We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep

9

THE GREAT SILENCE COMES when darkness fully falls. The hours that follow Compline. No speaking, of course. But also a time where every action should be made softly. Every movement. Every footstep. A time for rest, for prayer.

I have no will in me for either.

We have been spit from the belly of the beast. Not safely upon a shore, but alive. Seven of us. For a time.

I must have done God’s will, in the end. The missile did not launch. It was thwarted. By divine intervention?

Something inside stops me from believing that, reminds me of how dangerous it is to believe that.

Little waves lap at the gunwales of the rubber raft, slap beneath us. They are not large. Do no more than rock us lightly, roll beneath. Night has almost fallen, and we all gaze above at the cloudless expanse of deepening sky, a bowl already blue and sprinkled with what must be stars. For I do not remember stars. Have only read about them.

The way the ancients once navigated, finding patterns and trustworthiness in their constant positions.

My mind doesn’t know what to do with it—this expanse of sky—these endless reaches. It feels as though I’m looking down instead of up, into a wholly different sea, about to fall in.

I must close my eyes.

Lazlo shivers in my arms.

His thin body, a collection of sharp bones kept contained in bible-paper thin skin.

The stars offer light enough to see his scrubby head mottled with sores, his angled cheekbones.

“I did right,” he whispers softly.

“What?”

“I did right. I broke the reactor,” he says. His voice is little. It’s weak. “I loosened a coupler on the pressure line. I knew I had to do something… knew you must have been captured. The others… they helped, too.”

Edwin is still awake, sitting up, watching in silence.

Lazlo coughs. A wet sound.

I look down to find glossy black sputum on my arm.

“Yes,” I whisper. “You did good. You saved us. You might have saved the world. What’s left of it.”

When I open my eyes again, it is fully night. Deep night. Stars blazing.

Something in my body tells me that it is time to rise and sing. Matins.

Time to praise the Lord, the very act of creation. Goodness and light.

And, as though answering, a faint, ever-so-soft crying fills the air. It’s coming from under us. From beneath the waves.

A sorrowful bellow.

And then, an answer.

A sonorous, distant response. They are together again. The two whales. The ones that have been apart for so long.

“Listen,” I whisper to Lazlo.

He does not answer.

I feel his full weight on me. I lean in to him, listening for the soft hiss of breath. Find it. Alive.

Only just.

St. John is still awake. Watching us from the other side of the raft. I see his bruised face by the starlight, his gleaming eyes.

“Does he know?” he asks. “The truth about you.”

“No,” I say, wiping my salt-chapped cheeks. “It won’t matter to him, though.”

This, I believe with all my heart. This, I have faith in.

Sometime later, St. John begins singing. It’s a broken song, uttered by a broken voice.

The Benedictus.

Sung at Lauds, at the break of day.

“Per viscera misericordiae Dei nostri, in quibus visitabit nos oriens ex alto,” he sings.

In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us.

I join in with him. I’m not sure why. “Illuminare his, qui in tenebris et in umbra mortis sedent.”

To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

Those of us who were former Choristers join in now. One last chorus. Our audience, the sea and sky. Lazlo stirs.

“There,” St. John says suddenly, pointing to the horizon, sitting up, waking the others.

Just at the pale orange line that must be the coming dawn, a small shadow crosses. And then a flashing light. A ship.

In the raft, there is a kit. A bag labeled EMERGENCY FLARES. We can use them to signal this ship, whether it be friend or foe.

If that distinction matters.

St. John points one of the canisters to the sky, pulling the string at the end. The first does nothing. Neither do the following two. Duds. But the last one works. It spits a hot, brilliant, flaming bulb high into the sky. An arc of light that seems to take forever to finally fizzle and sink.

Whether the ship sees us, we cannot know.

So, we wait. Listening in great silence to the wind, to the lapping waves. To the leviathans.

They move unseen, beneath us, in that vast darkness. Singing, calling out to one another, answering. Exalting nothing, or perhaps everything. Every mountain and trench and cavern and creature in the sea. Every soul lost to it, waiting there, for the inkling of light to finally come.