The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome

by Serge BRUSSOLO

  To top it all off, smoldering dreams reeked of burnt flesh. At their slightest touch, the smallest backyard brazier became a stake from the Holy Inquisition, and the smell of charred human flesh the ectoplasms let off impregnated clothes almost permanently, necessitating a change of wardrobe. That disposal method had to be scrapped, and people to be persuaded not to try to deal with withered objects on their own. And so a removal service was created, a service whose black trucks patrolled town at nightfall to collect the ectoplasms standing in bins on the sidewalks among the innocent family trash cans.

  “Let’s do this,” was all Pit Van Larsen said, pulling his mask over his face. David took a cautious step back. Splashing was always a possibility; he didn’t particularly feel like having a pearl of gummy matter leap his way and stick to his skin like a wart, as sometimes happened.

  Since collecting dreams posed a real problem, allowing them to decompose in the open air of landfills like regular household trash was out of the question, for as the weeks went by and they fell apart, ectoplasms wound up unraveling in sticky, invisible tendrils in the wind. Scattered, reduced to a state like microscopic droplets of rain, they then became windborne. Those unlucky enough to live near landfills breathed them in, absorbed them unknowingly. And the terrifyingly sticky particles built up in their lungs and bronchial tubes, permanently obstructing them. Eventually, the Ministry had had to face facts: dead dreams were exceptional sources of pollution. They’d rather glibly thought the problem solved for a while when the strange raw material was recycled in a less-than-noble, but highly useful form: one minister had conceived of selling used ectoplasmic substance to glue manufacturers, who could tube it up and market it as a cement of unequaled adhesive power. The accident toll had been very high, so the project had been forcibly discontinued. The Ministry had to get used to the idea that far from being a source of extra income for the state, disposing of used dreams would remain one of its duties and expenditures.

  David could perfectly recall the shameful and laughable superglue debacle. Millions of little red tubes had flooded store shelves. DIY types had rubbed their hands with glee: finally, a truly adhesive glue capable of resisting any amount of tension, which definitively bonded the most varied materials. The pretty red tubes were a pleasure to purchase because they replaced every type of existing sealant. The euphoria hadn’t lasted long. Soon EMTs were dashing to all four corners of the country to try to free foolhardy home improvers from being held hostage by walls, pipes, and roof beams. Faced with the horrifying resistance of the gunk, they’d had to bring themselves to amputate a few fingers, carving deeply into flesh—which had resulted in countless lawsuits. David had long kept one of the scarlet tubes in a desk drawer—not to use, of course, but because he saw it as the strangely iconoclastic coffin of a defunct work of art.

  The garbagemen had opened the incubator. With gloved hands, Pit seized the dream slumped like a dead jellyfish and dropped it into his bag. The ectoplasm landed with a flabby smack, leaving just a trace of mucus on the technician’s gloves. An official copied the specimen number onto the blank label affixed to the circlip of the tear-proof bag.

  “Correct?” he asked, raising a gloomy eye at David.

  “Correct,” the young man agreed.

  The garbagemen did the same for the other dreams that had died as a result of quarantine. David felt a tightness in his throat. He tried to imagine the ordeal the little ectoplasm must have endured just a few days ago. What had they put it through, what kind of idiotic, pseudoscientific torture? They said some lab techs got off on injecting young dreams with a solution of frightfully strong black coffee, that they put still-fragile ectoplasms in special chambers where the unbearable beeping of a digital alarm clock rang out nonstop. All this, in the name of testing the object’s physical resistance to outside reality. Was there an ounce of actual science in these routines, or did madness reign, an undisputed sovereign, within the service?

  “OK,” said Pit Van Larsen. “Here we go.” As he passed David, he asked, “You coming all the way or have you had enough?”

  “All the way,” said the young man softly.

  Pit spat on the floor. “Masochist,” he said, heading up the line. The garbagemen fell in behind in orderly fashion, each holding at the end of an arm a bag containing the cadaver of a poisoned dream. Their rubber jumpsuits made curious sucking sounds, and David reflected that they must have been sweating atrociously inside those ridiculous outfits.

  “See you next time,” the fat watchman said as David passed by. There was no malice in it, just the remark of a blasé man who’d finally realized that no matter what you did, everything went pear-shaped.

  The garbage truck for dreams was waiting outside, a huge black machine with riveted sides. The bags were carefully deposited in airtight containers to avoid any chance of their exploding in transport. David sat down beside Pit while the others gathered in back for a coffee break. “So,” the former dreamer began, “you still in the game? You pulling down a living? That tadpole I wrapped up earlier wasn’t about to make you a millionaire. Me, I was making even scrawnier ones toward the end there. I called ’em sleep shits.”

  “Don’t you dream at all anymore?” David inquired, kicking himself for asking the question.

  “No,” said Pit in a tone of false relief. “They gave me a shot, and ever since then, I don’t dive. I dream, but like everyone else—unimportant bullshit you forget as soon as you open your eyes.”

  He paused for a moment, steering the truck around a bend, then added, “You should do what I did before it’s too late. You check out the Ministry’s figures lately? You know what the life expectancy is for dreamers? Not so hot. When you start getting old, the ectoplasms start thickening up; they stay in the lungs and choke you.”

  “I know,” David cut him off sharply. “Skip the lesson.” He hesitated, bit his tongue, then ventured, “How does it feel, never seeing the people down there anymore?”

  Pit shrugged, but his great gloved hands squeaked on the wheel when he tightened his grip. “I try not to think about it,” he whispered. “Anyway, the injection must’ve killed them. I tell myself it’s like a sick dog, you put it down for its own good. Nothing good can come from hanging out with them. Plus, I felt like I was cheating on my wife with the girl down there, it was ugly.”

  Not another word was exchanged until they reached the gates of cold storage. That was where they kept the dreams on ice, for lack of a better solution. To keep them from crumbling in the wind or fermenting in their special bins and then exploding, they were frozen. Only freezing allowed them to be kept in a stable form without danger to the environment. Every time he entered the massive labyrinth of cold storage, David was captivated by the ice crystals that drafts swept about like whirlwinds of an endless ice storm. You had to wear protection if you didn’t want your ears and cheeks sheared off, and the men who worked in the aisles were all decked out in thick black headgear that made them look like polar explorers. David and the garbagemen got out of the truck and ran to put on thermal jumpsuits in a heated airlock. For the garbagemen, it was always an unpleasant ordeal to extricate themselves from their sweat-slicked black rubber diving suits, towel off in a hurry, and then go to face an underground winter. David stepped out first, his hood drawn down tight in an attempt to ward off the sting of ice shards. The parka was too big, and he tugged furiously on the cord around his waist. His breath exploded in a thick cloud, concealing his view of the maze of stingily lit tunnels. Pit went ahead of him, stooping, followed by his men. They were all clearly in a hurry to have it over with. Their fat antiskid shoes gave the burial an oddly military air. David let himself be guided along. His lips were already frozen. The cold drilled pain into his metal fillings. At last, they reached the door of the freezer room. A crust of ice had formed on the handle, and Pit had some difficulty getting it to turn. Inside, the dreams lay piled in a great heap, a shapeless bric-a-brac of jellyfish petrified by the polar temperatures. Like marble, Da
vid thought instinctively, but that wasn’t it, not exactly. Marble didn’t have the luminescence of ice crystals. The solidified dreams seemed to be dusted with ground diamonds; they lay piled in a great heap, unidentifiable beneath a thick crust of ice. A cemetery, a cemetery of paralyzed ghosts, reduced to the immobility of eternal incarceration. But it was the only way to halt their death throes and the pollution that ensued. Freezing them kept their cadavers from falling apart any further.

  “Someday they won’t know where to put them anymore,” Pit grumbled. “They’ll have to stuff ’em in rockets and send them to the stars. They’ll put a ‘No Vacancy’ sign here, like everywhere else.”

  With a flick of his wrist, he sent the bag’s circlip flying and tossed the dead ectoplasm on the crust of ice covering the floor. The dream adhered to it with a clearly audible crackle, and suddenly its color changed. The other garbagemen were already falling back, fleeing the unbearable cold that came in waves from the depths of the room. Pit grabbed David by the arm and pulled him back.

  “What are you waiting for?” he growled. “You want your lungs burned? You can’t stay here without a mask.”

  David let himself be led away. He knew full well that the Ministry had been forced to install a nuclear plant at the edge of town for the sole purpose of providing enough energy for the cold storage depots scattered underground. The wintry coffin of dreams required a great deal of power; no one dared think of what might happen if all the funerary freezers suddenly stopped working someday.

  “They’d blow up,” Pit had replied once, when David asked. “Dream decay is accompanied by intense gas production, which, in such an event, would automatically find itself under pressure. No one knows how long the chambers can hold back the gas. Plus, there’s the risk of suffocation, explosion …”

  True, it was a hell of a headache and no one wanted to think about it too much for now; they’d have to deal with it sooner or later. As usual, not until disaster became imminent. David shed his outfit in the heated airlock and took his leave of Pit. The cold from underground clung to his clothes, and he had a hard time warming back up, even once he was aboveground. He walked quickly, keeping to the sunny sidewalks. Marianne’s threats ran through his mind. A rest cure? The road to dismissal always began with a rest cure in an institution full of worn-out, unprofitable dreamers. When the stay was over, you had the right to a second chance, but only one. If that dream ended in failure, you were offered the full discharge injection that Pit Larsen had received. A magic shot that freed you from diving and made you a normal man. Desperately normal.

  [ 10 ]

  The Call of the Deep

  He went home, clothes stiff from the underground winter. He could still feel the sting of ice shards on his cheeks, and his chapped lips were bleeding. He made himself some coffee, very sweet, and tried to warm his hands by caressing the mug’s porcelain sides. He had his first hallucination as he was walking diagonally across the kitchen. Suddenly it seemed like the tiled floor crumbled beneath his feet, revealing a cleverly concealed liquid expanse. The tiles broke loose, one from the next, sinking into the dark pool that seemed to spread beneath the floor of the entire apartment. David leapt to one side, blinked his eyes. Suddenly, the image vanished. The kitchen floor revealed itself to be untouched. There was no hole, no secret lake … He sat down, legs trembling slightly, and passed a hand over his face. The hallucination had been so realistic he’d felt for a split second that he was balancing over a chasm, the tenant of a hut on stilts that was falling to pieces. He wanted another sip of coffee, but was surprised and appalled to find it tasted like seawater. Seaweed floated on the surface of the beverage. In the depths of the mug, sugar had been replaced with silt. He knew instinctively that if he kept staring stubbornly at the mug, he’d soon see fish swimming around the spoon. He closed his eyes, covered his face with his hand. The smell of salt and mud blossomed from the coffeepot’s spout, filling the room. He forced himself to breathe slowly. He knew these symptoms perfectly; they always came before a few hours of oneiric trance. It was an alarm signal his unconscious sent out to announce a deep dive. Normally, he would’ve jumped on the phone and called Marianne to alert her he was about to sink into the coma of dream. She’d have come over right away with her little suitcase, her bottles of glucose, her IV drips. She would’ve assisted him while he lost consciousness, seeing to the continued function of his deserted body. He made a motion to rise, but changed his mind immediately. No, he shouldn’t. If he told her he was about to go under, she’d rush to bring him an inhibitory injection.

  “It’s for your own good,” she would explain in her forbearing nurse’s voice. “There’s no point tiring yourself since we’ve suspended you for now.” She’d nip the dream in the bud with a squirt of poison, and he wouldn’t be able to do a thing to thwart the spread of venom in his body.

  He took a deep breath to banish the ball of worry forming at the tip of his sternum. What he was about to do infringed upon the fundamental safety rules of diving, but he couldn’t help it, he wanted to see Nadia again too much. Gently, he opened his eyes. The hallucination had worn off. The mug held only cold coffee now. The tiled floor was intact and afforded no glimpse of secret seas ingeniously hidden away. It’s too soon, the voice of reason murmured to him. You’re still too weak to try another descent, you haven’t recovered yet. But this cautionary advice fell on deaf ears. He got to his feet. The apartment was pitching a bit, like a ship on a rising sea. The objects on the sideboards, the mantles, came and went, obeying the movements of the swell. The entire building was taking to the ocean, slicing through the tide with its redbrick prow. David could clearly hear the regular slap of waves against the walls of the ground floor. He knew that if he opened the curtains, he would see sea foam streaming down the windowpanes. The dive was always heralded by a profusion of maritime hallucinations whose origin he could not explain. He almost lost his balance going down the hallway. Here, there, everywhere, chairs were falling over, dishes slid about in the cupboards, books tumbled from the shelves. They’d left the port; now the apartment building was braving the first breakers of the high seas. Used to it as he was, David still felt overtaken by a slight nausea. He staggered toward the bathroom. The faucets of the sink and tub had turned themselves on, pouring out green, frothy water that smelled of iodine. Gray fish flopped about in the toilet, slapping the porcelain with their powerful fins. David felt his head spin, felt fear knot his stomach. The illusion was too strong. The terribly convincing, almost palpable images presaged a dive of great depth. It was one of those dizzying descents from which he might well never return. If he gave into the trance, he could easily sleep for two weeks, maybe more. Without medical assistance, an escapade like that was tantamount to suicide. In a few days, he would become dehydrated, then slide into a coma. More than one diver had died that way, from an infringement of safety regulations. Diving alone was throwing yourself down a well with a stone tied around your neck. He had to call Marianne. He had to call Marianne so she would come … poison the dream.

  Seized with vertigo, he dragged himself toward the bedroom and collapsed across the bed like a shipwreck victim clinging to a life raft. The apartment seemed be to hitting twenty-foot troughs, and huge waves came crashing down on the tiled floor with the thunder of a waterfall. The smell of iodine was everywhere now. The salt-starched bedsheets stuck to David’s fingers. He tried to remember where he’d hidden the bottles of glucose he’d illicitly acquired. Oh, he could jimmy up a homemade rig that would keep him alive for a while, but none of these pitiful precautions would succeed in keeping the dangers of a deep-sea dive at bay. This time, the call of the deep was terrifying. David felt the apartment warping from the assault of the invisible maelstrom. Soon the floorboards would give way, and he would sink like a rock into the blue waters. He would go deeper than ever before; he could feel it. His feet weighed tons, they would tug him bottomward like the lead ballast of the first undersea explorers. His entire body was becoming heavy
, immovable. His limbs would recover their give only once he was submerged. He had to dive, let himself be sucked into the whirlpool.

  He was panting, laid out with seasickness. All over the apartment, shelves were emptying their contents, closets were opening, vomiting out plates and saucepans, tables were sauntering from one side of a room to another, scratching the waxed parquet with their hard feet. The building plunged prow-first as if to go under, then abruptly straightened, a castaway who lifts his head above the waves to keep from drowning. David made an effort to sit up. He had to … he had to hang the glucose bag from its stand, secure the cannula to the timer that would set them going one after another as the bottles emptied. Enough to hold out for three or four days tops, keeping the rate of flow to a minimum. Would he be back in four days? He had no idea. The deeper you went, the more time it took to come back up; that was one of the fundamental laws of dreaming. The liquid night closed over you, thicker and more restive than the reassuring blue waters of the shallows. There was no point setting any ordinary mechanical device to wake yourself. Bell, beep, alarm, sensory stimulation—nothing worked. A thousand clocks chiming in chorus above the bed of a dreamer in a trance would have deployed their din in vain. David himself had tried it once. The biggest old-fashioned double bell windups, the strident whine of the latest clock radios, had never managed to so much as pierce the shell of dream. The trance insulated you from the world, enveloping you in its soundproofed carapace. Someone could fire a cannon at the foot of your bed, brand you with a hot iron, and you still wouldn’t open your eyes. Marianne had submitted him to all sorts of tests, even going so far to stick needles in the palms of his hands, without ever managing to speed up the ascent. Dreamers remained totally cut off from the outside world, indifferent to their mortal coils, disconnected from their flesh. Waking could only happen from within, when its time came, when the logic of the dream prompted it. For all these reasons, it was suicidal to dive without medical assistance. Though the nurse could in no way come fetch you from deep inside the dream, she was at least in a position to feed your body and keep it from getting dehydrated.