Chapter 2
The waters are dark and cold and the only light down that deep and wide sleep of hers is dulled. It has become Quỳnh's world, and she is used to it, although she remembers despising it a long while ago for a reason she's lost.
And so, she feels comfort in the sluggish sea.
She is lulled by a peculiar rhythm, oscillating between shivering currents that leave her feeling alive and warm ones that stuff her lungs heavily, leaving her drowsy.
This is what she knew, of her reality there. It was what she was accustomed to.
She could have gone on and on and on.
If only, it weren't for these flashes.
- - -
The first time Quỳnh sees it, it startles madness from her limbs.
She has lost count of how long she's been down there, how many time she went away fighting that rusty cell of hers. She has now entered a new stage of enlightenment. She has lost count, she is numb and yet she fights with every breath every time the water is churned down her throat She is a furnace, eating up metal. Water is something she is fed and she spits it out with a blinding faith she can't control, instincts always taking over, no matter how much she doesn't want to react, how much it hurts, no matter what.
She's in that spiraling mindset, where the waters aren't dark anymore, loneliness isn't a curse, she is no one, has no name, has no limits to her body and she takes a savage joy at breathing in the salted tears around her, at hitting her confines and hurting everywhere she can.
It's her whole world. She is alive, she burns with it and she's alright. She might be drifting, she certainly feels like she's soaring, even if she knows she is not moving. Not anymore at least.
In the end, it doesn't really matter after some time.
It's her mind that is freed from all physical considerations. She's reached a new level of understanding. She's come to enjoy it.
And so she's just there, breathing in water, trashing against iron and closing her eyes in the dark. She's at peace, after deaths and deaths of uncontrolled pain. She welcomes it. It's almost a new heartbeat.
She's at peace.
And then there is light, striking and feral.
A flash.
It shakes her to her core, questions her cycle, of life and death, of being and breathing. It's a sharp reminder of what is, out there, up away from the seas and the drowsy currents that had lulled her in an unknowable moment.
There is a flash. It’s a call back.
Quỳnh is breathless.
She has lost her freedom.
She has blinked into existence, witnessing again the outside world.
It hurts.
Her soul and her thoughts. Her lungs. Her throat.
Quỳnh doesn't appreciate it. It's worst than the cycle of going away and coming back hurting she had going, alone in peace, when she sees what there is out of the sea, just waiting for her to reach it.
Quỳnh starts throwing herself against her cage, a metal she previously had only scratched, for comfort, for herself, for the feeling of iron turning to sand beneath her hand. She starts screaming, reborn in her rage and the knowledge that there is a world out there, and it took her away from her own little world down there.
And it doesn’t come to her. It doesn't free her.
She doesn't care about what is there, in the flash of The Outside she gets. She doesn't care, she only trashes and screams, more pained and devastated and enraged than she had been for a long time.
When the flash is gone, she quiets down. Even if she keeps on dying, her thoughts do not leave anymore that imprinted vision. She quiets down but her mind keeps on turning, thinking back to everything she saw, everything she noticed.
When the second flash comes, she is ready. She watches, intention undivided.
- - -
Strangely, she isn't awed, or shocked by what she sees.
Quỳnh is so attuned to her reality of dull tones, of coldness, and of vagueness, that when the flash comes she only notices the sunlight, that leaves her eyes burning bright, and the snow, small and white, falling slowly down, but burning tenfold into her retinas.
She can't say how she knows it is snow at first, her mind focused on the vision, and with only the knowledge of her world, how she knows it is just another form of water, but it quiets her. She settles, knowing that there is water in that flash of life and that she isn't alone.
The water is still there. It’s not far.
Quỳnh quiets down.
The snow, and the light shining on it, it unlocks her mind and suddenly and slowly, everything else comes trickling back in, uncurling from the deep sleep it had been pushed in. For her survival. For her safety.
She doesn't understand yet why she is seeing these things, but she knows she hates it. The snow, the light, the sun bright. Deep down, the pain in her throat is nothing compared to the wrenching burn that the vignettes of life she witnesses from then on bring her.
With every new flash, she starts coming back from the never-ending circle of breathing, drowning, and dying. She starts questioning what is around her, and most importantly, what isn't. She feels the distant touch of a hand, on her cheek, and she screams until she dislocates her jaw, leaving it hanging.
There's no joy when these flashes come, that's her only certainty.
She hates it.
- - - -
The flashes are constant now . Almost every death of hers is a new glimpse, a new vision of what lives. She has got over the light, and the snow. She has now understood enough to watch the flashes unfold. The phantom itch of someone else by her side is a new companion she carries there now.
Quỳnh hates what she sees.
And she feels cheated, like something is missing.
Now, at least, she knows why she sees these things. And she can only spit and curse the devil that devised those doings.
Because it's a sad sight, and she wants to sneer that the glimpses of the world she gets to see now are revolving around an old white man hanging at the end of a rope over and over again. She doesn't know where, she doesn't know why, she almost doesn't care. What matters is that now she has to suffer through those sad times with that pathetic man who has crapped himself and is dying again and again and again.
She knows he isn't the only one hanging, there are others, by his sides, dressed just like him. He is the only one waking though, so that must make him special.
Quỳnh sees the other bodies, turning blue beside him, and she thinks about an army, marching against an enemy and getting caught and punished. She has seen it enough times that she is not even surprised.
Once, she almost acknowledges his intelligence when he manages to stop trashing, every time he comes back. It reminds her of herself.
She manages better than he ever could. What a shame.
But then she sees men walking in front of his hanging spot, casting fearful glances at him and his companions. Quỳnh feels a laugh bubbling, and she chokes between the air and the water, it's been a while since she had been unhinged enough to start laughing in her coffin. She laughs, out of disbelief, because the men walking by are dressed just like the men hanging.
It's an execution, a demonstration.
That pitiful man who comes back and wakes up, he's a traitor to his peers. She doesn't know why, she really couldn't give a damn. He must have betrayed them, one way or another, to end up there. End up there, and keep on dying, over and over again.
He is pathetic, it's the only thing she can think of. Pathetic and sad, and she screams because of the fact that it is the only thing she gets to see, out of the whole world she dimly remembers exist.
He is pathetic.
She doesn't yet make sense of why she is seeing him, but the reminder he stands for, for what she's lost and what still lives, out of her reach. It's enough to make her hate him. As he abandons himself to yet another sad death by hanging.
She feels a wide smile stretch on her lips, a scream coming up from her guts, with water slipping in and madness boiling under her skin. He dies another time, and she dies with him, different paths but same ending.
She isn't alone anymore.
He must know it.