Megalohydrothalassophobia, or Something by Aubri Kaufman

I can’t pinpoint the onset of my giant underwater statue phobia, but I suspect it crystallized ten years ago, around the first time I saw a photo of a massive Jesus submerged somewhere in Key Largo. Christ of the Abyss, I’d later learn it was called. I’d originally found it in a Buzzfeed article, back when that was a thing, entitled, “20 Majestic Underwater Structures You Need to See Before You Die.” I was immediately horrified, but I couldn’t stop looking at it. I Googled more images against my will. More angles. I saw it from above. From the bottom left. With a scuba diver alongside, which really put the size of this thing into perspective. I imagined it reaching out, plucking the diver from the water. I imagined its giant, waterlogged feet detaching from its pedestal, swimming to shore, clawing its way onto land as horrified beachgoers screamed and abandoned their towels and coolers. I imagined I was a horrified beachgoer, towel and cooler be damned.

Over the next few nights, I made a routine of Googling more submerged things to build a mental catalogue of what fucked me up and to what degree. I found a National Geographic article depicting a truly abysmal number of statues congregating somewhere in Mexico in an “underwater sculpture garden.” I made a list of the things I hated about them:

The sheer quantity of them
How they’re all facing in different directions, most not interacting with one another in any meaningful way, seemingly alone in their togetherness
The way they’re decomposing underwater, especially the ones housing various plant life
The fact that I have no idea why they’re down there and can’t bring myself to learn

The night I discovered Ocean Atlas, I had my first memorable panic attack. A giant, and I mean absolutely humungous, figure exists hunched over and contorted just below the water’s surface somewhere in The Bahamas. The head of this statue alone is bigger than the adult man depicted swimming alongside it. I wondered if the man was still alive or if this photo was taken moments before the statue swallowed him whole. I briefly considered searching for the man’s name in the captions and wondered if there’d be an obituary floating around that had something to do with a nondescript “diving accident.”

For years after, I’d come across other giant submerged statues in various corners of the internet. The Lost Correspondent in Grenada: a figure sitting at a desk with a typewriter as barnacles burrow into his face and body (Paranormal Activity levels of horrifying, a real jump scare). The Banker: a businessman on his hands and knees with his head buried under the sand (not so bad, he seemed pretty scared, too), also Mexico. I made a mental note not to swim in Mexico.

My husband started going to sleep much, much earlier than me, so I’ve been staying up alone to write this. I don’t know why this belongs here, but it does. Some mornings I tell him, “I’m working on this thing about underwater statues.” “Oh cool,” he goes, “You’re afraid of them.” Yep, I say. Yep, he says.

Trypophobia became repopularized online. I noticed lots of people seem to not like clusters of holes on stuff. I also do not like clusters of holes on stuff. It makes me think of disease. I made the connection that maybe I don’t like underwater statues because of how porous they are. Wishfully, I thought, “maybe this is just trypophobia,” because somehow “just” that felt better than whatever this weird thing is that I have, because lots of other people seem to not like hole clusters, but only I seem to not like giant underwater statues. When I told people about this fear, they’d laugh and I’d laugh and I’d say, “I know, I know” and I’d do this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and we’d move on. But no one ever said, “Oh my God, me too,” which helped me know something was really wrong about this.

I stopped writing this essay a month ago. I couldn’t figure out how to finish it without looking up more pictures. Instead, I texted a friend, another writer, and I said, “I’m working on something about giant underwater statues,” and at first, he said, “Whaaa?” But then I sent him pictures (because I had to, because how else do you explain this), and he sent me some back, and said, “like this?” and I said yes, and he said, “I kind of get it,” and I felt something in me loosen. The next time I texted him about it, I said, “my underwater statue thing is coming along,” and he said, “Hell yeah it is!” and that thing loosened more. We talked about other things: fantasy football and his divorce and pad thai, and I watched all mention of the statues float slowly out of view, up and off the top of the screen.

I stopped writing the essay again. I’m not sure for how long this time, but I’ve told a bunch of other writers that I’m writing it. They weren’t as weirded out about it as I recall people being a decade ago. Maybe we’re all afraid of more weird shit now. Or maybe, after all our “once in a lifetime” experiences, we’re all just a little more vulnerable and expressive about it. Or maybe these are just different people. My writer friend told me I deserved a trophy for having the weirdest fear of anyone he knows and, somehow, it felt like a compliment. I said, “Hell yeah I do!”

At a writers’ camp over the summer, one of my closest friends and I sat together at a round table in a giant barn with no doors and watched the rain come down. When I told her about the fear, she asked if I was afraid of The Little Mermaid growing up. I had no recollection of being afraid of The Little Mermaid, but she reminded me of that scene with the room full of gadgets and gizmos aplenty, and I remembered King Triton storming angrily in, blowing Ariel’s things to bits, for her own good, as fathers sometimes do.

In the subsequent days, I remembered my childhood obsession with The Titanic. There was something haunting about knowing that massive, crumbling ship was once opulent. I imagined walking through its rooms, what they must’ve looked like with all their bells and whistles still intact. I checked books out of the library to look at huge, fold-out diagrams. I looked for renditions of what it might’ve been like in its prime. I skipped over the pages depicting the ship in more recent states. I didn’t want to see it like that.

I remembered shutting myself in my room at my grandfather’s house (where I’d been living at that time) and playing Donkey Kong on N64 for hours. I was fully immersed. Absorption, I’d later learn this flavor of dissociation was called – a particularly handy tool for tuning out the unsavory bits of life and becoming one with whatever was happening on the screen. I played it for a long time, especially on those weekends when my dad didn’t end up coming, after all. In my kid brain, I made it really far. Now, I realize I only made it about halfway through the game before I reached a level that was all water. I wanted to keep going, but each time I had to leap from the safety of the raft into a three-dimensional abyss, I’d switch off the console and reluctantly rejoin the world around me. A few times I actually made the jump, only to die moments after at the hand of a poisonous starfish. Whatever lurked down there was not meant for me, I promptly decided. It was probably big. Threatening. Waiting.

Looking at photos of giant underwater things isn’t really becoming easier, but it’s becoming necessary to get this thing written. And writing it seems important for some reason. Understanding it seems important. I’ve begun to recognize, vaguely, that the next logical step is to learn more about giant underwater statues. I should better understand these things I’m terrified of. Normalize them. Humanize them. Demystify them. Desensitize myself. I’ve considered asking my friends to do the research for me. I imagine—

I stopped writing again. Literally stopped mid-sentence and didn’t come back. In the time since I left off, I’ve been accepted back to the writer camp, so it’s been at least a year. My writer friend met someone new and fell in love and got engaged. My son turned three. He became obsessed with The Little Mermaid. On my nights with him, I sang him the songs from memory. He told me I sounded just like Ariel (I don’t). We watched the movie together for the first time. I remembered this essay. I realized it wasn’t the King Triton scene that got me, but the very end, when Ursula becomes giant and protrudes from the water, lightning striking down around her and through her and illuminating her skeleton. She’s so much bigger than everyone else. There’s no way they’re going to make it out alive. The ocean is trying to kill us. And she was there the whole time, through the whole movie. She was my favorite character until the very end, when I realized she wasn’t a sassy, silly Disney villain singing her belty songs. She was actually always this thing capable of killing everyone. Prince Eric had to impale her with the bow of the ship just to make it all stop.

I look over to my son. He’s totally fine. He’s eating Easter chocolate in his new bunny slippers. He’s more than fine; he’s in his bliss. I feel something loosen even more in my chest. Ever so slightly, I begin to let go of the worry that my divorce will deeply fuck up his life. I begin to wonder if the things below the surface seem so horrifying because they were once beautiful, or because they were always a little scary, or because there’s no real way of knowing. I recognize that it doesn’t matter all that much to me anymore. I text my sister and ask her if she wants to book a trip to Mexico with me, once the divorce is finalized. I hold my kid tight while the credits roll and we pick a new movie.

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Aubri Kaufman

Aubri Kaufman is one of the chief chaos creators for Icebreakers Lit. Her work can be found in Pithead Chapel, trampset, HAD, Rejection Letters, Identity Theory, and elsewhere. She’s on a bunch of the socials as @aubrirose and she totally wants to talk to you.

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