Blue Field(12)

Finally she jiggled her hand and he released her. They both rechecked their gages. Soon they’d reach the safe limits of their breathing mix and planned downtime. She circled now with her forefinger pointing up. Dive over. A yes from him and she again followed the line, threading among the lurching objects while he reeled in behind. A few minutes and they returned to the silt-hole obscuring the bottom of the stairs. Hard to believe that through this brackish soup, impenetrable by her powerful primary light, lay the exit. And yet better believe, she told herself, bracing for the inevitable—the way in was the way out. No other choice. So once again she backed and forthed and upped and downed, bumbling on her hands and knees, every breath a vicious belch. The space seemed to increasingly narrow, as if she were funnelling in a reverse-tornado. A trick too this sense of timelessness—that she’d always been here, exerting herself, that all else had been but fa?ade, mystery.

Then she reached the top of the stairs. She clutched the railing again and swung backward, into sight.

She waited at the top of the stairs. Soon he would re-emerge and unwrap the line. They’d swim out together. All the way out, to open water. Eventually air—and ballooning above, the indigos and magentas and every shade in-between of the terrestrial world. On the dive boat’s deck, alternating swigs of energy drinks and beer and crude dumb jokes, a muzzy camaraderie among the dearly returned. Good one, Jane? Yeah, you too? And a moment when Marilyn would take her husband by the chin and observe the waxy polish of his eyes—symptom of the residual narcosis still lacing the bloodstream—and suppose it mirrored hers. She’d trace her hand over his unmasked face and explore the plains and gullies of his extraordinary features, feel the cold rise like marsh gas off his stubble, note the briefest blue shapes pulsing in his temples—indulge herself with such confections. Queen to his king. No one else on board would have pulled off the same dive. She’d lay her head against his considerable chest and inhale the tart scent of his suit. Fanning the grandiosity, she’d bask on deck, rain or shine, the cruise home like a triumphal procession. She knew, she knew. But didn’t she deserve? Over everything, a narcotic sheen like a silvery web. A pleasant spell lingering in the tissues and cortical pathways, the wrinkles and arcane pleats of the brain.

Waiting, she relaxed. The real dive was done.





11


Hypothermia struck fast. The longer she waited the more she chattered at her mouthpiece. She knew the danger. Feeling increasingly colder she’d breathe harder and, with the increased nitrogen in her bloodstream, her mind would go dark and darker. To wake her sluggish blood she swam into the nearby corridor and finned past a few cubby-sized rooms. She thrust her light inside one. Ochre-stained sink. A cupboard door off its hinge. Four tiny bunks. Rust tinted the water the sepia of old photographs sold cheap at flea markets—abandoned images of bun-haired progenitors, bushy-bearded patriarchs, genetic pre-histories in nose shapes and cheekbones, stooped shoulders, adversity-resistant gazes. Shivers racked her again. If only she could stay awhile despite the cold. If only she didn’t need to keep moving, owned unlimited gas, limitless downtime. If her husband wasn’t going to show any second and bust her again—for what, again?

*

In the floating place.

Childhood dog swimming alongside her in a lake, wet snout upthrust, snorting like a water dragon—please let me never forget, she remembered begging herself at the time. Another time, sick with having swallowed an ant, realizing too late as she pigged the cookie wickedly proffered by Jane’s older sister. Never again. Time too that Marilyn, bedevilled by hot greed, gobbled Jane’s doughnut on the school bus—Jane’s attention momentarily drawn to something out the window—and shame-sick recognized the lesson learned. Time of mumps-sick and feverish in bed, the slow lightning of the wallpaper’s repeating ivory roses, hiving vanilla cupcakes, Ferris wheels—brought to mind years later by Jane’s drifting hair a slow-spinning craquelure on the surface of the pool and then dissolving as she disappeared under for the first time, first dive class under Rand’s tutelage and Marilyn’s proud assist. Disappeared too the lush childhood ravine cut with creek water, that creek eventually bulldozed under, long gone. A snowflake’s brief sharp prism at mother’s funeral turned to dog dander, dog grown gimcrack, beloved muzzle massaged as the vet put him down. Or father’s drained exasperation each time he called his daughter a chub during her pre-teen years. Mother’s favourite ashtray whipped at Marilyn’s late-teen head the night cops drove her home, having found her high and bumping into parked cars on her return from a high-school party. The pilling on Dad’s most festive wool socks, worn every winter Saturday. In spring, mother in the yard with a baseball bat, laughing at her daughter’s wild pitch, the ball at rest among a rapture of daffodils.

*

Stay. No one will ever love you as much. A lullaby never-again like a lantern she brandished farther inside the wreck. One more small berth and then one more and she’d turn back—not much time left here, she knew, she wasn’t stupid. But in the precious minutes allotted her she’d take what she could get. Hers, all hers, all of it, the bad with the good. All aboard.

As if possessed she angled her light beam, gridding and slicing with surgical precision into each compartment, parting and parsing nothing and nothing. Something—an abandoned rubber boot overflowing with a fountain of mud. Stunning sight. Something to kill for. To die.