The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (17 page)

“Ow!” The needle had slipped along a saber blade and plunged too deeply into the torso of a standard-bearer with a powder-blackened face. A fraction of a second after pressing on the plunger, David distinctly saw the tiny figure’s eye open, burning with rage.

“Five minutes,” Nadia announced. A dark rivulet stained her T-shirt between her breasts. Jorgo’s face was glistening as if rubbed with oil.

“Quick—we have to take the canvas down,” the young woman ordered. “We’ll have just enough time to get out of here before the electric eyes come out of their trance.”

Jorgo had taken out a razor and began cutting the canvas along the frame. Nadia did the same. The varnish-covered painting resisted the blades.

“David!” the young woman hissed. There’s a ladder in the closet. We’ll need it to cut across the top of the painting.”

David shook himself, dropped the syringe, and turned toward the closet, but it seemed to leap back like a timid animal afraid to be touched. That was a bad sign. Such distortions of perspective signaled the embryonic formation of a nightmare. With a feverish hand, he groped for his drugs. His nerves were crackling like short-circuiting high-tension wires. He took a quick sniff of distancing powder from the back of his hand. The icy burn ravaged his nasal cavity and exploded in his brain, lodging like a harpoon in the middle of his head. The closet door drew obediently closer. He opened it and took out a window washer’s stepladder. He went blank, lost some time. When he opened his eyes again, Nadia and Jorgo were laying the giant canvas on the floor.

“To roll it up,” the young woman explained, “like a rug.” The notion seemed so out of place that David burst out laughing.

“You’re starting to take off,” Nadia snapped aggressively. “Try to control your dream instead of letting it carry you away!”

She was absolutely right. Besides, he felt calmer already,
cooler. Suddenly, the painting seemed almost ugly to him, without interest. Was it even worth stealing?

Nadia and Jorgo picked up the rolled canvas, each taking an end on one shoulder. With a firm step, they headed up the long hall leading to the exit.

“Two minutes,” the young woman whispered dully. David couldn’t understand why she was so scared. The things you could get done in two minutes! For instance … They were running now, pounding the parquet, filling the building with the rumble of a stampede. Nadia was staring at the electric eye overlooking the entrance. The metal eyelid was rising very slowly, with an interminable creak. With a desperate burst of speed they ran for the exit, tripping over the doorsill and tumbling head over heels down the stairs. The moment they hit the broad slabs of the esplanade, sprawling, the optical sensor raised its protective lid with a sharp click, coming out of its slumber to resume surveillance.

“It worked!” Jorgo exulted. Nadia silenced him with a wave. The canvas had unrolled coming down the stairs, and now lay spread in the middle of the plaza, a great gleaming rug with frayed edges. Puddles from the last shower (when had it rained? David had no memory of it) trickled iridescent water over its surface. David would’ve liked to know if contact with liquid risked damaging the painting, but not a word came from his mouth. The cold night wind made his teeth chatter, suddenly making him realize his clothes were so soaked he could’ve wrung sweat from them. The moisture assaulted his nerves, wrecking the powder’s effect; he got to his feet, feeling instead like he’d landed heavily on them. Migraine pains went shooting through his skull. He staggered,
fought to stay upright while Nadia and Jorgo struggled with the drenched canvas. Nadia was losing her cool, insulting Jorgo in a low voice because he was slow to lift the painting from the puddle where it was steeping.

“Take it easy!” David cried. “The varnish protects the colors. They won’t run that easily.”

“You don’t get it!” the young woman hissed. “The cold water’ll wake the soldiers! Jesus Christ! It’s like tossing a bucket of water at their faces!”

David rushed forward, not sure he really understood the new danger. Grabbing the canvas by one of its sides, he tried to lift it from the ground. But it was abnormally heavy, and he could make out confused movements on its surface … White spots, myriad tiny white spots. Eyes. Thousands of eyes, opening one after the next. Suddenly, those eyes were all he could see, piercing the darkness of the sullied varnish.

“It’s the cold water,” Nadia panted. “Shit! Shit! Shit! It’s cancelled out the tranquilizer. Now they’re going to be angry. We’ll never get the painting to the car.”

David felt the claws of nightmare sink into the flesh of his shoulders. Everything was going off the rails; he could feel it. So close, and yet … less than fifty yards lay between them and the car. He wanted to get ahold of the canvas, but it was like grabbing a handful of pincushions. The foot soldiers’ bayonets massed at the edge of the painting had just pierced his fingers. A muddled noise rose from the image, whose surface puckered, wrinkled, like living flesh shot through with shivers.

“Out of the way!” Nadia cried, pulling him back. “It’s dangerous. They’re going to defend themselves!”

But David clung to his loot, determined not to be deprived. He understood her warning only when a tiny cannonball tore through his jacket and whistled by his ear. A cannonball from one of the thousand cannons depicted in the painting. A cannonball about the size of a bullet, which had come less than an inch away from blowing his head off.

“C’mon,” Nadia begged, tugging at his sleeve. “It’s fucked now. We can’t take it anymore. It’s that antivandalism treatment they give famous works—it makes them able to defend themselves in case of theft, or attack … sometimes even a bad review. It’ll shoot at anything that moves, and the noise will bring the cops. C’mon, it’s over. We have to run.”

David remained frozen, shoulders hunched. Now the salvos were rolling round the esplanade, getting louder with each echo. It was like a firing squad had set up shop right in front of the museum, executing statues and the columns of the peristyle. The cannonballs ricocheted, yowling, while the smell of burnt powder rose from the canvas. Like his companions, David was flattened on the ground, not daring to lift his head.
Nightmare
, he thought.
It ended up happening anyway, even though everything seemed to be going so well
. And why were there puddles of icy water on the esplanade? Had it rained without his knowing … or was the vault of the sky beginning to give way beneath the pressure, letting the sea seep into the dream world?

Jorgo had begun crawling toward the car where Professor
Zenios was waving at them desperately. The wail of a police siren burst out from the far end of the avenue. In a few seconds, the flashing lights could be seen … David straightened up, teeth clenched, and made one last move for the painting. This time, a cannonball tore through his eyebrow, and his face was drowned in blood.

“We’ll come back!” Nadia sobbed against his temple “We’ll give it another shot sometime. C’mon! C’mon!”

He let himself be dragged away. They were almost off the esplanade when Jorgo crumpled, a black hole between his shoulder blades. The kid collapsed, mouth open, not even trying to cushion the fall, and lay there without moving.

“Jorgo!” Nadia screamed hysterically. “Jorgo!”

David didn’t know what to do. The beelike buzzing was driving him crazy. He saw the thousand little barrels of cannons spitting flames in their direction. The projectiles slammed into the car, spiderwebbing the windows. Instinctively, he backpedaled to lift the kid and sling him across his shoulders. Jorgo weighed almost nothing, and the outline of his body was already fading, as if the dream were striking him from its list of characters. Nadia jerked as she opened the door. David saw her eyebrows go up in an expression of disbelief. Then the young woman leaned against the car and opened her jacket. She was bleeding. A black stain was blossoming rapidly across her belly.

“No!” David roared. “I won’t have it! This is my dream! I’m in control here! I won’t have it!”

He made a desperate effort to regain mastery of the oneiric machinery quickly escaping him. It was like trying to grab a
bolting horse by the mane to halt its frenzied course. The animal kept hurtling along, impervious to pain, fleeing toward the cliff at a gallop that struck sparks from the stones.

“NOOOOOOO!” he screamed, and his cry was written on the night in great red letters. The nightmare retreated for a moment, like a junkyard mutt taken briefly aback by someone even louder. The stain immediately vanished from Nadia’s belly. David pushed her inside the car while Zenios started the engine. The vehicle peeled away from the sidewalk, door open, Jorgo’s legs still dragging on the pavement. Straining his muscles, David pulled the kid’s body onto the seat. The little motorcyclist was sticky with blood. The light from a police car lit up the entire street. The cops had lowered their windows and were shooting at the fugitives. Zenios clung to the wheel; between each shot that punched through the chassis, his teeth chattered. David patted his pockets for his drugs, but came up empty. The nightmare was hot on his heels now; he couldn’t let himself get scared a second time. He could hear it running right beside the car with heavy strides, slamming its head against the door to force the car off the road.
I can’t control a thing anymore
, David noted with a shiver of terror. Jorgo lay heavy on his knees, dead, leaking blood on the seat, staining it red. Nadia had collapsed, her face waxen; he couldn’t tell if she’d been wounded again. David checked his wrist, trying to make out the digits on the blood-smeared depth gauge.
Christ!
If he ejected at this depth, he’d be pulverized before he hit the surface. The pressure would crush him like a steam hammer. He couldn’t give in to nightmare, couldn’t afford to wake up before he’d brought the dream world back to a normal depth. But the gauge was still
stuck at
66,000
, as if the oneiric submersible lay wrecked in the silt of an ocean chasm.

As the car exited town, he felt his muscles melting away under his clothes, the lines on his face altering, the square set of his jaw fading away.

“I—I’m being torn away,” he murmured, hoping Nadia would hear. He dug his nails into the backseat to try to escape the tremendous suction pulling him toward the surface.

“Nadia!” he whimpered, wriggling in his too-big clothes. “I’m ascending!”

“No!” the young woman screamed. “You can’t leave us like this! Bastard! What about Jorgo? What about me? You have to fix this!”

“Fix this” was the last thing he heard. Then his body broke through the roof of the car, flying like an arrow toward the vault of the sky. Suddenly, the pain was horrendous. A crushing, dismembering sensation. For a moment he thought he’d been sheared in two by a shark lurking deep in the black waters, and only the top half of his body was still trying to reach the air.
I’ll never make it
, he thought, and then a hand cleft the water overhead and grabbed him by the hair. It was Marianne.

He lay wrecked amid the sheets like a castaway tossed up on a strand by the final waves of a tempest. He wasn’t in pain, but his body felt broken, shattered. If he could’ve, he would’ve felt his ribs with his fingertips to make sure they hadn’t been mangled by the reefs alongshore. He couldn’t feel a thing anymore save for a great absence filled with vague, short-lived shooting pains. The pressure had annihilated him, crushed him. No doubt not a single bone had been left intact. No doubt his skeleton was now a mere pile of splinters nothing could ever glue back together. He lay limp, a quasi-corpse of drooping flesh in the middle of a bed devastated by dream convulsions. A great big doll, a straw-stuffed puppet; the only thing still working was his brain.

All he could remember from the ascent was a tearing sensation.
The certainty of having been skinned alive, scraped to the bone. He’d made the climb toward the surface only by sloughing off his flesh, jettisoning ballast, abandoning his organs one by one to make it up there ever faster. He’d tossed it all overboard, all the viscera so terribly necessary for a normal life, emptying himself as the sparkling vault of the surface grew closer, that patch of mercury, that mirror where the sun was shining. Now he lay paralyzed, invertebrate, a minimal life form reduced to an amebic, even vegetative state.

Marianne’s face entered his field of vision once more. He was having trouble focusing, and the nurse’s features seemed to warp like a medusa, a jellyfish torn between tides. She was speaking, her tiny mouth with its pinched lips moving vehemently. The words took their time crawling into range of his hearing. Sometimes they got lost on the way, and all he heard were incomplete sentences.

“You acted like a fool,” the young woman hissed. “If I hadn’t come by, you’d be dead by now! The bottles were empty; you hadn’t had any water or glucose for almost three days! You were in a coma! Your vital functions were subsiding one by one. I brought you back to life with an adrenaline injection straight to the heart.”

An adrenaline injection? The little bitch! That was why the distancing powder had stopped working all of a sudden; that was why the dream had suddenly veered into nightmare.
It was her!
She was the one who’d derailed it all with her goddamned medications! He wanted to swear at her, scream insults, but his mouth remained closed. Anger crackled in his skull with no way out.

“I saved your life,” she stressed. “Without me, you’d be dead.
You were sinking into a coma. Do you even understand what I’m telling you right now?”

She was shouting, she seemed about to grab him by the shoulders and shake him with all her strength. Her eyes were blazing, with anger or—? She wouldn’t be crying, would she? That damned idiot! He wished he still had arms to slap her till her head came off. She kept talking, faster and faster.

“You need to be hospitalized for a scan,” she said. “A blood vessel probably burst somewhere in your brain, paralyzing your motor center. I noticed you lack all tactile sensation. Or maybe it’s nerve degeneration … I can’t do anything here, and if I take you to the clinic they’ll bombard me with questions. I’m your program manager, and this ‘trip’ wasn’t on the books; you never filed a flight plan. You went under alone, illegally, without assistance, hooked up to contraband equipment that wasn’t even up to safety standards! If anyone found out, you could be arrested for unlawful dreaming! We’d both be screwed! Oh, I don’t know what’s keeping me from just …”