by Leslie Lutz
Sir, I’m Graham Fitch, and I’m writing to tell you what happened. I meant to come by, to tell you man to man. For the last six months, I’ve taken the bus over to your apartment. But each time, I stand a few feet from the stairs for a while, stare at your closed door, then go wait at the bus stop.
You see, I don’t know which journal you read. I hear over a hundred washed up on the Florida shores. And they’re all different. In some, I ain’t the best guy. So I get on the bus and ride back to the little apartment Steph’s parents were good enough to help me find. And sometimes I don’t go straight home, just ride the bus route over and over, through a world so shiny and strange I don’t recognize nothin’.
Sia made me promise. We were suiting up and putting tanks on for our final trip down, and she turned to me and she said, “Graham, I forgot to tell him something. You promise me. If I don’t come back from the Andrews, and you do, you make sure he knows. You make sure, you hear me?”
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what she meant by that. She wasn’t quite right in the head by then, considering what happened after everything went sideways in the sinkhole, how many times we’d tried to make the Bubble pop. Women in general, they ain’t very specific sometimes, not that I know much about women, spending so many years growing up on a ship. Back in those days, ladies didn’t sign up to be sailors or soldiers. Apparently, they do now. Girls like Sia, I suppose. Strange new world, but I’m getting myself used to things here.
I spent a lot a nights sitting on the Key Largo docks, watching the charters come in and out of the harbor, and I figured it out. What Sia meant. So I’m writing you this letter to let you know, just like she made me promise.
Sia and I suited up on the edge of the sinkhole, the gray clouds above us angry and spitting. Coming for us personally. My hands shaking. Her hands shaking. Mine from fear. Hers from crossing that threshold more times than she could count. But Sia and me, we had a new idea.
Sia gave Felix and her mom a goodbye kiss. I thought about the people I wished were there, the guy who taught me to load the big guns. My mess buddies, the ones who hit the deck with me the moment the explosions began. But I had nothing, no goodbyes to take into the darkness with me except . . . I thought about my bunkmate, the best friend I ever had, what he done to me. But it’s hard to hate someone who’s dead, now that I know he’ll never have a chance to say goodbye to his people back home. Somewhere in Kansas, I think. I always thought if you did enough good things, enough brave things, the world would rain down forgiveness on you for anything you didn’t get right. It’s a hard thing, learning that ain’t true.
We slipped off the slippery, muddy edge and into the water, black as an oil slick. Sia and I floated for a moment, fiddling with cords.
“You ready?” she asked me.
“I was born ready,” I said, although I wasn’t.
“You should take that saying back with you, to 1943,” she said, as if she knew she wasn’t going to make it out of the sinkhole. And right then, I needed to know something, because maybe she was wrong, and I was the one who wasn’t coming back.
“Who wins?” I asked her.
“Who wins what?”
“The war. Who wins?”
“We win, Graham.”
I thought about that for a moment, floating next to her, why I didn’t feel anything one way or another about that. “How?”
Her face went dark, and then she said something I didn’t understand until later. “We just win, that’s all. In a kind of everybody loses sort of way.”
Hiroshima. Nagasaki. That’s what she was thinking. But I didn’t know yet what we’d done and she didn’t want to say.
I reached over and fiddled with the strap of her mask, which was twisted. At that moment, we were friends, you know, real friends, the kind who do things for each other.
“When the Bubble breaks, you think we’ll end up in my time or yours?” I asked.
She shrugged, and I could see she was pretty sure we weren’t going to end up anywhere.
And then she said something I didn’t understand. She got this faraway look and said, “Brand-new world, baby. Maybe you don’t belong, but you’re going there anyway.” I thought she was talking about herself, but now I realize she meant me. She knew, even before we went in.
Somehow, I felt my head settle on my shoulders better, and I saw more clearly. Which was good, ’cause I was going into the darkness with Sia.
I fit the regulator into my mouth, let the air out of my vest, and we sank.
We reached the lab fast, the darkness and silt swallowing us up. The cold seeping into my wet suit, moving up my arms and legs.
Our lights found the entrance of the hallway, and we swam in, both of us kicking shallow.
We made our way through the darkness. Right at the first juncture. Then left. Bits of stuff drifted through my beam. The world turned colder. So dark, like the storage room on a submarine. Down one hall, and the next. I remember thinking, This is what it’s like to die.
Ten minutes in, we hit the threshold.
Stretch, pop.
My stomach flipped, and a cold knife ran through all my veins. I gasped, choked. Stopped swimming, drifted. The darkness spun.
My light slid across gray walls of the USS Andrews, fell from my hand, dangled. Moved across the pile of bombs I’d stacked a year ago. No, seventy years. One year, seventy years, all of it the same.
My body hit the floor in a soft landing. A few feet away, the wooden crate hummed. Its shape blurred and sharpened and blurred, like I’d come back drunk from shore leave. The beam lay still, slanting across the metal deck.
I don’t know how long we lay there, curled up on the floor of the armory of the Andrews, sucking down air. But when I came back to myself, my air needle was down a ways, and my whole body shook from the gut yanking that the time machine’s threshold had given me.
I pushed myself up, fumbled for my light, and dragged the beam over the floor.
Sia lay a few feet away, and at first I thought she was dead. Then a cloud of bubbles pulsed from underneath her regulator.
I shook her awake. She moved slow, like she didn’t own her hands or feet.
I pulled a spool of wire we’d hooked to my gear, and a screwdriver, and moved toward the pile of bombs. It took me six tries to unscrew the cover on the bottom one. I kept dropping the screwdriver. I wondered if we were sending out a special made-for-monsters Morse code. We’re here. Come get us. As long as we got the place rigged to blow and it actually worked this time, I didn’t care much.
Sia held the light while I finished attaching the wire, although I don’t know how I managed, my fingers as cold as a dead fish. Remembered my time back in Lubbock, fixing engines to make pocket change. That time when I thought—I knew—the money would never be enough, and I had to leave it all behind and come halfway around the world to fight. Prove myself.
Then get caught. Then lose it all.
I finished wiring up the bomb; the voices of dead friends, the ones who taught me how to be a gunner’s mate, those voices kept me company in the dark. And that was the moment I decided I don’t regret what I did, signing up. Because to this day I know what I did was right and good and true. It’s just that sometimes people grow up faster than they need to, and that’s just the sacrifice they have to make, even if they’re sacrificing everything.
I know I’m talking too much about myself, when really this should be me telling you about Sia. But I think this is the way to make you understand. What it’s like.
Sia gave me a little nod, and we made our way back to the threshold. I prepared myself, my guts bunching up inside, knowing what was coming, how the knife would slide over my skin and my eyes and my whole body. We crossed the spot.
And nothing happened.
Nothing.
We floated for a bit, pointed our lights around the place. At first, I thought we’d gone to the wrong area of the room. Sia led me back over the invisible line, swam around in circles.
Then she stopped and pulled out her slate and wrote with the little stub of a pencil.
It’s gone.
I shook my head, swimming in circles again, searching for the threshold. She wrote again with the little pencil on the slate.
Get us out?
Out, through the rat maze of the USS Andrews, out into the drink. Which was full of five-foot waves and an honest to God sea monster.
I nodded—because what else was I gonna do?—and led her through the doorway.
Moving through our beautiful lady, wrecked at the bottom of the ocean like that, tore through me. All her hallways and quarters, the little bits of her that gave us comfort and peace on long days, and even longer nights. All of my past life dead and gone, a ghost of herself, a ghost of us, my years out in the South Pacific nothin’ but a flat photograph, a record in Uncle Sam’s file cabinet. It tore me up so much I can’t write about it now without my hands shaking.
The wire spool was long, and as I let her out, floor by floor, toward the upper deck, I laid a copper thread behind me. Sia held both lights so I’d have my hands free. We’ll blow her when we got up into the light, I remember thinking. Blow the whole tomato and take our chances with the storm and that thing that hunted us.
We reached the last door, and when we floated up the ladder, the darkness grayed, until a full-on parade of natural light lit us up, dim and soft, light so sweet I almost laughed. My chest eased up, and I had a feeling we’d be able to do this. That we’d blow it, and we’d swim back to shore, and the Coast Guard would come. Whether we were in Sia’s time or mine, we’d all live.
Sia and I slipped up and out and hovered above the deck. I pulled the gear from my waist and rigged the end of the wire to the prongs, got ready to throw the switch.
And the light changed.
At first, I didn’t notice. My attention was on the wire and the trigger. I floated a foot above the deck, the currents pulling me. But as I tightened the last screw into place, the light shifted. Slow, like a cloud had passed over the sun.
My finger stilled on the wire. I didn’t want to look up, so I wasted two full seconds staring at my hands, which now glowed green.
Above us. That’s where it floated. I tilted my head to look.
Its fat body stretched out so far on either side, her edges blurred in the distance. Water moving through her. A hundred tentacles and filaments spread out, stretched to either side of the deck, from the mizzenmast to the bowsprit, down to the crow’s nest and beyond—so huge she was all I could see. The tentacles of the thing hanging down like roots into the earth. And an eye, huge and unblinking, focused on me.
I dropped the trigger and pulled Sia’s arm so she’d look up. Then I bolted for the corridor that led back into the Andrews, swimming down into the darkness, Sia following right behind me. She still had both lights, the beams jagging and moving down the ladder, into the hallways. The darkness shut out the world, and I went through two compartments before I stopped and turned to Sia.
The copper wire and the trigger, in her hand. She’d had the sense to pick up what I’d dropped.
She held up her gauge and shone a light on it. Then grabbed mine. I blinked, focused on the needle to see how long I had. Mine sat on the red line.
We floated in the dark, face to face, both of us staring at the gauge. And I knew what I had to do. I’d draw that thing deep into the Andrews and blow the bombs and the machine. That thing and me. I’d die, but I’d take it with us. And Sia would head to the surface and back to your wife and son.
Then she did something I’ll never forget. Her hands came up, and as I remember it, they came up slow, the beam of her light falling from her hand and dangling from her wrist and sliding across the wall and the floor. And she held my head between her two hands and pressed her mask to mine, like that day in the sinkhole when she wouldn’t leave me behind. Everything around us dark and hollow and cold, and I thought it was her way of saying we were in this together. That we would go down together.
She slipped off her vest and tank, keeping the breathing part in her mouth. I didn’t know what she was up to, but I trusted her, so I waited, watched, trying to figure it out. Then she pulled the screwdriver from my waist and pushed me through a doorway behind me, into an open storeroom. With the trigger in one hand and the screwdriver in the other, she started banging.
I lunged for the screwdriver. She needed to put her gear back on. If it came, she wouldn’t have time. She needed to be ready. But Sia pushed me away and kept banging.
We struggled. One of her flashlights fell to the deck. I pulled the screwdriver out of her hand. She grabbed on to a bulkhead for purchase pushed me back again, toward the doorway to the storage room, and I didn’t understand, Sir, I didn’t, I swear I wouldn’t have let her do what she was planning.
And then the darkness lit up. That thing, squeezing itself long and thin and making its way into the ship’s corridors. After us.
And that was when my air ran out.
It wasn’t like it fizzled out, like a balloon slowly letting off steam. It just cut off, as if someone had filled my throat with concrete.
Sia gave me one last push, and I floated back through the doorway. And she was gone, her and the trigger and one flashlight and no tank to keep her alive, swimming fast back down into the ship, slipping away from me. I started to swim out the storeroom, but the thing filled the hallway, squeezing through, following her. A green glow, its body thick and moving fast. And me, I was trapped in the storage closet, my mind burning for air, and black spots in my vision.
The glow faded until the flashlight was the only thing I could see, lying in the hallway. I slipped back and grabbed it. Found her gear a foot away and took the best breath of air I’d ever tasted. Then I slipped off my vest and put hers on, ready to go after her, but I was all thumbs and it took too long. Must of been two minutes since she’d left. Two minutes. Holding your breath that long just ain’t natural. And that meant the trigger lay God knew where, somewhere inside the Andrews, useless. Our four hours would end, and we’d bounce back to the beginning. Which was fine by me, I remember thinking. Next time we’d do better. Next time we’d find a way for both us to get out and—
Boom.
Well, you know the rest. I guess everyone in Key Largo does, seeing as how the paper can’t shut up about it. Shipwreck survivors, rescued after four years of being lost at sea, made the news all the way up in New York City.
I’m sitting here on the dock, and there’s a band playing at a fish and chips place right on the water, next to the dive shop that’s hired your wife. Just for a little while, till she gets money in her purse again to buy a new charter. People coming and going, smiling and laughing like every day is shore leave. The marina smells right to me, like ship oil and seaweed, and the air coming off the ocean nudges me like it remembers I chose it over the desert. I ain’t important, but I feel like I’m a part of something here, so I’m staying, to make a life of it.
Steph’s stuck herself in her house since we got back, so we haven’t seen much of her. Shell-shocked, that’s what I call her. Phil’s still in the hospital, drying out, and none of us miss him much. Felix is waving to me across the parking lot. Ben’s inside the scuba shop, renting himself some gear for his first dive. I’ll never put that tank on my back again, but Ben, I guess he wants to see what all the fuss is about.
And Sia, she just drove up to the marina in her beat-up truck.
I hear from Ben that Sia hasn’t come to see you yet. When she finally does knock on your door, she’ll never tell you the real story. Maybe she don’t remember it like I do. Besides, that girl is not one to blow her own horn. And she’s stubborn. So I’m writing this letter to deliver her message, the one she gave me before we went under for the last time. A promise is a promise. So here it is.
She forgives you for what you did. She forgives you for leaving. She forgives you for everything.
That’s it then. As my old captain used to say, I wish you fair winds and a
following sea.
Sincerely,
Graham Fitch
ENTRY 1
THE COAST GUARD IS COMING.
The ship rising on the horizon is so small I could hold it on one fingertip. But it’s growing. Even better, it’s real. One hour, and they’ll launch the small boats and rush the shore like freakin’ Valkyries come to take us home.
One hour. Sixty minutes. Thirty-six hundred seconds. An actual movement forward in time.
Steph kneels in the surf, her head gripped in her hands, crying with relief and God knows what else. Ben’s leg is strong enough to climb a ladder, so he’s standing on the roof deck of the Last Chance, the place where I first saw him all those years ago. And when he meets my eyes, he looks calm and sure, like he knew this would happen.
The Bubble’s gone. I can feel it. The Sense has gone deep, back into the secret places of the ocean, where I hope she stays.
Felix has climbed up on Mom’s shoulders, and they’re both staring out to sea. He’s playing a drum on her head, and she’s too happy to tell him to cut it out. Phil’s gone off somewhere, wandering in the palm forest. I think he’s still alive. At least most of him is.
And me, I found the notebook in the charter. It’s blank now, all the way back to the beginning. Leftover math equations written in pencil cover the first two pages. My hands shake as I flip through the leaves, crisp with salt, dried out in the sun. Not one mark on any of it. My hands are shaking, because I have to say this last thing to you. The one thing I was too lost to say when I was heading out for what I thought was the last time. I just want you to know
Ben’s calling me to join him up on the roof deck. I don’t want to miss it—watching our Coast Guard arrive in a cloud of diesel fumes and glory. Because I’ll never have this moment again. Time moves in only one direction now. Forward. I can’t live in your cell with you anymore, trying to keep you company. I get that now.