In time he’d come to love her chipped canine tooth, her snaggletooth as she called it, which she never bothered to get capped under the belief that a face without flaws was a face lacking character. He loved her habit of squeaking after she sneezed. He loved the way her skin sparkled after sex. He loved everything about her, indiscriminately.
That first night they left the mixer and hit a bar. When everyone got kicked out at last call, they’d staggered happily down East Jefferson hand in hand. Snow had been falling, big fat flakes swarming out of the sky like the plankton was doing right now…
The glowing flakes scattered as a monolithic shape passed by the Challenger. Luke glimpsed a pitted wall of blue-gray flesh. For a heart-stopping instant, he saw an eye the size of a dinner plate, a ring of shocking white banding a black pupil.
The Challenger rocked; the displacement of water felt roughly akin to a tractor-trailer flying past his car on the highway.
“Sperm whale,” Al said. “It’s the only creature that big that could exist down here. I’ve never spotted one this low.”
Al cut the motors. The descent continued.
Luke’s back was beginning to ache.
“Can I stand up?”
“Go right ahead.”
Luke managed to stretch a bit, taking the pressure off his hips.
He watched Al work. She piloted the Challenger with easy authority—it reminded Luke of observing an experienced veterinarian perform routine surgery. There was an air of practiced boredom to the way Al’s hands moved over the controls.
“You don’t seem too concerned about all this,” Luke said.
“If you’re talking about the dive, I’m okay,” she said. “I brought your brother and the others down. Supplies and food and scientific doodads after that, before the drones were operational. Hell, on my last descent I brought a poster of Albert Einstein. I’m a glorified delivery girl.
“The thing is—and I’m sorry if this doesn’t make you feel any better—at a certain depth, it doesn’t matter. Where we’re going, the pressure per square foot is the equivalent of twenty-seven jumbo jets. If we spring a pinhole leak, the water will come through with enough force to cut through three feet of solid steel. It’d slice us apart like flying Ginsu knives. This sub will crumple. It’ll happen in a fraction of a heartbeat. Imagine being crushed between panes of extrathick glass traveling toward impact at the speed of sound.” She thwapped her hands. “We’re talking flesh pâté. Say good night, Gracie.”
“Comforting image, that.”
Al exhaled, jiggling a joystick using a few deft strokes.
“Listen, Luke—dying that way, crushed in the blink of an eye… there are worse ways to go down here. We’ve only lost two men so far. But we’ve lost a bunch of drones and…” She bit down, her teeth making an audible click. “You ever hear the term short, Doc?”
“You mean of stature?”
“No, there’s another meaning. It’s a military term: short-timer. It’s when you’re at the end of a long hitch, just before you hit furlough. In a combat zone, that’s the most superstitious time. When the fates are gonna take a swipe at you. People get hinky. I’m so short I could parachute off a dime, man. That’s kinda how I feel. The more dives I make, the more I test this big black motherfucker, the Mariana, the more I’m sure it’s going to… Jesus. I’m sorry. I’m rambling. We’re fine and we’re going to be fine.”
“I trust you,” Luke said simply.
A stiff bark of laughter from Al. “Try to catch a nap if you can. Sleep might be tough to come by the deeper we go; the pressure can mess with your REM patterns.”
The sea swept against the Challenger’s hull with a lush suctioning. Luke felt as though he was in an elevator plummeting to the bottom of the world—closing his eyes, he envisioned red numerals flashing past:
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, G, P1, P2, P3, B, SB, SSB…
Sub-subbasement—did floors go any lower?
“The Ag Mey.”
“Hmm?” said Al.
“The Ag Mey Are Here. The words written inside the Challenger. They have any meaning to you?”
Al sounded curious. “Is that how you read it?”
“What, you saw it differently?”
“Yeah. Man,” she said. “The Something-Man.”
“The Ag Man are here?”
Al shrugged. “Nonsense words, Doc. The grammar doesn’t even jibe. I don’t presume they’d have meant much to Dr. Westlake by the time he wrote them.”
4.
LUKE SHUT HIS EYES. He was hungry but he didn’t feel like eating; the sea seemed to reach through the submarine’s walls, pressing uncomfortably on his stomach. His thoughts circled back to his mother. He was anxious, and during such times his mind would stalk the walled-off corners of his memory relentlessly, chasing a handful of dire recollections like a terrier down a rat-hole.
After she was put on disability from the Second Chance Ranch, Luke’s mother began to eat. It became an obsession. Though she’d always been sturdy, she’d never been much of an eater—only enough to sustain her frame. She took no apparent joy in eating, and that never changed—only the quantity changed.
Porridge. She’d cook it in a huge steel pot—three, four pounds of edible sludge—and gorge herself in front of the television, eating it with the same sterling silver baby spoon she’d used to feed pabulum to her infant boys.
After a while the smell of cooking porridge was enough to make Luke feel ill. He’d come home and find his mother in the dark, eating congealed porridge with a wet-mouthed vacancy, her lips moving like a horse eating sugar cubes.
At first she simply got thick… a solidity over her arms and legs and bosom that gave her a matronly look. But she kept shoveling in that gray gruel and soon thickness gave way to bloated girth. Her arms projected from the sleeves of her shapeless shifts like the booms on a sailboat, larded with folds of quaking flesh that resembled hunks of wet wool. Her thighs widened to the point that when sitting, her legs appeared to be welded together: a vast blanket of quivering skin. When she limped from her spot on the chair, her thighs rubbed together with a raw whispery note. Her features receded into the shapeless bloat of her face. Her eyes stared out of that netted flesh like two raisins thumbed into proofing dough.
“We are all but flesh,” she would say to Luke’s father when he dared mention that she might think about cutting a few carbs, “and we will all go the way of all flesh.”
As her size increased, so did her cruelty. Especially to her husband. It was a sport to her. She’d belittle the man in front of his boys and torture him far worse in private moments.
One night, unable to sleep, Luke had crept downstairs for a glass of milk. On the way back to his room, he passed his parents’ open door. He caught the rustling of sheets, the movements of bodies.
Next: a breathless exhale. It sounded like the moan of a man who’d been stabbed and wanted to deal with the injury as quietly as possible.
“You dirty boy.”
His mother’s voice.
You dirty boy.
It wasn’t an endearment or a sly encouragement. No, this was more as if Luke’s father really was a boy, a depraved and softheaded one, who’d been found under the porch steps smeared with his own excrement. Yet his father moaned in that soft, gut-stabbed way and whispered: “Yes, yes, so fucking bad.”