from the "Submariner's Waltz"
I opened the brushed steel box and took my dinner wafer. There went another chirp. The dark wafer was instantly heavy in my stomach, and I looked out the window to see if I could see the boat chirping, if I could see a ripple move out from the boat from where it chirped, if I could look where the boat was about to chirp. No one had seen or felt the boat chirping, but everyone knew the sound of metals rubbed together, or apart, by playing ball with a boy with a metal patella in school, or moving a key across the door of a brushed steel box, or by a sticky shower door, so that when the boat chirped, in my periphery I could see the hull opening apart at the seams and my nasal cavity expanded and my palate sank to get ready to breathe in the pliant water.
There was nothing to see through the window except the immediate film of low gravity, which dilates the pupils, when Pavel tapped my arm to show me a black, silky cricket with violet eyes and hair. The cricket was long and thin, and huddled in a crease of Pavel’s palm. Pavel found it in a fissure in the wall of a torpedo tube, and mistook it for just a spot of something in his vitreous humor, until he noticed its smell. The cricket was black and violet, long and thin, had a smell like chlorine, glassy wings, and when it chirped, our ears buckled, and Pavel spit up the color of melon skin. I used one of my pins to remove one wing to test it.
For a long time it was quiet, just the humming of our systems, so I took my wing and struck it to the other wing like a match, and each time it made a clipped, broken, machine noise. I held the cricket while Pavel carved it a cage out of candle wax. I held the cricket and watched it look away, and when I looked where it looked, it looked somewhere else. I offered it a strand of yellow tinsel, and without looking it took it up in its forelegs.
The cricket’s wing was strong, and looked like a black glass oar. As a teenager I canoed. I canoed into the middle of the water, brought in the oar, and lay on my stomach with only my eyes peeking over the boat, scanning the surface of the water—reflections of the daytime moon, or I held out an orange to watch its image in the surface of the water. Now just the idea of the surface of the water disorients me.
For a week the cricket slept under Pavel’s bed in its cage, sometimes making short chops with its wing as if to chirp it against its other, phantom wing, and for that week I had good dreams of my wife. She lay giddy in the snow with her crimson blouse open and buttered my eyes with her small, pale breasts, to a strange, swooping, vaporous music, like a cello bowed with a viola, both breaking from the inside under the sound of it.
As Pavel slept I took the cage from under his bed and scratched his cricket on the nose with its wing, and considered it, until it began to murmur. It started like the sound of a minute furnace and grew.
I felt the bones in my ears tense and bow, and a ball in my brain get hot, and I could not try to move, and the cricket stared and fixed me, rattled my teeth like baby toys, drew a line through my throat.
Pavel found the cricket pinned on its back to its wax ceiling, its legs coiled and its antennae withered, a little gear half-emerged from its mouth-slot.
When we surfaced our beards fell out. Our nails went bright white. Our skin went loose. Underwater our eyes sank, and now they sank back up. The windows opened like little doors, and we flipped open the lid of the boat, and the new air seized in our lungs and our ear canals. Our brains bit at our eyes. Our tears fell out.
We inched over each other in the halls, mute, inverted, in the pale paper outfits we always put on just before surfacing. I spent my time memorizing the tread in the heavy black rubber runners in the halls, first the raised parallel obtuse zigzags, and then the recessed parallel obtuse zigzags, and the shadows in each groove. Submersed, the shadows are either airy smudges or a faint grey hoax, some small piece of a greater trick. Above water, they are proper shadows. Then, at once, everyone is pretty O.K.
I skipped and whistled and took the lawn chair and fish pole from my foot locker, and clicked my heels and spun once and went up and headed the enormous beach ball, adjusted the antenna on the transistor radio, wiped some sunscreen on my nose and shoulders.
Pavel bobbed like a cork some way east, letting out jets of ocean water between his incisors. Somewhere the sun pulsed, and I went light like a jellyfish, and a stork came past, pulling my wife through the sky on a string like an advertisement banner, her red hair going and her blowing kisses, the string in a cartoon bow around her three littlest left toes, the toenails painted with tiny islands in bright light.
I caught a blowfish and put it in my bucket. Dr. Isaac drew up a shuffleboard court in chalk on the afterdeck.
There’s a timing mechanism built into the inside of the nose of the boat, with concentric, toothed brass rings set in an abalone shell. I talked into it, asking for one rain before we went back under.
Some of the rings spin very quickly, and all of the rings spin, but some of them spin too slowly to notice it. I thought of the timing mechanism as one end of a mystical kind of two-cups-and-string telephone, and sometimes some thin scrap of language did come back out of it, unintelligible.
When the boat touched the floor of the ocean, it touched softly. The top of the floor of the ocean is barely firmer than coarse water.
It felt right to seize anything I could manage. It felt right to seize anything and save the worry of managing it. A hard, uniform wind blew across the bottoms of my feet.
While we sat at the bottom of the ocean, I imagined the ship stuck over with remora, waving like a handkerchief.
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Paul Fattaruso is the author of Travel In The Mouth Of The Wolf (Soft Skull Press) and The Submariner's Waltz (Factory Hollow Press).