by Chris Howard
She knew she had to end it when she saw “the look.” He'd told her to change out of a flirty pink blouse, and she'd laughed and said, “What are you, my grandmother?” His face had gone rigid, his blue eyes molten, like opening a little iron door on a furnace, nothing but hot blurry anger inside.
She said goodbye, walked away, and kept walking with Alan Yeater screaming at her back, “No one walks away from me!"
The tears weren't for Alan. He'd never really seen who she was, what she was like inside and out. As if he had some unchanging picture of her in his head, and any deviation from it was a challenge to his authority.
The frenetic notes of a Beethoven string quartet coiled and jumped in the background of her imagination. Her breakup with Alan had taken no longer than it took two violins, a viola, and cello to get through the second movement of “Opus 130"—which she'd renamed “The Alan Yeater Breakup Presto."
She sniffed back more tears, savoring the same minute and forty-nine seconds of memory over and over. At least she'd gotten rid of him quickly.
In the final stretch of 17, Corina had to deal with a few predatory stockcar racers, darting in and out of the lanes, making their own narrow passages down the shoulders. They taunted her into slaloming to the interchange. She obliged and would have outraced one of them if there hadn't been a blur of black and white in her peripheral vision. She slowed down and slid into the right lane, letting the patrol car go by.
There were California Highway Patrol officers who made careers out of Highway 17.
Corina emerged from the death race with her vehicle and pinkslip intact, and went south on Route 1 toward Monterey. Half an hour later she pulled off at the first exit of the old army post, Fort Ord.
The road had, at one time, curved around to drop drivers at the post's shooting range. Now it curved around into a small traffic circle with four roads shooting off in different directions.
Corina heard her phone chirping. Alan calling. She leaned into the wheel, grabbed her phone, and slid it up against her ear. She sucked in a deep breath.
"Yup?"
There was a long pride-swallowing pause. “It's me.” His voice was rough, hitching in his throat.
Her mind jumped right to: He isn't crying, is he? She killed the question, and her lips went tight with the effort to keep them shut. It's over. Make him do the talking. She pulled up to the curb, stopping in the darkness under the overpass. The shifter knob vibrated in her hand. She dropped the car out of gear, but left the engine running.
Alan drew in a long breath. “It's me, babe."
She sniffed and shook her head, annoyed. Already said that.
"Look ... I'm...” Alan's voice smoothed out. “You going to say anything?"
"I was pretty clear the day before yesterday."
She felt a drop in the temperature over the phone.
Alan's voice thinned to a knife's edge. “Are you seeing someone else?"
Else? That implies that I'm still seeing you. Corina stopped her grinding molars before they crumbled in her mouth. Seeing someone else ... She ducked to her side mirror as a couple in a minivan passed her. “Two, actually."
He choked. “So, this is it?"
It ended two days ago. “What more do you need me to say?"
"Fuck you! I don't need you to—” He fumed and spit more words out. “You need me. You hear me? Crawl back to me, stupid whore, begging me! You need—"
"Save your saliva."
She powered off her phone, took a deep breath, and stared back at herself in the rearview mirror, her brown eyes fixed with purpose. No more tears. No asking how she got herself into these relationships. Nothing blurry, overemotional, nothing out of control.
"Proud of you,” she whispered and her voice broke.
A couple cars passed her, entered the loop, and headed south toward the university. Old army posts never die—they're turned into parks and unique leasing opportunities like the Presidio of San Fran or, like Ord, schools.
Corina kicked in the clutch, put the car in gear, and took the northbound road. She passed ancient barracks and clapboard warehouses, all painted tan with big black numbers stenciled on the corners. Most were abandoned and had sat there peeling in the salt air and sun for decades. Cal State Monterey took up a large chunk of property at the other end of the post.
She turned onto a small road that swung back under the freeway toward the dunes and the bay beyond, pulling over at the end of a broken concrete pad, crunching mats of iceplant under her tires. She tucked her car up against a group of squat cypress trees.
She got out, stuffed her keys, rings and driver's license into a watertight pouch, and then she unbuttoned, unzipped, and stripped off her clothes.
Corina opened the door to the back and tossed her skirt, blouse, and bra across the cello case that shared the backseat with her dive gear. She squirmed into her wetsuit, black neoprene tubing that fit her body like another skin, tucking in her hair, snapping the black foamy material of the hood around her cheeks and chin.
Then she squatted and wriggled like a wet cat, getting used to the suit's squeeze on her neck and thighs. She fixed the seams along her arms and straightened her spine, reaching into the air, lifting her body on the balls of her feet, her calf muscles flexing until they burned.
She hauled her dive gear up the path that led to the endless Pacific, stopping at the crest to take it all in, the crash of surf, smooth blue folds at the horizon catching the sun in broken metal glimmers, a drawer full of wobbling teaspoons tossed over the bay's surface.
"I need you like I've never needed anyone."
She spoke the lie in a reassuring whisper even as the teeth in her mind, the hunger in her soul, fed on memories of shattered glass and steel wrung like a rag, a slick of oil and blood, brakelight fragments like wicked witch fingernails poking through the asphalt, through the oil, through the blood. And in her memories, she fell to the street and never got up, the rumble of cars coming into her skin through the warm tar surface, through her jaw, into her head; her tears pooled in the corner of her mouth, and time stopped there, a fluid that filled every yesterday, a moment long past that still rang in her ears.
She blinked at the California sun and saw her mother's hair squeezed between the seat and headrest in front of her, the tick tick tick of the left turn signal—and her sister's cold hospital voice interrogating her. “Why did you live when Mom and Dad died? What makes you so special?"
Corina had survived, dragged by firefighters from the backseat crush of metal and folded bones. Her mother and her father were dead in their seats.
Corina Lairsey cut off a whimper, but couldn't hold in her tears. They rolled from her eyes, falling down her wetsuit, soaked up by the sand—and she pushed the volume of the music in her head up to drown the endless-moment ringing. The music in her head—the only thing that softened the memory of her mother's sharp intake of breath just before impact.
The Pacific whispered loudly and Corina dragged her gear to the edge, another Thursday walking into the cold blue, and even when a part of her didn't want it to, it let her go every week.
She squinted at the sun. Smiling at a seagull, she wiped the tears away with the back of her hand, and slid the mask on, propping it on her forehead. The waves called to her and promised not to let her fall.
The Pacific was eternal. The ocean would always be there to hold her tight and make her whole, something the air just could not do.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter Three
Fast
Who are they, O pensive Graces,—For I dream'd they wore your forms—
Who on shores and sea-wash'd places
Scoop the shelves and fret the storms?
Who, when ships are that way tending,
Troop across the flushing sands.
To all reefs and narrows wending,
With blown tresses, and with beckoning hands?
—"The New Sirens,” Matthew Arnold
* * * *
"This is the most beautiful machine I have ever seen."
Her own words echoed in her head, and under her breath, she relayed a description of the marvelous submarine to the others inside her soul.
Kassandra had made her way several miles up the coast of New Hampshire to the mouth of the Piscataqua River, kicking against the current until she found the Naval Shipyard on the far bank. Not far. After all, her father and her bodyguard, Zypheria, told her to stay close to home.
There were two submarines in the water, one with a maintenance rack over the bell at the bow, and ropes and umbilicals running from the boat to the cleats or into the big gray utility sheds. She found two more subs in drydock, but settled on exploring one tied up at the pier.
The water from the Piscataqua dribbled from Kassandra's braids, down her back and off the rounded hull. She squatted and looked down the black sloping length of the boat, leaning against her sheathed sword, using it to keep her balance.
"Fast.” She stood and took ten even steps toward the sub's stern, trying to measure its length. “Attack.” She lifted her sword in its scabbard, tapping the steel cables running from the sail to the dock above her. “Submarine."
She heard the approaching footsteps of one of the Shore Patrol, but she didn't run, just glanced over her shoulder at the dark river to see that her path of retreat was clear. The Navy and Coast Guard ran patrol boats along the Piscataqua, and she didn't want one racing up behind her without knowing about it. She turned a little to face the patrolman on the edge of the dock above her.
"He's cute,” she breathed the words to herself.
The patrolman looked to be in his twenties, with stubbly blond hair and vigilant eyes that shifted along the docks and submarine maintenance buildings. Kassandra's gaze followed the earpiece that stuck out a little over his cheek, then dropped along his shoulder with some stripes, insignia she didn't understand, down to his waist where a handgun was holstered. His focus had moved to the river, but well over her head. He didn't appear to notice her, invisible in a tight blue long sleeved shirt and shorts, standing motionless ten meters astern of the sail.
She cleared her throat politely.
The patrolman's gaze dropped, and he swung one hand up into a boxer's guard position. The other unsnapped the holster strap.
"Who are you?"
Kassandra pointed at her feet with her sword. “How many crewmen does it take to run one of these?"
He blinked at her as if he had trouble seeing her. There was a young woman standing on the submarine below.
He shook his head. “Uh ... I mean ... Over a hundred and forty officers and enlisted. What are you doing here? How did you get past the gate?"
She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder to the river behind her. “I came from the water. What kind of weaponry?” She used her sword to indicate the length of the boat. “I see vertical launch tubes. Those are for torpedoes? I've done research, but there's still a lot I don't know. What can a torpedo—one of the MKs—do in terms of damage against stone battlements, let's say twenty feet thick? How deep can they go? Deeper than the submarine? What about mines? Does this sub carry them?"
The patrolman looked increasingly concerned. Was she waving a sword around? “You can't ... Does your dad work here?"
Kassandra huffed at his inability to answer her questions. Maybe he didn't know. She moved on. “How fast is fast? When you call this a fast attack submarine, are you talking thirty knots or a hundred and thirty?"
He spoke into his comm gear, his right hand slipping into the holster for his gun. “Patrol? I need back up at river five. Unauthorized—"
Kassandra sighed, and without another word, turned, tucked her sword against her side, and dove off the sub into the black green water of the Piscataqua, barely leaving a swirl in the surface to mark her passage.
By the time the harbor patrol boat roared up, she was out past 2KR, the red buoy at the Portsmouth Harbor entrance, marking the separation of the river and the Atlantic.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter Four
Free Diving
I know human lungs have never been capable of operating efficiently with so thick a medium as seawater. They have evolved over millennia for breathing air in a relatively narrow range of surface pressures. The human fetus does not breathe amniotic fluid, but receives all the necessary nutrients and oxygen through the placenta from the mother.
—From a journal by
Michael Augustus Henderson
* * * *
The Pacific slipped up Corina's legs, cold and clinging, circling her waist, the water sensing the warm life under her wetsuit, nimbly prying at the seams, seeping through the material to chill her skin.
She pushed the mask against her face, fitting it over her cheeks and forehead. Without pause or fear, she walked into the monstrous waves of ocean thundering against the beach.
Violent water swallowed her; there was a roar in her ears, a rush of ice over her body, then silence. She was under, inside the storm, inside the other world that folded over the surface of the world that didn't want her.
Then she weighed nothing.
She drew a breath, wet and loud in her ears, a gush of salt in her mouth, metallic and bitter.
She kicked hard, following the smooth sandy slope until the rocks broke it up, edging away from the floor, into open sea.
Corina was a hundred meters from shore when something in the endless blue hit her in the back, almost playfully. She kicked and paddled, turning much too slowly, her movements clumsy and heavy like an astronaut on a spacewalk. She spun, looking for the cause, a shadow that moved just beyond her peripheral vision. She was alone, but something not made of seawater had bumped forcefully into her tanks, something alive, with the weight and mischievous power of a sea lion. She sucked in a shallow breath, biting into her mouthpiece. Her skin went colder under her suit. Sharks bumped potential prey before devouring them. She paddled one more time around.
There was nothing there.
Her eyes moved in small left-to-right shifts, trying to pick up anything solid out of the wide space of water, dropping to her fins to focus on anything beyond them. The sloping floor of sand and rock darkened as it angled away from the shoreline, velvety blue fading into black.
She thumbed on her dive lights, one dangling from her wrist, the other on a strap over her left shoulder.
The Pacific's surge lifted her gently, and she watched and waited. Enough. She threw her hands over her head and kicked, a reflex, a reaction to tiny changes in the ocean her body somehow picked up without having any exposed skin. There was something in the water with her. She just couldn't see it.
Then it touched her, poked her in the shoulder. She kicked away, spinning right, too slowly, and it anticipated her direction; it hooked her arms and jerked her back, tugging on the hoses, nearly ripping the regulator from her mouth. Her feet flipped out in front of her. The skin along her neck tightened, and she scooped the water, twirling to catch a glimpse of whatever it was.
Nothing there.
A chill ran through her, and she slid her hands over her wetsuit as if to wipe something off.
Her eyes stung trying to focus on anything out of the infinite gloom. She looked up and kicked. Her intuition—the combined prickling, wrenching, and screaming of several major organs at once—told her: Get the fuck out of here! Surface. Get to the surface!
She kicked hard, her breathing loud in her ears. She pushed her body toward the light, her mind racing with questions, twisting her thoughts into knots, strings of words circling around and repeating themselves, mostly variations on What the hell is that?
She didn't have any immediate answers, and the ones lurking at the edges scared her too much to state them clearly.
&nbs
p; Corina jerked her hands back as a colder current pushed over her gloves. She slowed for half a second, stunned, and then kicked again. Her body slammed into something solid but invisible in the water, jarring her teeth. She grunted over her reg. Her mask hammered into her face. Seawater squeezed in, pooling around her nose. She slid upside down and the saltwater blinded her. Her legs swung over her head, and her heels hammered into the barrier, shaking every bone in her body.
Finger-like cables grabbed her hands. She couldn't see them. She felt them, tightening, squeezing painfully around her wrists, snaking over her biceps, under her arms and back over her shoulders.
Her hands slapped together in front of her and the tentacles dragged her through the water, towing her deeper and to the south, toward Monterey and the cliffs of the southern edge of the underwater canyon.
Corina folded her knees to create some drag, and tugged as hard as she could, fighting the thing that held her. She bit into her regulator, screaming curses in big wobbly bubbles that ripped past her face.
Her breathing quickened into a saw-like roar in her ears, making her lightheaded.
The water went black, her dive lights dancing off the rocks as her invisible captor dragged her up against the canyon wall. She kicked wildly, and tried to hook her fins on a passing ridge. She flew over the crenellated row of rock, gray in the twilight like the broken wall of a haunted castle.
Watery fingers wriggled over her body, tightening their grip, working their way down her back, around her waist, spiraling her throat. She tucked her head down, trying to stop it from choking her.
The shadowy face of the cliff came at her fast, and she drew her legs toward a meter-wide slice of pure black, a cave in the tall face of rock.
The current freed her at the mouth, and tossed her inside. Corina bent her knees and had her hands halfway up to her face when a thicket of woody-branched gorgonians caught her. Stiff pink stems of coral scraped her arms, clawing at her mask and hoses.
