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“Jonas.”
The voice of his wife pulled Jonas from his deep thought, and he blinked, looking up. Suyin stood over him, frowning, with her hands on her hips. It was clear she’d been trying to get his attention for a while.
“Huh? Sorry, what?” He attempted to smile at her, but it was pretty wooden. Her frown deepened.
“I was saying that we’ll need to be leaving soon if we want to make it in time. Don’t tell me you forgot? Again?”
Jonas blinked again, and for the first time noticed that Suyin was wearing a sleek black evening dress. He racked his brain for what he might be forgetting and came up empty. He cleared his throat.
“No, I, uh- of course, we’ve got the… thing…”
“The fundraiser? For the new Deep Sea Exploration division?” Suyin was struggling to hide her exasperation and frustration now. “I told you about this – this event could be huge in securing the new grant we need to fund our research. You promised you’d come with me. The potential investors would love to meet you.”
Jonas grimaced. He already had no taste for schmoozing and playing nice with a bunch of rich dickheads who wanted to play benefactor to get their name on a shiny plaque at as many universities as they could, just to add another pretty badge to their list of accolades so they could show off to other rich assholes about how good and generous they are. The last thing he wanted to do on TOP of that was field a bunch of questions about his “adventure” while those same assholes stared at him in goggle-eyed amazement, before laughing and calling their dickhead friends over and getting him to tell the same story again, as if he was some kind of birthday pony doing tricks that had been hired for entertainment. He’d been to enough of these fundraiser galas by now to know how it went.
Unfortunately, he also knew that this was the life he’d signed up for when he’d married the new head of the re-established research division of Mana One. He sighed.
“Yes, I know, of course I remember. I was just about to get ready, I just got a little… distracted.”
Suyin frowned at him again, but now her arms dropped to her side.
“You were thinking about the Meg again, weren’t you?” Jonas didn’t say anything. “Jonas, it’s been five years.”
“I know.”
“If it was still out there, we would have found it by now.”
“The ocean is pretty big.”
Suyin raised an eyebrow at him, and he remembered who he was talking to. He cracked a lopsided grin. “Right. You’d know that, of course.” Suyin sighed.
“You know, sometimes I think you spend more time thinking about that shark than you do about me.”
“No, that’s not true”.
“Isn’t it?”
He didn’t answer. They both knew she was right – the majority of the time he wasn’t completely focused on an active task, his brain did tend to slip back to that day half a decade ago, when he came face to face with the Megalodon. The one that got away, he sometimes thought. It wasn’t lost on him that that was a nickname that used to held exclusively by his ex-wife. When the giant fish overtook her in his regard, he wasn’t sure.
That was a lie. He knew exactly when it had happened.
It happened the day he stood on a boat in the middle of the ocean that was slowly turning red, writhing with sharks that were feasting on the remains of the giant creature that had been terrorising them to the point where it looked like the oceans themselves were boiling.
Or at least, it was supposed to be the creature that had been terrorising them.
In fact, they found out soon afterwards that it was just another whale, a poor creature that had approached their boat at just the wrong moment after mistaking them for one of the whale tour boats that sometimes followed this path and would occasionally throw down food for the wild animals. Just a case of it being in the wrong place at the worst possible time. When the Meg had seen the opportunity to get away in the confusion and let the whale take its place, they weren’t sure – only that it had happened, and Jonas was sure that it was still out there somewhere.
Just the memory of being up close to that magnificent creature, looking into its black eye the size of his own torso, seeing its teeth the size of his whole body…
Jonas swallowed as he felt a chill shudder through his body at the recollection. He wasn’t sure whether it was from revulsion, or excitement.
He wasn’t sure when he’d started thinking of the Megalodon as ‘magnificent’, either.
Suyin sighed at him again, and turned away. Her heels clacked on the wooden floor as she walked down the hallway, and she called back over her shoulder to him, “Please just get ready soon. We have to be there in half an hour.”
The fundraising gala was, naturally, held in an aquarium. Leave it to a millionaire to be as on the nose with the theming as possible.
At least this one was interesting. The tanks were filled with creatures exclusively found in the deep sea, the tanks made of glass over a foot in thickness to hold the simulated pressure that the fish were used to living in. The room was kept almost entirely dark to mimic the same conditions, with the exception of a few dozen candles floating throughout the wide room, and the bioluminescence coming from some of the creatures and algae within the tanks that lined every single wall.
Jason Statham stood in front of one of these tanks, staring mindlessly at the bizarre looking fish swimming within. The thickness of the glass reminded him of being behind the observation window on Mana One, all those years ago. When he’d seen The Meg for the first time. His hand clenched involuntarily around the champagne flute he was holding, and he forced himself to loosen his grip lest it shatter completely. Really, he thought, they oughta make these glasses out of the same material as these tanks if they really wanted to show off their research developments and secure their damn grant. Though, he reckoned he could still find a way if he was forced to converse with one more bigwig tonight. The pressure of 500 atmospheres had nothing on him being made to socialise politely.
Then again, he mused, a palm full of bloody glass shards would be a pretty great excuse to get out of here.
“That’s him!” Jonas’s ears pricked as they picked up a conversation behind him.
“Who?”
“The Shark Guy!”
Two people who evidently thought they were being quiet enough for him not to notice them gossiping about him behind him – not doing a very good job, considering they were only about three feet away. Jonas didn’t bother turning around as the conversation turned to egging each other on to approach him. He’d already gone through the same steps over a dozen times tonight – ‘did you really fight a megalodon’, ‘is it true you’ve spent the last 5 years trying to track it down’, ‘what are you gonna do if you do actually find it’. He didn’t feel like initiating the same song and dance again.
Truth is, he wasn’t sure what he was planning on doing if he found the Meg again. The past few years, his obsession had grown more and more, turning from a simple ‘I have to kill it before it can hurt any more people’ to a more all-consuming ‘I just have to find it again’. So no, though he wouldn’t admit it to any of the people here, he didn’t know what he would do when he found it again.
Hopefully have a decent interaction that doesn’t end with me contemplating skewering myself with shattered glass, he thought to himself with a smirk, twirling the champagne flute again in his large hands.
And that was just the thing, really. Deep down, he knew he didn’t belong in this crowd, dressing up and making small talk and eating tiny canapés. He longed for the salt burn of the ocean on his skin and the wind over his scalp, the thrill and rush of being out in the open sea. The pureness and simplicity of action. Sometimes he really believed that he and the Meg had a more pure understanding of each other than he and his wife did. He watched her across the room in the reflection of the glass, making a large group of Japanese businessmen laugh, and he knew that this was definitely one of those moments.
Suyin was patient with his obsession, at first. After all, she had lost people to the Meg too. She could understand the desire for revenge. But as time passed, she had moved on, and she couldn’t understand why he didn’t too. She didn’t understand that he just didn’t want to.
Inside the tank in front of him, an angler fish swam past, illuminating the space around it just faintly with the beacon that hung in front of it. Jonas knew that these were the females of the species. Looking close as it paused in front of him, he could see the male, fused to her side. He had learned years ago that when angler fish reproduce, the male would latch onto the side of the much larger female, and their bodies would melt into each other, their skin and blood vessels joining, fusing to essentially become one organism, stuck together forever. As he watched the angler fish swim away, a wave of sudden jealousy surged hot through his body.
Jason Statham came to a sudden awareness of himself at that moment. He truly understood now that he was not meant to be here. He was meant to be out there, in the ocean. He was meant to be with the megalodon who had invaded his mind so many years ago and stayed there ever since. The champagne glass tumbled from his hand and shattered on the concrete floor, causing several conversations around him to fall silent.
He made a decision in that moment, and he turned on his heel and marched away from the tank, pushing through the two stunned businessmen who had been gossiping about him only moments before. The crowd parted around him like the red sea as he strode purposefully towards the exit. Soon, only Suyin stood between him and the door, looking aghast.
“Jonas,” she hissed, eyes darting to the sides at the large crowd of people staring at them, “what are you doing?”
Jason Statham looked at her and felt a sad sort of acceptance. He smiled at her. “I need to go, Suyin.”
She looked at him with despair. “It’s the megalodon again, isn’t it?” She knew this was the final culmination of 5 years worth of build-up.
Jonas approached her and put his hands on her shoulders, kindly. “You’re not the first wife I’ve lost because of the Meg, Suyin.” He smiled. “But I’m damn sure you’re going to be the last.”
With that he ran out of the room, and she didn’t stop him.
Thankfully, the aquarium the gala was being hosted in was close to the pier, as aquariums often are. Jonas thundered up flight after flight of stairs, too keyed up to take the lift, until he thankfully broke free of the oppressive darkness and crashed through the doors into glorious sunlight, where he could hear the ocean crashing nearby and gulls crying overhead. He did not stop running, barrelling through passersby with no heed until the pavement underfoot turned to the slick, waterlogged wood of the docks.
The ocean glittered in the sunlight, and through the water, Jonas could see movement – movement that he would recognise anywhere, even though it had been so long since he’d last seen it. His heart soared as a giant fin broke the surface of the water, headed straight towards the pier. Could it be, that for all of these past 5 years, the Meg had been searching for him too?
With a sudden burst of speed, Jonas cleared the remaining distance between himself and the glorious shimmering ocean, and when he reached the end of the pier, he leapt – towards the sea, towards his future, and towards the giant fish that awaited him.
And in that moment, his life was meaningful.
