Our Wives Under the Sea (36)

“You, too?” Matteo said, and I turned and found him standing in the doorway from the rear chamber, silhouetted wide and rolling his knuckles down along the side of his face.

“I wasn’t here,” I said, hearing the illogic of what I had said a moment after I said it, though Matteo only nodded, crossing to sit at the comms panel and look at me baldly.

“I know, buddy,” he said, and then, “d’you ever think about how we had a plan—that there were things we were supposed to be doing down here?”

I blinked at him, tried to pull to the fore of my mind an image of the Centre, the research project we had prepped for, the concept of something intended and carried out. I looked back toward the main console, the dim lights and the small carved insignia on the top of the panel: the dark squinting eye etched in metal. Matteo watched me for several seconds before leaning back in his chair and nodding.

“I know, it bothers me, too. The way I don’t think.”

I tried to shake my head, to tell him that wasn’t what was happening. Phantom fingers at the base of my skull, moving downward: sunken thoughts. Who had said that? I remembered, but it took me longer than it should have done to dredge the name from the bottom of my mind.





MIRI


Things continue. This is something I have always found: unfortunately, things go on.

Leah bathes for approximately sixty percent of the day, though this is swiftly becoming something more like seventy. I go out and come back again, I do my work and fail to do my work and watch movies that I can’t follow and that fail to drown out the noise of the neighbors’ TV. When Leah is out of the bath, I try to make her eat, though this is largely unsuccessful. Her appetite, already poor, seems to be dwindling further. I bring her salt dissolved in beakers of water, and this seems to stave off the hard recurring pulse in her neck and shoulders that always sees her back in the bath again before much time has passed. For how little she eats, she doesn’t seem to be bearing up too badly, though “badly” is a relative term these days. There is something hanging over us that I seem to feel most clearly in the mornings, before the haze of my new routine has descended, before I have seen her into the bath and out of it, before I have lifted her arms to soap as gently as possible at the silvering translucent skin underneath.

Sometimes, when I look in the mirror that has hung in the hall since we moved in, I think I see myself not where I am but back in my mother’s house, though this is simply a trick of the light. I don’t feel particularly tired, but nor do I feel particularly anything. Even my bad tooth has stopped giving me grief.

The therapist contacts me to ask about a check she received from the Centre to cover the sessions we have attended so far. It bounced, she says and asks if I have a secondary method of payment. She tells me that she won’t be able to continue until we send her the money but suggests that if we need to contact her in an emergency, something could probably be worked out. I call the Centre once I have managed to get her off the phone, though they seem once again to have gone off-grid. The phone no longer clicks onto an automated message after a certain number of rings; now it simply rings on and on until I set the receiver back down.

For the first time since Leah returned, I go to search for the site run by the wives of fictional spacemen, but it has been over three months and I find I cannot recall the address. I google the Centre instead and find that the website I was expecting is likewise not there, only a 404 error message and a suggestion that I check the address before trying again. I shut my laptop and move to make a cup of tea. It occurs to me that I ought to just try visiting the Centre. I’ve been only once before—picked Leah up on her return—but now I have misplaced the address. I spend an hour going through papers in vain hopes of finding it and then give up. What, after all, am I hoping to say if I get there: Can you fix her? Can you give her back again, but better? I imagine ordering a cab and simply asking it to drive around until it comes upon somewhere I recognize. Later on, I will move through the flat, feeling suddenly terrified that each room might cease to exist the moment I leave it. The world is folding over like a book whose past pages I cannot access. I dial the Centre and listen to the phone ring out.

One afternoon, I am subject to a sudden attack of motivation and insist that Leah come with me on a walk. She doesn’t want to go, but she has been in the bath all day and the drain is clogged with the scum of whatever it is she leaves behind, so I lay out clothes for her and tell her it will help. She moves oddly now, a certain keel to the left, as though a piece of her is somehow unsupported. I wrap her up and tell her she’ll enjoy it.

The year has turned, the days growing shorter, a fact I seem almost entirely to have missed. I take Leah’s arm and she doesn’t resist me, allows me to tow her up the hill toward a place we used to walk. There is a wide stretch of common land between the circle of flats and houses that border ours, grass uninterrupted by the canals that ring so much of the city. We used to walk here a lot when we first moved, Leah desperate for some space and some air between trips while I was simply happy to accompany her. Look at that, she would say, pointing at nothing—a child flying a kite in the shape of a kestrel, a woman loudly breaking up with a man on a bench by the road. Today, she is quiet, goes where I lead her until suddenly seeming to become unable, dragging downward on my arm in a slow-motion movement that it takes me too long to realize is a fall. She goes down where she is on the grass and I don’t know what to do or how to get her back to the flat again. A woman, passing by with a dachshund wrapped up in a fuchsia jacket, pauses to ask if my friend is all right and I tell her yes without knowing what I’m saying, let her go without knowing how to ask for her help. Leah lies on the grass where she has fallen, curved into herself like a conch, like something from which a creature might emerge.