Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  ‘Do you know the story?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ she said, ‘hardly.’

  ‘The bond which held the Midgard serpent in was the weight of the sea itself, which was too heavy to push away. The serpent had a sister and a brother. The sister, Hel, became Death. She was given power by Thor to send the dead into nine separate worlds. Her table was made of hunger, the walls of her house were built with agony, and the mortar was horror. The serpent’s brother was the wolf Fenrir. He was bound by chains made of the opening and clamping of fish gills, the footfall of a lynx, the roots of stones under a glacier, the moods of bears and the droplets on the talons of an eagle dropping down on a lamb.

  ‘Of these three siblings it was the Midgard serpent who remained alive in longest in the sea.’ He smiled. ‘I mean the ocean.’

  ‘Who was the father?’ she asked.

  ‘Loki, the god of mischief. Of course, he ended up badly too. Odin had him chained to a rock and venom spat into his face.

  ‘His writhing caused earthquakes underwater.’

  She got up and stretched herself.

  ‘The Greeks,’ she said, touching her toes, ‘believed in Okeanos, the ocean about the equator shown on the shield of Achilles which kept the known world afloat.’

  She told him this and they spoke about Atlantis. She said nothing of Sumer and Enki; Abzu was as private to her as numbers were.

  She instead spiralled down the axis of time in the ocean. She held up for him the example of the orange roughy.

  ‘It is a fish that takes forty years to reach maturity and lives to one hundred years on the seamounts, but it has been fished nearly to extinction in a generation.

  ‘Let’s say the Atlantic is 160 million years old,’ she continued. ‘It might be older. We appeared less than one million years ago. We walked in yesterday. It’s not much of a claim. Yet somewhere in the Atlantic right now and in the other oceans, some man, I’m sorry, it’s always a man isn’t it, some man is smashing up a seamount more ancient than any greenwood on land, which he can’t see and refuses to value.’

  She was taken aback at her own vehemence. She stopped, then began again. ‘Tens of thousands of seamounts have been destroyed in our lifetime. Any seamount is sure to be demolished the moment it is located. The chains of those bottom trawlers will break into powder the cold-water corals and sponges which were there before there was an English language and which contain in them the most powerful antibiotics and chemicals which might be used for cancer treatment. If this was happening in a science-fiction world we would see it clearly for what it is, but we don’t because it’s happening here and now. It’s obscured by the money someone is making off it. Scientists are partly to blame. We’re always raising our hands after the destruction has taken place. There are scientists who become industrial collaborators, bringing out tailored research for one company or another. I’m lucky to be working at a depth beyond the reach of industry. They want the manganese nodules, gold and fuels that are in the deep, but they’re too expensive to get at now. There’s still some undisturbed time,’ and as she said this she was thinking very precisely of the abyss, its compass, duration, its secrets: of species of hagfish older than the Atlantic, who lived on those sunk from above and tied themselves in knots so as to give their jaws purchase on the rotting and blanched forms of the dead.

  It was already dark. They sat at the desk in silence. It had begun to snow; again the winter night, again the illuminated sign above the hotel door spilling out.

  These few facts and reflections, which had not even touched on biomathematics, nonetheless set in front of them a common question, which they were too tired to see: is man the joker god Loki, who must be bound in chains?

  They had different understandings of time and space. He worked on the surface, the outside of the world. For him, everything was in flux. He was tasking agents to infiltrate mosques in Somalia and along the Swahili coast. He was concerned with alleys, beliefs, incendiary devices; with months, weeks, days, with indelible hours. For her, an age was an instant. She was interested in the base of the corrosive saltwater column, delimiting through mathematics the other living world which has existed in darkness and in continental dimensions for hundreds of millions of years.

  ‘Open your eyes. Open them.’

  He did so. It was morning. The smoke-blackened room was empty except for a mujahid – from Chechnya by the look of him – who was squatting by the door breaking apart a Zastava machine gun and placing the pieces in a satchel. The colour coming through the windows and door was blue. Yusuf was dressed like a Mogadishu Bakara market trader in jeans, sandals and a short-sleeved shirt, sunglasses tucked in the pocket. Only the scars of a flesh wound on his neck hinted at his cause and fight.

  ‘You’re alive. Good. Drink this,’ Yusuf said, and passed him a cup of water.

  He drank from it.

  The Chechnyan brought over the satchel with the gun in it and, at Yusuf’s command, held the oil lamp close to James’s face, close enough to feel the heat of the glass. Yusuf moved in behind the lamp. He had shaved off his beard in the night. His face had become massive, scarred.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Yusuf asked, in Arabic and the broken English he had learned in Peshawar.

  ‘I’ve told your men,’ he replied, in Arabic. ‘I’m a water engineer.’ To his own ears, his voice sounded weak and faraway. ‘I wanted, I want, to plan a water system for Kismayo. I was invited.’

  ‘Not to do something else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We are fighting a war here.’

  ‘I understand, but your people need water.’

  Your people. Did Yusuf have any people?

  There was the sound of laughter from outside, rare laughter, but it altered nothing in there. There was no equality between them. Yusuf was a Somali, never tiresome about black and white, always superior.

  The man’s teeth were yellow in the dankness, rodent yellow. The eyes were yellow also, from a liver complaint. Big eyes: he was one of those brigands who never blinked when he pulled a pistol on an unfortunate.

  He identified it as a Ceska, a beautiful gun, easy to handle. It must have been a Somali army officer’s sidearm from when the country was a client state of the USSR. The grip had been painted over with enamel flowers, most probably in Afghanistan.

  ‘Is your work important to you?’

  ‘Yes, very much,’ he said, and like a prayer he said to himself, water be my cover, water cover me.

  Yusuf touched the tattoo on his arm with the pistol. A parachute. The regimental badge.

  ‘What is this?’ Yusuf asked.

  ‘A mistake. I had it done when I was young.’

  ‘Coming here was a mistake.’

  The pistol was jammed deeper into his face. He felt the 0 on his cheek, pressed to his teeth.

  ‘Please, don’t. I am needed. Please, please.’ He wept. He was shameless. Standing in the sea at the moment he believed was his death he had said nothing, yet now he thought he would say anything to survive, or perhaps he did not believe Yusuf would pull the trigger. The sky was not closing in, he was not turning, no, the pistol was exploratory, another way of getting to know him.

  ‘You have children?’

  ‘No children.’

  ‘A wife?’

  ‘I am not married. My employees rely on me, and so do …’

  ‘We will call you Mr Water,’ Yusuf said, decisively.

  ‘My name is James. I need to make a phone call to my family. I need to let them know I am alive. We can organise a deal. I am worth more alive than dead. I am worth a sum of money.’

  Yusuf held the Ceska by its flowery grip as if to pistol-whip him. ‘When we want to know about water, you will tell us. My men wanted to put you to death. I said no, Islam looks gently on the merciful, and your work is merciful. What nation are you?’

  ‘British.’

  ‘Correct. You are British and you are worth nothing. There is no money. The Spanish they pay, the Germans they
pay, the British they never pay.’

  Yusuf broke into long recitations in Somali. After some time, he made an aside in Arabic. ‘How sweet it would be at Eid, if instead of slaughtering an animal in the name of Allah, we would slaughter an unbeliever.’

  Involuntarily, James shook. It was a shattered fairytale. Fee-fi-fo-fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll cut off his fucking head. Fictions, none of them buoyant. Yusuf believed that Allah had hung an invisible curtain from the top of the sky to the bottom, separating the believers from the unbelievers. He was looking for quarantine, not Leviathan.

  ‘Do you drink alcohol, Mr Water?’

  ‘Yes, I drink.’

  ‘Alcohol separates you from the Creator.’

  ‘No doubt,’ he said. He was rotted through, anyone could see that; his kidneys infected, his piss sea green, and the sun was coming, illuminating the doorway, the shrine in the courtyard, but he wanted a tumbler of whisky, Macallan, Bell’s, Paddy, whatever; some ice, the bottle left open on the floor beside him.

  ‘It is important to me that you are treated generously. It is Allah’s wish,’ Yusuf said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, lowering his eyes.

  Yusuf demanded submission and James offered it, while the truth of their exchange was that the Somali had ordered him to be held hostage, to be laid in his own waste, and to be beaten there. He had lost a tooth, another two were loose, his nose was broken, his ribs fractured. They had sliced open his hand and shoulder with a blade and in another tussle a mujahid had reached in and grabbed his cock and balls and yanked down on them, tearing a muscle.

  It was true. He was worth nothing. Yusuf already had his passport, phone, electronic tablet and his watch. Her Majesty’s Government would never pay for his release. They would not even acknowledge the kidnapping in his case, unless forced to do so by a precise piece of reporting.

  Somalia was dried up. The rains had failed. The people were dying of thirst, and he knew better than any real engineer that he was alive only on the promise of water. He was grateful to live on as Mr Water.

  ‘You will go to see the doctor,’ Yusuf said, quietly. ‘He will take care of you. You will eat, you will drink. Understand?’

  He looked away. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hold out your hands,’ Yusuf said.

  He held them out.

  ‘Take this.’ Yusuf placed in his hands a small bottle of perfume with a sticker of a rose on it. ‘Open it.’

  It was cloying; the substance was sticky, like deodorant dispensed from a plastic ball. ‘Thank you.’

  Nothing more was said. There was only the tick-tock of the plastic clock above the door and the sound of the surf and the wind coming through the cracks in the thick walls and the muttering of the mujahid – he was a Chechen. Yusuf stood up and slung the satchel with the machine gun over his shoulder. He sat up and watched the clean-shaven commander go down the whitewashed steps to the beach and seemingly into the sea.

  The Chechen hauled him to his feet.

  They were half in and half out of the light and he saw a powder of frankincense on the Chechen’s fingertips of a quality that might have been presented to Christ at his Nativity.

  The Book of Psalms says the Heavenly Father gathers the waters of the sea together and lays up the deep, as in a treasure house.

  What the hell is down there? 91 per cent of the planet’s living space, 90 per cent of the living creatures. For every flea; nine sea fleas. No dogs, no cats, but so many other creations with eyes and thoughts, moving in three dimensions. It needs to be explored. With what?

  There are only five submersibles in the world capable of diving deeper than 3000 metres. These tiny submarines can spin on a coin, yet have trouble braking in the water column. Among them are the twin Mir submersibles of the Russian Academy in St Petersburg; Japan’s Shinkai, sailing out of Yokosuka; America’s Alvin, operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and France’s Nautile, named for Jules Verne’s Nautilus, jointly operated by the French Navy and IFREMER, the national research organisation. Their operating depth ranges to 6500 metres, or 680 atmospheres, putting 96 per cent of the ocean within reach of man (including most of the Hadal deep), but none of these submersibles are capable of matching the feat of bathyscaphe Trieste, which in 1960 touched down on the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench; at 11,034 metres, the very bottom of the known world.

  An aquanaut is someone who explores the ocean in the same way an astronaut explores space. The first aquanauts were dangled on a cable in a steel ball to depths only those buried at sea had previously plumbed. There were trays of soda lime in the ball to absorb the carbon dioxide the aquanauts breathed out. ‘I felt like an atom floating in illimitable space,’ one said.

  In 1954, two French naval officers made the first dive into the abyss, descending 4023 metres in the waters off Senegal in the FNRS-3 bathyscaphe. This unremarked dive marks the beginning of ocean flight, less celebrated than space flight, but no less heroic.

  Because in many ways the ocean is more hostile than space. Space flight is a journey outwards. You can see where you are going, which is why the crews in spaceships generally sit in swivel chairs facing a giant window or screen. Space is about weightlessness and speeds never before achieved by machines and which can scarcely be felt; the discharge of an aerosol is enough to propel a vessel forward, a nudge of a pencil sets its course, and all the while the air inside of it presses against the void outside. Ocean flight is, by contrast, a journey inwards, towards blindness. It is about weight, the stopping of the craft on thermal layers, the pressure of water pushing in, and the discomfiting realisation that most of the planet you call your own is hostile to you. There will never be a Neil Armstrong moment in the ocean. There is nothing to light the way, no prospect, no horizon; even encased in a metal suit the human body is too liquescent to contemplate stepping out onto the deep sea floor.

  He was left alone in the courtyard to wash. He was emotional like an animal that had been cornered and then inexplicably left alone. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

  Other fighters appeared. They gave him a clean shirt, a clean kikoi and a pair of sandals. They made him wrap his face in a scarf and pull down his shirtsleeves and they walked out together down empty sandy streets and across Kismayo’s deserted town square. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the Indian Ocean and something in him was set true at the sight of that expanse, he was straightened out, he was a part of the world again, not a consciousness removed from it, and Kismayo was a beggared town, not part of the madness that had spun too close to the sun. He was out, under the sky, exultant. He walked with sandals on his feet. He was no longer playing memories to himself, he was making them. The fighters flanked him. Their weapons were slung over their shoulders. They wanted to give the impression that he was a white-skinned mujahid, free to come and go as he pleased.

  They went by another mosque that was lit with white-and-red neon lights like an ice-cream shop. Next to it was a clinic run by an Iraqi doctor who attended patients in the morning and planned the jihad in the afternoon. Several mujahideen reclined on a balcony on the first floor, eating fruit. On the door to the surgery was a ‘No Guns’ sticker; a red circle with the machine gun crossed out. It was from an earlier time, when there were aid organisations working in Kismayo. It meant nothing. There were a lot of guns on the balcony and there was a Dushka anti-aircraft gun packed in with sandbags.

  He was pushed inside. It was a sterile place, for Somalia. The floor and surfaces were scrubbed. There were buckets of water. The windows and the glass door had been painted on the inside with white paint. There was a medicine cabinet. A woman in a hijab appeared from behind a screen. A nurse. She laid him on an examination bench. She opened his shirt and touched his chest. His head swam. She pressed malaria pills and anti-inflammatories into his hand. The brush of fingertips seemed illicit.

  The nurse stood by the door. After a few minutes, a doctor entered and brushed her asi
de. ‘That’s my job,’ he said brusquely, in English. He addressed James. ‘We need blood and urine samples from you.’

  Doctor Abdul Aziz. He was not the Abdul Aziz al-Masri, expert in chemical weapons, who served on al-Qaeda’s consultative council. He was the man known in Arab intelligence reports as the Iraqi with metal in his arms, who had flown on a Tupolev jet the Sudanese laid on in 1996 to transport the by then impecunious Osama bin Laden from Khartoum to Kabul. He was the doctor who was arrested by Pakistani intelligence in 1999, who had his arms tied to the steering wheel of a lorry and the door slammed on them, shattering them below the elbow. The one who, escaping Pakistan, underwent a number of operations to recover the feeling in his hands, worked as a paediatrician at a polyclinic in Riyadh, learned to hold an infant again, and to write out prescriptions. He was the man who eventually grew tired of life in Riyadh and who travelled to Somalia to give medical care to the poor. He had gone and the jihad had followed, or the other way around.

  What was true was when Aziz placed hands, coolly, softly, on his ribs to determine the fractures, it was possible to see the scars on the forearms where the metal pins had gone in, like holes in a ring binder.

  Seeing her at work the next morning, he kissed her tenderly on the cheek and went to his room.

  He lay on the bed and read the newspapers, then downloaded one of Jacques Cousteau’s television shows on his tablet. Even though she had not explained the calculations required for her work, he sensed Cousteau missed the point in the shallows.

  If she had attempted to explain her latest paper to him she might have used by way of example the complexity of the maths needed to work with the micromillimetre on the surface of the water which moves between sea and sky and is simultaneously both and something else entirely.

  Some of the punch-hole scars on Aziz’s forearms were covered by black hairs, others were warmed over in the light cast by the whitewashed windows. However, a man cannot be reduced to a single physical detail – a scar, a limp, a squint – except in a police report. His trousers and the crocodile belt that held them up made a more striking impression. They suggested a certain dash.