Pretty nifty. It's done. :)
Now I'm doing laundry and procrastinating on my studying.
So, I have decided to post any short stories I write on this blog as well. I think it would make for an entertaining read. Don't expect frequent stories, I'm not that creative, and I haven't written any since my creative writing class last semester. Here is my first one. It's titled Freed by the Sea.
“Are we ready to go yet? You’ve spent over an hour triple-checking the equipment. We’re late.” She threw him an apple, but he wasn’t looking, and it hit him in the head. She held her laughter at the back of her throat. He was such a goon.
He looked up. “Hold on, Clara.” He stared intently back at the checklist for what seemed to be another ten minutes. Clara used this time to pack a few extra apples for her lunch. Who knew how long it would take for them to find the correct sample area once they were down there.
“How much can you recheck that thing? We used it yesterday, it was fine.”
“You call it fine when the oxygen gauge suddenly stops working?” He gave her that I can’t believe you look and she knew to stop. He was so type A; he’d been that way since undergrad at the University of Rhode Island. He’d studied Ocean Engineering, and she’d studying marine biology. They’d been lab partners in freshman Chem. Even on the first lab, he’d watched her with what had seemed to be haughtiness; later, Clara realized he was just being really careful. He needed everything done his way, because in his opinion his way was the right way. He’d told her he’d picked her out to be a klutz when she walked into the lab and knocked over the beaker of hydrochloric acid, sending the TA running over to clean up before anyone burned themselves.
He hadn’t changed much. He still had to make sure everything was perfect before they went on another journey to the trench. But, as much as Clara hated to admit it, she actually was glad he was so careful. That way she didn’t have to stress out. And Clara hated stress almost as much as she hated being on land. That’s why she was glad to be doing this field work. Anything to keep her sea-bound, exploring the underwater trenches of the Atlantic Ocean. She wasn’t too interested in the chemosynthetic bacteria she was studying, but, man, she loved going down into the depths in the little sub named the Underwater Research Instrument (URI, which was also a tribute to their alma mater), even if it was a little small for her liking.
The URI was Chris’s baby. He’d designed her and had been part of the team that helped build her six years ago. The URI was still tugging along, but definitely needed adjustments once and a while. For one thing, the oxygen gauge. When it had stopped working the day before, Chris had blown a gasket himself. “Shit. How the hell are we supposed to know if we can breathe if this fucking thing isn’t working?”
“Because we’re still breathing,” Clara had said. They both had known there was enough oxygen in there for two days if they needed it. She hadn’t understood what he was so worried about. They were only going to be down there for, what, two more hours, and then they’d begin their four hour trip resurfacing. So six hours total. There was no way they’d need an oxygen gauge to tell them how much time they had left. But sure enough, Chris had changed plans as soon as any malfunction took place—he’d decided that it wasn’t safe to be under one and half miles of water without a working oxygen gauge to tell them that they could breathe. That’s why there were trying again today. And she was already irritated.
As much as she loved going down in the submarine, the research when she got back to the boat was wearing on her. She just wanted to be back in the deep, exploring the ocean. When she was on the bottom, it was like she was in a whole other world. That’s why she was so interested in the ocean. The particular research she was doing now centered around the chemoautotrophic bacteria she could find near deep sea thermal vents in the Atlantic; the research itself was boring—taking DNA of the samples, amplifying it, studying it. But the actual field work—going down the URI and seeing first had what most people can only see in the pictures of their textbooks—that was what kept Clara going from day to day.
Prior to this, she had been doing research on fin whales in the Mediterranean. After five years of hard work and nights of caffeine overdosing in order to decipher the language of the whales, the World Wildlife Fund decided that her research was no longer important and stopped funding her. She called her boyfriend Gerry who was still in Rhode Island, to tell him what had happened and that she’d probably be returning home soon, and not just for a vacation, but for good. She’d mostly been e-mailing him from Spain, because the phone calls were expensive; she hadn’t actually talked to him in over a month, and it had been nice to hear his voice. That is, however, until he told her that he’d been seeing someone else—for a few months.
Clara had needed a drink. She went out to a small bar a few blocks from the water, one that seemed to attract more locals than tourists. This was probably because it was not the ideal Spanish bar—it almost reminded her of the bars back home. She ordered a margarita and just sat there, mostly keeping to herself and listening to the conversations in quick Spanish around her. She continued to drink until the bar closed—trying to dilute her mind with the alcohol until she could no longer remember what Gerry looked like or the sound of a fin whale calling its calf.
She woke up the next afternoon and realized she was in need of a strong espresso. She walked a few blocks to the café. While waiting in line, she felt a tap on her back. It was Chris. She was so surprised to see him, she gave him a big hug and made him spill his own coffee all over the place. She replaced it, ordered her own coffee with a double shot, and they got to catching up after years of not seeing each other. In the end, Chris told her about the open position in the lab he was collaborating with on his current project. She followed up on the tip, and was now aboard the Triton, researching something that, although she wasn’t interested in it, kept her connected with the ocean. She guessed that’s how life worked: when a door in life is closed, a hole is blown in the wall, and you run out screaming into the unknown, but you survive, whether you like it or not. Clara happened to like it.
Clara zipped up the lunch pack and looked back over at Chris. She’d never found him attractive, with his five foot five stick-figure frame and his constant five o’clock shadow. He was too controlling for her to handle in anything other than friendship anyway. She liked freedom—being able to pack up and go anywhere at any time. In fact, she’d only been in one semi-steady romantic relationship, which had recently ended due to her inability to commit and her persistent temper, which flared up against most people who were anything like her. Many acquaintances—she didn’t like to call them friends—from undergrad at URI had thought that she should date Chris; but, they didn’t really get Clara and Chris’s relationship. To Clara, she and Chris were nothing more than good friends. Even though she hadn’t seen him since undergrad, once she began this research with Chris, their friendship had picked right back up where it had left off, and Chris had the courtesy not to ask why she hadn’t contacted him for years. He probably hadn’t wanted to know, anyway.
Chris was now talking with Mack, another engineer on the URI team. Beyond them, she could see the small waves lapping the hull of the Triton, the vessel that was housing the research and URI engineering teams for their 6 month long expedition.
“Yeah, I think we’re good now, but want to check the left vertical thruster one last time? I just want to make sure it’s in top condition. It had a little delay yesterday, made the ride back up to the surface a little shaky.” Chris looked in Clara’s direction, and said, louder, “Gave Clara a little scare. You know, women.” He winked at her.
“If I remember correctly, you were the one who was worried. I didn’t even notice. You practically screamed.”
Mack laughed as he went off to check the thruster.
Finally, Chris declared the URI to be in “tippity-top shape.” Clara grabbed a long t-shirt and wool sweater, because it would be cold on the descent before they reached the thermal waters of the trench.
“Ready, Clara?” Chris said.
“I wouldn’t have to be ready if you hadn’t cut our trip short yesterday.”
“Come on. I was keeping both of us and the URI safe. It’s in the manual that if anything happens I don’t like, I can resurface us.”
“And who wrote that manual?” Clara stared at him through the silent pause. “You did. Because you have to control everything.”
“Let’s just drop it, okay?”
Clara put her hands on her hips and looked at the lime green Converse Chucks she was wearing. He was right, of course. She didn’t want to be annoyed with him the whole trip. Besides, she could never stay upset for long. She had a strong temper, but it cooled as quickly as it came, which is something that most people couldn’t understand about her. When she looked back up, Chris was grabbing his forehead, his eyes shut tight. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I got a little headache, nothing to worry about. I think it’s just ‘cause I haven’t eaten yet today. Thanks for packing me the lunch.”
“No worries. We’ve got Tylenol in the first aid pack in the sub. Let’s get going.”
Mack was on the deck, ready to operate the controls to lower the URI into the water once Clara and Chris gave the signal. Clara climbed the ladder to the sub and placed the lunches and extra clothes inside. Then, she hopped in, followed by Chris, who pushed the hatch up into the doorway and turned the wheel to make it super water tight. Clara knew, from her short training about the sub, that everything in the URI had to be not only water tight but pressure resistant, because the pressure down there was so great that it could crush a person, or anything not made to withstand it.
Chris picked up the radio. “Mack, we’re ready. Let her down.”
“All-righty, Captain!” There was laughing on the other end. Clara could picture Mack, choking on his coffee after his own overenthusiastic response. Then her stomach lurched, and she realized they were being lifted off the Triton’s deck and into the water.
Clara looked out the small portal on her left. She wasn’t very fond of the confined space of URI, but it was the only way that she could see first hand the greatness of the deep sea. “When you designed this thing, couldn’t you have made it less coffin-like?”
Chris rolled his eyes and shook his head in an overdramatic way. “We’ve been over this a million times. Its small design makes it more resistant to pressure.”
Clara knew this of course. But it had become tradition over the ten previous trials for her to ask Chris that same question. She smiled, because sometimes it was fun to annoy him.
She felt them hit the water and begin to slowly sink. She heard Mack come on over the radio. “All right guys, we’re ready to detach the tail so you’ll be free of the Triton. You ready?”
Clara grabbed the radio before Chris could; she stuck her tongue out at him and batted his open hand away from the radio. “It’s called skill,” she said to Chris, before pressing the button on the radio. “Yeah, we’re ready, Mack.”
“OK. Make sure you turn on the UQC so we can contact you once you’re fully submerged.”
“Will do.” Clara nodded to Chris, who flipped the switch to the UQC. A little red light went on.
“All right, you’re disconnected.”
“Thanks, Mack.” Clara gave the radio back to Chris as the URI was engulfed by the salty water of the Atlantic.
Clara sat back and prepared for the four hour descent. Chris was not only the chief engineer of this expedition but one of the pilots of the sub. She’d done most of her trials with him as the pilot. Although she’d had a general training in using the research equipment and using the UQC, it took a lot more training to learn to drive the URI. It involved too many switches and multiple joysticks; even after going down to the trench over ten times, she still had no idea what most of them did, and she’d finally lost interest in it all together. She didn’t want to be a pilot, so it didn’t really matter.
She hunted in her bag for one of the apples she had packed. She put it in Chris’ outstretched hand, while he now carefully steered the URI, keeping it level in the water as they traveled downward.
The apple rolled out of his hand and his eyes closed.
“Chris?” Clara poked his shoulder, and his eyes immediately reopened.
“It’s that damn headache again.”
“Tylenol?” She lifted the first aid kit from where it was attached to the side of the cabin. She found the Tylenol, and pulled a small Nalgene of water out of her bag. “Here.”
He popped the pills in his mouth and swallowed them without water. He tipped the Nalgene to his mouth, and water trickled in. He swallowed that too. As he took the meds, he was careful never to take his right hand off the controls, keeping the URI straight. He steered the sub like he was a grandmother driving in a school zone. “Much better.” He sighed.
“See, I am so helpful.” She grinned.
“Nice to meet you, So Helpful.”
“Very funny. HA HA.”
They continued their descent downwards. It took a few hours, because the URI didn’t move very fast.
Both Chris and Clara snacked on their lunch and added layers to their clothing, talking for a bit. Clara found this the best way to distract herself from the boredom of the mid ocean layers, where relatively few fish could be found to interest her, and there was so little space in the sub that she couldn’t move around, especially with her relatively tall five-foot-nine frame. That, and listening to her iPod while looking out the window. She had a whole playlist of Star Wars music that Chris had given her. It was the music from the old trilogy, which they both shared a liking for, and she especially liked to listen to it as she “boldly went where few men—and even fewer women—had gone before,” as Chris always liked to say—another sci-fi reference. It was kind of cheesy, but it made her smile.
Finally, they got to the rift. After the first handful of trials she’d almost gotten used to this giant underwater crack in the Earth. But Chris had orders to stay away from the edge. If for some reason they lost power and dropped down there, the URI wouldn’t be able to withstand the pressure at much greater depths. Plus, the heat inside the rift would surely boil them alive. The rift was an opening in the earth’s crust, and the temperatures around it climbed from 60 degrees to almost 600 degrees Fahrenheit. And it was just creepy looking: black and gray smoke came out of it like a chimney. Clara thought that maybe Hell was buried underground, and the rifts were its gateway.
The only light that illuminated the bottom was from the URI now, and had been for the last two or three hours. Water was thicker than Clara had originally thought; she hadn’t realized until her first Marine Biology class in college that light only penetrated the first 100m of the ocean.
“You remember the general area where we were yesterday?” Clara said.
“Yeah, I remember. We were a little west of here.”
Clara looked out the window some more. She could never get enough of the mystery down there in the deep ocean. Chris seemed unaffected by it, though she knew he enjoyed it as much as she did. Clara had seen giant tube worms, and other weird organisms had been reported, like giant jellyfish and squid. They seemed to be huge replicas of many species found in shallower waters, something researches liked to call “Gigantism.” Clara imagined one day she’d see a giant shrimp—how totally oxymoronic. However, her research now didn’t focus on any of these interesting animals. Instead, she was doing work on chemo-autotrophic bacteria—bacteria that make energy from the chemicals in the rift, similar to the way plants make energy from sunlight. Until a few decades ago, people thought that life could only exist where there was light, but these rifts seemed to be proving that scientific fact to be a flaw.
“Hey, Mack?” Chris was on the UQC, and the transmission crackled a bit, as usual.
“Hey, bud. You at the bottom?”
“Yeah, we made it. We’ll call you when we're resurfacing.”
“All right, and if you need anything, don’t be afraid to ask.”
Chris laughed. “How would you get us what we needed? Expect us to wait down here for a week until another deep sea sub can bring us an extra sweater? Because it’s kind of cold down here.”
“Hey, Alvin would only take 5 days to get here. Don’t exaggerate. And, you can’t be that cold anymore. You’re at a hydrothermal vent for Christ sakes. Over and out.”
“See you, Mack.”
Clara saw Chris turn off the UQC to save battery, and the little red light went off in confirmation. “All right, to the west.” The horizontal thrusters kicked in to push them forward.
“We were at the edge of that cave last time, remember?”
“Yeah, Clara. I got it. We should be near there soon.”
Finally, they got to the collection site. Clara began to operate the mechanical arms on the outside of the submarine with the only controls she had learned to use in the sub. She grabbed a large rock. It’d be covered in the chemosynthetic bacteria, and that’s what she needed. She carefully directed the arms to the collection basket, a container also located outside the sub that would hold all her samples until she and Chris returned to the Triton.
As Clara carefully guided the arm to a new rock, the URI jetted forward. “What the heck are you doing, Chris?” She looked over at him.
Chris was seizing. His body was shaking, and his mouth was foaming. Clara just stood, dumbstruck for a second. He was all over the controls, pushing buttons and moving the steering as he thrashed around. The URI responded to his sporadic movements, tumbling and tossing, zooming forward and then crashing to a stop, bumping upwards and smashing downwards. The exterior and interior lights went out, and the dim inside emergency lights flashed on. She tried to move but couldn’t—she felt like all her bones and muscles had been replaced with Jell-o. Finally, her will overpowered her seemingly dead muscles, and she snatched Chris’ shoulders and guided him to the floor of the sub. It was still small, but there was more room for him to squirm around there without hurting himself or the sub. Without thinking, Clara grabbed a water bottle from her bag and emptied it on his head and body. There was a sizzling sound, coming from somewhere, but she ignored it. She needed to get Chris back to consciousness.
His movements became smaller and less violent, and Clara once again threw water on him, hoping it was helping, though doubting it at the same time. Soon, he stopped, but was still unconscious.
Clara began to cry. “Chris? Chris? Wake up—please. I don’t know what to do with this piece of shit sub.” She sat with her back against the wall of the cabin and hugged her knees. She squeezed her eyes tight, trying to keep the tears from flowing down her cheeks. She was just a biologist. Why the hell hadn’t they taught her how to operate this thing? She knew the basics of the equipment she’d be using, but all the switches, gears and joysticks had been left to the professional pilots.
She opened her eyes. It was still dark outside. She grabbed the first aid kit. All that was there were some bandages, gauze, tape, gloves, Neosporin and the Tylenol. Really helpful—nothing to wake the unconscious pilot. She poked Chris a few times, but no response. Then she remembered the UQC.
She tumbled over to the panel where the UQC was located, and flipped the switch. She picked up the receiver and said, “Mack, you there?” There was no response, nor was there any interference buzzing to suggest the UQC was working. She looked down. The little red light hadn’t gone on. She flipped the switch off and then back on again. It was soaked, and the light still hadn’t gone on. Shit. The water she splashed on Chris must have gotten on the controls, including the UQC. How could she have been so stupid? She was never good in emergency situations.
She breathed in enough air to completely fill her lungs and looked out the closest portal. She couldn’t tell what was going on or where she was, because there was no light outside, and the light from inside the sub barely illuminated an inch or two around them. She looked back at Chris lying still on the ground. He was still breathing—she could see his chest moving up and down.
She knelt down next to him and realized his head was bleeding a little. Nothing serious in comparison to everything else happening. She reached for the practically useless first aid kit and took out some gauze, medical tape and the Neosporin. She spread the Neosporin on the cut with her bare hands. The gloves seemed worthless nuisances at the moment. She placed the gauze over the cut, then taped it on as best as she could.
Chris’s eyes opened. “What the fuck happened?”
“You—you had like a seizure or something.”
“What?”
“A seizure.”
They sat in silence for a second.
“What happened to the lights?” Chris had sat up and was looking around.
“Well, when you began seizing, you were all over the controls. You bumped a bunch of switches and the sub went crazy—I don’t know. The UQC isn’t working.”
“Why’s everything wet?”
She bit her lip. “I—I tried to revive you by splashing water on you. I didn’t know what else—”
“You splashed water on me in a sub with electric controls? How dumb can you be?”
“I was trying to save your life. Hey, maybe if you had told people how sick you were really feeling, we wouldn’t have gone down today and we’d be safe back on the Triton waiting ‘til you got better.”
“I didn’t know I was this sick.”
Clara knew that neither of them wanted to admit how deep the trouble was that they were in. “Okay, Okay. Let’s figure out what is working. We need to fix this. I can’t have gotten everything wet.”
She and Chris began checking the switches.
“Did you turn off the external lights off for any reason?” Chris had stopped and looked at Clara, his mouth slightly open.
“No, they went off when we hit something while you were seizing all over the control panel. Why?”
“Because if there’s a malfunction with them, the outside emergency lights should go on too, like the ones inside. Automatically.”
“But they didn’t. Is there a switch for them or—“
“No, Clara, they’re automatic.” His voice was higher pitched than normal.
Clara was confused. “Okay. So the outside light’s not working. Let’s just figure out what else—“
“Clara, if the outside lights aren’t working, that means that they got shorted—water got through the hull somehow to the wires that connect the emergency lights to the power source. That means that half our stuff won’t work. We’re fine in here, for now; the hull has multiple layers. But the thrusters might not work, because heck, their wiring is in the same compartment.”
The reality of what was happening began to sink in. Still, it made Clara feel a little better to know that they weren’t stuck here just because she’d poured water everywhere. And she had complete faith in Chris to fix everything. He was the engineer.
“Well, I’m sure you designed ways for us to float up to the surface without the thrusters. I mean, this thing has to be kind of buoyant, right?”
“Yeah, kind of. I have to release some things with manual levers—it’s not done electrically, so it should work. We’ll have to get rid of the sample basket and some of the extra weights we have on the outside of the sub that helped us sink to get down here in the first place. That should make us buoyant.” He sighed.
Clara knew he didn’t want to have to do that. Leaving behind parts of his precious URI was, to him, like giving the doctor the okay to amputate his child’s leg.
“OK. I’m going to release the collection basket. We may not start moving at first, and when we do, it’ll be slow. So I’ll wait at first to see if we can tell if we’re moving. If it doesn’t feel like we are after a few minutes, and since we can’t see outside to be able to tell, I’ll drop a weight or two.”
Clara was glad to be in this with Chris. He was much better in emergencies than she. “Chris, thanks for putting up with me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I hope you don’t think I just like hanging around with you to laugh at you.”
“Well, you’re funny. When you’re laughing at me, I’m laughing at me too.” He smiled for the first time since he gained consciousness.
“I just want to let you know that you’re a good friend. Getting me this job, helping me with my grades at URI, and even just being my friend when I wasn’t always the nicest. I appreciate it.” She looked down for a second, then back up at him. “I’m really sorry I lost touch with you after college.”
“Let’s just get this thing back to the surface.” Chris pulled a lever, and as the sub shook a little bit, Clara felt lighter.
“Is it gone?”
“I think so. Let’s wait a minute.”
A few minutes passed, but nothing happened.
“OK, here goes another one.” Chris pulled another lever, and Clara really felt the sub rise this time, but very slowly.
“Alright, we should be at the surface in about four or five hours.”
Clara hugged him. “I don’t know what I would do without you. You’re the helpful one. Well, except when you seize out on me and destroy the submarine I’m in.”
They laughed.
Thud. They felt it and heard it at the same time. They’d stopped moving.
“What?” Chris stared dumbstruck. He tried to look out the portal to his right, even though it was way too dark to see anything.
Clara followed his gaze. That portal looked much smaller than it had before. She immediately started feeling claustrophobic and had to sit down. The floor of the sub was wet from the water she’d splashed onto Chris.
“Clara—“ He stopped himself, swallowed, and began again. “Clara, you said that when I was seizing, I jetted the sub forward?”
“I think so, I told you I was so confused and scared that I’m not really sure what happened. We were moving all around.”
“Well, I think we jetted into that cave.”
“What?” The sub was getting smaller. Was there still enough oxygen in here? “So now what do we do?”
“Umm—“
Chris, the fantastic engineer, the builder and designer of the URI, didn’t know how to get his own sub out of here. “They’re not going to find us, are they?”
“Well, they’ll find us; but they won’t suspect anything is wrong until a few hours from now, when I don’t call up to the surface to say that we’re coming back; and then they won’t assume for sure anything’s happened until we don’t resurface 6 hours from now; but by the time they can get another deep sea sub here after that—I mean, Alvin is the closest. And you heard Mack. It won’t get here ‘til 5 days from now. We only have enough oxygen for two days.” He looked at the oxygen gauge. “Or less, seeing as the fucking oxygen gauge isn’t working anymore, so I can’t tell.” He sat down in the pilot’s seat, and Clara saw a look of resignation on his face.
“Are you telling me we’re going to die down here?” Clara’s voice was small. She crossed her arms, clutching at herself.
He just stared at her. Clara could tell he was clamping his teeth down on his tongue. He rolled his head to the side and looked out the portal into the darkness.
“It’s not your fault, Chris.”
“I can’t even get my own piece of junk to get to the surface.” He punched the side of the cabin. “Pathetic.”
“Don’t blame yourself. I don’t want to be stuck down here with you blaming yourself.”
They sat in silence. Clara tried to keep her spirits up, but the longer she sat there, the antsier she became. She kept checking her watch, trying to guess how much oxygen they had left; they’d been in the submarine for about seven hours—so enough oxygen for forty-one hours. Chris just stared out the small window. He hadn’t moved.
“Chris, remember that party on Columbia Street in South Kingston?”
“What?”
“You know, that party? In that big old vacation house that Sharpe and Allen and a few of their friends were renting for the year? The one where I found the basketball players hanging you out the window by your ankles?”
Clara knew he remembered it vividly, even if he didn’t want to admit it. If it had been her, she’d want to forget it too. It was an embarrassing scene. At the time, she’d laughed with the basketball players about the situation—especially since they’d decided to throw him outside just because he’d been complaining that his beer was warm. But she’d convinced them to bring him back inside.
Clara remembered that his lips had been blue, and his face had been wet and red. Chris had left that night without saying a word, and the next day he acted like it had never happened.
“Listen, I’m sorry about that night. I shouldn’t have laughed at you—“
“That was forever ago. It’s not important.”
“No, it is important. I may have been laughing, but I was scared at the same time. I mean, if they’d dropped you—“
“I told you, just drop it.”
They sat in silence for another few hours. Clara began to listen to her iPod again, but its battery ran out of power. She couldn’t take it anymore. “We’re not just going to sit here and wait. I can’t do that.”
Chris looked at her. “Well what do you think we should do?”
“Well, we’ve got those mechanical arms. What if we just try to push ourselves out with them?”
“They aren’t made to have the strength to push the whole sub, especially now that we’re pressing up against the ceiling of this cave.
“It can’t hurt to try.” Clara grabbed one mechanical arm and looked at Chris. “You going to help me?”
Chris grabbed the other arm. “All right. Let’s see first if we can even touch the cave walls.” He seemed to have regained some determination. Clara thought this was probably because he had something to occupy his mind. If he could focus on a possible solution to their problem, then she knew he didn’t have time to focus on what would happen if their problem couldn’t be solved.
Clara used the lever to slowly move the mechanical arm around in the darkness. It was odd to do this without being able to see where the arm was. She couldn’t eve tell if it was actually there; it may have fallen off in the collision with the cave walls.
“I’ve got nothing, how about you?”
Chris was still moving his arm around. She saw his motion stop short. “I’ve got a piece of the wall, I think. Let’s see if I can do this.” He put all his weight on the lever and pushed, so that the arm would be pushing towards the front of the sub; if this worked, the sub itself would move backward. Clara could see that his jaws were clamped together in the effort of trying to push the sub out of the cave.
“Nothing.”
“Well, let me help.” Clara came over and sat opposite Chris, the lever between them. “On three. One, two, three.”
Clara held onto the lever while leaning backward with all her weight. She felt the sub move slightly. Then it jerked, and Clara fell backwards. Chris fell forward, almost on top of her.
Chris quickly got up. “Damn it.”
“What happened?” said Clara.
“The arm snapped. It’s not like it would have worked, anyway. We don’t have enough strength to push fourteen tons, even if it is in the water.” He sat back down, this time on the ground.
It was another four hours before they spoke again. Now, they only had about thirty two hours of oxygen left.
She’d though Chris was asleep, but then he said, “If I could have chosen who would be down here with me—anyone in the world—I would have chosen you.”
Clara didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.
“I mean, not the dying. But being here with me in my last moments."
More silence.
"Why didn’t you call me after graduation?” Chris stared in Clara's direction.
Clara still didn’t say anything and looked away. She didn’t want to talk about it.
Chris pressed on. “You kind of just disappeared off the face of the earth. You’d told me you were taking a year off and you’d be around Rhode Island somewhere. Why didn’t you call?”
“I don’t know. I have a habit of messing things up. I mean, look at my relationship with my parents. By the time I was eleven, they’d shipped me off to school in New Hampshire because they couldn’t stand me anymore. People just get sick of me.” Clara played with her lime green shoe laces.
“That’s not true. People don’t get sick of you. Most people I know from college wanted to know you better. I think you just don’t open up to people.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t. Most people don’t know lots of things about you—you don’t give them a chance to. You’re just a charming face at a party, or a smartass in class. You make people laugh, and then you vanish before they can ask what happened.” He slid across the floor of the sub so he was sitting next to her. “I think I’m one of the people who know you the best—I know you like Star Wars and that key lime pie makes your nose itch and that when your ears get itchy you think its because people are talking about you behind your back. I know that you cry when you watch Bambi and that you hate mint toothpaste.” He folded his arms across his chest. “I called you plenty of times, but you never answered. I e-mailed, and my e-mails were returned. So why didn’t you call me?”
“I didn’t want to talk to you, all right?” Clara looked up. She was yelling, but she didn’t care. “I wanted to remember my friendship with you as being happy. I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing. It was only a matter of time before my temper flared up and you hated me, just like everyone else I ever got close to.”
“Like who? You never get close enough to anyone.” Now Chris was shouting, and Clara slid away from him a little. Chris began to talk again, this time more softly. “I just figured you were sick of me or something. If that’s the case, it’s fine. But don’t lie to me and say that you were afraid you’d get mad at me or something.”
“You don’t understand, Chris. Do you want to know why I hate my parents? Because I got to know them. I know it sounds stupid, but it makes sense. I figured it out freshman year of college. As a little kid, you idolize your parents—you think they are perfect. When I found out that was a myth—that they weren’t perfect—I resented them for it.” Clara looked up. “You know, I was a mistake. I wasn’t even supposed to be alive. My parents got married because my mom got pregnant with me.”
“You’re not a mistake; you’re amazing. It doesn’t matter how—"
“That’s not the point. The point is that I find flaws in everyone I get to know. For instance, my best friend in elementary school was really nice and sweet. Sure, she had a few minor flaws—she’d snort when she laughed and sometimes boogers would fly out, and she often forgot to brush her hair, so it was like a giant rat's nest. But when we got to middle school, she started ditching me all the time. I had no idea why, and so I thought maybe I had done something wrong or something. It turned out that she was hanging out with this group of girls who were really snobby and mean. That’s not the problem though—the problem was that all of those girls, including my friend, found a new hobby of cutting me down every time they had the chance. I was so glad to get out of that place and start over at that boarding school—away from my parents and my classmates.”
Clara took a breath. She hadn’t talked about this to anyone, and it felt good to get it off her chest, even if she was stuck in a dark submarine.
“And then, when I went to the boarding school, pretty much everyone already had friends. I spent my time reading about different countries, imagining myself traveling. So, naturally, I got to know the geography teacher pretty well—Mr. Herman. He was really nice to me. He let me do my homework in his office after school, helping me where he could. We talked about different countries and customs, and he even gave me cookies once and a while.” She wasn’t sure if she should continue talking, but she couldn’t stop; she closed her eyes so that she could pretend that Chris wasn’t there. “But, obviously there was more to him than I thought. One day, after school, I was doing my homework in his office, as usual, and he shut the door behind him when he came in. He hit me a few times, and then—“ She grabbed her knees. “And then he—he made me do stuff. I—I don’t want to talk anymore.”
She felt Chris’s arm on her back, but then she felt it lift quickly. She just sat there, her head buried between her knees. She wasn’t crying. She was just embarrassed. It was a long time ago, and she’d dealt with it in her own way.
“Clara, I—“ Chris stopped, and Clara looked up.
“It’s fine. I didn’t mean to say all that. I just couldn’t stop talking—It’s like it wanted to come out. It was a long time ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I told you, it was a long time ago.” Clara looked at Chris. His head was leaning on his own shoulder, and his hands were in his pants pockets.
“No, I’m sorry for getting you this job. It’s my fault you’re here.”
“No, it’s not. You are the smartest person I know. Look at me, Chris. You are the smartest person I know. You couldn’t have known we’d get stuck down here.”
Clara knew no one was there to help her anymore. No one could reach them. She shivered. This was the last place she would be, this death trap. She couldn’t stand it. She put her hands on her hips and stood up straight. “Let’s say we take our fate into our own hands.”
Chris looked up. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well, do you want to wait ‘til we die from suffocation? Let’s just do it ourselves.”
“What, do you think I carry a gun or a knife down here or something? What are you talking about? We probably still have enough oxygen for at least twenty-four hours. Something could happen.”
“Nothing’s going to happen. There are no currents this deep, so we’re not going to get pulled out of here. Plus, the oxygen gauge isn’t working; we won’t know we’re out of oxygen until we can’t breathe, and then we won’t have enough strength to do it.”
“What—”
Clara looked at the entry portal, and knew that now Chris understood what she was thinking. “It’ll be quick. We’ll be crushed by the pressure before we even get a chance to exhale.” She was shaking, but she ignored it.
“O-Okay.” He was shaking too.
“Let’s turn the wheel to the portal together. You ready?” She grabbed his hand and squeezed it.
He squeezed back. “Wait—Clara, I love you. I’ve loved you since I met you, and I’ve wanted to tell you, I just—I was real glad I bumped into you in Spain. I mean, I’m not anymore, but—”
“I love you, too.” She squeezed his hand again, and then bent her head down slightly to kiss him. The distinction between friend and lover didn’t matter anymore to Clara. She knew that it was all love. They held each other for a moment, afraid of what they knew they had to do.
“Ready?” Clara said.
Chris nodded.
They began to turn the wheel together, and Clara realized that she couldn’t have thought of a better way to go—she was free of the land and free of the confines of the URI, giving herself over to the sea she loved with her best friend by her side.
I hope you enjoyed my story and aren't made too sad by the ending.
Comment if you wish :)
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