“It’s all OK,” I say vaguely, hoping this answers whatever question it is I have been asked, “I’m just tired, you know?”
This, at least, is something true, something I feel I can give to her. Over the past few weeks, exhaustion has settled in the arches of my feet, in the small of my back.
“I hear you,” Carmen says, reaching out to touch my arm and then changing the subject to some issue she’s been having in getting her passport renewed. The day has turned suddenly nauseating—smell of sulfur from a backed-up drain—and I look toward the canal and wish this city were not veined with water like the lines on the back of a hand.
LEAH
I remember when I was twelve and I first read about the Challenger Deep. This is—or was, at one point—the deepest known point of the ocean, located in the Western Pacific at one end of the Mariana Trench. In 1960, a Swiss-designed submersible craft, the Trieste, was piloted down to this point—a record at the time—by the Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard and an American naval officer named Don Walsh. The descent, which took almost five hours, resulted in a grand total of twenty minutes spent on the ocean floor before the two men decided to take the craft back up again. According to reports, they would have spent longer down there, but the outer window of their vessel had started to crack on descent.
I read about this in one of my father’s books, the name of which I no longer recall, though I remember its turquoise cover and the illustrated submarine casting its exterior lights onto the title in an eerie downward spill. I must have taken that book down from my father’s shelf more times than he considered strictly polite, because at one point I pulled it out and found he had printed his name on the inside cover: Property of Michael Henry Frayne, on long lease to his daughter Leah. There was something I loved, aged twelve, about the way the book spoke so coolly of the deep ocean, not as something to be survived or conquered but simply navigated. It made me think about the straight imperative of technology, the way anything could be constructed to solve a problem. Coffee makers make coffee, trains carry you places in a hurry, and submarines allow you to travel farther than the ocean’s vastness and your ill-equipped body should permit. I suppose the book spoke to the part of my imagination that still held on to the thought of the sea as something unknowable—spoke to and, in a sense, calmed it. I don’t know that my endless reading and rereading of the book was what specifically instilled in me the desire to explore the ocean. More likely, I simply read it so much that it fell apart and I had to go and find something else to do, like exploring the ocean.
* * *
I said to myself, OK that’s enough, and then said it again aloud to ensure I meant it. I told Jelka to stay where she was and took Matteo through to the rear chamber to assess the situation. There was little enough to be gained from doing this—Matteo had already checked every piece of equipment that could be checked and found them in fine working order—but taking a moment away from Jelka’s incessant humming was frankly result enough. The rear chamber was narrow and arranged like a small galley kitchen-cum-study. There were lockers along the back wall and a table with bench seating, a small sink and sideboard for food preparation, a bookshelf and a table for taking notes, a storage box shaped like a chest freezer, two foldout bunks arranged one on top of the other across one wall. The craft was one of the smallest I had ever been on, resembling nothing so much as an upside-down light bulb, designed to drop like a stone. At the base, the control deck, rear chamber, and wash stall were sealed off from the rest of the craft in a pressurized hull, the only doors the ones between the deck, chamber, and stall and the lower hatch leading to the escape trunk.
I looked around for a moment, as if assessing for damage. Matteo shone a torch into the corners.
“I’d like a rare steak,” he said, apropos of nothing. “I’d like a rare steak and a drink.” I looked at him, registering again the curious sensation of blandness, yes wellness. We were still falling, had no way of stopping, and I felt very little about this beyond a mild sense of incorrectness, a soft constriction at the back of my neck, like someone had taken hold of the flesh and pinched. I watched as Matteo made his way around the lockers, squinting into the white shaft of the torchlight, as if expecting something dreadful to emerge. He had only three fingers on his left hand and held the torch somewhat awkwardly in his right, with which he was still less dominant. He had told me the story once, long ago, before we both came to work for the Centre. We were working on a midsize submersible somewhere in the Arctic Basin, Matteo as the chief engineer and I as part of a small team of biologists conducting species inventories and studying certain proteins present in the bloodstreams of cold-water fish. One night, Matteo had held his fingers out before him like a TV medium and told me how, when he was a teenager, he’d gone ice fishing with his father at Lake Simcoe, not far from the Durham Region of Southern Ontario. It was a four-day drive from San Luis Obispo, California, where he had scrawled out a broadly uninterrupted childhood existence of spray-can cheese and TV and bed when his mother said so, but as his father told him on the morning of their departure: nothing worth seeing is ever only walking distance away. This was baseless California logic at best, but Matteo still took it to heart—my dad, he once said, loved a slogan and I bought whatever he sold. It was during this fishing trip that Matteo developed such bad frostbite that he lost significant movement and ultimately all but the cigarette fingers and thumb on his left held. I had looked at his nails, lumpy as oyster shells, black around the cuticles. I had asked him what his father had done when he’d realized what was happening, and Matteo had shaken his head at me, explained that he hadn’t told him. End of the third day, when I realized the skin of my hand was changing color, I just put my gloves on and used my right hand to hold the fishhook for the rest of the trip. It felt too important, you know? I didn’t want to ruin it. I didn’t want to go just yet.