The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (12 page)

That morning, the doorbell yanked him from his thoughts as he mulled, as was his habit, elbows on the table, face bent over a mug of coffee, spying on his reflection in the black liquid. An
ill-shaven telegram boy, his hat on sideways, handed him a cable from the veterinary services of the Museum of Modern Art. The rectangle of blue paper informed him that due to medical testing prior to being approved for the market, the dream he had submitted to quarantine a few days ago had just passed away. As per his contract, he had the right to attend burial proceedings for the object.

He wasn’t really surprised. Marianne had prepared him for this outcome, but still, he couldn’t keep from crumpling the telegram with rage. No-pass. From now on he’d be classified as a no-passer, a dreamer whose oneiric objects couldn’t stand up to quarantine. The crude, stupid stamp would sprawl in runny letters all over his file. To take his mind off things, he shaved methodically with the straight razor his father had left in the medicine cabinet fifteen years ago. A delicate operation, it required all his attention, and even kept him from brooding on dark thoughts. His face wrapped in a hot towel, he waited for the burning in his cheeks to die down, then put on his black suit. The suit he found himself wearing ever more often. He remained seated in his armchair for a long time, flipping with a nervous finger through a little novel whose binding was coming off. It recounted the adventures of Dr. Skeleton in Patagonia. He knew it almost by heart, but was always amused by the part, beloved by fans, when the formidable doctor formed an army of kamikaze soldiers by hypnotizing gorillas from the nearby jungle. He wound up falling asleep in his mourning wear, tie knotted, legs spread, like a dead man who’d broken out of his coffin. He only came out of it fifteen minutes before the ceremony, and had to hurry to the museum. The fat old
watchman he so often bribed met him at the service entrance of the veterinary clinic with a fitting scowl. David heard not a word of the usual expressions of commiseration and crossed the storage chamber toward the incubators. The sanitation men were already there, in their black rubber suits, gloved and booted like sewage workers. David knew all too well that many of them were former dreamers dismissed because they’d stopped turning a profit. In order to spare them the vagrancy that usually followed such a discharge, the Administration, like a child seeing dutifully to an aging parent, had suggested they retrain for what was discreetly known as the
removal service for withered oneiric objects
. A name that seemed to turn them into florists charged with gathering up faded bouquets at the end of official ceremonies. Though he understood their distress and the awkwardness of their situation, David could not help but think of these men as traitors, vandals abusing their status to despoil works of art with impunity. He had sworn never to submit to such reeducation. Even now, the garbagemen of dreams, stuffed into their rubbery outfits, looked like giant frogs trained to stand on their hind legs. A hood perforated with giant glass eyeholes completed the outfit and put a finishing touch on the resemblance. David nodded to them. One of them, Pit Van Larsen, with whom he’d used to hang out, nodded back. They put out their cigarettes, pulled the flabby masks down over their faces, and approached the incubators. The dead dreams sagged beneath the bell jars like limp salads. They were still just as immaculately white, but they had altered in density. Their fine texture had coarsened, and had transmogrified into a gooey substance that was extremely difficult to manipulate. Personnel were highly discouraged from
seizing a dream bare-handed if they didn’t want to find themselves glued to whatever it had been sitting on. Oneiric objects had frightening adhesive powers. When they were first put on the market, the Ministry had to deal with many accidents, and rescue teams crisscrossed the cities in every direction, twenty-four hours a day, to bail out unfortunate souls who’d found themselves fastened to their mantel or buffet while trying to sweep a withered dream away with the back of a hand. Disintegrating ectoplasmic matter adored human skin and hardened instantaneously upon contact, turning into a fearsome cement. In such cases, careless victims were rarely freed without recourse to a razor and local anesthetic. The instructions that came with all oneiric objects specified that disposing of sculptures at the first sign of rot was highly advised. The recommended method was simple: all it involved was being sure to slip on a pair of rubber gloves (household gloves for washing dishes would do nicely) before seizing the shriveled ectoplasm and placing it in a tear-proof plastic bag. In each building a special receptacle had been installed for express use with dreams. It was a big black rubber cylinder whose lid opened and closed automatically at the press of a red button. The very peculiar nature of persistent ectoplasms had necessitated this amenity, and it would have been naïve to consider it a pointlessly precautionary luxury. Indeed, dreams in full-blown decline were almost unmanageable. Though they lost their shape and their suggestive power—in short, their beauty—their substance survived, incompressible. It did not shrink or evaporate. Grown flaccid and sticky, dreams stood up to the most powerful means of disposal. At first, attempts were made to burn them like dead leaves, but incinerating them gave rise to
a pestilential, intensely toxic smoke whose effluvia had resulted in several cases of poisoning, and even a few deaths.

To top it all off, smoldering dreams reeked of burnt flesh. At their slightest touch, the smallest backyard brazier became a stake from the Holy Inquisition, and the smell of charred human flesh the ectoplasms let off impregnated clothes almost permanently, necessitating a change of wardrobe. That disposal method had to be scrapped, and people to be persuaded not to try to deal with withered objects on their own. And so a removal service was created, a service whose black trucks patrolled town at nightfall to collect the ectoplasms standing in bins on the sidewalks among the innocent family trash cans.

“Let’s do this,” was all Pit Van Larsen said, pulling his mask over his face. David took a cautious step back. Splashing was always a possibility; he didn’t particularly feel like having a pearl of gummy matter leap his way and stick to his skin like a wart, as sometimes happened.

Since collecting dreams posed a real problem, allowing them to decompose in the open air of landfills like regular household trash was out of the question, for as the weeks went by and they fell apart, ectoplasms wound up unraveling in sticky, invisible tendrils in the wind. Scattered, reduced to a state like microscopic droplets of rain, they then became windborne. Those unlucky enough to live near landfills breathed them in, absorbed them unknowingly. And the terrifyingly sticky particles built up in their lungs and bronchial tubes, permanently obstructing them. Eventually, the Ministry had had to face facts: dead dreams were exceptional sources of pollution. They’d rather glibly thought the
problem solved for a while when the strange raw material was recycled in a less-than-noble, but highly useful form: one minister had conceived of selling used ectoplasmic substance to glue manufacturers, who could tube it up and market it as a cement of unequaled adhesive power. The accident toll had been very high, so the project had been forcibly discontinued. The Ministry had to get used to the idea that far from being a source of extra income for the state, disposing of used dreams would remain one of its duties and expenditures.

David could perfectly recall the shameful and laughable superglue debacle. Millions of little red tubes had flooded store shelves. DIY types had rubbed their hands with glee: finally, a truly adhesive glue capable of resisting any amount of tension, which definitively bonded the most varied materials. The pretty red tubes were a pleasure to purchase because they replaced every type of existing sealant. The euphoria hadn’t lasted long. Soon EMTs were dashing to all four corners of the country to try to free foolhardy home improvers from being held hostage by walls, pipes, and roof beams. Faced with the horrifying resistance of the gunk, they’d had to bring themselves to amputate a few fingers, carving deeply into flesh—which had resulted in countless lawsuits. David had long kept one of the scarlet tubes in a desk drawer—not to use, of course, but because he saw it as the strangely iconoclastic coffin of a defunct work of art.

The garbagemen had opened the incubator. With gloved hands, Pit seized the dream slumped like a dead jellyfish and dropped it into his bag. The ectoplasm landed with a flabby smack, leaving just a trace of mucus on the technician’s gloves. An
official copied the specimen number onto the blank label affixed to the circlip of the tear-proof bag.

“Correct?” he asked, raising a gloomy eye at David.

“Correct,” the young man agreed.

The garbagemen did the same for the other dreams that had died as a result of quarantine. David felt a tightness in his throat. He tried to imagine the ordeal the little ectoplasm must have endured just a few days ago. What had they put it through, what kind of idiotic, pseudoscientific torture? They said some lab techs got off on injecting young dreams with a solution of frightfully strong black coffee, that they put still-fragile ectoplasms in special chambers where the unbearable beeping of a digital alarm clock rang out nonstop. All this, in the name of testing the object’s physical resistance to outside reality. Was there an ounce of actual science in these routines, or did madness reign, an undisputed sovereign, within the service?

“OK,” said Pit Van Larsen. “Here we go.” As he passed David, he asked, “You coming all the way or have you had enough?”

“All the way,” said the young man softly.

Pit spat on the floor. “Masochist,” he said, heading up the line. The garbagemen fell in behind in orderly fashion, each holding at the end of an arm a bag containing the cadaver of a poisoned dream. Their rubber jumpsuits made curious sucking sounds, and David reflected that they must have been sweating atrociously inside those ridiculous outfits.

“See you next time,” the fat watchman said as David passed by. There was no malice in it, just the remark of a blasé man who’d finally realized that no matter what you did, everything went pear-shaped.

The garbage truck for dreams was waiting outside, a huge black machine with riveted sides. The bags were carefully deposited in airtight containers to avoid any chance of their exploding in transport. David sat down beside Pit while the others gathered in back for a coffee break. “So,” the former dreamer began, “you still in the game? You pulling down a living? That tadpole I wrapped up earlier wasn’t about to make you a millionaire. Me, I was making even scrawnier ones toward the end there. I called ’em sleep shits.”

“Don’t you dream at all anymore?” David inquired, kicking himself for asking the question.

“No,” said Pit in a tone of false relief. “They gave me a shot, and ever since then, I don’t dive. I dream, but like everyone else—unimportant bullshit you forget as soon as you open your eyes.”

He paused for a moment, steering the truck around a bend, then added, “You should do what I did before it’s too late. You check out the Ministry’s figures lately? You know what the life expectancy is for dreamers? Not so hot. When you start getting old, the ectoplasms start thickening up; they stay in the lungs and choke you.”

“I know,” David cut him off sharply. “Skip the lesson.” He hesitated, bit his tongue, then ventured, “How does it feel, never seeing the people down there anymore?”

Pit shrugged, but his great gloved hands squeaked on the wheel when he tightened his grip. “I try not to think about it,” he whispered. “Anyway, the injection must’ve killed them. I tell myself it’s like a sick dog, you put it down for its own good. Nothing good can come from hanging out with them. Plus, I felt like I was cheating on my wife with the girl down there, it was ugly.”

Not another word was exchanged until they reached the gates of cold storage. That was where they kept the dreams on ice, for lack of a better solution. To keep them from crumbling in the wind or fermenting in their special bins and then exploding, they were frozen. Only freezing allowed them to be kept in a stable form without danger to the environment. Every time he entered the massive labyrinth of cold storage, David was captivated by the ice crystals that drafts swept about like whirlwinds of an endless ice storm. You had to wear protection if you didn’t want your ears and cheeks sheared off, and the men who worked in the aisles were all decked out in thick black headgear that made them look like polar explorers. David and the garbagemen got out of the truck and ran to put on thermal jumpsuits in a heated airlock. For the garbagemen, it was always an unpleasant ordeal to extricate themselves from their sweat-slicked black rubber diving suits, towel off in a hurry, and then go to face an underground winter. David stepped out first, his hood drawn down tight in an attempt to ward off the sting of ice shards. The parka was too big, and he tugged furiously on the cord around his waist. His breath exploded in a thick cloud, concealing his view of the maze of stingily lit tunnels. Pit went ahead of him, stooping, followed by his men. They were all clearly in a hurry to have it over with. Their fat antiskid shoes gave the burial an oddly military air. David let himself be guided along. His lips were already frozen. The cold drilled pain into his metal fillings. At last, they reached the door of the freezer room. A crust of ice had formed on the handle, and Pit had some difficulty getting it to turn. Inside, the dreams lay piled in a great heap, a shapeless bric-a-brac of jellyfish petrified by the
polar temperatures. Like marble, David thought instinctively, but that wasn’t it, not exactly. Marble didn’t have the luminescence of ice crystals. The solidified dreams seemed to be dusted with ground diamonds; they lay piled in a great heap, unidentifiable beneath a thick crust of ice. A cemetery, a cemetery of paralyzed ghosts, reduced to the immobility of eternal incarceration. But it was the only way to halt their death throes and the pollution that ensued. Freezing them kept their cadavers from falling apart any further.