And then Matteo ruined everything by pushing me aside and slapping her right across the face—and that was the first day.
The second day was the second day because at some point I woke up to it. I jogged several laps around the rear chamber the way I had taken to doing to prevent my legs from shaking when I stood up too fast. It was back by then, the whaling sound, the familiar curling, ooming, and I thought about what Jelka had said about it being a distraction from something else. I did not listen, closed my eyes, and jogged in circles around the space I knew by heart. I ate something from the chest freezer, I thought about Miri, and I went through to the main deck, where I found Matteo sitting in his circle of torches and a panel on one of the main control boards smashed across its center, three buttons cracked, as though they had been hit with some force. One of the torches in Matteo’s circle, I noticed, was also cracked across its reflector, but I found I was too tired to comment on any of this, so I only sat with my back against the comms panel and looked toward the window until he started to speak.
“Did you ever think that maybe this is just a dead part,” he said, after a moment. “I mean, not that we’re not in the ocean but that we’ve somehow fallen down into some part of it that died however many years ago and now there’s nothing here at all.”
I didn’t look at him, kept my eyes trained on the window. （Miri placing her hands on either side of my face to shake me when I drifted away from the thread of a conversation. Are you there? Or is this person a replicant?）
“When I went ice fishing with my dad,” Matteo said, holding up his hand with its missing fingers as if to remind me, “it was so still and bleak—temperatures below freezing, of course—but you still knew there was life down there, just under the ice. When you cut a hole, baited the hook, you were already anticipating the frenzy, the thing below that was ready to fight you when you tried to pull it up. This doesn’t feel like that,” he said, and I wanted to tell him that I disagreed, that I felt certain we were still somewhere where something else existed alongside us, that there had to be something here that we simply couldn’t see. I felt, as I often did, an agony at the emptiness, of wanting to see where we were and assess it for myself, but I didn’t know how to say that without sounding like Jelka. I stared out of the window, willing something to blink back at me, and then I closed my eyes and thought about the book about the Trieste and the Challenger Deep that I had borrowed so often from my father: its turquoise cover, talismanic in the fact that it was the same color as my lunch box, the same color as the toothpaste my mother used, the same color as the single fleck in my father’s right eye.
When I came back through to the rear chamber sometime later, Jelka had once again been in the wash stall and I found her wet and clothed and leaning up against the table, staring at the floor. I didn’t ask her what she was doing, only moved toward the worktop to make a cup of tea. I felt, rather than saw, her reach out for me and dodged her, drew back my elbow and edged toward the sink. At that moment, I felt unable to tolerate the thought of her asking me once again if I heard some noise I couldn’t hear. I feel bad about that now. Of everything, this is the thing that makes me feel worst.
The third day came in two parts, which I will call morning and evening, though there was little enough to differentiate them beyond what will shortly become obvious. I did my jog around the rear chamber and then found something to eat, trying my best to keep my mind along lines that did not seem calculated to hurt it. I had been recollecting a lot of things in Miri’s voice, just recently, my memory throwing up some snippet of conversation and then refusing to fill in the blanks （all Miri, all things she had said in the past that my brain had held on to without any obvious reason: I don’t think that kind of thing necessarily makes a person smarter problem is I think I’ve been trained to think of Catholicism as a sort of winnable game, like a computer game the ubiquity of a straight woman reading an e e cummings poem at a wedding）。 Jogging kept my mind temporarily clear, and so I did it, sometimes for what seemed to be hours simply running in circles in my bare feet and uniform. My father had always told me it was better to keep busy, that there could always be something to do if I looked for it. Things didn’t crawl from the sea for the very first time, he had joked, for you to pay them back loafing around idle.
I remember a sensation of damp—a wet pressure along the surface of my skin like the imprint of a finger dipped in water. A directionless quality to everything, though nothing moved except me, in circles. At some point, Matteo came through from the main deck, rubbing his eyes and telling me he’d dreamed the comms panel came online while he was sleeping. “They were all there,” he said, and did not offer to explain who he meant. “It came online and they were all still there.” It was at this point that the door to the wash stall opened and Jelka emerged, advancing on him quickly. Once again, she was fully clothed and wet from the shower, and she placed her hands on either side of his head, pushing him back against the table so he yelled.