Our Wives Under the Sea (40)

She was looking at me now, sitting up and gripping my arm, and I could see the shape of her jawbone, like something I could remove from the rest of her skull with only a minimum of effort.

“I don’t,” I told her, helplessly, “because there’s nothing to hear.”

Much later, I left Jelka in her bunk and went through to the main deck, where I found Matteo sitting in a circle of torches. “I read a story once,” he told me, “about a paranormal detective who spent a night in a haunted room, and as long as he was inside this ring he’d created, this ring of protective objects, nothing could get at him.” I asked him if I could come inside the circle and he shook his head at me. “Nothing personal, buddy,” he said and looked like he meant it. “I’d just rather you didn’t, right now.”

The sound was back, the surging and retreating, a whirring, whistling, rending sound that I knew wasn’t all that Jelka heard.

“What do you think it is we’re here for,” Matteo asked me, and I looked at him inside his circle and felt unsure of what to say.

“I don’t think they told us the truth,” he said when I didn’t answer him, and I shrugged and looked toward the windows, the way I often did, listening to the sound as it whaled itself around the craft and trying to imagine what it was Jelka could hear speaking in its place. “I mean,” Matteo said, “we both know this, don’t we? They shipped us off with so much food onboard. The comms went out before the system died, like they switched us off externally. We know all this, we know this.”

I nodded, shrugged again, tried to imagine how I would have felt when I was used to feeling anything. I thought about Pamela, wondered if I would still remember her name if I didn’t have a postcard to remind me. I thought of the upward curl of her arms, the way she boiled up out of the water to reach for me. I thought of the shock of her strength, the first time, the way she had gripped me from right wrist to elbow as one of the keepers pulled at my shoulder and told me I’d just made a friend.

“I feel like we’re waiting for something,” Matteo continued, “or experimenting with something. I don’t feel like this is a research trip. Don’t you think? Feels more like being dropped in a tank at feeding time and waiting for the sharks to come out.”

I nodded, understanding what he was saying but somehow unable to get my mind off the octopus, the tight but forgiving press of a creature strong enough to break my bones and yet choosing not to.

“They said it was a research trip,” said Matteo. “Do you remember that? Because sometimes I feel like I don’t, like I’m forgetting.”

“I don’t think it’s that important,” I said, but didn’t mean that so much as that there were other things, more important things, that I felt in danger of forgetting.

“She’s hearing things that aren’t there,” he said, after a pause. “I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Neither do I,” I said, and after that I went to sleep for a long time on the floor next to Matteo’s circle of torches. I dreamed in pieces, shapes and shards of broken pictures: I dreamed about the octopus, knew her name and then forgot it, and I dreamed about Miri, except her face was different and something was off about the way she moved, on all fours rather than upright, and not toward me but somehow to the side. And I dreamed that it was the ocean after all, that I was in the ocean, but not the ocean as I knew it. I dreamed that it was a different part, something older and deeper, and I dreamed that there were things there with me, in the dark.





MIRI


The woman across from me is tall in a way I’m not used to and worries at the skin of her upper lip so hard that at one point during our conversation she has to pause to press a paper napkin to the center of her mouth.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, “it’s a disgusting habit,” and I nod and hand over my own napkin because I’ve done this to myself so many times before. We’re in the café I often visit with Carmen and I wonder in a way that passes in and out of my mind like a flickering light how long it’s been since I last checked in with Carmen.

“Do people keep trying to bring you coffee?” the woman across from me asks, when she returns from the counter bearing two cups of tea and a slice of depressed-looking apple cake. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s just my experience. When I told people what had happened, at the beginning, everyone just seemed to want to keep me extremely well caffeinated all the time, as if I would want to be particularly awake for all of this, you know?”

Her voice is oddly formal, with an accent I cannot quite place, and it occurs to me that she must look similar to Jelka, except that I cannot for the life of me remember what it was that Jelka looked like. We met once, of course, at the reception the Centre held before they left, but I remember little of her and can only impose the image of this stranger over the top. Her name is Juna, something she has to tell me twice and pronounces with a J that bends into the shape of a Y. She is taller than me, better kept, blue veins forking at her wrists like roots, and she is my age, I think, or slightly older, though various things about her make it difficult to be sure.

“Six extra shots, my friend used to say,” and she is talking to me still, rolling her eyes up in a way that seems at once friendly and impersonal, as if this is a story she would just as happily tell in the office. “He’d bring me these enormous coffees, these buckets of the stuff, and I’d think to myself, Six extra shots and I’ll be on the ceiling. I shouldn’t complain though, I know,” she adds and hitches up one sleeve and then the other with an odd, precise gesture that is not at all interesting except I have never met a person who moves in exactly this way. “Having people be kind to you is so important, but it’s also incredibly irritating. It’s hard to find the balance of what you’re actually able to accept without wanting to hit someone.”