Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness. Unstill is the word Leah uses, tilting her head to the side as if in answer to some sound, though the evening is quiet—dry hum of the road outside the window and little to draw the ear besides.

“The ocean is unstill,” she says, “farther down than you think. All the way to the bottom, things move.” She seldom talks this much or this fluently, legs crossed and gaze toward the window, the familiar slant of her expression, all her features slipping gently to the left. I’m aware, by now, that this kind of talk isn’t really meant for me, but is simply a conversation she can’t help having, the result of questions asked in some closed-off part of her head.

“What you have to understand,” she says, “is that things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they n...

“There are no empty places,” she says, and I imagine her glancing at cue cards, clicking through slides. “However deep you go,” she says, “however far down, you’ll find something there.”

I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.

Her blood retains no sense of the boundaries it once recognized and so now just flows wherever it wants.

A footprint, once left on the surface of the moon, might in theory remain as it is almost indefinitely. Uneroded by atmosphere, by wind or by rain, any mark made up there could quite easily last for several centuries. The ocean is different, the ocean covers its tracks.

Miri used to call these my sunken thoughts, tapping on the base of my skull with the flat of her hand when I grew quiet, frowning at some thought I was chasing in circles. How’d they get so far down in there? she’d say. Next thing you know they’ll be halfway down your neck. When she did this, I would often catch her palm and keep it there, take her other hand and hold it to my temple, as though surrendering the responsibility of keeping my head in one piece.

I’ve always worked from home, which never bothered me particularly until she went away and forced me into closer proximity with myself.

Now that she’s back—now I’m used to her being back—I can’t decide whether to register her presence as relief or invasion.

The people who live above us keep the TV on at all times. Even when I know they’re both out, at work or at the movies, the noise bleeds through the ceiling—downward drip of talk, of title music, spilling down the wall like the damp that speckles into mold around the chimney breast.

More than once, I have come in to find Leah sitting on the edge of the bathtub, staring into the water with the fixed expression of someone barely awake. She is, as I often think at these moments, deliberating whether or not to get in, though at other times I interpret her expression as something more uneasy—the look of a person who has let their gaze drop too deep and now can’t seem to retrieve it.

There is a practice in Norse mythology that involves the severing of the ribs from the spinal column and the lungs being drawn from the back, extracted in such a manner that the victim is supposedly still able to breathe. Variously described as a method of torture and a means of human sacrifice, there is some debate as to whether this was ever actually performed outside of literature. It would be impossible, of course, to do so with the victim still alive—the lungs wouldn’t function outside of the body, and even if they did, the victim would most likely go into shock and stop breathing on their own.

this is what I thought about in the sixty seconds between the system dying and the next breath I was able to take. I thought about my lungs being wrenched through my back and still swelling, contracting, thought of water spilling into the space where my rib cage had been and my lungs going on regardless.

Occasionally, I will tell Leah I’m leaving the flat to complete a specific activity and instead simply walk to some fixed point and stand there until I get bored enough to return.

On occasion, particularly with friends like Carmen, it occurred to me that this perceived resemblance between Leah and myself had more to do with the two of us being women than it did with anything real.

The deep sea is dark, particularly when the lights on your submersible craft have cut out for reasons unknown. I did my best to keep my gaze away from the windows, thought of strange-shaped ocean creatures peering in at the three of us and smiling with all of their teeth.

Very often, people argue as a way of expressing the fears and frustrations they cannot say aloud.

The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.

In the sea there’s no such thing as a natural horizon, no place for the line of the sky to signify an end. When you sink—which we did, long hours of sinking—you can’t see the bottom and you can’t see the top and the ocean around you extends on both sides with no obvious limit except the border around your own window. Earth and its certain curvature become far less clear underwater.

It was like the dispassionate realization that one has left the house without first turning a light out—unfortunate but hardly a disaster. I don’t remember thinking we would die, so much as noting that we wouldn’t be able to come back up again. I don’t remember thinking we could fix things, only wondering what would happen next.

If you’ve got breath enough to scream, as my father said, you’re not drowning, and so I held my breath and thought about screaming and imagined the ocean coming to an end.

I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes.

It’s easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.

She told me once that when she was young she would imagine herself with scales that grew beneath the membranes of her skin—a flaking layer of silver-blue between her bones and the surface of her body that would prevent her from becoming waterlogged if she were ever to drown. I used to think of her like this, before we fucked or when she rolled over toward me in the night; about hands pulling her down beneath black water, about scales growing over her eyes. She taught me to swim because I couldn’t, held on to my waist and buoyed me along. If I wanted to teach you the way I was taught, she was always saying, I’d hold you under.

OK, I think of saying, but that’s not the point. The problem isn’t that she went away, it’s that nothing about her going away felt normal. It isn’t that her being back is difficult, it’s that I’m not convinced she’s really back at all.

Once you reach depths of thirteen thousand feet, everything has a strange name but rarely a backbone: vampire squid and zombie worms, cosmic jellyfish, tripodfish and faceless cusks and pelican eels. Creatures that live this deep are frequently solitary and only infrequently seen. There are big things down here, old things, and certainly more of them than we know about. Almost every piloted dive to these depths has uncovered something new.

layer is known as the Hadalpelagic, or Hadal Zone, a name that speaks for itself. Lying between roughly nineteen and thirty-six thousand feet, much of this layer of the water is unexplored, which is not to say uninhabited. It was difficult to tell exactly how far we had fallen without the system online to give us a read. It would, I suppose, have been entirely possible to hit the seabed without falling into one of the trenches, although looking out onto the blackness, I believed almost without question that we had fallen as far as it was possible to go. It was difficult to imagine anywhere deeper than the place we had ended up.

Would you look after me, I found myself wanting to ask and unable to do so, the request tangling back on itself, coming out as would you pass the gravy, would you change the channel, would you look at this. For a long time, it failed to occur to me that I was not, in fact, the only person this could happen to. I would look into the mirror and imagine that only I could be in any sense finite.

I lifted up flyers that had been pinned in such a way as to obscure older ones, imagined pulling a card from some hidden place and holding it up to the light: WIFE UNDER THE SEA? HERE’S THE NUMBER TO CALL.

I imagined my mother’s symptoms and read them into the way that I swallowed, the way that I shaped my words. I fell prey to patterns of terrible thinking, imagined myself crowded with cysts, with cancer, growing an untreatable skin.

One night, I dreamed a congregation: fifty women in formal hats declaring themselves the acolytes of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament of Our Wives Under the Sea. The church was tall, a plunging upward streak of ceiling that leered into the distant vaulted rafters, then fell beneath our feet to corresponding depths.

peered into the vast abyss that should have been the floor, the chancel, aisle, and transepts. The space beneath us seethed with almost-movement—dark surge of something otherworldly.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the deep sea might be dark, but that doesn’t make it uninhabited. It certainly was strange that however long it had been since we stopped sinking, we had not seen a single thing beyond the glass.

Why, I write, did you go if they’d told you to expect all this. What, I write, was so fascinating down there that you didn’t come back.

It is still comforting, of a fashion, to think about my Leah, though such thoughts come attendant on the usual wave of grief that my Leah is not who I have with me now. My Leah was funny and strange and predominantly wore men’s underwear. My Leah chewed hangnails loudly and knew the name of every actor yet never remembered the words to a song. My Leah took me out to the beach near the nuclear power station where she’d used to go walking with her father—haar fog in January, too cold and too early for anyone to be there but us.

the chilly liminality of water and earth.

I didn’t date as a teenager, missed the boat due in part to an excess of panic. At the age of thirteen I became obsessed with venereal diseases, misunderstood my way into a locked box from which I then spent the rest of my teens attempting to extract myself. At some point, I had come to understand that somewhere at the core of sex as an activity lay the possibility not only of illness but specifically of bodily harm, and this conviction, once formed, proved difficult to shake.

Sex with Leah was a key and a lock, an opening up of something I had assumed impassable, like a door warped shut by the heat. Joy in the fact of pleasure, in the fact of my own relief. When we fucked, I felt myself distinct from my previous versions: the frenzied me, the panicked me, the me who had imagined herself poisoned by something she had never even done. I don’t think, Leah said to me once, that the problem was really you.

“I don’t understand,” I reply, looking at the side of Leah’s face with an attempt at frankness that I hope is mirrored in my tone, “because she never tells me anything. I know you went away and I know you stayed longer than you meant to and I know you must miss it now, or else why do you run the taps all night and carry your sound box everywhere you go? Problem is I don’t know what it is you miss, I don’t know what it is at all.” “What is it you imagine,” Leah says to me, though her eyes are now on the therapist, “what is it you imagine when you think about where I was?”

I take the thickest book I can find from the shelf and carry it back to the coffee table, pull a slip of paper from my own handbag, and hold it up for a moment before sliding it between the very last page of the book and the back cover. Then I allow the whole heavy weight of the three hundred or so preceding pages plus front cover to fall shut. The slip of paper sticks out between the final page and back cover like a bookmark and I think of how I felt on the viewing deck years ago, when she left not for this last trip but for another, the thing I wished I’d said louder: I’m not sure a ship like that can take the whole of the ocean on top of it, I’m not sure they can all go down that deep and not be crushed. “This is how I imagine it,” I say and watch as Leah’s eyes travel slowly from the therapist to rest upon the book with the little strip of paper crushed beneath the weight of its pages.

I used to hope, I typed once, that I’d die before my partner, even though I knew that was selfish. I used to think that I hoped I’d die before she died and before the planet died and really just generally before things got any worse. I didn’t send this message, specifically because it seemed to imply that my views had changed, when they hadn’t.

After all, why would it help to be shown the mathematics of things, when instead we could simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless.

“I feel like we’re waiting for something,” Matteo continued, “or experimenting with something. I don’t feel like this is a research trip. Don’t you think? Feels more like being dropped in a tank at feeding time and waiting for the sharks to come out.”

When something bad is actually happening, it’s easy to underreact, because a part of you is wired to assume it isn’t real. When you stop underreacting, the horror is unique because it is, unfortunately, endless.

When your dad died, I replied, what did that feel like, and then, She’s not dead, so this is a stupid thing to ask.

I remember I saw it—the eye, and then the face beyond the eye, the way it rose up from the chasm below us and kept rising, the way it filled the windows, filled my field of vision, seemed to fill the whole ocean by itself. I don’t know how to tell you this, really.

felt, with an exhaustion that sat down inside me as though unable to support its own weight, that there would never be any way of knowing whether we had come here intentionally, whether we had been pulled down or pushed.

living means relinquishing the dead and letting them drop down or fall or sink.

Passingly, I think that this might always have been inevitable, that perhaps she had always known it but had wanted to hold on for me, for as long as she could. I can see it now, the way her chest begins to frill, the upward swell and tremor of the skin that registers its natural habitat, growing first translucent, then entirely clear. I can feel, as well, the way the body I am holding is becoming less a body, the way she slides between my fingers—first my Leah, then the water, first my Leah’s arms, her chest, her rib cage, then the water they are struggling toward. I think of nothing, then I think about the sea lung, the day on the beach with Leah where the ice sat on the water and the air around us seemed about to take some other form. This alchemist sea, changing something into something else. I think of this and I look at her face, the remains of her face, my Leah. She is looking at me—this now, the last of her—and she is still looking at me when I move my arms to release her, when she melts between my hands and into water, twisting down into the rolling tide. What persists after this is only air and water and me between them, not quite either and with one foot straining for the sand.