Our Wives Under the Sea (22)

I know that, sweetheart, she said to me, I had a feeling. Her voice was thick but she kept talking and I think I loved her for that.





LEAH


I’ll tell you something: for someone who likes the water, I’ve never been particularly keen on the dark.

We sat together and stared at the torches, at the thin central reeds of the filaments, which left white lines across the backs of my eyes.

“We submerged at noon,” Jelka said at one point, gesturing to her wrist, “but my watch is broken. It’s stopped on two forty-five.”

It was tricky to tell much in this regard by any normal method; none of us were very hungry or very thirsty or showing much of an impulse to sleep. I had no watch and neither did Matteo, and without power, all the dials and meters and timepieces ranged around the main console were less than useless.

“Could have been days,” Matteo said and then shook his head in the manner of someone trying to get water out of their ears, “but that’s not really a helpful thing to say, is it?”

“Is it strange,” I asked, “that we haven’t seen anything yet?” They looked at me and I gestured my head toward the window without moving my eyes from the lights. “However long we’ve been here, I mean, and we haven’t seen a thing.”

Matteo laughed, the sound metallic against the ceiling of the craft.

“Well, I don’t know what you expect to see, buddy, just staring at that torch for hours.”

I nodded, shrugged.

“That’s fair enough, I guess, but you haven’t seen anything either.”

Deep-sea fish are not fish in a way that the average person would recognize. Having evolved to deal with the dark and the pressure, they sprout feelers from unfamiliar places, grow great gulping jaws that overspill the circumference of their bodies, produce their own creeping chemical light. Instead of relying on gas for buoyancy, many deep-sea species simply roll through the water like jelly, unencumbered by an inner or outer skeleton, their bodies made up of compounds of such low density that the pressure of surrounding water poses no threat at all. Some of my favorite deep-sea fish are also some of the strangest-looking: the frilled shark, generally considered a living fossil, with its thirty-odd rows of needlelike teeth; the faceless cusk, which appears to have almost no features at all beyond two pairs of nostrils and a large and bulbous snout. Many deep-sea creatures also have a tendency to gigantism, though this is not a topic on which, so far, there has been a great deal of study. Suffice it to say, there has been a noted tendency in crustaceans and cephalopods retrieved from the deep ocean to be of far greater than usual size, though suggested explanations for this range from lower temperatures to food scarcity and are not generally agreed upon.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the deep sea might be dark, but that doesn’t make it uninhabited. It certainly was strange that however long it had been since we stopped sinking, we had not seen a single thing beyond the glass.





MIRI


“Let’s be serious,” the therapist says, “I don’t think that either of you are listening hard enough.”

When she says this, she is talking about me.

“All right,” I say, “I’m listening,” but this apparently demonstrates my tendency toward belligerence and we have to start the exercise again.

The therapy is free, bankrolled by the Centre on the understanding that further assistance will be forthcoming, although they are somewhat hazy on the details. This was the main thing I managed to sort, on finally getting through to someone on the phone. I tried to mention other things, tried to talk about the obvious changes in Leah, tried to ask for an explanation, but the voice on the line was implacable in the face of my questioning, assuring me several times that prolonged dives could throw up all kinds of issues and that I shouldn’t be too concerned. We call it the resurfacing glitch, the voice said, so cheerfully that I felt almost churlish for asking. It’s so common, more common than you’d think.

To begin, the therapist shows us a series of inkblot cards and asks us to say what we see in each butterflying shape.

“A genie,” I say, “an ice-cream scoop. Was the Rorschach test not widely discredited around the mid-60s? An enchilada.”

“What I see,” Leah says, looking hard at each shape, “is an eye, and an eye and an eye and an eye and an eye.”

The therapist lays her cards facedown on the coffee table and makes a series of notes in a ring-bound pad before asking me how I feel about my mother. When I say that I’m not quite sure how that could be relevant, she explains that she takes a “deep listening” approach to couples’ therapy, adding that childhood experience could often be a root of dysfunction in adult relationships.

“What we’ll do here together,” she says, “is connect the dots.”

I am, apparently, too given to the process of blame. I have allowed blame to settle over me like a weather system, swelling damp inside the curve of my forehead and setting my teeth electric. The therapist tells us to ask each other questions, insists that the silence between us can be broken by something as simple as one of us opening our mouths. I write my questions on index cards as though I am revising for a test and then fold them away somewhere where Leah won’t see. Why, I write, did you go if they’d told you to expect all this. What, I write, was so fascinating down there that you didn’t come back.