The squid nearly exploded. Its shattered beak seemed to keep opening, spilling flecks of torn innards. The convulsing tentacles yanked my shoulder from its socket and peeled away more armor and skin, but another burst of fletchettes freed me and I swam away.
The current made restless ghosts of its gore and mine.
Consciousness faded to a glimmer, but the thought of sharks kept me swimming—
I don’t remember the ride or the hammerheads that came after me. The shouting in my cheekbone, that much I recall. Stenstrom’s panic was too intimate to forget. Trying to reload the fletchette gun with one functional arm while clinging to the tug was a monumental task. They say I did it twice, which must be why it seemed like I never finished.
The sea is no place for the weak or wounded.
Andrea never wanted me to volunteer, not because of any danger or even because of what they’d do to me, but because it would take so long. We’d argued before, like all couples, silly stuff like who was supposed to take out the garbage, and we’d had bitter discussions after she got pregnant.
At the time I was just twenty-seven after ten years in the strict, almost exclusively male world of Special Forces, and I had not proved myself excellent family material by butting heads with her son Brent. But until I told her that I needed to leave, we had always found a compromise. She let me name our baby after the father I’d never known — and I agreed to be more lenient with Brent, let him choose his own friends and music and clothes.
We’d never shouted before. She’d never cried before.
“We don’t need this,” she said, but we did. If we wanted to give Roberto and Brent the education they’d need, if we ever expected to live someplace where sirens and knifings weren’t regular affairs, a chance like this was too fat to pass up.
The politicians said the recession had ended in ’17, but that was news to us. The SCUBA guide business I’d started after I got out of the Navy failed almost immediately. I should have known better. The tourist trade had been flat for years and my competition, already well-established, gobbled up what little income there was to be had.
We weren’t destitute. Andrea subbed as a math teacher wherever she could, we both did spot work for the Park Service, and I made wages on the docks as a mechanic and welder. But I missed the simple vacations we’d taken in the early days, surfing, kayaking. To be reduced to a life of debt, coupons, and freebies was hardly a life at all.
The real horror had been the resentment with which I’d begun to view my family, for needing so much I couldn’t give.
On the day before I left, Andrea argued that I’d undervalued my soul. “Two years,” she kept saying. “Don’t leave us alone for two years.”
“We’ll talk every week,” I promised.
“Two years, Carlos. The boys won’t even recognize you.”
Stenstrom opted for a swimsuit when he visited, which was all that I was wearing. To perform their repairs and to let me heal, the doctors had turned me into something of a surface creature again, enclosing my head in a large plastic sphere that piped in salt water, placing me on a table lined with gutters to collect my liquid exhalations. Keeping my skin damp was more complicated.
The mist ducts tended to fog the room, so the doctors wore aprons and goggles and long yellow gloves.
Stenstrom had a better grasp of psychology than that.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, not bothering with how are you or hello.
“Sorry, chief.”
“My fault. We should have ordered you to quit for the day. It’s not like we were running late.” His laugh was a goofy bird squawk that sounded fake the first time you heard it, but he was just a geek — desk belly, pale, with his fingers constantly in his hair or at his nose. “Seriously,” he said. “Anything at all.”
“Someone to read to me. Someone pretty.”
“She can be friendly, too, if you like.”
I would have thought he’d be too embarrassed. I was surprised to find I was myself. Maybe I’d spent too much time alone out there.
My next thought was of my marriage vows. Guilt arrived late, but my first reaction was the honest one. I was basically a cripple here, and the idea of being manipulated did not excite me at all. I’d much rather masturbate, caressed and tumbled by the sea, alone with favorite memories of my wife.
“Someone to read,” I repeated.
Stenstrom nodded. “What do you like, oceanography and biology, right?” Standing up, he patted the table rather than jarring me. “I’ll have someone come in.”
It was awfully cynical, but I couldn’t help but think that he was improving at trying to make himself my friend.
I contacted Andrea days ahead of the schedule we’d set, despite an earlier decision not to worry her. Stenstrom was right. I needed friendly, female attention, and I didn’t have to tell her that I’d been hurt.
She wasn’t home, even though it was dinnertime. Brent answered and said she was substituting at the community college. That made me angry. I didn’t understand why she’d bother with such a low-paying job, especially since she must be incredibly busy, settling into the new house, helping the boys adjust to new schools — but of course Andrea enjoyed teaching, and maybe the fact that we were rich didn’t seem real to her yet.
Maybe it was good I’d missed her. Our exchanges had not been going well and I might have said something stupid. Maybe communicating over such a distance, through typed words alone, was impossible.
The boys didn’t think so. During my recuperation, they peppered me with messages full of abbreviations and icons that my computer and I puzzled over. They were obviously spending more time online than they had with me around, learning new languages and modes of thought. I was pleased that they remained excited about my accomplishments, but Roberto seemed overly attached to a new interactive he’d discovered, and Brent confessed — maybe bragged? — that he had been caught in two stim sites. I admonished them both to finish their schoolwork as soon as possible each day, put the keyboard away and get outside. Go play in the mud, I said.
Returning to the ocean was unspeakably good, but my days grew more complicated as I coordinated with surface traffic, massive barges that probed the quiet dark with fat, long, phallic drills, blundering through ancient beds of sediment, polluting vast stretches of water with their shrieking as they powered down into the detritus and carbonate. New voices sprang out of my cheekbone, crowding my skull — and four new mods had come through surgery and would join me soon.
This was ultimately what I’d signed on for. I took close note of each shift’s accomplishments, but the joy it gave me was purely intellectual, and I clocked out with the surface crews rather than working overtime.
The best part of each day was making my way to and from my shelter, by myself, letting the currents and whim dictate my course, always discovering new beauty, new peace.
I think I knew what was happening back home.
Most of Brent’s chatter washed over me like a familiar, soothing tide: “Club VR opened a new place downtown and I got to virt Gladiator and I could have done it twice except Uncle Mark is a bracket colon equal sign.”
The computer had grown better at recognizing icons, but Brent used so many. This one meant flathead, I guessed, or chicken neck or whatever. What concerned me was his tone. Brent had once directed this same mean jealousy at me.
“Who is Uncle Mark?” I croaked, the elongated fingers of my hand tightening into a ball.