Our Wives Under the Sea (33)

“Yes, I know all of that,” Jelka interrupted, “but thank you for the biology lesson.”

I looked at her, blinked, looked away. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was a story I was more used to telling Miri. In my head, I think I’m often telling Miri stories, logging away information or things I’ve seen in order to tell her about them later. Even trapped as I was down there, I was still doing this: taking everything in with one eye on how to recount it. I think I’ve trained myself to look at things this way, as if for her as well as for me. Although now, writing this, I’m not sure I really want her to know about it. I can’t say whether this is a story I actually want to tell.

The noise had retreated since the first time but returned again, intermittently and then often. It became possible to tell one time period from another, only by virtue of when the noise sounded and when it stopped. Sometimes I would fall asleep in silence and wake to the noise, sometimes vice versa. When it came, it winnowed out around the sides of the craft, creaked like floorboards, like straining rope, like something wrapped around our hull and pressing inward. Sometimes I thought about what it might be but more often I didn’t.

Once, I came through to the main deck to find Matteo with his cheek against the window, not looking outward, staring at the floor. When I asked him what he was doing he told me he’d been trying to get cool, gestured to the cheek not touching the window as if inviting me to touch. “I don’t feel hot,” he said when I asked him, “I just feel weird—you know the feeling right before your leg falls asleep.” There was nothing beyond the window, the way there was always nothing. It made me feel restless, anxious to see something move. This was meant to be a research trip, I wanted to grumble. How are we supposed to conduct research on something we can’t see? The water was directionless in its blackness, moving no visible way. It was difficult, particularly if you looked for too long, to imagine there was water around us at all.

We ate a lot of concentrates, drank purified water. There was more of everything than we had expected; at one point I unearthed a bottle of wine in one of the food lockers, though I stowed it away as soon as I found it. Deceptive, this space, the woman from the Centre had told us when she showed us around, rapping her knuckles against one of the lockers. Designed that way. Space efficiency—you’ll be shocked how much you can stow. She had spoken like that about everything, the way you might try to sell someone a car. The lighting, she said, was designed to enhance vitamin D metabolization. The ceilings, she said, were designed to give the greatest possible illusion of space. Unsinkable, she said, tapping her toe against the bulkhead and then correcting herself. I mean, not unsinkable, obviously.

Time passed. However little happened to hurry it along, it still passed. Days, weeks, I couldn’t tell you. We ate and slept and tried the comms panel. Jelka and I did jumping jacks in the rear chamber, kicked our knees up to our chests to get the blood flowing, lay down and bicycled our legs in the air. It felt important, in a dull way, to remain active, important to tidy away after eating, important to remain awake until it became absolutely necessary to sleep again. Sometimes, Matteo would draw a great grid of dots on a piece of paper and convince one of us to play Dots and Boxes. Sometimes, Jelka would sit with her legs up on one of the benches and stare into space for what felt like hours at a stretch. It’s insane, of course, that we did so little, insane how little it occurred to us to do. Certainly we were trapped, but in retrospect it’s still hard to imagine the kind of lethargy that seemed to grip us. I can’t explain it, except to say that inaction felt obvious, a decision already made by someone else. The basic truth of the situation occurred to me only as if shouted across some great distance and barely heard. I felt afraid, of course—but, beneath this, still in some sense quietly removed. I suppose a body has to find a way to cope with panic. I don’t know how this works. Panic, as I’ve said, is a waste of oxygen.

I thought about Miri, sometimes. Tried not to because of the very particular ache it summoned and then did it anyway. I thought about Miri describing the type of cat she’d like to adopt, about Miri brushing her hand over my hair in the way she often did. When I couldn’t think about Miri anymore, I gave up and thought instead about the imprints of deliquesced jellyfish, the brown and pink remainders—only imprints—fading to nothing on a white expanse of shore.





MIRI


Years ago, when we were still new, Leah took me out to a bar and then to another bar and then to a late-night movie where we bought popcorn and sat together in the dark. The movie was a ’60s thriller: the mutineering crew of a tramp steamer set adrift on a sea of carnivorous seaweed, beset by time-traveling Spanish conquistadors, giant hermit crabs, octopuses, and sharks. Every time another obviously puppeteered monster or oversize plastic snail appeared on-screen, we both shrieked with laughter. I can’t believe you’ve never seen this movie, Leah hissed, it’s so terrible. I used to watch it with my dad. In the dark, I kissed her and she tasted like popcorn. I think you’re perfect, I said, like an idiot, and she was kind and let me pretend I hadn’t said it.

We came back out into the open air around midnight and Leah gave me her coat, pulled me close by the lapels, and then interrupted herself with a laugh before she could kiss me. People do this in movies, she said, but now I just feel daft. A dribble of fine gold chain around her neck, the chilly flush at the tips of her ears. You know, she said, with the portentousness of the evening’s many whiskeys, I love going into the cinema when it’s still light and then coming out in the dark. Makes me think about the way a city is never the same. I mean, the way everything changes. Every night, every minute, it’s over and things will never be the same again. I put my hands over her hands, still fisted in the lapels of the coat she had given me, and made her pull me forward. That makes no sense, I told her, and she kissed me in the street.