“If I found something like that in my mouth, I’d spit it out.”
* * *
We used to watch movies—it was our thing, our first obvious point of connection. Our first dates revolved around it—watching movies by Cronenberg and Bava alone in cinemas emptied out by summer weather, Leah’s shoulder damp against my own and the scuffle of mice in dark places, behind the screen and along the backs of our chairs. In the evenings after these dates, we would wander together, arguing about Shivers and The Fly, about whether or not a movie even counted as a date if it didn’t come attendant on dinner. The first time Leah stayed over at mine, we watched Jaws and afterward talked so long about how Hooper and Brody were obviously in love that we forgot to have sex and simply fell asleep together, Leah’s ankle hooked over my hip. In the morning, she woke me up by playing the Jaws theme full volume in my ear.
（My friends often told me in these early days that we were similar, something I always thought bizarre, although Leah pointed out that all they meant by this was that we both talked fast and watched movies in the evenings after work. In truth, I never thought there were too many points of congruence between us. We were both small, though I was specifically short and Leah specifically skinny; we both hated loud noises and bad manners and enjoyed the peculiar clench of city space. Beyond that, there were few similarities. On occasion, particularly with friends like Carmen, it occurred to me that this perceived resemblance between Leah and myself had more to do with the two of us being women than it did with anything real. You’re just like twins, Carmen said once. I wish I had what you have. I found myself wanting to point out that she and her boyfriend Tom actually had a lot in common, though this didn’t seem a point on which she longed for me to press.）
I watch movies alone now—Leah’s concentration is not what it used to be. When I can’t sleep, which is often, I take myself out of the spare room and watch movies on the living room floor until the sky grows light beyond the telegraph poles and my back starts to hump from sitting so long with my arms curled over my knees. I watch only movies I’ve seen before—impossible, I think, to follow something new, to find the will to do so. I put Jaws on, once, although this turned out to be a mistake and I turned it off within the first ten minutes. The first time we watched that movie together, Leah went into great detail about all the ways she would have gone about catching the shark, about the technology available, the ways in which our ability to observe and understand marine life has advanced since the mid-1970s. After talking like this for several minutes, she suddenly grinned at me, cutting herself off and rolling her eyes to the ceiling—but this is boring, she said, I don’t want to be boring. We’re watching a movie. I shook my head and turned down the sound on the television. No, I said to her, no, not boring at all.
LEAH
Jelka prayed, because that was what Jelka did. Matteo said nothing, only checked and rechecked the oxygen systems and announced every time that we were fine, still fine, still breathing. I’m not entirely sure what I did. It occurred to me several times, in a mildly hysterical manner, that a submarine going down was not in itself a terrible thing. It occurred to me several times to say this—What are we worried about, this is just what we’re supposed to be doing! I didn’t say this, of course, only held my finger against the transmission button at ten-second intervals and registered dead signal each time. Typically, it should take a manned submersible craft anywhere between three and four hours to reach the deepest point in the ocean, depending on the size of the craft and its engines. I wondered, in a fairly distant way, what would happen when we hit the bottom and couldn’t control the ballast tanks to bring us up again. I wondered how it was that the system had cut out in all meaningful ways except when it came to the CO2 scrubbers. I wished, with a vehemence that felt vaguely misplaced, that I had thought to bring a deck of cards with me. I imagined the three of us sitting at the bottom of the ocean and playing old maid.
The deep sea is dark, particularly when the lights on your submersible craft have cut out for reasons unknown. I did my best to keep my gaze away from the windows, thought of strange-shaped ocean creatures peering in at the three of us and smiling with all of their teeth.
Twilight Zone
MIRI
There was a cocktail party to celebrate their going away; white wine and Twiglets held in a hotel conference room by the Centre for Marine Enquiry and three men in turquoise suits playing bossa nova music on a platform near the door. I spent much of the night caught up in interminable conversation with a man who specialized in seaweed （specialized in what sense I wasn’t sure; he introduced himself as such and I didn’t care to probe）。 Which one is yours, he asked at one point, gesturing toward the group that stood farthest from the buffet, as though asking me to identify my jacket from a pile. Leah was standing at the outer edge of the group, holding a glass and talking in a tone that seemed flushed through with bright authority, though I wasn’t close enough to hear what she was actually saying. Her dress was white and clung to her like sealskin. She didn’t often wear dresses, though when she did it always seemed she chose the ones that looked like something else: cocoons and folded paper, carapaces, wet suits, wings. Like an insect that mimics something else, at a distance it could often be hard to tell quite what it was that you were looking at. Dressing for formal events, I often thought of her like this: sheathing herself with the intent to deflect. She didn’t much enjoy being looked at. There’s a lot of it about, the seaweed specialist said when I pointed Leah out and explained what we were to each other. My brother’s wife has a sister, you know. Same thing.