BY Nova Wang
The scientists are teaching us to experience the world through sound. They call it
preparation for darkness, for the unending nights that are sure to stretch themselves across our
skies. The experiment is still in its nascent stage—the scientists say it may take generations to
perfect their method, to raise a people that can ride sound waves into a future where the Earth
goes dim with smog. These are the predictions they have made through measuring the weight of
the weather, the staggering height of the seas. In the years before dark, the oceans will bloat past
their shores and corrode our land-bound lives with salt. The scientists step onto news channels in
suits of black and blue and map the trajectory of our future demise: cul de sacs washed into tide
pools, barnacles winding up trellises, drowned carcasses of trees. They announce the necessity of
a new life underwater. One where submarines cut through currents of black like silver fish,
emerging only for air.
This is why they have selected us children, brought us to research centers in repurposed
aquariums, built for creatures now extinct. We are young enough to learn a new mode of
navigation, old enough to hold ourselves afloat. Once, we were swim team captains, triathletes,
high diving champions. Now, we sit in darkened rooms and click our half-formed tongues,
waiting for each object’s response. We learn the sounds of glass, of metal, of each other’s flesh.
When we have mastered echolocating first on solid ground, then in aquarium tanks, the
scientists guide us to the ocean. Show us the songs of whales, how the vibrations bend through
water at different speeds. When we dive in, a chorus of sound greets us at once, reverberating
from a world’s worth of spaces and times. The past and the present reaching for us together. We
chirp across the waves, searching for evidence of each other’s lives. For the songs of those
animals that inhabited the aquarium before us, their voices suspended in water and time. For the
future that flows into our mouths, brining our tongues in salt.
Nova Wang is probably thinking about ghosts. Her writing appears in publications including Frontier Poetry, CRAFT, and Narrative Magazine, and she tweets @novawangwrites. You can find more of her work at novawang.weebly.com.