Our Wives Under the Sea (43)
When I came back through to the rear chamber sometime later, Jelka had once again been in the wash stall and I found her wet and clothed and leaning up against the table, staring at the floor. I didn’t ask her what she was doing, only moved toward the worktop to make a cup of tea. I felt, rather than saw, her reach out for me and dodged her, drew back my elbow and edged toward the sink. At that moment, I felt unable to tolerate the thought of her asking me once again if I heard some noise I couldn’t hear. I feel bad about that now. Of everything, this is the thing that makes me feel worst.
The third day came in two parts, which I will call morning and evening, though there was little enough to differentiate them beyond what will shortly become obvious. I did my jog around the rear chamber and then found something to eat, trying my best to keep my mind along lines that did not seem calculated to hurt it. I had been recollecting a lot of things in Miri’s voice, just recently, my memory throwing up some snippet of conversation and then refusing to fill in the blanks (all Miri, all things she had said in the past that my brain had held on to without any obvious reason: I don’t think that kind of thing necessarily makes a person smarter problem is I think I’ve been trained to think of Catholicism as a sort of winnable game, like a computer game the ubiquity of a straight woman reading an e e cummings poem at a wedding). Jogging kept my mind temporarily clear, and so I did it, sometimes for what seemed to be hours simply running in circles in my bare feet and uniform. My father had always told me it was better to keep busy, that there could always be something to do if I looked for it. Things didn’t crawl from the sea for the very first time, he had joked, for you to pay them back loafing around idle.
I remember a sensation of damp—a wet pressure along the surface of my skin like the imprint of a finger dipped in water. A directionless quality to everything, though nothing moved except me, in circles. At some point, Matteo came through from the main deck, rubbing his eyes and telling me he’d dreamed the comms panel came online while he was sleeping. “They were all there,” he said, and did not offer to explain who he meant. “It came online and they were all still there.” It was at this point that the door to the wash stall opened and Jelka emerged, advancing on him quickly. Once again, she was fully clothed and wet from the shower, and she placed her hands on either side of his head, pushing him back against the table so he yelled.
“I told you to listen,” she said, and sounded extremely measured, all things considered. “I just want you to listen like I told you.”
She was holding his face so tightly that I could see the skin turning white beneath her fingers. He grunted, pushed back against her but seemed unable to dislodge her, bending back against the table as she held on to his head.
“I can’t stop it now,” she said. “It’s all I can hear anymore. I know I’m not supposed to respond but I can’t help it. It’s like there’s something on the inside”—she pressed her thumbs upward into his temples—“like water condensed on the inside of my brain and I can’t wipe it away. Ghosts don’t speak,” she said, again, the way she had before, “but something is speaking to me.”
I don’t remember what Matteo’s face did at that moment; all I remember is her hands and the white of his skin as her fingers crept in toward the corners of his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’ll pray if you want me to.”
She said nothing to this, only paused for a long time before releasing him, looking at him with an expression that could have meant anything but which I took as proof that Matteo had said the right thing.
“Listen,” I said, “why don’t I make us some coffee,” and things must have been all right for a while after that because the next thing I remember, Jelka was asleep in her bunk and Matteo was eating at the table as though nothing had happened.
“It’ll be all right now,” I remember Matteo saying, and I didn’t ask him what he was basing that on, although oddly enough when I went over to Jelka’s bunk sometime later to tuck the bedclothes up around her shoulders, she said the exact same thing. “It’ll be all right now,” she said, and I bent down to pick up her figurine of Saint Brendan from where he had fallen on the floor.
The second half of the day went like this.
I was asleep, not in my bunk but on the main deck, which is why I didn’t see all of it. I woke to a crash and to Matteo yelling, and when I came through to the rear chamber he was beating on the lower hatch leading to the escape trunk—through which, I came to understand, Jelka had just disappeared.
Escape trunks are a feature on most submarines and operate as a fail-safe in medium-depth waters, where the pressure of the ocean outside is intense but should nonetheless still be survivable if a person is able to exit in the correct diving gear. One climbs through an inner door, which is then sealed tightly, before engaging a switch that partially floods this closed-off section without needing to drown the entire craft. As the chamber floods, the air is simultaneously pressurized until it matches the pressure of the ocean against the outer doors, though a bubble of air remains at the top of the chamber to allow the person inside to continue to breathe. Once the pressure in the chamber is equal to the pressure outside, the outer doors can be opened and one can theoretically swim to safety. Of course, this is all predicated on the pressure outside not being such that the doors opening would result in one being instantly crushed.