The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome

by Serge BRUSSOLO

  David let himself slip into his bed and crawled toward the closet where he hid his bottles. Would he be strong enough to set them up? Wouldn’t the storm snap the mast and shatter the bottles? Oh, c’mon, that was stupid, the storm existed only in his imagination. It was just an expression of the psychic upheaval that was brewing. He pressed down hard on his eyeballs. The pounding of his heart slowed a bit, the blood beating at his temples subsided. He seized upon the momentary calm to raise the metallic mast, hang the bags, lay out the valves and lines. He wondered, with a certain fear, if he would manage to set up the drip without too much damage. He’d always been a fumblefingers. The building was rolling less, but water seemed to be lapping behind the walls and beneath the floorboards, sealing him in the heart of a liquid prison. He sat down in the middle of the bed and rubbed his shoulders; he was cold, yet sweating all over. Water splashed behind the wallpaper with a thick liquid sloshing; he could hear it trickling under the carpet in an unending drainlike gurgle. It occurred to David that people trapped on a sinking ship must feel something similar when the gutted vessel slipped under the surface and pressure forced the last air pockets from the carcass. Marianne … should he call Marianne? He was afraid of what awaited him down below, but he was even more afraid of ending up a garbageman with a paralyzed brain.

  Slowly, he undressed, tearing off his clothes like remnants of an old skin after molting. With one trembling hand, he tore open the sterile pouch with the IV needle and its transparent little tube. Had he set the timer correctly? His vision blurred and the digits on the counter danced a saraband around the buttons. He quickly arranged the lines, plugged the device in, and stuck the needle in the hollow of his arm. It hurt. He tore off some surgical tape with his teeth, slapped it flat over the insertion point, and lay down on his back. He was nauseous, and his visual acuity was decreasing with each passing second as if night were flooding the apartment. At this simple sign, he knew he was already going down. This is madness, he thought with a desperate start, I should’ve alerted Marianne, I can still get up, grab the phone … But in reality, he didn’t want to. This would be his greatest dive, he could feel it: a journey to the heart of the abyss, into the black hole of the great deep, where he had never before set foot. Where maybe no one, apart from Soler Mahus, had ever set foot. He was going to sink like a stone, let the weight of his rancor drag him down, his fear of being crippled and put out to pasture, all the sadness of murdered dreams. He was going straight to the bottom, cleaving the ocean depths like a diver caparisoned in brass and lead, his gleaming helmet tracing through the liquid night a wake of humming bubbles. I’m coming! he thought, closing his eyes. The pillow lapped at his neck, the froth of the sheets licked his loins. He sank and nothing could keep him at the surface anymore.

  Suddenly, everything was blue.

  [ 11 ]

  The Basement of the Deep

  Jorgo’s motorcycles gleamed in the shadows of the garage, showing off their tailpipes like strange chrome sculptures. David glimpsed their distressing luster through half-closed eyes. He didn’t want to move; his body still seemed too fragile to him. He was afraid that if he got up on one elbow, he’d see his flesh tear away, his bones perforate his epidermis. He was like one of those desserts that had to be left to cool until it reached a certain consistency. Sprawled on his stomach, he waited, convinced that if he tried to sit up, his organs would be jostled loose like overripe fruit, landing pell-mell in a horrifying organic mush. Yes, he had to wait, wait for his flesh to firm up, for all the seams and sutures of his internal mechanism to set. At the moment he felt flaccid, fragile, unstable. Bizarre phobias flashed through him: fear his fingers would come off if he grabbed something, fear his toes would scatter if he set foot on the ground. Fear he’d swallow his teeth if he tried to speak …

  He lay on his belly, against Nadia. He couldn’t see the young woman’s face because his head was turned the other way, but he knew it was her. They lay entwined, naked and damp in an army-issue sleeping bag, a kind of fat khaki caterpillar. Two bags, in fact, joined by their zippers. He moved his hand slightly, caressing the curve of a hip. Had they made love? He always woke up too late, once the act was over, never retaining any image of their presumed romp. This lacuna frustrated him horribly. But maybe he’d just materialized in Nadia’s bag while she was sleeping? His memory was never very clear. It was dark in the garage. Drafts bore odors of grease and gasoline. David shifted his arm to check the depth gauge on his wrist. He shivered at the sight of the reading: 66,000 feet. Too far down! He’d tumbled to the bottom of a chasm. The pressure here must be terrifying. As for the ascent—that would take an eternity. Nadia’s touch dispelled his fears. He wanted to turn around, take her in his arms, but something forced him to get out of the sleeping bag and take a look around. An old survival instinct that admitted no laxness. With infinite precaution, he sat up, expecting to fall to pieces at any minute. It was too early; he wasn’t completely reformed yet. He was going to lose an arm, a leg … He put a hand on Nadia’s shoulder. The flesh was silky but different from human skin, had a radically foreign feel. It reminded him of rubber … but living rubber. Absurd, but it was the exact sensation beneath his fingertips. Nadia’s hair was like artificial fur … but again, artificial fur that was somehow alive. David was utterly incapable of explaining these paradoxes; all he could do was notice them, and be surprised. The way she was, the young thief still seemed more solid than her sisters on the surface, protected from the usual afflictions of the fairer sex. Tenderly, David traced the curve of her shoulder, crossing her chest, letting his finger run all the way to the tip of her breast. Nadia was asleep. Did she dream? No, there was no way, dreaming was a disease that held no sway in the world below. Gently, David drew away and dragged himself from the sleeping bag. He wasn’t cold. At his wrist, the big scarlet digits of the depth gauge pulsed like an alarm. He took a few steps among the motorcycles. A bit farther off, Jorgo was sleeping, rolled up in a sleeping bag spattered with old grease. Making contact again was an immutable ritual that always took place according to the same script: David would wake first in a world sleep had vanquished, an anesthetized world where nothing moved. He’d run to the window every time, to try to catch a stray dog pissing against a lamppost, an early bird crossing the sky, but no … everything was asleep: dogs, birds, and streetlamps. It was as if everything had stopped while he was away, as if the stilled carousel were gathering dust under its tarp, letting rust slowly devour its gears. As if the traveling fair had closed its doors, deprived of its only customer. It emerged from its torpor only slowly, very slowly, with great pain and creaking, as David’s presence gradually relit its bulbs and circuits. The young man walked to the edge of the garage. He was naked, but did not shiver. Here, his body was more impressive, sheathed in hard muscle that made for an excellent defense against the cold. He surveyed the horizon beyond the unused lot. Everything seemed flat, painted on muslin by a bad set dresser. The buildings, the cranes, the former water tank. A two-dimensional image. No doubt it’d get better as the day went on.

  He took a few steps out into the litter-strewn field that spread before him to try to convince himself the landscape actually had depth and wasn’t merely a painted backdrop. He felt like sticking out his hand to gauge the distance to the horizon, but held back abruptly from fear. What if his fingers stopped dead at the side of that building under construction that only seemed to stand two hundred yards away?

  He lifted his nose to examine the unmoving clouds, suspended over his head. Wasn’t that a bird up there? A bird inexplicably frozen in midair, as if pinned to the sky?

  He frowned. The clouds began to move, the bird to flap its wings. The great machinery of the world cranked laboriously into motion again, squeaking and sputtering as it got under way. The cloud mass advanced in fits and start, the bird darted jerkily, as if their movements were controlled by twitchy, ill-oiled machinery. The world of dreams took up its slow rotation again: in a minute the wind would start blowi
ng; the stiffened grass with its paralyzed spine would recover its suppleness. David blinked several times. Perspective came into its own again, the deserted lot stretched out, the horizon line grew distant. He no longer had the unpleasant sensation of standing in museum gallery with his nose a few inches away from a giant painting. The image deepened before his eyes to give him the possibility of entering it. He swallowed. His ears ached, and with the slightest gesture, blood beat painfully at his temples. Too low, he’d gone too low. Would the world of the dream be able to withstand the terrifying water pressure? He felt a painful sensation of heaviness on his shoulders, as if an invisible hammer sought to drive him into the ground. He checked the watch, where the digits were pulsing. Christ! He’d dropped through the seas like an anvil dropped from among the stars. He’d never thought he could pull off such a feat. Had Soler Mahus ever known such terrifying exhilaration? The exhilaration of diving deeper than anyone else?

  The sky gave a creak and he shuddered. The water pressure on the vault of the sky must have been nearing the breaking point. The world of the dream was now only a submarine in freefall, a vessel ceaselessly dropping ever lower, whose metal hull the depths had begun to crumple, bringing their force to bear on the fragile stitching of bolts that kept the sheets of armor plating in place.

  The sky had groaned; the clouds too. A complaint of abused and twisted metal. David scanned the azure, suddenly convinced a leak would spring open among the clouds, pouring torrents of salt water on the plain. He made an effort to wrest back control of his imagination, well aware that his fears directly affected the organic structure of the oneiric world. It behooved him to remain calm and keep his phobias in check.

  He went back into the garage and lit the camp stove, which lay among the tools on the workbench, to make coffee. Now that the wind was working again, he was a bit cold. He sat down, waiting for the water in the saucepan to start simmering. Out the open window sprawled the landscape, the buildings oddly bulbous, a bit squashed on top, as if something were weighing on the upper floors of houses, warping the parallels of walls. Pressure. Still pressure. It mashed objects down, giving them a squat, swollen look. Trees and streetlights stooped, suffering from the invisible hammering. A compressed dog came out from between two abandoned cars. Its abnormal morphology caught David’s eye. Its firmly tamped body came down to a kind of hirsute cube that flapped two pairs of tiny paws. The animal’s anatomy had been undeniably compacted. Unable to spread out in some harmonious fashion, it had shriveled until it began to look like a figurine of fresh clay flattened by a dissatisfied sculptor’s fist. David drew a sharp breath and stared at the creature. After a moment, it seemed that the animal unfolded, recovering its natural proportions. Its ears stood up on its head, its paws stretched out … The young man tsked in irritation. He could tell it’d take some fine-tuning to compensate for the effect of the great deep. Even the horizon betrayed an exaggerated, completely implausible curvature. All this was very annoying. He inspected the sky again. At least the birds were flying normally; the clouds no longer came to a sudden stop and crashed into each other like carriages on a train that had braked too abruptly.

  He reckoned he had set things straight enough to wake his companions. He grabbed the saucepan and poured the water slowly over the grounds filling the paper filter. He was a bit afraid of seeing Nadia emerge from the sleeping bag with a misshapen, cuboid body, her legs crooked, her breasts square. He’d never dragged them this far down before, to these unfathomable depths, the hunting ground of great dreamers. How would they take the submersion? The smell of coffee spread through the air, supplanting that of gasoline. Nadia stirred, then Jorgo. Their awakenings were always difficult, mechanical, their gestures horrendously approximate. Whenever they came out of sleep, it was like they needed to learn to stand again, to walk, to speak. They were like babies with only a few minutes to learn everything. However brief, these moments were extremely painful for David, who felt each time like he was seeing cardboard dummies or lobotomized simpletons come to life. He decided to let the aroma of the coffee do its work and left to get dressed. His clothes had been tossed in a heap on the suitcase of brushed steel he was never without in the world of the dream. He knelt and undid the clasps. The armored luggage contained quite an assortment of drugs whose vials were lined up like strange ammo on a sheet of black rubber, held in place by leather loops. There were concentrated rationality pills, logic tablets, plausibility adjustment drops. And above all, an array of fast-acting tone powders that allowed him to instantly modulate the nuance of a moment: irony powder, comedy powder, distancing powder, which when snorted off the back of your hand immediately attenuated the excessively tragic outline of any situation. Used wisely, these chemical tools enabled skillful corrections over the course of a story, slowing the formation of nightmare and its inevitable corollary: ejection into reality.

  David gently stroked the vials. With these drugs, he had no need for a noisy, cumbersome sidearm. All he had to do was know how to juggle the pills, know which capsule to swallow at the right moment.

  When he was done dressing, he saw that Nadia and Jorgo had taken up seats on either side of the workbench and were drinking their coffee in silence. They were staring into space, and feeling around a bit with their cups to find their mouths, but apart from these details, everything was going well; their bodies had suffered no visible alterations. David sat down at one end of the table and watched them. In fact, he knew nothing about them. Who was Nadia? Who was Jorgo? He’d racked his brains, but couldn’t manage to dredge up from memory the slightest snatch of information about their pasts, their childhoods … And yet if he’d created them from scratch, as Marianne claimed, he should’ve known all the most intimate secrets buried in the depths of their skulls. He should’ve enjoyed the omniscient view of novelists for whom characters were completely transparent, from whom they could hide nothing. In that case, why were Nadia and Jorgo sitting in front of him like opaque, taciturn, and mysterious figures?

  “They don’t exist,” Marianne had told him time and again. “They’re just images of your own self. Symbolic puppets that each represent an impulse, a tendency, a complex, a facet of your individuality. They have no depth because they’re not really alive.” But David had never been able to accept this line of reasoning. Nadia lived a real life. He was sure, now that the world of dream was back in working order, that the young woman’s skin had lost its rubbery feel and turned into warm, actual flesh. Couldn’t he spot, at this very moment, the bluish tracery of veins beneath the milky skin of her arms?

  “It’ll be a big score this time,” he declared after clearing his throat. “No jewelry boutiques. Something huge. A world-famous masterpiece.”

  The words had formed themselves independently of his will. They’d left his mouth without his even knowing and flown to meet his companions. Where had they come from, these plans he hadn’t known a thing about a minute earlier? Nadia and Jorgo turned toward him, frowning.

  “You sure we’re up to that?” Nadia fretted. “A jewelry boutique is one thing. A museum is something else altogether.”

  “Aiming kind of high, aren’t you?” Jorgo chimed in. “I mean, we’re just small-timers. Why try to be the all-stars of the heist world? Our haul doesn’t do it for you anymore? You already blow everything we got off the diamonds from the last job?”

  David shrugged. He’d never managed to make them understand that once in the real world, the loot from the jewelry stores no longer retained its original shape. Despite all his explanations, they stubbornly persisted in believing that the diamonds from dreams became real diamonds when you woke up. When he’d confessed that the fruit of their theft materialized as soothing knickknacks that were sold for a trifle, they’d burst out laughing, convinced he was joking. He hadn’t dared insist, for fear he’d go down in their esteem. How could the head of a gang be content with living the life of a pathetic government art worker in the surface world when they imagined him spending his days in golden pal
aces and casinos?

  “My credibility’s at stake,” he lied. “I need a big score to get back in the game. The diamonds I brought back the other day were fake.”

  Nadia swallowed hard, which made her naked breasts shake. David happily breathed in the redhead’s familiar scent. If she’d started sweating, that meant she was done taking shape. She wasn’t rubber and nylon anymore, but well and truly flesh and hair; it didn’t matter that he knew nothing about her. Besides, did you ever really know anything about the people around you? In his everyday life, David most often felt like he was rubbing shoulders with robots devoid of the slightest scrap of humanity.

  “A museum, that’s big-time,” Jorgo muttered. “What do you want to take?”

  “A ten-foot-by-six-foot painting,” David heard himself reply. “The Battle of Kanstädt.” And he slid toward them a catalog of paintings, which had mysteriously appeared in his hands. They bent over the workbench to examine the reproduction. He felt their hair touch his. What the hell is happening to me? David thought. I’m losing my head. It’s the rapture of the deep. Past sixty thousand feet, you become a megalomaniac. Like Soler Mahus and his white creatures, his mythic animals, his unicorns and yetis.

  He was afraid. At that very moment the sky let out the groan of a chassis compressed beyond its limits. Pressure. The pressure was there, weighing on the clouds, the roof of the garage. Even the flame on the camp stove was bizarrely flattened. The image of a submarine crushed by the depths leapt to mind again. He saw the submersible crumple into itself like a beer can, scrunch up in a terrible screech of sheet metal. What if the ocean closed up on them, crushing the world of the dream?