The Deep Zone

why she wanted to lose weight. Core motive, the doctor called it. If she could identify her core motive, it would empower her, the doctor said. It wasn’t easy. For an hour every day for a week, she sat with blank paper and pen, staring into space, thinking, waiting for her core motive to show itself.

It never did. The best she could manage was that it might have something to do with wanting to look good for men, and she laughed out loud at that. She wrote the word in the middle of the blank sheet of paper:

MEN

After staring at it for some minutes, she drew a line though it:

MEN

It felt good to do that, so she drew more lines and more and more until she could see only a jagged clot of lines that looked like a ball of fishhooks and no word. She had never visited that doctor again and had not tried to lose weight since.

She set her plate and glass and silverware on the coffee table. The living-dining room had a beige couch, end tables with matching lamps, and two matching white chairs. A large bookcase stood against one wall. The shelves were filled with big hardcover books arranged alphabetically by the single word that appeared on the spine of each book: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, twenty-nine in all.

She decided to read the book about France again and went to retrieve it. On the shelf above the books sat two framed pictures, black and whites, her mother and father. Her mother had straight dark hair, three deep creases in her forehead, and full, swollen-looking lips. Her face was tilted slightly to the left and her eyes were soft and unfocused. Her father wore a T-shirt that emphasized his thick and muscular neck. Black chest hair curled over its collar. Her father was the hairiest man she had ever seen. The hair swathed him like an animal’s coat of fur. She remembered running her fingers over the mat of hair on his back and being surprised by how stiff it was, not soft and pliant like her own hair but more like the bristles of a brush.

She talked to them as well as to herself. “Hello,” she said. “How are things where you are?”

She brought the book back to the coffee table and paged through it as she ate the soft chicken and mushrooms and peppers over white rice, careful not to spill any on the beautiful pictures. There was an entire section titled “Paris, City of Light.” She lingered over those pages, pausing to put herself in one photo, savoring a glass of fine Bordeaux at Cafe Constant on Rue St. Dominique, watching the Tour Eiffel throw off shards of light as night overflowed the day.

But it was the sun of Provence she loved most, and that was her favorite part of the book. Every photograph of Provence seemed to radiate light. There were times when she felt a physical hunger for light, especially in gray, overcast Washington, D.C. She had spent too many years in dark places. There had been no choice about some— the trailer in Oklahoma, dark dorm rooms in college, the dingy studio in graduate school. Then, after earning her doctorate, she had searched for apartments that would be filled with light. She had looked at a good many. But every time she stood in one, empty and echoing, the white walls and white ceilings bright with light that poured through curtainless windows, she had begun to feel anxious for no reason she could understand. The longer she stayed, the more anxious she became, until the urge to get out became a breed of panic. And so somehow she always ended up in places like this one, apartments that were clean and dark, and in which she felt safe.

She hand-washed her dishes and set them in the drainer, replaced the book on its shelf between England and Germany. In the bedroom she locked the door, undressed, and put on her white terry-cloth bathrobe. She stepped into the bathroom, locked that door, and took the robe off again. She turned on the shower to let hot water run in. From the medicine cabinet she took two sleeping pills and swallowed them with a handful of water she cupped in her palm under the faucet. She closed the medicine cabinet door, over the mirror of which she had taped thick brown wrapping paper, and stepped into the shower. Flemmer showered twice every day, once in the morning before going to the lab and again after dinner.

The white wire basket hanging from the showerhead held three bars of soap, white, green, and blue. She washed her face with the white one and her body with the green one. With the blue soap she washed her buttocks and groin area three times, using the handheld sprayer to rinse with very hot water after each soaping.

Toweled dry, she put on her nightgown and robe and went back to check the apartment locks a last time before going to bed. On the tan carpet lay a white envelope someone had slipped under the door. They must have done it while she was showering. She picked up the envelope and took it back to the brighter light of the kitchen. She tore one end of the envelope open and shook out a single sheet of stationery on which was written,

PLEASE TAKE OUT THE TRASH BEFORE FRIDAY.

She stood in front of the stainless steel kitchen sink, looking at the paper for a long time. She found some matches from a drawer, lit the envelope and paper on fire, and let them burn to ashes in the sink. She used the sprayer to flush the ashes down the drain and then ran the disposal for a full minute.

Back in her bedroom, Flemmer went to a second closet, which did not contain clothes. In it were scores of true-crime paperbacks, a library of murders committed by husbands and wives, bosses and workers, friends and strangers, parents and children. She ran her index finger along the spines of the books on the top shelf, dropped to the second, and stopped at one with a yellow cover and red title: Home of the Devil: A Grisly Tale of Torture and Murder in Small-Town America. It was one of her favorites.

She read until she became drowsy and put the book on top of the Bible on her bedside table. She looked at the framed photos of her mother and father, the same photos as those on her bookshelf, just in different frames.

“Good night,” she said, and turned off the light.

TWENTY-EIGHT

HALLIE’S BRAIN FLARED WITH ONE LAST BRIGHT THOUGHT: Go left. She pushed off in that direction, legs still bound together, stumbling, clawing the cave walls with her bare hands.

She bumped the pack.

She lurched up so fast that she hit her head again, but felt no pain, felt only the inrush of cool air into burning lungs, felt the agony begin to recede from her belly and chest and groin, felt her throat begin to loosen and her eyes to settle back into their sockets.

There were only two inches of air space here, but that was more than enough for her to fill her lungs over and over again, flushing the carbon dioxide out of her system, oxygenating her brain and muscles.

“Cave almost got you, Hallie Leland,” she said.

It was as close as she had ever come to dying in a cave, and she knew it. But something strange had happened, that last flaring thought, and she was alive.

“Thank you,” she said to Chi Con Gui-Jao. “Thank you.”

When she felt able, she freed her legs from the rope. Instead of retying the rope around her waist, from then on she would haul it along with one hand or the other, so that she could break free instantly if she needed to. She retrieved a backup light from one of the thigh pockets on her caving suit and used it to find her helmet and the other light.

Half an hour later she came out the siphon’s far end. She stood knee-deep in a black lake of still water. On her right, the beams of her lights revealed a sheer gold-colored rock wall rising up to the ceiling fifty feet overhead. She thanked the cave god again and walked out onto dry cave floor. Bowman was waiting.

“That was a bitch,” he said, sounding really challenged for the first time.

“Tell me about it. I almost bought it back there.”

He looked up quickly. “What happened?”

She saw that Bowman had taken off his pack. She shucked out of hers, too. “I stumbled, fell underwater, and