Our Wives Under the Sea (3)

It’s hard to describe the smell of a submarine when it goes under. Hard to pin down—something like metal and hot grease and something like lack of oxygen, ammonia, the smell of all but what’s necessary filtered away. Twenty minutes before we lost contact, Jelka told me she thought she smelled meat, which was strange, because I’d been thinking the same thing—a hot unsavory waft like something cooked. I remember I looked to my own fingers, half expected to find them roasting, bent to observe the skin on my shins, on my knees, on my ankles. There was nothing, of course, and no reason at all for the smell that seemed to hit us both with such force. When Jelka repeated her claim to Matteo, he told her to hold her nose if she was so bothered and I didn’t say anything to back her up.

At first it was only the comms panel, the crackle of contact from the surface cutting out and not returning. I remember Matteo frowned and asked me to try to find a signal while he dealt with the main controls. I held down the transmission button and chanted nonsense into the radio, expecting the Centre to come back online any second and ask me what I was on about. Ten minutes later, when the craft’s whole system went off-line, it would occur to me that the comms hadn’t faded like a wavering signal so much as been switched off, though by that time we all had more pressing things to deal with.





MIRI


She’s been home three weeks and I’m mostly used to everything. In the mornings, I eat and she doesn’t and then I answer emails for half an hour and ignore her wandering back and forth with wads of toilet paper wedged along her gumline to absorb the blood. I write grant applications for nonprofit organizations for a living, and I’ve always worked from home, which never bothered me particularly until she went away and forced me into closer proximity with myself. Now that she’s back—now I’m used to her being back—I can’t decide whether to register her presence as relief or invasion. I make heavy weather over glasses left half-empty on windowsills, over the bin not being taken out. I have near-constant mouth ulcers and complain about unhoovered floors. At night, I dream I grit my teeth so hard that they break off like book matches.

The people who live above us keep the TV on at all times. Even when I know they’re both out, at work or at the movies, the noise bleeds through the ceiling—downward drip of talk, of title music, spilling down the wall like the damp that speckles into mold around the chimney breast.

Sometimes, if I listen very closely (sometimes, if I stand on a chair), I can make out the show that’s playing upstairs and tune our television to the same channel, which negates the irritation a little. They seem to favor game shows and programs about people tasked with falling in love with each other in exotic locations for money. I enjoy these, too, I suppose, enjoy their fabulism, the lunar tones of teeth. Contestants on a show I often watch in tandem with the neighbors have to stare into a stranger’s eyes for four minutes, uninterrupted, as studies have apparently shown this is the amount of time it takes to fall in love. This often seems to work, at least for the duration of the episode, though once a male contestant threw his chair back after two minutes and walked off the set, later stating that something he saw in his partner had unnerved him. I’m less fond of nature documentaries and tend not to bother matching my channel to the neighbors’ when they switch these on. One evening, I fell asleep on the sofa and woke to the unusually clear sound of a voice narrating a program on California pitcher plants from the floor above me: Foraging insects are attracted to the cavity—or mouth—formed by the cupping of the leaf and are hastened down into the trap by the slippery rim kept moist by naturally occurring nectar. Once caught, the insect is drowned in the plant’s digestive juices and gradually dissolved. This was some months after Leah was first absent, when the phone calls from the Centre were still semiregular—the kindish, professional-sounding voices telling me they were doing all they could. I remember I lay on the sofa and listened to the show for several minutes before reaching for the remote and aiming it at the ceiling.

Leah used to go up there sometimes, knock on the door late at night, and ask them to turn it down. They were nice, she would tell me when she came back, brushing her hands together to indicate a job well done. Very apologetic about it, I like them. They left the TV on at night to keep the cat company, they’d turn it down, no harm no foul. The noise from the television never altered but I don’t think Leah even particularly minded this. Going up there seemed, to her, to be almost the whole point of the exercise, telling the neighbors to turn it down more important than the turning down itself. After she went away, I quickly became grateful for a noise I had previously regarded as irritating. Sunday mornings I would stand on the kitchen table and listen to soap opera music, to upbeat voices selling nasal sprays and Lyle’s Golden Syrup and nonstick Teflon pans.

“I can’t stand this,” Leah says suddenly. She’s been sitting in the corner of the room for upward of an hour, chewing on the collar of her jumper in an odd, reflexive gesture, like one might gnaw at a hangnail. I ask her what she means and she doesn’t say anything, only gesturing upward as the noise from the neighbors’ television fades from the closing credits of a program to a splash of advert music in a frantic major key. I go upstairs and hammer on the door, but the neighbors don’t answer, the noise of the television oddly quieter in the corridor than it seems in the flat below. It occurs to me that I have never actually laid eyes on the neighbors, that the whole time we’ve lived where we live I’ve taken their presence as a given on the basis of evidence that is, at best, circumstantial: the footsteps and the muffled music, scrape of furniture being moved around at night. I never asked Leah a single thing about the neighbors, never once after any of the times she went up to ask them to turn it down. Is that odd? I start to wonder to myself and then disregard the question. It barely matters, after all, since my issue is not so much with my neighbors as it is with their TV.