Smells like teen spirit

The first time I heard Smells like teen spirit we were having dinner and my father was beating the shit out of my mother. The TV was on, and some talking head was expressing his solemn contempt for the “senseless anthem of an apathetic generation.” On the screen, pon pon girls with hairy armpits bounced up and down, while Kurt Cobain’s scream grew louder and more desperate: a denial, a denial, a denial…

The beating is not the reason I remember the song; it was not the first one, and it wasn’t the worst either. In fact, I didn’t even take my eyes off the screen. The reason I remember the song is that it stuck with me. Not the way a song can stick in your head and come up, say, under the shower. It never left my ears. It kept going for days, weeks, and then months, mostly in the background, but turning up unexpectedly whenever my father tried to explain himself to my mother, as he called it. We saw a dozen different doctors; we even traveled out of state to participate in a weird lab experiment at a nearby university. I wasn’t the only case---tinnitus is apparently a common hearing problem---but I certainly was the most interesting. Because they could find no explanation, and therefore no cure, I was told I should learn to live with it.

It was a nurse who, while checking me out of the umpteenth clinic we visited, asked me if I would still hear the song underwater. I had never swum in my life; I was afraid of the water, and on the beach I would never venture past the seashore. I had always credited that to my father---we had a small boat we used for short, nightmarish Sunday trips along the coast, and to demonstrate his theory that swimming is an instinct, one day he just plopped me into the water. Then he turned the engine on and pretended to be sailing away from me. I might or might not have worn a life jacket (here the versions diverge), and though I understand that makes a big difference, at the time the terror of being abandoned to that hostile element was untamed by rational scrutiny.

The day after that last office visit I went into the YMCA downtown. I had always walked past that huge building in awe, feeling threatened by the sweaty, muscular virility that I pictured training inside. But that day, shielded by the soft envelope of my mother’s large body, we bought a day pass to the pool. My mother waited for me, sitting on a blue towel that was hardly thick enough to protect her from the cold porcelain tiles, while I cautiously stepped into the water. It took me a few attempts that day, and many more in the days to come, before I could really control myself and submerge my head under water long enough to hear the silence. But the silence was finally there.

I made it a habit to go to the swimming pool every day. We had explained the situation to the facilities manager, and she had agreed to let me in every morning from 6 to 8, during the seniors’ aerobics classes. It was the quietest time of the day, and I would be allowed to simply float in the farthest lane while a dozen sagging bodies moved slowly but rhythmically to a music I could not hear.

When the first scale came out, on my left hip just below the waistline, I was not scared. I kept observing it, mesmerized by its dissolving colors, an opalescent blending of yellow, green, and purple. I first picked at it with curiosity, but it hurt the way cuticles do if you push them too far. In a couple of months, the scales had spread through my upper thighs. The problem was not so much covering them---I would wear soccer pants at the pool, an unremarkable sheepish teenager. It was walking that became increasingly difficult the more my legs were being wrapped together. My visits to the pool grew longer. I would stay through all the morning classes, leaving only at 2 pm when the training of the local water polo team began. Apparently, the coach had explicitly asked the manager to “remove the creepy girl lurking beneath the water,” and given how much the Blue Dolphins had contributed to the gym’s funding in the past years, he only had to say the word.

By the time the scales had reached my knees, I was not able to walk normally. This was met with mild displeasure by my parents. To all stages of my metamorphosis my mother had reacted with fatalistic acceptance, as if not even this could shake her from going through life in a distracted haze. My father would simply peek into my room every morning, where I would lie in bed under a layer of wet towels. He would ask me, How is it, and I would reply, The way it is, and he would go on with his life, satisfied with himself. I would still hear him shout at my mother in the dining room sometimes at night. And of course I would still hear the song, and the song would grow louder.

As time went by, my eventual release into the sea started to appear to everyone as an obvious, inevitable destiny. We did not make a big fuss about it. My mother cried a little, mostly feeling sorry for herself. My father carried me into the water, and when the water was chest-high he took a little leap and threw me into it, and this time I swam away.

This was 28 years ago. I’ve never walked the ground again. And how could I? My tail has grown out of proportion, and the air feels thinner and thinner in my lungs. My hair is also very long now, and entangled with seaweed and little fragments of coral. I do, however, sit on the rocks at the port’s entrance whenever I need a bigger meal than my usual dose of herring and squid. It is usually young, dreamy fishermen who answer my call, the ones who are sailing back home after a night offshore. And it is always with the same song that I lure them into the water, the only song I’ve ever known.

Hello, hello, hello, how low…

Hello, hello, hello, how low…