Chapter 6 #2
I got my arm under her and lifted, and she came up out of the water with a noise I intend to keep, and then she was against the wall of the tank with her boots off the floor and her hands in my hair and the whole rotunda going around us in rings.
She laughed at some point. Not at me — at the situation, at the sheer administrative absurdity of it, and I felt it go through her ribs into mine.
"What."
"Nothing."
"Delphine."
"I was thinking that I have a methodology," she said, "and it has never once included this," and then she stopped being able to finish sentences for a while.
I'm not going to give you all of it.
Some of that is mine. Most of it is hers. Here's what I'll say, because it's the part that mattered and not the part people want.
She kept trying to narrate. She got about four words into observation, subject exhibits and then had to stop, and thirty seconds later she tried again — hypothesis — and got no further, and the third time she just said, "I'm — I'm losing the log," in a voice that had come completely off its axle, and I said, "Yeah," and she said, "That's unacceptable," and I said, "I know," and she gave up on it entirely.
I got her jacket down off one shoulder and stopped, because she'd gone quiet in a different way.
"Hey."
"I'm fine."
"That's not a fine noise."
"It's an overwhelmed noise, Ruin, they're adjacent, keep going."
"I'm going to need better instrumentation than that."
"Oh, you absolute—" She got hold of my collar with both hands. "Yes. Continue. Log it, notarize it, put it in the ledger—"
"Malachi would want the exact quantity."
"Malachi is not invited."
There was a wool coat and a canvas jacket, and one of them ended up folded on the ladder rung and the other one didn't end up folded at all, and there was concrete under us that had been poured before either of us was born by somebody who would have had a great deal to say about it.
The water was cold. Her hands got warm.
And the light kept going around the walls, slow, in circles, over and over, the way it had been doing for eighty years with nobody down there to see it.
Afterward we lay on the coat with the lamp burning low and the tank breathing around us and neither of us moved for a long time.
"We haven't finished the weir," she said, into my shoulder.
"No."
"It'll go off in the bucket."
"It'll go off in the bucket."
"Malachi will know."
"Malachi will know either way. He's got a sense for it. It's like a barometer but for shame."
She started laughing and couldn't stop for a while, and I lay there with my hand in her hair listening to it come off the concrete in rings, same as the light.
"Tell me something you've never told anyone."
"That's a big ask for a Saturday."
"We're in a tank, Emmett. The bar for the day is already extremely strange."
I lay there and watched the light go around.
"I go out to the wall," I said. "Every year. Same day. I find his nail scratch and I find the water and I don't write it down."
"You don't write it down."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because if I wrote it down it'd be a record," I said, "and a record is a thing you have to answer for. A memory you can put somewhere."
She was quiet for a moment.
"How many years?"
"Six."
"So you know the whole series."
"Three, three, four, three, three, and four."
She sat up so fast she took half the coat with her.
"You have a six-year unbroken subsidence record in your head."
"Del—"
"I've had four days of instruments and you've had six years, you have the single most valuable dataset on this entire coast and it's in the same skull as a man who has repeatedly told me the gate is that way—"
"Are you going to be like this every time?"
"Emmett, I want you to understand that I have never been more attracted to anyone in my life and it is entirely about the numbers," she said, and I have decided to take that as a compliment for the rest of my life.
"Emmett," she said, eventually.
"Yeah."
"I'm going to leave in about ten days."
"I know."
"I want you to know that I said it now. Not after. Now, while we're still down here, so it's not a thing I did to you upstairs."
I looked at the ceiling of a stormwater tank in a drowned suburb.
"Doctor," I said. "There's a limestone shelf ninety miles north with nobody's survey on it."
"Yes."
"So we've both got a reason to still be in the same place in ten days."
She was quiet.
"That's the single most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me," she said, "and it was about geology."
"I'm a practical man."
"You're a disaster."
"Same thing. Ask my father."
We did finish the weir. It took another two hours and it was, professionally speaking, our worst work.
We came up the ladder at first light with the lamp dead and the grout half-cured and both of us wearing more of the bucket than the wall was.
Mama Onyx was at the top with two cups.
She handed one to Del. She handed one to me. She looked at neither of us, said nothing whatsoever, and walked away across the yard humming.
Del stood there holding the coffee with an expression of pure horror.
"That was worse," she said. "How was that worse than being caught?"
"That's the technique. She's had ninety years to develop it."
"I'd have preferred a lecture."
She was still holding the cup like it was evidence when Malachi went past with the ledger.
He said, "Weir's not cured."
"No," I said.
"It's Saturday."
"It is."
"You had eight hours of lamp."
"We did."
Malachi looked at the two of us for approximately one and a half seconds, wrote something in the ledger, and walked on without breaking stride.
Del made a small noise.
"What did he write?"
"I don't know."
"Emmett, what did he write—"
"Doctor, that man has been keeping the books of this town for eleven years and he has never once told anybody what's in them, and I am telling you as a friend that the only way to survive Malachi is to accept that he knows and that it is filed."
She put her face in her hands.
"I have a doctorate," she said, into them.
"You do."
"I have four publications."
"You do."
"And there is a man with a cardigan who has written down that I did not cure a weir."
I got her most of the way back to container nine before she started laughing again, and she had to stop at the standpipe and hold onto it, and Ruiz went past with two jugs and said good morning to both of us in a voice like a boy walking past a lion.