Our Wives Under the Sea (39)

* * *



Jelka on the main deck, with her cheek against the window. Jelka in the rear chamber, leaning down toward the hatch. Matteo pulling her away, at first with concern but increasingly with something more like impatience. “You’re giving me the creeps,” he said.

The shower running in the wash stall and no one using it. I turned it off, told them to be more careful, though both claimed not to have left it on.

The noise sometimes waking me, sometimes coming when I was already awake. I held my hands before my face and counted fingers, recollected dreams I’d had at seventeen, of webbing growing down past the knuckle and gill slits in my neck.

Jelka standing with her back to me, looking out toward the dark. The main deck lit by torches lined up along the central console.

The feeling in my legs after I fell asleep and woke again—like pins and needles.

Matteo flinging a plate against the wall and then apologizing for it.

“Let’s talk about this, reasonably,” I said, then found myself unable to continue.

Jelka’s figure of Saint Brendan turning up in strange places: in the shower tray, in the chest fridge, standing guard beneath my bunk. “I hate that fucking thing,” Matteo said, “feels like it’s watching me.”

I ate something from the stores and wondered how much could possibly be left, wondered why it hadn’t started running out yet.

I went into my pack and found the postcard Miri had bought me, the image of a tangerine-colored octopus. PAMELA—GIANT PACIFIC OCTOPUS—ESTIMATED AGE BETWEEN 3 AND 4 YEARS OLD.

“Who are you again?” Matteo said, when I came to join him at the table. “Only kidding,” he said, but then asked me why it was we were here.

“I won’t speak to you,” Jelka’s voice in the dark, in her bunk with the blanket thrown up over her head. “This isn’t me speaking to you now.”

I sat on the main deck and thought again about Sylvia Earle, about something she had said in an article I’d cut out and treasured. Our understanding of the universe, so she said, comes from the ocean: It has taught us that life exists everywhere, even in the greatest depths; that most of life is in the oceans; and that oceans govern climate. Perhaps because we’re so terrestrialy biased, air-breathing creatures that we are, it has taken us until now to realize that everything we care about is anchored in the ocean. I had my back to the window as I thought this and found myself suddenly unable to bear the oppressive blank of space beyond the glass. Where are you all, I wanted to scream, overcome with a sudden vivid grief at the thought of this nothing—no strange deep-ocean creatures, no bioluminescence, no life. Come on, I found myself thinking, give.

I chewed my tongue to keep from talking and listened to the noise outside the craft.

Matteo dragged Jelka up by her arm, up and away from the hatch where she had been crouching. “I’m sick of this,” he said, and she pulled her arm away too hard and overbalanced, grabbed the air and fell. “I can’t take any more of this fucking behavior,” he snapped and reeled back as if to kick her, and I pushed myself between them, pushed him away, and he pushed me back and I thought help, once, sharply, and wanted Miri even though she was smaller than me.

“I’m sorry,” he said to me later, holding his frostbitten hand out to take my elbow, passing his other hand over his face. “I’m sorry, buddy, I’m so fucking sorry, I don’t know what’s going on.” I shook my head at him, wanted to hug him but couldn’t quite remember how. Jelka was back where she had been, by the hatch with her head pressed downward, and it seemed easy enough to imagine that nothing had happened at all.



* * *



There’s a point between the sea and the air that is both and also not quite either. Does that make sense? I’m talking about the point at the very top of the ocean that is constantly evaporating and condensing, where water yearns toward air and air yearns toward water. I think about this sometimes, that middle place, the struggle of one thing twisting into another and back again.

I was asleep, which is why I missed what happened. I woke to Jelka screaming and Matteo seeming both to be pushing her up and pushing her away from him. He told her she was fucking crazy, repeated it and repeated it and she fell down and started sobbing and I wasn’t sure what was going on, so couldn’t really do anything except push myself between them again and hope things would start to make sense. Matteo wouldn’t explain, only told me he couldn’t be where he was and crashed away to the main deck, leaving me with Jelka. I asked her what had happened but she refused to speak to me, remaining where she was on the floor of the rear chamber, pressing her head down toward the escape hatch, grinding her forehead into the metal. I sat down beside her and I thought about everything I had hoped to do, the things I had wanted to study and see and the trappedness of everything, the darkness, the lack. This isn’t the ocean, I thought to myself, once and very clearly, I just wanted to see the ocean, and then for a long time after that I thought nothing because I realized it would be easier.

“I was trying to make him listen,” Jelka said, after a very long time of saying nothing, and I nodded, as though this was what I had expected her to say. “I know I shouldn’t be listening,” she said, “I know I’m not supposed to respond, but I can’t stop it now. I hear it all the time. I thought if he would listen with me, it would make it easier. Do you hear it, Leah? The voice—whatever it is—do you hear it?”