Have you ever heard of the Tektite habitat? This was an underwater laboratory and living station designed and built around the late 1960s as a base from which to study marine life. Closely resembling a pair of connected grain silos, it sat at seabed level at Great Lameshur Bay and was used in preparation for NASA’s Apollo missions from early 1969, when the moon landing was just months away. In the main, NASA used the base to study the behavior and psychology of small crews living in extreme close quarters and the biomedical responses to long stretches spent in oxygen-controlled conditions, not unlike those of a spacecraft. Several teams were sent down to live for ten- or twenty-day stretches underwater, though my favorite among these has always been the team led by Sylvia Earle--a renowned biologist and explorer--which also happened to be the first all-female saturation dive team in history.
- Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield
They sent us down in a submersible. Six women in a tin can getting slowly crushed by the pressure. Despite being accompanied by the sixth woman, Sheryl or Sarah or Samantha, who had been sent only to deliver us five to the station, I somehow was under the impression that the submersible would stay docked--some small path to escape for women who were trained to be impossibly confined with only death waiting for us past our airtight doors.
Space never scared me, but the ocean was a different beast. Space is dead, it’s full of barren rocks and the discarded junk of humanity; but the ocean is, even at its coldest and blackest, full of increasingly more terrifying life. For weeks before the descent I dreamt of grotesque and alien creatures sickly white with too many eyes dotted about in unusual places--creatures that made their own light and chewed blood into the water with teeth the length of their bodies.
Fleur laughed. Of course she did.
My beautiful wife pulled at my fists, cracked open my sleep-choked arms to press herself against me.
“Two space missions and you’re afraid of fish,” she laughed in a whisper while I spoke to the ceiling, untangling an arm from the greedy mess of her to scrape salt grains from the corners of my eyes.
“I can’t help it,” I said. And then--“you wouldn’t understand, you’ve never been afraid of anything in your life.”
She caught my hand and brought it back into the warmth between us. “I am afraid,” she said, “I’m afraid of losing you.”
So I kissed her, slowly, before she cast some incurable illness on us.
Fleur kissed me quickly before she turned to our team with an excited smile. The console bathed her in yellow blinking light that stopped short at the edges of her body and cast hard shadow over me. We began to sink deeper into the blackness of the sea and like something buoyant, I felt the bile rise in my throat.
I was the last one out of the submersible. I stood alone with Sheryl in the escape tube. She made what she must’ve assumed was meaningful eye contact with me as she shut the trap door. “Keep it together--” she had secreted under her breath “--they’ll need you.”
I listened to the familiar hiss of the compartment pressure equalizing and imagined that if I’d had it in me to look out the porthole window I’d have seen the lights of her craft getting smaller as she ascended.
All I heard was “Something is coming and the gods will be watching.”