Our Wives Under the Sea (24)

The only time I felt something very different to this was when we saw the sea lung. It was a term Leah taught me, that day in fact, grasped my hand and kissed it and told me that “sea lung” was an ancient term once used by sailors to describe the slough of ice that forms on the surface of the ocean when the air changes temperature rapidly enough to freeze water thrown to the surface in choppy weather. The effect created is that of a sort of floating platform—a spread of barely solid water like a vast and drifting jellyfish that sailors once took to be some organ of the sea’s internal structure come loose and straining skyward.

I still remember it: a drifting anomaly of matter, solid and yet not quite so, spread out beyond the doom bar. I remember the sensation of my feet on solid ground and my hand in Leah’s solid grasp and the disconcerting sight of something almost solid farther out. It seemed, from a distance, to be something one could conceivably walk on, though of course in reality if you set foot on it, it would immediately give way to the water beneath. I turned to Leah and felt an odd sort of relief, despite her hand around mine, to find her still with me, to find she had not moved farther up the beach to search for cowrie shells and left me teetering in this uncertain place. The sea lung moved very slightly, leading me to feel that the ground I stood on might be moving, too, might be less substantial than I assumed. I pressed my free hand to my chest and wondered how solid that could really be, how tangible anything about me might really be. Standing on the edge, I could feel it. The chill of the air, aching to become something else.





LEAH


At some point, Jelka had produced a small plastic figurine of Saint Brendan of Clonfert and set it down beside one of the torches. She now sat on the floor in front of it the way one might huddle around a fireplace, her neck bent to such a degree that the bulging white marbles of her vertebrae showed up like something seeking exit through her skin. She had told me once that you prayed with saints, not to them, correcting a turn of phrase I think I must have inherited from Miri, who was a Catholic hobbyist at best. Praying to a saint would be a gesture of idolatry, Jelka had said, seeming to smirk at herself but carrying on regardless. You pray so that a saint will make an intercession to God on your behalf. Spiritually speaking, it’s like diving with a buddy.

Jelka’s Catholicism had always been a curious part of her, a white-hot core to a person I otherwise knew to be brisk and rational and often cold-blooded, little given to panic but simultaneously hard to placate once panic had set in. We had worked together frequently on research projects at our old facility, had transferred to the Centre together, and I had always known her to be smarter than me, a little aloof but given to sharing lunches, rarely open about things that Matteo and I discussed freely and often. I was unsure, for instance, if she had any siblings, a partner, parents she cared for: all things about which I typically liked to ask because I knew that Miri would be interested to know. I didn’t know if she’d ever been in love, if she considered the concept of love important. I didn’t know what it was she might think about Miri and me, as two women together. One thing I did know about Jelka was her saints. As a child, she had been an altar server at her church in central Haarlem and growing up had been blazingly convinced that by the time she hit adulthood, Catholic policy would have bent to oncoming modernity enough to allow her to train as a priest. This having proved incorrect, she had taken the somewhat sideways step of training in marine ecology and conservation and had ultimately spent several years completing fieldwork on the New Caledonian barrier reef before we met. When I asked her once (with a glibness that really should have been embarrassing) if the appeal of the ocean lay, to her, in some sense of religious universality, of God being everywhere, she had shaken her head and told me, No—what it is is that I’m fucking furious I can’t do the thing that I wanted to do, and I feel better in places where there aren’t any churches. I was pretty chastened by this and didn’t ask her any personal questions for a long time afterward, which I think is what she’d hoped.

Saint Brendan of Clonfert is the patron saint of mariners; more specifically the patron saint of sailors, divers, adventurers, travelers and, for whatever reason, whales. He was one of several saints I associated particularly with Jelka—one of several saints whose existence I had come to recognize because of her. As a teenager, so she told me once, she had passed through fleeting passions for saints the way most people ran through movie stars, fixating short bursts of ardor upon Saint Erasmus, Saint Augustine, Saint Clare of Assisi, Saint Benedict, Saint Genevieve, and Saint Anne. At the age of thirteen, she had conceived a particular passion for Saint Lidwina, a Dutch mystic partially paralyzed after breaking her rib in a fall on the ice. This fall, so a teenaged Jelka had read with the breathlessness that accompanies a crush, precipitated a lifetime of physical hardship, from gangrene and bleeding from the nose and mouth, to parts of the body falling off, to blindness and even stigmata. My favorite part of the story, she told me, was that she fasted. She was in that much pain, bits of her skin coming away, pieces of her body, and she was still so devout that she fasted for God. I was a bloodthirsty little bitch when you think about it. I loved that so much. I read this book once that said that all she ate were apples and dates and all she drank was salt water.

I remember the way she told this story, the way she touched a hand to her lips directly afterward, as though checking for excess moisture.

Saint Brendan is less of a horror story, although no less compelling in its way. An Irish saint and seafarer, he sailed the Atlantic in search of the Garden of Eden, encountering devils, gryphons, and sea monsters. Jelka told me this story while half-asleep, a long time ago. Midnight on the coral triangle, the two of us bunking together on a trip. We were working for a conservationist project in tandem with our old facility, collecting data on biofluorescence in cryptic fish species, and the hours were long, leading to curious, overtired conversations that simultaneously rambled and went nowhere. There are different stories, I remember she said, tight voiced, moving her hands through the darkness, sometimes the journey is his own quest for the holy land and sometimes the journey’s a punishment. He does something wrong and so an angel sets him out onto the ocean and makes him sail for nine years. Heavy-handed, but then things to do with angels usually are.