The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome

by Serge BRUSSOLO

  “NOOOOOOO!” he screamed, and his cry was written on the night in great red letters. The nightmare retreated for a moment, like a junkyard mutt taken briefly aback by someone even louder. The stain immediately vanished from Nadia’s belly. David pushed her inside the car while Zenios started the engine. The vehicle peeled away from the sidewalk, door open, Jorgo’s legs still dragging on the pavement. Straining his muscles, David pulled the kid’s body onto the seat. The little motorcyclist was sticky with blood. The light from a police car lit up the entire street. The cops had lowered their windows and were shooting at the fugitives. Zenios clung to the wheel; between each shot that punched through the chassis, his teeth chattered. David patted his pockets for his drugs, but came up empty. The nightmare was hot on his heels now; he couldn’t let himself get scared a second time. He could hear it running right beside the car with heavy strides, slamming its head against the door to force the car off the road. I can’t control a thing anymore, David noted with a shiver of terror. Jorgo lay heavy on his knees, dead, leaking blood on the seat, staining it red. Nadia had collapsed, her face waxen; he couldn’t tell if she’d been wounded again. David checked his wrist, trying to make out the digits on the blood-smeared depth gauge. Christ! If he ejected at this depth, he’d be pulverized before he hit the surface. The pressure would crush him like a steam hammer. He couldn’t give in to nightmare, couldn’t afford to wake up before he’d brought the dream world back to a normal depth. But the gauge was still stuck at 66,000, as if the oneiric submersible lay wrecked in the silt of an ocean chasm.

  As the car exited town, he felt his muscles melting away under his clothes, the lines on his face altering, the square set of his jaw fading away.

  “I—I’m being torn away,” he murmured, hoping Nadia would hear. He dug his nails into the backseat to try to escape the tremendous suction pulling him toward the surface.

  “Nadia!” he whimpered, wriggling in his too-big clothes. “I’m ascending!”

  “No!” the young woman screamed. “You can’t leave us like this! Bastard! What about Jorgo? What about me? You have to fix this!”

  “Fix this” was the last thing he heard. Then his body broke through the roof of the car, flying like an arrow toward the vault of the sky. Suddenly, the pain was horrendous. A crushing, dismembering sensation. For a moment he thought he’d been sheared in two by a shark lurking deep in the black waters, and only the top half of his body was still trying to reach the air. I’ll never make it, he thought, and then a hand cleft the water overhead and grabbed him by the hair. It was Marianne.

  [ 14 ]

  The Raft and the Medusa

  He lay wrecked amid the sheets like a castaway tossed up on a strand by the final waves of a tempest. He wasn’t in pain, but his body felt broken, shattered. If he could’ve, he would’ve felt his ribs with his fingertips to make sure they hadn’t been mangled by the reefs alongshore. He couldn’t feel a thing anymore save for a great absence filled with vague, short-lived shooting pains. The pressure had annihilated him, crushed him. No doubt not a single bone had been left intact. No doubt his skeleton was now a mere pile of splinters nothing could ever glue back together. He lay limp, a quasi-corpse of drooping flesh in the middle of a bed devastated by dream convulsions. A great big doll, a straw-stuffed puppet; the only thing still working was his brain.

  All he could remember from the ascent was a tearing sensation. The certainty of having been skinned alive, scraped to the bone. He’d made the climb toward the surface only by sloughing off his flesh, jettisoning ballast, abandoning his organs one by one to make it up there ever faster. He’d tossed it all overboard, all the viscera so terribly necessary for a normal life, emptying himself as the sparkling vault of the surface grew closer, that patch of mercury, that mirror where the sun was shining. Now he lay paralyzed, invertebrate, a minimal life form reduced to an amebic, even vegetative state.

  Marianne’s face entered his field of vision once more. He was having trouble focusing, and the nurse’s features seemed to warp like a medusa, a jellyfish torn between tides. She was speaking, her tiny mouth with its pinched lips moving vehemently. The words took their time crawling into range of his hearing. Sometimes they got lost on the way, and all he heard were incomplete sentences.

  “You acted like a fool,” the young woman hissed. “If I hadn’t come by, you’d be dead by now! The bottles were empty; you hadn’t had any water or glucose for almost three days! You were in a coma! Your vital functions were subsiding one by one. I brought you back to life with an adrenaline injection straight to the heart.”

  An adrenaline injection? The little bitch! That was why the distancing powder had stopped working all of a sudden; that was why the dream had suddenly veered into nightmare. It was her! She was the one who’d derailed it all with her goddamned medications! He wanted to swear at her, scream insults, but his mouth remained closed. Anger crackled in his skull with no way out.

  “I saved your life,” she stressed. “Without me, you’d be dead. You were sinking into a coma. Do you even understand what I’m telling you right now?”

  She was shouting, she seemed about to grab him by the shoulders and shake him with all her strength. Her eyes were blazing, with anger or—? She wouldn’t be crying, would she? That damned idiot! He wished he still had arms to slap her till her head came off. She kept talking, faster and faster.

  “You need to be hospitalized for a scan,” she said. “A blood vessel probably burst somewhere in your brain, paralyzing your motor center. I noticed you lack all tactile sensation. Or maybe it’s nerve degeneration … I can’t do anything here, and if I take you to the clinic they’ll bombard me with questions. I’m your program manager, and this ‘trip’ wasn’t on the books; you never filed a flight plan. You went under alone, illegally, without assistance, hooked up to contraband equipment that wasn’t even up to safety standards! If anyone found out, you could be arrested for unlawful dreaming! We’d both be screwed! Oh, I don’t know what’s keeping me from just …”

  She paced the room furiously, now and then swiping at her damp eyes with the sleeve of her lab coat.

  “What were you trying to prove?” she stammered. “That you could go deeper than everyone else? That you could bring back a treasure no one had ever seen before? You’re so stupid! Putting your life at risk for such trifles!”

  She came to the bed, leaned over David to speak with him eye to eye. Their faces were almost touching when she murmured, “And now what am I going to do with you? You’re illegally ill. If I have you hospitalized, they’ll put you in a penal clinic. You’ve put me in an impossible situation. I should’ve let you drown. When I think that I saved your life, and you’re probably not even grateful!”

  David closed his eyes. He could at least do that much. Marianne wore him out. What did she think? That he was going to cry his eyes out to thank her for intervening? She’d ruined everything! Ten minutes from the end of the job, she’d just had to come with her adrenaline injection, switching the dream right onto the nightmare track, and everything had gone runaway from there. He’d been ejected right in the middle of the action, abandoning Nadia, Zenios, and Jorgo in a tight spot. He’d jumped ship without seeing to the passengers. He had only to shut his eyes to see Nadia’s tensed faced lifted toward him. There was hatred and despair in the young thief’s face, a kind of scandalized terror. What had she said? You can’t leave us like this! Something like that. Then she’d shouted: Bastard! Bastard! It was the first time she’d ever insulted him. Maybe she’d thought he was fleeing in fear, ejecting himself out of cowardice, when everything he’d done could be chalked up to the adrenaline.

  “You were almost dead,” Marianne gasped, close to him. “Do you hear me? I brought you back, I did. I called you several times, you didn’t pick up. I got a bad feeling. I wouldn’t have bothered for anyone else, I’d have tipped off the home monitoring service, but it was you … Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

  He kept his
eyes closed so she wouldn’t see the hatred blazing deep in his pupils; he would spare her that much, at least. Finally, she got up. “I won’t say anything,” she murmured. “Not right away, at least. We’ll see if things improve. I’ll steal some medication. I’ll look after you as best I can. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

  The minute she stepped out the door, he sank into unconsciousness. He slept a long time, an idiot sleep that felt like going down a long, dark, dreamless tunnel. Whenever he came to, he would find Marianne at his bedside. First she washed him like a baby, and he was happy not to feel her skinny hands on his naked body; he would’ve felt like a chicken was crossing his belly. Then she would make the bed, tuck him in, turning him into a respectable patient. She accompanied all these tasks with repetitive monologues that always came back to the incredible intuition that had compelled her to slip into David’s house with her oneiric assistant’s master key. She dwelt in detail on the sight he’d been: pale, waxen, thinned by fasting, breathing slowed to a harsh whisper, heart beating only irregularly … She’d thought him dead indeed and had been this close to fleeing, then she’d recovered her composure and grabbed her kit. First an injection, a shot right to the heart to kick-start the weakened muscle. The machine had slowly groaned to life, then the heartbeats had gotten faster.

  “And you came back,” she concluded gently. “I spoke to you, encouraged you, and you opened your eyes. I was so happy I cried.”

  What an idiot, David thought, whom weakness had exempted from hypocrisy. Between two monologues, Marianne would vanish into the kitchen to whip up some soup she would then try to make her patient swallow through a straw. When he drooled, she would wipe his chin and chide him gently.

  This ordeal lasted almost three days, and then she had to go away to assist another dreamer on a deep dive, someone famous whose works sold well … and for high prices. Even then, she found a way to slip away and see David to make sure all was well. “Do you realize what you’re putting me through?” she said with a sad smile. “I’m navigating in illegal waters here. If there’s the slightest hitch with the guy I’m supposed to be assisting, they’ll toss me in prison for the rest of my days, and then what would become of you, eh? My poor dear …”

  She tended to elaborate on this theme with increasing frequency. She would describe the artists’ hospice in the former marble depot where Soler Mahus had been transferred as soon as he’d stopped producing marketable works. She spoke of the open dormitory and the beds with their straps that David knew well, the far-from-charitable nurses who often left patients to marinate in their own urine. Wasn’t he lucky, to be pampered in his own home, his pillows fluffed daily, getting shaved and powdered?

  “Now, now,” she said, placing a quick kiss on his brow, “you know you have nothing to worry about. Marianne’s watching over you, even if it gets her in trouble.”

  And off she would go, leaping into a taxi to rejoin the diver she’d abandoned mid-trance. True, she had a lot to lose if her little stunt got found out, but David couldn’t have cared less … or so he told himself.

  When she was off duty, she virtually moved into the apartment, washing her underwear in the bathroom, moving from room to room in a nightgown or pink pajamas. She would hum, yawn, stretch out her skinny arms. She had taken up the detestable habit of monologuing out loud, involving David in moronic discussions wherein she’d answer for him on the pretext that she knew exactly what he was thinking. It had become one of her refrains: “Oh, I know what you’re thinking, you think that—”

  In the afternoon, her chores polished off, she’d sit down beside David and read to him. At first she’d sat obediently at his bedside, on a straw-bottomed chair, and then she’d planted her butt on the edge of the mattress. Now she lay completely on the bed, a foot away from him, and he foresaw with horror the day she decided to lift the covers and slide in beside him. In such moments of extreme disgust, he was grateful for the debility that deprived him of all tactile sensation. He could tell that in a week or two, she’d stop using the guest room and come sleep with him, like a mistress … or a wife. It was inevitable.

  She would come and lie down after selecting from the library shelves a little spy novel wrapped in tissue paper. She’d start reading, puffing out her cheeks sometimes, interrupting her reading to comment on the inanity of the plot. How could anyone take pleasure in this kind of reading? Wouldn’t he prefer a nice historical novel? One of those very French stories that instructed you in the ways and mores of the past and improved you even as they entertained? David wished he were deaf, so as to be spared this unbearable chatter. Besides, she couldn’t read worth a damn. She rattled off her sentences like a man cutting kindling, in a sharp voice that soon turned oppressive.

  Luckily, David slept a great deal, and this anesthetized awareness freed him from the torture of living with Marianne. Alas, he dreamed no more. His sleep consisted merely of a suspension of existence not far removed from nothingness. Holes he fell into, a sheer drop, like a dead body wrapped in a bag and tossed off a cliff.

  This ersatz couplehood drove him crazy. He even began to suspect Marianne of prolonging his condition to keep him at her mercy, like a pet entirely submissive to its master. He ground his teeth when she called him “my illegal patient,” and when she showed up triumphantly bearing the basin of warm water and pink sponge for his wash. Trapped, he was trapped. The bed had been turned into a raft; around it, an enormous venomous medusa circled ever closer. He had to settle for drifting and waiting while trying not to think too much about what would happen next: if he never got the use of his body back, if Marianne grew tired one day of playing nursemaid, if … he blamed himself a thousand times over, cursed himself, accused himself of not knowing what he was doing. Why, instead of insisting on bringing back objects, hadn’t he ever, JUST ONCE, tried to grab Nadia bodily and bring her back with him to the other side of the mirror? Yes, if he’d held her tight against him instead of grabbing those stupid bags of gold, wouldn’t he have been able to bring her back to the surface? He spent whole hours obsessing over this harebrained hypothesis. He pictured Nadia surging up from the deep, toppling into reality in the shape of an anthropomorphic ectoplasm. Yes, he would’ve suddenly woken up next to an extremely fragile statue. A statue of a woman with extraordinarily soft skin, a ghost so smooth, so transparent, that he wouldn’t have dared lay a finger on her. He would’ve left her there, as if on a pedestal, white and luminous like a consecrated host shot through with light. He would’ve gazed upon her from morning till night without touching her, to avoid hastening her wilt. He wouldn’t have sold her, just kept her for himself, selfishly, to revel in the sight of her. He would’ve been the first dreamer to produce a realist sculpture, a work that represented something. A body … Nadia’s body. A body carved from a gigantic petal, housing not a single organ. Immaterial flesh that nothing weighed down. Yes, he would’ve preserved her here, in the dark; she would’ve been his sleeper, eyes forever closed. She wouldn’t have withered away for a very, very long time.

  But no, that was stupid! Dreams only ever produced figurative objects, abstract eclosions … scrambled eggs, as the fat museum watchman so poetically put it. Besides, why bring back Nadia? Why inflict on her the withering that reality would bring? Once withered, she’d have to be handed over to the garbagemen, he’d have to make his peace with knowing she was interred deep in a freezer. No, she was better off where she was this very moment, deep in the dream, alive … lifting her head toward him and shouting: Bastard! You can’t leave us like this!

  Immobility weighed on him. Suddenly, as though he’d spent his life shriveled deep into a chair, he felt like walking, running. Maybe Marianne was the one who induced in him this desire for flight? Marianne, who shared his nights now, dressed in a sober flannel shirt. She came in smiling, with an apple and a book.

  “It’s easier to watch over you here,” she’d explain. “The guest room is too far away, something might happen. I feel better when I’m here … and so
do you, right? No shame in admitting it, you know.”

  She would lift the covers and slide under the sheets, taking care that her shirt didn’t ride up her thighs, so shyly there might’ve been something touching about it, had her presence not been so unbearable. For a few nights now, she’d undertaken to educate David and introduce him to the pleasures of “quality reading.” In the voice of a schoolmistress, she’d read him pages from an enormous historical novel recounting the adventures of the Maid of Orleans. From time to time, she’d stop, lift her head, smile vapidly and say, “Good, eh?” If he could’ve, he would’ve spit in her face.

  He loathed finding her there beside him on the pillow when he opened his eyes. Over the course of the night she would sprawl out, embarking on an assault of the mattress. It was not unusual for her to fling an arm and a leg across David, as if to make him hers. More and more often, he found himself succumbing to the illusion that she’d been there for years … and would never leave. He even began to envy the solitude of the hospice at the marble depot. At such times he would yearn for the tiny enclaves demarcated by the rough curtains, the flimsy beds with their straps, the neglected patients, Soler Mahus, who was ending, in utter public indifference, a life wholly consecrated to the art of dreams. When would David join him? Most likely the day Marianne was caught red-handed, absent without leave, for she neglected other divers ever more often to see exclusively to him, her patient.

  “Phew!” she’d declare, barreling breathlessly into the apartment. “That big lummox has gone under for a good week! We’ll have some time to ourselves at last.” She, who once spoke so little, never stopped talking now.

  But the hardest pill to swallow was still how she would ritually punctuate her soliloquies with the words: “It’s nice, just us, isn’t it?” To escape her diarrhea of the mouth, David tried to cut himself off, but his brain did not respond well to requests. With each new attempt, David felt like he was piloting a bomber bashed up by AA guns. A bomber losing altitude, its cockpit filling with smoke … Had he contracted the notorious porcelain disease Soler Mahus had spoken of? Was the world down below fossilizing inside the hemisphere of his brain? That was a diver’s number one fear. Too rapid an ascent was known to provoke a kind of cerebral hernia that dream characters suddenly found themselves prisoners of; it was said that when these curious porcelain tumors were dissected, tiny, exquisitely chiseled figurines were found inside—an entire microscopic world that fit inside a matchbox. Surgeons appointed to autopsies collected these malign excrescences, which, like geodes or Kinder Surprise eggs, contained every character the dreamer had ever imagined. Quite a market had developed for such items; there were even swap meets. Was that how Nadia would wind up, on a shelf in some surgeon’s library, reduced to the status of an amusing curiosity showed off to friends over for dinner?