The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (19 page)

“It’s not a pretty sight, darling,” she’d concluded. “There’s an ugly-looking bloody effusion.”

David could not repress a shiver inside. Was she about to let him die for the simple pleasure of watching over him until his final sigh? He had no doubt she was capable of it; she was crazy. He wanted to cry out for help, but who would’ve heard him? Nadia, lost in the depths of dream, could do nothing for him; as for Antonine, the plump baker, Marianne had skillfully gotten rid of her a week ago by announcing stiffly that “Mr. David was in a deep trance, and disturbing him for a mere trifle was out of the question.”

No, he was well and truly alone on his raft, prisoner of a medusa as vigilant as she was venomous, and he saw no way of escape.

The phenomenon occurred while Marianne was away. He was lying in bed, stiffer than ever, when he seemed to hear a knock at the door … Not the door to the bedroom, or even the apartment, but a door situated somewhere in the back of his skull, just about at the nape of his neck.
The back door
, he thought instinctively.

The sensation was strange, unaccountable. Three swift knocks, soft and light, followed by three more, louder and harder … then three quick knocks again, barely grazing the wood. The rapping traveled the bones of his cranial vault like curiously rhythmic pistol shots. Right away, he was assailed by an image: a door at the far end of a shadowy hall, behind which shone a blinding light. Someone was on the other side of that door; the twin blots of his or her feet could be seen in the sheet
of light spilling across the floor. Someone was knocking mechanically, tirelessly. Three light knocks, three heavy knocks, three light ones … 
an SOS!

It came from a great distance, and David could tell without difficulty that behind that door lay an abyss. Someone was trying to call him, establish communication—someone from the world down below. But it was impossible! It had never happened before, in the past. Had he, in his infirmity, been compensated with new powers? He clung to this idea as sweat began to glisten on his cheeks. He should be walking toward that inner door, clutching it by the knob and trying to open it. But he was exhausted, and fell asleep before making it halfway down the corridor. The next day, he remained alert all day, but alas, no light went on in the back of his head. Blinded by the gloom, he failed to locate the door and refrained from moving, terrified at the thought of getting lost in the labyrinth of his cervical convolutions. Now he kept his eyes permanently shut to cut himself off from the outside world, scrutinizing his own private night in hopes of seeing the dot of a keyhole winking at him from the dark. He heard the SOS again, two or three times more, without being able to situate it. When Marianne came back, he refused to take the medication she persisted in putting on his tongue. She scolded him like he was a child, but he didn’t give her a moment’s thought. He was afraid the drug would weaken his ability to dream. Wasn’t the door the sign of a trance in the offing? Not for anything in the world did he want Marianne to suspect a thing. He was going to escape! Someone was digging him a tunnel so he could flee this maimed body. The possibility set his heart
racing, dragging him to the edge of exhaustion, and Marianne spent a sleepless night watching over him, certain he was going to have a heart attack.

For three days and nights he remained on the lookout, hoping insomnia and fatigue would sharpen his senses and ease the passage. He’d often noticed that states of extreme tension made the wall between dream and reality strangely permeable. If you knew how to choose your moment, you could slip between the bricks in the wall and conquer the obstacle. Sometimes he heard knocking at the door, and at other times he detected pickax noises, as if someone were digging an endless tunnel in the back of his head. He alternated between phases of excitation and despondency. He felt like a man buried alive in the coffin of his body. Reality weighed on his chest and belly like the layer of earth between an entombed man and his headstone. There was no side door; salvation could only come from below. Someone would soon reach him, pry the nails from the bottom of his coffin, and let him out. Oh, how he wished he still had enough sensation in his skin to detect the scratching of tools under his shoulder blades. He had to keep hope alive: any minute now, the trapdoor would open, and he’d vanish like a rabbit into the depths of an illusionist’s hat.

Marianne circled the bed, frowning, suspecting something was up. He tried to pull the wool over her eyes by affecting a weary expression, but she didn’t seem to be buying it. He kept his eyes closed all the time to get used to the inner dark and remained sitting in a corner of his skull for days at a time, waiting
for the ray of golden light to spill at last from under the mysterious door. The SOS rattled the jambs with disturbing vehemence, and he wondered if Marianne might not hear it. He lived in terror of her suddenly suspecting him of trying to escape; he knew she was well capable of resorting to the most extreme means for holding on to him. Would she think twice before trepanning him with her own hand? He wasn’t so sure. The night before, she’d brought over a kit of surgical instruments and lined them up carefully in a drawer. What was she getting ready for? If she found the door inside, wouldn’t she be tempted to bore through his bones and stitch it shut? He could picture her quite clearly, blocking the hallway with great lengths of catgut, leaving him no chance of escape … He had to flee before she decided to take action.

Luckily, by groping around in the darkness, he managed to locate the door and begin making his way over. The closer he got, the more violent the SOS became. The fist behind the door was getting impatient. The blows resounded through the labyrinth of his half shut-down brain like a gong echoing in a train station. He walked with his hands outstretched and seeking, but the hallway was endless, and it took him a century to reach the porcelain knob. When his forehead hit the door with a hard smack, he froze, his breath short.

“David,” whimpered a voice from the other side, “is that you? You have to come … everything’s going wrong.”

It was Nadia. He didn’t know how she’d gotten all the way up here, but was that remotely important? What counted was that she’d come looking for him, that she’d shown him the way.

His hand closed over the porcelain knob. It was smooth and icy as a stone egg. He turned it. The void sucked him in right away, and he began to whirl down into the deep without holding himself back in any way, or even trying to slow his fall.

David walked toward the edge of the garage to survey the landscape. He felt exhausted, and his whole body hurt. Over the last few days, he’d worked like a maniac to try to repair the worst damage, and without the sturdy body he’d gotten used to wearing in his dream world, he’d probably have died at the task.

When he’d arrived, he could tell right away Nadia hadn’t been lying. Everything was going wrong indeed. The dream world was still stuck at 66,000 feet, and it was clear the pressure was beginning to close on it like a vise, crushing its edges, its borders, its very cosmos.

“When you ejected, everything got stuck,” Nadia had explained. “We were still prisoners of the great deep; here and there, the walls sprang leaks. That’s why I set out to find you. You’re the owner; you’re the only one who can fix it. People down here say
you have an obligation to maintain things in good working order; it’s in the lease.”

All it had taken was a quick stroll for David to notice all around him the groaning of the hull’s abused metal. The pressure of seawater on the vault of the sky had deformed it, denting it like an old car. The blue was flaking from the effects of damp, the clouds rusting. Everywhere, water was seeping between the reinforced plating and the bolts—salt water, which tarnished all it touched. The empty lot had become a muddy waste where starfish swarmed by the hundreds. The damned animals had mounted an assault on the city, scaling buildings, slipping through windows, exasperating the citizens.

David had made his landlord’s rounds, holding Nadia by the hand. But the young woman remained distant, sulky. He could tell she still held his hasty departure against him, as well as Jorgo’s death. Though he’d explained it wasn’t his fault, that Marianne had triggered the nightmare with her damned injection, Nadia remained suspicious and aloof.

The sky really looked terrible. Like an aging hull letting in water. Worst of all were the rusted clouds, which only moved now with a creaking noise and a shower of red dust. To top it all off, the air reeked so thickly of silt that it made him gag. The streets were empty, everyone lying low at home in hopes that living conditions would improve. David and Nadia walked through the empty streets of a ghost town entrenched in its funk, stepping over starfish crawling over the sidewalks.

“They snuck in through cracks in the hull,” Nadia murmured. “They’re colonizing the bathtubs, coming up through the drains.”

The most worrisome part was the damp in the bulwark. It blistered the sky’s paint and was slowly dimming the sun. Already less bright, the star had taken on an ugly yellow tinge, and when it shone, it gave off smoke that smelled like a sputtering candle. He had to do something right away, plug the leaks and caulk up the heavens before a bulkhead gave way to flooding, let loose a deluge.

David called for general mobilization and put up the highest ladders he could find. For a … week? the populace made fire lines to pass buckets of tar and welding alloy. The vault of the sky was reinforced with stays and beams that didn’t look very pretty, but relived the hull’s ribs of the terrible pressure upon them.

“Why not just bring us back up to a less dangerous depth?” Nadia suggested.

“I can’t anymore,” David confessed. “My body’s out of commission up there. I don’t have the same powers as before … Something’s broken.”

“Oh,” the young woman sighed impatiently. “You always did like being begged.”

But that wasn’t it. David really felt a stiffness taking over. Even his dream body didn’t feel as supple, as strong as it used to. It was now a somewhat inconvenient outfit that rubbed him wrong at the seams. A coat too heavy to wear. Things themselves were overtaken by a certain rigidity, a sudden lack of elasticity. They no longer transformed with the same carefree joy as before. So it was with the starfish. He’d been unable to check the sudden spread, and now they were rotting, letting off a horrible odor—they seemed to exist
outside of him
, against his will. Independently of
his desires. But this waning of his powers wasn’t his only worry. There was also Nadia. Nadia, who was suddenly distant, as if irked to see a bothersome guest make himself at home. And everyone shared in this irritation, slowly bringing David around to feeling like a spoilsport.

“You’re never going up again?” Nadia asked. “You mean you’re staying here for good?”

“Of course,” the young man would insist. “Why go back to an uninhabitable body? You know what they’re going to do to me up there? When Marianne’s had enough of playing home nurse, she’ll commit me to the dreamers’ hospice at the marble depot. I’ll rot away on a cot next to Soler Mahus, until my brain decides to wink out completely. Don’t you think I feel better here, with you?”

Nadia would smile halfheartedly and press herself against him, but her body had that rubbery texture again, the feel of a dream not fully under way.

“You won’t ever have nightmares again?” she would ask, over and over.

“No, the real nightmare is up there, lying in wait. Whatever happens down here is nothing compared to what’s waiting for me up there, see? Here I can walk, I can talk, I can make love.”

She nodded, pensive.

“Your skin,” David finally asked. “What’s wrong with it? It’s like rubber.”

“Oh,” she shrugged, dodging the question. “We’re all like that now. It must be because of the moisture. A way of staying waterproof … but the pink is pretty, right?”

They walked through the streets. Now that he’d plugged the leaks, the starfish were dying by the thousand, blackening the sidewalks with their marine rot.

“Will we start pulling jobs again? Break-ins, and all that?” Nadia murmured. “Like before, I mean?”

David wasn’t sure. Burglary seemed incompatible with his new status as landlord. Wasn’t he here to restore order to a world in critical condition? Wasn’t he a sort of doctor-architect? They expected efficient solutions from him, plans, responsible management. Hell, it wasn’t going to be easy to ensure the safety of this microworld trapped at a depth he could do nothing about. A thief? No, rather a guardian, a sentinel.

“Don’t you think we’ll get bored?” Nadia would say. “It’s sort of bourgeois, don’t you think? A living-room life. What will we do if we don’t rob people?”

She didn’t seem to be swayed by this new side to things. She took no pride in David’s sudden responsibilities. “Plus, my feet hurt from all that walking,” she declared with a pout.

Jorgo lay in the back of the garage. He was dead, no doubt about it, but his body was otherwise unchanged. When you walked up to him, his eyes began to move, but no sound escaped his lips. He was like a big, somewhat cumbersome doll that you were afraid of leaving alone, but whose presence made you ill at ease after just a few minutes. Maybe a nuclear suppository would’ve improved his condition, but where would you get drugs like that down here, and without a prescription, to boot? Nadia spoke to the dead man as if to a child, and insisted on giving him sponge baths. David wished he could’ve said that kind of attention probably annoyed
a dead body, but he was afraid the remark would put her in a bad mood again. After all, wasn’t it his fault Jorgo had died?

While she lathered up the corpse with a pink sponge, he went out for a walk. Strangely enough, ever since he’d moved into the dream as a landlord returning to his property after a life of absences and voyages, he’d felt vaguely like a fraud … an emigrant. And yet he was at home here, wasn’t he? He was the one who’d created this world, these people. In a way, he was their god. So why were they snubbing him? Because he’d come from Reality? Because they found him too different?