I am diving for my mother’s last working kidney. The pay glistens: I make in a month what I used to make in a year. Her hospital bills get devoured by my salary. I no longer harangue every desk nurse at every hospital for a taxonomic breakdown of her bills. I don’t ask for the numbers of the Benadryl, the water cups, the abdominal touches done with gloved hands. I am the most American I’ve ever been—she costs what she costs and I eat it. The insurance company hates her. The insurance company loves her. She is expensive every time, so I go under.
Before a new SAT dive job starts, the divers and crew go into an adjustment period. We spend twenty-eight days in a barely-submerged saturation unit under the belly of a ship. You adjust; your pressure moves. Abdominal touches. You get acquainted with the right density and the right gas before the diving bell lowers you to swimming distance from the job site. We are industrial. You have twenty-eight days to languish with three or four other people. You cannot go down all at once. A violent series of nitrogen bubbles would scatter through your cells, would dot your nerves, would take up ministry in your brain. We take the time to change internal pressures to match the environment. Organs meld slowly into gummy equilibrium. My mother goes to treatment willingly. She is very good at looking easy and happy in the dialysis center. She goes like butter and I drive her there. I think she must hate me, somewhere inside her gentleness. I hate her everywhere and I’ll never say that to her because I love her so much that it makes my skin sore.
We are off the coast of Scotland. My co-diver is new to me and has some expected name like Mark. Like Mark seems kind and professional. Both joking enough and quiet enough that, in the four chambers we share for adjustment, I find him tolerable, digestible. The saturation habitat is small in all possible ways. Everyone is given a bright, scant space for an eccentricity. Mark’s: a plastic Trader Joe’s bag with dried mango—some spiced, some not. Mine: I am a woman in a high-paying, high-casualty engineering construction field, and I am not amiable. My husband tells me this often like it’s somehow, at the rusted end of itself, deeply endearing.
NASA almost sent Sally Ride to space with 100 tampons for a week-long trip. My systems managers know this. Before this adjustment, they brought down a grocery bag lacquered in red thank-yous and stuffed with 101 tampons. When they showed me, I imagined their hands selecting boxes at a CVS, their brains processing the price of their joke, the self-checkout at the pharmacy and the looks they got for laughing. I loved it, their joy in it and the connection to space, even though what I do, what we do, is fix oil rig machinery on the sea floor so that the world can go on ending exactly as it is. Like everyone else, I had wanted to be a marine biologist, and then I missed. But I was loved here: 101 tampons. I made a dalmatian joke. They loved it, I loved them. Never mind that I use pads. This only made it better. The pictures of the tampons are always bigger than the tampons. History eats history for all its meals.
Our bellman, who mans that little white clutch of a chamber and watches our umbilical cords while we dive and speaks to the ship above and eats his lunch over the pool of water we swim through, is Rob. Rob stands in his fifties with white-sparkled stubble and the idea of a wife always roaming through his head like she was grocery shopping for specific neurons. He is calm and easy and warm. I’ve had him for two dive jobs before. His eccentricity: the communion wafers he places on the surface of the bell’s pool for our return. He wants divers to grab them on resurfacing. We almost always forget, exhausted by arrival and not in the mood for staging ourselves, in utility or in beauty, just for him.
The saturation system’s chambers are compact and not unlike the interior of some spaceships. Nothing floats midair, but everything is softly, silently floating in unison. There are bunks and food storage cabinets and a comm system and stashes of meds, extra gear, and a purple-cased Nintendo DS someone has left behind. I claimed it quickly when we found it. One more thing besides a gender to make me feel singular and jagged in the hazy, contained month before the dive. I call my husband every other day with nothing new to tell him. I grasp at his language for any sense of change, of landscape, of certain colors. I feel deprived of green, which seems to be nowhere in the white-silver-blue-orange of my regulated, helium-clouded habitat. I find green in the Pokémon SoulSilver game left in the DS. I make my way into a pixel field of flexing weeds and stay there. No progress. Digital stagnation to match the stagnation of the system. Light pours over the palm-sized screen that is less-than-palm-sized for my coworkers. I shower everyday, sometimes twice, in the only chamber with the toilet and the running water and the foggable porthole.
You catch pieces of nudity as you brush by the circular windows into a person’s bunk, or walk by the shower to see if you can piss. You see the bare shoulders, the excerpts of skin, the stomachs in which swim working, healthy organs. There are no sick people here and no substances that could rot a liver or a kidney or a heart. The adjustment is sober. My mother could never survive this. She would need her dialysis. I am good with my hands. I see Mark’s dick on accident on day seven and then throw the picture away. It was from behind anyway. The pictures of the body seen this way are always smaller than the actual bodies. I was seeing if I could piss. The toilet is inside the shower. I should have listened for the shower first, but I was in my own coping haze to get through the time as fast as and molten as I could. I hate the waiting. Even worse than being a woman is having to wait for something.
Rob prays, and when I see it, it almost feels like seeing another dick. Not because it’s obscene, but because its size and weight and duration feel too personal to look at. And because I know my face. If he saw me see him, he’d think that I thought he was stupid. I think he’s real, but my expressions, something in the masculine positive canthal tilt of my eye position (as was once truly written of me), offends. Satirizes. I sit on my bed in front of the green electronic field of the game and wait. I am not reading the books I brought. Something by Carson McCullers and then something on Carson McCullers. This is the second dive I’ve done while having a husband. By day twelve I want a divorce and I also want him right in front of me to run my palms over. Abdominal touches. I want to get married again between the steam pipe and the door you have to crawl through to go piss. I want a divorce-marriage and what I have is pixels. I steal a bag of Mark’s mango strips one night and I’m sure he knows, because how would you not compulsively count everything always down here. He doesn’t bring it up. Some days this feels like camping and somedays it feels like purgatory. The moment I have this thought I realize those two things are the same to me and the thought should be thrown away like a dick.
So Rob prays. I haven’t seen an inch of his body aside from his face, hands, and wrists. I try to know if I’ve been seen. I’m decently careful, but I don’t see my body as either sacred or profane these days. This prevents me from having any meaningful investment in my nudity as a kind of danger. It’s not my body so much as it is the body that is here. It is just the body I am using. Nothing world-ending would happen if they saw it. Nothing world-ending would happen if no one ever saw it again. I guess there could be an alcoholic on a SAT dive; they would just be suffering. I cut off like seven inches of my hair on day twenty but there’s no good place to put it, so I leave it on my bunk. I’ve scared Mark and Rob enough that they don’t bring it up: the gold lines on a navy pillow. My husband tells me he’s bought a dog for me to see when I’m back. He promises to send pictures smaller than the animal itself. I move my hair with my fingers—one hand on skull, one hand on pillowcase.
On dive day, we are rigged with our suits and tanks and extra oxygen and umbilical cords woven with three tubes: hot water, an oxygen-helium mix, and a communication line. I spark up my unnecessary ritual: I touch all three lines and say what they are before we go. Rob knows I do this and Mark doesn’t. Their faces show. Mark’s is penned in by a raincoat-yellow suit and a glass-plastic hybrid panel. So is mine. We are replacing a section of pipe that belongs to the cardiology of an oil rig. Mark is in first, standing on the platform below the bell, pointing out into the dark while he fiddles with something about his headlight. I slip in. The last thing I see above the water is the box of communion wafers and the ham sandwich pressed between Rob’s wrist and ribcage like it’s taking his radial pulse. My mother’s pulse is almost always too high. We go down.
I still love the fish. The biology. I love touching the edges of the field I meant to go into and then didn’t. It’s dark here and cold in a way we can’t understand in our heated suits. I follow Mark, who follows light, which follows our direction to the rig. Rob is singing into the comm system. It surrounds my face like another water. Then Rob is laughing. All of our voices are ruined—the helium in the system’s airflow, which is critical to our adjustment, sends us careening into cartoon renditions of ourselves. Everyone has their language living in an alien octave. It gets old to most people within forty-five minutes tops. Rob will never, ever get tired of it. I hate it. He’s so easy to love that it’s mind-destroying. Mark is normal and predictable. He is here to do the job. He is not singing.
I wish I could see each one of my mother’s organs like fish going by. I’d let them all pass, but I’d catch the kidney. I’m not sure whether I’d destroy it in my three-layered gloves or carry it home like a premature puppy born to a mother that’s run off into the woods. I’m not sure what’s to blame and what’s to kill. My mother is my mother—but she is also against herself. Or some of her is. I am diving. We are close to the pipes. We are close to what we are here to do, to the point of the money. The glisten.
My mother is extremely good at cheering up the other dialysis patients, but she is always depressed in the car, before and after. She goes back and forth like a school of silver alewives with sharks on either side of them. She’s told me her depression is personal, not public.
I could donate my kidney any day. I’ve checked: we match, though I haven’t told her. But I won’t. The donation would take me out of commission and the potential complications might stop me from ever diving again. You have to be in good shape with good insides and no active addictions and no cuts or sores and you have to take an antibacterial bath before that wipes you cleaner than any other living thing on the planet. For a few seconds, you shine like something actually new to the world.
Yes, I am the worst animal in my mother’s landscape, and when I am home, I take her everywhere all the time. When I am gone, my husband does it. We are very faithful. I started diving for her and then I got too enamored with it and now I can’t bear to risk stopping it for her sake. My husband is not a match. If he was, he would have been one kidney lighter a long while ago. I don’t think she’ll ever forgive me. I dive for her kidney, for my kidneys. I don’t ever plan to have children. My body ends on my body.
Mark and I watch a few gray fish go by and I try to remember what they are called but can’t and get to feeling distractingly sad about this. Mark has his welding torch out. We are here, he is pointing, his high voice is rehashing information we both already know. Rob repeats the information again too. I say it third. It is dry and simple. I will never get over how the fire looks underwater. It’s funny, how world-breaking it is, even when I know all of its math, its sensible body.
We douse the seam in light and start on the work. We make a contained area of helium around the site. This is dry welding. The electric fire passes into the air pocket. The torch has a fine point and we move it over the same line again and again. We check each other’s work like estranged parents looking at a kid’s report card. We are stoked to approve and that approval is silent. Maybe a few movements of hands. Sometimes Rob asks “All good?” We say “All good.” It is the bare minimum. What we are doing has a 15 percent mortality rate, on the most dangerous jobs. I have never felt that 15 percent hovering over me. Most of the time it is terrifying and tiring, but very easy. It feels right. Things slot into their places. We move to another seam. We are fixing. Oil will be able to be pulled from here. The distant killing I take part in is slow and removed; I do not feel complicit. When I go home to my husband, he will ask about my hair. I will hold our new puppy that I will not see a whole lot. The Gulf of Mexico is next.
I do not get my period the whole time, though I am due.
The job is simple and goes smoothly. At one point, Mark grabs and holds onto my left wrist like he wants me to have an affair, but then he lets it go, and we don’t say a single thing about it. It’s a neat, contained bubble that slides harmlessly up to the surface. It will not get named or perforate a lobe or save anyone’s mother.
When we surface, like a believable kind of god, Rob is there in the light. He is halfway through his ham sandwich and a quarter of his way through his communion box. The white wafers come in sleeves. There are six floating in the pool. One rests on the top of my helmet and I don’t know it’s there. Neither Mark nor I grab one. In seven weeks, I will be back driving my mom to dialysis in a minivan she bought with the idea that I might have kids that I will never have.
I am good at my job. My arms hold visible muscle. The space of air around the dry welding site is called a habitat. I go to bed crying in the bunk because I can’t remember what kind of fucking fish those fish we saw were. My systems managers who gave me 101 tampons can see my crying on the camera and they check in with me once and I tell them it’s my process. I know, deep down, the reason they believe me is because I am a woman. They’ll never actually know how to believe in me because I am a woman. It is still real to them: my sole eccentricity. If we were working as waiters, or something, Mark and I might have ruined my marriage as much as our voices by now. Fucked in the deep freeze and made my divorce desire feel organic. But we’re diving. We’re adjusted and locked in. The way my mother is dying is polite and is also the reason I won’t be able to buy a house, even with this salary. We keep each other. I’m an American all of the time.
Everything is a little container. My body has memorized a false depth and recreated it inside itself. It is a completely fantastic thing. I have had it all explained; I don’t understand why her second kidney failed. I have hair in my eyes now. I blink until I adjust. I roll onto my back. There is a hand on my stomach. I have been too loud and they’ve caught me in the middle of myself. Mark is backlit in the doorway. Rob is next to me, crouched uncomfortably on his knees. Warm palm on my abdomen.
Whenever something terrible happened, my dad would pace the house saying “No gods, no devils” to deflate the stakes of everything from losing a job to abandoning his wife’s imploding interior. I buck under Rob’s touch like an air-drowning fish. Mark puts a hand over my forehead. They think I am a woman.
I need to get somewhere where I can look at the shaking thing that is incapable of being its own animal, incapable even of keeping an animal going, and say to it “I need you.” My mother no longer buckles her seatbelt on the drive. We are underwater. How to tell the men around me that a heart, the exact size, weight, color, and gender of my actual heart, has eaten my heart whole. It sits there now, moving blood like work. Everything in the interior dark of me, everything that is neither my fault nor my credit, works perfectly. Four hands hold it all down now. I could be used for a medical textbook. I could be used for my mother. I could be used to understand something about survival, if opened, if killed, if not left to die.