Silhouetted against the Norwegian coast, a figure stands outside the Mørk Verden bar, a humanoid shifting its palm sidelong against the glass as if motioning to me. Behind the shape a flock of gannets circle and spin in unknowable patterns before plunging into the North Sea. The figure must be one of our shipmates. No one else seems to notice.
The noise in the bar spreads, rises, disperses. All around me the saturation diving squad of the Frontier sings and celebrates our last day on land, the crew swallowing Hansa before we survive a month in the oil fields off the coast.
I’m looking at the shape, trying to figure out why it reminds me of my brother, when my phone buzzes in my pocket. I answer and hear Nicole’s voice all the way from the reservation.
“John, it’s the baby,” Nicole says. She always says the baby instead of our baby. I can’t blame her since the child was conceived a week before we broke up.
“What happened?”
“We need you here.”
The fast Navajo speech from KTNN radio station follows behind her words. She must be at her mother’s house in Arizona.
“Tell me.”
“The umbilical cord,” she says. “The doctors here say it’s—” She rustles papers, searching. “Velamentous cord insertion.”
Her mother must have forced this call. Normally, Nicole hides everything. If she sliced her thumb off cutting mutton, she would wear gloves and fake it until she had to shake hands. But she knows where I’m going, and she knows that underneath the ocean worry can become a lifeform, study you through portholes while you sleep, swim alongside you like a pontoon in search of mooring. When we were together, I would try to explain and become all metaphor.
Nicole continues in clinical terms. “That means the umbilical is attached to the membranes surrounding the placenta. Instead of the central mass.”
It is as if an oncologist has, between bites of his lunch, told me I have a few months remaining. How can I respond except with more bare facts? “It sounds serious.”
“It’s uncommon,” she says, “but the white doctors here say it happens like this sometimes. The family needs you.”
“The job is about to start.”
“That’s why I called.”
“It will take a month before I’m back. You know the money I make here.”
“We could use more than money.”
“Then I’ll send a lot. And I’ll come back after this. You’ll see.”
She waits a long time. Then, “Your grandmother was here last week. She said your brother sent you a letter from prison.”
I can’t think of what to say. Nicole never mentions my brother, and he has never written me.
She says, “It’s your kid too.”
Hard to talk over the singing.
She says, “Why don’t you want to come home?”
I tell her to update me all the time. I tell her I will read all her messages and she won’t need to remind me. She says hágoónee’ even though she never speaks Navajo and I say the same because I know the elders were clever and it doesn’t mean goodbye. I think she might be crying but I’m not sure.
A snowplow floats white by the window like a tiger shark. When I step outside, cold detonates on my skin. The job now is to avoid daydreams about the child.
In my peripheral, the figure turns its face toward me, but I still cannot make out its features other than the domination of its height and a pale patch beneath its cap, hinting at a skull.
“Hei, du drømmer,” the figure says, voice slurred.
“What?”
“Don’t stand there.”
“Why?”
“Bad luck to stand there.”
When I don’t respond, it grunts and says, “America,” as if I were a country manifested. The shape moves opposite the plow, away from me and toward the immensity of snow.
◆
The wind swims over the upper deck of the Frontier like a living being, settling along parts of my body, seabreeze salt on my lips, and I hear a groan as meter-high waves shove the hull, the clang of metallic drums and squeal of a 130-ton heave compensated crane shifting above me, the webbings and tools on the deck swallowed by the shade of its looming, its jerks spasmodic as a lobster thawing.
Ahead of me is Audrey Anderson, one of my saturation partners this trip. She strolls with a clipboard as if untouched by the wind. Beside her is a dive tender I don’t recognize, chin up and chest puffed, following her too closely and pretending he isn’t. They have finished inspecting the umbilical supply line.
Once we dive, the 5-cm tube will be our way to breathe, our communications cable, and our tether to the Frontier. It is not my job to check it, but another glance won’t hurt. Along the upper deck, the umbilical spins down and spreads across the sole. Crouching, I grip the line and then pull it through my fingers, searching its layers for wounds. If life is in these tubes, so is death.
I feel Audrey lean toward me, her hair brushing my forehead as I squat along the umbilical winch. She touches my arm above the elbow and I look in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
The last time I saw Audrey I confessed to her about my brother, about his arrest, the murder trial, and my testimony. I don’t know why she seems to get the truth from me. Ever since I met her, through two years of random dives, across arguments and close calls with debris wanting to surface, she has always shown an odd emotion toward me: tenderness or something close. A buoy unacknowledged.
The trainee sees me examining the umbilical and says, “I inspected that portion already. It checks.”
“It needs another look.”
Beneath the winch, a segment of the umbilical drips Morse code on the hull. Audrey tucks her hair behind her ear and watches me. The trainee says, “I told you I inspected it.”
The drip gathers in the webbing of a metal grate, falls through the deckles, travels and thins by the baskets. Something beginning to spin inside me.
“Look at this,” I say, pointing.
He squints. “Incidental.”
“It looks real to me.”
“Are you part of the inspection crew?”
“What if I’m not?”
He looks at Audrey. She examines the drip and then says to the trainee, “Go check on the baskets.”
When he moves out of earshot, Audrey again leans close. “Tell me what’s going on. You’ll feel better.”
“A curse happened I guess.”
“You always say that.”
“This time it’s true. I’ve been thinking about him too.”
“Your brother?”
“He wrote me a letter, but it’s at the reservation.”
“Oh. So, are you going to see him?”
I shrug. “Florence State Prison is kinda far. Rumor is he took over a gang inside.”
The trainee calls for her but she holds a palm toward him. “Do you want me to go with you?”
I want her to. But Nicole would not understand why this white woman followed me across the world. She would ask questions I could not answer, and I would have to ask Audrey, and then there would be no escape from everything after. For an absurd second, I want to say something in Navajo to her. When we speak, I feel as if we are clanmates, standing close in a private prairie, the cities of the world far off. It must be because we are aliens among the aquanauts, her the only woman saturation diver I have known, and me a man who, prior to joining the Navy, had never been in more than ankle-deep water on the reservation.
“It’s the pregnancy,” I say. “There’s been a complication.”
“Shit.”
“It’s okay for now.”
“Nicole told you to come back and you said no.”
“Something like that.”
Audrey looks at me, into my left eye then my right, her unreadability my weakness. It’s a failing my grandmother warned me about. Once, she had some savings stolen by a white missionary. She, discarding the embarrassed part of herself as a starfish casts off a limb, kept the details of the theft a secret. But later, in her house near Shiprock as we watched chicken blacken in a wire rack, she regarded my brother and me, half-European as we were, with an expression between pity and resentment. She said you can prepare for the wider world all you wish. It won’t matter. You must feel terror long into your white years.
A wave tilts the Frontier into the brick-colored sunrise and the horizon dives beneath a handrail. Audrey crouches beside me. “You’re not cursed. I’ll prove it.”
“What are you doing?”
“Re-checking every centimeter of this line,” she says. “What does it look like?”
◆
At the lowest level of the Frontier there is habitat 1A, a saturation environment where we will live for a month, enclosed within a sterile series of circular pods, irradiated by fluorescent lights, bringing unwanted thoughts of hospitals, maternity wards.
When I arrive at the habitat, Audrey is speaking with Rich Early, a squat bullfrog of a man, his thick Dublin accent booming around the room.
“… and focus,” Rich says. “Focus is why I’m the best bellman. Some divers are down there exploring like scientists. Hell no. I leave earth behind. The earth can kiss my ass.”
Near them is our newest dive supervisor—Ivan Horat, from Croatia—hands crossed behind his body. He regards me with an empty expression, and it feels as if I’m being subjected to the unnerving, tubular gaze of a barreleye. His heavyset skull turns as he examines the habitat.
Next to Ivan stands Ludwig Grimmer, our medic, tall and skinny. If he were wirier, he could pass for Audrey’s cousin. English is the standard, but Ivan and Ludwig mumble something to each other in what sounds like Croatian.
Strange how news can alter a space and make meaning of cliches. Like when people say My world changed. Why should the world change because of pain in my life? The habitat still spreads fourteen meters across, its many arms comprising a medical lock, communication systems, environmental controls, electrical distributions. Yet the room itself has augmented in my mind, coming alive like a long-camouflaged octopus beginning to hunt.
◆
Ivan goes over our work details. A recent storm has scattered debris across a subsea manifold and less oil is spilling out of the earth. Ivan implies it will be a simple garbage removal job. “Good luck,” he says.
Through the lock we go, the other divers leading, and Ivan closes the hatch behind me as I enter the wet room, with its hose and toilet combo hooked to the wall and its rubbing alcohol smell. Rich says the essential trait of a saturation diver is the ability to shit on command.
Punched through the ceiling is the diving bell entrance. The others don’t seem interested in examining the bell, so I follow Audrey into the living quarters. She slides a hand along our dinner table. Rich takes condiments out of his bag and begins arranging them by color and size. In high pressure, hot sauce is the only solution for reanimating the taste buds. Beside the table, a blanket draped from a rod serves to separate the sleeping quarters. Audrey slides it open. Four bunks, the lower level a prize for the most senior divers.
“Go on, you can have the bottom,” I say to her. She nods, hiding a smile, and slides in. I climb onto the top bunk and close my eyes.
Rich’s footsteps thump toward us. “Chief,” he says. “You letting Audrey take the good spot?”
“Seems that way,” I say.
“You’re taking it back later, right? Like an Indian-giver thing?”
I’m supposed to strike in the same place, mention his Irishness. This has been our relationship since I’ve known him, habitual callousness splashed over with alcohol.
He says, “You been here longer than her.”
“I guess that means I can change things.”
“It belongs to you. You can’t just give it away.”
His close breath hits my face hard. I open my eyes. He’s leaning over me, unsmiling.
“What do you care?” I ask.
“It’s tradition, lad.”
“Since when does that matter?”
“You break a tradition, you fuck with the whole group. It’s bad luck for everyone. We don’t need that down here.”
“But I get to pick, so it’s something I control.”
“Don’t question it. Just switch bunks.”
“I won’t. She stays.”
“Chief,” he says and moves his face down to mine. “You’re an arrogant little shit.”
Audrey stands. “Boys, we can switch—it’s not a big deal.”
Ivan’s voice crackles over the speaker, “Beginning blowdown.”
Rich trundles back to the dining area. I want to follow him, scatter his condiment bottles all over, and ask him what will happen now, what are his traditions worth.
Soon, the life support crew starts pumping heliox through our habitat. The helium flows along our vocal cords, so our words rise faster, covering the walls in our cartoonspeak. Ludwig squeals laughter in the dining area. The amusement will recede quickly, first through its loss of novelty, then through its imposition on understanding.
A sensation as the temperature rises. The feeling something has changed. The room darkens as if the sea is inside. Looking down at the skin of my arms. Whitening. Translucent like an anglerfish at depth. The others’ voices far off, inhuman. Walls weak as snowmelt. Shutting my eyes and seeing accidents. Flat images at first, then moving scenes, twirling near and loud. The Waage Drill 2 incident. A gas leak like a cloud formed between the mating flanges. The divers were sent to a chamber to divert them from death. Then the supervisor misread the Heise gauge. Sent helium into the wrong section. The pressurization and thermal transfer pushed the temperature to 50 °C. Divers all frantic. Pulling at the chamber to escape, their sweat near boiling. Not opening. They flung off their mattresses. Lay against the cool metal. They took trapped breaths for hours, hot in their lungs until they died.
I take off my shirt and press my back against the bunk and imagine holding a baby in my body. Feel the kick of its growing form. I see myself sent overboard, weighted down to a midnight zone where phantom jellyfish burning the faintest orange engulf their prey. What adaptations would I need to swim this depth? Lit with creatures none of us should see. Apparitions floating like full scalps. I imitate the breathing of those dying men, quick and weak as if from newborn lungs.
◆
Warm hands finding my skin and I am pulled by the wrists through the black opening of our house, my eyes open enough to see my brother’s face and the Arizona night. He is fourteen and I am sixteen and the sky is ocean-dark and filled with clouds which elongate from my perspective, huge and abnormal.
My brother wraps his hand into my hair and drags me through the dirt toward a juniper and in his left hand is our grandfather’s ceremonial dagger. Gently he rests it along the side of my neck and he looks down at me, his eyes near glowing, reflecting shrub grass turning in the wind, the wide and orange mesas flowing into his delicate and expressionless face.
“Nidiidááh,” he says.
“I’m awake.”
He pushes the dagger against my neck and I feel something warm falling away from me and the desert fills with the smell of terror sloughing off my skin.
“Tell me,” he says. “You won’t leave. Or ever try to.”
“Okay. I won’t.”
“I’ll cut your legs off.”
“Don’t.”
“I’ll cut your tongue out.”
“I’ll stay.”
“You’ll never go?”
“I promise.”
He presses harder. It is the first time I think I will die.
He releases my hair and rests the dagger in the dust and his shadow covers me. Already the much larger boy despite his age, he lifts me to my feet without effort and touches my head again.
“I love you,” he says and pulls me into a hug. Compresses me. The smell of car oil and death. And I still do. Even after they arrested him for multiple murders, the victims total strangers.
I can’t see the horizon or anything, and then he becomes obscured too, a wavy glitch of a figure evaporating, all his violence left for me like snow filtering down to bones. What a fool I am, this dreaming meat far from the world. Isn’t creating another life a violent act? The calm nothing erased by a pulse in the womb. This sick desire to see a child through their first winter storm, to watch them shake the branches of junipers for snow baths like we did, shouting and laughing.
◆
Awake, we eat a large breakfast. Any tension at the table does not take our focus—we stuff enough calories to match the work. Afterward, I leave Audrey and Rich discussing pop culture and return to my bunk. I find Ludwig watching me, his head propped up under pillows, a leatherbound book half opened in his hands.
“Good luck today,” he says. I nod and he clears his throat.
He speaks haltingly, embarrassed, but with the committed manner of someone who has prepared a speech and will follow it through whatever the result. “I always bring this book with me. It helps me to calm down. Maybe it could help you too.” He tilts the title toward me: The Holy Bible.
“Oh. Did Audrey say something to you?”
“What? No, no, I’m just talking out loud.”
“I got enough going on. Not looking to convert down here.”
“Of course. I understand.”
“God,” I say. “Where can I escape you?”
He gives no reaction to my sarcasm so I regret it immediately. He pretends to continue reading as I gather my gear. Then he says, “I wanted to be a monk once. Kinda like this job. Not of the world, you know.”
“It makes sense,” I say, hoping to end the tension but not knowing what he means.
“What about you? What did you want to be?”
“I can’t remember making a choice.”
◆
As the ship gets into position, I rest my palm along the chamber wall. It can’t be thick enough. If an undiscovered creature living down here, a clicking thing from a norskerenna abyss, stuck its pincer through that barrier, my body would be sucked into the wound. Digested and ejected out. Explosive decompression—it happened once on the Byford Dolphin. The men were separating the diving bell from the chamber when they opened a clamp out of order. The unsealed chamber decompressed instantly, from the force of nine atmospheres to one. A man went through that small hatch, half opened like a crescent, forced himself through, and he split in two and all his organs were expelled, thrown out a distance of ten meters in a soup save for his trachea and some of his spine, and the blood of the other men in the chamber all lit at once by some invisible flame waiting to swirl in and they boiled inside.
The swish of the airlock. Ivan passes in our work outlines. The task seems simple enough: clear the debris from a gas manifold in Dunlin. A massive storm whirled under the Norwegian current, absorbed driftwood and barnacled metal, and spit them like seeds all over the structure.
Today’s work calls for two divers and a bellman, with Ludwig to stay behind. In the wet pod, Audrey and I switch into our hot water suits and then climb through the hatch into the diving bell. Rich is checking the gauges and the umbilical. Audrey helps me slip my helmet on and Rich shines a flashlight in my eyes, looking for signs of fatigue or fear, a routine exam that he makes uncomfortable. He leans far from me and grips my helmet to maneuver my skull. Any pro can experience shutdown, days when even the muscles between the fingers ache, and the bellman must toss them for fresher chum. He studies me and I expect him to say something like chief, where’s your warpaint, but instead he asks if I’m okay, no hint of his aggression from before, and I remind myself that he is a pro like everyone else down here.
“I’m solid,” I say in my high-pitch tones.
Ivan’s voice crackles into our ears through our helmets. “Comms check.”
“Working,” I say. I help Audrey with her helmet and soon we are ready.
“Follow Audrey’s lead,” Ivan says.
Audrey crouches at the edge of the moonpool. Like a crab pulled into an anemone, she slides legs first into the barrier of the water. Every centimeter of her overtaken, she disappears and I follow.
◆
The sea grips my shoulders and climbs up around me. Lights from the diving bell wave through the water, gentle tentacles. The hot water drifting through my suit fights off some cold but not enough. Audrey’s body descends away, her helmet light a flare in the oil-black darkness.
Weightless. This feeling sometimes recurs to me on land, but only as an imitation. The moment of falling through the sea has an enormity, direct and vestibular, as if you are in an immense pool in which it is finally right to stop resisting. And there is a sound, not quite a drone, but a changing ambience, abstract, the tone of weight and pressure.
As I follow Audrey, the amniotic peace I crave does not arrive. Instead, my heartbeat increases in my ears. Around us marine snow shifts and glows in the light, flecks of sand, soot, dust. Her helmet light moves through the blackness like a lantern, as if she is riding horseback along a night prairie.
My diving shoes hit the seafloor, the impact sending up a mist of silt, and when it dissipates I step into a puddle of viscera, long rotten spittle from the jaws of organisms above, as foreign as birds to this benthic zone, and a nearby creature, translucent and sperm-like, pulses on the seabed as if excited by my flesh, half its body lit like a carnival horror, tube mouth agape, a bucket waiting for marine snowshine. The world above is an ever-raining cloud.
“Comms check,” Ivan says in my ear.
“Still good.”
“Audrey, you should be close to the start of the manifold,” Ivan says.
“I see it,” she says.
Toward her light, I hop-walk like I’m on the moon. The black outline of the subsea manifold begins to fill in with detail as our lights penetrate its geometry.
I think I see something move about ten meters beyond its valves and platforms. A glow, soft and orange, as if from a third diver. My hands clench and the glow vanishes.
“John, everything okay? Your breathing is fast,” Ivan asks.
“All good. Ready to work.”
Lengths of the manifold’s piping take form in the light from our helmets, and an unexpected cold floods my suit. Back on the reservation, my brother saw the pumpjacks lining the landscape as violations. What had he called them at his trial? Tumors. Atop the platform, scattered rocks and debris lie in jumbled arrangements like the bones of an ancient being. The manifold awaits its rebirth and its feeding.
◆
Ivan orders the basket crane down and Audrey and I begin loading debris in darkness. Hours pass with only their voices in my ear and the work, intense enough to tighten the muscles between the ribs. We are ending the day when the light appears again, meters off the platform.
An orange gloaming: it must be another helmet lamp. Beneath the glow, there is a shape, humanoid. Parts of its outline disintegrate with the distance, become the sea. Audrey stops and turns. She hops to me, touches my arm, points back to the debris. Her expression suggests she wants to say something more, but we have no private communication channel, so I point at the orange and she shakes her head. My feet move toward the edge of the platform.
“John, everything all right?” Ivan’s voice in my ear. He can see through my camera but makes no comment on the glow.
“I’m seeing—”
A great lurching.
My body lifts in the water, rattles my skull in my helmet, and I spin through the ocean, hearing metal scrape metal, a squeal.
“—COME BACK—” Ivan’s says, voice broken.
Again my body jerks, whirling the sea.
Instinct deletes the present.
I find myself pulling on the umbilical, climbing back to the bell, its cord the only visible thing. A wave or storm has probably battered the ship, and the Frontier’s redundancy measures have failed.
Far below, I see a single light.
An umbilical floats up, untethered from anything human. It must be Audrey’s. I look at its severed end.
“—COME BACK!” Ivan again.
The end of her umbilical is an open vein. Gas, still pumping from the bell, propels it randomly through the water. If the navigation systems are offline, they won’t be able to locate Audrey for hours.
With her umbilical gone, she’ll wait untethered at the sea floor. Eventually, instead of a breath, only panic and hyperventilation will come. Then unconsciousness and death. Yes, it happens like this sometimes. I can’t remember a minute ago. Hand over hand. I pull my body forward. All procedure now. Get to the bell.
Can’t help myself from looking down. Far off, the orange glow drifts beside Audrey’s light, undulating. The bell must be closer than the platform now. Both invisible in the dark. Ivan’s voice over the radio, turning into noise. Rich is safe in the bell, waiting for us. I must believe it.
Come back—the last thing I heard from Ivan. He knows everything up there. Maybe debris will slice through my umbilical too. The cord between my fingers wavers, doubles in my dizziness. My heliox tube must have been damaged.
“All right,” I say. No one can hear me.
I let myself drop again, aiming toward the lights, umbilical creaking. A faint hissing spreads through my suit. Already there. How long has it been hissing? I may pass out soon. Still, I drop, lungs constricting, maybe all imagination. The orange glow rises to receive me, shapeless humanoid. You’re dreaming. The figure morphing, slow and alien, face spinning, a swirl of orange like a watercolor mesa, embossed in vantablack. Below the skull, the body covered in turquoise like a prison jumpsuit. Torso waterbloated. Each aspect of its shape turning inward as if toward a single point. The figure reaches for me. Beneath, Audrey’s light and the platform materializing. Her body prone, unmoving. Touching down, I grip her shoulder, spin her around, her arm spasming out of shock. I shine my light toward her helmet, her eyes opening, a look of expectant dreaming. The peace fades. Terror then anger. Her lips saying stupid, stupid, stupid, leave me. Telling her she can take my air. Her weight welcome against me. Climbing the umbilical again, expecting a snap. Is death at the instant of its arrival an eventless experience? Some underwater structure beyond awareness, eating the glow of any headlamp? Then sudden lights from the diving bell like campfires on a prairie. The endless last meters as we swim toward the clump weight, the bell stage. Rich’s white hands float out of the bottom hatch. I push Audrey into his arms and he pulls her into the bell. Watching the two of them, figments separated from me by the seal of the water, blurry and black. Almost sleeping now. As it nears my eyes, the whirlpool figure radiates, not bioluminescent, a more primordial shine, its spiral beginning to fill my helmet, coiling, and within its glow I see images and memories, their depths like ocean trenches. Into each I am pulled, my mind surfacing by our vessel, seeing the ship turning in a squall, and then I’m atop the snowy junipers near Nicole’s house, and I’m above the courtyard in the prison where my brother sleeps, and I’m in the dirt looking up at the Arizona sky, at the teeth of a galaxy swirling there, a stellar remnant indifferent to my body, full of life I can’t imagine.