But perhaps not this just yet, actually. I’m not sure I have the stomach for it.
* * *
The sofa again, and Leah talking the way she does—not at me but at some point to the general left of me, soliloquizing at the wall.
“Some people,” she says, “think the granite floor of the Pacific was torn away to make the moon. Darwin’s son, actually. He said that. That when the Earth was young it rotated very quickly—it went so fast that part of it flew off into space, and the Pacific is the scar it left behind.”
“Cool,” I say. “I’m trying to watch television.”
I sit where I am and don’t look at her. She is wearing a tank top that shows the strange silvered places in her underarms and around the base of her neck and I no longer feel much compelled to comment on this. I find that if I squint at the television hard enough, it’s easier to think about things other than how much I miss my wife.
LEAH
In the sea there’s no such thing as a natural horizon, no place for the line of the sky to signify an end. When you sink—which we did, long hours of sinking—you can’t see the bottom and you can’t see the top and the ocean around you extends on both sides with no obvious limit except the border around your own window. Earth and its certain curvature become far less clear underwater.
Jelka stopped praying after the first hour and instead started humming, which was worse. I considered saying something and then willed myself to kindness. How would you feel, I thought, forgetting for a moment that I was in the exact same position as her. Technically speaking, there was nothing to fix and so no way we could go about fixing it. Matteo continued to batter vaguely at the console and I helped him, though this was not my job and wouldn’t have had much effect even if it had been. At one point, Matteo caught his elbow on the corner of the comms deck and cursed, drawing up sharply and swearing he could break his neck in a fucking toy box craft like this. I clicked my tongue and told him to stop before he broke something worth actual money. I’m not sure why we behaved this way, to be honest. It feels odd, on reflection, to consider the very little we chose to do as we fell beyond diveable depths and still farther. I know it occurred to me, in a distant fashion, that an alarm ought to have gone off to alert us to a battery failure, however many hours ago. I know it occurred to me, too, that we’d need to release weights to slow our descent once we reached thirty-five thousand feet but now had no obvious way of doing that, nor any way of telling how far we’d dropped. It occurred to me that falling too fast and landing too suddenly—wherever we did eventually land—would surely result in a catastrophic rupture of the craft’s outer shell, with upward of six miles of water on top of us. All of this occurred to me, certainly, but only at a kind of remove. It was like the dispassionate realization that one has left the house without first turning a light out—unfortunate but hardly a disaster. I don’t remember thinking we would die, so much as noting that we wouldn’t be able to come back up again. I don’t remember thinking we could fix things, only wondering what would happen next.
At some point, Matteo brought out four wide electric torches and placed them around the base of the main deck. Since the console lights had failed, we’d been sitting in semidarkness, and in this fresh illumination, I looked about the craft the way one might peruse a Spot the Difference game—the same, but with deliberate mistakes. Same console, but with all the buttons dim; same machinery, only silent. Same Jelka, too, only hunched about the base of her chair, pulling quietly at the skin around her nails. Certain things, however, remained as I remembered them: Matteo’s Cthulhu bobblehead suckered to the ledge beneath the main window, Jelka’s rosary looped around the console stand the way you’d hang prayer beads from a rearview mirror. I remember thinking idly that we ought to have brought air freshener—hung the little pine-fresh trees like talismans around the deck.
“Do you think,” I said at some point （I forget what point exactly）， “that we ought to do something.”
Neither of them said anything to this, although Matteo did begin to whistle, which was a weak advance on Jelka’s humming. He whistled tunefully and through his teeth, Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies, swooning low about the tin-can confines of the craft.
* * *
When I was seven, my father taught me to swim, by which I mean that he wrenched my knuckles from the side of the municipal swimming pool and hurled me into the deep end with a ruthlessness bordering on zealotry. Just keep your head up, he yelled, impassive to my shrieking and to the well-intentioned lifeguard who blew a feeble whistle twice and then gave up. Prior to this point, I had never been keen on the water, imagining only preying dark places and ocean floors that dropped suddenly away. My father, sensing pathology the way that bloodhounds catch a scent, had taken on my training as a kind of aversion therapy, and despite being the type of man to whom anxiety was only proof of thinking too hard, he had turned out to have the right idea. If you’ve got breath enough to scream, you’re not drowning was his most frequent refrain, and inasmuch as that I had to learn to swim to avoid being fished from the bottom of the pool and taken directly to the coroner, his method basically worked. When explaining the divorce to me, I remember my mum said that it had always been next to impossible to tolerate a man whose approach to problem-solving was the psychological equivalent of a Wile E. Coyote–shaped hole in a canyon wall. That they were happier unshackled from one another was obvious, and I certainly enjoyed them both better the moment they stopped pretending to share any common goal beyond me. My father taught me to swim and later to scuba-dive, my mum bought me UltraSwim chlorine-removal shampoo. I grew used to the water in stages and then fell in love with it, read the books my father bought me on deep-sea exploration, dreamed in shoals of Humboldt squid and molten silverfish. I found I slept best to the telling of stories that flung me out onto the ocean, asked to be read to until I grew older and read the stories to myself. One of the stories I loved best was that of a man named Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer of the mid-1940s who once sailed five thousand miles across the Pacific in a hand-built raft crewed only by five men. Heyerdahl had nearly drowned at least twice in boyhood and did not take easily to water, which perhaps was why I liked him so much. To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half-hidden. There was a particular story from Heyerdahl’s various writings that I returned to often, reading aloud to myself on nights when sleep was elusive. It was an account of a night on the ocean during one of Heyerdahl’s many long overseas expeditions; I had read it first at the age of nine and kept it folded tight in some tidy part of my mind ever after.