I sat on the main deck and thought again about Sylvia Earle, about something she had said in an article I’d cut out and treasured. Our understanding of the universe, so she said, comes from the ocean: It has taught us that life exists everywhere, even in the greatest depths; that most of life is in the oceans; and that oceans govern climate. Perhaps because we’re so terrestrialy biased, air-breathing creatures that we are, it has taken us until now to realize that everything we care about is anchored in the ocean. I had my back to the window as I thought this and found myself suddenly unable to bear the oppressive blank of space beyond the glass. Where are you all, I wanted to scream, overcome with a sudden vivid grief at the thought of this nothing—no strange deep-ocean creatures, no bioluminescence, no life. Come on, I found myself thinking, give.
I chewed my tongue to keep from talking and listened to the noise outside the craft.
Matteo dragged Jelka up by her arm, up and away from the hatch where she had been crouching. “I’m sick of this,” he said, and she pulled her arm away too hard and overbalanced, grabbed the air and fell. “I can’t take any more of this fucking behavior,” he snapped and reeled back as if to kick her, and I pushed myself between them, pushed him away, and he pushed me back and I thought help, once, sharply, and wanted Miri even though she was smaller than me.
“I’m sorry,” he said to me later, holding his frostbitten hand out to take my elbow, passing his other hand over his face. “I’m sorry, buddy, I’m so fucking sorry, I don’t know what’s going on.” I shook my head at him, wanted to hug him but couldn’t quite remember how. Jelka was back where she had been, by the hatch with her head pressed downward, and it seemed easy enough to imagine that nothing had happened at all.
* * *
There’s a point between the sea and the air that is both and also not quite either. Does that make sense? I’m talking about the point at the very top of the ocean that is constantly evaporating and condensing, where water yearns toward air and air yearns toward water. I think about this sometimes, that middle place, the struggle of one thing twisting into another and back again.
I was asleep, which is why I missed what happened. I woke to Jelka screaming and Matteo seeming both to be pushing her up and pushing her away from him. He told her she was fucking crazy, repeated it and repeated it and she fell down and started sobbing and I wasn’t sure what was going on, so couldn’t really do anything except push myself between them again and hope things would start to make sense. Matteo wouldn’t explain, only told me he couldn’t be where he was and crashed away to the main deck, leaving me with Jelka. I asked her what had happened but she refused to speak to me, remaining where she was on the floor of the rear chamber, pressing her head down toward the escape hatch, grinding her forehead into the metal. I sat down beside her and I thought about everything I had hoped to do, the things I had wanted to study and see and the trappedness of everything, the darkness, the lack. This isn’t the ocean, I thought to myself, once and very clearly, I just wanted to see the ocean, and then for a long time after that I thought nothing because I realized it would be easier.
“I was trying to make him listen,” Jelka said, after a very long time of saying nothing, and I nodded, as though this was what I had expected her to say. “I know I shouldn’t be listening,” she said, “I know I’m not supposed to respond, but I can’t stop it now. I hear it all the time. I thought if he would listen with me, it would make it easier. Do you hear it, Leah? The voice—whatever it is—do you hear it?”
She was looking at me now, sitting up and gripping my arm, and I could see the shape of her jawbone, like something I could remove from the rest of her skull with only a minimum of effort.
“I don’t,” I told her, helplessly, “because there’s nothing to hear.”
Much later, I left Jelka in her bunk and went through to the main deck, where I found Matteo sitting in a circle of torches. “I read a story once,” he told me, “about a paranormal detective who spent a night in a haunted room, and as long as he was inside this ring he’d created, this ring of protective objects, nothing could get at him.” I asked him if I could come inside the circle and he shook his head at me. “Nothing personal, buddy,” he said and looked like he meant it. “I’d just rather you didn’t, right now.”
The sound was back, the surging and retreating, a whirring, whistling, rending sound that I knew wasn’t all that Jelka heard.