Our Wives Under the Sea (17)

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I’m not sure what the sound is at first, and then I am sure, and then it is Leah screaming. It is a Wednesday, or possibly a Thursday, and I am not awake except in the parts of me required to jackknife out of bed. The scream seems wrong at first, garbled up into something other. It takes me several moments to recognize this interference as Leah’s sound machine—her screams half-drowned by the swelling, the oozing, the sinking noise, like a mouth forced open and leaking something thick. It’s dark, and I can’t find the light switch, and the noise is louder in the corridor, louder still toward the barrier of Leah’s bedroom door. I reflect, in some faraway part of myself, that every horror movie begins like this: no lights and a voice in the darkness, feet tangled in bedclothes, a knocking hand left aloft as the door swings back. I push the door, take in the room that used to belong to both of us. Leah is there, and the bed is soaking, and it takes me longer than it should, even in darkness, to realize the water is coming from her. As I stand in the doorway, she screams and keeps on screaming, apparently unaware of my presence, and the sound is only interrupted when her body contorts, convulses, and she vomits a shower of water across the bed. I’m not sure what happens after this, only that the screaming proves to have been almost entirely unconscious, as when I shake her awake it stops and she stares at me, mouth swollen with salt, and she doesn’t seem to know me at all.





Midnight Zone





LEAH


Sea floor, full dark. About half an hour after the craft came to its miraculously gentle stop, Matteo started vainly trying to send distress signals again, though as Jelka pointed out there was little to no sense in doing this, since we were onboard the only vessel capable of diving to such a depth.

“What are they going to do,” she said, her impulse to pray apparently cut short by irritation, “send a search party ten thousand feet then throw a rope ladder the rest of the way?” I remember her then, glaring at us, as thin as I have ever known a person to be and still be able to move around.

None of us commented on the strangeness of the situation, on the way a routine research dive had so quickly turned into this. As before, during the fall, the impulse to question felt curiously flattened, the notion of how this had happened somehow beside the point. I smelled burning flesh again, just for a moment, and thought about saying something, then distracted myself with thoughts of things I had left above sea level, of polystyrene cups and orange juice and pizza, of the sound of our neighbors’ television and the way Miri bit at the skin of her lip so often that kissing tasted bloody; metallic zip of a licked battery. Sunken thoughts, I imagined her saying, and turned my face toward the windows. Without lights, the water was blind around us and holding torches to the glass resulted in little but our own faces reflected back—ghost forms in deep water, six eyes peering in from without.

There are five main layers to the ocean, at least if you go by scientific designation. The first is the Epipelagic, or Sunlight Zone (also known as the Photic Zone), which covers the distance between the surface and approximately six hundred feet beneath. Here, there is only minimal pressure, coral reefs, color, and pleasure divers, the option to hold your breath and jump. After that comes the Mesopelagic, or Twilight Zone, reaching an approximate three thousand feet, at which point sunlight may still penetrate, though beyond this drop comes the Bathypelagic, or Midnight Zone, and from here on, you’re down in the dark. At around thirteen thousand feet and below, you pass through the Abyssopelagic, or Abyssal Zone, an area whose name roughly translates to “no bottom.” No light here, of course, and temperatures a little above freezing, though you will still encounter life, of a fashion, at this depth. Things come down this far and farther, though they seldom come with blood and bones included. Once you reach depths of thirteen thousand feet, everything has a strange name but rarely a backbone: vampire squid and zombie worms, cosmic jellyfish, tripodfish and faceless cusks and pelican eels. Creatures that live this deep are frequently solitary and only infrequently seen. There are big things down here, old things, and certainly more of them than we know about. Almost every piloted dive to these depths has uncovered something new.

Beyond this point, there is a final layer, though the farthest depths of the sea are fragmented and interspersed among trenches formed by tectonic subduction, where the plates of Earth converge and the older, denser plate is pushed down beneath the lighter, creating fissures and places for things to drop deep. This layer is known as the Hadalpelagic, or Hadal Zone, a name that speaks for itself. Lying between roughly nineteen and thirty-six thousand feet, much of this layer of the water is unexplored, which is not to say uninhabited. It was difficult to tell exactly how far we had fallen without the system online to give us a read. It would, I suppose, have been entirely possible to hit the seabed without falling into one of the trenches, although looking out onto the blackness, I believed almost without question that we had fallen as far as it was possible to go. It was difficult to imagine anywhere deeper than the place we had ended up.





MIRI


Leah and my mother never met for a number of reasons, most conveniently because by the time Leah and I were serious enough for the issue to arise, my mother was already quite ill. Leah was good about this, for the most part; rarely asked and didn’t seem to take offense. When I visited my mother at her house, before I moved her, I often came away afraid of insane things, spent days afterward terrified of the ceilings falling, of being bitten, of something crawling up my leg—and Leah was patient with this the way I ultimately came to see as central to the whole of her. In the nights directly following my visits, I would fall asleep in often unexplainable panic and Leah would soothe me, tell me she had me, press her hands into the small of my back. She discovered it was easy to calm me down by repeating words whose shapes I found appealing, muttered redolent and pelt and chicanery until I fell asleep.