They watched the Lieutenant go down. He let go of their improvised lifeline and struggled to give up his shoes, and then his pants. He struggled again as he went under repeatedly, and he begged the others for some kind of help, but soon he was paralyzed and wordless and all alone, although he was right there among them, and then he was gone.
Before nightfall the wind blew gentler, the swells were born smaller and more courteous, and life got better. But then night fell, and there was no more seeing in this life.
In the dark they stayed near each other, fought to keep near when one lost hold of the lifeline, though clinging to one another was fatal, and they called to one another and answered — there was never any talk about why. It was understood that they would stay together, though Marie had forgotten by now who they were, how many, what they looked like. Hands were sought, voices chased with precious strength, the touch of hands slipped away, voices were lost. People went silent, gasped and choked. It occurred to her that these people were falling asleep. Her own changeless condition was a paralysis that somehow found a way to move when the water lapped her nostrils and she panicked, snorting and coughing, and sculled again. She passed beyond waking, but she didn’t sleep. And yet it was hard to tell the difference. For a while there were some stars, and a blurred half-moon, but they disappeared without her noticing and then there was only herself in a floating dark of no particular dimension but full of soft aimless noise. Uniformly, infinitely, and permanently it hissed, and along the fabric of this sound it burbled and squeaked, it flushed and spat. In the action of water it trilled and sang. It spoke; it rolled words over words. It knew — and, in a kind of shock, it ceased; in the water of it it reconsidered; it cleared its mind and opened its eyes and saw itself.
Her ears were filled with water, her tongue so swollen she could hardly shut her mouth on it, but still she tasted the ocean, and she heard it. Her nostrils were closed tight and she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or not. She realized the stars might not have gone away, but that the salt might have blinded her.
At some point in the dark two hands clutched and held her, someone trying to stay afloat. She poked their eyes and bit the fingers digging into her arms. She kicked their stomach and tore herself away. A little later, as she began to let herself sink, finding no difference in her mind anymore between the blackness of air and the blackness of water, something frond-like touched her cheek, and something more solid bumped her shoulder — a person — and she grabbed at the neck, held on to the collar of an undershirt. There was no resistance; the person was dead. The body went under a ways, but she was able to use it to help keep herself above the water a little longer. She rested with her head on its back, until it went under deeper, and she kept it near, straddled it a while and finally stood on it for a second at a time, keeping her chin above the swells, while it washed downward and came up again to give her feet its slight support, until she lost it.
When the sun came up the first day, its light was unbelievable. There was strength in it. Marie felt saved. The time in the water now seemed longer than all her life before. Her life before had been a preparation for this water, and the sun finally becoming a whole circle and clearing the surface, flying out of the water into the sky, paid for and explained everything. She laughed and felt powerful. Her stomach ached and the thirst, as the sun touched her lips, was all of a sudden more fateful than the need for air. She drank some water. Her throat was swollen nearly shut, and her tongue had forced itself halfway out of her mouth. She was hardly able to swallow.
Captain Minh was nearby. A man and a woman floated between them. Nobody else was in sight. The sea lifted, kept, and released her over and over.
The woman tried to keep the man’s head above the water when he passed out. She kicked the water, launching herself as high as her shoulders repeatedly, and slapped him, but he didn’t come around. She cupped his chin in her hand and tried to drag him along behind her, her face, smashed and puffed-up like a beating victim’s, turned up toward the sky. After a while he slipped away from the woman. The water flowed into his mouth with a sucking noise as he went under. The woman floated on, looking at the sky. Marie turned her own eyes up to the sun.
It clouded over slowly and then began to rain.
The rain, which was a hard one, fell down on her face and tongue with great force. The water on her tongue was new, and the purity of it on her eyelids brought her to life. Then she felt the fresh water reaching the cells of her stomach as if each one were being stabbed. She let her feet drop, kicked once, and lifted her head to look around.
She was alone. The rain drove up a low fog from the ocean’s surface, and she couldn’t see very far, she thought, but had no idea how far she was seeing where there was nothing to see. A swell coming toward her broke into two shapes, and one was another corpse that came right to her arms. It was the man who’d gone under some time ago, she didn’t know how long. She clung to the body and rested piecemeal as she had before, until the effort to find its lowering support was greater than the effort to float alone. The rain passed over, and now she was rested enough to know, at least, that she was here.
But in just a few minutes she was gone again, without strength enough to think, without mind enough to know if she was above or below the water. If she didn’t have a thought, still she had a sense that she’d been in this life for a day and a night and a day, that this was all there was, or ever had been, of this life, and that she had somehow reached, by floating, the bottom of everything. But she was wrong.
The stamp of endlessness driven down onto her mind was erased, washed away, the first time she passed out and slept, as the others had, and slipped beneath the waves. She might have been anywhere as she woke up with water in her mouth, disbelieving and startled, charged with the responsibility of taking a breath. The shock of finding herself here where she’d always been was like a birth. It became the common torture of her existence to sleep, choke, wake, and come back to the slave-labor of floating. She began to experience the process less and less as trying to stay afloat, and more and more as trying to stay in the air, trying to keep from crashing to the ground. Then it came to her that the ground was where she wanted to be, the place to lie down and breathe; and then she woke up, drowning.
The idea of lying down on the earth to take a deep breath seemed so wonderful it could only be put off; it was something worth waiting for, something to enjoy a moment from now, and then a moment from now.
Breathing was living. It was a living accomplished by no one, but a living that this No One had to accomplish on purpose, willingly, because she could not both sleep and breathe. She could not forget herself without dying. Nevertheless she forgot herself.
She left herself and drifted with a sense not of the water, but of something that was in it, a perfect and invaluable presence, a rubble of treasure growing up from the bottom of the world how many countless fathoms beneath until it touched and lifted her, bringing her face up to feel the air; and then it abandoned her and declined away into its origins so that she sank down again, not into water but into black, sharp, unconsolable pity. But it came back, growing out of nothing from the floor of life, and lifted her. It wasn’t just the most priceless fact and thing; it was her breath; it was the sole fact and thing.