I am surprised that Groverson and Afaaq are still sleeping when I wake in the dark. In the relative darkness, that is. Here, the moon and stars wash the coastline in a silver film. Their luminous spindles stick to the sand, the sand clings to the spindles.
Maybe I am anxious. Maybe I am dreaming. Above, the unbounded sky. The envy and contempt, the hope and reason of bounded earth, of the earth-bound. I am not sure where I am until I begin to hear motion, shapes.
Afaaq and Groverson are busy about a morning fire, behind them a violet swath of sunrise. "We'll be paying for this late start, won't we?" I ask, walking towards them.
"It's only a few kilometers from here," Afaaq responds.
"And this no place to be alone," Groverson adds. "We go with you until you are suited." I can't tell whether he looks at me with respect, admiration, or whether he betrays admonition, bewilderment.
We pack and set off with hushed, methodical deliberation. For the first time I admit I am uneasy.
* * *
You can see them a kilometer off. Rusted hulls, rusted rigs, rotted sails. Scuttled shells, desiccated bodies. Giant gravestones stuck into the sand, burial plots staked out of desperation, not design. We approach, haunted, reverent, reminded. Visible from satellite, Groverson tells us. To no one in particular, really, but something one should say in the presence of those decaying colossi. On the rocky sea shelves, a fort stands sentinel. Abandoned, but it casts a long strip of shadow onto the shoreline. We stand in its shade for protection from the sun, from the ships.
Bret reviews the equipment. I have rehearsed all procedures, but there is something comforting in the routine one last time, something comforting in the final company. "There's no more delaying," I say. I do not remember if I said this out loud or to myself, but I do remember thinking it didn't matter either way. I take out some bills. Both refuse, hands up and out, shaking my offer away. "Really, that's not necessary," Groverson says. Afaaq smiles graciously, but his gaze is out at sea, studying the position of the ships.
Groverson turns to go, Afaaq some moments after. I look up after securing my gear and zipping my wetsuit. Gone, soundlessly, their tracks already erased.
Solo navigation. The most authentic mode, perhaps. The authentic mode, and thus the most unsettling. This, too, I may have said aloud. Labyrinths are not the mere sites for cogitation, they are thought physically manifest. The boundaries of the known and unknown, of the knowable and unknowable.
* * *
I wade into the water, and I am in the labyrinth. The Ribbon Reef wastes no time, however.
In many labyrinths, the vestibule is contiguous with the port of ingress. In others, the vestibule adjoins it. Not so here. Some claim it is no coincidence that the vessels ran aground where they did, especially given the notoriously unpredictable (and treacherous) currents there. Whatever the case, theory, too, runs aground as soon as the navigator crosses the threshold.
Suffice it to say the location of the vestibule changes in the Reef. And suffice it to say that many navigators have not advanced beyond this point.
Fact is, I am paying for the late start this morning. Behind me, past the deserted fort, the sun, vermilion, recedes. I have swam through and climbed up the eviscerated bellies of too many ships, finding nothing. Even tracking the ships has become difficult. The first stars are glowing through, the water releasing its heat.
I think of Afaaq. I think of scribes. And I remember the swirling constellations that night. I have nothing to lose, I think, as a spiral of shipwreck emerges before me. Do I see this, or do I create it? Neither matters, I conclude, coursing the whorl to reach the center vessel.
* * *
I discover the vestibule after sundown in the hold of the center vessel. Luck. Or maybe not. There is neither pure accident nor rigid causality in the logic of the labyrinth. A controlling, uncontrollable logic.
Still, the waters block my entrance. I peer into the passageway, seeing no further than its upper coral ring. Dark, cold, breathing, moving. This labyrinth is alive. Its coral corridors alive, themselves harboring life.
I do utter this aloud. I remember the dead surfaces of the reefership stealing my sound, my breath, my motion, as soon as they could reach the corroded walls of the hold. I have arrived at the boundary of a foreign physics.
The perishable cargo in the hold of the reefership had decomposed long ago. Subsumed by the sea that crawled up from the hole that rotted through the keel in one of the refrigeration chambers. The sea, voracious, inexorable. The sea, substantial, thick, viscous. The sea, an entity. All-moving, unmovable. I discard all I thought I knew about the sea. Expectations, presumptions are dead weight in any labyrinth.
I search for the vessel's name, no longer legible on its half-bleached, half-rusted shell. Something to give the boat a hold over the water, to give me a hold over the boat. But I cannot waste my light. I find a dry refrigeration chamber adjacent to the vestibule and turn off my headlamp. The labyrinth moving, groaning below me.
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