Blue Field by Elise Levine
For D
Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.
—Clarice Lispector (trans. Benjamin Moser)
Part One
1
She hung. Fifty feet beneath the high-noon surface, over glinting beer cans and pouting bass, her breath-exhaust balled upward like starburst—and when her shadow in his black suit and hood bumped her, she tumbled as if through sky. Memory-flash of song, mildew scent of old-dog fur, whoosh down white fathoms. His gloved hand clamped her shoulder and he pressed his mask to hers. Cratered skin floodlit, beard-stubble blue. Eyes flushed. Weeping? She could hardly believe. His other hand hove into view and jiggered the regulator in her mouth. She clenched her jaw and snorted. Fuck. Could he be more in her face?
All she was also pissed at—death of her parents, cancer and a subway bomb within days of each other, boom-boom then a comet tail of grief sparking in their wake, year of parched, thirsty. The recent succession of colourful drinks like cheerleaders’ pompons. An expensive, complicated hair cut. Work and more work and colourless classes her closest friend urged. Lives of the Post-Poets. Meditate-Don’t-Medicate Your Mood. A medical-textbook illustrator who’d never helped anyone she knew personally, when she bit her tongue the blood ran grey—until the Learn to Dive course. Once a week she crouched rabid as a harpy mermaid on the pool floor and found the turquoise underworld stowed her. Protests and non-mandated ordinations and tailspin economies dangled here like glinting spinners she refused. She hunkered in and held her breath despite the instructor’s fog-horned edicts warning of pulmonary embolism. Inky black scrolled through her vision. Behind its scrim she grew a new heart, green—strange new creature worthy of further inquiry, she thought, emboldened by the chlorine ethers, the weightlessness. So she performed drill upon drill and nailed her certification test and, curious enough to bite again, promptly proposed to the dive master. Open-water date?
Suck-bang—his respirations, hers. A pneumatic storm. Suspension of teal fish. He shook his big head after a moment—you win—and let her go, then rolled into ribbons of eelgrass and disappeared. She lazed again among zebra-striped dorsals, ogled canker-lipped perch. Floating particulate glimmered. Suddenly he came at her from above, enormous as an airship. He locked onto her with a shudder and ferried her to the lakebed where she sank in the marl. Where on earth were her legs and arms? Mud spirited away much of her sight. She struggled, goggles knocked. Cold liquid slicked in and a pin pricked open inside her. Gone—mother handing her a small ancient package bandaged white. Pain parcel. Gone the smell of urine and candy, chemo’s whiteout. Selling childhood’s backyard sparrows, old tree with its branches like busted brains. Girl-junk milky and sour. Poof, bottom’s up, cheers.
She let him have it. Spat out her reg and reared her neck back and hissed the air from her lungs. The muck semi-parted and she got her index finger up and crooked it. What the? He removed his own reg and sealed her lips with his. His tongue twisting hers made another question mark. He withdrew and popped her mouthpiece back into place. She gritted her teeth on the silicone, hacked out her lung’s last withheld nugget, drew in fresh breath. Surprised she still could. Surprised by her surprise. And by his bent, black-gloved finger. Well?
2
They checked into a motel room and ripped it for real. After—sticky, cooling—they lay side by side on the floor. Yeah, she drawled. Double that, he said.
Late October, late afternoon. Blue leaked onto the walls from where the curtains refused to fully close. Bruised sheets and carpet—even skin was a blue echo. They rose and shook out their limbs. As if blue were the colour of starving, they foraged the shabby corridor’s vending machine, scarfed candy bars and chips. They made love again, crinkling amid foil wrappers. When it was over she tucked the bedcover beneath her chin. So anyway, she said. What’s your story? Where’d you come from?
He nuzzled his long strange feet against hers. She’d already stolen moments to peruse the pale second toes nearly double the length of his big ones. Now she imagined prodding and prising the elongated proximal phalanxes with her mechanical pencil, imagined her own renewed interest in modelling body parts with her softwares. But he just stuffed his hands beneath his head and pursed his lips. Pitted scars on his face and chest suggested volcanic kid-acne. Who, what hatched him? Story short, he said. I was adopted, grew up happy, the end.
She recalled her mother sporting a happy birthday hat, sundress straps askew. Father’s eyeglasses bristling with reflected cake-candles. She nudged around for the recently familiar feelings—anger, ashes—and drew a blank on which the morning’s wavy motion of the water soon teetered. She gripped the edge of the mattress with one hand. Funny, she managed to say. I’m kind of an orphan as well.
He dislodged the cover and nudged her to his side. You okay? he asked, a blued sweat pooling in tender droplets on his temples.
Soon he was crusty where his penis drowsed against her belly. She got up to pee, flushed. She splashed water in the sink and drew the bathroom curtains apart. Night now. Lit by a single streetlamp, fog foundered in the motel parking lot amid drifts of leaves. She shivered. Pressure in her ears. A drop formed on the faucet and hung like a sac. From the bed, an impatient mattress creak.
Too soon again they packed into his truck and rode out beneath an overcast dawn strung with trances of migrating geese. An hour of dun fields and he pulled over. They were miles still from the nearest checkpoints. Wind gasped pebbles at the truck’s undercarriage and razzed the windshield. He roughed his stubble with his thick-jointed fingers and a predatory beat invaded her head—water-borne bacteria scaling her canals and tympanum, who knew? Infection and appointments and permanent hearing loss.