Blue Field(31)

So Marilyn, Bowman went on. Hear you did Slater this morning. Make it to the Ant Tunnel? Or the traverse to Hermann?

She kept her back to them. On the river past the cavern a four-person team prepared to descend Devil’s Eye. Male or female impossible to tell in their drysuits and masks and sundry gear.

No, Rand answered for her. Just a little tune-up.

Tune-up? Bowman yelled. Petrie, are you telling me you did a f*cking weenie dive?

She turned in time to catch, in quick succession, annoyance, sheepishness, muted determination fleet across Rand’s face. She’s got some catching up to do, he said.

I bet she does, Bowman said. You *.

She gaped but Bowman merely crumpled his empty chip bag and dashed a few yards and slam-dunked it in a trash can.

You’re hard to like, Rand called after Bowman. You know that?

Bowman moseyed back. Anyway, when’re we going to do Cleargate? I can pencil you in for Saturday.

You meaning not Marilyn. She turned away again and grasped the bibbed remainder of her tight suit on either side of her hips and shimmied while pulling down. Her chilled nipples poked from under the thin material of her swim tank. She decided to leave the rest of the wetsuit on for now rather than display her near-naked rump like a baboon in estrus.

Well? Bowman grunted. In or out?

In, Rand said.

She swallowed more nasal drip and suddenly, as if on schedule, felt nauseous. Too much upside-down time. Too much movement too fast. She could hardly keep up with herself. She tilted around and crossed her arms over her chest. Bowman suddenly stared her up and down. Rand stared at the ground. Blackness fringed her vision. Do not, she told herself. Do not even think it.

Cripes, Bowman said. You okay, princess?

What you get for stuffing it beforehand, Rand muttered.

She roused enough to glare. Serious? she muttered.

Uh oh, Bowman cried, flinging up his hands. Let’s not have a domestic. At least not in the vicinity of my vicinity.

Her only serious, she told herself, was the river and its cave system. In less than a week she figured she’d be ready for the Eye. As she recalled it, the difficulty was mental compounded by the physical. Her first time in on a now-long-ago training session, she’d shredded the pads on every one of her fingers as she hand-over-handed outcroppings on the Eye’s walls, banging herself in against the ripping outflow. After, she could hardly unsuit. Her fingers bled for hours. Before subsequent dives she’d had to bandage each fingertip then wrap it with duct tape. Took a full week for what became clear oozing fluid to stop weeping. She remembered Rand had laughed at her, as had the other cave divers hanging around at the time, Bowman included. So what? The Eye had taken a nip out of her—just a taste of what it could do. What it could do—the canyon-like opening at the bottom of the river led to a soaring rock cathedral inside, a floor like a beach littered with boulder-sized breakdowns in the limestone structure. Past that there was the squeeze of the narrow bedding plane through which she’d grunted and pressed prostrate as a lover against the water-maddened rock. On the other side of the squeeze lay chambers large enough to drive four trains through. The roar of current in her ears had agreed. A channel cut open inside her, a glimmering intuition that felt like a fragment of the geologic dreams of the earth. Inside her, corridors and shining rooms. Territories opening to a largeness bigger than sky.

Bowman and Rand continued to caper and sputter but they’d lost interest in her by now. As they gossiped about people they knew, her gut calmed. The dive team prepping out on the river sank among glittering fish. Like the turtle whose skeleton she’d seen this morning and the massively fat catfish she’d spied on that greenhorn dive six years ago—there must have been ten or fifteen of them lolling sumptuously under the scalloped limestone ledges not far inside from the entrance—she and the divers and the fish as did everyone she knew and had ever known belonged to an impoverished history of abbreviation. And yet. Riding the body into inner space felt like leaping beyond all limits. And in light of that knowledge, she didn’t care about Bowman or Rand.

A few holas rang out and a woman and man strolled toward them. The woman was compact and muscular with confident-seeming strides, the man wiry. Heard you were coming, the woman said and then chinned toward her companion. He’s not but I’m flying the Nest on Sunday. Haul down there and do it with me if you want.

Rand scrunched his face and Bowman made as if to swat him. You *, Bowman said. Do it. Ask me nice and we’ll make it a three-way.

Marilyn ducked her head and shuffled closer to the riverbank. She refused to care. Refused! She had her plan. Put up with the bullshit for now and don’t let on. Head in or bust. What Jane did, Marilyn thought. Though she herself had quit once, in Jane’s death lay Marilyn’s own big chances. She’d take them all the way. Beneath topsoil unlocked by worms and voles and rotting things to underlying rock that yielded to rain. Rain to aquifer in passages that, aerialed on maps, resembled lightning strikes. An aquifer that still existed but soon might not, washed away by rising sea levels. Lost. Like so much else.

Sick again swirled her stomach. She bent over at the river’s edge.





31


Over the next several days she entered and re-entered the underworld. Deep and narcotized in Jordan Blue, her blood boomed to the belling curves of grand white walls. She exited with Rand at noon for a first decompression stop at eighty feet. For the sight—seen from the bottom of this tower of water—of trees rimming the top of the sink like eyelashes. For an hour rising in stages through clear liquid like an omphalos between realms. In Torsun Sink she flipped upstream in current that pinged baroquely curlicued rock. Her exit one fast gliss. For that dive’s deco, they lounged on their stomachs in the cave mouth, sharing a magazine they’d stowed in a giant baggie that Rand had clipped to the permanent line so they could catch each page’s drift before it eddied into the water in schools of ink.