Manual for an Underwater Tour Guide
/Elisabeth Strayer
You, too, can be a tour guide of a drowned place: scuba certification in hand, equipped to lead a family of four through the submerged areas of the city where your great-great grandparents once lived out their dream in a windowless third-floor walk-up.
When the family arrives, you will unfurl a timeworn map, creases rubbed pale and soft from countless uses. Beside this, you will display another map — a newer one — which the family’s two children will recognize from school: in this map, the coasts of the world have been nibbled away, blue supplanting green. The shapes signify either erosion (if you are pro-land) or abundance (if you are pro-water). You must not make clear your own stance on the great land versus water debate.
With the topographical overview complete, you and your charges will slip into scuba gear and then the water, the children slashing and sloshing joyfully through the waves. Their parents will hush them and turn to face you, their expressions reverent as they lilt in the surf. As you tread water, your flippers bending lazily back and forth, you will point to the remnants of a fast-food chain (location #435) directly below. Back in the day, you will explain, this was the place to go for a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich.
You will continue speaking of submerged places as if you knew them in their heyday, all the while encouraging the family to peer down into the water and revel in their godlike aerial view of these streets and structures. A few feet at a time, you lead them along — above — this flooded block and its remnants of a lifestyle so mundane that you ache for it: a roller-skating rink, a café, a bookstore, a sports bar. They may ask questions, in which case you have the liberty to shape your answers, weaving together a perhaps-unreal tapestry of this haunted ocean. Then, you will let the family loose to explore this abandoned, skeletal city: to delight in its novelty and to unveil its specters for themselves.
Meanwhile, you will swim past salt-eaten steel and rotted wood, dodging rubble and swarms of sediment, searching for traces of your great-great grandparents. You will drift into hundreds of waterlogged apartments, thousands of aqueous rooms, during your years as a tour guide. You will gain entry however you can: propelling yourself through shattered windows, gaping door frames, caved-in roofs glazed with barnacles. You will wonder if this, here, or that, there, was the place your family once called home.
After the allotted period for exploration, the family will be ready to resurface, and you must see them out. The searing sunlight will melt the water droplets off your wetsuit as the parents thank you and fold a tip into your moist hands. As they wander off, their easy return to land will distance them already from the sunken city. But you — you will linger, taking tentative gulps of the burnt air, awaiting your next tour group so that your search may continue.
Elisabeth Strayer is a writer and editor based in upstate New York. Her work appears in The Coachella Review, The McNeese Review, Paperbark, and elsewhere. She is also a co-writer/co-producer of the audio drama Burgess Springs.
