Beneath the Waters & All That Live in Them

By Matt Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 11 Minutes

It is a beautiful night on that chimera shore. The heavy ocean tide is lapping at the seawall, the stars spread themselves lazily across the velvet sky, the sand is still warm between our toes from being cooked all day in the sun, and Bow, immemorial Bow, who owns the resort, is trying to convince us that the German girl is a water spirit.

“Look at her eyes,” he says. “Like sea foam. Her skin, so tough, beaten by the waves for centuries. I’m telling you, she is phi phraya. She is not of this world.”

“Wasn’t she on our flight?” asks my husband, sipping his mojito.

But Bow is insistent. “So many visitors to Khao Lak every year. Never before have I seen one like her. She is a phantom, a tsunami girl. She doesn’t belong.”

We only nod, because the truth is none of us belong. Fifty miles up the coast from Phuket, away from that raucous, eternal fire, the serene white sands of Khao Lak beach are home to all of us, and none of us, except for old Bow, who sleeps in the house in back of the resort.

My husband and I have vacationed here every winter since we were married. It began as our honeymoon oasis where we soaked in the salty water, our bodies young and sun-fresh, dreaming of the ways we would fill the expanse of years ahead. And, as we went ahead and filled them, we kept coming back, even during the years I gave birth. We brought our daughters, who have grown up in this amaranthine world beneath the swaying palms, and we have watched them go from toddling in the sand to stretching long-limbed across it. Now Emilia is going to college next year, and, in two more years, Margaret will go, too. Our house, which we bought when Emilia was four, will empty itself of the voices of children. But Khao Lak, which existed before, will remain. Not even the tsunami can change that: Khao Lak has always been a land underwater.

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You can find it if you swim deep enough. 

You begin at the Phuket airport where, through the throng of Hawaiian shirts and crop tops, Charon, that spectral sentinel of Greek myth, stands reincarnated as a Thai taxi driver. He waits, leaning unhurried against his black sedan, wearing dark sunglasses and holding a sign with your name. He is ready to ferry you down the River Styx. You pass through water and through mountains, and you must hold your breath. When the mists part, you will see it. Charon allows you to disembark, but to visit only: he will be waiting in the street when your time is up. No one can stay in Khao Lak.

Not even the Thai people stay. They trade off shifts between morning and night, emerging and melting back into the mountains to the east, where their true lives are. On the beach, they have erected a facade. The only people who eat at the restaurants are tourists. The only people who shop in the stores are tourists. The only people who get massages and rent motorbikes and get their clothes tailored are tourists.

In the middle of the illusion, right along the shoreline, lies Bow’s House. It is the oldest resort in Khao Lak, a sleepy little castle on a sleepy beach, solid and eternal, twenty private bungalows arranged along brick walkways and sheltered by the umbrellas of palm trees. Beyond the bungalows sits the restaurant, half under a canopy and half under the sky, where old Bow himself serves complimentary coffee, fried eggs, bacon, wheat toast, and bananas every morning. Beside the restaurant is the infinity pool and, just a little further, is the seawall, holding back the abyss. Near the restaurant’s outdoor tables, there is a single flight of stone steps affixed to the side of the seawall that go down into the deep, where there is no longer any barrier between you and the hereafter. At low tide, you can walk barefoot in the smooth, wet sand, bubbling with mollusks and skittering crabs. But at high tide, the mighty waves return. The wall has kept them at bay every night, save one.

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The German girl does catch one’s attention. In all our years vacationing in Khao Lak, we’ve never seen anyone quite like her. She has come alone. She never smiles, and there are full sleeves of tattoos going down each of her arms. Her hair is cut short, almost buzzed, and she always sits along on the edge of the seawall, letting her long, lanky legs dangle over the froth while she smokes a cigarette. 

It’s Margaret who finally speaks to her. Margaret the curious, Margaret the incessantly innocent. Perching next to her in the sand like a little bird, she asks, “Where are you from?”

The German girl looks down at the water. “Nowhere,” she says. Her voice is surprisingly soft.

Margaret tries again. “But where do you live?”

“Nowhere.”

“Don’t you have a house? A job?”

The girl blows a puff of smoke and puts the cigarette out on the hard cement. “No.”

“But how do you buy things?” says Margaret. “How do you pay for this resort?”

“I sell shells.”

“Shells?”

“Yes.”

Margaret looks out over the edge of the wall. “From down there?”

The girl nods. “Yes.”

The next day, Margaret is convinced: “Bow is right. She’s a water spirit.”

The following morning, my daughters rise earlier than should be possible for teenagers on vacation. They go to the restaurant and sit at one of the outdoor tables nearest the seawall, Emilia and Margaret peeling oranges overlooking the beach. From the perch high atop the mountain, they can see the German girl far below. She is hunting for shells. She picks them up, turns over their smooth surfaces with her long, callused fingers, and discards them. She rejects them all. When she climbs the stone stairs, slick with sea moss, back up to Bow’s House, Margaret cannot help but ask whether she has collected anything. 

“I am picky,” the girl responds. “I will wait until I have found the right one.”

For the rest of the trip, Emilia and Margaret are fixated on her. It becomes their game, spying, tracking her movements, making up wild stories about her as they fall asleep at night. She is an assassin, they speculate, an insurgent, a counterintelligence agent, a bodyguard for hire. Yet always Margaret arrives back at Bow’s insistent conclusion: she is a phantom of the water, a shred of soul the tsunami has left behind.

Overhearing them while brushing my teeth in the bungalow bathroom, my daughter’s words make my arm-hairs prickle. If asked, I would dismiss her fantasies with a practical wave of my hand; but, in my secret heart, I am not sure that the waters have ever actually receded. Perhaps we are still living in the tsunami; perhaps all of Khao Lak is drowned. You can feel it when you walk down that long and dusty street with its quaint resorts, restaurants, coffee shops, massage parlors, motorbike rentals, tailors, and tuk-tuks: as if you are unmoored from reality, swimming. If you let a pen slip from your hand it may float upwards, dreamily, instead of falling to the floor.

Even in that incorporeal hinterland, though, it is odd that the German girl has come alone. People seldom come alone to Khao Lak. The only other lone traveler at the resort is an elderly Italian man with wrinkled, sunken skin. He lounges by the beach with all the quiet confidence of a general for whom the war was a rousing success and who is now allowed to rest. Yet he does not rest: he is too friendly to sit by himself. When I tell Margaret to move her chair out from under a palm tree, he laughs and points with a crooked finger. 

“Co-co-nut,” he says, enunciating each syllable. She has a better chance of being struck by a car than being killed by a falling co-co-nut, he tells me. I offer a smile, but I do not change my mind.

For the next three days, the General—as Margaret has taken to calling him—paces the length of the great fortress of the seawall, making polite conversation with anyone who will listen, smiling in amusement when the sea spray gets high enough to come over the ropes strung along the top of the wall. The beast below still remembers that day sixteen years ago, when it gathered its strength and broke over those ramparts. But today the General stands at the battlements. The ocean stretches out its aching hand.

It isn’t until the fifth day that the General finds a friend at last. Margaret elbows Emilia, and they sit up in their beach chairs, removing their headphones and shielding their eyes against the sun. The ancient Italian has left his citadel and is descending the stone steps. Just ahead of him, beckoning him to follow, is the water spirit.

“Oh!” gasps Margaret, whose heart has enough room to hold every baby rabbit, every sparrow. “He will slip and crack his head open!”

But he does not slip. With careful, shuffling steps, the General follows the siren down below the seawall, down into the wild lands. Margaret and Emilia rush to the ropes, the wind playing with their hair. Below, the old man and the tattooed young woman are wading out into the water, speaking in broken English. He is jovial and animated like a gesticulating grandfather. She laughs and does not look so pensive anymore. The water rises higher and higher, drinking them in, climbing up past their knees, their torsos, reaching up their necks. They work their way out into the deep with practiced strokes—two soldiers, swimming side by side. My daughters watch as they swim and stop, coming to rest out in the foamy blue-green waves, their laughing heads bobbing like two buoys set free from their tethers at last.

When they arrive back at the beach, ascending to the safety atop the seawall again, the German girl towels off her short-cropped hair and says, very pleasantly, “Thank you for the swim.”

The next morning, he is helping her look for shells. Once again, he descends those stone steps. At breakfast, Bow brings us our coffee and eggs and we shake our heads together, watching the old man plunge recklessly down into that netherworld. But, once again, they return safely. When they climb the stairs together, the General spots my daughters and gives them a toothy grin.

“See what we have found!”

He opens his cupped hands and there, resting in his desiccated old palms, is the most beautiful shell we have ever seen. Margaret gasps and Emilia raises her eyebrows. My husband sips his coffee.

“How much does that go for?” he asks the German.

But she only offers a little smile, looking at the elderly Italian as though they share a secret. “This one I will not sell, I think. It is the one I have been looking for.”

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That night, the storm comes. The girls are coloring with Bow’s grandchildren when it rolls in from over the waves, all the water that has been clawing at our feet all week finally lashing down at our heads. The storms come fast here, quick and belligerent, and my daughters barely have time to gather up their coloring books and towels and clothes before they are chased by the hard rain that nips at their bare feet as they dash under the palm trees and back to our bungalow, laughing all the way. We stay under our awning and peer up at the clouds. These tropical storms usually last only a few minutes, but they make sure to have their say. No one can get a word in when the weather is talking.

But this storm does not end quickly. It lasts well into the night. We cannot have dinner on the beach, and we all huddle together under the canopy of the restaurant while Bow and his wife and sons and their wives scramble over the woks in the kitchen. At the very edge of the restaurant, nearest the rain, the General and the German share a table. They have been talking for a long time, and he is not his usual chipper self. He holds a neglected beer in his lap and stares out at the rain.

“You don’t have to go back to that empty house,” I overhear the German girl say, her soft voice colored with compassion.

His eyes are fixed on the storm. “It isn’t home anymore without her.”

She nods and lights a cigarette. The smoke goes wafting out into the rain where it is pelted down and dissipated. “Have you been to the lagoon? Not far from here. The water is beautiful, and calm. You can float and feel it very cool on your bones. And, when you are ready, you put your head under the water and look at the coral and starfish. It is a paradise.”

“Maybe we shall go tomorrow,” says the General. He raises his beer, stops, and sets it down on the table. “I never want to leave.”

She peers at him with her siren gaze. “Maybe you don’t have to.”

The next day, Charon is waiting for them. He is lying on the hood of his taxi, smoking and scrolling on his phone, but when he sees them coming, he jumps into the dusty street. He senses without words that he is being called. He knows when it is time.

Together, the German girl and the elderly Italian get in the taxi, an obol placed in the mouth, and together they are ferried down that dusty road. Down the Styx and Acheron they go, out of Khao Lak, at last.

The following morning, our final day of vacation, Bow is bringing us breakfast, but Margaret does not eat. She is staring out over the seawall, where the waves, for once, are quiet. I ask her what is wrong.

“They never came back,” she says.

“Who?”

“The General and the German girl.” She looks up. “Bow, did they check out yesterday?”

But he only shrugs.

And when we finish breakfast and take our places in the sand by the pool, safe atop the wall, I see that a coconut has snapped from the palm tree and lies fallen next to Margaret’s beach chair. 

So it goes in Khao Lak. Tomorrow, the taxi driver will ferry us away, too. We will pass back through those mists. But, I wonder, which is the true illusion: the place where we are going or the place we leave behind? 

That night, I pack the suitcases, and my husband makes a business call. Here, on this white sand, I see snapshots of time. I remember the days before my daughters, I remember their infancy, here at Bow’s House. They are getting so big. I still can’t believe I can no longer lift them in my arms. I still can’t believe that Emilia is going to college next year. We have moved four times in our marriage, but this move feels different. It is an emptying, a hole opening with nothing to fill it. 

And, deep in my bones, I know it will not stop there. The hole will grow wider. My little daughters will become that Italian man. They will form wrinkles and creases and their cheeks will sink and their eyes will dim. The coconut will fall from its branch. The storm will break, the water will come over the seawall at last, and an angel draped in flesh will take their hands and lead them aboard that ferry where Charon stands waiting.

We will be left with Khao Lak. Khao Lak, that shifting sand on the ocean floor, that bit of floating seaweed, that dream, that vapor, that millisecond flash before the millennia. This is where we live, beneath the waters, this place that is home but not home, not really, not to anyone except for Bow and his wife and their three children and his sister, who washes the clothes, and his brother, who repairs the doors, and his nephew, who hacks the palm tree leaves off before they come loose and break the windows of the bungalows. 

Life on earth is Khao Lak. Maybe we are all water spirits. 

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Story by Matt Mills · Photo by Jorge Rosal

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