I sit there and think about Leah, the version of her I imagined before I met her, the gentle pressure when I pushed my lips in the cup of my own hand and pretended a kiss. I think about the way that we met, and then much later the way I assumed she was dead, after five months of radio silence—about how all you want to do in response to grief is talk about it but all everyone assumes you want to do is talk about anything else. I think about this, and about other things, and at some point I must fall asleep because I wake to a message from Sam and another from Toby: Sam says she can’t get hold of you and she’s not sure whether or not to come around. I go outside at about 3 A.M.—the kind of cold air that only seems to occur when you get a cab late or very early. I sit on the wall in front of our building and look across the road toward the grass. I imagine that I have wandered the wrong way through some door and found myself in an alternative, uninhabited version of things, but then a car streaks past playing music and everything is the same as it was.
When I come back inside, Leah is lying in the bath, the way I left her. She is faceup, entirely submerged—the pale wash of her remaining eye beneath the surface, the amniotic shiver of the water. The light in the bathroom is off, there is little illumination but for the orange glow from the streetlamps. I lean down over the water. It’s hard to describe it—the way her chest seems to brim, a sensation of something teeming. As I look, I see that the skin across her ribs is pulling, clearing, growing transparent like a window wiped of mist. I see her ribs through her skin and then her lungs, expanding, retracting, the whole of her sheer in the water, translucent, transparent, and breathing easily, though—submerged as she is—she has no recourse to the air.
LEAH
Here are some things I find quite interesting:
The tides are the natural response of water to the gravitational pull of the moon and sun. Just as the moon will rise a certain number of minutes later every day, so high tide in most areas will be correspondingly later also. The difference between a high and low tide will be at its greatest at full or new moon, as this is the point at which Earth, the sun, and the moon are in line and most in concert, with gravity consequently exerting its greatest strength upon the sea.
There is no concrete theory as to the origin of the phrase “the seven seas,” although it appears in various ancient Sumerian, Indian, and Roman texts, apparently as far back as 2300 BCE.
There are very possibly more historical artifacts in the ocean than in all of the world’s museums, although more often than not I do wonder whether this is simply something people say, rather than a quantifiable fact.
Most of Earth’s natural wonders owe their existence to bodies of water, in some way or other. Niagara Falls and its gorge, for example, date back to the Silurian period when a vast recess of the Arctic sea moved southward and deposited dolomite beds along what would in time become the Niagara escarpment. Millions of years later, water released from melting glaciers came plunging over the edge of this escarpment, wearing away at the shale beneath the dolomite and creating what you would now recognize as the falls and its gorge.
There is actually very little similarity between the chemical makeup of ocean water and river water, with the various compositional elements of each present in almost entirely different proportions. In rivers, for instance, you’re likely to find something like four times as much calcium as chloride, whereas the exact opposite is the case for the sea. This difference is likely to be due to the number of ocean-dwelling animals that use calcium salts to build their shells and exoskeletons. Almost everything that lives in the ocean is also made up of the ocean, to some degree, rather like the way we inherit mitochondrial DNA from our mothers, and our cells likewise hang around in our mothers’ bloodstreams for years after we’re born.
These are all things that I know, but none of this is really important. I used to think it was vital to know things, to feel safe in the learning and recounting of facts. I used to think it was possible to know enough to escape from the panic of not knowing, but I realize now that you can never learn enough to protect yourself, not really.
* * *
Matteo went down into the escape trunk once it had closed again, when the drain valve had expelled the residual water from the compartment. I didn’t go down with him to look. When he came back, his face was odd, unpleasant. His hands were wet, as though he had run them across the still-damp interior of the compartment. I went to fetch a towel from the shower stall and dried his hands for him, and afterward I made coffee, and afterward he fell asleep. As he slept, I went out onto the main deck and looked toward the windows, willing something to appear and seeing nothing, the way I always saw nothing, and this briefly felt worse than the fact of what Jelka had done.