The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome

by Serge BRUSSOLO

  David didn’t really enjoy the company of other mediums. He’d soon realized that in such a confined setting there was no such thing as conversation; everyone soliloquized without paying any attention to what was going on around them, drunk on the sound of their own voices, sinking into self-hypnosis and narcissistic vertigo, endlessly recounting their last descent and the miracles they’d performed down below. He only ventured to the Divers’ Café after coming back from a difficult expedition … and this one had been, no point lying about it anymore. Earlier, he’d been putting on a show for Marianne, but he couldn’t fool himself: the job had gone wrong. Without Nadia’s help, he’d have been stuck in the boutique, and the cops would’ve caught him red-handed. He felt a kind of fear, in retrospect, that made his stomach turn. He blamed himself for taking off too fast, ditching Nadia in the middle of the empty lot before he could see her get away with Jorgo, that kid with the smallpox-scarred face who knew everything there was to know about motorcycle acrobatics. What were they doing right now? Were they back at the hideout, that old plastic doll factory they’d made their headquarters? Nadia would be smoking nervously, checking the sky in hopes of seeing David materialize. She’d light cigarette after cigarette. Later, she’d have bad breath and a pasty tongue. Jorgo would be tinkering with one of the twelve motorcycles cluttering the garage. He never stopped coming up with new kinds of fuel, devilish new compression systems … A good team, for sure. People he could count on. Friends like he’d never had on the surface. “When do you think he’ll be back?” Nadia would ask for the tenth time. “It sounds so dangerous up there.” And she’d lean out the window by the crate of grenades they kept there in case of a police raid.

  “When you’re done with your motorcycle,” she told Jorgo, “take a look at the rabbet on the machine gun. It likes to jam.”

  “That’s ’cause you hold the trigger down too long,” grumbled the teen. “You have to fire in short, even bursts, or the metal gets hot and warps.”

  Yes, a good team, with a few nice jobs under their belt. Oh, far from notorious yet, but that would come; it was up to him, David, to give them the boost they needed, to tell them one day, “No more penny-ante stuff, we’re going for the big score”—because that was how thieves had talked ever since he’d first watched police series on TV.

  Dressed as if for winter, he paused at the door to his blue apartment. Did he really want to go out? Marianne had said there was nothing left in the fridge; now that he was back up, he had to start eating again. And shitting, and pissing … Funny, you never thought about stuff like that down there, and were no worse off for it, proof that all it took to get rid of bad habits was a little willpower. Or maybe it was because you had less time to get wrapped up in your own thoughts … to get bored. Up here, in the end, shitting and pissing passed the time. It was a kind of ceremony, a private little mass.

  He went down the stairs, clutching to the banister with one hand. Yeah, he’d been showing off for Marianne. In fact, the job had been a really close one, and without Nadia … But no point bringing all that up with Marianne. Besides, she wasn’t even a real psychologist, just some specialized nurse the Museum of Modern Art had recruited. She tried to pick up stuff from books, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. She didn’t believe, and never would. She could never understand how the plunge worked. “You talk about diving too much,” she would say, “and not enough about coming back up, but that’s the part the Museum’s interested in. That’s what you get royalties for. That’s what allows you to ‘bring’ something back from the depths of sleep.”

  David shrugged and grimaced. He felt despondent; his joints ached. “From the pressure,” he thought. “I should’ve made the decomp stops.”

  Outside, the street seemed appallingly noisy, crowded, and bright. It was an effort not to shrink back hurriedly under the awning.

  [ 3 ]

  The Next Day/Visit to a Sad Zoo

  Very early the next morning, he reported to the health clinic at the Museum of Modern Art. It was easier for him to confront the outside world in the half-light of dawn, when the ink of night, barely faded, still stained the streets and sky. He hugged the walls, leaping from one pool of shadow to the next. Whenever he had to cross a zone that was too brightly lit, he held his breath without even thinking. The entrance to the clinic was at the rear of the building. The cellars and the former restoration studios had been repurposed to house works and their creators. It had required space, and the daubs and sculptures of past masters had been dumped on the market pell-mell. Junkmen and flea marketers had filed through for weeks, carting away in ramshackle trucks canvases by Picasso, Klee, and Hartung that had sold for a song. Who was still interested in a form of art now completely passé? Curators had been happy to see rag-and-bone men, with their own filthy hands, take down from the walls dusty paintings no one had come to gaze upon in forever. Even antique dealers no longer bothered to come when invited to a clearance sale, so utterly barbarous did they deem the old mediums of expression. “Paint applied to a piece of canvas with a stick topped by animal hair?” one of them had snickered at a cocktail party. “How crude! Why not excrement hand-smeared on animal hide?” David passed through security, flashing his art worker’s card with the national flag, and threaded his way through the maze of damp corridors that led to the medical center. A sleepy doctor, cheeks blue-tinged with beard growth, put him through the usual tests while yawning, a cigarette damp with saliva stuck in a corner of his mouth. Once the last encephalogram had been recorded, David slipped out, making for the heart of the building. The corridors, with their narrow walls and terribly high ceilings, seemed to have been made for very tall, spindly creatures. Depthless beings, he thought. Silhouettes able to slip through a mail slot. He advanced down the hallway slowly, wondering if that was how the great painted figures of giant paintings once displayed in the main hall had fled. He had no trouble picturing the two-dimensional people detaching themselves from the paintings, stepping over the gilt frames and slipping away shamefully, head down, struggling against the occasional draft. That was how they had left for exile, for oblivion—through the artists’ entrance at whose end awaited the terrible light of day. A light that would devour their colors once protected by carefully calibrated gloom. One after another, they had gone, as painting became an obsolete, piddling activity forgotten by the public. The landscapes, the coronations, the great battles, the depositions of Christ, the allegories had all emptied themselves of their subjects, their crowds, their nymphs. Only trees and objects had remained frozen on the canvas, too dumb to realize their hour of glory had passed. Or too prideful to consider it. Upon exiting the museum, the figures hadn’t known what to do, had started walking in circles, giving way when shoved by a gust of wind. Those whose varnish was still intact had resisted the rain, while others had quickly begun to mold, to come undone. To withstand the wind that blew on the museum esplanade, they’d wound themselves round benches, great flapping oriflammes with knotted legs. The sun had gone to work on them then, bleaching colors, roasting varnish, hardening the fibers of old canvases. The faces of Madonnas, Christs, Generals of the Empire had slowly been erased; pink had turned gray, pigments exhausted by centuries of survival had faded. Eyes and mouths had grown progressively paler until there was nothing left in the forecourt but strips of white, vaguely anthropomorphic canvas which were mistaken for bits of tarp wind had torn from a scaffolding. Yes, that was how the museum’s inhabitants had met their fate, the tenants of famous paintings, victims of a consumption to which no one had paid the slightest mind. David made his way forward step by step, like a burglar expecting at any minute to be pinned to the wall by a floodlight beam. He shivered at the slightest sound, an eye out for ghosts of the art of yesteryear. Phantoms here didn’t hide beneath bedsheets like their ancestors in Gothic novels, but beneath painted canvases. They slipped behind a crate, stole through tears in plastic sheeting to delude themselves that they were still hanging on the wall, the object of everyone’s atte
ntion …

  David shook himself to dispel the phantasmagoria assailing him. There were no ghosts, no straying images. If the frames were empty, it was because the paintings they once displayed had been relinquished to the naïve rapacity of junk dealers, nothing more.

  He threw a quick look over his shoulder. He wasn’t allowed in this part of the building. From here on out was the quarantined sector; only veterinarians were allowed to move around freely there.

  At the end of the corridor, a fat man jammed into a less than immaculate lab coat kept watch from his perch on a stool. Arms crossed over his chest, he shifted from one butt cheek to the other, trying vainly to find a comfortable position. His red eyes bore witness to a desperate lack of sleep; all he wanted was to be in bed. David had been betting on the night shift’s general fatigue. Relief was still an hour away, and a long night’s duty had dulled their watchfulness. He had to take advantage of this slackened attention.

  “Yeah,” grumbled the man at the sight of a visitor suddenly emerging from the tunnel of the shadowy corridor. “What is it?”

  David pulled a twenty from his pocket, rolled it up lengthwise, and, for kicks, began whistling through it as if it were a flute. The fat man watched him without any show of impatience.

  “Yesterday,” the younger man said at last. “Around eight. A girl from psych section, with a bun and a pinched-looking mouth?”

  “Oh yeah,” the fat man snickered. “Piehole? That’s what we call her. She’s no barrel of laughs. Probably frigid. That mouth isn’t the only thing of hers that’s pinched tight.”

  Grabbing the sign-in sheet, he ran a soiled finger down the columns. David flattened the twenty and slipped it in between the pages. “Yeah,” said the man. “Just a quick look, though, or I won’t hear the end of it. Dream Number 338. It was kinda weak; the doc on call put it in an incubator. You really want to see it?”

  David tried on a pleading look. The watchman sighed, straightening up. “I just don’t get it,” he groused, “you guys’re all the same. You sell ’em, and then you come down here crying for a look. Well, c’mon—I have to go with you. If we run into anyone, I’ll say you’re my brother-in-law.”

  He pulled an imposing key from his pocket and unlocked the great doors that led to the former exhibit halls. The windows had been blacked out, resulting in a gloom pierced by rays of sunlight where dense golden dust danced about. On pedestals that had once supported masterpieces of Greek art perched cages big and small. Simple wire affairs, or solid jails with bars. Right away, David recognized the smell of dreams, the “electric” smell of resurfacing successfully.

  “Those ones there are earmarked for auction,” the watchman muttered. “They’re fresh from quarantine. Got their photos taken for the catalog yesterday. One or two of ’em are gonna go for millions!” He kept waddling from one cage to the next, a nasty grimace on his face.

  “I just don’t get why you guys all want to look at them,” he said again. “They’ve got no eyes, no mouth, nothing. Scrambled eggs, I call ’em—nice, right? There’s a certain resemblance. Some of the other guys, they call ’em miscarriages, but that’s not nice.”

  David hardly dared move. As with each time he managed to sneak into the storage room, he was struck with a mental and physical paralysis. “They’re not even real animals,” the fat man complained. “They don’t piss, they don’t shit. I was a watchman at the zoo for a while, I know what I’m talking about. These things, well, they look like they’re alive, but no one’s figured out just how that is. Man! I’ve fed lions and tigers; now, them you better not mess with. They’ll gobble that meat on the end of your stick right up. But these things? Just what are they, anyway? They look like flesh, even skin, but at the same time, they’re not part of our world. They’ve got no fur, no scales. You know, some of the guys even poke ’em to try to make ’em scream? But they never make a sound. What are they?”

  “Dreams,” David murmured. “Dreams, stolen from sleep.”

  “Stolen?” the big man grumbled. “I thought all this looked shady. Never thought I’d wind up guarding stolen objects!”

  David wasn’t listening to him anymore. He was like a kid on his first trip to the zoo, suddenly discovering that a rhinoceros wasn’t just a funny-looking animal with a horn balanced on the end of its nose and leather chaps too big for its body, but a living, breathing thing, enormous and monstrously impossible. He didn’t dare stick his hand through the bars of a big cage; the watchman probably would’ve stopped him anyway. But inside was something incredibly fragile, an organic … architecture? With skin more delicate than a petal. A kind of indefinable being, rolled up in a ball and barely touching the earth. Volumes harmoniously joined but lacking any precise vital function. This one looked like a shoulder. A giant shoulder so soft, so fragile, a mere brush of your finger would immediately mottle it with bruises. A belly? A breast, maybe. Or maybe all of the above at once, imbricate, interchangeable, but only just hinted at. As soon as you began walking around the cage, images poured forth, endlessly revising your first impression. No, it wasn’t a breast, more a belly, the belly of a young girl … or a cheek, a cheek flushed pink by a spot of sun … No, no, it was a back. The marvelously smooth back of a woman bathing herself. It was … everything and nothing, all at once. Volumes whose fragility put a lump in your throat and halted you mid-gesture. An existential precariousness that made you an oafish brute, a bull in a china shop. A half-materialized sigh, still wavering between existence and dissolution. “Scrambled eggs,” the watchman grumbled. “To think some people spend their whole lives gushing over these things!”

  David shivered, uneasy. Though he still felt a visceral need to see the dreams he’d given birth to, upon seeing them he experienced nothing like the extraordinary rapture aesthetes spoke of.

  “Well, of course,” Marianne had told him bluntly. “Dreamers can’t derive any pleasure from contemplating their dreams. You don’t experience sexual arousal when you see your naked body in a mirror, do you? Well, same goes for the dreams you’ve materialized. Other people might derive a certain pleasure from them, but there’ll always be something like an incest taboo between you and your own dream. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” Yes, he understood: he was like those miners who dig gold from the depths of the earth for a large conglomerate. He labored, while others’ hands fondled the ingots …

  “Yours is a lot smaller,” said the watchman, tugging David’s sleeve. “Plus they’re not done running tests on it yet. It might even die before it hits the market.”

  These words were uttered without a trace of meanness; he was just a man used to life’s hard knocks. Giving David a shove as if they were old friends, he ushered him into a room filled with the hum of incubators. A greenhouse swelter reigned; sweat sprang to their brows. Just like everywhere else, lighting was reduced to a strict minimum, and it was hard to get an exact idea of just what was being stored in the incubators. The fat man checked a chart and tried to orient himself among the rows.

  “Over there,” he whispered. “The vet isn’t done vaccinating it yet.”

  David leaned toward the bell jar, ringed in a halo of moisture. For most dreams, the mandatory quarantine was a terrible ordeal. Many of them couldn’t stand up to the numerous injections and samplings the boy butchers at the lab believed it their duty to inflict.

  “You never can tell,” Marianne would utter with an erudite air whenever David let his indignation show. “Dreams come straight from sleep, so they could be vectors for sleeping sickness. A few troubling cases of a slowdown in bodily functions have been recorded among collectors who spend lots of time contemplating their acquisitions. Yes, in some cases even trance state and memory loss. Dreams aren’t as harmless as you claim. We must be very cautious.” Being cautious meant pricking that wondrous skin with long needles, slicing into it with scalpels, scarifying these organisms until they finally shriveled up and disintegrated. “If they croak before making it out the laboratory door,” asked
the watchman, “do you still get paid?”

  “You get a kill fee,” David replied mechanically. “It’s not much, but enough to carry you till the next dive.”

  “And if it goes to auction?”

  “Ten percent of the selling price.”

  The fat man frowned and leaned over the incubator. “It’s not very big,” he observed. “That’s not gonna make you rich. Strictly for small savers. My sister-in-law, owns a deli? She loves these things. Her mantle’s covered in ’em.”

  David blinked, but the condensation inside the bell jar kept him from clearly making out the contours of the dream. He recalled the two bags of uncut gems he’d taken from the safe in the jewelry shop down below, and the crunch of raw diamonds against his chest … that had been the symbolic image allowing the dreamer’s attractional energies to be concentrated. A sort of fictional target you focused on before casting your net. Deep in the incubator was something pink and plump, with soft, gentle curves. A little netsuke, perhaps, a blissful and mysterious sphere that emanated a kind of harmonious satisfaction, a soothing radiation. No, that wasn’t it at all, it was … oh, what was the use? No one ever managed to describe the oneiric ectoplasms, anyway. No two people ever saw them the same way. A round and stretchy Buddha? A hairless cat, sleeping in a ball, a—damn it! Did he have to go seeing some kind of link between its morphology and the symbolic image of bags snatched from a safe? Psychologists rejected any connection, but psychologists reasoned according to theories, clinical reports. Not one of them was capable of diving into the depths of sleep and bringing back something solid, something … alive. Not one of them had the power, and that very thing made them hostile, that impotent jealousy.