He was stunned by the fact that he hadn’t made the connection immediately, but he was mollified a little by knowing that the context was so entirely different. He was on a Saturday outing. He was relaxing, enjoying the day.
Miranda gasped, and woke up feeling strangled. She sat upright on the side of the bed, waiting with futility for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. There was a complete and utter absence of light. Her body convulsing with surges of panic, she clutched at her gut, wrapped her arms around her rib cage, and tried to hold enough air in her body to breathe. She lifted her hands to her face and could see nothing. Even when she covered her eyes, it made no difference until she pressed hard into the sockets and saw dazzling red streaks against black.
She was afraid to move, to stand. She had no idea where up was or down. She would fall, she thought, or step off the edge of the world. Images rushed through of being underwater, of being deep below the surface of a raging sea in the dead of night.
Miranda took a deep breath and held it, then slowly released air through pursed lips, then took another and did the same. She did this repeatedly, trying to focus on her training for PADI certification, the diver’s course she had taken in the Cayman Islands. She cast herself back to the Caribbean, visualized herself at ten metres, about thirty-three feet, hovering over the sandy bottom, taking her regulator from her mouth, releasing bubbles through pursed lips, recovering her reg, breathing again, filling her mask with water, tilting her head back, blowing out through her nose until the mask was clear. In her mind she took off her scuba gear and laid it on the sand, put it back on, secured the BC vest in place, and made a controlled ascent, absurdly slow, moving to the surface while releasing air in bubbles that rose faster than she did as she watched them expand and transform from spheres into elliptical disks.
When she broached the surface, having expelled more air than she had thought possible, she blew out one last heroic breath, then filled her lungs, inflated the BC, leaned back, tasting the sweetness, and floated near the boat until a gorgeous blond youth, a sun-bleached instructor who applauded her from the rails, helped her aboard and gave her a big innocent hug, apparently oblivious to the suggestive drape of his Speedo.
Her breathing was now under control. She groped behind her for reassurance that the bed was still there. Lying back, she shifted around to stretch out, comforted by the embrace of the softness beneath her. It wasn’t like floating; gravity pinned her against the pliable surface of the bed. No, it was like being cradled, or whirled gently against the side of an invisible centrifuge.
As Morgan would say, oh, my goodness!
Now that her breathing was normal, she had to go to the bathroom. Not an apt expression, she thought. She wasn’t going anywhere. She needed to pee. She reached down and surprised herself by grasping the side of the bedpan on the first try. She had surveyed the room when she came in. She knew where everything was. As long as she remained calm, the room would stay the same size and everything would be in its appropriate place.
When she was finished, she lay down on the bed again. Her mind danced like an escaped marionette. She was slipping deeper into fear — not from claustrophobia but from disconnection, from an abhorrence of death. She had no idea how long she could last without water. She knew it wasn’t as long as people thought. It was dry in here, which made it worse. What kind of wine cellar would be bone-dry? The room had humidity controls — wasn’t the point to make it humid? But this wasn’t a wine cellar; it was a prison cell, a dungeon, a vault, a crypt, a tomb, a grave — the words rattled through her mind.
Miranda held her arm up to look at her watch. She had a digital at home with a light, but her analogue watch was invisible. She held it against her ear. Nothing. She took the watch off and placed it gently on the floor under the side of the bed. Her Glock and her cell phone were in the car, safely in her bag tucked under the seat. She was off-duty, on compassionate leave.
She pulled the cover over her legs, which were a little damp from her episode with the bedpan. Miranda had no idea how long she had been there. Afraid to sleep because she would lose track of time, she stared up into the darkness, her eyes sore around the edges, smarting from the strain of finding no depth to her vision. She closed them softly, and the room seemed to float away, leaving her suspended in a strange, empty universe, a black hole leaking from inside her own skull.
My goodness! she thought. What a dilemma!
That was what Morgan would have said. My goodness! He never swore.
She remembered asking him once, over dinner after a gruesome day’s work, why he didn’t swear.
“Why should I?” he had said.
“Morgan, you know what I mean. I’m not saying you should. It’s just refreshingly unusual.”
“You use a word like refreshing and I’m liable to start. Makes me sound like a room deodorizer. I do know all the words.”
“I have no doubt.”
“Darlene and Fred used to swear.
“A lot?
“My parents? Like troopers. Maybe I didn’t swear the same as I didn’t smoke, because they did.”
“I like that you don’t swear.”
“Yeah, well, it’s an intentional rejection of male privilege and human conceit.”
“Pardon?”
“Obscenity is an expression of male privilege.”
“Go on!”
She said this in mild derision, but he took it as an invitation. “Men swear because they’re lazy with language and/or because they’re bullies — it’s a power trip over women who flinch at the words, whether they’re present or implied. And, of course, women who don’t flinch are simply proving they can be as ignorant.”
“Morgan, do you have an opinion?”
“Damn right I do.”
That conversation had come back to Miranda virtually intact, perhaps polished a bit, his rhetoric improved in recollection.
They had both been eating wiener schnitzel. It was a mistake, and neither of them had eaten very much. They were sharing a nice German Riesling that Morgan had picked out. She didn’t recall the names of the wine or the restaurant, and yet it seemed she remembered, word for word, the entire contents of their discussion and the endearingly pontifical tones with which Morgan had delivered himself of his views.
“Profanity,” he told her. “It’s not the same as obscenity. It’s about fear and conceit.”
“As opposed to privilege and conceit?”
“Like spitting in a windstorm, whistling in the dark.”
“Which?”
“Both. If you spit upwind, it hits you in the face. Downwind and it’s sucked out of your mouth. Either way you’re diminished. You’ve challenged the wind and, paradoxically, you’ve proved its power. A simple ‘god-damn’ and you’ve reaffirmed your sad relationship with an indifferent God.”
“My goodness!”
“Whistling in the dark — you asked? A string of profanities is a feeble emulation of Descartes. I swear, therefore I am. Invariably, it’s the believer who swears at God, since profanity only works if on some level you know it’s profane, and it’s only profane if God is real. And if God’s real, then maybe you are, too.”
“You don’t swear because you’re an atheist!”
“Yes.”
“You’re a strange man.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you, Morgan.”
She now heard their words echoing inside