Besides, he wasn’t even sure he could still pull off a trick like that. Ever since he’d started living inside the dream, his powers had grown weaker. He was melting into the crowd. Becoming ordinary.
“How about we pull a job again?” Nadia would whine when they came together at night in the hollow of the sleeping bag. “Now that you can’t have nightmares anymore, maybe we could start working for real?”
She clung to her role, vaguely guessing that outside her narrow remit, she wasn’t much of anything.
[ 17 ]
Springtime in the Abyss
One fine morning, the flowers came up from the ground without warning. On the field of the empty lot, grass began to grow, stiff and close. Downtown, the smallest crack in the asphalt shot forth stalks of scrub still sticky with sap. Vegetation besieged the buildings, the statues. Vines covered the façade of the Museum of Modern Art, masking the windows with their hirsute cascades. Plants now hugged the vaults, festooning the sky and clouds with their villous sine waves.
“Did you do all that?” Nadia asked, yawning. “Redo the décor?”
David shook his head. For a while now, he’d been unable to accomplish these kinds of feats. He didn’t know where these upheavals were coming from either.
They left the hangar, forgetting to get dressed, and ventured naked into the middle of the brand-new meadow. It was good grass: lush, well-nourished, almost insolently healthy.
The flowers were beautiful, enormous, dandling their corollas. They gave off thick aromas and sticky juices. The colors almost hurt his eyes.
“It’s so pretty!” Nadia enthused. “Jorgo has to see this!”
She ran to fetch the corpse from the back of the garage and set it up on a chair in front of the door.
“It’s from the starfish,” she remarked. “When they rotted, they fertilized the soil, and—”
“No,” David demurred. “The seawater left too much salt in the soil. The ground should be sterile by now. This is something else.”
They walked through town without bothering to get dressed. No one was shocked by their nudity; they were all too concerned by the mystery of the garden that had sprung up from nowhere overnight. People everywhere were enraptured. These flowers, these colors … all this grass, so alive!
“It’s spring!” someone shouted. “Springtime in the deep!”
The cry became a chorus, and soon everyone began to cheer for David, believing him responsible for this new improvement. He smiled modestly, not daring to protest his innocence. It was the first time everyone seemed happy about his presence.
“Wonderful,” said the ladies.
“Invigorating!” decreed the men.
Children were running in every direction, scaling stalks, betting each other they could climb the giant ivy vines to the sky. Their parents had to grab them before they cleared the buildings.
“It smells nice,” Nadia sighed, taking David by the arm. “Sharp, and fresh …”
Only when they reached the museum esplanade did the young man understand where the garden was coming from.
“It’s my body,” he murmured, seizing Nadia by the shoulders. “The body I left up there—it’s dead.”
“What?” whimpered the young woman, still wearing a smile.
“It’s rotting,” David sighed. “My rotting body is fertilizing the plants. We’re growing from its compost. I—I’m dead.”
“But what about … us? I mean, here?”
“We’ll live on as parasites. We’ll feed off my corpse like a flower off a dead animal. We’ll start fading away when there’s nothing left in the bottom of the coffin but a pile of dry bones. That’s it—that must be it. I should’ve known.”
“But …” Nadia stammered, “will it take long?”
David shrugged. He’d never really grasped the temporal exchange rate between dream and reality. How many weeks would springtime in the deep last? How long did it take a corpse to shrivel away within the walls of a box buried in the earth?
Nadia pressed herself against him. She was shivering. Fear had given her rubbery skin a certain human velvetiness. David placed his fingers on it with pleasure. All around them, springtime wrapped the city snugly in a fibrous, aromatic cocoon.
“Are you sure you’re dead?” the young woman asked. “Is that the only explanation?”
David nodded. He knew he was right. Somewhere up there on the surface, a machine of muscle, bone, and guts had given out. The decomposition of organic matter had acted like fertilizer on the dream world. The world encysted in the diver’s dead brain had begun sucking out the powerful juices of this disintegration just like a rose thriving on the spoiled meat of a dead mole.
“It’s better this way,” David murmured against Nadia’s temple. “At least we’ll have a beautiful summer.”
“And after?” the young woman sobbed. “After that?”
David shrugged. After? What did that even mean? He didn’t even want to think about it. Moments were better. This way, they wouldn’t have time to get bored.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE TRANSLATOR
SERGE BRUSSOLO is one of France’s most singular, influential, and perennially bestselling authors. He is most acclaimed for novels that are hypbrids of science fiction and fantasy, set in a uniquely skewed reality. But he is also one of France’s most prolific authors, producing seminal works in numerous other genres, including historical fiction, thrillers, horror stories, crime novels, and young adult fiction. Remarkably, though many of his works have been adapted to the screen, The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome is his first book to be published in English.
EDWARD GAUVIN is a translator from the French. His work has won multiple prizes and has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Subtropics, World Literature Today, and Weird Fiction Review. The translator of more than two hundred graphic novels, Gauvin is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders.
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