Published in the The Pushcart Prize XLVIII Anthology & The Kenyon Review

You would not believe in the existence of a manta ray until you’ve seen one. She’s nearly a creature of mythology, with underwater arms that can span twenty-ish feet from tip to tip. The manta twists and turns by tilting the edges of her wings—her acrobatics accented by a dark dorsal topside and white-gilled underbelly. Her diamond frame and right-angled fins can encapsulate a three-thousand-pound mass so flat she might flash invisible when she turns vertical—like a nickel in a hand trick.

The mantas off the coast of Kailua-Kona congregate at night, when the bounty of planktonic creatures arises. So I organized a night boat. There were two options. My husband and I could snorkel at the top of the water, putting our masked faces under the sea’s surface, looking for the tips of those steel wings peeking white and manifesting from darkness in our direction. Or we could don scuba tanks, weight belts, four-millimeter wet suits, and release the air from our diving vests and our lungs at the same time. Till there’s no air left to buoy us, and our bodies sink to the sea floor.

This is where I find a nook among rocks to plant my knees.

Where we sway with sea fans—as we wait.

Down here, the waiting is quiet. There is the sound of my breath as I pull air from my tank. There is my exhalation, a knocking of air bubbles against each other like bamboo chimes. There is the scraping of a nocturnal creature’s teeth on coral. Otherwise, it’s black, and I am left mostly alone to the orbs of my thoughts.

My hand moves—as quickly as a hand can move underwater—for my husband’s. He knows my quiet languages. He reads them in my eyes. Even behind the scuba mask he proves this literacy as he returns my hand squeeze—a little stronger than normal. Because he, too, is wondering what’s going on with me. I, after all, am the expert. I am the one with the divemaster certification and dozens of night dives sketched into my logbook. I organized this dive with the manta rays. It was my idea. My wish. So what are these hooves now trampling in my chest? I know anxiety. But the slow kind that accumulates like tumbleweed through the night and is brushed to the side of the road by the velocity of day. I don’t recognize this mob in my heart—all at once—scanning for an exit. I look up. There’s the surface of the ocean, only thirty feet above my head. I could take one breath of air from my tank and “slowly exhale and slowly kick” to the top and reach it just fine. I know this because it’s one of the first diving tests I passed for my certifications. But there is danger. Equally silent and lethal danger. If I did not exhale as I made my “emergency swimming ascent,” the air in my lungs would expand. And with nowhere to go, the air could break through the blood vessels in my lungs’ tissues. The invisible pressure could rupture and collapse my lungs. Technically it’s called “pneumothorax.” Casually, it’s called “burst lungs.”

As I’m looking at the roof of the ocean, I’m thinking of this because I am thinking of what lives on the other side. This night dive is different from the last one I did with my husband, off a wooden Indonesian boat five years ago. The difference is my two small children, by now tucked into their beds by the babysitter. Two children who have no place even in their borderless imaginations to know their parents, tonight, are sitting on the floor of the ocean, swaying with sea fans, pointing flashlights at an underwater night sky of sparkling plankton.

Looking at the top of the water, I understand it is my distance from my children that makes my eyes wide enough to speak the quiet language of panic. Luckily, a scuba regulator functions much like a brown paper bag. I can hear my drag of air from the tank, see my exhalation in the rising bubbles. And I’m practiced at slow breathing. Especially underwater. In my dive-training months, on the occasions the divemasters could take the boat without clients, we would tumble into the water without briefings, maps, or dive tables. We’d take off our diving vests and turn them backward so as to “fly” underwater, with the tanks underneath us and our arms outstretched. And we’d play. Pulling a fin off a friend’s foot, snapping another’s mask, even turning off someone’s tank as a prank. The playing wasn’t always well received (especially by me), but it did make us all nimble for real emergencies. In those days, I was the last diver up. I was small and not as involved in the air-guzzling tumbles. Rather, it was my instinct to use my unrestricted time to hover. To make myself as still as a sea fan and watch what revealed itself from the dark nooks of coral walls. And because being a sea fan requires very little air, I was able to stretch my tank into the longest, safest allowable dive. I am at home in the underwater world. After hundreds of dives, I did not expect to find this panic in it.

What was not my idea, my wish, was the new meaning of death upon the birth of my children. This was not mentioned in the shelf of motherhood books I read. No one told me about the heaviness. The blue whale weight of walking into the future with a baby on my hip and another child in Velcro-ed shoes holding my hand. About how the small bodies add gravity to life. From the ocean floor, looking up, I feel this pressure. And I am not the only warm-blooded mammal in the ocean tonight with this anxiety.

A sperm whale births her babe in the sunlight zone of the ocean. Close to the surface is where she nurses her infant for two or more years. But the fat in her milk comes from meals consumed two thousand feet below. In frigid, high-pressure depths, where her babe can’t follow. So while the sperm whale mother is foraging, she leaves her child to the care of an orbiting pod of related females who babysit, sometimes even wet-nursing the babe themselves. A “mother culture” it’s called by whale biologists.While mom is below, she is still in touch with her offspring, sending messages via sonar clicks. Mom typically stays in the depths, hunting, for about an hour. Unless she panics. Peter Matthiessen once documented a whaling ship’s chase of a sperm whale. The whaler’s sonar pinged the animal at a thousand feet deep as it tracked her panicked flight, waiting for her to run out of air and into the crosshairs of the harpooner above. Matthiessen noted of the sperm whale’s ability to stay submerged: “[T]his time is rapidly decreased by panic.”

I know the sperm whale’s quick breath: The time I turned around at the pool and my three-year-old son was sinking in the deep end. My daughter’s fall from a car seat teetering on the edge of a table. Five calls to poison control for the berries and plants and tubes of old medicines my toddlers put to their lips. Two swift Heimlich maneuvers. A broken arm. Midnight runs to the emergency room for spiking temperatures. My recurring nightmares in which climate disasters arrive.

Down in the high-pressure depths, with my body anchored by rocks and my husband’s hand, I’m thinking about death. I do not ponder death as much as I did before I had children. I no longer have the time to meditate for two hours a day. I don’t remember the dreams I used to prompt and record each night. I don’t walk so close to cliffs of bodily risk anymore. Those were qualities of my prechild life. Of regular earth-gravity living. Of nights uninterrupted by monsters, wet sheets, and the chills of fever. Motherhood breaks linear time. Life becomes instead—punctuated. By the unwavering eye contact of a nursing babe. By a small body shuddering with relief against my chest. By my son’s outstretched arm, pointing to the moon.

Swaying with the sea fans, my husband squeezes my hand again. He has read in my quiet language that I’m OK enough to be daydreaming. Or water-dreaming. Or whatever one calls the cartwheels of the waking human imagination at nighttime on the floor of the sea. He sees, too, that I’m looking at the ocean’s surface in a funny way. I squeeze his hand back, and a beam of light swings like a car’s headlights into the fog of plankton. It points at the flicker of faraway wing tips, and though a diver is never supposed to hold her breath, I have no choice.

Our first visiting manta ray—an entirely nonviolent creature of one and a half tons—swims toward us as her ancestors have been swimming for five million years. She flies into the center of the flashlights’ illuminating the plankton of her midnight snack. Except night and day are not distinctions for those who live in swallowed light. Humans don’t know if the manta ray sleeps. To the best knowledge of those who study her, she’s a perpetually swimming thing. This manta now swoops in impossibly graceful loops in our light beams. I lean back. I would fall if the water did not hold me. We are only guests, I think. My sigh is captured in iridescent ovals, rising toward the ocean’s top. Toward the land of my sleeping babies. Whom I have forgotten. Whom I can never forget. But whom I can hold even as I’m swaying with sea fans.

Long before I slipped into a black wet suit, off a boat, and into the cold coastal waters of Kailua-Kona, Native Hawaiians observed the manta ray with due respect. Roxanne Kapuaimohalaikalani Stewart, a Hawaiian cultural specialist, says, “The name of the manta—hahalua—can be interpreted as ‘two breaths’ . . . ‘ha,’ meaning breath, and ‘lua,’ meaning two. . . . When mantas leap [out of the water], their experience from below transcends into our sphere. . . . Their transcendence speaks to things that we don’t yet know.”

I flip this image—seeing myself in the eyes of the manta as a land animal of too many lanky appendages, anchored among rocks, submerged in her ocean’s sphere of preexisting laws and spirit. We are of different worlds, and yet we share viscera. We both have a heart. A stomach. Intestines. A gallbladder. Kidney. Liver. Uterus. Ovaries. Who would know the difference of our innards? And a brain! The manta has the largest brain of any fish, with developed areas for problem-solving, learning, communication, coordination, and intelligence. To the surprise of marine biologists, manta rays—in a “mirror test,” widely used to gauge self-awareness—were able to recognize themselves.

I have forgotten my husband’s hand. He has forgotten mine. Under the swooping manta, there’s no room for anything but awe. My thoughts of my children are tucked away. Baby manta rays are born wrapped in their own wings like a blanket. There is a single set of images of a manta ray birthing in the wild. It was taken by Roberto Fabbri in the Red Sea in 1968. In the black-and-white series, a tidy bundle of wrapped manta bursts from its mother’s body in a cloud of white. The photographer’s caption—in tiny font—reads, “The manta ray was speared. . . . [I]t represented a big trophy.” And if you squint at the photo of the mother mid-labor, you can see the man’s murky outline in the shadow just behind her. You can see the long white glint of his metal speargun. He stands waiting, a few feet from her arching, birthing body. A few feet from her eyes.

Two breaths.

Female manta rays are pregnant for thirteen months. For the ten months I carried each of my children, I had two hearts, two brains, four ears, four legs, four eyes. My children came out of my body, and I was back to two legs, but not one heart. I know this because when my child’s seashell ear is on my chest, my heart speeds up and theirs slows down. Female mantas might birth only one pup every three years. Their populations have a “low likelihood of recovery,” yet in 2022 they are still harpooned, pulled from their home and scraped alive of their gill rakers for fabled Chinese “medicines.” Humans may not even notice their extinction. Whales were native to this planet forty-nine million years before humans arrived, and yet man, in less than a hundred years, disappeared three million whales—like a nickel in a hand trick.

Herman Melville in Moby Dick (drawn from Melville’s experiences aboard whalers) wrote of the sperm whale’s mammary glands, “When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolor the sea for rods.”

In a sperm whale’s fourteen tons of warm-blooded body, her blood is blue like mine. Red like mine when exposed to the oxygen in air or water. Her blood spills when her calf is born. Her blood leaks brown in the blue wake of her afterbirth, the way mine trailed on the linoleum floor between my hospital bed and the bathroom. Her milk may be flavored by squid the way mine is by garlic. Milk that drops in my breast by an ancestral song of DNA. A dropping of milk that feels like the cracking of ice, the crunch of snow. “Man” does not know this reflex. But I do. And if you call my empathy “feminine,” that is my point. “Man” harpooned and dragged thirty-ton bodies onto boat decks until the oceans nearly went silent of humpback song. Man thought that if he could kill it, he could own it. He spread the red viscera of warm bodies but recognized none of it in himself. Man looked into the mirror and saw only himself.

My husband and I ascend from the dive. We strip off our wet suits in the dark. Shiver in the cold of night. Towel off our transcendence from the womb of water.

At home, I check on the children. I pull a blanket over the exposed limbs of my son. Tuck a pink bear under the arm of my daughter. Turn around with my lungs so full of hope they might burst. Knowing my tumbleweed of anxiety will not evade the velocity of day. That my children, tucked under covers, will face the consequences of all man’s great failures of compassion and care. Holding my breath for a mother culture I can feel—but can’t see.

I close their door, careful not to make a sound, still swaying with the sea fans under the silent and lethal weight of it all.

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