The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome

by Serge BRUSSOLO

  “Please,” Marianne cut him off sharply. “Stop acting like a first-time mother. This second phase of the operation in no way involves you. You know quite well that mediums are advised against maintaining the slightest emotional connection with their products. Close your eyes and let me do my work.”

  Deftly she lifted the covers, grabbed the thing, and slipped it into the steel box. Its lock clicked like a gun being cocked. When she dropped the sheet again, David saw she was wearing gloves of surgical rubber. He strained to hear a cry, a whimper, some tiny sob from the coffer, but there was nothing. They were said to be mute, to neither speak nor sing, but how could you ever really tell? Marianne came and sat beside him for his checkup.

  “You were bleeding,” she said coldly, wiping around his mouth and chest. “I’m getting the feeling that materialization is becoming harder and harder for you. And your object was quite small.”

  “But is it beautiful?” David asked, pushing away the blood-flecked compress.

  “I’m not authorized to evaluate the artistic qualities of dream objects,” the young woman replied at once. “I simply see to the medical side of the work. Relax, and let me do your physical. Did you feel any pain on waking?”

  “No,” David lied, “the ascent wasn’t any harder than usual.”

  Marianne pursed her lips in annoyance. She hated diving slang. Words like ascent, decompression, deep-sea made her furious. In her small, precise handwriting, she set about noting her patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, reflexes. Atop the medical chart he could read: David Sarella. Medium materializing ectoplasms of persistent duration. Date of entry into service …

  How many days had she spent in the apartment, waiting for him to emerge from sleep, to … “ascend”? Every time David decided to dive, she came over with her baggage, her severe-looking raincoat, and camped out on the very premises of the operation. That little black suitcase of hers—how he loathed it! The well-waxed suitcase of a priest, a plainclothes nun. He knew she always brought sheets, never trusting the cleanliness of his own. She would set up shop with her outmoded travel clock, probably passed down from some provincial aunt, her toiletries, her little slippers in their embroidered pouch. She perched the edges of her buttocks on the edges of chairs, eating with her own cutlery, drinking from a silver tumbler engraved with her initials. David had the hardest time picturing her sleeping in the guest room. Did she circle the bed for hours before deciding to go to sleep, an eye out for germs swarming in the folds of the pillowcase? As he, the professional dreamer, lost consciousness, she was free to come and go as she pleased in the old apartment: opening drawers, leafing through old letters, examining photos. She probably conducted her sneaky little rummagings with her fingertips, hands carefully gloved in surgical rubber, for fear of disturbing some virus dozing in the corner of a shelf.

  As usual, David began in a glum voice to recount the twists and turns of his dream, which Marianne noted on the routine form. He spoke, his mind elsewhere. Through a part in Marianne’s white lab coat, he could make out a big, shapeless sweater and a threadbare gray skirt. He’d barely said a dozen words before she interrupted him with an exasperated click of her tongue.

  “I’ve asked you before to refrain from using that vocabulary with me,” she said, stabbing the notebook with her pencil as if she wished to wound it. “Consistency pills, realism powder—they don’t exist. They’re inventions of your subconscious, symbolic warning signs. You know quite well you didn’t ingest any pills. Try to keep in mind that what happens ‘down below’ has no existence in reality. There is no down below. Don’t go lending these fantasies any substance, or you’ll wind up a schizophrenic. The police pursuing you were simply a manifestation of your guilt. This … Nadia, on the other hand, is symbolic of your negative impulses. She’s a bad example, urging you to commit crimes. She’s the secret leader of a gang you think you lead—which you like, since in feeling forced to obey her, you feel freed from ordinary moral obligations. In a way, she clears you in your own eyes. You can claim you’re only following orders.”

  “But Nadia—” David tried to object.

  “That’s enough!” Marianne hissed, stabbing the notebook again. “Keep this up and you’ll wind up confusing dreams and reality, which is what happens to old dreamers. I believe that among yourselves, you call it ‘the bends’—see, I’m familiar with your jargon. Be careful, David. I repeat: there is no down below. The whole break-in scenario is just a ritual, something that helps you do your work, a kind of magic formula that allows you to concentrate. Some dreamers imagine themselves on safari, hunting a mythical creature; others are climbing an unconquered peak in search of some undiscovered mineral. Still others explore space in a rocket, landing on unknown planets. I could go on; examples abound. All these patterns stem directly from a childhood stock of images. They must not be romanticized.”

  David closed his eyes. Her incessant recommendations wearied him. He had to put up with them every time he surfaced, and every time Marianne reeled them off in the same reproving voice of a teacher tired of lecturing a backward student. These repetitive sermons never managed to weaken the reality of the world below in his mind. How could Marianne, who’d never taken the plunge herself, be so adamant about it? David could still taste Nadia’s lips on his own, and remembered precisely the pattern of freckles on her cheeks. How could he have invented all those details? The badly stitched rip that split her jacket by her left shoulder. Jorgo’s good old motorcycle—always the same one, its gas tank salvaged from an old Rolls … Mere dreams had no respect for such consistency of detail. In an ordinary dream, Nadia would’ve switched back and forth from being a blonde to a brunette. Her name and face would’ve changed over the course of a heist; she would’ve been multiple women at the same time. Marianne could go on spitefully stabbing her notebook as much as she wanted, but she’d never understand the difference in texture, the … the skin of the dream itself that made divers’ oneiric images so different from those of ordinary people. Marianne just dreamt, plain and simple, like everyone else, but David went elsewhere, slipped under the barbed wire of some mysterious border to enter a land known only to a privileged few.

  “You’re not listening to me,” the psychologist observed. “David, you’re wasting my time. I’ve been camped out here five days already, waiting for you to come out of your trance. If you think that’s pleasant—”

  “The job took a lot of prep,” David pleaded. “Nadia had to figure out the jeweler’s schedule so she could—”

  “Christ! Are you doing this on purpose, or what? Is it some kind of provocation, is that it? Do you want to drive me crazy? Is that it? There was no ‘job,’ no ‘jeweler’—that’s all smoke and hot air, immaterial images.”

  David gave up arguing. Insisting would have been awkward; assistant psychologists were obsessed with schizophrenia. Their mouths were full of phrases like “loss of any notion of reality,” “obsessive oneiric constructs.” He had to avoid fanning the flames if he didn’t want to end up in a clinic with an IV drip and electrodes all over his scalp.

  “Just kidding,” he apologized cautiously. Marianne glared at him, suspicious. She had a tomato sauce stain on the back of her lab coat. What had she been doing for five days, while he was drifting in a deep trance? He tried to picture her, tiptoeing in her careful, mousy way around the winding hallways of the large, awkwardly laid-out apartment passed down when his parents died. It was in an old building so damp the window frames were swollen shut. Carbon monoxide from the street had slowly upholstered the panes with a gray fluff that greedily filtered out the light. There reigned a shut-in smell, commingled with that of dust and stale frying oil; David had gotten used to it. The permanent gloom did not bother him, not in his line of work. He’d slathered everything in blue paint: the shelves of the massive library, the old upright piano, the Renaissance buffets, even the hallway flooring where a lack of rugs left the floorboards bare. The apartment as aquarium. Of course the rooms were weird, oddl
y-shaped, hard to furnish. Their too-high ceilings made them look a bit like corridors clumsily converted into lodgings, but it was his domain, and he loved it. For five days, Marianne had wandered through these rooms with her little pursed mouth. She’d deemed the decoration in bad taste, the books infantile. All those silly pulp magazines carefully slipcased with maniacal care, as if they were valuable!

  More than anything else, David’s library must have plunged Marianne into abysmal consternation for there, on overloaded, sagging shelves, he kept all the books and magazines he’d sated himself on ever since he could read. The paperbacks were organized chronologically, not by date of publication, but by the date David had first discovered them. A little label thumbtacked over each row specified the age range its two feet of shelf covered: 8–10, 10–12 … At twelve, crime series began to appear, with their violently gaudy covers, bare-shouldered women with outrageously slutty pouts, cigarette holder in one hand, revolver in the other. Secret agents had replaced the musty gumshoes of romantic American noir. The first adventurers of the technological era, they weren’t so conceited as to fall back on their fists alone in the face of every menace. Gadget men, the appliance salesmen of intrigue, they traveled the world, their pockets, shoes, hats, and ties jam-packed with felt-tip torpedo launchers, ballpoint blowtorches, fountain pen transmitters … They kept poison in hollow teeth, bombs in their fake heels, bazookas in their artificial limbs. With them, it was deception through and through. A shoe-radio gave them a direct line to the president of the United States, a pair of x-ray glasses let them see through solid walls … David had adored this fictional world, prodigious fodder for afterschool daydreams. Those dog-eared little paperbacks whose cheap paper went frightfully yellow the minute sun hit them—he had but to brush them with a finger, and he saw himself at twelve again, curled up on the living room rug behind the rampart of an armchair that insulated him from the real world, his sweaty hands gripping the adventures of Agent BZ-00, aka The Liquidator, who at this very second was leaving for Hong Kong in the company of an Asian lady “too almond-eyed to be trustworthy.” Despite the years, the armchair hadn’t budged from its spot. The part of the rug unfurling in its shadow would forever be gummy with cookie crumbs caught in its weave, puddles of spilled soda. David cautiously avoided that corner of the room, and even made a strict point of not looking behind the seat. Something stopped him from doing so, a vague and magical anxiety, a fear—maybe the fear of suddenly being face-to-face with himself? Of finding a wizened little boy, a kind of doppelganger freed from the passing of time, who dwelled there still, a stowaway in his own life, furiously reading without a moment’s rest.

  Marianne must have drawn a thousand less than flattering conclusions from this stockpile of popular literature. What could she possibly know about the magic of those covers hacks had hastily daubed, using only crude colors squeezed right from the tube to portray women with bombshell breasts?

  In the end, she’d probably told herself she was only rooting around for the good of her patient. To collect “material for interpretation.” He could just picture her: breathlessly opening drawers, sweating with excitement under her gray wool. She’d plunge her hands with their bitten nails into packets of letters, seize upon photo albums. Research! Just a routine investigation, nothing personal about it.

  Had she already gotten her hands on the spy cards twelve-year-old David had made with bits of cardboard snipped from shoeboxes? And the honor code, written in red ink, of the secret society founded the year he started sixth grade? The Club of the Scarlet Executioners … Three members, with their code names and passwords encrypted in a teacher-proof cipher. Yes, Marianne must have unearthed those quaint, poignant mementoes, those solemn licenses issued by some President of the Republic who wasn’t good at spelling. And she hadn’t been moved; her ugly little lips had vaguely pursed with scorn before such childishness. She’d simply thought how stupid little boys were at twelve when compared to girls, who …

  And what about the graveyard of old toys? The former liquor cabinet he’d padlocked. But it was a dime store padlock, and Marianne probably had a whole ring of skeleton keys. They probably gave them out at the hospital: a burglary kit, lock picks an integral part of the paraphernalia, along with a stethoscope and the whole array of sedatives.

  Every time he woke up, he found he hated the young woman a bit more, with her certainties and her bun. He was sure she never washed anything but her face and hands. She had a smell about her. A nasty little bitter sweat that stewed, muffled under her woolens. Where did she live when she wasn’t squatting at her patients’ apartments? Probably nowhere. She had no home of her own, a perpetual nomad, going from one building to another, camping out a week here, a few days there. She had nothing to her name but that well-worn, well-waxed suitcase. David pictured her sleeping inside it, pulling the top down over her head and sucking her thumb like a little old maid. In the end, they weren’t so different from each other … and that was why he hated her.

  He didn’t like the idea of her sticking her nose into the graveyard of old toys, rifling through the rinky-dink odds and ends. Sheriff stars that twinkled no more, having lost their gilt. Pocketknives whose rusty, spring-loaded blades folded back into the handle only with a disillusioned squeal.

  “You spat up blood again,” she said, examining the inside of his mouth with a flashlight. “You’ll need a fibroscopy.”

  “It happens a lot with mediums,” objected David. “You know that. It just means the ectoplasm’s texture is high quality, that’s all.”

  Marianne shrugged and jotted something down quickly in her notebook. “Maybe you need to take a little break,” she said. “You’re too close to the dream world for my liking. You refuse to understand that Nadia is just a substitute for a maternal image. The words you use betray this obsession. Taking ‘the plunge,’ the undersea world where you become a kind of diver—how can you not read the classic elements of a fetal environment into all this? Your dreams reveal the desire for a typical intra-uterine regression. Learn to see them as just dreams, images projected by your subconscious that fade away the minute you open your eyes. Don’t wind up one of those old dreamers who think the people in their dreams keep on living ‘down below’ while they’re away, pining for them. Here, look what I found in your library.”

  She held up a much dog-eared spy novel from Alley Cat Books, on whose cover a young woman in a longshoreman’s cap was springing from a long black car whose bodywork had something oily about it. She’s snooping! Snooping! She admits she’s snooping! David thought with vicious exultation, not even glancing at the illustration.

  “C’mon,” Marianne whined in a voice that annoyance made unpleasantly shrill. “Don’t be a hypocrite. Look at that girl. She looks exactly like Nadia, the way you’ve described her. The cap, the red hair …”

  “No way,” David retorted. “Nadia’s way cuter.”

  Marianne tossed the book disdainfully aside and got up, her cheeks red.

  “Oh, you’re becoming impossible to work with!” she screeched. “You think it’s fun for me waiting around for you to wake up? This apartment is creepy! Those windows don’t even open! All this blue, blue everywhere! I feel like I’m locked up in a drowned submarine! And why the soundproofing? You can’t even hear noise from the street anymore. Sometimes I’d give anything in the world just to hear the neighbors’ toilet flush! There’s no TV, no radio—not even a real library, just these stupid books! Really, I—”

  She ran from the room and locked herself in the bathroom. David didn’t lift a finger to stop her. For a moment, he was tempted to take advantage of her absence and open the metal box at the foot of the bed, but gave up at the thought that she’d no doubt put a combination lock on it. “Down below” the lock would’ve been no match for his fingers, but up here he no longer benefited from the strange skills that faded from his brain as soon as he opened his eyes.

  Marianne came back in. She’d run some water over her face.

 
; “I’m ordering a full exam,” she announced like a punishment. “Report to the medical center at the Fine Arts Academy tomorrow. It’s long past time for a checkup. I’m not kidding. Put up a fight, and the museum will take disciplinary action. They may even revoke your art worker license.”

  She left the room without so much as a wave. David heard her buckle up her little suitcase, muttering incomprehensibly to herself. She appeared again, stuffed into an old blue coat, seized the metal box as if confiscating a toy from a child, and turned on her heel.

  “I’ll buy a radio!” David shouted just as she stepped out on the landing, “but only because you said so.”

  He lay back down again, unable to take his mind from the steel coffer Marianne was now hurrying to the storage center at the Museum of Modern Art. What had he created this time? Another knickknack? He was always bringing back novelties, curios for mantles or shelves. His works sat enthroned atop TVs, never in museums or the cellars of great collectors, bristling with alarms. His file described him as a “popular” sculptor, a “mainstream” artist. He didn’t know if he should be worried or delighted. It was said that famous divers for wealthy art galleries suffered great agony; some even ended up dying from it.

  He rose slowly and set his feet on the carpet with care. After a dive, the things up top, on the surface, seemed excessively, unbearably solid. The carpet stung the soles of his feet like sandpaper; his silk bathrobe weighed on his shoulders like a cement slab. Objects made war on him; everything was an assault. Even shaving cream chafed his cheeks. Down below, everything was so fluid, so supple … He hesitated before going into the bathroom. He was ready to bet the shower would be pure acid, and as for the food in the fridge—if there was any left—it’d be about as tasty as a shovelful of gravel flavored with tar. Better not to push it.

  He dressed in slow motion, like a man fresh from an operation, afraid of splitting his sutures open with too brisk a movement. He felt weak. Five days of dieting. Marianne had hooked him up with a glucose drip, but that didn’t fill your stomach. He decided to go down to the Divers’ Café, an establishment strictly reserved for members of the profession, where you were weaned on milk and vanilla custard while waiting to reacclimate to the roughness of the real. It was a low room—a “colon,” its detractors called it—bathed in a swimming pool’s blue gloom, where everyone whispered without caring if anyone was listening. Monologues intertwined there, oneiric accounts endlessly rebegun, ecstatic descriptions, somnolent mumblings. It was like a sauna where you did your best to sweat out the last droplets of dream and readapt to normal life, an airlock that protected you for a little while longer from the dreadful confrontation with the light of day. No sooner were they torn from bed than divers hurried there, wrapped in thick woolens, eyes hidden behind huge sunglasses that turned them into groping blind men. They gorged themselves on milk and grenadine syrup, honey and cream, chocolate mousse, vanilla porridge …