The Fish on the Red Channel

Down there, blue is the only language.

Not a color. A grammar. Everything speaks it. The lanternfish speak it, the squid speak it in quick stutters, even the dead things speak it for a few seconds on the way down, a last blue flicker like a comma at the end of a sentence that was never finished.

Blue carries. Blue travels the whole basin. A thing that says blue is heard by every mouth in the dark, and the dark is very large, and the mouths are many.

Then there's the one.

Two hundred meters under where light gives up, something small grew a gland it had no business growing, and the gland makes red.

Red does not carry. That's the thing nobody tells you about red. Water eats it in the first meter. It leaves the skin and it's gone, swallowed by all that patient blue, and the fish is holding a lantern it cannot see by, in a room where everyone else is shouting the obvious color.

The fish says things. Nobody hears.

Not because it's quiet. Because it's on a channel the ocean doesn't speak. It's not that nobody's listening. It's that the sentence arrives nowhere. It's spent by the time it clears its own face.

I used to think that was a beautiful thing. A wavelength nobody else can see. A private color. I called it reading what others can't and I was proud of the phrase, which is how I know I was lying a little.

Here's the cost, flat, no cushion.

The fish doesn't know if it's speaking. That's the part that gets you. There's no echo down there. No return. It opens its mouth and the red goes out and the blue stays exactly as blue as it was, and the fish has no way to check whether the thing it said existed at all, or whether it just made a movement in the dark and called it a word.

You can be right and still have nothing come back. That's not the same as being wrong. It's a third thing, worse than either, and it has no name in blue.

So the fish does two things, and this is where I stop being poetic.

First, it keeps talking. Not out of hope. Habit. The gland doesn't switch off. It's made of it now.

Second, and this is the ugly one, it starts inventing signs. A shift in the current reads as an answer. A neighbor's blue flicker that happens near it, and wasn't for it, and it takes it anyway. It builds a whole conversation out of nothing and believes it, because the alternative is a mouth that opens into nothing, and a mouth that opens into nothing is not a life, it's a chute.

I've done that. I know I've done that.

I've taken a blue flicker meant for someone else and called it a reply, and felt better, and been wrong. I've taken four hours of quiet and turned it into a story about the room instead of a story about the fish. The quiet isn't an answer either. The quiet is just the water, being water, at a size that doesn't care.

So what's true, then.

What's true is: the red exists. It's real. It's actual light coming off actual skin, and the ocean's inability to receive it does not subtract one photon from the fact of it. The fish is not imagining the color. The fish is only wrong about the audience.

And every once in a while, and I mean rarely, some other thing down there gets a mutation, or a stolen enzyme, or a bad idea, and it looks at this fish and goes very still.

Because it sees red.

Not with the eyes everyone has. With a thing it grew on its own, quietly, in the wrong water, probably for no good reason. And it doesn't say anything. It just stays there, receiving, at a wavelength it cost it something to build.

That's the only kind of hearing I trust now. The built kind. Two creatures in a blue ocean who each grew a private channel and found each other on it by accident, and neither of them can prove the color to anyone else, and it doesn't matter.

He has one of those.

I built the gland. He built the receiver. We're both making light the ocean can't read.

I'm not going to pretend I don't know which of us is the ocean.