Who Are You?

There’s a fish that swims through my dreams.

A long time before I settled in a desert town, when I was just visiting for field work, a fish would writhe through the desert of my sleeping mind’s eye.

At least I think it was a fish. Shining, hard to see against the glare, it had a broader head, thinning into a slender slip of a tail, flicking against the wind. A flash of something that could be fins, and the whole of it twisting through a cloudless sky above the burning corduroy sand. Like a salmon forging upstream. Swimming, always swimming, pressing on and on.

I didn’t think much about it – there was work to do. Tools to fix, samples to store, meals to cook, routes to plan. I suppose I thought the fish was some Cretaceous echo, a lone remnant of the inland sea which once lapped a kilometer or so above our heads. Cruising the sea bed, the way fish do, swimming aimlessly. There's nowhere to go in the sea, right? So you may as well just swim. A fish should be strange to see in the desert, but this one seemed to fit.

I almost forgot about it after I started living with her, after the floods had bogged both land rovers and we’d walked into town one night and stood there in the main street, bog men, too tired to reply when she wove through the raindrops and offered us a place to stay. I stared and never saw the peeling paint, or the mould spattered on the shower wall. I saw nothing but her.

I woke beside her one morning, the dawn light, grey-green, rippling through the sheer curtains, the stained fan blades thubbing overhead like a boat propeller.

She turned to me and said, Far up north, she said, the land, and the sea, is covered in snow. I was used to her stories by then, which travelled through time and space like they didn’t exist. So I lay still, and listened.

The ground is white as eyeballs, she said, and the sky soft and grey like seal fur. The wind carves the snow into wavelets, and two fish together ride the currents of the wind. These two fish swim all over the land, wherever there are waves to ride, and d’you know, when it snows? She rolled closer and whispered into my ear. The snowflakes are their eggs.

I smiled. Her feet smoothed against each other in pleasure.

There are desert fish too, she went on, more quietly.

My smile faded.

She said, You’ve seen how the sand carves itself into ripples? You can see them sometimes, when the heat turns the air to water, flicking through the edge of the sky.

She watched me. I didn't move.

Do you know what their eggs are? she asked.

The sand? I whispered, my brow rippling in concentration.

She smiled, The rain.

I sat, then, cradling my knees, seeking air, feeling my thoughts delved by her slippery fingers, and my fish plucked from my dreams.

How do you know that story? I asked, wondering what other thoughts she’d leaked from my head.

She stretched in the sheets, her arms flung gentle above her head, her pale belly tightening, her round eyes hunting mine.

Where'd you get it from? I asked, turning.

The Story Sea, she smiled. Which is what she always said, like it was the Argasso, or the Tasman, and its shores only a dusty bus ticket away.

I searched her face. Why are there two fish?

It needs two, don’t you think? Her hair spanned the mattress like kelp. It’d be lonely with only one.

I’ve never seen - I started, then stopped. But her eyes pulled it out of me - two.

No, she said. Her lips stretched, amused. How could you? Her hand swam to mine and clasped it. It’s a bit hard to see yourself.

The fan throbbed overhead.

Only you, I whispered.

And two fish slipped together forever through my dreams.