Our Wives Under the Sea (42)

Now, in the kitchen, I appear to have made myself another cup of tea despite having had one at the café. Leah’s sound machine is making a strange, juddering noise, as though something has come loose in its inner machinery and is causing the usual noise to sound arrhythmic and somehow off-center. I stand with my back to the counter and sip at the tea I do not want and try to play back everything Juna said to me. I didn’t want to tell you over the phone, she said several times, I thought seeing your face would make it easier. Or maybe your seeing my face would make it easier, I don’t know. Her sister was dead, she told me, and the Centre had at first given her contradictory information, then seemed to start screening her calls, then appeared to close up shop altogether. She had been forced to find things out for herself, she told me, had things she needed to show me. I cut her off when I should have allowed her to talk for longer and she told me she understood. I didn’t want you to be alone, trite as that sounds, she said. We can talk again, if you would like to.

I think about all of this now with a peculiarly glassy sensation, as though I might raise my hand to my face and find it made of some hardened material, as though my thoughts might turn out to be equally so. I am thinking about all of this when the sound machine abruptly shuts off in the next room and Leah makes a sound halfway between a cry and loud exhalation and I realize she is standing in the doorway to the hall, naked and still wet, and that one of her eyes is no longer an eye but a strange, semisolid globe that on closer inspection appears to be made up of pure water. When it bursts, it falls down her face like a yolk escaping a white and I put a hand over my mouth and nose as though anticipating a smell.





Hadal Zone





LEAH


I don’t know how long the next bit took, so let’s call it three days. I woke to Saint Brendan at the foot of my bunk—not on the floor but actually in among the covers. When I sat up to ask Jelka why she had done this, I found she was not in the rear chamber with me and shortly afterward Matteo came through from the main deck to say that she was not there either. We found her in the wash stall, under the showerhead in her clothes with her face turned upward, mouth open to drink the water. “What are you doing,” Matteo asked her, in a voice that did not seem to expect a response.

I brought her out of the wash stall and sat her on my bunk in her wet clothes. She seemed sharp beneath my hands. I wanted to push her hair around, pull it away from her face. What are you doing, I wanted to ask her.

“I’m tired of hearing it,” she said to me then, grasped my wrist and looked at me the way people do when they’re drunk and about to tell you a secret. (Miri leaning toward me across the table in a bar—our third or fourth date—a sweet slur, I’ve been thinking about you, a bit. I bite the tips of my fingers and I think about you.) “I’m tired of hearing it,” Jelka said, “and I don’t hear it so badly when I’m in there.”

I let her hold my wrist and look at me as if she was willing me to understand. “You know what I mean, don’t you?” she said. “I know you’d have to hear it, a little bit—if you tried. The big sound, like the ocean, that’s just a distraction. There’s something else, if you listen properly, if you try—”

And then Matteo ruined everything by pushing me aside and slapping her right across the face—and that was the first day.

The second day was the second day because at some point I woke up to it. I jogged several laps around the rear chamber the way I had taken to doing to prevent my legs from shaking when I stood up too fast. It was back by then, the whaling sound, the familiar curling, ooming, and I thought about what Jelka had said about it being a distraction from something else. I did not listen, closed my eyes, and jogged in circles around the space I knew by heart. I ate something from the chest freezer, I thought about Miri, and I went through to the main deck, where I found Matteo sitting in his circle of torches and a panel on one of the main control boards smashed across its center, three buttons cracked, as though they had been hit with some force. One of the torches in Matteo’s circle, I noticed, was also cracked across its reflector, but I found I was too tired to comment on any of this, so I only sat with my back against the comms panel and looked toward the window until he started to speak.

“Did you ever think that maybe this is just a dead part,” he said, after a moment. “I mean, not that we’re not in the ocean but that we’ve somehow fallen down into some part of it that died however many years ago and now there’s nothing here at all.”

I didn’t look at him, kept my eyes trained on the window. (Miri placing her hands on either side of my face to shake me when I drifted away from the thread of a conversation. Are you there? Or is this person a replicant?)

“When I went ice fishing with my dad,” Matteo said, holding up his hand with its missing fingers as if to remind me, “it was so still and bleak—temperatures below freezing, of course—but you still knew there was life down there, just under the ice. When you cut a hole, baited the hook, you were already anticipating the frenzy, the thing below that was ready to fight you when you tried to pull it up. This doesn’t feel like that,” he said, and I wanted to tell him that I disagreed, that I felt certain we were still somewhere where something else existed alongside us, that there had to be something here that we simply couldn’t see. I felt, as I often did, an agony at the emptiness, of wanting to see where we were and assess it for myself, but I didn’t know how to say that without sounding like Jelka. I stared out of the window, willing something to blink back at me, and then I closed my eyes and thought about the book about the Trieste and the Challenger Deep that I had borrowed so often from my father: its turquoise cover, talismanic in the fact that it was the same color as my lunch box, the same color as the toothpaste my mother used, the same color as the single fleck in my father’s right eye.