The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome

by Serge BRUSSOLO

  “C’mon, move along,” the watchman ordered. “Can’t loiter around here or you’ll get caught. You’ve seen it now, so, what? Feel better? It’s not like it’s a baby, right? Hey, you look like a first-time dad who’s just gotten a secret glimpse of his kid behind his wife’s back. Weird, isn’t it? You mediums, you’re not quite normal. But then you never claimed to be!”

  David didn’t claim a thing. He thought about the little dream imprisoned in its incubator. “Don’t say dream,” Marianne said whenever he used the word. “It’s an incorrect and stupidly sentimental term. It’s not a dream, it’s an ectoplasmic product a sleeping medium has materialized from an oneiric image haunting his brain. The dream allowed you to create this object by stimulating your imagination—that’s all.” Was that really all there was to it? David didn’t believe it for a second. These objects were cut from the very skin of dreams; for him, they were proof that down below a woman’s flesh was softer than anywhere else. A woman’s flesh … Nadia’s. Especially Nadia’s.

  “Don’t come ’round here again for a while, OK?” the fat man whispered to David as he escorted him out. “I don’t think this is good for you. Tell yourself it’s like a deformed kid you were forced to leave at child services. Better that way in the end, right?”

  [ 4 ]

  Afternoon/A Walk in an Antiseptic Desert

  Upon leaving the museum, David realized that it was Sunday, a day he’d long associated in his mind with activities like ritual visits to cemeteries, hospitals, or public parks full of retirees taking in the sun. When he was ten or so, he’d decreed one fine morning that in coded language the word Sunday meant “the day of the dead,” because the empty streets seemed to bear witness to a sudden embolism in the city, shops stood padlocked behind metal shutters, and the rare survivor you ran into here and there had the gait of a convalescent, quite unlike the weekday pace that sent people charging toward subway entrances as if an air-raid siren had just urged them toward shelter in rail tunnels. David hated Sunday, a day of anemic languor when the streets seemed suddenly to be short of blood, only the odd car circulating, or, worse yet, bicycles.

  He wandered across the esplanade. Luckily it wasn’t very nice out, and the city was still enveloped in a vague fog that made its hard angles bearable. He decided to walk to the clinic that cared for dreamers with work-related injuries. The establishment was on the other side of the bridge, in the compound of the former marble depot where sculptors once came looking for raw material for their work: stone slabs hewn from state quarries. The main room on the ground floor had been summarily converted, divided with folding screens and curtains on great sliding tracks as in a medieval hospice. Meant as a “temporary” setup, it had dragged on for several years already. At the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, no one really cared about broken-down divers whose strange afflictions were the despair of the medical profession and profoundly annoyed doctors.

  David crossed the bridge and had lunch in a bistro cramped as a concierge’s quarters, where a fat man was cooking up an enormous pot of onion soup on a little hot plate. He tried not to think too much about the veterinary quarantine room and his dream, imprisoned in its muggy incubator. He wondered if he could maybe grease the watchman’s palm and get him to personally oversee the growth of that overly fragile little thing slowly coming into its own under its bell jar. Couldn’t it be spared a few tests if its charts were hidden, or even tampered with? Sure, it’d cost a lot of money, but David told himself that was the price of making sure his work survived. His last few dreams had died in quarantine, poisoned by ham-fisted vets who thought they were still working on plow horses and jabbed at dreams as if inoculating hippopotami.

  He lapped up his soup, brooding over the idea, downed two cups of very sweet black coffee, and headed out toward the marble depot. The compound’s great courtyard was still littered with useless chunks no one would ever come for now, and these rain-soiled slabs had ended up forming a kind of miniature mountain range firmly rooted in the muddy ground. Just past the main gates, you found yourself deep in a labyrinth of abandoned megaliths richly slathered in pigeon shit. It was like a garden of stone, a pagan cathedral of menhirs raised to the sky. The ruins of some unknown disaster lost to memory. Wandering among these forgotten monoliths, David wound up convinced he was crossing the wreckage of a bombed-out city reduced to its bare foundations. He found the sheer enormity of the slabs somewhat frightening, and hastened his step toward the far side to exit the oppressive enclave.

  Upon entering the building, he flashed his card at a sullen orderly who waved him along, stifling a yawn. “I’m here to see Soler Mahus,” David explained. “They haven’t moved him?”

  The orderly rolled his eyes as if he’d just been asked a particularly moronic question, and dove back into reading his paper. David hesitated at the room’s threshold; on the heels of the stone labyrinth was now one of curtains shivering in the drafts. It was as if they’d hung a gargantuan load of laundry out to dry … or the sails of a ship. David ran his gaze over the canvas expanse, trying to pick out a mizzen, a jib … He gave himself a shake. They weren’t sails, just rough, thick curtains. Numbers had been painted on them to help you find your way around. When would he get over the annoying foible of always seeing things in other things?

  Once a week, he came to see Soler Mahus, an old diver who’d suffered a serious decompression accident. Soler’s brain was deteriorating as the months went by. He had gone prematurely gray, and the prolonged bed rest had melted his muscles away, reducing his body to a skeletal schematic wrapped up in cellophane skin that would tear at the slightest scratch. David had nothing to say to him, but Soler liked to soliloquize before a willing audience. The accident had stripped him of his powers, and he no longer lifted a finger to fight his illness. The doctors paid him erratic visits, not knowing what cure to prescribe, content to cram him full of sedatives while waiting for his EEG to flatline.

  David went up the central aisle. The worn, porous stone had been sprayed down with some milky disinfectant still stagnating in the cracks between slabs. After getting it wrong twice, he finally found Soler’s cell and pulled back the curtain. The old man didn’t move a muscle, didn’t even wink to greet his guest. For two months now, his facial muscles had been almost completely paralyzed, and he spoke in a curious ventriloquist’s voice, without moving his lips. No sooner was David was seated at his bedside than he resumed his monologue, as if the young man had simply slipped away for a moment. Maybe he didn’t notice the passing of time, and believed his visitor had just returned from the bathroom?

  “Did I ever tell you about my Bengal safari?” he murmured, his face not betraying the slightest expression. “It was Prince Rajapur who had summoned me. Twelve elephants, a veritable army of beaters. The tiger was a great male, a child-eater ravaging the villages of the region. They’d been trying to corner him for a year now, but he was a sly beast, extraordinarily cunning, orange as flame, with stripes of camouflage that made him almost invisible to the naked eye. But his breath was atrocious, and …”

  David wasn’t really listening. Soler’s imaginarium didn’t really overlap with his own fantasies, but he knew that every dreamer haunted his own territory. In his youth, Soler Mahus had been weaned on tales of adventure and big game hunting. He too had once owned a library full of twopenny pulps. From these storybook memories, he’d built a world made of jungles and vast rivers cleaving sunburnt lands in two, savannahs, all-devouring deserts, through which he tracked fantastical beasts, legendary animals whose atrocities local tribes recounted in fearful whispers. Mahus hunted down the white rhino, the white gorilla, the white tiger … ghostly creatures, each the only living one of its kind. Wild monsters whose white coats contrasted strangely with green forests thick with sap. Down below, he’d been a great hunter bristling with bullets, sporting an anaconda-skin hat. A formidable stalker of the savannah who made his own cartridges, whose catchphrase—no matter the adversary—was always “Boys, don’t shoot till
you see the whites of their eyes!” He’d faced down the fiercest predators, felled at point-blank range elephants driven mad by a poisoned assegai. He’d had every tropical disease there was, every fever, every pox. He’d eaten quinine by the fistful, sewn his wounds shut with his own two hands. His body (his body down there) was but a quilt of scars, an appallingly stitched figure no white woman could gaze upon without immediately hiding her eyes. The negresses were the only ones to lick his wounds, and they did so with the tips of their tongues, naming him a great warrior, knowing what they gazed on was indomitable courage. But Soler cared little for women. He came and went, content with a virgin offered up by some unworthy kinglet during a quick halt; then once more he was the ascetic hunter of endless expeditions. The mad monk whose rifle was loaded with bullets he’d carved Xs into. He sought the white beast, the one he had to kill at any price and throw over his shoulder if he wanted to go back up with a trophy …

  “Did I ever tell you the one about the lion of Magombo? Or the panther of Fijaya?” His monologues always started out the same way. He never bothered waiting for an answer, and dove right into an endless, convoluted tale, full of backtracking and contradictions. He’d once successfully hunted down a tiger in Africa—it hadn’t posed him the slightest problem of believability.

  “Or the Raja of Shaka-Kandarek’s safari? And the great massacre of the mad gorillas? And the tale of the leopard with the golden claws?” Stories, so many stories. Down below, he was Majo-Monko, He-Who-Slew-Like-Lightning. He had his friends, his chief spear-carrier: Nemayo, a prince of the savannah, sole survivor of a tribe wiped out by a terrible civil war. Nemayo, an athlete slender as an assegai, his face covered in ritual scars and his body in inscrutable tattoos. Nemayo knew the lair of every legendary beast, was never scared of any taboo; he alone remained, faithful, when the whole troop of porters had scattered in the jungle at the first roar.

  “Kid,” Soler whispered. “I was happy down there. I hunted the great white beasts. It was hard—terrible, sometimes—but that’s life, real life! Know what I’m saying?”

  David understood. For a long time, Soler had worked as a packer in the basement of a department store, hiding his power for fear of being persecuted. Changing fashions had delivered him from this hell, making him a star overnight. The great white beasts … how many had he killed? Monstrous gorillas, taller than trees, which once brought to the surface had become magnificent works of art. Oneiric ectoplasms (as the psychologists would say) of sufficient size to be displayed in public spaces. For Soler dreamed grandly, majestically. For ten years, he’d been the toast of every museum and collector. His dreams were too meaty, too robust to have anything to fear from being put through quarantine. At the mere mention of his name, auction prices shot through the roof, buyers went into a frenzy.

  “I was so bored up here,” he kept saying, “up top everything was ugly, just horrible. My real life was down below. You’re like me, you know what I’m saying. Plus whenever I stayed up top for too long, things would start to go bad in my own personal Africa, the tribes would start fighting, poachers would go around slaughtering game with machine guns. Nemayo would say, ‘You must not go, bwana. No sooner do you leave for the surface than misfortune falls upon us, all goes wrong, epidemics ravage the savannah.’ Plus it killed me not to know how they were doing. You feel that way too, right? The sudden desire to ring them up on the phone. Sometimes I’d open my mailbox automatically, hoping to find a muddy, dirty, wrinkled envelope inside with an African stamp on it. But there was never anything. They can’t write to us. That’s the hardest part: exile. My health got worse, the doctors wanted to keep me from diving. They said, ‘You’re staying too long down there, Mr. Mahus. It’s bad for your brain. You have to limit your forays into dreams, your last scan wasn’t very good, there were shadows …’ I didn’t give a damn about their shadows. I told them, ‘But it all goes to hell down there as soon as I turn my back! It’s obvious you don’t know the colonies! There’s this tribe, the Mongo-Mongos, cannibals who come down from the mountains and snatch children away because they’re tenderer than animals. Everyone’s afraid of them except for me, me and Nemayo. But Nemayo won’t do anything if I’m not there, those great stoic savages can be so abominably fatalistic!’ My words fell on deaf ears. They gave me drugs that kept me from dreaming. Stuff that fills your brains with lead, cement, that sends you tumbling into a barren sleep, imageless, the sleep of plants … Yeah, that’s probably how salads sleep, and cabbages too. And potatoes. The sleep of morons! Don’t ever let them drug you, kid! Ever! Even if they say you’re sick, even if they say you’ve got deep-sea diver’s syndrome. That’s what they call the jones to go back down. They claim divers who’re hooked really just want to go to sleep down there and never come back up. Bullshit. They’re just jealous.”

  Sometimes he would stop to rest his throat muscles. At such moments, he looked like he’d fallen asleep, vanquished by exhaustion, but soon he’d start talking again, cursing doctors and psychologists.

  “Drugs are poison. When I dove again, after a year’s rest, I was terrified by what I found waiting for me down below. The drugs had poisoned the rivers and the trees. The animals had died. Deep in the heart of Pandaya, crocodiles were floating belly-up downstream. Even the vultures wouldn’t eat the rotting hippo carcasses. The whole jungle was festering, polluted by sedatives. It pained me to see what had happened to Nemayo. I found him sitting atop a hill. When I tried to walk up, he cast stones at me. He had leprosy—the tranquilizers had made him a leper. He’d eaten of the moldering flesh of the dream, and he himself had begun rotting too. He wept, hiding his mutilated face beneath a zebra hide. ‘The white beasts were the first to die,’ he sobbed, ‘and their cadavers infected the entire jungle. The earth began to decompose. You were gone too long. You should have come back, bwana. As soon as you left we grew weak, our bodies became feeble, unable to fight off illness. We were overcome with dejection, and weariness. We remained inert, sprawled on the ground, staring at the sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. Men no longer made love to their women, and predators lost their appetite for their prey, and the grass no longer had the strength to grow, and the fruits were without flesh or flavor. It is you who give us the will to live, you alone. Why did you stay up there so long, on the surface? Is the tobacco there more flavorful? Are the women they give you more beautiful? Do they save you better parts of the hunt?’ He was a savage, kid, but it pained me to see him in such distress. I told him, ‘I’m here to stay, Nemayo, and you’ll heal, the earth will heal, and all will be as it was before,’ but he just kept weeping. He said, ‘It’s too late, all the great white beasts are dead, woe is upon us, and even the girls are no longer born virgins.’ ”

  “I struck out deep into the jungle with my faithful over-under Gambler-Wimbley, my bandoliers full of bullets, and enough food for a week, but he was right, the great white beasts were dead, and their corpses were sinking into the earth like rotten aspic. A gooey snow—can you picture that? Snow like runny marshmallows. That’s all that was left of the mythical creatures. Right then I got so scared that the nightmare tore me from my dream and I shot right up, straight past all the decompression stops. I thought my head and my lungs were about to explode. I tried hard to hang on anything I could—trees, rocky outcrops—but the nightmare had done its job, forcing me back up. I hit the surface screaming.

  “At the hospital, they told me I had an effusion in one of my cervical lobes, a blood vessel had burst. I shouted, ‘It’s because I came back up too fast,’ and they said, ‘It’s from overwork.’ Not long after that, my brain started hardening. I know it’s because of the drugs, the medicine. The dead dreams are drying out, setting inside my head. The dead bodies of Nemayo and everyone else have ossified my brains. They’re in there, I can feel them. They just keep getting heavier, pulling the nape of my neck into the depths of my pillow. It’s no tumor, it’s a whole dead world, a jungle with its animals and tribes. It’s everything from below in necros
is, with its rivers poisoned by tranquilizers. Don’t ever let them treat you, ever. If they give you drugs, spit ’em out. They claim they’re trying to help us, but actually they’re waging war on our people, our worlds. A dirty war whose damages you won’t even see right away. If you’ve got people down below who are dear to you, protect them. Don’t make the same dumb mistake I did.”

  Every time Soler fell silent, David couldn’t help looking at the sick man’s head sunken deeply in the pillow. It was said that the brains of divers with the bends slowly calcified, taking on a porcelain aspect. One day Marianne had insisted on showing David a pathological brain sample floating in a jar to persuade him of the realities of the risks he was running by stubbornly attaching too much importance to the dream world.

  “Looks like a piece of a soup dish,” he’d snickered, trying to stay composed, but the brittle brain hitting the sides of the jar with a sound like rattling plates had terrified him.

  “They should’ve written me,” Soler was mumbling, “they should’ve warned me about what was going on down there. But Nemayo didn’t know the language of white men. Maybe he tried calling me with the tam-tam? I must have mistaken the beating of my heart for the pounding of jungle drums. Oh, I should’ve paid more attention! That’s the terrible part: this exile. The impossibility of holding even a semblance of conversation …”