Time passed. However little happened to hurry it along, it still passed. Days, weeks, I couldn’t tell you. We ate and slept and tried the comms panel. Jelka and I did jumping jacks in the rear chamber, kicked our knees up to our chests to get the blood flowing, lay down and bicycled our legs in the air. It felt important, in a dull way, to remain active, important to tidy away after eating, important to remain awake until it became absolutely necessary to sleep again. Sometimes, Matteo would draw a great grid of dots on a piece of paper and convince one of us to play Dots and Boxes. Sometimes, Jelka would sit with her legs up on one of the benches and stare into space for what felt like hours at a stretch. It’s insane, of course, that we did so little, insane how little it occurred to us to do. Certainly we were trapped, but in retrospect it’s still hard to imagine the kind of lethargy that seemed to grip us. I can’t explain it, except to say that inaction felt obvious, a decision already made by someone else. The basic truth of the situation occurred to me only as if shouted across some great distance and barely heard. I felt afraid, of course—but, beneath this, still in some sense quietly removed. I suppose a body has to find a way to cope with panic. I don’t know how this works. Panic, as I’ve said, is a waste of oxygen.
I thought about Miri, sometimes. Tried not to because of the very particular ache it summoned and then did it anyway. I thought about Miri describing the type of cat she’d like to adopt, about Miri brushing her hand over my hair in the way she often did. When I couldn’t think about Miri anymore, I gave up and thought instead about the imprints of deliquesced jellyfish, the brown and pink remainders—only imprints—fading to nothing on a white expanse of shore.
MIRI
Years ago, when we were still new, Leah took me out to a bar and then to another bar and then to a late-night movie where we bought popcorn and sat together in the dark. The movie was a ’60s thriller: the mutineering crew of a tramp steamer set adrift on a sea of carnivorous seaweed, beset by time-traveling Spanish conquistadors, giant hermit crabs, octopuses, and sharks. Every time another obviously puppeteered monster or oversize plastic snail appeared on-screen, we both shrieked with laughter. I can’t believe you’ve never seen this movie, Leah hissed, it’s so terrible. I used to watch it with my dad. In the dark, I kissed her and she tasted like popcorn. I think you’re perfect, I said, like an idiot, and she was kind and let me pretend I hadn’t said it.
We came back out into the open air around midnight and Leah gave me her coat, pulled me close by the lapels, and then interrupted herself with a laugh before she could kiss me. People do this in movies, she said, but now I just feel daft. A dribble of fine gold chain around her neck, the chilly flush at the tips of her ears. You know, she said, with the portentousness of the evening’s many whiskeys, I love going into the cinema when it’s still light and then coming out in the dark. Makes me think about the way a city is never the same. I mean, the way everything changes. Every night, every minute, it’s over and things will never be the same again. I put my hands over her hands, still fisted in the lapels of the coat she had given me, and made her pull me forward. That makes no sense, I told her, and she kissed me in the street.
* * *
The therapist sends us a bill for the session Leah missed and a note requesting clarity on whether we plan to continue. The Centre, apparently, is willing to bankroll sessions attended but not sessions skipped or rescheduled. Leah is in the bath when I get the invoice, though she has left the door unlocked, which is new. When I come in, she looks up, head back against the lip of the tub, and her skin seems to shrink and then reshape before me—the stretch and settle of a rubbed eye, briefly off-center, then nothing unusual at all. I sit down on the toilet seat and we regard one another for a moment.
“What are we supposed to do,” I say, at last, “about what’s happening.”
“I don’t want a doctor,” she says, anticipating my suggesting it again.
“But what if it gets worse?”
“It isn’t.”
She isn’t being unkind, or sharp, or dismissive, not like she has been recently. Her tone is perfectly reasonable, even kind. Beneath it, however, there is little enough in the way of feeling, a chilly blank where the rest of her voice, as I know it, should be. There is nothing of the previous night, when she dipped her head into my shoulder. Something has crested the surface between us and sunk again, the water closing over its head. She moves her hands through the water—the soft and semitranslucent blue at her hip and thigh—and I know she is only talking because I am making her talk.