Our Wives Under the Sea (11)

At some point, Matteo brought out four wide electric torches and placed them around the base of the main deck. Since the console lights had failed, we’d been sitting in semidarkness, and in this fresh illumination, I looked about the craft the way one might peruse a Spot the Difference game—the same, but with deliberate mistakes. Same console, but with all the buttons dim; same machinery, only silent. Same Jelka, too, only hunched about the base of her chair, pulling quietly at the skin around her nails. Certain things, however, remained as I remembered them: Matteo’s Cthulhu bobblehead suckered to the ledge beneath the main window, Jelka’s rosary looped around the console stand the way you’d hang prayer beads from a rearview mirror. I remember thinking idly that we ought to have brought air freshener—hung the little pine-fresh trees like talismans around the deck.

“Do you think,” I said at some point (I forget what point exactly), “that we ought to do something.”

Neither of them said anything to this, although Matteo did begin to whistle, which was a weak advance on Jelka’s humming. He whistled tunefully and through his teeth, Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies, swooning low about the tin-can confines of the craft.



* * *



When I was seven, my father taught me to swim, by which I mean that he wrenched my knuckles from the side of the municipal swimming pool and hurled me into the deep end with a ruthlessness bordering on zealotry. Just keep your head up, he yelled, impassive to my shrieking and to the well-intentioned lifeguard who blew a feeble whistle twice and then gave up. Prior to this point, I had never been keen on the water, imagining only preying dark places and ocean floors that dropped suddenly away. My father, sensing pathology the way that bloodhounds catch a scent, had taken on my training as a kind of aversion therapy, and despite being the type of man to whom anxiety was only proof of thinking too hard, he had turned out to have the right idea. If you’ve got breath enough to scream, you’re not drowning was his most frequent refrain, and inasmuch as that I had to learn to swim to avoid being fished from the bottom of the pool and taken directly to the coroner, his method basically worked. When explaining the divorce to me, I remember my mum said that it had always been next to impossible to tolerate a man whose approach to problem-solving was the psychological equivalent of a Wile E. Coyote–shaped hole in a canyon wall. That they were happier unshackled from one another was obvious, and I certainly enjoyed them both better the moment they stopped pretending to share any common goal beyond me. My father taught me to swim and later to scuba-dive, my mum bought me UltraSwim chlorine-removal shampoo. I grew used to the water in stages and then fell in love with it, read the books my father bought me on deep-sea exploration, dreamed in shoals of Humboldt squid and molten silverfish. I found I slept best to the telling of stories that flung me out onto the ocean, asked to be read to until I grew older and read the stories to myself. One of the stories I loved best was that of a man named Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer of the mid-1940s who once sailed five thousand miles across the Pacific in a hand-built raft crewed only by five men. Heyerdahl had nearly drowned at least twice in boyhood and did not take easily to water, which perhaps was why I liked him so much. To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half-hidden. There was a particular story from Heyerdahl’s various writings that I returned to often, reading aloud to myself on nights when sleep was elusive. It was an account of a night on the ocean during one of Heyerdahl’s many long overseas expeditions; I had read it first at the age of nine and kept it folded tight in some tidy part of my mind ever after.

As we sank, I tried to recall this story, though as I did so I felt the strangeness of attempting to soothe myself with the very element currently building to unsurvivable pressure over my head.

Chiefly at night, so the story went, but occasionally in broad daylight, a shoal of small squids shot out of the water precisely like flying fish, gliding through the air as much as up to six feet above the surface, until they lost the speed accumulated below water, and fell down helplessly. In their gliding flight with flaps out they were so much like small flying fish at a distance that we had no idea we saw anything unusual until a live squid flew right into one of the crew and fell down on deck.

I loved this story. Loved it, I suppose, for its slapstick, but also for the way it went on to suggest that deep things routinely rose to the surface and sometimes even higher than that. In this account, Heyerdahl goes on to describe dark nights on which strange, phosphorescent beings, on some occasions bigger than his craft, reeled up toward the ceiling of the sea and bumped heads before descending. As we sank, I tried to tell myself this story and it worked, to a certain extent—I thought of the way deep things move upward, of the ocean’s escapability, even despite its depths. If you’ve got breath enough to scream, as my father said, you’re not drowning, and so I held my breath and thought about screaming and imagined the ocean coming to an end.





MIRI


I stand beneath the spray of the shower and scream for twenty minutes. I’m all right, for the most part. It is only on occasion that I feel the need to scald myself down to the marrow, sugar-scrub my thighs until I bleed in streaks, and clog the drain with the expendable parts of me. I have spent the morning on the phone, shuttlecocking back and forth between recorded voices, the majority of whom desire a number I cannot provide and the rest of whom want me to know that my call is important. Around noon, I moved the phone from my ear and smashed it some seventeen times into the wall before dropping the remnants and going to fetch a dustpan. Leah had been sitting on the sofa but looked up at this outburst. For a moment, I imagined a kind of reemergence, Leah as I knew her stepping out from behind the baffle of this person and asking me what the fuck I had done. This didn’t happen, so after I had cleaned away the pieces of the telephone, I told her I was going to take a shower and that after that I would see about getting a replacement.