“I need to tell you that my sister is dead,” she says, “and I need to tell you what I know.”
* * *
My face feels stiff, as though I’ve washed it with hand soap, and the tooth that has sat curiously dormant at the back of my jaw for however long has spontaneously resumed aching. I am in the kitchen, and Leah is in the bathroom, and I don’t know how long I’ve been here or how long it’s been since I returned home, but the sunlight is peeling away from the kitchen worktops like paper torn in strips. I let Juna speak for a while and then told her I’d had enough, but that maybe she could phone me, at some other time, on some other day, and then I left without paying for my tea and had to double back when I realized. It’s fine, Juna said when I almost ran into her outside the café, I’ve paid for it. Least I can do. And then she walked me part of the way home while telling me a very long and frankly incomprehensible story about an older couple she knew who appeared to have had polyamorous affairs with half of the people she knew in the city. You know when two people are fifty, she said, and not at all interesting but somehow their open marriage has consumed the lives of everyone around them? I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you this story. I think I’m just trying to make noise.
Now, in the kitchen, I appear to have made myself another cup of tea despite having had one at the café. Leah’s sound machine is making a strange, juddering noise, as though something has come loose in its inner machinery and is causing the usual noise to sound arrhythmic and somehow off-center. I stand with my back to the counter and sip at the tea I do not want and try to play back everything Juna said to me. I didn’t want to tell you over the phone, she said several times, I thought seeing your face would make it easier. Or maybe your seeing my face would make it easier, I don’t know. Her sister was dead, she told me, and the Centre had at first given her contradictory information, then seemed to start screening her calls, then appeared to close up shop altogether. She had been forced to find things out for herself, she told me, had things she needed to show me. I cut her off when I should have allowed her to talk for longer and she told me she understood. I didn’t want you to be alone, trite as that sounds, she said. We can talk again, if you would like to.
I think about all of this now with a peculiarly glassy sensation, as though I might raise my hand to my face and find it made of some hardened material, as though my thoughts might turn out to be equally so. I am thinking about all of this when the sound machine abruptly shuts off in the next room and Leah makes a sound halfway between a cry and loud exhalation and I realize she is standing in the doorway to the hall, naked and still wet, and that one of her eyes is no longer an eye but a strange, semisolid globe that on closer inspection appears to be made up of pure water. When it bursts, it falls down her face like a yolk escaping a white and I put a hand over my mouth and nose as though anticipating a smell.
Hadal Zone
LEAH
I don’t know how long the next bit took, so let’s call it three days. I woke to Saint Brendan at the foot of my bunk—not on the floor but actually in among the covers. When I sat up to ask Jelka why she had done this, I found she was not in the rear chamber with me and shortly afterward Matteo came through from the main deck to say that she was not there either. We found her in the wash stall, under the showerhead in her clothes with her face turned upward, mouth open to drink the water. “What are you doing,” Matteo asked her, in a voice that did not seem to expect a response.
I brought her out of the wash stall and sat her on my bunk in her wet clothes. She seemed sharp beneath my hands. I wanted to push her hair around, pull it away from her face. What are you doing, I wanted to ask her.
“I’m tired of hearing it,” she said to me then, grasped my wrist and looked at me the way people do when they’re drunk and about to tell you a secret. （Miri leaning toward me across the table in a bar—our third or fourth date—a sweet slur, I’ve been thinking about you, a bit. I bite the tips of my fingers and I think about you.） “I’m tired of hearing it,” Jelka said, “and I don’t hear it so badly when I’m in there.”
I let her hold my wrist and look at me as if she was willing me to understand. “You know what I mean, don’t you?” she said. “I know you’d have to hear it, a little bit—if you tried. The big sound, like the ocean, that’s just a distraction. There’s something else, if you listen properly, if you try—”