I measure Leah again now—the limited parts I can reach outside the dressing gown—wrap the strip around her wrists and upper throat and forehead, take the length of her collarbone and the distance between her nose and cheekbones and chin. I am thinking about the sides of the bath as I do this, about the indeterminate matter that I find myself scrubbing at day after day, about a certain mutability in Leah’s stride and looks and presence, a certain ebbing, about the way I don’t always hear her when she comes into the room. I note everything down, but having done so I find I can’t tell whether these new measurements mean anything—whether Leah is smaller or lesser or different—since I don’t remember the measurements I took before.
* * *
The therapist agrees to see us over Skype, as Leah has been complaining more often about a lack of sensation in her feet and fingertips and doesn’t want to make the trip. I tell the therapist I’m finding it difficult to take things seriously, that I’m finding it difficult to act as though any of what’s happening is real.
“You’re finding it difficult to connect,” she says, and writes something down, and then the internet connection on her end stutters like the punch line to a lazy joke. “I should say,” she adds when her picture readjusts, “that I really would find it easier to speak to the pair of you. This kind of therapy can’t work when only one of you is present.”
I explain to her that Leah is in the bathroom, has been in the bathroom with the door locked since the previous evening, in fact, which is new.
LEAH
I don’t know who I’m writing this for, really. I think I need to explain what happened, but it’s hard when so much of it happened in the dark. I need to talk about the days, and not knowing what was a day, not knowing how to keep track or what it was that separated night from morning, not knowing how to keep ourselves from going mad.
The noise first started at night—or really what we referred to as night, since it came long enough after an equally arbitrary stretch of daytime. A sudden creak around the southmost side of the craft, a long, wide, billowing motion. It was a noise that seemed to pulse and then retract, like a beating, like the back-and-forth of wings, or of swimming—a noise I can’t really explain.
We had moved into the rear chamber by this point and were sitting around the table. Sometime previously, I had checked the shower in the wash stall and found it still in operation, the water running and evidently free of salt. That’s something anyway, Jelka had said when I reported this, slipping past me into the stall to turn the shower on and tilt her head back, opening her mouth. We had eaten, of a fashion, cleaned up after ourselves. At one point, Matteo had folded down one of the bunks and settled down, as if to sleep, only to get straight up again.
When the noise first came, Matteo suggested whales and Jelka argued that whales would never dive so deep.
“We don’t know how deep we are,” Matteo said, and Jelka shrugged at him, pushed a hand through the hair at her temples, still damp from the shower.
“Still doesn’t mean it’s whales. I’ve never heard a whale that sounds like that.”
The noise seemed to shiver and retreat for a moment, a long wail that faded down into something more like a grinding, like the pull and give of something caught between teeth. I thought about the dark beyond the windows and said nothing, shook my head at the tingle of fright that sat poised at the base of my spine and preparing to struggle higher. The ocean, I had to remind myself, was a place I felt safe, and thinking about the ocean was the method by which I felt safest. When the noise returned, this time on the opposite side of the craft and louring inward （leering inward? swooning inward? It’s hard, in retrospect, to assign a tone）， I closed my eyes and thought about the shifting shell-soft texture of an octopus mantle, and after a while I felt better, opening my eyes again to find that Matteo and Jelka were still arguing about whether or not the noise might be a whale. I started to say something but at this point there was a rattle around the base of the craft, a hum and screech that seemed to come from somewhere against the exterior structure, beyond the lower hatch leading to the escape trunk, as though something were knocking to be let in.
There have been all sorts of “unexplained sounds” recorded in deep water, and almost all of these are actually just the sounds of glaciers calving, the aftershocks of ice sheets moving over land. Miri used to watch programs that made much of these so-called mysteries, docu-style American deep dives into popular phenomena that always ended on a note of jittery speculation: So is there a simple explanation, or is it something altogether more sinister? Only you can decide. Miri would grin at me at the conclusion of these programs, nod her head very seriously, and pretend to be convinced. You’re no fun, she would say when I explained to her the process of seabed gouging, the sounds emitted when the keel of an iceberg drifts into shallower water and scrapes along the bottom of the sea. Yeah—she would nod—or maybe it’s octopus people like the show said. All of which is to say that sounds, in deep water, are not unexpected, and often far more easily explained than you’d think. We weren’t scared, is what I’m really trying to say here. We had far more pressing things to be alarmed about and as yet unexplained.