The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (13 page)

“Someday they won’t know where to put them anymore,” Pit grumbled. “They’ll have to stuff ’em in rockets and send them to the stars. They’ll put a ‘No Vacancy’ sign here, like everywhere else.”

With a flick of his wrist, he sent the bag’s circlip flying and tossed the dead ectoplasm on the crust of ice covering the floor. The dream adhered to it with a clearly audible crackle, and suddenly its color changed. The other garbagemen were already falling back, fleeing the unbearable cold that came in waves from the depths of the room. Pit grabbed David by the arm and pulled him back.

“What are you waiting for?” he growled. “You want your lungs burned? You can’t stay here without a mask.”

David let himself be led away. He knew full well that the Ministry had been forced to install a nuclear plant at the edge of town for the sole purpose of providing enough energy for the cold storage depots scattered underground. The wintry coffin of dreams required a great deal of power; no one dared think of what might happen if all the funerary freezers suddenly stopped working someday.

“They’d blow up,” Pit had replied once, when David asked. “Dream decay is accompanied by intense gas production, which, in such an event, would automatically find itself under pressure. No one knows how long the chambers can hold back the gas. Plus, there’s the risk of suffocation, explosion …”

True, it was a hell of a headache and no one wanted to think about it too much for now; they’d have to deal with it sooner or later. As usual, not until disaster became imminent. David shed his outfit in the heated airlock and took his leave of Pit. The cold from underground clung to his clothes, and he had a hard time warming back up, even once he was aboveground. He walked quickly, keeping to the sunny sidewalks. Marianne’s threats ran through his mind. A rest cure? The road to dismissal always began with a rest cure in an institution full of worn-out, unprofitable dreamers. When the stay was over, you had the right to a second chance, but only one. If that dream ended in failure, you were offered the full discharge injection that Pit Larsen had received. A magic shot that freed you from diving and made you a normal man. Desperately normal.

He went home, clothes stiff from the underground winter. He could still feel the sting of ice shards on his cheeks, and his chapped lips were bleeding. He made himself some coffee, very sweet, and tried to warm his hands by caressing the mug’s porcelain sides. He had his first hallucination as he was walking diagonally across the kitchen. Suddenly it seemed like the tiled floor crumbled beneath his feet, revealing a cleverly concealed liquid expanse. The tiles broke loose, one from the next, sinking into the dark pool that seemed to spread beneath the floor of the entire apartment. David leapt to one side, blinked his eyes. Suddenly, the image vanished. The kitchen floor revealed itself to be untouched. There was no hole, no secret lake … He sat down, legs trembling slightly, and passed a hand over his face. The hallucination had been so realistic he’d felt for a split second that
he was balancing over a chasm, the tenant of a hut on stilts that was falling to pieces. He wanted another sip of coffee, but was surprised and appalled to find it tasted like seawater. Seaweed floated on the surface of the beverage. In the depths of the mug, sugar had been replaced with silt. He knew instinctively that if he kept staring stubbornly at the mug, he’d soon see fish swimming around the spoon. He closed his eyes, covered his face with his hand. The smell of salt and mud blossomed from the coffeepot’s spout, filling the room. He forced himself to breathe slowly. He knew these symptoms perfectly; they always came before a few hours of oneiric trance. It was an alarm signal his unconscious sent out to announce a deep dive. Normally, he would’ve jumped on the phone and called Marianne to alert her he was about to sink into the coma of dream. She’d have come over right away with her little suitcase, her bottles of glucose, her IV drips. She would’ve assisted him while he lost consciousness, seeing to the continued function of his deserted body. He made a motion to rise, but changed his mind immediately. No, he shouldn’t. If he told her he was about to go under, she’d rush to bring him an inhibitory injection.

“It’s for your own good,” she would explain in her forbearing nurse’s voice. “There’s no point tiring yourself since we’ve suspended you for now.” She’d nip the dream in the bud with a squirt of poison, and he wouldn’t be able to do a thing to thwart the spread of venom in his body.

He took a deep breath to banish the ball of worry forming at the tip of his sternum. What he was about to do infringed upon the fundamental safety rules of diving, but he couldn’t help it, he
wanted to see Nadia again too much. Gently, he opened his eyes. The hallucination had worn off. The mug held only cold coffee now. The tiled floor was intact and afforded no glimpse of secret seas ingeniously hidden away.
It’s too soon
, the voice of reason murmured to him.
You’re still too weak to try another descent, you haven’t recovered yet
. But this cautionary advice fell on deaf ears. He got to his feet. The apartment was pitching a bit, like a ship on a rising sea. The objects on the sideboards, the mantles, came and went, obeying the movements of the swell. The entire building was taking to the ocean, slicing through the tide with its redbrick prow. David could clearly hear the regular slap of waves against the walls of the ground floor. He knew that if he opened the curtains, he would see sea foam streaming down the windowpanes. The dive was always heralded by a profusion of maritime hallucinations whose origin he could not explain. He almost lost his balance going down the hallway. Here, there, everywhere, chairs were falling over, dishes slid about in the cupboards, books tumbled from the shelves. They’d left the port; now the apartment building was braving the first breakers of the high seas. Used to it as he was, David still felt overtaken by a slight nausea. He staggered toward the bathroom. The faucets of the sink and tub had turned themselves on, pouring out green, frothy water that smelled of iodine. Gray fish flopped about in the toilet, slapping the porcelain with their powerful fins. David felt his head spin, felt fear knot his stomach. The illusion was too strong. The terribly convincing, almost palpable images presaged a dive of great depth. It was one of those dizzying descents from which he might well never return. If he gave into the trance, he could easily
sleep for two weeks, maybe more. Without medical assistance, an escapade like that was tantamount to suicide. In a few days, he would become dehydrated, then slide into a coma. More than one diver had died that way, from an infringement of safety regulations. Diving alone was throwing yourself down a well with a stone tied around your neck. He had to call Marianne. He had to call Marianne so she would come … poison the dream.

Seized with vertigo, he dragged himself toward the bedroom and collapsed across the bed like a shipwreck victim clinging to a life raft. The apartment seemed be to hitting twenty-foot troughs, and huge waves came crashing down on the tiled floor with the thunder of a waterfall. The smell of iodine was everywhere now. The salt-starched bedsheets stuck to David’s fingers. He tried to remember where he’d hidden the bottles of glucose he’d illicitly acquired. Oh, he could jimmy up a homemade rig that would keep him alive for a while, but none of these pitiful precautions would succeed in keeping the dangers of a deep-sea dive at bay. This time, the call of the deep was terrifying. David felt the apartment warping from the assault of the invisible maelstrom. Soon the floorboards would give way, and he would sink like a rock into the blue waters. He would go deeper than ever before; he could feel it. His feet weighed tons, they would tug him bottomward like the lead ballast of the first undersea explorers. His entire body was becoming heavy, immovable. His limbs would recover their give only once he was submerged. He had to dive, let himself be sucked into the whirlpool.

He was panting, laid out with seasickness. All over the apartment, shelves were emptying their contents, closets were opening,
vomiting out plates and saucepans, tables were sauntering from one side of a room to another, scratching the waxed parquet with their hard feet. The building plunged prow-first as if to go under, then abruptly straightened, a castaway who lifts his head above the waves to keep from drowning. David made an effort to sit up. He had to … he had to hang the glucose bag from its stand, secure the cannula to the timer that would set them going one after another as the bottles emptied. Enough to hold out for three or four days tops, keeping the rate of flow to a minimum. Would he be back in four days? He had no idea. The deeper you went, the more time it took to come back up; that was one of the fundamental laws of dreaming. The liquid night closed over you, thicker and more restive than the reassuring blue waters of the shallows. There was no point setting any ordinary mechanical device to wake yourself. Bell, beep, alarm, sensory stimulation—nothing worked. A thousand clocks chiming in chorus above the bed of a dreamer in a trance would have deployed their din in vain. David himself had tried it once. The biggest old-fashioned double bell windups, the strident whine of the latest clock radios, had never managed to so much as pierce the shell of dream. The trance insulated you from the world, enveloping you in its soundproofed carapace. Someone could fire a cannon at the foot of your bed, brand you with a hot iron, and you still wouldn’t open your eyes. Marianne had submitted him to all sorts of tests, even going so far to stick needles in the palms of his hands, without ever managing to speed up the ascent. Dreamers remained totally cut off from the outside world, indifferent to their mortal coils, disconnected from their flesh. Waking could only happen
from within, when its time came, when the logic of the dream prompted it. For all these reasons, it was suicidal to dive without medical assistance. Though the nurse could in no way come fetch you from deep inside the dream, she was at least in a position to feed your body and keep it from getting dehydrated.

David let himself slip into his bed and crawled toward the closet where he hid his bottles. Would he be strong enough to set them up? Wouldn’t the storm snap the mast and shatter the bottles? Oh, c’mon, that was stupid, the storm existed only in his imagination. It was just an expression of the psychic upheaval that was brewing. He pressed down hard on his eyeballs. The pounding of his heart slowed a bit, the blood beating at his temples subsided. He seized upon the momentary calm to raise the metallic mast, hang the bags, lay out the valves and lines. He wondered, with a certain fear, if he would manage to set up the drip without too much damage. He’d always been a fumblefingers. The building was rolling less, but water seemed to be lapping behind the walls and beneath the floorboards, sealing him in the heart of a liquid prison. He sat down in the middle of the bed and rubbed his shoulders; he was cold, yet sweating all over. Water splashed behind the wallpaper with a thick liquid sloshing; he could hear it trickling under the carpet in an unending drainlike gurgle. It occurred to David that people trapped on a sinking ship must feel something similar when the gutted vessel slipped under the surface and pressure forced the last air pockets from the carcass. Marianne … should he call Marianne? He was afraid of what awaited him down below, but he was even more afraid of ending up a garbageman with a paralyzed brain.

Slowly, he undressed, tearing off his clothes like remnants of an old skin after molting. With one trembling hand, he tore open the sterile pouch with the IV needle and its transparent little tube. Had he set the timer correctly? His vision blurred and the digits on the counter danced a saraband around the buttons. He quickly arranged the lines, plugged the device in, and stuck the needle in the hollow of his arm. It hurt. He tore off some surgical tape with his teeth, slapped it flat over the insertion point, and lay down on his back. He was nauseous, and his visual acuity was decreasing with each passing second as if night were flooding the apartment. At this simple sign, he knew he was already going down.
This is madness
, he thought with a desperate start,
I should’ve alerted Marianne, I can still get up, grab the phone
 … But in reality, he didn’t want to. This would be his greatest dive, he could feel it: a journey to the heart of the abyss, into the black hole of the great deep, where he had never before set foot. Where maybe no one, apart from Soler Mahus, had ever set foot. He was going to sink like a stone, let the weight of his rancor drag him down, his fear of being crippled and put out to pasture, all the sadness of murdered dreams. He was going straight to the bottom, cleaving the ocean depths like a diver caparisoned in brass and lead, his gleaming helmet tracing through the liquid night a wake of humming bubbles.
I’m coming!
he thought, closing his eyes. The pillow lapped at his neck, the froth of the sheets licked his loins. He sank and nothing could keep him at the surface anymore.

Suddenly, everything was blue.

Jorgo’s motorcycles gleamed in the shadows of the garage, showing off their tailpipes like strange chrome sculptures. David glimpsed their distressing luster through half-closed eyes. He didn’t want to move; his body still seemed too fragile to him. He was afraid that if he got up on one elbow, he’d see his flesh tear away, his bones perforate his epidermis. He was like one of those desserts that had to be left to cool until it reached a certain consistency. Sprawled on his stomach, he waited, convinced that if he tried to sit up, his organs would be jostled loose like overripe fruit, landing pell-mell in a horrifying organic mush. Yes, he had to wait, wait for his flesh to firm up, for all the seams and sutures of his internal mechanism to set. At the moment he felt flaccid, fragile, unstable. Bizarre phobias flashed through him: fear his fingers would come off if he grabbed something, fear his toes
would scatter if he set foot on the ground. Fear he’d swallow his teeth if he tried to speak …