* * *
Getting married was easy—twenty minutes, in and out. When I decided I wanted to get married, I told Leah and she started crying, which I hadn’t expected. I knew you wanted to, she said, I’m not surprised, I’m just crying. Carmen said she was quite startled to know that I’d been the one to do the asking, since I was the one with longer hair. I didn’t mean that the way it came out, she said, I meant to say congratulations, and then she hugged me in a way that moved me a surprising amount. The town hall was having issues with its electrical supply thanks to a workman accidentally running a drill bit through the mains, and so the registrar had lit the room with battery-operated candles, which made everything seem more like a school play than it should have done. This is good, Leah said, mood lighting. People usually have to pay for this sort of thing. I told her to take it seriously and she smiled at me （the way her face moved, the way I had to tip my head up a little to look at her） and said that she’d never told a joke in her life. In the candle-dark, then, we got married, and came out afterward to gentle rain and no plans for the rest of the day, which felt like a miracle. Leah suggested we find something to eat and walked us over the road to a place that sold burgers, her hand in my hand like something obvious, something grown from the fabric of my own body and pressing out. The afternoon was strange-colored, inconsistent, the way the sky goes dark before a thunderstorm but the grass is still lit up and you can’t figure out where the light is coming from.
LEAH
The world was different once, dry, before a century of rain that filled the oceans. Sometimes I think about this, the way that things might once have walked about the deepest places without fear of drowning. Sometimes I think of oceans rising faster than it is possible to escape them, of water drawing tight around the boundaries of the land.
Jelka sat cross-legged on the floor of the main deck, and for whatever reason I imagined her sitting by a campfire. I took a torch and set it down by her feet, crouched down opposite to complete the illusion.
“Now we just need marshmallows to toast,” I said, though she only twitched her head—a quick, frustrated gesture, as though I was talking over something she was trying to hear. She was unnervingly still. Beside her, the Saint Brendan figurine stood with his face to the wall.
“It’s my birthday,” she said, and I looked at her through the upward beam of the torch.
“I didn’t know that,” I said. I didn’t ask how she could possibly know this either, with no way of recording the time or date, no way of knowing how long we’d been here. “We should do something to celebrate.” She nodded and didn’t say anything further. I could hear Matteo knocking about in the rear chamber, kicking his feet against the benches. He had been growing increasingly irritable, prone to interrupting his own sentences to ask if we could hear a noise, complaining it was prevent ing him from thinking clearly. I would hear him moving about when I was trying to sleep, and think about my neighbors—mine and Miri’s—and the television they never switched off. Once, I woke to find him standing at the foot of my bunk, though when I asked him what he was doing he apologized quite genuinely and told me he must have drifted off.
“I can smell it again,” Jelka said now, gazing in a seemingly untroubled fashion into the torch beam. She was talking about the usual smell, the suppurating meat smell that had saturated all of our clothes by this point, though we washed and wrung them under the shower spray and hung them out across the benches to dry. I said nothing and Jelka continued, “I wonder if it’s actually just us, you know. The smell. I wonder if this is how people smell, this far down.”
I thought of reminding her that we’d both noticed the smell the first time when we were still descending but found I didn’t have the energy to argue.
“And what about that sound,” she said then. “What about the talking, the words. Can you hear that?”
There was nothing, not just then—there had never been any talking—and I couldn’t picture what it was she was imagining or think of a useful thing to say. Instead, I only commanded her to make a wish, the way one would on a collection of birthday candles, and then to blow on the torch beam, which she did until I switched it off.
* * *
I want whoever reads this to understand what they’re getting, which is mainly confusion, because I don’t know how to be clear about any of this.
In the dark, I pressed my face against the main-deck window and saw nothing. The blackness seemed another color, something less than black, altogether more devoid, more dumbfounding. I thought again about falling, imagined us tight in the grip of something that had snatched us down to the place we were already going, and then lifted my cheek from the glass and realized I didn’t know how I had come to be here. I had, it appeared, been sleeping, and now I was here.