As we sank, I tried to recall this story, though as I did so I felt the strangeness of attempting to soothe myself with the very element currently building to unsurvivable pressure over my head.
Chiefly at night, so the story went, but occasionally in broad daylight, a shoal of small squids shot out of the water precisely like flying fish, gliding through the air as much as up to six feet above the surface, until they lost the speed accumulated below water, and fell down helplessly. In their gliding flight with flaps out they were so much like small flying fish at a distance that we had no idea we saw anything unusual until a live squid flew right into one of the crew and fell down on deck.
I loved this story. Loved it, I suppose, for its slapstick, but also for the way it went on to suggest that deep things routinely rose to the surface and sometimes even higher than that. In this account, Heyerdahl goes on to describe dark nights on which strange, phosphorescent beings, on some occasions bigger than his craft, reeled up toward the ceiling of the sea and bumped heads before descending. As we sank, I tried to tell myself this story and it worked, to a certain extent—I thought of the way deep things move upward, of the ocean’s escapability, even despite its depths. If you’ve got breath enough to scream, as my father said, you’re not drowning, and so I held my breath and thought about screaming and imagined the ocean coming to an end.
MIRI
I stand beneath the spray of the shower and scream for twenty minutes. I’m all right, for the most part. It is only on occasion that I feel the need to scald myself down to the marrow, sugar-scrub my thighs until I bleed in streaks, and clog the drain with the expendable parts of me. I have spent the morning on the phone, shuttlecocking back and forth between recorded voices, the majority of whom desire a number I cannot provide and the rest of whom want me to know that my call is important. Around noon, I moved the phone from my ear and smashed it some seventeen times into the wall before dropping the remnants and going to fetch a dustpan. Leah had been sitting on the sofa but looked up at this outburst. For a moment, I imagined a kind of reemergence, Leah as I knew her stepping out from behind the baffle of this person and asking me what the fuck I had done. This didn’t happen, so after I had cleaned away the pieces of the telephone, I told her I was going to take a shower and that after that I would see about getting a replacement.
* * *
I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. It’s nearly impossible, at least in my experience, to listen to someone telling a story about their partner and not wish they’d get to the point a little faster: OK, so, you’re saying he likes long walks, you’re saying she’s a Capricorn, skip to the end. It’s easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.
The thing about Leah as I knew her was that every so often when I was pissed off and sitting on the sofa, she would grab my legs and start to pedal them, chanting tour de France tour de France until I laughed. The thing about Leah was that nine times out of ten she couldn’t bring herself to be unkind about anyone, but then three times a year she would say something so blisteringly cruel about someone we knew that she’d clap both hands to her mouth and turn in a circle as though warding off evil. At a point perhaps six months after we’d first started seeing each other, she read a book in which a pair of lesbians emailed each other meaningful lines of poetry and shortly afterward she asked if this was the sort of thing we should be doing, too. If you ever send me poetry, I texted her, I’ll cut your tits off, and over the course of the next week and a half she emailed me every poem from The Complete Works of Wilfred Owen, signing off every email with a winking face and a heart.
She told me once that when she was young she would imagine herself with scales that grew beneath the membranes of her skin—a flaking layer of silver-blue between her bones and the surface of her body that would prevent her from becoming waterlogged if she were ever to drown. I used to think of her like this, before we fucked or when she rolled over toward me in the night; about hands pulling her down beneath black water, about scales growing over her eyes.
She taught me to swim because I couldn’t, held on to my waist and buoyed me along. If I wanted to teach you the way I was taught, she was always saying, I’d hold you under. We’d go to the lido in the mornings and sit in the café afterward, damp in our clothes and eating bacon sandwiches and Leah fishing ice out of her Diet Coke.