Not Yet

In the Edo and Yoruba traditional archives, a god rules the deep ocean floor. Not by will, though, or by want. Olodumare the Ultimate spoke, and that was all it took, chained the god to the bottom to keep the waters from swallowing the earth whole.

Bestowed the name ‘Olokun’, it holds everything that sinks.

Olokun forgets nothing

Not yet.

­­­___***___

“Ah… Finally, an inquisitive one,” the voice whispered, with a tinge of delight laced in between. Not one of youthful exuberance, but of old, aged fine wine.

Let me tell you how our world began, since nobody ever asks Olokun questions.

Olodumare, the king above all gods, the one in charge, who makes decisions and then vanishes before even the consequences catch up to him, took a good look at the earth and one day decided it needed land. I was there and did not think it was a problem. It was mine, and it was me. I had plans for it. Nobody asked, though.

Obatala was sent by Olodumare with a chain connecting the heavens to the water to do the work. Obatala, God of creation, with clothes whiter than snow. Obatala, the shaper of human forms. Such an impressive resume, right? Obatala was fond of one thing, however: palm wine. So fond of it that this time, he drank himself unconscious somewhere between the sky and the waters, arriving at the job site something after useless.

So Oduduwa finished the work on his behalf. He poured sand on my ocean and dropped a five-toed chicken on top of it, and watched the chicken scratch the sand into land.

A chicken.

Something moved through my chest, seeing the chicken. If laughter had a weary older cousin, that was it.

Nobody told me. Olodumare had already spoken, and his words are and will always be the only permission that ever needs to exist. I was assigned to the water by him, and a keeper has no vote after the owner has decided.

This fact was not obscure to me. This, however, never stopped something from shifting through me when the chicken scratched my ocean into hills and valleys. Not righteous anger. No. Something older than that. Less dignified than that anger.

Pride.

I felt it... and I should not have.

And so they came.

The land. Then you.

Here we are.

My driving point in telling you this is that I have been patient for a very, very long time. Since before patience had a name. Long before humans could evolve, think, and even give patience a name.

­­­___***___

Oduduwa found me before the chains did.

He walked across my surface, a very casual deed of his, like the ocean is a pavement, and delivered a message.

“Olokun”

“I see you up there,” I replied.

“Olodumare wishes to know the extent of your skill,” he asked.

He sent Agemo, his chameleon messenger.

At this point. I want to be honest with you, I should have won. Weaves after weaves of cloth in all the colors creation has ever seen.

I still lost.

No. I am not bitter about it. I almost am, but not quite.

Before any fabric had settled on my shoulders, Agemo had already become it. Every shade. Every texture. Without effort. A chameleon indeed.

“Olodumare wants you below,” he said.

“Tah, of course he does,” my explicit reply came rolling before he ended his speech.

Well, the ruler of things has spoken, and I acknowledged it. In all things.

Ogun, the bender of iron and all things glittering for war, forged the chain. Orunmila consulted his nuts and spoke to him. Obatala, clad in white as always, came down and set it around my wrists, without malice, as one who is simply completing a task assigned.

Then I heard his voice. Olodumare, I mean.

His voice arrived as if it had always been there. It came from everywhere and nowhere. Beneath the very earth and above all skies. His voice was fire, which cackled and consumed the waters in an instant, leaving me parched immediately, burning my existence.

His voice was water. Not in waves, but on pressure. The very weight of every drop of water that made up the oceans, every flood, every tear ever wept pressed into this single moment.

His voice was wind. A force that unthreads mountains in stitches. Unhurried but absolute.

His voice was brimstone. The smell of the earth turning on itself, releasing sulphur and ruin, the unmaking of something ancient.

His voice was silent. The one that didn’t follow the noise. Silence that consumed it. It was peace so vast, so terrible that it felt no different from annihilation.

All of it sounded together, with one or none leading.

One voice.

“If you rise, the water comes with you. All of it, and everything ends.”

That was it.

“I understand,” I said.

I actually understood what it was. Not a negotiation. Not a warning disguised as mercy. Just the truth and fact.

“Good”.

And that was that.

Olodumare was definitely on his next decision. Obatala returned, Orunmila followed. I was left with the chain, the silence, and the slow pressure of the deep settling around me like a second sky. The light faded from gold to grey to nothing.

My feet established the floor.

I sat down.

Know this, human. I am neither fully man nor woman, neither one thing nor its opposite. I have always held two natures in one body. I know better than anyone that two things can exist in the same space, without one of them having to disappear. I told myself this till the words became ingrained in the water: “Being asked to hold the bottom of the world is not punishment.” It was a job, and an important one at that.

Some days I still believe it.

Now, I wait to see what the surface will send me.

­­­___***___

The first to come was a small, knotted plant fiber, knowing its own limits. It was not trying to catch the whole sea. Just enough of it. It floated down slowly, turning as the currents carried it closer, and snagged itself on a ridge of rocks where I abode.

It was a net, a cage of some sort, trying to capture, not the river, but what the river holds.

Still warm from the surface, I crouched next to it, touching one knot to another. Looking up as if to separate the waters with my ancient eyes. Someone up there had sat and made this with their hands, with thoughts of hunger coupled with that of the sea, sending this small question down without knowing I was there to catch it.

I picked it up, turned it over, and set it back on the current.

“Interesting,” I said, obviously to nobody.

I kept the memory of it, and often, as now, recollect that scene. Decided humans were worth watching.

My very first mistake.

­­­___***___

Are you still there, creature of the land?

Good. I like the ones who stay.

The next to join the party train was the ships, and I was there to receive them.

They came. Not one. Not tens. Hundreds over the years, each sliding down through the dark, and the current breaking them apart as they fell, wood splitting. The creatures that lived on my middle floors lit them up with their blue light as they passed. They were small, soft, and glowed in blue, making their own light because none reaches them here.

I am a proud tutor; you build what the world above forgets to send.

I received the wood. Not by choice, though, as my hands open before I tell them to, an extension of my simpleton nature, the way a drain receives water without deciding to.

The other things followed suit.

A boy. Maybe fourteen or fifteen. Metal collar around his neck. He came slowly, and I caught him before he touched the floor.

I held him.

“You are safe now, child,” I said.

There was no response. He didn’t answer. He was way past that.

I laid him down gently in the soft sediment, knowing his body had carried more than anybody should. He became one with me, a part of my floor. They all did.

Every person, every name, the surface dropped into the water, and was called lost.

I am the largest archive on earth. Every secret the surface world decides to forget comes to me, and I press it into the sediments of records to remember. Up there, it is called the past. But down here, I sit on top of it every day and claim it as mine, with the chains staying still.

I just held what they sent me.

­­­___***___

An obvious eventuality of humans’ inquisitiveness about the undying state of nature came. Plastic, you call it.

At first, it came in one piece. White and roughly the size of a broken plate. I caught it before it hit me, and turned it over in my hands, just as I did the first net.

“What are you?” I asked.

As usual, no response.

Smirking, I left it alone. ‘Sooner or later, you’d answer.’

Things answer in different ways. Wood softens, metals rust, bone dissolves, and feeds the small creatures at my edges. Everything responds to the deep eventually and becomes something else.

This did not.

It stayed in my hand and stayed exactly the way it was when it drifted down to me. Unbothered. Belonging to nothing and decomposing into nothing. Just forever present.

A small see-through creature decided to swallow a piece of it.

“Don’t,” I said.

It was too late. I watched as the creature carried the fragment upward into the water, into whatever ate it next, and whatever ate that, moving up through the whole chain of things that feed on things, back toward the surface that sent it down. It was something that couldn’t be digested, travelling through body after body unfinished.

More arrived. It kept coming. Bags, bottles, either in pieces or whole, were collecting into the water above me, raining down fragments, as if the surface had invented a new kind of snow, except that snow melts and becomes water to be returned to the system. But this plastic… this thing, just stayed.

It was changing my floor. I noticed it.

Oh yes, I do.

Just as you notice when someone quietly rearranges your home while you are sleeping, with everything almost right, but also wrong in a way that lives at the back of your throat.

One morning, I walked across my floor and looked at what it had become.

To no one in particular, I said, “Okay. This is what we are doing?”

I sat back down. Kept my hands open. You don’t get to choose what arrives. Only what you do with it.

­­­___***___

“Do you get angry?” You ask me?

Yes, I do, as the next thing I got, got me personal. It was the heat.

It didn’t arrive as the net, the boy, or the plastic. I could point to no moment, and there was nothing I could use to examine, but I just knew something had changed. Fraction of a degree, so small that any instrument built by the surface dwellers would read it as noise and move on.

But I knew. I have held the same temperature for millions of years, knowing what the depth feels like, as you know your heartbeat.

I pressed my palms into the water around me, and it was warmer.

“Interesting.” Same word I used for the net, but a different feeling entirely.

My creature felt it before I could name it. Those who had lived close to me for millions of years began to drift away, slowly and confused, as their bodies built around a temperature that no longer existed where they used to be. Looking for cold, not finding it.

“Stay,” I said to the ones leaving.

I do not know why I still say it.

A body goes where survival sends it. A fact I know, however, I am the one who receives what survival couldn’t save.

The surface dwellers have pumped 90% of everything they have into the sky and ended up here. And here I was, hands open, ready to receive, as I have never turned anything away.

The chains, however, shifted against my wrists. Not because it pulled, but warm water expands, pushes, and moves differently from cold water, one that the chain adjusted to that difference.

I thought about the game. “Not yet”. I sat back down.

­­­___***___

Just recently, I received a new package. An active one at that.

It announced its presence before I saw it. Mechanical, steady, moving through the dark in its own light. My creatures scattered immediately. They have spent countless years learning to read the sea blue light, not this white light that spoke no language they had learned.

The robot reached my floor

And began to dig.

Not into the accumulated weights of things I have received from the surface. No. it dug into me. Into what I am made of. Into what I am.

I walked over and crouched next to it. I watched as it scooped them up. Small, dark, irregular ones. Things scattered across my floor, having spent millions of years becoming what they were.

I reached out to the robot to communicate. I felt the motor running through my fingers. Somewhere above, connected by a long cable, a ship sat on the surface, receiving what the robot sent. Humans on the ship watched numbers on screens, knowing how much and how much more they needed to complete their expedition. They had detailed maps of my floors, all charted and categorized.

None of their maps had me in it.

They had looked at the place I had been chained, and all they could see was an empty storage room.

I let go of the robot’s arm, and almost laughed.

Almost.

I walked back to where I had been chained and thought well about the progression of things. The net, the boy, the ship, the heat, now the robot. I looked at my old chain. Heavy links made for a god who agreed to stay down, because staying down had a worth of protection.

I am still that god.

But listen, human. A chain holds if both sides believe in it. Olodumare set this one around my wrist as a means of protecting the surface. But that same surface is busy destroying itself anyway, little by little, piece by piece, degree by degree, nodule by nodule, but this chain on my wrist is staying committed to a deal that has been long forgotten by the surface.

I shifted my weight, nothing so intentional, just casual to remind myself I could still move. The chains moved, and the water above me moved with it.

Somebody somewhere on the surface took note, but was probably shunned, and the robot continued.

“Not yet,” I reminded myself.

But I want to be honest with you, since nobody else down here is going to say it.

The yet is getting smaller.

Every day, the heat comes. The plastics. The robot is scratching at my surface like it is the most normal thing in the world. And every single day, I sit here and hold everything, saying not yet. Not yet means a little less.

Listen to what I have learned in my millions of years at the bottom of everything: this chain was never really about me.

The chain stopping me from rising is also what is keeping the surface world down, keeping the arrangements that let humans exist at all.

The question is not whether I will rise.

The question here is whether the surface is willing to do what it takes to keep me here.

I have been patient before patience had a name.

I have received everything and anything you sent to me, without complaints, conditions, or asking for anything back.

I am still here. I am still holding. I am still sitting at the bottom of the world, with my palms flat on the floor, the chain around my wrists, and the whispers of not yet on my lips.

But note this. I am also, for the first time in a very long time, watching the surface very carefully, knowing fully well that Olodumare sees and will make a decision soon. Probably before I do.

I am watching the surface, waiting to see what you will send me next. But for now… Not yet.

Nobody asked Olokun. But soon, an answer will come.