Julia
Julia great moon
My bellowing conch
My leviathan true
L’appel Du vide
My love
My girl
Julia,
I will find you.
“Akimov.” Sergei knocked on the thick earphone, startling Lev out of his studies.
“Your turn to shovel snow.”
Lev sighed and pressed his eyes closed. Pain bloomed behind his eyelids- He shouldn’t stare at the screen so much. He hesitantly removed the headphones, averting the gaze of his comrade.
“Just go do it. I’ll shout, should the wife call.” Sergei remarked, knocking him on the shoulder.
The very idea of Sergei discovering Her made Lev nauseous. He didn’t even care if he got credit for their discovery. If Lev had to spend the rest of his life as a rusting name listed on the plaque underneath a concrete statue of The Greatest Scientist of Our Age, Sergei A. Mogatov then so be it, just as long as he isn’t the first contact.
Of course, to assume that science was the reason for their situation was just for show. That's why there’s soldiers down here, pacing back and forth in their little steel rooms, picking fights with each other and desperately waiting for anything to go wrong. For nothing but the betterment of mankind.
Lev looked through the small circular window on the way to the door. The sky was thick black and still as always, and the white slurry fell in clumps onto the snowpile that creeped up the side of the wall. He turned to the cabinet near the door and wrenched open the rusted steel. Lev was as boney and wobbly as any good scientist- As if the soldier's presence wasn't enough, not even the equipment seemed to want to work with him.
“Need help, Akimov?”
Marya Legasova walked up to his side and threw open the doors the rest of the way.
“Nobody dries off the suits so it makes the closet all rusty. Whoever decided to make marine equipment storage out of metal?”
She had very friendly eyes. Poor her, Lev thought. This is not a place for joyful souls. Lev pressed his lips together in a weak smile and nodded his thanks.
He dragged out one of the damp suits, removed his glasses and handed them to Legasova before wrestling his way into the synthetic sealskin. The heavy boots were way too big and the sleeves crumpled around his wrists. He took his glasses back, fiddling with them through the flabby gloves as Legasova hoisted a helmet down from the shelf. She used her jacket sleeve to rub the condensation from the inside of the dome.
“So… What is it like out there?” She screwed on the helmet and pressed the switch on the side, causing Lev’s ears to pop.
“Wet.” Lev called. Legasova’s smile faded. Lev stumbled slightly as she clipped the tank to his back. She pressed the code into the panel and yanked open the portal. In the anteroom was a rack of gunky shovels.
“Filling, please stand by.” Legasova’s voice clicked onto the radio in his helmet. Jets in the bottom of the chamber began to flush water into the room, causing the material of the suit to stick to his legs as the air was removed. Soon the room was full, and Lev could hear nothing but his own tinnitus.
“Good luck.”
The second door rose open with a muffled buzzer. The water in the chamber escaped into the open sea, murk flowing in to replace it as Lev was pulled out into the open. His boots sunk into a foot of marine snow, burping out a cloud of grey into the water. He stuck the pole of the shovel into the mire as he trudged to the ladder on the side of the building. He felt around for the buttons on the side of his helmet and clicked on the Research stations’ radio. It was hardly ever being used for surface communication, nowadays playing mainly fuzzy recordings of old classicals, with time interruptions every thirty minutes.
The snow was so thick around the side of the laboratory that Lev could hoist the shovel onto the roof before ascending. This wasn’t Lev’s first underwater research station, but it was certainly his messiest. You would think deep in the abyss you’d be spared of crabs, kelp and barnacles but no, instead their absence granted shelter to an endless stream of marine snow, falling detrital bits of every creature that had ever died in the six miles of water above them since the beginning of time. The weight of death literally threatened to cave their roof in.
Lev waved to the other men. It was a constant job, and three people always had to be on the roof at once. He stomped through the cleared paths to the roof above his wing. He knew just where everything was, what equipment was lined up against which wall, what spot to stomp in the hopes of knocking dust onto Sergei’s head. He dragged his foot along a cleared spot, revealing an engraving clogged with snow. Two hands grasping the outer rings of an atom surrounded by laurel leaves. The logo for the discovery service. The same logo was printed across the front of the dive suit.
The water began to cloud around him, blurring his vision as he scooped out layers of slop. He stood at one end and pushed across until the snow bubbled over the top of the shovel before hoisting it off the side of the roof. Lev stopped and dropped the shovel so he could wipe some of the muck from his helmet. It didn’t do much but leave blurred smears across the dome. Through the muck’s greasing he suddenly couldn’t find his shovel, straining to look for a dark pole amongst the grey gunk.
Just one wrong step and one of Lev’s boots sunk like a brick over the side of the building. He grasped onto a pipe across the side of the wall as his standing leg buckled.
“Shit!” Lev shouted as he was yanked to the sea floor, his leg stretched down painfully. He let go of the ledge, knowing his only hope was to walk around the perimeter. He groaned to himself and kicked up a cloud in anger. Ah. There’s his shovel. It was at this moment that Lev noticed the radio had gone out. Only the gentle scratching of white noise remained. He clicked at the button but nothing happened, Instead pressing down on the one next to it.
“Legasova? Comrade Legasova?” he called.
“I’ve fallen off the roof, I’m walking back to the door now.” No answer. Not even the channel marker. Well, perhaps he will just have to pound at the windows until someone let his sorry ass in. Just his luck.
Lev wiped at the snow on his helmet until he could see again. He placed his hand on the station’s warm wall and looked out at the land. The snow wrinkled off into infinity, growing blue in the distance. Thin, ribbony creatures scanned the surface, the same ones who clung to the grime on the station’s walls. He followed the wall slowly, laboriously throwing his legs in front of each other, the heavy boots growing harder and harder to walk in with every step. Lev was growing increasingly nervous.
The silence in his helmet let the call of the void seep through ever so suddenly. Lev was prone to it more than any man on earth. The blackness hid a pair of outstretched arms and hummed a song that flurried his heart. He halted to stare again into the abyss. He rested his shovel and trudged away from the wall.
“Julia.” He whispered into the water.
“I’m here, Julia.” The water around him felt particularly crushing, shortening his lungs to bated breaths. He waited desperately for something in the void to squirm, to see a figure throb from within the nothing, for a great golden eye bigger than the sun to peel open in front of him. But nothing happened. The blackness remained black, the snow remained still. He dragged himself back to the research station wall and pushed along in silence once again. In one step Lev jerked forward a bit, something within the snow tripping his boot. He crouched to clear the snow, making sure he didn’t kick a pipe or a wire.
As the snow-cloud cleared, Lev’s eyebrows creased. Pulled taut across the top of the bronzed boot was a thick clump of black hair. He removed his foot from the hair and shifted to his knees, reaching to grab at the strands. He pulled one end out of the snow, stroking it to squeeze out some of the gunk. It curled in his hand, the wavy strands drifting up into the dark water. He tightened his grip and grunted as he tugged at the other end, ripping it up from the sea floor. Suddenly, a cloud of hot blood began blooming from the hole it left. Lev gasped in confusion as the red slipped around his legs. He stumbled until he hit the wall, still grasping the hair in his hand.
“Comrade Akimov?” His radio cracked to life, Legasova’s panicked voice sending electricity down Lev’s spine. He shouted out in shock.
“Are you alright?! Please answer me!” Lev pressed a shaking hand into the button.
“Im here, I’m here. I-”
“What happened? Are you alright?”
“Yes!” Lev barked. “Hush. I fell off the roof is all. I’m almost to the door. I um,”
He opened his eyes to see that the blood had disappeared. He quickly checked his other hand- the clump of swirling hair remained in his grip.
“I’m not injured but I’ve found something.”
“I’m very happy to hear that. I will get medical standby just in case.”
The water felt warmer on the way back to the door.
Lev watched the hair deflate onto his glove as the water was removed from the antechamber. The portal to the laboratory opened and hands were on him, pulling him back into the light.
“What.. What in the world is this? Where did you fall?” He heard Legasova’s voice within the clamor of medics holding him still and wiping his suit. Lev squinted as the grime was properly cleaned from the dome, the harsh fluorescent lights hurting his head more than usual. A pair of hands landed on the glove holding the hair and immediately Lev shot the fist to his chest, feeling a sting of anger at the invader.
“Sorry..” Lev muttered, allowing the scientist to scoop out the dripping strands and place them in a specimen jar. As soon as the hair left his hands he went lightheaded. A normal reaction to re-entering the laboratory. It’s just the pressure difference.
His helmet was finally removed and immediately the medical team went quiet.
“Is there a leak in the suit, Lev?” Legasova’s voice was gentle, scared.
“No… Why?”
“Your hair is all wet.”
The rest of the day felt very strange. At some point, Lev must have asked for the hair sample to be removed and dried, because he found it back in his grasp. He felt slow and sick, like he was wading through waist deep water. Every action was just routine- He followed the steel halls to the Radar center, sat in his plastic chair at the readout and just stared. Stared into the green spiral, its needle arm brushing across the ocean spirits, illuminating every blip and burp that would otherwise never be heard, a cry alone in the suffocating blue.
“Well, you didn’t miss much.” Sergei kicked the recycling bin full of paper from the readout machine.
“I know.”
“I heard you found something outside, is that it?” Sergei’s pointed finger made Lev flinch.
“Yes. don't touch it.” Lev folded the strands back over his fingers. The hair was exquisitely cold and silky, slipping around in his grasp.
“You seem to be touching it.”
“That's because it's for me!” Lev raised his voice. Sergei made him so angry. Thick headed, he was. How he stumbled his way into being a marine biologist was beyond reason.
“Alright! Fuck.”
“It’s for meeee!” Lev screamed, standing up with a force that knocked his chair to the ground.
“She gave it to me! It was a gift! It shall never reach the greasy filth on your fingers, never be ripped apart by a cold knife and crushed to atoms, violated by the blind eyes of the discovery service just to see her stripped bare, you monster! You stinking child. What will you do then? When you find her? When you think you’ve found her-- will you cut her into steaks? Shall she be ripped at by a billion sets of dull, breaky teeth? Will you in your infinite hubris, infinite appetite build a cage larger than the very earth, just to trap her here? When she dies by your impure hands, filthy hands, will you animals spend eternity scraping the rotty flesh from her endless bones, cutting open her velvet organs, releasing the great stench of deadest death to bubble the sea away into rotten gold bile, and swamp the whole earth in shame unknowable, for you have severed the spine of the sea and without her loving, crushing, annihilating grasp we will spiral, spiral, spiral! Spiral! Spiral! Spiral! Only the infinite perverted grasp of man could ever kill a titan such as her. For that, you will never lay your hands on her as long as I have teeth to snap and nails to claw! She remains at MY breast- fragile, alone! Forever!”
---
The sting lingering in his throat kept Lev awake. Sergei was asleep a few bunks down, and the sight of his back ached with guilt. Why? He hated Sergei. Lev’s outburst was just a weak moment. It was a very stressful, strange day and there was no one better to yell at. Lev couldn’t even remember what he had said to him. It was still a little embarrassing- that he would have to rise tomorrow and join him again at the desks, spend all day avoiding his eyes and listening to his music playing too loud on his headphones. But these things happen, Lev assured himself. All of these things.
The hair tickled at the opening of his nightshirt. Lev let it from his sweaty grasp, tucking the strands into his shirt. He would sleep with her tucked right to his heart. He reached under his pillow for his single book. He grabbed it in a rush from his shelves in his apartment in Moscow, not realizing the cover would be the same blue as the walls of the laboratory. It was a poetry collection from the writers society that Lev never attended the meetings for. He peeled open the book at the center, hoping the words would put him into sleep.
The Cup on The Captains Table
I am his mouth
Said the cup on the captains table
I taste the worry on his breath
I sit in hand when times are dark
I am his eyes
Said the candle on the captains table
I warm the face of loving company
Draw his maps and keep his hope
What is more bright or bleak
What a captain tastes, what a captain sees
Salt and salt, sea and sea. Spill out upon the table where
The cup and the candle sit
What the candle on the captain's table knew
And the cup didnt
Is the warping of sights by the whiskey decanter
And that his only true visions of sunlight will be
When the captain takes a swallow
Lev attempted to turn the page. He found his thumb stuck to the paper, peeling the page off to reveal a wet thumbprint. The spot bled over the corner of the paper. Lev shut the book abruptly and tucked it back under his pillow. He rolled over to his side, the hair slipping into the crook of his arm.
That night, he dreamt of Julia. As in all his dreams of Julia, he saw her below him, laying on the sand with her curling black hair in sprawling oblivion over Lev’s hands. Her face was warm but unknowable, her eyes taking no shape and her smile warbling, as if warped by water. No matter, Lev thought. Her face would sharpen very soon. Lev leaned in to kiss her, his lips meeting a surface of rotted brine. He persisted through, the salt burning sick in his eyes and curdling his tongue. It slipped into his ears and fouled his brain, dissolved his soul, Ate away at his clammy skin. Julia sunk deeper, her smile unwavering. She hit the seafloor and became it, just as in all his dreams of Julia. Lev drifted eternally downward, his feet landing on the great curve of her face. Julia stretched into infinity, her form unfathomable. Lev stood under the great endless sky of the sea and his world never, ever, ever felt so small. He drifted in the heavy water across her face. Her eyelashes stretched into the black sky, great curving obelisks over the globby blisters of her pink clouded eyes, her nose stood a mountainous smooth mausoleum, with beckoning valves that blew a horn so earth-shattering it destroyed the stars.
Then, her great mouth would pull open. The sea would drain into her maw, swiping Lev and every single thing in the very universe with it. And in that moment, in the dip of obliteration, as Julia ate, as in all his dreams of Julia, Lev knew he would wake again, with a start.
He did not.