Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  “No mouthpieces to bite down on,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “And you can talk. There’s a radio link to earpieces we can all wear and to Archimedes here on the boat.” The captain gave a mock salute and a little grin. “It’s all perfectly safe. The water is not super deep, so you don’t need to worry about pressure, and you can toggle between your tank and the ambient air when you surface, so you don’t need to take the mask off at all once you have a good seal. We’ll all stay together. If anyone feels light-headed or disoriented, or you otherwise think you aren’t getting enough air, you tell Archimedes and he’ll give you this.” He indicated another, smaller tank. “Three liters pure O2. Emergency use only. OK? Let’s do this.”

  The boat’s engine rumbled, blew out a puff of brown smoke, and came to life. Archimedes cast off and we began chugging out of the harbor. I caught Marcus watching me and gave him a brave smile over Simon’s shoulder as he walked me through my equipment and helped fasten the air tank to my back. It felt clumsy, doubly so with the ridiculous fins on my feet, and I felt both absurd and scared. Melissa and Brad were, predictably, as much in their element as Simon, trading stories of wreck dives and shark sightings in Mexico and Costa Rica. Kristen looked wary but game, and Marcus, apart from his concern for me, seemed happy to at least try. The only person who looked as uncomfortable as I felt was Gretchen, and I found myself warming to her a little.

  “You OK?” I asked.

  “Not much of a swimmer,” she said under her breath, thumbing absently through a homemade picture book of the creatures we might see that Archimedes had given her. “Or sailor,” she added.

  “Oh,” I said, making a sympathetic face. We had barely left the dock, and she already looked a little green and was sitting very still, as if refusing to move at all would compensate for the bouncing of the boat’s nose on the water.

  “I’ll stay close,” I said.

  She managed a smile.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Do you do this a lot?”

  “First time,” I said, resisting the impulse to lie and then, as her smile stalled, wishing I hadn’t.

  “You think it’s safe?” she said. “I’m not sure I should really be trying this in the ocean. Shouldn’t we have training first? In a pool?”

  “Simon knows what he’s doing,” I said.

  She nodded, watching him, but murmured, half to herself, like it was a mantra, “I’m really not a strong swimmer.”

  “It’s just kicking,” I said. “You don’t have to work to keep yourself afloat. The gear gives you a kind of neutral buoyancy, so you just pick the direction and go.”

  “I thought you didn’t know anything about this stuff?” she said. Her nervousness gave the remark a sharpness and her eyes were faintly accusatory, as if I had misled her on purpose.

  “My sister does it,” I said. “Loves it. She’s always trying to talk me into joining her.”

  “Family Thanksgiving under the sea,” said Gretchen mirthlessly.

  “Oh, I won’t be seeing her this year,” I said. “She lives in Portland. We don’t connect much.”

  “Had a falling out?” said Gretchen, pleased by the idea of something else to talk about. Or by someone else’s unhappiness.

  “You could say that.”

  “Over what?”

  I looked away.

  “Go on,” said Gretchen with a pleading smile. “Take my mind off being about to drown.”

  I smirked at her, then shrugged.

  “Nothing exciting,” I said. “What sisters always fight over, I expect. Our parents. Who loves whom most. Who’s doing the other person’s share of the work, the care, the worry. The usual.”

  “What line of work is she in?”

  “Software development for movies,” I said. “CGI and such.”

  “Ooh, fun,” said Gretchen, managing a real smile for the first time since the boat hit open water.

  “You’d think,” I said. “She spends most of her time talking about how companies are constantly shopping for cheaper labor. The people who actually do the work don’t get to stamp the finished product with their name and face like actors do, so it’s hard for them to demand what they’re worth when less-skilled companies elsewhere are prepared to do the job for less. And then the studios are constantly adding work to the contract—more scenes, more edits—and expect not to have to pay extra. CGI takes time so the work starts early, but then the script changes or the director goes in a different direction, and all the digital work that was already done is useless and has to be scrapped, but the contracts are structured so that the studios don’t have to pay for anything but finished product. It’s a mess.”

  “Sounds like you know a lot about it,” said Gretchen, impressed.

  “About as much as I do about scuba diving,” I said. “I can tell you what Gabby—my sister—bitches about, but ask me to add a troll to a battle scene, and I’d be drawing on the film with a Magic Marker. Let’s hope my diving is better.”

  “Stay close to me,” said Gretchen. “We’ll drown together.”

  “Terrific.”

  Archimedes doubled as gear tech as well as captain, and we spent twenty minutes or more being poked and scrutinized once the boat came to a halt. He was a big guy, a decade older than the rest of us, broad shouldered, strong, and tanned to the color of tea. His black hair was silvering at the temples and he was developing a gut. He smelled, not unpleasantly, of sea and sweat and oil. As he tightened the straps around my tank, he managed to be careful not to brush against my body while still giving me a mischievous look that reminded me of the awkwardness of being so close to a strange man while wearing very few clothes.

  “Now this,” he said, giving me the mask Simon had already shown me. He guided it over my face and inspected the seal. “Breathe OK?” he asked.

  I tried, feeling hot and claustrophobic, my peripheral vision lost, and nodded.

  “Talk,” he said, pointing at his mouth. “You can talk.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yes. I can breathe.”

  Talking and breathing at the same time was hard, and I had to pause, feeling my heart racing, to steady my nerves. I took longer, slower breaths and felt better. Archimedes took my hand and guided it to the airflow regulator in front of my mouth.

  “This air,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the sky, then turning the switch. “This tank. OK?”

  I nodded.

  “Talk,” he said.

  “OK,” I said. “Yes.”

  I wished I could see. The scuba gear was handicap enough without me being close to blind to begin with.

  “If you like this,” said Simon, “we could come back. There’s a World War II German fighter farther out. A Messerschmitt. That would be pretty cool, right?”

  “A 109?” asked Marcus, clearly excited.

  “How the hell should I know?” Simon quipped. “What do I look like, a historian?”

  “Could be a 110, I guess,” Marcus mused. “Or a Focke-Wulf. A 109 would be neat, though.”

  “Whatever, professor,” said Simon. “It’s an old plane. Who cares what kind?”

  I looked at him through the diving mask, and it was like I wasn’t really there or was watching the scene on television, so I could do or say anything I wanted and they wouldn’t know. The effect gave me an oddly critical distance. Simon was joking, boisterous and grinning in a matey way, but the remark had that casual unkindness he and Brad so easily slipped into. It wasn’t malicious exactly, just dismissive, as if there were a line between what was cool and what was dorky that they instinctively recognized. People like Marcus were always straying over it. For his part, Marcus shrugged the moment off, laughing at himself, and I couldn’t tell if he felt stung.

  We hadn’t actually gone far from the boathouse—a half mile, perhaps, maybe less—and I found myself both relieved and disappointed. Not that I could see the shore, but Gretchen kept checking. Everything was a blurry vagueness to me, and I suddenly wondered if that would also be a safety haz
ard on top of making the whole expedition a bit pointless. I considered Archimedes, and as soon as he was finished with Melissa—clad today in a vivid yellow bikini worthy of Sports Illustrated—I got his attention.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, still speaking through the mask to his earpiece, “but do you have any lenses? I left my glasses at home and . . .”

  “Lenses?” he said, frowning at the word.

  “My eyes are . . . not good, and . . .”

  “Ah,” he said, holding up one hand and beckoning me over to the stern of the boat, where a series of plastic baskets were heaped with snorkels and life jackets. He pushed things around, grunting to himself, and came up with a box of single-piece goggle inserts. He pushed it over to me and pulled my mask back.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Should have done this before. Sorry.”

  There were only four options to choose from, and he pressed each in turn into the faceplate of my mask. They were a little fogged and scratched, but one of them improved my vision significantly, and I thanked him, delighted. He grinned back, pleased by the improvement in my mood, then resealed the mask in place.

  “I thought you were wearing contacts,” said Brad shrewdly.

  “Not while I swim,” I said. “Too easy to lose them.”

  Almost as easy as glasses . . .

  He nodded and looked away, and I grinned to myself, glad of the way the mask hid my face. I could see. For the first time in twenty-four hours, I could see. I would happily stay here all day, scuba diving or no fucking scuba diving.

  Archimedes called the dive spot Daedalus, and he asked if we knew the story of the man who had designed the labyrinth for King Minos and then built wings for himself and his son to escape the island.

  “Like bird,” he said, flapping vaguely with his arms and smiling.

  “Icarus, right?” said Marcus. “His son was Icarus.”

  “That’s right,” said Archimedes. “He fell. Drowned.”

  “Let’s hope that’s not an omen,” said Gretchen, gray-faced, worried eyes fixed on the water, as if something might emerge that would save her from going in. A submarine, maybe. I felt for her, and not just out of pity. The water looked deep, and I was suddenly sure that making a fool of myself was the least of my worries.

  “Icarus,” sneered Brad, catching Marcus’s eye and shaking his head. “Jesus, professor. You teach this stuff?”

  “Not my field,” he said.

  “So why do you know it?”

  “Just think it’s kind of cool,” he said, looking abashed. “Icarus is . . . I don’t know: aspiration and daring but also arrogance and hubris. It’s a cool story, the boy who flew too close to the sun so that the wax holding the feathers in his wings melted, but it’s also a great tragic metaphor for overreach, not knowing your limitations.”

  Brad just shook his head again and made a face.

  “The things you choose to care about,” he said. “Yo, Simon! We there yet? Let’s get to it!”

  Marcus seemed to hesitate, as if waiting for Brad to speak to him again, and then, when he didn’t, just turned away. I was going to say something, but I didn’t want to draw attention to the moment or let him know I’d seen it, so I studied my gear and went back to wishing it would all soon be over.

  But the dive was more than fun. Against all the odds, even Gretchen didn’t drown. We braved water that was about twenty-five meters deep, navigating a reef with sizeable rocks that formed a kind of underwater cliff face that was home to all manner of plants, fish, and other creatures. Kristen and Brad saw an octopus, and I saw some kind of pink, squiddy-cuttlefish thing with big baby eyes and little flouncing tentacles jetting over the reef, which was, I had to admit, pretty damn cool. Simon guided us all to a hole from which a speckled bluish moray eel watched us, all beady eyes and nail-like teeth that gave me the willies. We moved around with flashlights, scanning the pocks and hollows in the rock for crabs and little lobsterlike crustaceans and anemones, but I was at least as transfixed by the luminous blue of the water around us, the sensation of looking up through cascading bubbles and schools of flashing silver fish toward the surface. It was electrifying.

  And I was graceful. I’m used to feeling bumbling, clumsy, and the gear—especially the flopping fins on my feet—had made me feel worse in the boat, but in the water I became a mermaid, moving effortlessly with little kicks, rolling and turning in a kind of disbelieving rapture. I had been so glad when I found I would be able to talk with my mask on, to stay connected to the others, but once in the water, exploring the darker depths and glimpsing the first gleaming shoals of colorful fish, I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to keep it to myself, the thrill, the surprise, the simple pleasure of it.

  And amazingly, everyone felt the same way. Not the quiet secrecy part—the joy. In fact, the less experience we had, the more we reveled in it, so that those of us who had been most apprehensive—me, Gretchen, Kristen, and Marcus—had the best time. Simon and Melissa exulted in our pleasure, vindicated, and only Brad showed any sign of sourness, the dive not “challenging” him as much as he wanted, not showing him marvels greater than he had seen before. Everyone, Kristen included, ignored him, and eventually he came round, joining in the general exuberance even as we bundled into the Mercedes, crooning, à la Dean Martin, “When the bite on your heel’s from a massive great eel, that’s a moray!” The fact that it was him made it funnier, and the moment became rare and precious because you know in your lying heart that nothing this good can last; you want to preserve it in crystal forever, a few perfect minutes in time that you can hold and step back into whenever you want.

  We had an early dinner—linner, Simon called it, after Seinfeld—at a harborside restaurant in a town whose name I didn’t even catch, and it too was perfect, higgledy-piggledy houses, all painted bright, cheerful colors long ago and then left to age in the sun. They might have been there centuries, repurposed from time to time, added to, renovated, but essentially the same. I suspected that some of them, like the villa we were staying in, had Venetian or Ottoman roots, and I found myself thinking amazedly of how houses got knocked down at home, scooped off the landscape to make way for something bigger and shinier in ways that left not so much as a scrap for the archaeologists of the future to see what might once have sprouted from the Carolina clay. I thought of Mrs. Robson—Flo—who had moved into assisted living at the age of eighty-five, leaving the house she and her husband had built half a century ago across the street from my Plaza Midwood apartment. The house was demolished two months later, a pair of tracked diggers breaking it down to the foundation and a bulldozer scraping the remains away while Flo stood by, watching for as long as she could stand it. The shiny new condo that had taken its place was half-finished now. I doubted I’d ever see Flo again, and the only trace of her presence would be in aging town records.

  Here there was continuity, the past reaching back centuries, always lived in, always handed on to the next generation. No doubt I was romanticizing something fundamentally un-American, something that would lose its appeal if I had to actually live in it for any length of time, moldering and small as it was, no doubt I would soon be crying out for the neat, pristine newness and flexibility of life in the United States, but right now, through my out-of-focus tourist eyes, it looked pretty great.

  Even the food was unreasonably good. Though we had chosen the place at random, we couldn’t have hoped for better: mussels cooked in white wine and crispy fried sardines with olive tapenade and crusty bread brought to the table beside the marina by the elderly lady who ran the place and her bashful daughter. Simple food, made from fresh local, staple ingredients according to family recipes and prepared exquisitely. More tradition and continuity.

  “You know what you’d pay for this in New York?” Melissa remarked, pouring more wine.

  “Or London?” Simon agreed. “Forget about it.”

  “Not sure you could even get this in Charlotte,” said Marcus.

  “Well, no,” said Simon
with that knowing smirk that pulled the side of his face out of handsomeness, “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “We have some pretty good restaurants in Charlotte now,” Marcus said.

  “Bojangles?” said Simon.

  “I mean real restaurants,” Marcus answered. “High end.”

  “And don’t be knocking Bojangles,” I added.

  Marcus grinned at me.

  “My shoulders ache,” said Kristen, stretching. “I suppose diving is more of a workout than I thought.”

  “You’re using different muscles,” said Brad.

  “It’s more about using the muscles you always use differently,” said Simon.

  “I’d kill for a massage,” said Kristen. “When I’m on set, the studio has a masseuse on call to keep everyone relaxed. Raul,” she added with a mischievous grin, “plays my spine like a grand piano.”

  “Does he indeed?” said Melissa.

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” said Kristen. “Shooting is so stressful. Everyone running around, new pages to learn, the director racing the light . . . so stressful. Not sure what I’d do without Raul.”

  “Raul,” said Melissa again, tasting the word in her mouth like it was ice cream.

  “We have masseuses in the office,” said Simon. “Neck and shoulder only. Very professional.”

  “There’s a spa we use in Buckhead, isn’t there, honey?” said Brad. “When you don’t have Raul, of course.”

  Kristen smiled and looked down. Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought she was on her guard. There was something about the way Brad fixed her with his gaze that seemed . . . not predatory exactly, but proprietary. Like he’d just had his car detailed and was checking it over to make sure he’d gotten what he paid for.

  “What about you, Jan?” asked Marcus abruptly.

  I gave him a disbelieving stare. He knew as well as I did that neither of us could afford regular massages.

  “You still go to Charlene every Wednesday?” he said.

  To my amazement, he smiled fractionally and, sure that no one else was watching too closely, winked. Needless to say, I knew no one called Charlene.