by Lloyd Kropp
Peter laughed. “You can breathe underwater.”
“You mean you could just stay down for days and days and never come up?”
“No, the air gives out after a few hours.”
“But how do those things hold enough air for all that breathing?” she persisted, still not convinced.
“The air is compressed. That is to say, the important part of it that we breathe is compressed. It’s called oxygen.”
“Compressed?” said Pao.
“Yes, it’s, well, compressed.” He made a gesture with his two hands.
“A lot of air is pushed together into a small space,” said Tabor. He smiled and put his arm around her shoulder. “Air is thin and you can put a lot of it in a small space if you push hard enough.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Pao, reddening at Peter’s laughter. “How could anyone push all that air into these funny tubes?”
“A machine does it,” said Peter, hoping that she would not ask how the machine worked, or who made such machines.
She was silent for a while. “I guess I don’t know anything about machines,” she said finally. “Tabor will have to teach me about machines.”
“Tabor will teach you nothing about machines,” said Tabor. “Tabor hates machines, and besides he is no longer your teacher.”
“But teaching is your profession,” said Pao. “You cannot help being a teacher.”
“Teaching is my profession?”
“Teaching and loving,” she said. “You teach everyone and you love everyone. Those are the two things that come naturally to you.”
Tabor looked down at her, but he said nothing.
“That’s a fine compliment,” said Peter after a moment. “I was always such a bad teacher and such a bad lover.”
“How completely you’ve changed,” said Pao. She put her hands around his shoulders in back of his neck, and drew him against her.
“Ugh,” she said. “How can one make love to a metal monster?”
“Aqualungs are not for loving,” he said. “They’re for swimming.”
“Then swim,” said Pao. “Show us how it works.”
“Why don’t you explore the underside of The Drift?” said Tabor. “None of us has ever really seen it very clearly.”
“Give me fifteen minutes,” said Peter. “If I don’t come up be sure to call the coast guard.”
“Wait!” said Pao.
“What is it?”
“I—I don’t know. Be careful. Don’t let that metal thing drag you down. Don’t let anything hurt you.” She kissed him.
Peter balanced on the edge of the listing boat, setting himself for the plunge into cool water.
“We’ll be waiting right here,” said Pao.
Then Peter remembered their swim in the netted pool. “Why don’t you come with me? You could stay under for a minute or so.”
“Not in the thick weeds. No. You go alone this time. We’ll be waiting right here.”
An enormous splash and then he felt himself sinking in the green water, while the bubbles from his aqualung gurgled upward through the thick weeds.
At first he could see next to nothing; the weeds caressed him, parted silently where he moved forward, and obscured everything beyond a hand’s reach. Then, quite suddenly, he found himself in a kind of wavering corridor of green that branched off in several directions. Then the lane where he traveled began to close and he felt a moment of panic, as if somehow the wall of weeds, moving in the unpredictable and subtle currents, would crush him.
For a while he traveled again in the green blindness until he came all at once into an open space. For a hundred yards or so all around him the weeds thinned into drifting strands and chains, and in the wavering light from above he could see parts of the underside of The Drift quite clearly. It was an amazing sight. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of ancient ships, almost completely enveloped in the mass of weeds near the surface, lay submerged at odd angles. Most of them had lost all detail in the overgrowth of vegetation and appeared only as long shapes that heaved slightly in the current. He saw now that The Drift was like an iceberg: a small piece showing above water and a vast pyramidal structure widening below the surface.
He swam in large circles, trying to see other parts of The Drift, but soon the weeds had moved inward in large drifting islands, and his vision was partly obscured. Then the water below him suddenly cleared, and again he could see for hundreds of feet. The endlessness of the ocean filled him with a kind of fearful rapture. He thought again of Pao and the netted pool. But now there was no net to guard him against that infinity, that frightening expanse of mystery and imagination.
Three hundred feet below him hovered the remains of a twelfth-century warship. Its forecastle and sterncastle were plainly visible. What, he wondered, was holding it up so far beneath the weeds? It was like a miracle, a ghost risen from its graveyard thousands of feet below.
At that moment he saw the shark.
Somehow he was sure it was the same shark he had seen in the netted pool. A bleary smudge of gray far below him, it nosed back and forth, sometimes changing directions very suddenly like a caged tiger. He had a strange feeling now that he had lived through all this before. It was as if the time he had dipped his face into the water and seen the shark from his dinghy, the time he had swum with Pao, and now were all the same moment, repeated in different settings. The shark was an image, a hieroglyph in some forgotten language. And on each occasion the image of the moment had drawn him deeper into the water and into the secret resources of his own mind.
Slowly the shark moved upward. It seemed aware of him now. Its turnings and gyrations always brought it closer to where he treaded water, breathing through the aqualung, which sent bursts of silver bubbles oscillating, spiraling toward the surface, a surface that was now no more than a diffused lambency far above him. He could sense the great power, the great freedom and grace of the thing that was coming toward him. It was less than two hundred feet below him now. He could see its lidless eyes staring at him.
Peter began to breathe very deeply. Inside him he felt a great roaring silence, a rapture, a sense of the immortality of the sea that moved like an invisible spirit, a dark wind, everywhere around him. He waited a minute or two longer, treading water and listening to the bubbles, and then he swam down to meet the shark.
He moved his feet in a slow undulating rhythm and parted the water in front of him with his hands. It seemed to him that he was very deep now. The water was darker and the glimmering of light from far above was a shifting of yellowish green, an elusive thing. Then he wondered where the shark was. He turned around in the space of water where he was suspended, but there was nothing but a great pressure against his body, a silence, a numbing coldness. Dimly he realized that he was breathing too often and too deeply.
Then an enormous gray shape brushed against him, turning him over in the water. It wheeled around and began circling him. The great pointed nose, the rows of teeth in the moon-shaped mouth, the gill slits, the forked tail, the malevolent eyes—he saw them all and he felt curious, strangely unafraid. Such an enormous and evil thing, he thought. Evil, and yet it would not attack him, but only circled and waited. Evil and yet not evil. Like a ghost of something he had always feared which suddenly, in a strange new light, had become more an object of fascination than fear.
The shark was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Like a giant wave, like the roaring locomotives he had dreamed about and feared as a boy, like a great ship sailing in the space between the stars, like a mythical beast or a prehistoric sail-backed reptile swimming in the ocean. A great universal force that seemed, with its brute beauty, its danger, and its infinite strength, to lie behind everything, behind all the pleasure and pain of the world, behind all that he had ever hoped or dreamed. How beautiful, he thought. And how incredibly grotesque.
“Have you ever been eaten alive?” Pao had once asked him. Perhaps that was what was happening. His whole life was being eaten, devour
ed, ingested, and changed into something that he had never clearly imagined before. Now the shark was moving toward him, its forked tail swinging back and forth, and it seemed that the water became grainy and disconnected. Something was roaring in his ears. He could see nothing but the face of the shark very near his own, the gray face with its mouth half open. With trembling hands he reached out and touched the jaw and the gill of the great beast, and as he did so it turned and plunged toward the bottom of the sea at such a speed that in a moment’s time it was only a gray smear below him. And for a long moment after it had disappeared he could feel the rubbery flesh in his hands, the jaw of the great shark.
He knew that it was time now for him to go back to the world above, but he had no desire to do so. He felt that he was slowly dying, sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Strange lights were bursting everywhere in his mind and in the grainy water, and soon he was aware of nothing but the sound of bubbles rising a thousand miles to the surface.
Fifteen
NIGHTSONGS
For a long time it seemed that he was drifting in the deep water. The current rolled his body over and over, and sometimes the fish would nibble curiously at him. One day a pair of half-hungry sharks tore at him in a desultory way, and another time a dolphin nosed him to the surface, and rolled him over and over. By the end of September the current had carried him to Bermuda.
His head was missing now as well as one of his arms and most of both legs. His swollen body had assumed an altogether inhuman shape, a blue and red fruit with dark creases where shreds of the rubber diving suit still circled his body.
“Mummy,” said the little girl in the white bathing suit. “Come see what I found.”
“What is it, Rachel honey?” The mother lay under a large green umbrella.
“Big rubber fish,” said the little girl. She made a big circle with her small arms to emphasize the “big.”
“Later, honey,” said her mother. “Mummy was up late last night and she’s going to sleep for a while.”
“It’s so blue, Mummy,” the little girl persisted. “Like sky.”
“Blue?” The word made her mother vaguely uneasy. “What is it, honey? A rubber swan or something like that?”
“Uh-uh. S’like a fish. Only it’s all big and s’got pretty colors.”
Her mother sat up and looked at her. “Is it something dead, honey? Don’t play with dead things.”
“Dead?” The idea had not occurred to her. “It smells funny,” she offered.
Rachel went back down the beach to her new toy. It lolled back and forth very gently in the foam. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in all the four years of her life, and the sight of it filled her with delight and wonder. It was like a fish, like a whale, like a tree trunk, like a funny colored balloon that you blow up and squeeze into shapes with your fingers.
Then a wave came and the blue and red shape turned over and Rachel saw an arm with gray fingers, and she thought that perhaps most of all it reminded her of a person. And then she imagined that at one time it really had been a person, and that the sea had changed it, given it the colors and the shapes that belonged to the sea, and that this was only the end of a long trip that had begun on the other side of the water where the sun was.
She reached down and touched the shoulder of the thing she had found in the water. It was very pleasant to touch, like all things that came from the water: smooth stones, soft driftwood, spongy weeds, the water itself that went out everywhere as far as she could see. And the colors were so pretty. They made her think of big, bright flowers she had once seen growing somewhere in a tree stump.
But suddenly Rachel was terrified. Her mother was standing behind her screaming, clutching at her, trying to drag her across the sand, away from the bright thing that lay on the beach.
“Sutherland! Are you all right?”
It was Pao’s voice. The sound wavered in his ears as they lifted him out of the water.
“Sutherland! Are you all right?”
Tabor laid him on the deck and removed the breathing tube from his mouth. “He went down too far,” said Tabor. “The pressure and the drop in temperature were too much for him.”
“Is he going to be sick?” said Pao.
“Yes. Very.”
“But is he going to be all right?”
“I think so. He’s got the bends, but he doesn’t look too bad.”
Peter opened his eyes. Tabor’s face wavered in front of him.
He blinked several times until the image was clear. “How long—how long was I down there?” His voice was a thin whisper.
“Only a little while,” said Pao. She took his hand and pressed it between hers. “Are you all right? You look so blue.”
Blue, he thought. Such a pretty color. But the word made him uneasy. He had dreamed something about blue that he could not remember.
“I don’t know. I think so. I saw a shark.”
“Sharks won’t hurt you,” said Pao.
“Sharks will tear your legs off if they have a mind to,” said Tabor. “It depends on what you do and how hungry they are. Why didn’t you come up when you saw him?”
“Sharks won’t hurt you,” said Pao. “But I was worried because you were gone so long. I didn’t really think you could stay under with your metal tubes. I thought—I thought you were dead.”
“I’m all right,” said Peter. But he could not sit up by himself, and he felt very sick and very cold. His fingers and his feet felt numb and the bones behind his ears ached. For a moment he wanted to throw up.
“I went down too far,” he said. “And when it was time, I didn’t want to come up at all. And then for a second I must have passed out, and then I remember coming up, trying to stay beneath my bubbles, but I came up too fast.”
“Nitrogen narcosis,” said Tabor. “You’re lucky to be alive at all. I never should have let you go down there by yourself.”
Pao and Tabor helped him to his feet, and together they started back toward The Mary Strattford.
“For God’s sake, tell us what happened,” said Tabor. “Tell us about the shark.”
The warm boards of the boats felt good beneath him as he walked, dripping wet, from ship to ship. Slowly his head began to clear and the nausea began to ease. “I’m not sure what I can say about it,” said Peter. “Everything was strange. Sort of, well, rapturous. The shark was swimming toward me, so I swam down to meet him. I had a feeling he wouldn’t hurt me. I had the feeling that nothing could hurt me, or that if something did, it wouldn’t matter. It was as if—” But he could not find the words.
“It was as if the shark were not really a fish, but something else,” said Tabor. But Tabor did not look happy.
“Yes,” said Peter. “As if it were something else.” For a few moments he thought about the shark, trying to remember why he had gone down to meet it, why he had reached out to touch it. It seemed now to have happened a long time ago. “Or as if it were a person in disguise,” he said. “A person who wanted me to go somewhere. No, that’s not quite it. The shark seemed to be a representation, an emblem of something. Does that make sense?”
“Finally,” said Pao.
“Finally what?” said Peter.
“Finally you are learning what the children know. You’re learning about shadowgames.”
Tabor looked at her in surprise. “Shadowgames!” he said. “You don’t seem to realize that he might have been killed. The shark might have torn him apart!”
When he reached The Mary Strattford he was still very weak, and the sight and smell of food suddenly made him violently ill. Bright helped him into the kitchen where he threw up into a large washbasin and then lay down on a mattress in the corner where she napped sometimes during the day. An hour later he felt much better.
When the meal in the other room was over, Pao came into the kitchen and bent over him. There were tears in her eyes. “If anything had happened to you I would have died,” she said. “I would never have danced again for
anyone.”
He smiled weakly and reached up to touch her. His hand felt cold and damp against her cheek. He trembled. “I feel better,” he said.
“Would you like something to eat?”
“Yes.”
She brought him a small bowl of yellow vegetables and a piece of fish, something that Reuben had caught that morning. They talked quietly for a while, holding hands, listening to the soporific murmur of the water against the hull of the boat that lay beneath The Mary Strattford.
“Let’s go to The Bridge,” said Pao. “All the clans will be there this evening for the Nightsongs.”
“Will you sing tonight?”
“No,” she said. “I told everyone that I would not be singing tonight and that I—that we would not be staying very long.”
She touched his arm and looked down at her own feet.
Musicians from all the clans had gathered on The Bridge that evening to play their music. First, one group would sing or play, and then another would take its place when the first had exhausted its repertoire. When the sun set, a dark-haired Madrid girl came with a dozen torches, and there was music that went on for hours into the night, music that moved and changed like the flickering of diamondlight in the black eyes of the singers. Soon many torches warmed and illuminated the cheeks and shoulders of everyone who gathered within their circle of light. He sat with Pao and they held hands and listened to the music.
Many of the songs were composed by a slender, hawk-faced young man, a Bluewater, who looked something like Raven. He sang in a reedy voice that reminded him of a clarinet. His songs were based on modes that never involved more than four or five notes, and he accompanied himself with a mandolin-like instrument upon which he plucked a bass continuo pattern of parallel fifths and sixths. Peter noticed that many of the other young singers had learned his songs or had written others that were imitative. Other songs that sounded like slow English ballads were sung by small groups of singers, sometimes in two or three part harmony. Still others were quick songs, like sailors’ jigs or medieval dances, sung by two or three people and accompanied by drums made of small wooden kegs held between the knees. Others were instrumentals, complicated pieces that involved a slow counterpoint between two guitars and a mandolin or two lutes and a guitar. Sometimes they imitated classical fugue or canon forms. Others were songs that everyone seemed to know, songs that everyone sang in unison.