Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  O Hera, Poseidon, Anubis, Thor: heal me. Inject me with Venus and Mars, Herr Doktor Medicine Man. Lay the god pill on my tongue. Yes, the fever was good. It brought back the names of the gods, and much more. Fever made him hot, a hothouse where memory bloomed, and memory was his purpose. “What do you remember?” his strange little Latin-namesake had asked that very first night in Aix. “What do you remember?”

  Not much, then. Just enough to get their feet wet: bad joke. Faint memories, like the stories the black fisherman had told him about fire on the water.

  Now he remembered much more. He remembered all the words to “Mack the Knife.” In German. Not that he, component number three, knew German. But he had known it long ago. He had understood, perhaps even spoken it. Mother knew German. Fritz knew German. And Daddy had spoken it too, with a funny accent.

  Daddy. Daddy brought him to memory number one, the memory stirred by the sight of the gaudy tropical fish on the postage stamp, the antediluvian memory, hidden in the densest undergrowth in the farthest corner of the hothouse. The cast: Happy, Nurse Betty, Daddy, Fritz. The events: first, a boat ride on baby blue water; fingers trailing in its warmth, cutting tiny bubbling wakes of white froth, indescribably beautiful, until Nurse Betty slapped his hand, not hard, and said be careful or you’ll fall out and drown. Second: a day at the beach with Nurse Betty. A hot day, with iced coconut milk in a paper cup, and later Nurse Betty asleep under a tree, and Daddy and Fritz gone.

  Third event: A walk in the woods. Alone. Piney woods and mushy ground under his feet. Something gleamed through the trees. A pond. He stood on its rim. Things floated in the still water. Moldy things. A wooden crate. The brass-studded top of a trunk, the brass dull green. Something white as a slug in a rotting life jacket.

  The little boy stood by the pond. He looked at the floating things. After a while he noticed two ropes, each tied around a tree near the pond. The ropes led to the water, disappeared under it. Bubbles rose up beside them, two sets of bubbles. It was so quiet the boy could hear them popping on the surface. Once he thought he heard Nurse Betty calling through the woods: “Happy? Happy?” He didn’t answer. He wasn’t fond of Nurse Betty. Her skin was leathery, not soft like Mama’s, and although she had smacked him lightly on the boat ride, that was only because Daddy had been there. She smacked harder when they were alone.

  The boy watched the bubbles rising, sometimes in long strings, sometimes in fat ones and twos that made miniature splashes when they popped. Two sets of bubbles. Then, quite suddenly, there was only one.

  The remaining bubbles came faster. They zigzagged across the pond. One rope stiffened, the other slackened. The slack rope floated in loose spirals to the top. The other end hung a foot or so under the water, torn and frayed. Then the second rope slackened too and something big came surging up from the depths. It erupted through the surface in a tumult of white water, driving waves across the pond. The moldy things—the crate, the trunk lid, the white slug in the lifejacket—bobbed up and down.

  It was a monster, a sea monster. Lusca was its name: the fisherman had told him. It had one eye, but huge, bigger than the boy’s entire head. Glistening black coils wound up from its back. The monster held them in its mouth. It looked wildly around, saw the frayed rope, grabbed it, then let go and looked around again.

  And saw the boy. The sun glared off its giant eye. The boy tried to run, couldn’t move; tried to cry out, couldn’t utter. He was mute. He was paralyzed. He could only see and hear. He saw the monster spit out its coils. He heard the monster speak.

  “Geh veg.”

  The monster had a loud and terrible voice, but the boy remained mute and paralyzed.

  “Um himmels Willen, geh veg Kind.”

  The boy stood rooted. The monster sucked in its coils, but spat them out again. The monster screamed. “Du Lieber Gott! Keine Luft.”

  Now the boy screamed too. The monster churned the water white. Then it plunged head first under the surface. The monster had glistening black feet, webbed and enormous. The boy ran.

  He ran through the woods, stumbling, panting, falling, crying. Far away Nurse Betty was calling. “Happy? Happy? Happy?” The boy tried to answer, but could form no words. He could only stumble, pant, fall, cry.

  “Happy? Happy?”

  Antediluvian memories.

  33

  Three days before the appeal deadline, the last guests—a hard-drinking couple from Atlanta and some divers from Montreal—left Zombie Bay. Matthias gave eight weeks’ pay to everyone on the staff, leaving him with nine-hundred-and-seventy dollars in the bank, and let all but Moxie go. A few went to Nassau, a few to Freeport, most just returned to their homes in Blufftown and Conchtown. Matthias understood what he should have known all along: they hadn’t been counting on him.

  Krio had job offers in Barbados and St. Vincent. He packed his knives. Matthias drove him to the airport.

  “Smoke?” said Krio, offering him a joint as the Jeep bounced along.

  Matthias shook his head. “Diving today.”

  Krio nodded, puffed away. He didn’t speak again until they shook hands at the foot of the stairs leading to the plane. “Be all right,” he said. “I and I.” Krio had faith.

  But Matthias didn’t believe in Ras Tafari or any other benign superbeing. Three days left, no money for an appeal, and despite what Ravoukian had said, no grounds. Back at Zombie Bay, he locked and shuttered all the cottages. At the dock, Moxie scrubbed the boats. It was so quiet Matthias could hear the water gurgling from his garden hose. He looked into the near future, and saw new owners unlocking the cottages, hiring most of the same people, spending too much on brochures, welcoming the first guests with a little too much intensity. Fuck them, he thought, and started toward the equipment shed. He was almost running by the time he got there.

  Matthias laid out what he would need: a backpack with new twin aluminum eighties, each topped up to 3300 p.s.i., each with a separate regulator; another set of eighties with a single regulator for decompression; BC; three-eighths-inch-thick full wet suit, jetfins, mask, snorkel, fifteen-pound weightbelt; two waterproof torches, guaranteed to a depth of 250 feet; plasticized decompression tables; five hundred feet of neutrally buoyant eighth-inch nylon line on a non-jamming reel; depth gauge, dive watch, compass. He was adhering to every rule of cave diving except the first: never dive alone. Moxie was a good diver, but he had no experience in caves and Matthias didn’t have the right to make him start learning now. That was the morally defensible reason. The other reason was that Matthias preferred and had always preferred to dive alone.

  He packed the equipment in the Jeep and drove along the narrow track that rounded the old weed-cracked shuffleboard court and ended in the woods near the blue hole. The sun shone, making the blue hole glow through the trees. Matthias carried in his gear and began donning it.

  He made two dives. On the first, he descended to the top of the red layer at 50 feet and laid the spare tanks in a niche in the limestone wall. On the second, with the other tanks on his back but free diving to save air, he dove down to 122 feet, switching on a torch when he hit the blackness of the salt water, and glided into the sloping cave to the pile of marble blocks at the end. There, before the manhole-sized hole in the wall, he put one of the regulators in his mouth, purged it and started breathing. He clicked the red dot on the bezel of his watch into place over the minute hand. Then he tied the end of the nylon line around a cylindrical outcrop of limestone near the entrance to the tunnel and pulled himself inside. His tank scraped the rock as he went through, but after a few feet the tunnel widened and he began moving freely. Clipped to his weightbelt, the reel of line silently unwound. There was nothing to hear but his bubbles flowing out of the regulator. Holding the light, Matthias walked on the fingers of one hand until he was sure there was no silt to stir up on the tunnel floor, silt which could quickly reduce visibility to zero; then he shone his light at the ceiling. No silt lined it either, waiting to rain down at the slightest disturbance
. All he saw were his own bubbles, clinging to the gray limestone ceiling like tiny flattened balloons. They weren’t moving: slack tide. It would be flowing soon, at his back on the way out. On the floor Matthias noticed more debris—broken china, rusty nails, a three-tined fork—but he had no time to examine it. He flutter-kicked into the tunnel.

  Cave divers like to say that caves don’t kill divers, divers do. But Matthias had done enough of it, years ago in Florida sinks while assigned to the Navy Mine Defense Lab in Panama City, to know that wasn’t true. Caves had killed even the most careful and best-prepared divers. The official explanation was always equipment failure, dropped equipment, not enough equipment, wrong equipment, getting tangled in equipment, or: nitrogen narcosis, vertigo, getting lost, or: staying down too long, failure to understand the decompression tables, the bends, or: going down while thinking one was going up, going in instead of going out, or: getting separated from one’s buddy, searching too long for one’s buddy, getting caught in buddy’s death grip.

  But unofficially everyone knew that caves do kill people. In open water a diver can easily kill himself too, but at least when trouble strikes he can usually manage to start going up before he dies. In a cave he has to get out first. Cave diving was the most dangerous sport Matthias knew—more dangerous than boxing, hang-gliding, bullfighting, bear wrestling. The reward was the chance to experience the fun and esthetic pleasure of coal mining. Matthias kicked his way along the tunnel.

  It began doing the things cave tunnels do: it widened, narrowed, divided in two. Matthias checked his compass. One tunnel led in a northern direction, at least as far he could see with his torch. He paused before it, completely still, and felt no current on the skin of his face. The second tunnel led due east. That was the right direction; he also felt water flowing weakly around him, gentle as a summer breeze. The thought made him smile and he looked at his depth gauge: 155. Not deep enough for him to feel the effects of nitrogen narcosis; more accurately, he’d never been narced at that depth before. So why was he smiling? Matthias stopped smiling.

  He tied off at the dividing point, looping his line around a limestone spur sticking out from the wall. He checked his air: 2400 p.s.i. No sweat, as his commander in Panama City had liked to say. One-third in, one-third out, one-third in reserve. Matthias caught a handhold inside the eastern tunnel, pulled himself in. He felt the line at his waist, made sure it was unreeling. The nylon line beat Hansel’s bread crumbs, but not by much. His commander had used one too, but that hadn’t stopped him from disappearing one day in the maze under Warm Mineral Spring.

  Matthias swam along through the cone of yellow light. He found himself thinking about the day Danny was born. It was too Freudian, but he thought about it anyway. He was thinking about it so hard that he almost missed the cave that opened up on his left. He paused and shone his light inside. The beam touched the far wall, about thirty feet away. A few stalactites hung from the ceiling and dark silt covered the floor. Matthias fanned his free hand through it. The silt rose quickly, muddying the water. He stuck his hand in up to the shoulder without reaching the limestone floor. But his fingers brushed something. He grasped it and backed out into the tunnel.

  It was a military boot, well preserved. The silt would have protected it from the decaying effects of oxygen: it could have been there for a month, a year, a generation. The boot was laced to the top, knotted and bowed. He scraped it clean with his fingernails, then turned it over to see if there was anything written on the sole. There wasn’t, but little bones fell out of the boot top and drifted like feathers to the cave floor.

  Matthias tied the boot to his line and checked his air pressure: 1650. Then he moved on. His compass pointed east. His depth gauge read 80 feet. That surprised him. He was going up. The tunnel inclined to 70 feet before it dipped back to 80, then beyond—90, 100, 110. At 130 feet it leveled out, but quickly narrowed. Rubble covered the floor. It grew thicker, driving Matthias up to the ceiling. He squeezed along until he could move no farther. Rubble filled the tunnel, except for an opening at the top, just big enough to stick his fist in. He stuck his fist in, felt nothing, withdrew it. Was it the end of the tunnel or a rock fall? And if a rock fall, how extensive? Matthias pointed his light at the small opening. A baby nurse shark came swimming through, the first living thing Matthias had seen in the cave. It turned away from the light and swam back into the hole. Matthias considered the implications of its presence, then began pulling quickly at the topmost rocks. They came away, rolled down the rubble pile. Matthias slipped over the top and down the other side.

  There was no sign of the nurse shark. The tunnel stretched ahead, widening slightly in the beam of his light, continuing beyond. Matthias swam on, but less than a minute later he felt a slight tug at his waist, glanced down and saw that he had come to the end of his line. He checked the time: he’d been down for twenty-five minutes; pressure: 1100. Depth: 120. Air one-third gone, out of line, still going in. He found himself smiling again. This was cave diving. Nothing went right.

  Matthias unclipped the reel and jammed it between a cut-off stalagmite and the left-hand wall. Then, lineless as the silliest amateur whose body had never been recovered, he kicked on.

  He swam quickly now. The tunnel grew to the width of a suburban garage. Matthias kicked harder, not even taking the time to read his pressure gauge. Then all at once the walls, the ceiling, the floor all vanished. It was as though he had stepped off the edge of the Grand Canyon, except he wasn’t falling. He shone his light: behind him, and saw the opening of the tunnel he had come out of; overhead, and saw a great rocky dome arching high above. He swung the beam down. It barely reached the opposite wall. His eyes followed the yellow circle along the wall’s face. Down, down it went, at least one hundred feet, to the limit of the light’s range, and beyond. Matthias aimed the torch straight between his fins. It illuminated a long yellow column of clear water and no sign of the bottom. He was in an enormous underwater chamber, somewhere beneath Andros, or possibly beneath the seabed of Zombie Bay. His heart beat a little faster. That was bad. He took a few even breaths to slow it. Then he checked the depth—150—and started down.

  He spiraled slowly all the way, shining his light around him. He saw black caves in the walls, bare ledges, white limestone columns. But he didn’t see the bottom. He hit 200 feet, 220, 230. At that depth he was sucking up ten pounds of air with every breath. There was something he should be doing, but what was it? Something Freudian? Matthias smiled and almost lost his mouthpiece. He squeezed the rubber between his teeth, muttered, “Christ,” and kicked harder.

  Two-hundred-and-eighty feet. Two-ninety. Three-hundred. He paused. Three-hundred feet under and seven- or eight-hundred feet in was a good place for pausing. He smiled again. He was very witty today, down in the cave. A witty caveman. All at once, he wished there was a woman waiting for him when he came out. The wish was so strong it brought tears to his eyes. He was thinking of wiping them away when he remembered he was wearing a mask.

  Narced. Matthias grabbed his pressure gauge. That’s what he’d been trying to think of. Check the air: 100 p.s.i. As soon as he saw the number his air started to pull hard. He breathed the last of it and switched to the second tank. Three-hundred feet down. Seven or eight-hundred from the blue hole. “Step one,” his old commander had said, “get narced. Step two, get bent. Step three, get buried, if they ever find you.”

  Get out. Matthias swept his beam into the depths for one last look. And this time he saw the bottom: a cone-shaped pile of rubble, boulders and other objects he couldn’t identify. “Christ,” he said again, because he knew he should get out. But he went down instead.

  Matthias had never dived deeper than 310. Few people did. Fewer returned. Three-hundred feet was the theoretical limit for compressed air. After 300 there was more to worry about than nitrogen. Oxygen itself became poisonous. Matthias went down. He hit 320, 330, 340. He felt like a little bird flying in a big night sky, a hidden picture of grace. He did a long
slow somersault, wishing that the woman who wasn’t waiting by the edge of the blue hole could see it. He was thinking of doing another one for her when he noticed things on the rubble pile, metal things: twisted hunks of rent and rusting steel plate. He checked the depth several times, but the numbers wouldn’t register in his mind. He went deeper, and could now make out the rivets. A little deeper, and he saw a big cylinder wedged between two boulders. Deeper still, and he realized it was a submarine conning tower. He hovered above the top of the pile. He was about to check the depth when he saw something white in a silty depression. He couldn’t look at two things at once, so he forgot about the depth gauge. He picked up the white object. It was a human skull.

  Time passed. Christ, did it really? Matthias found himself staring into the empty sockets of the skull. How long had he been doing that? He dropped the skull. Get going. But he didn’t get going. He watched the skull waft down on the pile, saw it roll past a few other skulls and some bones and out of sight.

  Get going.

  Matthias took his first kick toward the surface. Then his torch imploded. His retinas retained a lingering yellow image of the rubble pile. It quickly faded to blackness. He could see nothing: not his compass, not his depth gauge, not his pressure gauge, not up, not down. Don’t panic. Panic equals death. Matthias didn’t panic. He breathed slowly, regularly. But that didn’t mean he remembered his second torch right away. And when he did remember it, he wasn’t sure where it was. He felt around his body, finally locating it on the back of his weightbelt. He spent some time unclipping it, finding the switch. He pressed it. The light shone in his face, blinding him. He turned it around, felt it slipping from his grasp, held on. He aimed the beam above his head and saw the rubble pile, not far above him. He was upside down. He reversed himself and kicked up.

  At 320 feet he glanced at his pressure gauge: 1900. He was on the last third, his reserve. He should have been out by now, but he was in, deep in. “Going to die, pal,” he said, or thought he said. Then he saw something in the east wall of the chamber: a big black cave mouth with a wide ledge sticking out in front. A suitcase lay on it, a few yards from the edge. Matthias swam over, grabbed it and started up, kicking, kicking. His heart was beating fast again, but there was nothing he could do about it. 300, 280, 250, 200. He was coming up too fast, but he didn’t look at his gauges or his watch. His gaze was on the west wall. Where was the opening? Hadn’t it been at 200? He rose above the 200-foot point. 175. Had he missed it? Would he go all the way to the dome and end up as one of those cave divers who tried to claw his way out? No one would ever know.