Our Wives Under the Sea (4)

I’m only gone a total of six minutes but by the time I get back, Leah has moved from the corner of the living room and is locked in the bathroom, running both taps. This isn’t entirely unusual. Quite often these days I will wake at odd hours and hear the bathtub being filled. Four A.M., gray twitch of morning in the sky about the telephone wires and water running in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the room where the washer-dryer sits. More than once, I have come in to find Leah sitting on the edge of the bathtub, staring into the water with the fixed expression of someone barely awake. She is, as I often think at these moments, deliberating whether or not to get in, though at other times I interpret her expression as something more uneasy—the look of a person who has let their gaze drop too deep and now can’t seem to retrieve it.

Standing outside the bathroom, I think of knocking, think of asking her to let me in. I imagine I can hear the water spilling down across the floor, pooling thick across the lavender linoleum. She has, it appears, taken the electric box she uses to sleep into the bathroom, the one that arrived in the post, no return address—a parting gift from the Centre—along with a pair of decompression socks and a book of aphorisms bound in PVC. I hear her turn it on, hear the shiver of sound it produces—swell and oom of something spilling, something seething, judder and groan of something building to a roar.



* * *



A long time ago, we met. I think that’s important—the fact of a meeting, the fact I remember a sense of before. Meeting implies a point before knowing, a point before Leah and I became this fused, inextricable thing. We used to make a game of remembering, elbowing each other about it: d’you remember the time I sent flowers when you were living in another city, d’you remember teaching me to swim, d’you remember the time we went out for my birthday and you spilled water all over the table and the waiter looked at us like we’d crawled from a hole in the ground. Every cou ple, I think, enjoys its own mythology, recollections like note cards to guide you around an exhibition: Fig. A. Portrait of the couple dancing at a colleague’s Catholic wedding. Fig. B. Charcoal sketch of the couple fighting over who said what at a cokey dinner with acquaintances (note fine lines beneath completed sketch, indicating places where the artist has repeatedly erased and redrawn). Things are easy enough to recall, in isolation. Scenes appear complete unto themselves: the time we went to the fancy dress party, the time someone stole my wallet in a club, the time our train carriage got stuck underground for an hour and forty-five minutes and Leah kept hold of my hand until we started to move. You can wander the exhibition this way, picking favorites, placing dots by the frames of the pictures you most want to keep. Trickier is the task of pulling the pictures together, of connecting the points in a way that makes tangible sense. I remember the first time we kissed, the first time we slept together, the first time she told me she’d once seen her father appear at the foot of her bed as a ghost. I remember fucking—or the abstract sense of fucking—the fact of doing it often and cheerfully, though with little recollection of one time over the next. I remember the first time she went away, the first time I traveled to see her off. I remember the last time—the fact that she was supposed to be gone for three weeks and disappeared for six months, the fact that none of us knew what had happened, the way the Centre called several times to give out contradictory information before ceasing to call at all. All of this is easy enough, at close range—bright flashes, a relationship borne out by evidence, the bits and pieces that make it a fact. What is harder is stepping back far enough to consider us in the altogether, not the series of pictures but the whole that those pictures represent. I don’t particularly like to do this. Stepping back too far makes me dizzy—my memory, like something punched, reeling about with its hands clapped over its face. It is easier, I think, to consider the fact of us in its many disparate pieces, as opposed to one vast and intractable thing. Easier, I think, to claw through the scatter of us in the hopes of retrieving something, of pulling some singular thing from the debris and holding it up to the light.

So in pieces, then: a long time ago, we met.





LEAH


Panic is a misuse of oxygen. The first thing anyone learns in diving is how to breathe. When the console lights went off, I held my breath for a full sixty seconds, considered the wet wing-shapes of my lungs. There is a practice in Norse mythology that involves the severing of the ribs from the spinal column and the lungs being drawn from the back, extracted in such a manner that the victim is supposedly still able to breathe. Variously described as a method of torture and a means of human sacrifice, there is some debate as to whether this was ever actually performed outside of literature. It would be impossible, of course, to do so with the victim still alive—the lungs wouldn’t function outside of the body, and even if they did, the victim would most likely go into shock and stop breathing on their own. Even so, one can think of the lungs sometimes and believe it. Picture their wide, whaling chambers, the bald imperative of all they are made to contain. I don’t know why I’m mentioning this, really, except that this is what I thought about in the sixty seconds between the system dying and the next breath I was able to take. I thought about my lungs being wrenched through my back and still swelling, contracting, thought of water spilling into the space where my rib cage had been and my lungs going on regardless.

At this point, I should note, we were still following protocol, at least to some degree. It is actually very rare for a submarine to sink, but there are guidelines in place for this eventuality as there are for all things, the most vital of which is to send a distress call without delay. The earlier you can do this (and the closer to the surface you are when you do), the more likely it is that a coastguard or passing vessel will pick up the signal and realize that something is wrong. The problem, of course, is that sending a distress call relies on your system being online, which ours was not. I remember Matteo at the comms panel, moving his hands over the console for a moment and then looking at me. I remember, too, the disquieting lack of electric light—the switches dull—the way our craft seemed suddenly less a piece of precision-tooled engineering and more a swiftly sinking box. Matteo was the one who checked the engines, the junction boxes, the pressure gauges. “There’s nothing wrong,” he said. “It should all be working fine.”