Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  There were days when the wind blew hard before the rain and he had to anchor his net with rocks. The creek turned to jade, crabs scuttled in greater numbers on the banks of putty mud from one settlement to another. The tide rose, and there was gunfire and shouting in the forest.

  Almost all of his sober passages of thought involved people long ago dead. He wished he was in England, following the edges of a wood … God, enough. He wished he was with her. That was all. It didn’t matter where. It had been his training to push away thoughts of what might be but now he was in the place of martyrs and he was slipping away and there was no more space for death, there was only space for life, for her. She was so beautiful, to him, so strong, so true. He wanted more than anything to hold her. He could feel the embrace; her shirt, her shoulders, his head on her shoulder, her hands cradling him; him sobbing into her, crying the way you do in dreams, without any inhibition. He had recreated every word, every experience of her; tried to understand it. And the joy; the joy was that he was not making it up. She felt the same way. She said so in the letters she had sent him, always physical letters, handwritten, so he could never be at liberty to file her away, she said, or share her on a screen.

  But death is remorseless. Death is the tide which sweeps away consciousness. It is the absolute zero which stops any acceleration. Poetry speaks of the ocean as a tomb, whereas science reckons it to be a womb. If you must waste away or perish violently in the morning light then a burial at sea might resolve this conflicted view. Lash me in a hammock and drop me deep … Would you wish to be sunk to a great depth, or to be dropped a fathom down, on a reef, gently rocked, until your bones are of corals made and you suffer a sea change into something rich and strange?

  A year or so before – it seemed a lifetime ago – he had been at a dinner party on a farm not far from Mount Kenya. It was well attended, very smart, but the mood was subdued: a European royal who had been a close friend to the hosts lay gravely ill in his palace overlooking the North Sea. This royal had promised – extravagantly or on a Jungian impulse – that were it possible, his soul would take the form of a daemon at the time of his passing and appear to his friends. During the main course, a bird with carmine breast feathers appeared on the veranda. No one at the table had seen such a bird before. It was remarked upon. The bird did not settle in the thatched roof with the weaverbirds, but sat forthrightly on a vase in front of the hostess. It looked at her, cocking its head to one side in the way birds do, then it hopped around and regarded the others at the table.

  ‘My God, it’s Bernhard,’ the hostess said.

  Everyone fell silent.

  ‘Bernhard!’ she called out, at which the bird warbled, bowed, and flew off.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the hostess said, ‘I must call Europe.’

  Sure enough, she was informed that the prince had died a few minutes before.

  What form might he take in death? If he could appear to Danny, he would be a small African owl, fluttering at her porthole. If he could only send a message, some sign of the afterlife, he would return to her the inscription she had written inside the cover of one of his books, from Job:

  Have you entered the springs of the sea? Or have you walked in the depths? Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Or have you seen the door of the shadow of death? Have you comprehended the breadth of the Earth? Tell me if you know all this?

  He would have messages for his family and friends, but the passage from Job would be his sign to her.

  The Kaaba was the empty space to which all Muslims directed their prayers. He was sceptical – Catholic, English, he desired a New Atlantis, a windswept All Souls College – still the Kaaba caused him to shudder. If he were allowed a supernatural instruction, it would be for her to achieve a dispensation to study the microbial life inside it.

  He was standing in the creek washing himself. Ablution, with no rhythm, no conviction. He saw it coming a few seconds before it hit. The colours on its snub nose were the same maroon as the flashes 1 Para wore on their right arm. It was his colour. It was coming for him.

  How it twirled towards the ground. He was transfixed. He thought of a helter-skelter, circling down on hessian mats heavy with sand, those colours going round and round, ‘Helter Skelter, feare no colours, course him, trounce him!’

  It glinted. It burned from its tail. It was an astonishing creation. Entirely human, wholly American. It had been fired over the curvature of the earth from a submarine off the coast of Somalia. The viscosity of seawater at so many fathoms, the loosening of rocket motors in flight, the load of explosives, the Coriolis effect as it applied at the equator, all of these considerations had been accounted for by minds and machines, yet it was impossible in the final moment not to see the missile as something more.

  Machine guns were fired.

  ‘I’m bleeding out,’ someone cried in Arabic.

  ‘Allah u Akbar!’ was the last utterance heard.

  He dived into the creek. With all his strength, he kicked to the bottom. Addition, subtraction. His mind stopped like a roulette wheel. His last thought, peculiarly, blessedly, was of the wool markets in Langland’s Piers the Ploughman. The wine merchant calling out ‘Wine from Alsace! Wine from Gascony! Rhine wines!’

  The surface exploded like a star. The sides of the creek were thrown up into the sky. The noise was so loud it became silence. Then there was that secondary platinum light that turns bodies to ash.

  The sun went so fast, the stars faster, yet not as fast as young More’s body to the earth. He came up for air in bloody gaining waters, with cooked crabs, with martyrs. He looked at death, went under again, and swam away, towards the Boni, towards Kenya. In this sense, at least, his submergence was shallow.

  3088 metres … 3120 …

  ‘There it is now, Danny,’ Étienne said, with feeling. ‘Your Enki.’ They went slowly towards a column the size of an office block. The chimneys on it billowed like so many Turks setting back their heads and expelling cigarette smoke through their nostrils.

  It was in the style of Gaudi; pitted, knobbly, rust-coloured from oxidation, black in places, in others mottled white with mats of bacteria. Amphipod danced at the edge of the vents. Tubeworms swayed like heavy cocks. There were mussels and other bivalves. Blind fish circled. The Turks sat very still, smoking, regarding them.

  After some time at the base of the column Étienne lifted the Nautile and piloted it to where the floor of the earth was cracked. There was no fire, no hearth. The magma was glassy and cool. The light broke against heavy drifts of marine snow; it was useless to think the abyss could be illuminated by thallium iodide. She was excited, intent, but at the same time thought, the places we will have to dwell as a species are terrible. We will have to accommodate ourselves to realms for which we are not evolved, to lodge ourselves in them, to articulate our bodies from inside a suit of titanium and the other materials. She felt the metal hollow inside the submersible acutely – the stale air, the sweat of Peter and Étienne, the smell of vomit, bleach …

  With great care Étienne set the Nautile down at the edge of a crack. They extended the robot arm to scrape bacteria from its interior. She adjusted her weight on the bench and the craft in turn settled on the fine silica mud, on the diatomaceous ooze of dead creatures that on land was used as scouring powder.

  Étienne turned off the spotlights.

  ‘Testing systems.’

  They did not speak. There was just the sound of their breathing. She touched her forehead to the quartz. Outside, viscous black flowed into black. My God, it was a trance, it was the most consuming painting. A powerful sense of vertigo overcame her, of a kind she had not experienced since the day she tried to follow James into the wood on the grounds of the Hotel Atlantic. She felt the Nautile was too close to the edge, that they were teetering, and would fall into the underworld, the true underworld. She felt that the Nautile would break apart, the three of them would fall out, and she herself would tumble down, like Alice, but not into Wonderland.
Her body would be a puff of life, gone, instantly, with no possibility of ascent, and the same for Peter and Étienne; each of them cartwheeling into a chemical soup.

  You lift off to heaven, you sink into hell. You rocket into space, you drown on a slave ship. The encompassing sea of Abzu made more sense than any astral plane put forward by the great religions. Why not a sea behind the universe, making fast the stars?

  She admired the musculature of ballet dancers, but understood that they were liquid beings, trailing tendril lives. The gas bladders of fish burst and filled their mouths when the net was winched up. Salp lost structure, died and became indefinable at the surface. All living creatures were at some point disassembled. It was only a question of where the parts ended up and were made into something new. The volume of life in the deep, its complexity and self-organisation, would over millions of years take in the disassembled from the land as it crumbled into the sea and was washed away by rivers and rains. It was too dramatic to say damned souls cooked in agony while satanic whores scored them with fingernails and others with flaccid and scaly bodies dashed them against the shiny obsidian …

  It was tranquil, in a way. There were no storms, no swells, the water was very calm. Did the abyss sing of itself? Seen from below, the surface looked like heaven. Seen from heaven, she thought, it was a roiling sea, a darksome air infernal. Human beings were between worlds, they were inbetweeners, who did not know where light dwelt or where darkness had its place.

  Her eyes adjusted. There were again the soft glowing switches, like the smoking signs on old airliners at night; the association with seamless life, the comfort of collective awareness, common nostalgia. She could make out Étienne, leaning forward. Her sense of vertigo left her. She felt that she more clearly belonged to the present.

  ‘All right,’ said Étienne. ‘Let’s take her up.’

  1 Benedicite, aquae omnes, quae caelos sunt, Domino, benedicat omnis Virtutis Domino.

  2Charcot’s boat, the original Pourquoi Pas?, sank off the coast of Iceland in 1936, drowning him together with many of his crew.

  Another epitaph would be from the Roman poet Horace:

  ‘Plunge it in deep water: it comes up more beautiful.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to remember:

  The French DSGE secret agent Denis Allex, who was captured by an al-Qaeda-linked faction of the Shabab in Mogadishu on 14 July 2009. At the time of writing he is still being held hostage.

  The hundreds of sailors and yachtsmen captured at sea by Somali pirates and held at gunpoint off the coast of Somalia.

  Asho Duhulow, who was stoned to death in Kismayo on 27 October 2008. She was thirteen years old.

  The tens of thousands of victims of the 2011 Somali famine, presaged in the book.

  In the autumn of 2011, some months after the first edition of Submergence was published, missiles were fired into the mangrove swamps around Ras Kamboni. Dozens of jihadists were killed. At the time of writing Kenya has invaded south Somalia and its troops are advancing on Kismayo. Jihadists there remain defiant, telling the people: ‘Every one of you who dies here is a mujahid and will enter paradise’.

  Thanks to:

  The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Columbia University and ETH Zurich, whose scientists patiently and brilliantly introduced me to the world of oceanography.

  My friends in the mighty nation of Somalia, who welcomed me in a time of distress.

  The Economist, for allowing me to follow the story.

  The Tasmanian Writers Centre, for generously providing space to write.

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  Copyright © J. M. Ledgard 2011

  J. M. Ledgard has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

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