print previewback ELISE LEVINE
On Floating Bodies
No sign of Bowman by the time she and Rand hit it northbound. They stop only for fuel, fries, other shit he kills on the go while she nurses vitamin waters. Nineteen hours in, a hundred clicks from home, an early snow sparks the night fields beyond a gas station. She manages herself from the truck. He’s sullen at the pump, shoulders hunched to his ears. The thick hose stirs between them. Wind fires their hair. Flakes drift down.
~
Pitiful sleep. Now she squints, stunned by weak sunlight, parses the rows of red-bricks. Rotting pumpkins on porches. Polyester ghosts espaliered over shrubs. Orange plastic bags, leaf-stuffed. Her own home sweet dime-sized lawn scaly with waste. She shuffles to her front gate, arms from her sides as if walking a gangplank, her breath in white parachutes. She sticks her key in the mailbox, scoops envelopes and flyers, other people’s ideas of things. She cants her face skyward. Cumuli, starling drift. The cold planes her skin at the jawline, cheekbones. In the hallway again, she feels cleansed, decored like an apple. Not bad. Just her wrist aches, she realizes when she reties the drawstring on her sweatpants. The fabric bunches. She billows the hem of her shirt, her stomach concave, pelvic bones thrusting like tusks. Last night in bed Rand had strummed her ribs. You’re disappearing, he’d said.
~
Three recovery days later, smoke jets from her bony crotch, her ears twirl like whatzits. She’s in the garage, hunched over a workbench. She squeezes the tube of silicon, wands the applicator over crushed neoprene. Never mind the slices in her dry suit’s kneepads, her mind eels along, outpaces her repairs—never mind a week ago she’d crawled a thousand feet through mandibles of flooded rock, her mask a bedazzle of tears. Claustrophobia nipped her brain. Even as she silently begged no small help from Rand, she’d calculated her uses of pressurized gases, the biochemical curtsies and swoons, the soaring exchange in the bloodstream that had her at addict, at more—she whistles while she works, a mechanical seesaw, just thinking. She plans and plans again. Next dive—deeper. When the inner garage door slings open—Rand this, Rand that, just home from the office, wincing—she stores her suit on a coat hanger, admires how much the dark shape resembles her own. The custom fit cost her a fortune. Now she’ll have to get it taken in. God knows how much she’ll pay for the alterations. As if he’s thinking the same thing, the face on Rand. Pinched, wary. As if he should care. She lets fly, corners him by the rebreathers. His shirt is wilted, trousers creased around the groin. He puffs his cheeks, extends his neck at an angle commonly seen on men too old to fix. Do not threaten me, he says. He says, Everything is different now. Game changed. You’re different now. Even after he stops speaking his jaw keeps working. When his voice seems to catch up with the motion he says, I’m trying to make this simple so you can understand. I am not babysitting you anymore. She says, Huh. She says, For a man of few words you suddenly have a lot to say. She twitches her chin with her thumb, pantomimes thinking. She says, Threaten? Don’t mind if I do.
~
The next morning Bowman says, Don’t make me get on the blower with him, Princess. She says, Try it, baller. She says, What, you think I should solo instead?
~
She slams her car door. Rand’s already left for the day, but Bowman she can’t seem to lick—he’s in her earpiece like cream in a Twinkie. Dickweed. Why she ever had to kiss him. Ugly does not begin to say. So she shuts it, cranks the heat, trammels right then left, runs a yellow. Smile for the camera. Cool and bright today. Bowman croaks on, another story. She transponds the newest city limits, checkpoints gussied to look folksy—single-story cinder blocks with polyurethane-thatched roofs, guards in belled floral skirts and dimity slacks, purple-laced jackboots. She roars past pillared entrances to the bramble of interconnected subterranean malls, finally coasts the old residential streets once wide as fields, now doll-tiny. She noses the car by a life-sized woman in sweats wrestling some recycling curbside, two boys swording sticks across a narrow lawn—in her rearview she sees them vault the narrow ditch, clamber into the road, remonstrate in her direction like miniature trolls. She cruises the main thoroughfare, mostly empty of traffic, its multiplexities the strongest evidence the latest Cabinet’s Six-Year Renewal Works! Every second or third bronzed doorway is a restaurant or specialty market, storefront windows with signs in Cyrillic, Korean, Farsi, Franglish, as far as she can tell all saying, You Should Eat. Bait. Her stomach rumbles. Undeterred she tours alongside the park she and her childhood bestie practically owned, strangely unchanged save for being uninhabited. The swings swing. The sugar maples rustle their last few crimsons, umbers. Princess? Bowman says.
~
She pulls over. Sparrow, grass. She’s fallen behind. Her adipose cross sections, abnormal thyroids modeled, cinereous hand-drawn pencil sketches remodeled—her bread and butter—half-done, not done. Undone. Her medical textbook illustrations. Her freelance job. Two weeks off, a little va-cay south with the husband, and all goes to hell. Though she primed for it all, the past three years. The wreck diving, wall diving. Floridian caves, those underground palaces accessed through unprepossessing sinks and springs and sumps—couch surfing at Bowman’s a week or two here and there, base operations. Abandoned mines. Cozy inland lakes, great lakes. Bejeweled reefs and stingrays. Freshwater, salt. The bilious North Atlantic where clouds of broken-backed shrimp made aureoles around her drowsy, decompressing head. Such joy. Work deadlines she increasingly near-missed, heaven and hell of another species. So much for her previous lifetime, a now-ancient history of building relationships with clients, steady Freddy-ness. She cuts the engine, circles her wrist in the air. Bowman continues to carp, nearly bleeding her auricles. Bad idea, he keeps saying. Rand is right, Princess, that is one bad idea. Let me clarify. Ideas. She thinks: Yes, but you’ve had yours. This one is mine.
~
She thinks so hard she can hardly think. Six months ago, middle of a minor domestic with Rand, it had first come to her. How would you know, you bastard? she’d said. What it feels like to really lose something.
Came out of nowhere. They were in the kitchen. Married two-and-a-half years. Or not nowhere. There was the broken bowl, her mother’s—killed five years ago in a Subway Action, those immolations of innocents in the name of freedoms her daughter is unable to identify though she’s perused the Commission’s reports outlining struts and guy wires, axial link-pins in a shadowy nest of plotting minds. This Action that happened to her. Happened to Rand too—they met when she took up diving, trying to take a load off her bottomless mourning. Adopted as a baby, her instructor and soon-to-be husband already half a lifetime into his—surely a lesser grief. How could he love what he’d never really had?
~
Proof: a broken bowl, his dim fucktard apology. Or whatever he was calling it. Sunshine, toast with jam, la-la. Taste of chlorine on her tongue, brass in her throat. Poison jaundicing every chamber of her heart, its warrens of white rabbits, spent quivers in the hold of a boat she was burning. She said it again, You bastard. His shoulders slack then tight, ching-ching. He said, Do you even know who you are? Do I even know?
Ever since, they’ve hooked and crooked, all they can have and hold. She’s made sure of that, this something she can do. Let him lose someone. Even if that someone is her.
~
Now her mind floods, just thinking. She licks her lips, peers through the car windshield, longings fulvous as the rotting leaf piles that remind her of sepsis, the mephitic whiff of sewers, sulfurous sinkholes to which she is astonishingly drawn. How astonished she is by herself. In her wildest dreams in her old life of work, work, work, she would never have thought that who she is now were possible. That she could possibly think, Stupid crier, at Bowman’s yacking and clacking Hear Ye’s. That she could be this bored, up here in the bounded world, a portly squirrel lugging a bagel beneath a teeter-totter, four black helicopters fleeting the west. Smoke pluming one or two mercantile citadels. Incendiaries. Occupations. Injunctions. Nothing and everything to do with her and hers. A day so ordinary she could puke. Business as usual, she presses end-call.
~
She parks at the cemetery. Pardes Shalom, peaceful garden. The car’s heater blasts. She buzzes open the window, undoes her coat, hikes her dress to her hips. She waits for Bowman’s callback. She traces the pattern on her thick tights, as if memorizing the snaking ridges—as if their woven tattoo echoes the rows along the hill before her, lanes organized by sections and distributed under crusting and crimping sycamores, the denuded hickories and oaks, the spiny arrays of east-facing headstones, including her parents’ double memorial. She runs out of breath, patience—heart hot and heavy, out of the car and lickety-splickety digs in the customarily rock-filled steel bucket placed next to the path. Claws, despite the pain in her forearm, because of it. In no time, rocks in her coat pockets, hands. Rocks dun colored, heather grey, flecked with quartzite, rocks smooth and flat, round, rocks shaped like stars, plums, dates. The pretty pit of Bowman’s Adam’s apple, how it jumped when she’d nailed him. This was at a corner table in the Tallahassee oyster shack, Rand in the bathroom. They were all still narcotized up the butt from how deep they’d just been, in a sinkhole. Nitrogen-high. She was also bent. Lymphatic edema, swollen forearm. Stupid novice bent. She’d managed to conceal it so far from Rand, tugging at her shirt, but Bowman had noticed when she couldn’t open the door to the bar. Rand hitting the can and Bowman nudging her shoulder, his wiry frame and slutty drawl edging into her. He said, Come on now, sweetie, we eat, we go. Straight to the chamber in Gainsville. They know me there. We’ll do the run together, play cards. Recompress you good. She’d rammed her tongue between his teeth to quiet him. Hours later, back at Bowman’s, she couldn’t unload her gear from the truck. Rand gaped, shoved aspirin, codeine, slapped an oxygen reg at her. His silence a bludgeon. Bowman a shadow, evanescing altogether halfway through the night. What was he, scared? Pussy. What was she? Monster. That she’d buy, take that to the bank. He’d stayed gone until she and Rand left. Three days, no calls. Now he wants to talk? And now he doesn’t?
~
Up the hill, above the trees, an undammed sky so blue her veins hurt. She cuddles into her coat. The lumps in her pockets bruise her legs. Rocks in her head, she traverses the swale, arrives at ma and pa in no time. In accordance with ancient custom, she lays her offerings to rest atop the granite shelf. How parched she is. Dying.
~
Forget Florida’s soured sun on Bowman’s flimsy trailer, oyster shacks booming with business. This far north, this late in the season, way past the most weakly guarded perimeter, most of the peninsular town’s shops or hotels are closed, their windows and doors boarded in anticipation of a routinely harsh winter. Many of the cottages—they cusp the lakeside, semi-circle the bayside, others are serried through the wooded hills—will have already had their pipes shut. Out on the water, visible through chinks of pine forest and sumac scrawls, waves rear, white capped. Rand drives fast, scudding the gravel. When they get to Leo’s, Rand parks his black behemoth behind Leo’s white one. The house is a timbered A-frame set back in a stand of spruce and cedar. When she thumps on the front door, pine needles mat under her feet. Faded leaves drift against her ankles. She’s sick, dizzy, beset by fears she’d somehow forgotten since Florida. She can hardly believe she’s going to go through with things. She can hardly believe she won’t. She can’t tell which fear is worse. You told him four, right? Rand shouts from the truck. He blurs then snaps into focus—frowning, hoisting a backpack. She knocks again, then turns the handle, lets herself in. Mildew, acrid cleanser. She mounts the three stairs from the vestibule into the living room. On the couch, something mounded under a blanket, hushed movement. She slowly backs out. On the drive again, the wind spatters grit. Her lungs burn. Rand has dumped their bags on the ground. She feels loose as balloons let go. Here’s her chance, an easy out, hers for the asking. No chance. Forget living to tell the tale. Forget living. Without the diving, the near-dying, how will she know she’s alive?
~
She will not say, How weird is this? Guess it’s all over. She will not say, Sorry Rand. Sorry for putting you through all this trouble. She will not duck her head and scuttle on by. Not allow him to sneer, say, I’ll bet you’re sorry. She will stride past, rattle the back of the truck open. Joking, she will say, and yank out the grocery sacks. She will say, Leo, that asshole. He’s upstairs getting off. She will propose that she and Rand crack some beers, wait a few. She will say, Let’s pretend everything’s normal. We know how to do that, don’t we?
~
Within the hour Rand and Leo are on the patio with the rusty outdoor grill fired up. She’s in the kitchen opening a bag of fancy salad, scouring the cupboards and drawers, eventually finding a nest of plastic utensils, a stack of paper plates. In the fridge, gelatinous bottled dressing. She sips another brew, counts out three place settings—Leo’s paramour having evaporated through the rear door, apparently no introductions necessary. The forecast for tomorrow is iffy, strong winds, possible thunderstorms. She can hear the wind now, netting the occasional flash of Rand’s or Leo’s laughter. If he can get them out on his boat to the dive site tomorrow, she’ll have to really have her shit together. No screwups on the bucking deck of Leo’s converted fishing tug, in the mashing confusion mistakenly placing one piece of gear where another should go, no puking over the gunwales, motion sick. No getting dehydrated, weak—asking for another hit. Her already damaged tissues won’t conduct nitrogen as effectively as healthy ones. How many more chances can she take, anyway? She holds her bottle up to the kitchen light. Half empty. She gurgles the rest down the sink, straightens her back, winches herself taller.
~
The gusts keep up all through dinner, which she only picks at, and then their florid rushes accompany the movie she and Leo and Rand watch, one they’ve each seen before. Leo periodically turns down the volume to check the marine forecast. Not good. She and Rand retire early to the guest lair next to Leo’s. She falls asleep immediately, an errant airstream hooking her ankles, hauling her upside down and far away, hair trailing below, the wind jubilant, black, if black were a sound. She wakes. Rand is on top of her. She opens to him and he enters and fucks her. She’s about to come when from the bedroom next door she hears above her own wail that of another woman, orgasming. She pushes against Rand’s chest with her hands. Stretching his mouth over hers, he grinds away, beating a succession of cries from her, which pass into him.
~
Blown out, she and Rand and Leo play cards all the next morning. Still no sign of Leo’s girlfriend. At one point he scrambles some eggs and they eat. They watch more movies, TV, sleep again. In the afternoon she gets up and washes her face, goes for a walk. A brute day, raw. By the side of the road the trees shorn of leaves scrape and bend, pine and spruce throw up their bows as if exasperated. From here, half a forested mile inland, she can’t see the water. Even so, the enormous bay on one side joining with the great lake on the other fills her mind. Open water. As she scuffs along, she pictures it blotting and smudging the shoreline like a giant sponge. Leviathan. Not open: instead, a scaffolding of levels, each with its own exigencies, depending on light, current, pressure, temperature, which demand reciprocations from the diver, forethought—the dive plan like an airy set of trusses delicately cantilevered over liquid, an architecture invisible to the naked eye. A translucent water zeppelin. As if envious of such beauty stashed in a realm it can’t plunder, the wind doesn’t let up. Tomorrow will likely be a wash, too. Four-foot swells, insane chop. The sky starts to hiss and spit. She troops on like a rat on a treadmill, trying to discharge the lashing inside her like a juiced wire. Only the clarity of the dive can harness this fizzing that ghosts everyone she knows, has ever known, refused to know, refuses. Her mind a fastened hatch.
~
When she returns to the cottage she finds Rand sitting alone in the living room, dark except for the TV. She turns the lamps on for him as one might for an invalid. Leo’s at the shop tying up business odds and ends before he closes for good for the season. She and Rand make sandwiches with the bread and cold cuts she and Rand brought and then she and Rand eat them. They read dive magazines, spy novels found in a rickety bookcase. Leo calls at six. Let’s bag it, Rand says over the phone. She clicks the off button on the TV remote. Rand listens for a moment, cell to his ear, scowling. No glory in losing your boat, Rand says. He says, And more. He rubs the back of his neck. This silence is longer. Then he says, It’s not me. I can do it. Again he waits a moment. He says, Yeah, let’s talk again later. He tosses his cell onto the couch, between his thighs, rubs his face. She says, Thanks for the sterling recommendation. He rises, refusing to look at her. Piss off, he says. He stalks from the room, down the stairs. The front door slams. She takes a shower, gets dressed again, lies down in her clothes and takes another nap. Soon it is eight o’clock at night, nine. The TV’s kettle-drumming, keening from the living room. In front of the bathroom mirror she untangles her hair with a comb, harps a fingernail along the ridges. Puh-link, she imagines. Puh-lunk. At ten Leo calls again to report that the wind is falling. The waves mere five-foot swells. She and Rand get in the truck and drive to the dock.
~
She is so stoned.
In a glass jar, suspended among drifts of white gauze. Metallic pings, sonorous snores—her breath a miracle-soup. She halts her descent, shines her light on her forearm, studies the display on her primary computer. Instantly the fog around her brightens, her peripheral vision widens—hello synapses soaring back into business. She sweeps her beam through the tar-waters below, along the jagged contours of the limestone cliff. Forty-foot visibility, she guesses. She rechecks her computer, depth and pressure gages, unable to remember what they read seconds ago. Two hundred and five feet. She’s shaking with cold though she feels lit as a drunk jacketless on a frigid night. She picks her way lower, avoiding the mud and sludge-furred rock. Stir it, and her light will affect little more than a hazy circle swallowed by silt. By two-fifteen, twenty her breathing woozes like a lazy accordion. Good thing. The slightest spike in her inhalations, any increase in her rate of respiration—exertion, anxiety—will enhance the narcosis. Breathing harder will spike the oxygen in her bloodstream, render it toxic. Cause convulsions, seizures. Drowning. She thinks and thinks, check-listing, reviewing, working the sloppy, cantering horse of her brain. She understands the slipshod bullshit she’s in. She’s lost sight of Rand.
~
She directs her light beam toward her chest. Darkness explodes. She peers further down, into the inky well. And picks out his beacon—thirty feet below?—fading fast. Here her mind dismounts. Not here. In white veils trailing hidden streams, a gondola floats beneath crumbling aqueducts. Someone sings, a barrel-chested boar, his boater at a rakish angle. A wolf too, her coloratura a colony of cats with cricket tongues. Here, notes like chipped tiles in an ancient mosaic. A destination. Hurry.
~
She casts her light. The aureate slope like an old painting. She strokes her beam up, down. Urgent. Please respond. She tries again. Zip.
~
Options. Please.
~
Leo somewhere above. She’d last seen him bailing in the vicinity of a hundred-seventy feet. The tug, meanwhile, has been left unattended. In any book, an illegal move. No one to make sure the anchor doesn’t break free. No one to prevent the former fishing tug from surging away, capsizing, colliding with other night-plying vessels. No one on board to radio for help in case of an emergency.
~
Rand’s light expires. She gorges, fattens on fog. She can barely hear her blood sirening through her veins, heartbeat a sortie of hobgoblins. Pure primitive: gland lodged above her forehead like a third eye. The pineal. Aware. And so she slows her breathing, bats away the cobwebs, exhales, cautiously descends, one foot, another, maniacally eyeing her depth gage. Two-thirty, god-forty. She no longer shivers, no longer anything but vigilant, machining.
~
Until at two-fifty-seven she calls it. O Alien. She turns, faces the broken slope and begins her ascent. Water, more water. She will live, after all. Some weepie. Periodically she looks behind—no mean feat given the gear she’s wearing, nearly a hundred pounds lashed to her frame. Down there, no sign. Her head clears. Grey minutes transpire, until a sudden tickle in her left eye—a sac of hope—alerts her. Relief hatches in her belly, swarms her chest. She waits, clinging to rock. Eventually, in a controlled fashion, he passes her with barely a nod. She climbs again until, somewhere in his vicinity, she makes her first decompression stop. Trailing him, she continues to ascend. By thirty feet they’ve risen through several thermoclines to a balmy fifty degrees. She has to pee. Otherwise, she’s reasonably comfortable. With little sense of urgency, she prays the boat is on the surface where it’s supposed to be, that Leo’s on board awaiting them, prepared to ferry them back. That they’ve all gotten away with something.
~
At twenty feet she and Rand rest against a massive limestone outcropping riddled with holes the size of quarters. Hang time, major deco. They lie in darkness, turning off their beams to conserve the batteries and avoid attracting swarms of the underwater life that exists at these warmer, shallower depths, small freshwater shrimps, nits, already a twittering corona around—the two of them larger bugs. Occasionally one or the other of them plies a backup light, checks gages, computers, illuminating the limestone as a crayfish condo. At each of the thousand windows, antennae pricked, a crustacean waves, bidden by the presence of visitors once giants, now nearly fish food. How close they’ve come. 
