Our Wives Under the Sea (48)

I’m not sure what time it is when I call Juna, though she picks up right away. I have a car, she tells me after I’ve explained, don’t apologize, I barely sleep anymore as it is. When I’ve hung up, I take every towel we have and wet them in the bathroom sink, one by one, then pour the rest of the table salt over each and allow it to soak into the fabric.





LEAH


I wasn’t aware of the power returning, only that when it did we were on the main deck and that suddenly the light was not what it had been seconds previously. The overheads blinked back on, as casual as anything at all, along with the beams from the front of the craft, and at once we saw the darkness for what it was.

“Jesus Christ,” said Matteo and then covered his mouth. “I mean—” He seemed frozen, looked toward the control panel without moving his neck, like a person being stalked by a jungle creature and desperate to avoid being seen. “Don’t move,” he said. “I don’t know why. It might go off again. The power. It might notice we’re still here.”

I looked at him, noticed the tendons in his neck pulled taut, straining to keep his head from swiveling. “That’s ridiculous, isn’t it,” he said, and then, “Jesus Christ,” again.

“Fuck.” My voice felt too big in my mouth, like I was trying to swallow something without first chewing sufficiently.

The lights along the control panel switches glowed a faint electric yellow, just the way they were supposed to do. Matteo’s circle of torches, still upright as they were, seemed dimmed in the sudden brightness of the whole compartment. I could hear a faint whirring sound—the vibrations of a craft in order, of a working mechanism rattling suddenly to life.

Beside me, in the unaccustomed light, Matteo was sweating.

“This is insane,” he said, and then, “we can go. If it works, we can surface. We could do it now.”

He flicked his eyes, once again, toward the main panel; he remained frozen in place, as if convinced that a single move could trip a wire that would throw us back into darkness. “Jesus Christ,” he said again, and I felt quite certain he was about to cry. “Are they allowing us to do this? Is this what those fucks want? Just to send us down and bring us back up again? Are they doing this or is something else doing this? What if it works?”

I remember I looked at him then and I thought, with a clarity I hadn’t experienced in ages, that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. I remember I looked at him then and I thought Not yet, just once, and then I looked toward the windows in the spill of the exterior lights. I have always felt there is something knowable about the sea, something within comprehension, and I knew that I couldn’t allow the opposite to be true. We couldn’t—and I felt this with a force like a taste, like copper washed up against the backs of my teeth—we couldn’t go until I had seen it, until we had seen some vestige of what we had come down to see. Not yet, I thought to myself, once more and with a sort of ridiculous earnestness I can’t defend, my body slack around me, everything suddenly superfluous but the desire to see what I needed to see.

“We will,” I said then and thought about Miri once with a sharp stabbing pain, and Matteo looked at me.

“Buddy—”

“I promise you,” and I was moving toward the main panel, my body little enough my own at this point that I barely felt aware of it. “I promise you we will before the power goes.”

And Matteo was moving now, breaking out of his temporary freeze to come toward me. “Buddy, please,” he said, and his hand moved across the outer edge of the border made by the torch circle to take hold of my arm. “We can go,” he said, and I looked at his fingers, the blistered black skin that bubbled up toward the nails and the blank space toward the outermost point of the fist where nothing remained. I looked at his fingers and I said, “But you have to understand this, don’t you? When you went ice fishing with your dad and you knew what was happening and you ignored it. When you told me you said you didn’t want to ruin it, you didn’t want to go just yet.”

He held on to my arm, worked his mouth without producing a sound. Out of the silence there rose once again the voice I knew Jelka had been hearing, the voice I hadn’t let her explain.

“I promise you,” I said again. “We won’t lose power. I promise. I just want to know,” I said, without really meaning to say this part aloud, “I just want to know that it wasn’t for nothing. I just want to know what’s here.”

He didn’t release his grip on my arm, though he allowed me to move one step toward the panel and then another, his fingers loosening in the manner of someone dazed or briefly distracted, his face now turned toward the glass.

“I don’t see anything different,” he said, “even with the lights on. It doesn’t look like anywhere at all.”

I didn’t follow his gaze, thought instead about the slow deep salt of the ocean and all I knew about it, thought instead about the lights of the craft and moving away from where we were into something new.

“It’ll be OK,” I said, and tugged my wrist gently away from his grasp. He appeared to let me go for a moment before blinking, grabbing once again for my arm and pulling it back as his eyes moved down from the windows and back to me.

“No—” he said, his voice falling downward from his mouth like something dropped. He tightened his grip on my arm, pulled me back with a force that should have been painful but left me strangely blank. “We’re going to—” he started and paused again, his jaw working, raised his other hand in a gesture that might have meant anything.