* * *
There was a test I could have taken, you know, that would have told me whether or not I’m likely to develop the same condition as my mother. I never took it, though I meant to. The sharp end of a day and Leah asking if I thought I would do it—for your own peace of mind, she had said, and then, but only if you think it will matter. I had gone out one day with the purpose of sorting it, had booked a test and walked through town in a thin and drifting rain that settled like a layer of fabric across my shoulders and back. I had reached the place where the test was due to be carried out fifteen minutes early and, thinking vaguely that it would do to while away the time before my appointment, had simply turned around and walked home again. I’d been back on my sofa watching television several hours before I realized what I’d done.
I suppose I think about this sometimes; the reason for booking a test and the reason for missing it. It is easier, I guess, to believe that life is inexhaustible. Not so much that its opportunities are vast or that one’s personal dreams can be reached at any age or season, but rather to believe that every dull or daily thing you do will happen again any number of times over. To stamp a limit on even the most tedious of things—the number of times you have left to buy a coffee, the number of times you will defrost the fridge—is to acknowledge reality in a way that amounts to torture. In truth, we will only perform any action a certain number of times, and to know that can never be helpful. There is, in my opinion, no use in demanding to know the number, in demanding to know upon waking the number of boxes to be ticked off every single day. After all, why would it help to be shown the mathematics of things, when instead we could simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless.
* * *
The phone rings again at 6 A.M. I have left Leah in the bath, the way she asked me to when her mouth drained of water sufficiently to allow her to talk. I answer the phone and the caller identifies herself as the sister of Jelka, who was on the craft with Leah when it went down. “I’d love to speak,” she says, “if that wouldn’t be too much trouble. There are some things I think we ought to discuss.”
LEAH
Things broke down—I think that’s fair to say. Not that this happened suddenly, but my recognition of what was happening still came on in the sudden way things tend to in a crisis. Things were bad, but fine, and then they weren’t fine and I’d missed some crucial point by which to fix them. We were trapped, and Jelka was suddenly hearing things that Matteo and I couldn’t hear, and there was nothing I could think of to do that didn’t involve first rising to the surface and then looking around for help.
* * *
Jelka on the main deck, with her cheek against the window. Jelka in the rear chamber, leaning down toward the hatch. Matteo pulling her away, at first with concern but increasingly with something more like impatience. “You’re giving me the creeps,” he said.
The shower running in the wash stall and no one using it. I turned it off, told them to be more careful, though both claimed not to have left it on.
The noise sometimes waking me, sometimes coming when I was already awake. I held my hands before my face and counted fingers, recollected dreams I’d had at seventeen, of webbing growing down past the knuckle and gill slits in my neck.
Jelka standing with her back to me, looking out toward the dark. The main deck lit by torches lined up along the central console.
The feeling in my legs after I fell asleep and woke again—like pins and needles.
Matteo flinging a plate against the wall and then apologizing for it.
“Let’s talk about this, reasonably,” I said, then found myself unable to continue.
Jelka’s figure of Saint Brendan turning up in strange places: in the shower tray, in the chest fridge, standing guard beneath my bunk. “I hate that fucking thing,” Matteo said, “feels like it’s watching me.”
I ate something from the stores and wondered how much could possibly be left, wondered why it hadn’t started running out yet.
I went into my pack and found the postcard Miri had bought me, the image of a tangerine-colored octopus. PAMELA—GIANT PACIFIC OCTOPUS—ESTIMATED AGE BETWEEN 3 AND 4 YEARS OLD.
“Who are you again?” Matteo said, when I came to join him at the table. “Only kidding,” he said, but then asked me why it was we were here.
“I won’t speak to you,” Jelka’s voice in the dark, in her bunk with the blanket thrown up over her head. “This isn’t me speaking to you now.”