FAREWELL, TRAVELLER, DIVE ON IN THE BEAUTIFUL AFTERWORLD.
BYE DUMB BITCH, PUTTING YOUR LIFE IN HELL ON PURPOSE EARNED YOU A BODY BAG.
YOU SHOULD LIVE SO WELL, TO DIE DOING WHAT U LOVE.
She stopped reading and dug her gear from storage and cleaned and treated it, prising apart and adjusting as she might illustrate the effects of toxoplasmosis on the nervous system or the five organ-ravaging stages of an infectious disease so new it bore only a sequence of numerals for a name. Mother’s ding-dong cancer lung. Father’s liver and left-earlobe in shreds. The beauty and terrors of the body! She reassembled her kit instead of meeting deadlines. Some bankable projects Marilyn refused outright, bestowing on others in the grisly trade. She had a little saved, she reasoned. She could afford to let things slide on the work front.
One day she borrowed Rand’s pickup and carted her tanks to a fill station to have them inspected and pumped. Then she drove two hours to an abandoned water-filled quarry where forty feet beneath the surface she searched for the busted school bus a local dive club had gutted and sunk.
Found it. She tied some line to the passenger-side mirror then ran the reel in the front door and through the murky centre aisle to the back row. She tied the other end of her reel to a jutting metal strip. She removed her mask. Blind, she followed the line out, bumped down the steps on her hands and knees. Outside, she donned her mask again and reversed course, continuing to make contact with her thread since inside now was solid murk from her clumsy disturbing of the silt—might as well still have her mask off. Working by touch she then recouped her reel. Then, still inside, in the back of the bus, she reached behind her neck and turned off first one and then the other of her tank valves. Three sucks at her reg. A resisting fourth. Then the choke-hold of no-air. She opened her valves and reeled out of the bus. Practice makes perfect. She farted around in the shallow depths, daisy chains of perch and sunfish petalling around her. She fiddled with back-up lights under the cool gaze of a four-footer pike and ferreted the old set of decompression tables stored in her waist pouch. Her computers, bulked one to a wrist, blinked green. She worked her way around that bathtub of a place, drilling and two days later did it all again—priming, practicing. Leaping, it felt like, but in a series of controlled movements that seemed the opposite of reckless. Seemed right. Which she knew couldn’t be true, making a wrong right—okay! a shit-pail of wrongs—but still she kept on.
Leaping, one night she got into it with Rand. It’s too early, he said. Wait until next fall. We’ll go nice and easy at first. Belize or Truk this winter.
No, she told him. You go nice and easy. If that’s what you want. I’ll go ahead on my my own.
They were in the bedroom. She lay sprawled on her stomach, chin on one hand, TV remote in the other, surfing the channels, sound low. Almost everything was commercials. Gone mute and crushed to one side of the lounger, he stared at the screen. What happened to Jane in the cave remained unknown and both Marilyn and Rand had declined to discuss it. What was the point, for now? The coroner’s report could take months. Flip flip. She found a sitcom and stuck with it.
She endured her soaked sneaker until she and Rand got to Bruce Bowman’s double-wide on the heavily wooded grounds of the springs. That’s quite the mind-fuck you had, Bowman said, grinning as he greeted her at the door. Don’t worry, won’t hold it against you. This time.
Even from Bowman’s sticky living-room couch she could detect the river smell. It spored, she imagined, through the door and window screens, straining past the moths that pressed to the mesh, seeking the interior light. Aw-shucksy Bowman nodded at her from his lounger, stroking a tabby on his lap, and though she inwardly cursed Rand for showering first and abandoning her, she feigned a genial interest in the cats and more cats occupying Bowman’s place—black, white, black and white, tortoiseshell and more tabbies under the desk pushed to the trailer’s window and under the bookshelves and on the chairs opposite the couch. They obscured her wet footprints on the sorry-excuse shag and paced esses on the coffee table, leaving snake impressions where their tails dragged along the two bottles of beer Bowman had plunked down. A sleek tawny suddenly flung itself at her and colonized her lap with tiny claw pricks. Youch, she said, shifting the animal about to minimize the damage.