Our Wives Under The Sea — Chapter no 4

Leah.

Panic is a misuse of oxygen. The first thing anyone learns in diving is how to breathe. When the console lights went off, I held my breath for a full sixty seconds, considered the wet wing shapes of my lungs. 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.

Even so, one can think of the lungs sometimes and believe it. Picture their wide, whaling chambers, the bald imperative of all they are made to contain. I don’t know why I’m mentioning this, really, except that 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 ribcage had been and my lungs going on regardless.

At this point, I should note, we were still following protocol, at least to some degree. It is actually very rare for a submarine to sink but there are guidelines in place for this eventuality as there are for all things, the most vital of which is to send a distress call without delay. The earlier you can do this (and the closer to the surface you are when you do), the more likely it is that a coastguard or passing vessel will pick up the signal and realise that something is wrong. The problem, of course, is that sending a distress call relies on your system being online, which ours was not. I remember Matteo at the comms panel, moving his hands over the console for a moment and then looking at me. I remember, too, the disquieting lack of electric light – the switches dull – the way our craft seemed suddenly less a piece of precision-tooled engineering and more a swiftly sinking box. Matteo was

the one who checked the engines, the junction boxes, the pressure gauges.

“There’s nothing wrong,” he said, “it should all be working fine.”

We were still descending when the system went out and already too deep to evacuate. Our COscrubbers, for whatever reason, appeared to have2 remained intact, but with no way to control the ballast tanks, there was nothing we could do but continue to drop.

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