The Shell Collector

by Hugh Howey

  “There’s a bag on the shelf behind you,” Ness says. “A couple of apples, granola bars, some juice. Go easy on the juice, but if you have to relieve yourself, there are ways.”

  “Do I even want to know?”

  “Probably not. Oh, and I packed your book and borrowed a reading light from one of the bosuns. It’s in there as well.”

  “I can read about the hunt for Moby Dick at the bottom of the sea,” I say in perfect monotone, so he knows just how enthused I am.

  “Spoiler alert,” Ness warns. “Down here is where the Pequod ends up.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s how it gets there that’s interesting. You should read it anyway. Great book, even if no one recognized it at the time.”

  “Is that what you’re up to?” I ask. “Is that what this is all about? Being remembered as someone great, even if it’s only after you’re gone?”

  Ness laughs. He turns and looks at me in the dim light of the indicators. “Really? We’re going to do this here? At …” He checks something. “Two hundred meters and falling?”

  “Why not? I’ve got you here for the next two hours. Interview on.”

  “Five hours, if we spend an hour at the bottom.”

  My bladder clenches. “Five hours,” I say, mostly to myself. “So tell me, what did you mean by redemption on the plane last night—”

  “That was off the record,” Ness warns.

  “Okay.” I try to think of how to rephrase what I want to ask. “How about this? Why do you want to show me whatever led you to the creation of these shells? Do you expect me to rewrite my story so that it’s mostly about this? Are you trying to be remembered differently than your father?”

  Ness doesn’t reply immediately, which makes me think he takes the question seriously, is at least introspective enough to consider this as a possibility.

  “I don’t care how most people remember me,” he finally says.

  “Most people?”

  “That’s right. But I do care what Holly thinks. And she sees me the way you do.” He turns to me. Is back to his serious self. And from what Victoria told me, this is the Ness that I believe. Not the smiling and laughing man—not that he isn’t capable of joy—but there’s meat inside that shell; it’s not all rainbows and sunshine in there. “Holly won’t care about any of this now, maybe not for years, but I want her to know the truth someday. I don’t care if you write that truth. In fact … you want to know what I think this is about for me?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Are you just realizing it right now?”

  “Yeah,” Ness says. “I am. I think this is a test—”

  “You’re testing me? Why do you care what I think?”

  “I don’t. I mean, I do. What I mean is that I’m not testing you. I’m testing myself. Seeing what would happen if I told people the truth.”

  I laugh at this.

  “I’m serious. Because I could get into a lot of trouble. I could spend the rest of my life in jail. But I want to tell Holly someday. I want to explain myself, tell her why I wasn’t around as much as I should’ve been, why I drove her mother away, why I—”

  He turns to the porthole on his side of the submersible and is quiet for a while. When he speaks again, his voice breaks. “Why I tore the family apart. Because it’s gonna take a lot to make that worth it. And if she thinks it was frivolous, that none of it mattered—all the hours I was gone—then she’ll hate me for the rest of my life and then keep on hating me for the rest of hers. And I’ve felt that hate in my own heart. Felt it toward my dad. And my granddad. Which is why when my granddad passed, and his journal fell into my possession, and I saw how wrong I was … that’s when I knew I had to leave something behind for Holly. That I couldn’t do everything in secret. Not forever.”

  “Do what in secret?” I ask.

  “Soon,” Ness says. “Soon.”

  “Look—”

  “You’ll know everything in a few days,” he says, cutting me off. “And then you can decide what to write, if you write anything at all.”

  He turns to face me. Even in the dim light, I can see that his eyes are filmed over with tears. “I was familiar with your shelling pieces back in the day, and I read some of your more recent stuff before you came over that first night. I trust you. And it’s even better to see that Holly trusts you. That means the world to me. She might be angry with us for a few days for not being in love, but when she reads what you have to say—if you have anything to say—and sees the truth instead of all the lies out there about me, that’ll go a long way with the healing.”

  “That’s too much to put on me, Ness. I have to be objective. You can’t use her like that to make me write what you want to see. And you can’t use me like this hoping I’ll write something nice about you. I hate to break it to you, but I’m a resistant cuss. If I like you, I’m just as likely to rip you apart to prove I’m capable of being fair.”

  “No, you’re right. It’s too much to ask. And I don’t mean any of it like that. It’s just … I can see how this all plays out, how it has to play out, and I guess I’m thanking you in advance. I shouldn’t do that, I know. Now I’m the one skipping to the end.”

  “Yeah. And you should be prepared for me to disappoint you, Ness. Because I probably will.”

  Ness adjusts one of the levers on his side of the sub and settles back into his seat. “I don’t think that’s possible,” he says. “I don’t think you can.”

  31

  Flying commercial as often as I do, I feel trained for this journey to the bottom of the sea. The sub is far more comfortable than coach in a 797. More leg room, better snacks, and no one behind me coughing and sneezing. I read for an hour, wondering when these people are going to get to sea already and get to whaling, and I take occasional breaks to gaze out at the pitch black beyond the glass.

  The only thing I see out there is the small bubbles forming on the portholes; it looks like we’re in outer space but with stars that can’t sit still. As we plunge down and down, the sub makes creaking sounds, which Ness tells me at least a hundred times is perfectly normal. He says the military subs do the same thing, that it’s just the metal settling against the phenomenal pressure outside, that at this depth, a watermelon would instantly become the size of a grape.

  From what I can tell, Ness is good at a lot of things—but reassuring people is not one of them.

  “Probably a good idea to kill the book light,” he tells me. He turns on an interior light, which bathes the interior of the sub in a red glow.

  “Is that a bad thing?” I ask. Red is always bad. This is a bad thing. Something is wrong.

  “The red light? No, that’s to save our vision. We’re almost to the bottom.”

  There seems to be a red glow outside the submersible as well, some kind of dim light beneath us. Ness steers the craft to the side and rotates us. I can hear the motors whirring elsewhere in the capsule.

  “That’s the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” Ness says, pointing through one of the portholes. “I’d guess a hundred people have laid eyes on it in person like this. Far fewer than have been in space.”

  This factoid gives me goose bumps. The previously surreal in my life now feels banal in comparison to where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m seeing.

  “Do you want to steer?”

  “Sure,” I say, even though I don’t really.

  “I’m slowing the rate of descent.” Ness adjusts a knob. “If you think of the sub as having four wheels, the stick on the left controls the driver’s side wheels, and the stick on the right controls the passenger side. If you want to rotate, move them opposite each other. Try it.”

  I do. Hesitantly at first, but then with more force as I feel how slowly the craft responds to input. The light beneath us rotates. It’s also getting brighter outside, the dull red now beating crimson.

  “You can control the depth by pushing the controls toward or away from each other. And adjust your pitch by rotating them.”
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  “I just like spinning in circles,” I say, and Ness laughs.

  “The cool thing is you can flip this switch, and then you’re controlling the sampling arms. Usually, one person drives, and the other person operates the floodlights, the arms, and the research tools.”

  “Do I need to know how to do all that?” I ask.

  “No. This is mostly a sightseeing tour. I just want to show you something, an idea I had one day when I was down here, so you can see where it led me. So the rift here, this is from the sea floor being torn apart. You remember from grade school how Africa and South America fit together—?”

  “Plate tectonics,” I say.

  “Right. Well, this is the wound from those plates moving apart. That’s magma down there, flowing up through the wound. It cools when it hits the water and throws off a ton of steam. There’re all kinds of temperature gradients down here. It’s one of the ways our oil platforms generate power. But there’s something even more interesting about these vents.”

  Ness takes over the controls and brings us down through a cloud of black smoke. He turns the interior lights off again. The sea floor rises up. It looks like a flat expanse of sand and rock, just like the ocean floor I’ve seen while snorkeling in twenty feet of water. But now we’re a thousand times deeper.

  “Watch,” Ness says. He flicks a switch, and floodlights bathe the area in front of us. One of the vents is just a hundred or so feet away. The water and smoke swirl there. The crust throbs red. I’m seeing inside the Earth. To me, this is as wild and inhospitable a place as the surface of Mars—

  And then there’s a different sort of movement. An erratic, zigzagging shadow. “There,” Ness says, but I already see it. A fish. Or squid. An oblong creature with a fin and a snout, but it’s gone before I make out any more detail.

  “What the hell was that?” I ask.

  “A fish. And there are tubeworms and shrimp and crab down here. And slugs. Also, it’s currently sixty degrees Celsius out there. It’s even warmer closer to the vent.”

  “Sixty Celsius—” I try to remember formulas I haven’t had to use since college. “About one-forty Fahrenheit?”

  “Not about,” Ness says. “Exactly one-forty. Nice.” He seems impressed. “That’s why I had to switch from the heater to the cooler when we crossed the thermal barrier. Otherwise we’d cook in here. As it is, we can’t stay long or the battery will go dead.”

  “What if that happens?”

  “They’d have to send the other sub down with a cable to retrieve us. It’s happened before. We’d be fine for a couple of hours, but it does get uncomfortable. Anyway, this is just a sideshow, one of those really cool things you have to see while you’re in the neighborhood. The real magic is over here.”

  Ness grips the controls, and we lift from the sea floor. I watch the floodlit sand for more signs of life. I see what look to be shrimp running. “I think we had all of two days in class about these lifeforms,” I say, marveling at the sight. “Exo-something organisms?”

  “Two days, huh? What’s amazing is that the biodiversity down here is almost as great as in a rainforest. They discovered these ecosystems back in the 1970s. It defied everything we thought we knew about life, where it could live, what it could adapt to. Now we know that life can live practically anywhere, that it even grows like lichen on the surface of the space station. I was thinking about this one day, down here, getting some samples. And it struck me both how robust and how fragile nature can be. It seems as though life can adapt to anything, but then a small change wipes out an entire species.”

  He’s quiet for a moment. Then picks up where he left off.

  “The crazy thing about these vents is that the chemistry of the sea is completely different here. There’s no sunlight to get everything going. The base unit of energy is hydrogen sulfide, which is toxic to the creatures we know up top. Resemblance between these animals and the non-vent kind can fool you. But they do share ancestors.

  “Here. Check out this gauge. That’s our current sea temp. You can see how quickly the temp falls away as we leave the vent. If we keep going, it falls below zero. The pressure and salinity are the only reasons the water doesn’t freeze.”

  The readout shows nineteen degrees Celsius. I think that’s about seventy degrees Fahrenheit, but I’m rounding. “Right now we have something like surface sea temp,” I say.

  “Right. But go either direction, and you get something warmer or something cooler. The temperature gradients form rings around the vents. It got me wondering: If life exists in these extreme ranges, why did it get hammered by a few degrees rise in the rest of the ocean? Look.”

  He sees something I don’t. Ness bursts into activity, driving the sub down to the bottom and then controlling the arms, scooping something up. A fountain of sand erupts where the arm attachment hits the sea floor.

  “Gotcha,” he says. It’s the most excited I’ve seen him. He works the arms back toward the sub, then throws more switches. “Won’t be sure until we get back to the surface, but that looked like a good sample.”

  “Of what?” I ask.

  “I’ll show you when we get back to the estate—”

  “Jesus, Ness, enough of this. What the hell are we doing here? And yes, I’m skipping to the end of the story. I don’t care anymore. None of this makes sense—”

  “Breathe,” Ness says. And I realize I’m panting. Hyperventilating.

  “I need out of here,” I say. My heart is racing. I feel trapped, first by Ness and his meaningless clues, and now by the thought of twenty thousand feet of water above us, the creaks and groans of solid steel as the sea is trying to crush us, and the realization that there’s nowhere to go, not for hours, and I swear the air in that tin can is growing stale, is getting thin, is running out—

  “Look at me,” Ness says.

  “I—can’t—see—” I labor between pants for air.

  Ness floods the submarine with that red light. I only see a spot of it; the rest of my vision has closed in around the edges, irising shut. I feel Ness’s hands on either side of my face, supporting me. Making me look at him. He has arranged himself sideways in his seat. He is asking me to breathe in, to hold it. I try.

  “Let it out,” he says. “Slowly.”

  Puh puh puh. The best I can do is three short and rapid exhalations. And then I’m gasping for air again.

  “Listen to me,” Ness says. I concentrate on his voice. Part of me believes I will die here, at the bottom of the sea, and that there’s something romantic about that. A good death for a rubbish life. As a staff writer, I’ll get a killer obit in the Times.

  The other part of me is certain that Ness will save me. That he won’t let me die. And the resistance I feel around him, that I protect myself with—I let it go. I want him to save me. I don’t want this rubbish life to end so soon.

  “That’s it. A deep breath. Hold it. Concentrate on me. Just look at me. Listen to my voice. Good. Now let it out.”

  I don’t know how they got there, but my hands are on his cheeks. I feel two days of stubble rough against my palms. I see his lips moving, his eyes locked on mine, all in that red glow of lights meant to guard our vision.

  I can breathe again, barely, but I don’t want to let go of him. And I don’t want him to let go of me. I can breathe like this. To release him would be to drown. I feel like I should warn Ness that he’ll have to hold me like this, and I’ll have to hold him, at least until we get to the surface. I feel like I should warn him to get away from me, warn him of what I’m about to do.

  And it’s hard to say who moves first. There is a lightning bolt of awareness, an electrical shock as my mind rewires itself to cope with this looming fact: We are about to kiss. And then I’m pulling him into me, and I swear I feel him pulling me as well, and lips that I have damned crash into the lips that damned them. Holding his face, like one might cup a chalice, I realize how thirsty I was for this. How badly I want him right then, in that moment. I don’t care who
he is, who I am, or about any story. We are at the edge of the world, in the depths of space, where the laws of biology and the rules of physics do not seem to apply.

  His lips feel warm and full against mine. Through closed eyes, I see hot magma and the cool, deep blue. I feel the rush of the Atlantic as it fills the space around us, swirling, lifting us into weightlessness. Breaking free from the kiss for a moment, I manage a deep breath. A heavy sigh. Then I moan and collapse into his lips once more.

  His hands feel strong on my back, on my waist. I run my hands up his arms, to his shoulders, through his hair, pulling him into me, our kiss turning into something as crushing as the depths.

  “Maya—” Ness mumbles around my lips. He’s about to talk sense into us both.

  “Shut up,” I whisper. I grab one side of my coveralls and pull the snaps apart, which go like cracked knuckles, popping staccato from neck to navel. I start to wiggle my arms out, and Ness says, “Are you sure?” And I say, “I’m hot. I need out of this.”

  Ness pulls away from me and reaches for a knob. “I can make it cooler,” he says.

  “Just help me out of this.” I wiggle and contort my back, but one of my arms is stuck. Ness laughs and helps me. Kicking off my shoes, I wiggle the coveralls down my legs until I’m free of them. The air in the submersible is blessedly cool on my feverish skin. Adjusting myself on my seat, sitting on my knees, I lean over Ness and tear the chest of his coveralls apart. He gets his arms free. I pull his white t-shirt over his head and toss that aside. Kiss him again. Our tongues touch, soft and warm. Gentle. I bite his lower lip to let him know gentle is nice, but it’s not everything.

  “Mmm,” he murmurs, pulling away. Again, I fear he’s about to talk sense into the both of us. Mention Holly. Or professional codes of ethics. And I’m going to have to explain to him how what happens at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge stays at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. But he says, “Gotta save the battery,” and reaches around me, embracing me, and I laugh as he fumbles for switches behind me, a pump running somewhere for a moment, Ness cursing, the pump switching off, and then the red lights around us and the harsh white floodlights outside all going dark.