Where the Sea Used to be

by Rick Bass

[jamiereadthis]

One of my favorite short stories is Rick Bass, “Where The Sea Used To Be.” Some days I don’t qualify it; I don’t say “one of,” it’s just my favorite story. Other days, another Rick Bass story is fresh in my mind so I get around it and say “one of.”

This is the novel, by Rick Bass, by the same name. Wallis is here. Old Dudley is here. The oil is here; the buried sea. But it’s a whole different beast. First I thought it took place after that story, fleshing it out, expanding. Then, I thought it might do the same thing, but take place before. It’s neither. It’s alternate history. An alternate universe. The story and the book, they each have details that exclude the other. Even Wallis, Old Dudley. That Wallis, in the story, he couldn’t drill at the coast, he couldn’t drill anywhere but his buried beach in Alabama. He would say, “Why would a man want to go into a country he was not familiar with, knew nothing about?” This Wallis is drilling the coast, this Wallis is mapping millions of years in Montana. That Old Dudley was not good at cruelty. He was predatory by exception, not the rule. This Old Dudley is eating the world.

And there is Mel, and there is Matthew, and there is Helen, and there is no Sara. And I love it. That the thing I love could be two things instead of the one. What Wallis thinks: “As if a man could be both awake or asleep, or both good and evil.” Or, also? That it’s either/or. A binary. What Mel thinks:

A thing could be either one way or another. There didn’t need to be any more variance in the universe than that most basic rule of binary. A thing— glacier, fire, flood— happened or didn’t. A thing came or it went. A thing was either being born and was growing, or was dying. And with only those two possibilities— the day and night of things— transcribed across every object of the world, came all the mystery and richness one could ever hope to seek.

It’s a love story. It’s the high and rich cost of metamorphosis. It’s the hot sea of oil. And it’s slow and languid and reckless and animal and I sank down into it like a place to live.

“You could never figure it all out,” Mel said, watching the blinking of orange. “The closest you could come is to learning a small thing really well, and then hoping the big things run pretty much the same way.”
“What small thing would you learn?” Wallis asked, and Mel laughed.
“You’re right,” she said. “There’s probably nothing that small.”

Or Matthew, with my thoughts exactly:

“Shit almighty,” Matthew said, still grinning.