I understand that she needs more salt, but I’m running low and I don’t want to leave her. I put my hand to her face, the place where her eye once was. I try to take her hand and experience the distinct impression that if I squeeze it, it will melt away into the water. There is a softness that wasn’t there before, the sense of a semiporous membrane in place of what was once a solid scaffolding of muscle and skin.
It is after midnight when her breathing becomes bad enough that I am seized with a sudden mania for changing the bathwater. She has been lying in it for so long that there is a scum of dust over the surface and the salt is collecting across the upper planes of her body. I try to pull her from the water, although when I do so, her face is not as I remember it. She has been beneath the surface for days now and the shape of her expression without the distortion of water above her is something I am not prepared for, to the extent that I almost drop her back. It is hard to explain, the way I see her in the moment before she starts to gasp and protest at the air and her extraction from the water. The way her features sit in her face seems uncertain, as though they have been placed there only delicately and might at any point leak sideways, like ice melting off a curving surface. In the second before I drop her, I half expect her to sluice through my fingers. She goes down again—a sharp splash, water slopping forward over the edge of the bathtub and soaking my feet—drops back, her eye on me, her long-drenched bandage slipping sideways, and I realize as I watch her sink that I cannot keep her here.
I’m not sure what time it is when I call Juna, though she picks up right away. I have a car, she tells me after I’ve explained, don’t apologize, I barely sleep anymore as it is. When I’ve hung up, I take every towel we have and wet them in the bathroom sink, one by one, then pour the rest of the table salt over each and allow it to soak into the fabric.
LEAH
I wasn’t aware of the power returning, only that when it did we were on the main deck and that suddenly the light was not what it had been seconds previously. The overheads blinked back on, as casual as anything at all, along with the beams from the front of the craft, and at once we saw the darkness for what it was.
“Jesus Christ,” said Matteo and then covered his mouth. “I mean—” He seemed frozen, looked toward the control panel without moving his neck, like a person being stalked by a jungle creature and desperate to avoid being seen. “Don’t move,” he said. “I don’t know why. It might go off again. The power. It might notice we’re still here.”
I looked at him, noticed the tendons in his neck pulled taut, straining to keep his head from swiveling. “That’s ridiculous, isn’t it,” he said, and then, “Jesus Christ,” again.
“Fuck.” My voice felt too big in my mouth, like I was trying to swallow something without first chewing sufficiently.
The lights along the control panel switches glowed a faint electric yellow, just the way they were supposed to do. Matteo’s circle of torches, still upright as they were, seemed dimmed in the sudden brightness of the whole compartment. I could hear a faint whirring sound—the vibrations of a craft in order, of a working mechanism rattling suddenly to life.
Beside me, in the unaccustomed light, Matteo was sweating.
“This is insane,” he said, and then, “we can go. If it works, we can surface. We could do it now.”
He flicked his eyes, once again, toward the main panel; he remained frozen in place, as if convinced that a single move could trip a wire that would throw us back into darkness. “Jesus Christ,” he said again, and I felt quite certain he was about to cry. “Are they allowing us to do this? Is this what those fucks want? Just to send us down and bring us back up again? Are they doing this or is something else doing this? What if it works?”
I remember I looked at him then and I thought, with a clarity I hadn’t experienced in ages, that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. I remember I looked at him then and I thought Not yet, just once, and then I looked toward the windows in the spill of the exterior lights. I have always felt there is something knowable about the sea, something within comprehension, and I knew that I couldn’t allow the opposite to be true. We couldn’t—and I felt this with a force like a taste, like copper washed up against the backs of my teeth—we couldn’t go until I had seen it, until we had seen some vestige of what we had come down to see. Not yet, I thought to myself, once more and with a sort of ridiculous earnestness I can’t defend, my body slack around me, everything suddenly superfluous but the desire to see what I needed to see.