The Devil and the Deep

by Ellen Datlow

  Despite the exertion, his heart rate slowed. Even before the threshold forty feet down, his lungs were already compressed to half their normal size. At sixty, they were reduced to a third. If he were acclimated enough to go that far, at three hundred feet his lungs would be no bigger than baseballs.

  Here, though, a couple miles out to sea, over a shelf of land jutting from the central Oregon coast, the bottom cut him off at a depth of seventy-six. Almost there, he tucked into a ball and flipped head over tail, to finish dropping flippers first. He touched down with a gentle bounce that stirred the silt, amid a sparse garden of kelp and seaweed that swayed in the current, and all was so very quiet, like awakening to a dream world of slow time and profound tranquility. The need to breathe remained on some far horizon. The pressure was a cocoon, a presence as welcoming as a hug.

  All this time he’d been lying to himself. Thinking he knew something about the ocean, and why—because he’d grown up on an island? Because he’d first stepped onto a surfboard when he was seven and had hardly stepped off since? That was how you fooled yourself into believing you truly understood the sea when all you’d ever done on a board was scratch the water’s surface.

  Above, the day was clear, bright and sunny. Down here, the sun still found him but was filtered to a murky twilight, as if the fog of morning and blue of evening had joined, to wrap around and welcome him home.

  It took slow moments to take shape: a mass off to his left, a ragged, edgeless hill rising from the sea floor. Danny moved toward it in fin-encumbered hops, a feeling maybe like walking on the moon. He hadn’t gotten close enough to satisfy his curiosity before his tether to the surface ran out of slack.

  The dumbest thing in the world would be to strip the lanyard from his ankle. He did it anyway, fearing if he didn’t get close enough for a look now, he might never find this spot again. He left the safety line behind, and was truly diving free.

  The mass was no longer edgeless, and no hill. A hill wouldn’t have two masts, jutting down from one side to dig into the sea floor. A hill wouldn’t have rectangular openings, nor broken windows, metal railings, cleats still wrapped with decaying rope. It was somebody’s lost sailing yacht, a fifty-footer at minimum, resting on its starboard side. The build was old school, lots of wood where most buyers would’ve been content with aluminum and fiberglass. Now it was an ecosystem, submerged long enough to have sagged into itself and crusted over with rot and life.

  The cold found him through his wetsuit and went for his marrow. Shipwrecks had always bothered him, even from the safety of pictures. Planes lost at sea, too, and sunken cars, and houses and timber groves in valleys flooded to make new lakes.

  It was more than the tragedies and calamities they told of. It was their status, things perfectly normal in the topside world, aliens now, lost and alone where they were never meant to be. They were a rebuttal: You’re lying to yourself, you know. It’s the hypoxia talking. You think you belong? This isn’t your element at all.

  Regardless, the wreck drew him, until he was close enough to touch it.

  Everything down here is so much better suited to belong than you. Here, all you are is a resource.

  Breathing? Soon. The pent-up need, he now understood, wasn’t driven by a lack of oxygen. The body had no sensors for that. An amazing oversight. Nobody would ever design an oxygen-powered machine that way on purpose.

  Down here, you’re food. All you have to do is wait.

  Instead, the clawing need to breathe came from a build-up of carbon dioxide, and you could hack that to a degree. He let a poof of stale air slip his lips and it bought him a little more time. He squatted and gripped the yacht’s tilted gunwale, to shove off it and launch his ascent … but to his surprise, it gave way with a muffled crunch and a cloud of debris, crumbs and shards of rotten wood drifting loose.

  It was what was inside that really gave him a jolt.

  The cross-section of wood appeared tunneled, the burrows full of soft, pale bodies— worms, they looked like, some as short and thin as matches, others the size of a finger, one as plump as a cigar.

  Danny vented more CO2, this time not meaning to, a sound of disgust burping loose. And he’d been down too long, his vision starting to close around the edges, with the height of a seven-story building left to swim. He pushed off the bottom and kicked toward the beckoning daylight.

  If your vision began turning to a haze they called the pink cloud … that was when you really had to worry. What came next was a blackout, and he feared it was moments away— the resetting of the clock to a final countdown. You could drift unconscious for a couple minutes, no harm done, your larynx closed like a valve to keep the water out. Up top, they would know before it opened again, if they were paying attention. You just had to trust your team, they’d realize you were in trouble, haul you up by your safety line …

  Oh. Right. Shit.

  He kicked harder.

  Which came first then—the movement out in front of him, or the movement he felt through him?

  Through, probably. Yeah, go with that. His insides felt stirred, quivering as if he’d hugged a vibrator. Right away he knew what it was, he’d felt the same thing from dolphins— echolocation, a ping of sonar developed over millions of years of evolution, so advanced it made the Navy’s best look like a toy.

  But this was no dolphin. If a dolphin was a whisper, what he’d felt was a bark.

  He lowered his gaze from the beacon of the sun and back to the deep blue haze. Twenty, thirty yards out, it was dimly visible, a darker bulk against the murk, a slick, bulbous head and a body stretching too far back into the gloom to make out. With his vision closing down, Danny could barely see it anyway, and only for a moment before it faded into a wash of pink.

  He heard a muffled thump and the sensation enveloped him again.

  If you’re lucky and you know it clap your hands … Whatever was out there could’ve obliterated him without trying. Sperm whales? Loudest animals on earth. Their clicks could be so loud they couldn’t even exist in the air as sound. They could blow out your eardrums, maybe kill you as surely as the concussive blast of a bomb.

  Lucky. It was only scanning, giving him a sonogram.

  Kicking again, with legs starting to feel like tingling rubber, nearly blind now, he rose toward a total eclipse of the sun. A few feet from the surface he spewed a gush of bubbles to empty his aching lungs, then with a titanic whoosh broke through into the glorious air.

  “You stupid motherfucker!” Kimo was peering down from the boat as if he were looking at a ghost. Things started going clear again, even the sweat spraying from Kimo’s shaved head as he whipped the lanyard at the end of the rope, like shaking a leash at a naughty dog. “What is this? What the fuck is this!”

  My bad … ? Didn’t quite cut it under the circumstances, did it?

  “What, almost drowning once this year wasn’t enough for you, you thought you’d find another way?”

  Treading water, Danny peeled off his goggles and flipped his hair back from his face to splat against his shoulders. “Sorry, man. I needed more than ninety feet.”

  “But you stopped moving.” Kimo jabbed a finger toward the sonar screen. “It still makes you dumb as a rock, but if you’d kept moving, you wouldn’t have sent me from zero to panic mode, hauling this up and you’re not on the end of it anymore.” He flung the safety line to the deck. “I was two seconds from going in after you.”

  “But I started moving again. Obviously. You didn’t see that?”

  “While giving myself ninety feet of rope burns? No! I don’t multitask.”

  The man had been looking out for him for years, one displaced Hawaiian to another, and his anger was so pure, so righteous, so Kimo, Danny couldn’t help but laugh. It was the right thing at the right time—same as below, the body knowing what to do, and doing it.

  “I was fine. Really.” He took Kimo’s hand and clambered over the side into the boat, then tapped the sonar. “How about the whale? Did you see t
he whale?”

  For a moment, Kimo could only blink. Translation: Good going, asshole. Now you made me miss an entire whale, too. “You saw a whale?”

  “Just for a second or two. My vision was going, so …”

  “Are you sure you weren’t hallucinating?”

  “I felt him check me out. I didn’t hallucinate that.” He turned a clumsy 360 to scan the waves for a breach but saw nothing. “How long was I down?”

  “I think you were around two-forty-five, two-fifty when I went for the line. I don’t even know where the watch landed.”

  Danny plopped onto the transom and wriggled out of his fins. “So I had to break three minutes, easy.” Nothing impressive by competition standards. Competitive freedivers could rack up depths and times that were off the chain. But those people were all about the numbers, the endurance, not about merging with the sea. “A new personal best and I don’t even know what it is.”

  He tossed his fins aside, then spotted the stopwatch beside their cooler of water bottles. He snatched it up and held it toward Kimo’s face, back to normal brown after all that furious brick red.

  “Check it,” Danny said. “Six-thirty-four and counting.”

  Kimo rolled his eyes. “That’ll look good on your tombstone. ‘Still holding my breath, bitches.’”

  “Shipworms. That’s all you saw when the wood came apart,” Gail told him that afternoon. “They’re called shipworms.”

  Danny didn’t know whether to be fascinated or appalled. A whale, he could wrap his brain around that. Those aquatic grubs were something new.

  “Shipworms. That’s actually a thing?”

  “For someone who’s eaten as many waves as you have, your sense of maritime history really is lacking.” She gave him a peck on the cheek, as if to say she loved him anyway. “Yeah, they’re a thing. In the age of sailing ships, before steel hulls, they were a big, bad, serious thing. Termites of the sea, is the best way to describe them. If they weren’t busy eating shipwrecks, they were causing them. Or chewing through wharves, piers, anything like that. Waiting for a nice juicy log to drift by, to turn into a floating condo.”

  Your home is your food—pretty much the definition of a parasite. Like taking a gander around this cliff-top cottage and thinking, hey, break me off a piece of that wall, I’m feeling peckish. What am I in the mood for? The green room, the blue room? Something in the line of a honey-gold breakfast nook? Yum.

  “But they’re not actually worms. They’re mollusks. Like long, skinny oysters. They’ve got little shells on the front, that’s how they burrow in.” She perked up. “If you dive that wreck again, bring up a few. They’re supposed to taste like clams.”

  “That’s a bucket of nope, right there.” His stomach did barrel rolls at the thought. “How do you know this? You don’t even sail.”

  This was the distinction between them. For all her astonishing symbiosis with the sea, Gail hardly ever got out on it. That was his department. Gail was perfectly happy being its next-door neighbor.

  She crossed her arms and, with a cockeyed grin, withered him with a glance. He knew how to translate that look: Come with me, you fool.

  With a swirl of her skirt, she led him out of the cottage and across the stone path to the outbuilding—her workshop, bright and airy and open to clear out the smell of varnish. Its walls were the color of sea foam, its windows faced a panoramic view of the Pacific, and it was always, always, full of driftwood. Most of the pieces were still raw, just as they had been harvested from the beach. The rest were in various stages of processing and transformation.

  Every chunk she brought in was its own starter kit, anything from simple projects like necklace racks to elaborate constructions like lamp stands and chandeliers that she sold through galleries from Portland to Santa Barbara. Last year, she’d taken hundreds of seemingly useless fragments and, where anyone else might have seen only kindling, turned them into a mosaic of a whimsical octopus, with spiral seashells for eyes.

  Gail snatched up a sun-bleached branch the length of his arm, peppered with perforations as if someone had used it for target practice.

  “After almost twenty years of seeing me do this, you’ve never wondered where these holes come from?”

  “I guess I thought it was weathering.” By her skeptical look, she wasn’t buying it. “Okay, I guess I never thought about it at all.”

  She gave him one of those shakes of her head, playful but dismissive, that left him feeling she had so much more wisdom that he did, baked in from birth. “If it doesn’t eat the surfboard out from under you, it doesn’t exist, right?”

  “Pretty much,” he conceded.

  As a rule, ignorance was no virtue, but if you gave too much thought to the sea, and everything with teeth that called it home, you’d never venture out to meet it.

  Maybe that was why she stayed on shore.

  They grilled on the patio that evening, marinated tempeh and vegetables, and as they usually did unless the rain had other ideas, carried their plates out to the wrought iron table on the little redwood deck, so they could eat beneath the sky, facing the sea. The cottage was one of a haphazard nest of six, perched near the edge of a two hundred-foot cliff overlooking the beach and breakers below.

  Bellies full, they kicked their feet up on the brick retaining wall around the firepit and passed the evening’s joint back and forth.

  Danny wanted to say he liked it better living at the condo in Santa Monica and Gail liked it better here, but that wasn’t true. Santa Monica was only more convenient. He liked it better here, too. Time passed differently here, the days longer, the seasons more pronounced. On the luckiest nights he might awaken to the faraway squeal of a passing whale—humpback, he supposed, the only kind he was aware of whose songs carried above water. He would roll over to find that Gail was already up, her silhouette framed by the bedroom window, where she sat as still as stone and listened for as long as it would last. They never got that in Santa Monica.

  Although she was never farther away from him than she was in those minutes, lost inside a trance, and there was little he could do to get her back but wait.

  Anyway. Out with it. He’d been meaning to bring it up for months. Now felt as right as ever.

  “I’m going to have to find a business to go into. Or invent.” Telling the water but for Gail’s ears. “Got any suggestions?”

  She looked more concerned with diagnosing causes. “Is it the …?”

  Fear? That wasn’t it, but it made sense she would go there. They’d had to give the topic a couple of airings after his wipeout this spring at Prevelly Park.

  The bigger the wave, the more ways a ride could go wrong. Miscalculations, human error, the never predictable hydraulics of any given wave—however it happened, things went wrong. While you went shooting through the tube, the board got sucked up the wall of water curling over behind you. Or the wave rose up while the bottom dropped out, and you got slammed into the impact zone. You were no longer riding the wave. It was riding you, maybe grinding you into the sand and rocks to really teach you a lesson.

  He knew of no greater helplessness than that. Being held under by the first wave was terror enough. It you were still down when the next one came crashing in, you felt exponentially worse, battered and exhausted and desperate to breathe. Still hadn’t surfaced before a third one came along? That was when it seemed as though the ocean had made up its unfathomable mind: It wasn’t letting go.

  He’d known a couple guys who hadn’t come up alive. But he had. No idea how, but after a three-wave hold-down at Prevelly Park, he had. The ocean doesn’t want me today … It was as good an explanation as any.

  But one day, it might. It was the reason he’d taken up freediving. To extend his breath-holding duration. To get comfortable with being under the water a long time, because as a surfer, under was the last place anyone wanted to be. And it had helped. He felt recalibrated, more at peace with under than ever.

  So no. This had nothing to do with
fear.

  “It’s worse,” he said. “It’s the calendar. And the numbers.”

  Gail had been holding back a toke, and lost it with a hacking laugh. “I thought it would be at least another twenty years before maybe I’d hear you make a concession there.” She fixed him with a hazy leer. “Who are you, foul thing that crawled from the sea, and give me back my Danny.”

  Which version? He was developing a nostalgic longing for the Danny Yukimura who seemed incapable of thinking about consequences.

  Gail rubbed his arm. “It’s just another birthday, but with a zero. Don’t you know? Forty is the new eighteen, I think is what it’s down to.”

  “That only helps if eighteen is the new as-yet-unborn.” He took the joint, made it smolder, handed it back. “It’s the rankings. In the top thirty in the world, I’ve had a good run, but I’ve never gotten higher than twenty-two, and now I’m right back on that edge. The only place to go is down. That’s how this goes. Especially now.”

  It was the times—thrilling to be around to witness them, but shitty when you were a casualty because you couldn’t keep up. People were out there doing amazing things, unthinkable things, feats that had been considered impossible.

  “There’s something changing in the world …”

  He traced it back to when Laird Hamilton had caught the Millennium Wave, in Teahup’po. Until then, nobody had ridden a sixty-foot wave. Nobody. It wasn’t merely the height; it was the length, the girth, the colossal magnitude. Even Hamilton hadn’t been planning on it. He got towed into the wave, then it rose a behemoth. As the tube collapsed behind him, everybody watching thought he was dead, until he came shooting up out of the spray.

  A thing like that did something magical. It opened a doorway to unknown realms of potential. Eighty footers? Ninety? Guys were riding them now.

  It wasn’t only surfers, either. Skateboarders, skiers, snowboarders—superhumans were popping up everywhere. Somebody does something that blows minds around the globe and everyone says, damn, dude, that record’s gonna stand for years, then it doesn’t even stand a season.