Richard Leise
When God Opened Her Eyes

Looking like some destitute mother, The Animal races along a current. The Animal slipping into a cool stream. Flattened by force, The Animal, like a sheet of paper dropped from a great height, swings. The Animal glides. Less common noun than assemblage of accidental qualities, and unrecognizable as “thing” (when contrasted against the world of static shapes assembled and accrued, rocks and chasms defined by dimension), The Animal, like a melody becomes a song when, even if unplayed, is arranged as a line of notes, of symbols, on a page, is an object, something contained, becomes. Look. And see.

Sensitive not to the monochromatic blue from the down-welling sun but to the broader range of color that does not exist except as chemiluminsence, The Animal detects narrow, complex frequencies. The Animal makes of each a light by which to feel.  Here, in the deep and limitless dark, where to see the world is to weigh wavelengths. Here, atop the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, where The Animal’s huge, pointless eyes evolve not as a consequence of sunlight, but because of bioluminescence, and, miraculously (what part of your body would evolve solely as the result of your own thought?), its own. Pupils ever expanding—and this so dramatically as to have done away with cones—these are eyes informed by extra-long rods packed with light-absorbing pigment molecules. Here, where the idea is to see, and be unseen. Where only The Animal itself is the Animal’s hiding place.

Controlling water an involuntary action, The Animal’s movements are as lovely as human beings’, simply by being, are monstrous. And how, for such monsters, the ocean is a wall, a dyke these creatures must crack, must split through, moving through the planet as if injured, their tiny thoughts irregular ideas calamitous, and how each creates such monumental wakes. As if climbing a stairwell The Animal ascends, and how tissue registers warmth, and warmth activates skin, and like a held breath other organs responding as a monster’s face reddens, chromatophores augmenting to assume the perfect colorant for countershading. Ah. There. The Animal rests atop a current, a fixed kite pulling against instinct’s string.

Cool water brushes over, and beneath The Animal, and how easy it would be for The Animal to submit, to permit the tide to carry The Animal away, to leave The Monster, to leave worry behind. Why not? Like an apostate beneath the heaven’s cold starlight, beneath Vega and the water serpent, The Animal, were it human, would have shivered. But The Animal is anything but human. (Is it because there are no stars?  Is it because there are no seen galaxies that The Animal has never conceived of God, of a Mover Unmoved?) Ah, well. So much remains to be seen.

For all we know, the Animal has been here before any other animal. Unlikely, but— Only see how we, monstrous people, have some queer, some grave idea that The Animal, like one stepping from a closet, has willingly petitioned, has actually abdicated for something as disarming as discovery. As if everything under the sun were nothing more than some thing waiting to be found. By us. We, the monstrous. We, who handle, consider, identify, worry, ponder, remark upon, classify. How reductive! For it is not as if The Animal, once “discovered,” has a say. No. Given that The Animal, once found, once handled, cannot be identified—and, of course, will then be considered, worried, pondered, remarked upon, and classified—all The Animal becomes is fear. All The Animal may do is hide. Dropping feet. And then falling fathoms. The Animal resists. The Animal pushes against the current. Closer to The Monster, now, and forever away from before, when, before The Monster, only weather (like the lightning strike alighting a forest fire) prompted the buffalo’s impossible stampede, a roiling sea of energy crashing through grasslands untouched such animals, like a charm of finches, or a school of sardines, make of movement an incredible symphony, an impossible symmetry, epochs before hunters with their red-painted hands stamped on their horses, their loosed arrows inciting similar reactions, driving creatures to rivers, to cliffs, to deaths as pointed as the ends of Monster’s cul-de-sacs.

How, like an infant, The Animal possesses no diction. How like the deaf. The dumb. The Animal’s vocabulary defined by motion. The Animal’s syntax evasion’s script. Escape. The only possible option. Until—impossibly—it isn’t.

The Animal, rising, pushes through some jet stream quite high, and then higher still. Detecting a suitable change in temperature, here a silhouette teased gently from a tortured shapelessness into a form all too identifiable. And so vulnerable, now. The Animal suspended in between darkness and levitation, this creature whose body has never before met a hard surface, hundreds of maybe hundreds of millions of silica propelling the outline of appearance, an effort to maintain The Animal’s place in this always, this never-ending space. As if some other’s dream has arranged The Animal just so.

The Animal’s entire body an organ overtly sensitive, The Animal knows to wait to assume the grade of those blacks behind, before, beneath, and above. Like the man on the moon, The Animal. And see? The Animal does not disappear so much as it becomes. The Animal not so much becoming as falling apart.  Disintegrating.  Like a Monster’s sloughed skin. (Yes, we later decide. The Animal is female. And, if not exactly pretty, almost feminine. Feline.) Long in the dark, then, The Animal stays for fear. Waiting upon the precipice of this inner-darkness.

Away now, towards The Monster, The Animal finds warmer water and gains speed, the ocean a part of The Animal, and The Animal a part of the ocean, and there’s no resistance, just assurance, a sensation as stark as any Monster’s smile.

The Animal drifts, The Animal pauses to catch a current and then, floating, waits to detect another, flowing counter. A watery geometry like cupped hands holding The Animal in place. Listening for The Monster’s breathing, feeling The Monster’s light, The Animal sees, The Animal feels next to nothing. Just the strange, harried screaming of what—for now—passes as thought.

No concept of capture, aware only of detection—a different sort of predation, instinct containing nothing by way of meaning—The Animal drops, falls to the ocean floor. Its country flat and barren, behind and to either side of The Animal a bleak desert snuff colored and endlessly wet. This weird world of gloom where rocks, like different species, are notable simply for being. Otherwise? Nothing. Or, had The Animal words, everything.

Floating past a fissure, The Animal banks west. From deep within the Earth pressure rises to create bubbles which neither pop nor disappear. A fish slowly exploding from hiding. Floundering. Careening to gain higher ground. White as an albino absent light, and fighting the labor of its strange, weighted fins. Like slabs of meat. Its bay a curse upon the sightless purity of its silent wail and its movements like nonsense with a focused and angry purpose directed toward the immensity of the meaning-making ocean.

Like that (!) The Animal understands. Why not? How, within any of us, did consciousness come crashing? So don’t think. Please believe. The Animal discerns. Acumen above fleeing and finding, it rests what Monsters—what humans—will call an “arm” atop what we later call “abdomen.” No longer in flight, the idea of what The Animal has seen presses in. Like a house of mirrors, like a broken record, images aspersive, forms menacing both in outline and fully colored which, like an alien, probe Its sense of discomfiture, of well-being, forcing The Animal to think of self, to understanding living, and this as a being driven not so much to survive but to do right by consciousness. A feeling The Animal is unable to staunch. To repress.

Time. The thin edge of existence. Like those cells made flesh to contain Its blood. And organs. Eroding. Creating every moment, a distance between every moment and this moment creating distance between the next. Until there is nothing to remember. Until there is nothing left to remember.

The arrival of The Monster. With its horrifying luminosity and incredible weight of being. How it smashes through the stillness of The Animal’s static black beauty like a blown breath through fog. Like an enormous coal charred and steaming, falling out from the Earth, through the Earth, its reptilian eye shining bright and rolling as if enduring an agony. And how it crashes through the ocean to destroy everything, a massive Monster undulating with a horrifying roiling unstoppable immobility, and the sound of the creature announced like an order. A decree.

Cool and clear, bands of greater darkness descend in long textured tiers through the Earth and pass in horizontal waves high, and higher still, to settle overhead or work to stream around The Animal and to make of this milieu the sort of beauty The Animal once considered clarity and still, to a degree, does. Understanding. Such a ghostly stillness.   

Past sight now and the thought of too much light terrifying. A ridge created by some seismic shift shows the way and The Animal drops easily, inhabits a lower geography. A wall of earth now, and this on The Animal’s side directly and here the current rises as a form of resistance, an obstacle to overcome. Lovely.

Sailing above a pool of pebbles, the Earth level like the horizon of some planet’s moon, and how this extends forever in every direction, stretching, everywhere expanding, a galaxy infinite and without limit. In hue a violet haze, and debris, the remains of dead sea animals occupying less impressive depths, descending like broken snowflakes, not to melt but to disintegrate.

A change in pressure. Then warmth, like a breeze, slowly arriving in waves before assuming, as if a shape The Animal could see, a temperature all-encompassing, and this long before The Animal sees the black smoker which is neither an end nor a beginning, just something to pass by. To witness.

From a mound bulging from the Earth, the formation rises high like a turret. As if its purpose is to burst forth with beautiful life, and this painted a radiant sort of white. Of vermillion. Kiwa and Giant tube worms clustering and creating a fauna dense and fantastic. The creatures huddling as if to keep warm. Like logs in a fire, arranged in their pyramidal pyre and having been aflame for some time now reduced to little more than ash, suffuse with a lavatic red that, defined by lines yellow and gold, pulse with an incendiary purple, and it’s as if the logs collapse with a considerable crash, a crescendo of charred embers and flying sparks, and how from either side of the vent smoke billows and The Animal observes two columns. Black, this gas, but this black not the absence of light; rather, this black is that of an object so colored by a marked, a chemical composition. A fiery cumulus which seems made of a certain, smoky, solidity. In sound arriving low and hypnotic, a dreamy and pleasant tremolo.

Acting against instinct made vestigial by consciousness, The Animal still making for The Monster. A sound. Startled, The Animal swirling, cycling through an impossible array of colors, spinning now in the water and releasing a purple, a bioluminescent shadow. In The Animal’s stomach, among other things, light cells, the pulsating heads of millions of tiny glittering cells. So little, this great light.

In action like breathing, The Animal augments this biology to create sufficient camouflage, expunging ink, but this like a scent, a trail easily detected and so only a moment’s security before rising and falling, carried on liquid air— But motion, too, can give The Animal away.

Striking out across the country, the water cool and two currents swelling and receding, held in place by some sort of swollen pressure as if the Earth were bulging. As if The Animal had arms, and these arms extended like wings, The Animal feels passing over what we call “hands” the water moving in opposite directions. And this with about the same amount of force. So, in its way, the Earth acting to steady The Animal’s course. This being what The Animal now believes. Of those things beyond which The Animal cannot possibly comprehend.

Bubbles from crevices unseen rise in clear plumes great and insubstantial. Their purpose the result of forces with qualities totally unrelated, and so this static and ensuing beauty – only that. Aesthetic. The beauty of their milky viscous invisibility subject to change but indicative only of mysterious purpose. The process of release somewhat loud, but the bubbles themselves silent things pretty to hear. Like the blowing wind. Rather than the struck chime.

Closer now, The Monster. Upon the plain like a pointless giant rock and without doubt dangerous. Natural substances in this sort of aggregate and of this genesis seemingly impossible. For they have not descended. Nor have they issued forth from the land. Ah, how It, The Animal, suddenly sees this place differently. This area absent all other energy other than that force created from within.

In the distance the warped and folding Earth. This strange orogeny. The black, if such a thing possible, getting blacker. And the cold, colder. As if light were tired. As the world, so tipped on its side, descends into depths greater still. Gathering speed, it approaches the greater coldness and that point where the world even within this darkness disappears and the Earth drops like tears. With force It steps from the carapace and follows this self-created current before adjusting Its weight to fall with measured assurance, in speed like a controlled sprint, only absent effort, the clear crystal break of a simple brook atop a nickpoint cascading, tossing itself into its pool far below.

Here, then, The Animal alights upon a new course and floats, confetti stirred by the breeze, and so twisting Its shape drifts back to the rocky escarpment, arms raised and with a finger navigating Its delivery, form easily giving as It comes to rest upon Earth stretched tight like skin on a made fist.

The Animal does not hurry. The Animal has slowed to notice things. Or to experience. Anything. This world which, even with its monster, is so very beautiful. Or maybe has been been made even more so because of The Monster

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No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness which creates it. So, to overcome his anxiety, Asan modifies his mindset. An easy enough thing to do upon Earth, but far more challenging once entering the planet.

Fear arrives—and, for a time, remains—when the Plinko, so prompted, proceeds through the machinations, sealing him in the submersible. After cracking the shell of the Atlantic and beginning their descent? He panics. Monk does not notice. He is too busy working their way through given waters into an unknown wilderness. This crazed, inverted, cosmos.

We see ourselves being translated into forms of information. A truth, that, a few minutes later, and however many meters deeper, strikes Asan, who, as vessel, as instrument, is no different from a box of rain. A puddle on the ocean floor. He breathes easy.

A fish, negatively buoyant, floats in front of a portal. Another animal, part black, part silver, flashes on and off, on and off, its bioluminescence fantastic and mysterious. Here, eyes often evolve to become so large as to become the creature’s dominant feature, organs that grow not as sunlight’s consequence, but from the broader color range that does not exist except as the result of some prehistoric invention.

A stone, they sink through the ocean. Arriving upon the bottom of everything will reveal new life, and this life will better shape our understanding of living. Is this why they are here? The danger, the investment in going where no human has ever before been? The prize is worth the peril.

Even at less impressive depths, there is so much life. Lanternfish. Anglerfish. Strange mollusks. Huge starfish. Large animals, these, that assume in appearance a human skeleton’s rib cage. During his first dive, Asan witnessed more distinct forms of life than during twenty-seven years spent walking the Earth’s surface. That’s something.

Atop the Plinko are sets of infrared lasers. These illuminate life. Down here, most of the creatures are whacked. Like underwater bats, they flit with precision but no grace, their brains scientific instruments orchestrating wild abilities to echolocate, using red to survey and communicate. This is real, though.  Monk is not chumming.

Strange, then, how exciting it is, for hours, to witness nothing. On board a dozen monitors, and each broadcasts the same invisible darkness. For now, they just watch nothing. And wait.

They continue to descend. To plunge through the various depths of the ocean’s identified zones towards data which reveals something different. All of it black. Or, not white.

The bright white lights atop the rig? The tracers? Monk kicks these on before slowing to make contact. This light is beautiful. It is as if waking from some other life to see light for the first time. To, like God, make a world that before this moment never had night and never before had day.

Monk adjusts the controls. Machines. No longer considered separate from consciousness but, rather, an extension, a part of us. How we view and how we manipulate the world is an involuntary action. Upon allied code the world spins. As with God, it is from our minds—made manifest by simple keystrokes—where the world ends. It is down here where the world begins.

Monk, his studied face tight, eyes passing from monitor to monitor, strikes the keyboard and runs through a series of voice commands—having measured the conditions per a few competing models, temperature and current have been accurately predicted—deploying the landing gear. The Plinko, with a reverse thrust, slows to make contact, evenly settling within a foreign hadopelagic zone.

Monk flips a switch, he adds more tracers. The world around them polished shadow, outlines pewter against the absolute blackness. The ocean floor barren. Whatever passes for direction a bleak wet desert camel-colored and this for miles. This weird world of gloom. This gray wilderness atop the bottom of this nameless rocky trench. Inverted islands are separated from one another by interminable stretches of Abyssal Hills, and these alienated by their endless Plains. Flakes from hundreds and thousands of meters above fall like snow, tissue from the ocean’s dead and dying, eternity’s remains.

Monk is satisfied. It is enough to be this deep. To spend an hour staring at so much nothing, here, where Asan and Monk are as unknown as anything they might see, that no human being has ever before seen, and if for this reason alone is good, its distance from Man something warm and bright as if purity arises not from within, but from the absence of judgment.

An animal moves. There is no foreground and there is no background, so it is impossible to achieve perspective. The object is both itself and its relationship to scale, to distance. A spectacle. The full and total apex of essence. As if when younger, and gluing to black construction paper a white, cut-out, ghost. Monk consults his monitors. Asan relies upon experience. Neither considers the difference.

The animal is yellow. As if riding a gentle current, the creature moves towards them. It is not a fish. At least it is not a fish cataloged within any known database. While not quite round, Asan ascribes to the animal a circumference greater than a golf ball, but not by much. This creature the size of a child.

Closer, the animal lacks definite features. The creature possesses a rubbery exoskeleton. Asan looks at Monk. He is not with Asan. One hand here, the other there, he is busy with the business of recording, of collecting. What would humans, Asan thinks. What part of me would evolve solely because of my own thoughts? Of reflections turned inward?

The animal’s eyes are huge, pupils expanded, and this so dramatically as to have done away with iris, with sclera. While illusory, there appears just a bit of opaqueness viscous. Otherwise, just wide-eyed blackness. One third of its face consumed, eaten by the outer darkness, the outline of a skull, a spectral sort of band, red. In spectrum argon meeting, bleeding into ultraviolet. Coloring what will be her neck. Which falls unmistakably into shoulder. And this—in red—unrolling to define her (her?) back, which rounds to inform her rear end. From the curve of her shoulder two brilliant red lines descending, at a bit of an angle, perfectly vertically. An arm, or arms, terminating in nothing. Meaning that she does not have hands. Or that her hands are not illuminated. Ever. Or, maybe, just presently. Maybe her hands are dug into the sand. Asan knows that this grey desert, the bottom of this nameless trench, is more rock than sand, where inverted islands are separated from each other by interminable stretches of Abyssal Hills, and these alienated by their endless Plains.

A fish, negatively buoyant, floats nearby. Another, silver-black and white, flashes on and off, its bioluminescence fantastic and mysterious. At the top of the beginning. So much life. Strange mollusks. Starfish. Large animals, these, with arms curled so that they assume in appearance a human skeleton’s rib cage. Factor in our descent. Our slow, deliberate plunge through the various depths of the ocean’s identified zones. So submerged, we’ve seen more lifeforms in these past several hours than most who’ve walked the earth’s surface. We want to know who—or what—she is. Only there’s no one to ask.

There’s enough red, though. By degree of gradation. Although the girl occasionally flickers. Not like a broken bulb. No. But as though she were the faulty socket. Still, Asan makes out that Her arm is in front of her leg. Clear, the red outline of her thigh. Her hamstring. And her knee, which rounds at its cap. Here begins, or is so concentrated—who knew / who knows—a thicker, a duller, a less radiant red. Which intensifies to mark the girl’s abdomen. And this swelling to outline the considerable heft of a breast. Which is, of course, incredibly buoyant. Directly beneath this the suggestion of her other knee, raised.

Given the impression of her position fully formed, one foot is obscured. But the other is visible. It glows right there. Before Monk. Before Asan. Her toes like Christmas lights. Although this—the girl’s toes—might be more of an illusion. The power of suggestion. This being all very foreign. She appears to be kneeling, though, an outline, neon red, blood against the absolute blackness. A different sort of darkness. It is as he has thought.

A plan in the heart of man. How this is like deep water. And how this takes insight. A person of understanding. To draw forth from the wellspring of consciousness, of perspective— Asan has read this, or something just like it, somewhere before. Yes, here we are (wherever we may be), unique, eternal aspects of awareness, with an infinity of potential, yet we, as a race—which is to say as a species—the most dominant, the most powerful creatures to have ever lived …. Look how we have allowed ourselves to evolve into an unthinking, into an unquestioning blob. Some mass. It is pathetic. Asan, of this moment acutely conscious, does not have to read about this particular phenomenon to know that it is true.

It is strange, what happens next. Asan is certain that the girl is human. Well, as human as a creature like she can be. Physically? If not physiologically exact? It does not matter. The girl is human. Arms. Legs. Hands. Feet. Three dimensions. All that.

Perhaps the visual is a result of the Plinko’s highly specialized lights. But the girl, as opposed to darting off like a fish (or running, like a person) slowly fades from view. Her body flattening. And now her red like the air inside a popped balloon. Dissipating. Her side—or sides—turning a mirror’s silver, reflecting, Asan is certain, some blue spectrum cast from the submersible.

How monstrous they must seem! The Plinko, which Monk had set to stealth, triggers some needed response. Asan knows nothing about technology. Even less about science. Not that this matters. Whatever happened—oxygen released into the chamber / something mechanical owing to heating or cooling—the submersible makes so great a sound, or causes so terrific a disturbance, that the girl, drawn to them for whatever purpose, shudders. Alive with instinct the girl explodes with color and even Monk is awed, how like drops of dye in a glass of water, how in motion like a beta’s tail fanning inside its bowl, color spreads remarkably about them. A Day-Glo handshake—or perhaps a fist—the color moves to greet them. Crayola yellows and golds and greens and purples and oranges and blues and reds incendiary, colors possessing that potent vibrancy to create a quality like that of illuminated lava escaping from a fissure within the sea’s magical, never-ending floor.

And, like that, the girl is gone.

“Or maybe,” Asan says, “we just don’t see her.”