the water, the light blurred everything further. Its lensless eyes, able only to distinguish light from shadow, were forced to retreat to deeper darkness. A place once called home no longer belonged to us.

Perhaps the underground waters might lead it to the Realm of the Dead.

“Are you afraid?” I asked.

“Fear comes when there is another,” it replied.

Silently, we descended along a capillary, slipping between rocks into fissures where cold sediment gathered. There was a nearly inaudible current. It was neither the roar of a river nor that of an ocean. It widened like rings of memory, trembling with a mysterious sound rising from the upper world. I didn’t know death, but sensing my curiosity, Mother once said, “Everything has its order; children play with balls and spinning tops—leave the matches to me.” The water grew colder, heavier, yet carried us on. At the source of distant ages, it turned slowly within that narrow stream, gliding through dream channels like a wave that would not recede. This was neither river nor sea. It was a vessel most of us had forgotten, kept alive only by the trembling wish-sticks reaching toward the sky.

For thousands of years, those who drank from the holy spring, believing they would be healed, had whispered “ocean” into the water, as if speaking with a single body. I heard the clatter of keys and endured life through imagination.

The water became whatever it was called. The old scratches on the Nautilus’s shell revived with the living water, glowing softly.

“The spiral of humanity is breaking,” it said. “As your path expands outward, your center empties. Remember, you were the one who called me.”

“But I don’t even know how to swim,” I protested. “Look at me, I’m soaked. And I’m afraid I’ll sink straight down.”

“I am only a door—one of many doors. Whether you step through is your choice. The spiral always calls inward. Because in the innermost ring, you always encounter yourself.”

The sand quarries kept growing, like our silences, leaving us no place to breathe except Istanbul’s seven hills. Maybe the sand-holding plants could stop them; maybe the four-legged creatures seeking refuge on the hills could intercede for us. But they too, like us, had been displaced, worn down, hungry, and thirsty. There was death in the grave, death on the street, death at home, death in dreams. Mother, who never stopped praying that those who loved the sun could have the streets—and could have everything, absolutely everything—pulled the blinds tight; she had already drifted apart from her old companions because of the hill. Even if she said everything would eventually come to one’s doorstep, neither friendship nor neighborliness could be placed into a shopping basket. As the sand quarries grew, the gluttons fed by them fattened, and the more they fattened, the more monstrous they became, setting their sights on our homes. And it wasn’t just that—they were destroying our homes. They were slicing the city like a loaf of bread, vertically and horizontally, then opening massive pits. The air spat poison; everywhere resembled a construction site. They wanted to tear away the old fabric of our home and stitch on a disposable body, which they would also kill. When I spoke this way, Mother would call me a truth-teller. They wanted to drive us—city dwellers, the four-legged, the bodied and bodiless, the scaled, the budding, and the rest—out of the city. They were raising new hills to sell, plastering billboards from end to end with glossy posters, as if we could ever afford them. Yet only a handful could afford them. Weren’t you the ones who promised? Weren’t you the ones who swore not to cut, to protect? The locals’ patience was wearing thin.

Reluctant as I was to abandon my heavy baggage, it kept dragging me down, though I had only just been pulled out of forgetfulness. Every memory was a ring, though some were more flawed than others; I dove headfirst from one refuge into another fissure. In one, I heard cicadas. Mother was wearing her bra over her undershirt; her skin was chafed from the heat. Like the first elevators, we were not rising toward the Great Above but descending into the Great Below that was calling me.

In another, Mother’s father was skinning the animal. “It volunteered for this,” he had said, “stop averting your eyes. It must carry death so that you may live.”

I used to love him, but Mother said a serpent had once lied to him. He no longer spoke any language we could understand. And the serpent that lied had left behind its dead skin.

“Are you willing to be vulnerable?” the voice asked. “Allow the shame that isn’t yours. Let it pass through you. Otherwise, you too will become a sealed box before you know it.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “It’s something new in my lineage.”

*

After me, Mother, would there be still water or a rising wave? Still, within the layers of darkness, the pressure of the water and its enveloping hold felt the same. If I could no longer tell where my body began or ended, we had surely become one body again. The Nautilus’s tentacles quivered lightly in the current, and its soft fibers were teaching me the art of swimming. Inside that chamber, I heard the echo of my own faint heartbeat. In those few seconds, the joyful news of deliverance passed through my mind—what was it exactly? It was about a grain of bulgur wheat, and yet it wasn’t. If a grain of wheat did not fall to the earth, it remained alone; if it died, it bore much fruit. I had a clear sense of what I was not, and that gave me the faintest glimpse into life and death. I was neither monster nor serpent, neither sacrificial girl nor a grain of wheat; I could only be a sorcerer who found her own path, self-sufficient. Had I fallen into an inner sea? What was this unending roar of the waters? The waves formed circles of color in the light, and further above, a breeze kept blurring the surface. Yet my blindfold loosened, and I could see more clearly what was happening above. It presence reminded me of a verse I had once read:

We are each a small body of water.

But in the next moment, I found myself sinking into a spring of water; I must have been waiting at a safety stop to avoid decompression. The bubbles in my blood were growing larger, and I felt an overwhelming urge to rise to the surface, but it told me to wait. I could only see ahead of me, though above, the glints of a bright day were shimmering. I was at the threshold of a vent; if I reached out, I could touch it and tear it open with my hand. But then my submarine, darting from one worry to another, began to move, and the waters blurred again.

This time, we anchored on the seabed, where the sands lifted lightly. The frosted glass opened, and at last I stepped onto the sand. There was life on the ocean floor. But the first things I saw were plastic bags and two AA batteries. People were walking from one place to another, as if we were all at the entrance of a terminal. Dozens of people were moving around. It was nothing like the world above; the light came from an artificial source. I saw a line of people in red-and-white striped pajamas, with a chief at their head.

The chief called out, “Shoes are distributed further ahead.”

This explained the uniform shopping bags in people’s hands. I had just come from a long journey and needed a bathroom. I walked a little further and looked around, realizing I was inside a structure. Families were crammed into small, box-like cells. In one of them, a child behind the glass pointed to the stairs leading up, as if he understood what I was looking for. A woman was holding him by the shoulders. The stairs were pitch dark. Though I was on the seabed, I was afraid to climb up even a single floor.

Only when I turned back did I remember the Nautilus’s departure. When I set foot on land, it had said to me, “If I take one step further, I will run out of breath. I cannot bear my own weight; I will dry out and die.” Then it took its path back into the sea and vanished.

So I slipped my head through the frosted glass ring, as if passing beneath a curtain. I was barefoot, and I had grown accustomed to the roar of the ocean. I could only hear the scratch of pencils. It felt as if I were in a research laboratory in a remote corner of the world. Researchers were moving around. This time, they wore blue-and-white striped pajamas. I advanced reluctantly to the end of the corridor. Then I remembered the torch in my bag; I took it out and turned it on. I was in front of a passage and could descend only by lowering my rope. The patch of ground beneath my feet was wet and slippery, the air cool and dry. I crawled inch by inch through the narrow passage, low tunnels, and long corridors. When I reached a large hall, I saw animal drawings etched into the protrusions of the cave. I crawled through a passage, no wider than my shoulders, again with my stomach pressed to the ground. The female figurines planted in the earth were in this section. In their presence, I passed through the darkness in safety, as if those who once left the cave had entrusted the passage to the figurines. At certain points, my face brushed the ground, and I struggled to breathe, but I could not turn back. I hit my head on the low ceiling several times and lay unconscious for a while, but soon reached another space.

The Gatekeeper asked, “What did you see along the way?”

“I saw the shinbones kept in cupboard-like recesses, the skulls, the axes,” I said. Then, in one breath, I counted the fish, the bird, and the serpent I had seen in the painted room, but the guard kept looking at me as if unsatisfied. “I saw the fire,” I added. “Please open the house; I will enter alone.”

This time he asked, “Did you make glad all that you saw?”

“I saw the shipwreck, and I gladdened it. I saw the traces of sandals, and I gladdened them. I saw the fallen columns and broken idols, and I gladdened them. I saw the angel wings, and I gladdened them. I saw the dead fish wrapped in cloth, and I gladdened them,” I replied at once. I was so full that had I been patient, perhaps I would have glimpsed wonders.

“Then welcome to the house of the Hel dwellers,” he said and bowed. The floorboard creaked, the small wing of the massive oak door opened, and I passed through a cat-like entrance.

“Why have you come here?” the Gatekeeper asked.

First, he took the torch from my head, then my rope at another door. He kept saying, “Stay calm. These are the customs of the Great Below.” By the seventh gate, I had been freed from all the burdens in my luggage.

Another voice asked, “Why have you withdrawn to the secluded?”

I had no answer to this question.

He paused for a moment, perhaps to see whether I was ready, and the wait felt like centuries. “What does the scent of a flower smell like?” he asked himself; the other shrugged his shoulders and cast a vague glance.

I remembered the school trip, and the salty air and its smell washed over me. How could I explain it to someone who had never smelled a flower?

When I began to come back to myself, I had already crossed the waters of death and reached home. Mother had put me in the bathtub, rubbing my body under the water and bringing me back into the world. A bitter taste filled my mouth; I sat up and spat. Empty water jugs and ice trays were scattered around. As the waves receded, they left behind a kind of intuition. Just as some plants grow downward, I too could take root that way. Down below, in the depths, there was fresh water—enough for all of us.

When I jumped back into the water, the subterranean guards bowed their heads. There, a thorny plant was growing. On a descending stone forest floor, lit by fireflies, shrill birds cried out among the roots of the trees. Ignoring its thorns, I lifted it from the water. My tears dissolved into the sea, and I began to grow.

If life had begun before my birth, I knew it would end long after my death. My existence was no longer a final life nor a finite death. And memory was the shoots that continued to bloom from the severed branches of trees.