Casey Forest
The Senior Ocean Project
The Pocket does not have a passenger seat. The concept of a passenger was lost on the scientists who built her. So it is just me, there is no room for anyone else, just me and the goldfish. His bowl sits in the small nest-like space between some tubes to my right. He is the closest thing to a passenger I have, besides myself. We are really only along for the ride. I do not have much more of a say than he does.
When they showed me the set-up, they pointed out the Amenities. A toilet seat, a goldfish, an email system, a cot. The cot looked like a deck chair cushion, which I told them.
It’s not, they said.
It’s thermal. It’s high science. It cost thousands of dollars.
It reminds me of the one that Gigi has, but hers is red, or it used to be red, before the sun faded it into a sort of dying pink. She got it for fifty-five dollars after the party where her sister came over and noted that there was no color on her patio.
She also bought decorative pillows.
Now the view from my kitchen window to her deck is quite a bit brighter.
The Pocket does not have any decorative pillows, thermal or not.
At the end of the day, I climb from my chair into the back. It still just looks like a lounge cushion to me, laying there on the grated metal floor.
Before this, I did not spend a lot of time around thermal things or things that cost thousands of dollars so maybe that concept is lost on me too.
I do not have a lot of experience with water. When I think about water, I think about the shallow kiddy pool at the community center, where they let the dogs play at the end of the summer. That water throws me off, because I always expect it to be a nice teal, a summer color, but it’s too shallow and the brown bottom turns it taupe. It looks like a giant sink. Gigi’s dog refused to get in when we took him. He did not like the color either.
At the end of the day, it’s hard to tell what time it is. The Pocket does not have a clock, and it is always dark down here. There’s no shift in sounds, like crickets or empty streets or goodnights, there is just the sound of the motor, just the sound of my breathing, just the oxygen pump. The pressure has a sound, too. It holds everything close. It tries to push into me. My ears pop constantly. I am always opening and closing my mouth like a fish.
I am not disoriented yet. I just don’t know when nighttime is. So, I go to bed after I have fed the goldfish for the second time.
He looks sick to me.
When I sent them an email about it, they said:
Valued Employee,
Thank you for your concern. We are working hard to ensure you have the most comfortable mapping experience possible. We will address your question in the order it was received.
Sincerely,
Your Employers
A few days later, they said,
it is just the lighting.
The lighting is sickly, too. The Pocket has one headlight that shines out into the blackness. It reflects on the goldfish; it turns him green.
I wish they had sent me with a dog, or a hamster. A dog would look out the window. I could touch it. It would be so soft, and so cottony, and it would lick the salt off my fingers. It would whine when we went too long without touching.
The public is sick of dogs in cramped spaces, they said.
I am supposed to send an email every day. But they want readings on the currents, and pictures of fish or shipwrecks, and feedback on the Pocket’s performance.
Most of that is sent automatically. And, I do not care about the submarine. And, I did not pay attention during training, so I do not know how to read the dials properly. If they are in the green, my email says we are both doing fine down here. There has been no yellow or red yet. The Pocket is a healthy little boat.
There are six of us down here, mapping.
I imagine all of us, in our pods, like spelunkers in a giant cave. We have tiny flashlights and the cave is so, so big. I imagine running into another mapper. I imagine there would be a prize for that.
But there would be no way to say hello. We don’t know each other’s emails.
I do not sleep well.
Every morning, I check the dials and pipes and headlight, but not before I feed the goldfish. I can tell how long I’ve slept based on how hungry he is.
If I could send an email to him, it would say:
I will not let you get squashed.
The goldfish is freshwater. If the Pocket gave in to the pressure, we would both die, but not before the goldfish looked to me, as if to say, why did you bring a freshwater goldfish to the bottom of the ocean?
I would have no reply to that.
And then we would both be squashed, like soda cans.
A dog would not look at me like that. She would waste no time leaping into my lap. And licking my face, just once, and I would have just enough time to bury my face in her throat fur and feel it tickle my nose, right before the quiet flattened everything.
A dog would get it.
* * *
The brochure said,
It is unacceptable that in this day and age, half of our planet is undiscovered!
Join the six institutions that are gearing up to tackle the last great expanse!
Four of the institutions had already found a mapper when I signed up. The only ones left were Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the scientists. The scientists offered the best Life Insurance package. They threw in the goldfish as a bonus.
Gigi said, it’s too bad you couldn’t sign up for Marriott.
I agreed with her. And, petted her dog.
* * *
More than anything, I wish I could talk to the five others who are down here. It is hard to imagine. The ocean is a big place. When I want to feel better, I imagine all of us in the kiddy pool at the community center, all dipping our feet in the water. Someone would say, where are all the whales? I thought there would be more whales.
And then in my head, I make the pool deeper, three or four miles deeper, and darker, but we are all still down there together. And then I get rid of the pool walls and the water just rushes outward, like an aquatic Big Bang, and we are all rushed off in different directions but we promise to meet for a barbeque when the mapping is done.
The ocean floor is the same brown color as the kiddy pool. But it looks white in the headlight, and then at the edges it is greenish, and then the rest is black. And silent. The racket that the Pocket makes is very unnatural. It sounds like a metal stomach, gurgling all the time. Sometimes I close my eyes and pretend I’m sitting next to Gigi on a midnight porch. It is a very similar sound to her digesting a big meal. She’d say, the belly wears out faster than everything else.
It is not very interesting down here. I have not seen anything bigger than a pink fish. In my daily email, I write, we are both doing fine down here. When will we see the tube worms? And then I shut down the email system, because it uses up a lot of battery and that was a part of the training that I listened to. I understand, about conserving energy.
I helped Gigi lower her electricity bill when her husband left. She did not want to go to a home. He thought they should listen to their kid. She said, stop rolling over like that. They did not divorce. He just didn’t stay. And then a month later I went over because she was leaving her porch light on all night.
The Pocket reached the floor five sleeps ago. It felt so slow. Just a meander down a long, long hill. There was sand the color of a wedding dress. I saw crabs, or shrimp, or urchins. My eyes are not good enough to tell. There was a thickness about the seeing, but there was still light. Everything felt gentle around us. Nothing happened when the fish stopped swimming. They floated. They were held by the biggest hands on the planet. The kiddy pool stayed in my mind. The other mappers were there. I could tell, that they were still within reach.
The slope got steeper. The nothingness got bigger and reached farther. Thickened until we lost the sun. Bridal sand became greenish. The blueness disappeared. The cold seeped in. And then the goldfish started looking sick when the headlight switched on. Kiddy pool, dog, other mappers, patios, all seemed hazy and far away. But maybe that is because of my eyesight, too.
There are other things I want. A blanket, fresh supper, a bigger window. There is something about seeing where nothing else sees. A path is cleared by the headlight. It pushes back the sleepy dark so that I can see the jelly down here. Everything we’ve bumped into has dead eyes. I miss the crabs.
There are big words for everything down here. Words that make me feel like a pioneer. Shelf. Slope. Plain. Mount. We could be on the prairie.
I am glad my eyesight is not good. If it were, I would want to stare out the window and look for mountains, or squids. But I gave up trying to spot things from a distance when my son left. Now, things just happen. Suddenly there is a wall of brown instead of blackness. The Pocket pivots around the hill. It is noted in the map.
A prairie. Except the word ‘abyssal’ comes before everything.
Gigi took me the day the training started. Her dog was in the backseat. He did not like my suitcase. He would not stop growling at it. So it was too loud to say a proper goodbye, so I gave him a nose pet and held her hand for a minute and said, don’t forget to turn out your porch light when you go to bed, because it was easier than saying I know you were just left and now I am leaving you too.
Her hand was wrinkled. There were shallow grooves at her knuckles and liver spots like gravel along her papery skin. My hand in contrast was calloused. I have strange, squat fingernails and palms much pinker than the rest of me. They looked old. It always surprises me how old my hands look.
She squeezed my fingers. In the back, the dog whined and scratched at the suitcase.
They told me to bring pajamas for the nights we’d be sleeping in the center. And toiletries. But not clothes, no, we’d be wearing special suits during the days to get used to dressing like scientists. Which I was excited about. I hadn’t worn a uniform to work since my rig job in the seventies. So, I brought my shaving cream and my antacids. And my book. But they didn’t let me bring that into the ocean.
The suit was a gray jumpsuit and it did not fit me well. It did not fit any of us well. When we came out of our rooms after putting away our things, the hallway was full of six old geezers in baggy jumpsuits. No one could bend down far enough to roll up the pant legs.
There were canes and walkers and tennis balls. We were all very different in theory, but in that narrow linoleumed hallway it just looked like six lost grandparents to me. A young woman in a blazer took us across the center to the classroom. As we walked, I felt sillier and sillier in my jumpsuit.
“Thank God our kids can’t see us,” someone said.
I thought about my son. I had not seen him in two years. There was some chuckling. Someone flapped their overbig sleeves. Like a chicken.
The Pocket has not come up on any trenches yet.
I am not allowed to explore trenches. They say, it’s unsafe. What they mean is, trenches are above our pay grade. The six of us are minimum wage workers, and trenches are for people like film directors. And, the trenches have already been mapped with bomb pulses. And, I was not given any bombs in my toolkit.
The Pocket always keeps about a foot off the floor. It records all the bumps and ridges and rocks. It has an algorithm. The goldfish and I are just keeping it company. I imagine the map looks very boring, but all the scientists I met seemed to take their jobs very seriously, and so they probably don’t care that it’s boring. In our training they used big words that I haven’t heard since I tried to go to college in my twenties. Again, I wish I was in the Marriott pod. They would email things like, if there was a conference room here, which wall would offer the best window view? And then when the hotel chain popped up I would get a discount on room rates for all my hard work. And it would be better than the life insurance. Gigi likes hotels. Instead, I got a goldfish.
I do not love the goldfish. But I would never tell him that. I don’t want him to think that I don’t care about him.
Today I’ve decided to clean his bowl. The glass walls are getting filmy. When I try to look in on him everything is distorted. It’s a simple setup. There’s a plastic purple plant suctioned to the bottom and a little black filter floating on top. And a rubber space-man figurine who gently rolls around with the vibrations of the Pocket.
I don’t know if the goldfish is a minimalist. They didn’t give him much of a choice.
While I do it, I keep him in my water glass and set him right next to my cot. The dirty water goes into the toilet hatch, so it gets streamed back into the ocean. For a minute, there is a little jet of poopy freshwater at the bottom of the ocean. And then it marries into the soundless black eternity.
I use my drinking water to refill the bowl once I’ve scrubbed it. At least a day’s worth of my water goes in. As I’m returning the goldfish to his home, the email system turns back on. I hold the goldfish and read: you won’t see any tube worms. the sub can’t handle the vent water.
In the cup, the goldfish swims in circles.
Outside of the messages I send to my employers, I am allowed five emails to outside addresses. But I am saving those.
I’ve started doing thinking exercises, to keep the motor sound from getting to me. It’s hard to imagine where I am. It feels like I am in the earth, tunneling, going away and away from the humans.
During training, we got to see a counselor. She talked to us one at a time. We waited together in the classroom and did our calisthenics and once in a while she would come to the door and call a name.
“I miss my bed,” the jumpsuit on my left said. He was trying to touch his toes. We were all sore from the cots we’d been sleeping on. “These old joints . . .”
There was general grumbling in agreement. We still could not roll up our own pant legs. In the morning, one of us would kneel down and fold up the legs of all the others. Then we would call for the young woman with the blazer to help the pant-leg-roller up off the hallway floor.
We did not talk about the mapping. We laughed about how life stiffened us. We laughed about how wrong the scientists were about our bodies. We were amused most of the time. For all their talk about confirmation bias, the everything is interesting, the you should report on everything you see, the don’t assume the ocean is boring, they had expected giants. Ancient rock-muscled Spartans. Tom Sellecks. We were dressed in their jumpsuits. And, we had to roll them up. Which is why I stopped listening to the trainings.
On counseling day, I was the third one called.
Her name was Mindy and she was much younger than me. She seemed satisfied that we were all in good spirits.
She said, if it were me, I would pretend to be an astronaut.
I said, my son used to do that.
That is not the sort of thinking exercise I’m talking about.
The ocean is like the soupy mess before Creation. It feels like the pressure is on purpose. Like the ocean is giving birth. This is where everything began. The darkness, the silence, is the natural state of things. Life must have been so confused, to rise from this. And see the sun. It must have been blinding, and cold, to leave the womb of the sea floor.
It feels like a before down here. And so I am a before too, by proxy.
But I would feel dumb just saying that, down here by myself. So I will wait until there is a reason to say it.
I put the goldfish back into the clean bowl. His brain is not big enough to notice any difference. He does not even breathe through his mouth. He does not even taste it.
The brochure said,
Put your retirement to good use!
Get paid to sit in a comfortable chair and enjoy the view.
The day is over. I sprinkle food flakes into the goldfish’s bowl. I tap the dials to make sure they are still okay. One of them wiggles and settles on the notch between green and yellow. I don’t remember proper protocol. I boot up the email system and ask what I should do. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the goldfish nibbling at the surface of the water. For a minute, I’m so jealous that he is so close to the air. My eyes close. My old hands shake. The email dings as it sends, but it is almost indistinguishable from the rumble of the Pocket. When I open my eyes, the first thing I see is my unrolled pant legs.
I do not sleep well tonight either. I lay on the thermal cot and stare at the pipes above me and listen for the email system to wake up. Everything around me is close. So close that my elbows bump into cold things when I try to adjust.
I do not have a blanket. That would be a fire hazard.
We have Mindy’s email. I could ask her how the astronauts do it. I would email, did the scientists account for this loneliness?
I do not think Mindy understands how big the ocean is. It is above her pay grade.
The brochure was on my table when Gigi came over for supper. Her dog came with her and spent most of the afternoon chewing on my sofa cushions. She sat next to him while I mashed potatoes. She noticed the flyer.
“You’d better not do it,” she told me when I set our plates down. Her dog went immediately for the chicken. I pushed his nose away.
“Oh?”
A green bean replaced the flyer in her hand. “He won’t even call you back now. Your son. While you’re here.”
“It says email. Look. High-speed electronic mail to keep you connected—”
“What about us?” She pouted at her dog.
I did not answer.
“He’s not going to email you.”
I ate for a minute. Then, I said, “If I’m waiting here, I can wait there.”
We did not talk about it for the rest of the evening. We went through chicken, beans, potatoes, and pudding before she got up to leave. At the door, she said, “I will drive you if you want, old man,” and I kissed her wrinkly hand because Gigi is older than me.
As I lie there, I think about emailing her. In my head, I write it. Gigi, I was wrong. Gigi, I’m sorry I did not help you train your dog. Gigi, I liked your patio before you bought all those pillows. Gigi, I miss bingo with you. The ocean is not like the pool. There is no one else here.
I want to send messages to every person I have ever met. Grocery store clerks and Meals on Wheels deliverers and the retirement home bus driver and my first-grade teacher. I imagine us all in the kiddy pool and standing on the concrete lounge area. Hundreds of us. Some with sharper edges. The five gray jumpsuits, Gigi, the woman in the blazer, Mindy. Some just impressions. The man I bought my first car from, the man who ran the oil rig, the mailwoman, my son. I make the pool deeper, three or four miles deeper. I get rid of the walls and the lounge chairs. The water floods outward, but everyone stays. I cannot see them, but they stay.
If there was a dog here, I would sleep better. The warm weight of a dog head against my belly. I do not think I am wanting too much.
The Pocket receives an email a few hours later. I crawl up from the cot to check it. The goldfish is floating noiselessly in the arms of the plastic purple plant. The email says, we are sending you up to replace your motor bearings. We will keep you updated.
In the beam of the headlight, a little pink fish darts past.
I stare at the goldfish and feel the Pocket’s grumble shift. We could be in an elevator. The world’s darkest, most poorly decorated elevator.
Gigi’s sister would hate my submarine. It does not have any pops of color. It just has a dribble. There is the purple plant in the fish bowl, and that is it.
The goldfish kisses the surface. I wonder if they sent him as a gift. Or, really, if he was just a coal mine canary. If he can sense the pressure.
There would not be much point to that.
My ears pop.
The Pocket follows its silent ladder up. We are just along for the ride. From the window I realize the ocean floor has detached itself. It is just me and the goldfish in the middle of nowhere. If we were to get stuck here, maybe the scientists would find us. But maybe they wouldn’t. There are no markers anywhere.
I wait for the gradient change. My hands tremble. There is no sand here.
On the way down, I stared at it. It had been a sunset. The Pocket had felt like a balloon. It had fought itself to get down there. At any point, I thought we might shoot back up. And, maybe we would breach like a dolphin.
But there is no burst upward. The Pocket is a scientist too. We methodically rise. The blackness doesn’t lift.
Now I am disoriented. My heart squishes down. I reach out to touch the surface of the water in the bowl. But the goldfish is not interested. So, I leave my finger there and feel the water ripple and think about all the advice I’ve ever gotten about calming down.
Mindy told us to take deep breaths and close our eyes and go to our happy place. When we did the exercise in the classroom all I could think about was my bunk on the oil rig, which I shared. I did not think about it because it calmed me. I thought about it because I thought the sounds of a submarine would be similar to the sounds of an oil rig.
But I am afraid to close my eyes. I will not know if the lights go out. And, I will not know if the needle ticks into the red. And, I will not see any gradient change. I do not even know if that room still exists.
Gigi has never seen me upset. But she talks to herself when she worries. I hear her when her windows are open, or when she’s on her deck. Her worries do not care if she’s inside or not. She worries about a lot of things. A lot of them do not transfer to a submarine. She worries about her dog’s health. She worries about her husband, still. She worries about the electric bill. When we watched Into the Wild, she worried that she would not remember the proper SOS signal and be forgotten to die in the wild. She worries about the wild. That it exists, still.
As long as there is any gleam of something around, Gigi will be okay. Sometimes she is her own headlight. She used to tell her husband that. I am brave. So you are brave.
When he was a boy, my son never learned to calm down. I did not teach him. When I was home I would sit in our backyard and read. Or, garden. And he would cry. I wondered why he did not learn to stop, seeing the stillness I tried to bring him. I did not know what else to do but say look, look at all this quiet.
When I was away, he would go to his mother’s. Some of my rig mates’ sons would send them letters. I worked. I thought about the backyard. Maybe the silence meant he was okay.
And then, when he left, both the calm and the upset faded into the background. Once, I got a bill for anxiety medication. He did not answer my call.
I have been waiting for a long time. My eyelids feel heavy. The water has not changed from black. I miss the sun.
He started out so loud. I did not sleep. The quiet I gifted him did not settle in. There was nothing else for me to do.
And then, he moved out. There was silence then, years and years of it.
And then I was afraid he would call a home.
And Gigi said that was perfectly normal. And that you are a fucking coward too, Ned, why don’t you ever commit to anything?
I am not equipped to calm down. The Pocket has quieted as it rises—it does not have to fight the pressure now. I hear a ring from the emptiness. No rattle, no gurgle, no mapping. My ears pop. I wish there was a steering wheel to grip.
* * *
It is a cruise ship that comes to bring a motor bearing. Maybe they just had an extra. I do not know how the scientists do business. It is nighttime up here. I am on the employee smoking deck next to a man named Ringo, who gave me a plate of shrimp cocktail even though he wasn’t supposed to.
Gentle music plays somewhere above us. Occasionally there is a splash of laughter. Mostly it is quiet. If I listen hard, I can hear the hum of the engine, but it is at the other end of the ship. Evening hits me in the face with its openness. I can almost see for miles. But my eyes hurt. It smells so much like sunscreen and gasoline my head swims. My ears feel weak. I have to hold on to stand after so long lying and crawling and sitting. In my chest, my heart titters.
From where we stand, me with my shrimp cocktail and Ringo with his cigarette, I can see the top half of the Pocket. It looks like a manhole in the middle of the sea. The mechanic is in there, banging around. I can’t hear him over the ruckus. But I can see the little boat vibrating with his mechanical activity. I know he’s almost done. I am filled with the urge to return to the sub. To crawl back in.
No one will be able to reach you, they told us at the center, unless you email them first.
That’s how the email system works.
It’s high science. That we can connect you, from so far away.
Ringo is leaning against the metal banister, flicking ash into the slippery white reflections below us.
“That way,” he says, “is Florida.”
“Is that right,” I say. A shrimp sinks into the cocktail sauce. I make no move to save it.
And then the dial is green, the mechanic says, and we should be good to go.
Casey Forest writes love letters to her friends and fabulist stories at night. Her work can be found in Greyrock Review, Bourbon Penn, and elsewhere. She will earn her BA from Colorado State University in 2021, and then promptly escape organized society to live with her dog and some ducks somewhere very green.