Our Wives Under the Sea (2)
“I’m still on hold,” I say, for no reason really other than to have said it. She looks at me, slow blink. In case you were wondering, I think of adding and don’t.
At around six this morning, Leah woke and immediately had a nosebleed. I’ve been sleeping in the room across the hall and so didn’t actually see this but I’ve grown accustomed to her patterns, even at this state of half remove. I’d been ready for it, had actually woken at six fifteen, in time to pass her a flannel in the bathroom, run the taps, and tell her not to put her head back. You could set your watch to it these days—red mouth in the morning, red chin, red spill into the sink.
She says, when she says anything, that it’s something to do with the pressure, the sudden lack thereof. Her blood retains no sense of the boundaries it once recognized and so now just flows wherever it wants. Sometimes she bleeds from the teeth, or rather, not from the teeth but from the gums around the teeth, which amounts to the same thing when you’re looking at her. In the days immediately following her return, blood would rise unheeded through her pores, so that sometimes I’d come in and find her pincushioned, dotted red, as if pricked with needles. Iron maiden, she’d said the first time and tried to laugh—strained sound, like the wringing out of something wet.
I found the whole thing terrifying for the first few days; panicked when she bled, jammed my shoes on and demanded she let me take her to A&E. Only by degrees did I realize she had been led to expect this, or at least to expect something similar. She pushed my hands from her face in a manner that seemed almost practiced and told me it wasn’t a problem. You can’t go out in those anyway, Miri, she said, looking down at the shoes I’d forced on without looking, they don’t match.
On more than one occasion, I begged her to let me help her and met only resistance. You don’t have to worry, she would say, and then go on bleeding, and the obviousness of the problem combined with the refusal of help left me at first frustrated and subsequently rather resentful. It went on too long and too helplessly. The way that anyone who sneezes more than four times abruptly loses the sympathy of an audience, so it was with me and Leah. Can’t you stop it, I’d think about asking her, you’re ruining the sheets. Some mornings, I’d want to accuse her of doing it on purpose and then I’d look away, set my mouth into another shape, and pour the coffee, think about going for a run.
In the bathroom, just this morning, I passed her the flannel and watched her smear her hands with Ivory soap. My mother used to say that washing your face with soap was as bad as leaving it dirty, something about harsh chemicals, the stripping down of natural oils. Everything with my mother was always harsh chemicals—she filled a binder with clippings on the cancer risks of various meat products, sent me books on UV rays and home invasions, a pamphlet on how to build a fire ladder out of sheets.
Having washed her face, Leah stepped back from the sink. She patted her face with the backs of her hands, then the palms, then abruptly curled one finger into the lid beneath her left eye, then the right, pulling down to inspect the oily sockets of her eyeballs. In the mirror, her skin had the look of something dredged from water. The yellow eyes of someone drowned, of someone found floating on her back. Be all right, she said, be all right in a minute.
Now, in the kitchen: a jumbling noise on the phone. A sudden click and another robotic voice, slightly different from the one that has been repeating that my call is important, comes on the line to demand that I enter Leah’s personnel number, followed by her rank number, transfer number, and the statement number she should have received from the Centre on final demob. The voice goes on to explain that if I fail to enter these numbers in the exact order required, I will be cut off. I do not, as I have been attempting to get through and explain, have Leah’s personnel number—the whole purpose of my calling the Centre has been to try to get hold of it. I enter all the details required, aside from the personnel number, at which point a third recorded voice comes on the line and proceeds to scold me in a tight robotic jabber, noting as a helpful afterthought that my call will now be terminated.
LEAH
Did you know that until very recently, more people had been to the moon than had dived beyond depths of six thousand meters? I think about this often—the inhospitableness of certain places. A footprint, once left on the surface of the moon, might in theory remain as it is almost indefinitely. Uneroded by atmosphere, by wind or by rain, any mark made up there could quite easily last for several centuries. The ocean is different, the ocean covers its tracks.
When a submarine descends, a number of things have to happen in a fairly short span of time. Buoyancy is entirely dictated by water pushing up against an object with a force proportional to the weight of the water that object has displaced. So, when a submarine sits at the surface, its ballast tanks are filled with air, rendering its overall density less than that of the surrounding water (and thereby displacing less of it). In order to sink, those ballast tanks have to be filled with water, which is sucked into the vessel by electric pumps as the air is simultaneously forced out. It’s a curious act of surrender, when you think about it, the act of going under. To drop below the surface is still to sink, however intentionally—a simple matter of taking on water, just as drowning only requires you to open your mouth.
Miri used to call these my sunken thoughts, tapping on the base of my skull with the flat of her hand when I grew quiet, frowning at some thought I was chasing in circles. How’d they get so far down in there? she’d say. Next thing you know they’ll be halfway down your neck. When she did this, I would often catch her palm and keep it there, take her other hand and hold it to my temple, as though surrendering the responsibility of keeping my head in one piece.