LITMIR.BIZ

      Once again, I stand in Daoist meditation. As usual, my arms are out in front of me as if I’m hugging a tree, my elbows and shoulders are down and relaxed, and the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth. Children laugh nearby. Geese squabble. Runners curse what the geese have left behind. I wait for something to happen. I wait some more. Gradually, the park recedes, and I find myself paddling through frigid ocean water, dark blue and forbidding. I take a few strokes and feel the pressure of the water against my hands. My fingers prune. A leatherback sea turtle, mistress of the open ocean, appears beside me. A gargantuan turtle the size of a small car, she has a ridged, teardrop-shaped shell, bulbous at the front and tapering to a point at the back. The head and limbs bear beautiful white snowflake patterns.

      “I’m so happy to see you, Monk. I thought you might arrive too late to hear my story. What a shame that would have been.”

      “I’m breathing underwater,” I say.

      “You’re fine. Daoist magic, remember? I’m the one in trouble.”

      It takes me a moment to understand what she means. Then I see it. A piece of fishing line, anchored down into the abyss, is wrapped around one of her front flippers. It oozes blood.

      “You’re stuck,” I say.

      “I am.”

      “So you can’t get up to the surface to breathe.”

      “I can’t actually. I have approximately eleven minutes to live. Perhaps a little more if I gentle my mind and drift with the current. If you don’t mind watching me pass, you may stay with me.”

      I wonder what kind of immortal drowns caught in fishing line. I ponder the sort of lesson I can expect from spending the next eleven minutes watching a sea turtle drown. The Red-ear, perhaps the chelonian analogue of Lü Dongbin, the immortal leader of that famous gang of eight, informed me that the lessons I would experience would be unique and challenging. Be that as it may, I can think of few things I would rather do than watch this magnificent creature drown.

      “Is there no way for me to help?”

      “You can try,” she says.

      I swim over to the offending fishing line. The water is dense and cold. I ask the turtle where we are.

      “In the plastic deathtrap of the North Pacific Gyre,” she says. “Halfway between California and Hawaii.”

      “I’ve spent a lot of time in Hawaii,” I say, trying to get my fingers between the flipper and the line. “The volcanoes are getting angry at all that pollution and overpopulation. It’s not as nice a place to be as it once was.”

      “The islanders call the volcanoes by their goddess name, Pele,” says the turtle. “Of course, she’s seeking her revenge, though we Daoists would call it returning to wuji, to balance. Equilibrium. Humans have run amok.”

      “It’s not just the eruptions,” I say after clearing a gulp of salty water. I find I can’t break the line with my fingers or gnaw through it with my teeth. “The island spirit of aloha is hard to find among the transplants, and there’s a lot of racism and intolerance and traffic. Violence, too.”

      The turtle spins around in the water so she can see what I’m doing. “You’re not going to get through it,” she says. “If it’s too strong for me and shark and tuna, it’s too strong for your little fingers. The only way is spiraling. It’s what galaxies do. It’s nature’s way of dealing with conflict.”

      I follow her instructions and by swimming around her trapped fin, begin to loosen the line.

      “Speaking of conflict,” the turtle continues, “Violence is one of nature’s favorite ways to cull humans. Everyone knows she uses volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, typhoons, mudslides, droughts, dust storms, and tornadoes, but many people don’t recognize that all those terrible diseases are her work as well, as are religions that make you fight and kill each other, gender variations that reduce your reproductive rate, and, of course, the automobile, which takes so many human lives. She is the mistress of hate as well as the mother of great beauty, this ruler of ours, and mistress, too, of what you call war. Believe me, Monk, nature is ruthless in her campaign to survive you.”

      “You see all this from beneath the waves?” I ask, a bit incredulous.

      “Oh yes,” she says as I continue to unwind the line. “I see a great deal from the open water and from beachheads I have climbed, but of course I also hear from other turtles. Turtle Immortals band together, you know, and we’ve been watching humans for a long time. My cousins speak to me of your doings from their homes across the globe. We watch you from forests and jungles and rivers and streams, from deserts and mountaintops, too.”

      “I never knew,” I say.

      Her beak will not curve to her mood, but in the faint crinkling of the skin around her eyes, I detect an indulgent smile. I continue unwinding the countless layers of line that trap her, but she’s made the problem worse with her own spiraling, and I worry she will run out of air before I can get free her.

      “I’ve paddled to the Atlantic from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the North Sea, from the Cape of Good Hope to Labrador, she says dreamily. “I’ve greeted young of my kind off the beaches of Suriname and Guyana, Antigua, Barbuda, Tobago, and Gandoca and Parismina in Costa Rica. I’ve crossed to the Pacific and rested on the sands of Papua New Guinea and Gabon. Movie stars have watched me in California. I’ve been churned in the wake of a freighter off Malaysia, where once thousands of my kind gathered at the beach of Rantau Abang before the locals dug our eggs for soup, and kayakers have brushed past me in British Columbia. Once, years ago, I visited kin off the Nicobar Islands, but I never went back because I saw a ghost on a dune and beheld so many young of my kind fall to birds.”

      “Do your friends know you’re stuck?” I ask, pushing away the cloud of tangled line I’ve thus far managed to remove.

      “Of course. That’s why they sent you.”

      As I kick my way around her with the line in my hand, I notice a graveyard of bones on the seafloor beneath me—remains of air-breathing creatures who could not reach the surface to save themselves—primarily the long spines, broad tails, cavernous ribs, bristles, and teeth of whales. Evidently cleaned by scavenger fishes and the scouring of the constant current, they glow white.

      “How old are you?” I ask.

      “I was 204 last year.”

      “You’re so experienced. How could you get caught in this line?”

      “The multitude of new challenges in this world tire me, Monk. The search for food in this raped ocean, the drift nets, the long lines, the hooks, satellite tracking, harpoons. All of my kind struggle to survive and meet and mate and breed and survive, but there are only so many times any one of us can escape life’s traps and pitfalls.”

      “Weren’t

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