Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  “There’s always a second diver in case the lines get fouled. Or something else goes wrong.”

  “Who’d watch the air machine dials if he went down?”

  “Are you volunteering, sir?”

  Dexter laughed, impressed. In four simple words, the man had managed to both establish a jocular familiarity and assure Dexter that he understood exactly who was in charge. A diplomat.

  “Can the one machine make enough air for two divers?” Dexter asked.

  “They’re designed to. At the Yard, we use one per diver, but this one tested well for efficiency. With those gentlemen at the wheels, we’d get the maximum.”

  Dexter smiled, having finally received the compliment he’d been fishing for. “Say, suppose the machine should stop working?” he said. “What then?”

  “No reason for that to happen,” the Negro said evenly, but Dexter sensed a new wariness in him. “Even so, she’d have about eight minutes of air left inside the dress. More than enough to get her topside.”

  A signal must have come through the cord he was holding, for he jerked it firmly several times, waited, then jerked again. Then he walked backward along the gunwale toward his partner at the bow, letting out slack as he went, eyes still fixed to the bubbles. After a brief conversation, the towhead left the air machine, lifted the weighted line, and walked it quickly to the bow of the lighter, not far from the air machine. Dexter sidled up to the Negro, who explained that “the diver,” as he referred to her, had made a complete sweep around the line without finding anything. Now she would begin a second circle in a new location.

  “This could take forever,” Dexter said. “How long can she stay down?”

  “Two hours free and clear. Longer, and she’ll need to decompress on the way up. We’ve only a bosun’s chair for that, but we’ll manage it.” The Negro glanced at his wrist, where Dexter saw three watches strapped. “She’s been down thirty-eight minutes.”

  “I’d like to go down,” Dexter said. “And help her search.”

  The suggestion was pure impulse; a verbal essay that was more an expression of general impatience than a proposal. But the moment Dexter uttered the words, his mind locked around the idea. “I’m serious.”

  The Negro inclined his head politely. “Have you ever dived before, sir?”

  “I’m a quick study.”

  “With all due respect, from a safety angle, it would be out of the question.”

  “Nothing is out of the question,” Dexter said amiably, “as long as there’s someone to ask the question.”

  The Negro watched the bubbles. Dexter waited, knowing the man was too polite to ignore him for long. Sure enough, he resumed in a gently reasoning tone, “We had two weeks of training before we went down.”

  “And yet there was a first time,” Dexter said. “You hadn’t done it, and then one day you had.”

  The Negro cocked his head, trying to read him.

  “Today is that day for me.”

  The white diver watched the air machine gauges, giving no indication that he’d heard this exchange. Dexter moved closer to him and cleared his throat. He spoke softly, so that the diver could hear him but the boys turning the flywheels could not. “I’d like to take that suit off your hands and go down myself.”

  “That’s not the way these things are done,” the diver muttered, eyes on the dials.

  “They can be done any number of ways,” Dexter said. “Like all things.”

  The man didn’t glance at him.

  “I’d like to help, is all. It will save her time. And you’re needed up here.”

  “You’d be no help whatsoever.”

  “Say, now, that hurts my feelings.”

  “Just a risk and a distraction.”

  “Is it air you’re worried about? Having the one machine supply two people?”

  “Among other things.”

  “If there’s trouble, cut me loose,” Dexter said. “I’ll float to the top. I’d have eight minutes, right?”

  Now he had both divers’ attention. “Your size?” the Negro said. “Less.”

  “Do it anyway.”

  The white diver made a dismissive noise. “That’s no favor to us if we end up with your body on our hands.”

  “There wouldn’t be a body.”

  The men exchanged a glance. “How do you figure?” asked the Negro.

  “Skipper,” Dexter barked. The mariner jolted as if a pan of water had been tossed in his face. “Come on over here, would you?”

  The skipper hobbled over painfully, like a squashed insect.

  “I need you to reassure these gentlemen of something,” Dexter said. “If I should happen to croak while diving in this harbor, can you guarantee that they would be free and clear to walk away? No entanglements with the law, the coroner, or the postman?”

  The skipper nodded, breathing hard. Dexter wasn’t entirely sure he’d understood.

  “With all due respect,” the Negro said, “bodies can’t just disappear.”

  “Ah, but they can,” Dexter said. “They do. You’re in a different world right now, my friend. It may look like the one you know, may smell like it, sound like it, but what goes on here doesn’t carry over. When you wake up tomorrow, none of this will have happened.”

  They were staring at him as if he’d gone unhinged. How to explain the workings of the shadow world in a way that would persuade them? He didn’t have to, of course, but Dexter always preferred argument to brute force. “I’m saying we’ve different rules,” he said. “Different practices. What can’t happen in your world can in mine. Including bodies disappearing.”

  “Where does our diver fit in?” the Negro asked. “What if something happens to her?”

  “Nothing happens to her,” Dexter said. “That we all agree on. But I’m different. I’m like . . . a reflection. A shadow.” He was reaching for something he’d not articulated before and didn’t fully understand.

  “That’s a lot of pretty talk,” the white diver said, looking at Dexter head-on for the first time. A hard face, tipped inward. “In my book, there’s but one world, and without oxygen, none of us lasts in it for long. Amateurs trying to play hero are a pain in the neck, but the chumps who let ’em muck things up are to blame for whatever goes wrong. I’m telling you no, pal. I will not equip you to dive in that harbor.”

  Dexter took a long breath. “I’ve tried reasoning with you,” he said. “But it doesn’t seem to work.”

  “Ain’t a word of reason in what I’ve been hearing.”

  “I’m giving you an order: take off that diving suit.”

  “I answer to the U.S. Navy. Not to you.”

  A burst of rage made Dexter’s nerves fizz. “The U.S. Navy isn’t here right now,” he said softly. “At least I don’t see them.”

  “Oh, they’re here. They control this harbor. They’re all around us.”

  Dexter turned to the Negro. “Does your friend have a screw loose?” he asked just loudly enough for the towhead to hear. “Does he not understand that my boys will shoot him through the head and throw him overboard for fish food as soon as they’d step on a cockroach?”

  Though he hadn’t raised his voice, a charge passed over the boat, distinct even through the wind. Enzo loped over eagerly. “We got trouble, boss?”

  “I don’t know,” Dexter said, watching the Negro. “Have we?”

  Who better than a Negro to recognize when the world had cut him off at the knees? Calmly, he went to his partner’s side and spoke into his ear. Dexter caught phrases:

  “. . . not that hard if he . . .”

  “. . . fact that Savino could . . .”

  “. . . navy does it routinely . . .”

  Dexter knew he’d won; the Negro was in charge. Sure enough, he returned to Dexter’s side and said, “We don’t want trouble, sir. Not at all.”

  “Neither do I,” Dexter said. “That’s why I’m giving your partner one last chance to sidestep the part where I scare him so badly he shits
his pants. I assure you, it’s not pleasant.”

  The color had drained from the white diver’s face. Reflexively, he glanced at the dials on the air machine. Dexter imagined he was inside the man’s mind, undergoing the compression on his skull that he must feel. He disliked knowing what another man felt.

  “Holy Christ,” the white diver said to his partner, his voice dry with horror.

  “I don’t see him here, either,” Dexter said.

  * * *

  When Anna received a signal that a second diver was coming down, she wondered if she’d mistakenly requested him. Then it occurred to her that something had gone wrong—beyond the obvious fact that the descending line had been moved three times (the last around to the lighter’s other side), and she’d found only a broken barrel and a tree stump. She kept crawling while he descended, then felt him lift the circling line and follow it toward her, forcing her to rise. Instinctively, she opened her eyes, but of course saw nothing.

  She recalled having learned in class that two divers could hear each other underwater if their helmets touched. Bascombe was taller than she’d expected, and she had to tug a little on his arm to make him stoop. She pressed her helmet against his and said, “Why are you here?”

  The reply was distant, tinny, like a radio playing under a blanket. “Dexter,” she heard.

  “What about Dexter?”

  “That’s me. I’m Dexter.”

  She thought fleetingly that Bascombe was playing a trick, but couldn’t imagine him joking at such a time. “That’s impossible.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “It’s—dangerous,” she sputtered.

  “The gentlemen above made that clear.”

  She had a fractured intimation of the ugliness that would have preceded Dexter Styles’s replacement of Bascombe in the diving dress. Her mind swerved away; she needed to stay calm. “Can the compressor make enough air for both of us?”

  “Are you breathing all right?” he asked.

  She took a long inhale, which steadied her. She’d heard that the navy sometimes put men directly into the water in diving dress as the first step in their weeding-out process. The air coming into the hat was cool and dry, and her head felt clear. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve enough air. And you?”

  “Never better.”

  There was truth in this. Once he’d adjusted his air valve as the Negro had instructed, lifting the harness from his shoulders, Dexter had felt an unaccountable exhilaration while being pulled by the heavy shoes through the mighty, pressing dark. It was as if some mammoth effort he’d not been fully aware of having made was about to pay off at last. He could breathe. He could breathe and walk on the bottom of the sea.

  “I’m afraid we won’t find anything,” he heard her say. “How do we know this is the right place?”

  Her voice was faint, like a long-distance telephone connection. The result was that singular mix of intimacy and distance that Dexter often felt over the telephone, when a person far away seemed to whisper directly into his thoughts. “We’ll find him,” he said, his own voice booming by comparison. “The skipper knows. He’s here.”

  This utterance confused Anna; the skipper was here? The voice that arrived through the helmets was leeched not just of volume but of any trace of feeling. It sounded the way a machine would sound if one could speak. Yet the words lingered. He’s here. A clear image of her father came to her suddenly: rising from the water at Coney Island after one of his morning swims, his body dripping, shining. A wink and a wave to the startled lifeguards who’d come on duty after he’d gone out, a rub with the Turkish towel he’d left beside Anna on the sand with his clothing and billfold. The radiant bliss that rose from him after those swims, as if he’d shaken off a sorrow that was with him always.

  “I’m here,” she said softly. “I’m here, too.”

  Dexter Styles pressed his helmet to hers. “If you’ve another rope, we can hold it between us and cover more ground,” came the mechanical rendering of his voice.

  “I have.”

  Taking his gloved hand, she led him back to her starting point of a few minutes before, where she’d left the tool bag. Inside was a thirty-foot rope with a lanyard at each end. She slipped one over her free wrist, the left, and the other onto his right wrist, below the wristband. Pressing her helmet to his, she said, “Walk away from me until the rope is taut, then crawl in the direction you feel me crawling. Your helmet should always be higher than your body; don’t let it drop.”

  “All right.”

  He did as instructed, getting awkwardly onto his knees when the rope tensed. He felt the soft harbor floor through the rubberized fabric of the diving suit. He lowered his gloves to the earth, taking care to keep his head up—though he’d forgotten to ask what would happen if he did not. Crawling felt grotesquely unnatural—when had he last crawled, for Christ’s sake? But the rope tugged at his wrist, and crawl he did, tentatively at first, afraid of dropping his head. Each slight resistance of the rope made him believe they’d found something, but he came to recognize these as bumps and tufts of plants on the harbor bottom. Gradually, the primal nature of the motion emptied his mind. He was crawling in the dark. Crawling in the dark. He was crawling. Crawling. After a while, he could not remember why.

  * * *

  The obstruction, when it came, lay along the outer rope conjoining Anna to Dexter Styles. She unhooked the inner circling line—the one holding her to the weight—in order to crawl toward him. Only then did she recognize the flaw in her plan: the rope she was letting go was their only link to the boat. She remembered her first dive—the confusion of wandering, disoriented, underwater. Even in the comparatively luminous and shallow Wallabout Bay, a three-inch manila rope had been impossible to find. In the worst case, Marle and Bascombe could haul her up by her lifeline. But could they haul up Dexter Styles?

  Finding no alternative, she let go the inner line from her wrist and crawled along the outer rope to the obstacle: a heavy chain attached to a block of concrete. She felt Dexter Styles crawling from the other direction and then in the water beside her. She turned on her flashlight, its sallow glow awakening perhaps two feet of murky bay. The chain’s three-inch links were slippery with plant life, as if they hadn’t moved in a long time. Anna doused the light, frightened of what else she would see. She touched her hat to Dexter Styles’s and said, “What do you think?”

  “That looks right,” came the faint reply.

  The foreboding she’d felt all night moved very close. “I’m frightened,” she said, adopting the same monotone that his voice acquired in its passage through the two hats. This flat delivery had the odd effect of checking whatever emotions she might have felt. Only the words were left.

  “Why did they kill him?” she asked.

  “It’s what they do when they’re crossed.”

  “Was he a criminal?”

  “No.”

  “Why did he cross them?”

  “Only he knows that.”

  “I’m going to search without the light.”

  She felt him rise to his feet, perhaps to give her privacy, or from a disinclination to know what she found. The chain was coiled and doubled back to such an extent that it had assumed a solid mass. Tentatively, Anna began to loosen the folds of chain and probe among them. An enormous padlock affixed several links together and attached them by a padeye to the block of concrete. Anna wedged her fingers among the links, searching for something organic: fabric, leather, bone. She hadn’t any memory of what her father had worn the day he didn’t come back, but surely there had been a suit, a necktie, a hat. Shoes. She felt a pressure at her breastbone like a dark egg, its contents horror and revulsion. Anna dreaded these sensations, yet she craved a discovery that would unleash them: some proof that he hadn’t gone away. Had never left her. Anna’s need for this certainty drove her gloved fingers through mud and sand and slippery links of chain. But she found no shoes, no fabric, no bones. Could all of that have been carried away?
<
br />   Flagging, she reminded herself how close she’d already come. Her presence here was miraculous; her only chance. This recognition catalyzed a frenzy of new digging. She swore under her breath the way men swore at the Yard: Damn it! Fuck it! She dug until she was distracted by the glow swarming behind her eyelids. She tried opening her eyes to dispel it, then realized that her eyes were already open. The glow was coming from outside—from the water itself. It intensified as she dug: metallic orange, purple, green, colors that weren’t exactly colors, like the hues of a photographic negative she’d once seen. They rose from the newly exposed earth and shimmered in the water around her.

  Anna tugged at the laces of Dexter’s dress until he crouched. He rested his helmet against hers. “What the hell is that?”

  “Phosphorescence. Live things in the water.” She had learned about it in diving class.

  He began digging, too. The phosphorescence glowed around them in a cloud, dimly illuminating Dexter Styles in the water beside her. Warmth radiated from under her fingers, under the sand. She located a small round object stuck fast inside a buried link of chain and began working at it with her crude gloves, trying to dislodge it without snapping the tiny chain that held it fast. At last she freed the disk and turned it over in her hands. More metal; she was disappointed. There was a nub or a bolt along one rounded edge. Then, with an icy shock, the object became legible: a pocket watch. Anna cried out, the sound boxing her ears inside the helmet. She lifted the watch to her faceplate. Dexter Styles was still digging, and in that incandescence she barely made out the familiar engraving of a stranger’s initials.

  Her father’s watch.

  She began to cry. Even through her gloves, she felt the faint indentations of the engravings. JDV: Jakob De Veer, the man who had helped her father when he was a boy. Clutching the watch, she sobbed until the humidity inside her helmet began to daze her. She turned up her air and opened her spitcock to flush out helmet and dress. Still weeping, she pressed her helmet to Dexter’s, knowing that he would hear only the mechanical echo of her words, nothing else.

  “I found him,” she said. “He’s here.”