Absolute Pressure (2 page)

Worse, when my lungs ripped inside me, air bubbles would get into my blood. And once those bubbles reached my brain, I'd be dead.

Ninety-three feet from the top and running out of air, there was only one thing to do. A thousand to one shot. Or even less of a chance than that.

I unsnapped myself from the guideline. I dropped the weights from my belt and kicked upward. Already I wanted to suck for air. But I forced myself to breathe out instead. I had to keep bleeding air out of my lungs so that they wouldn't explode like the plastic milk jug.

I kicked more. It got easier once I left the ship. Without the weights, I was like a cork. There was air in my diving vest too. That buoyant air was taking me higher and faster.

I kept pushing air out of my lungs. My body screamed for me to suck something
in, not force it out. My body wanted to keep all the air. But if I held my breath, my lungs would rip.

Higher and higher. Second after second. I kept breathing out, kept pushing air out of my starving lungs.

Bam!

I felt something punch my chest. It was an air pocket in the vest, blowing apart as the air inside it expanded. It reminded me to keep pushing air out of my lungs, no matter what.

My sight became fuzzy and black around the edges. I needed air so badly I was about to pass out. But if I did, my body would try to breathe. My lungs would suck in water, not air.

The water grew brighter and brighter. But would I make the surface in time?

Then I remembered.

The boat!

If I was going straight up, I would hit the boat. Like a cork popping out of water. But corks don't have skulls that can be smashed. I did.

With my last ounce of energy, I kicked, trying to move straight ahead as I rose. I kicked. Kicked. Kicked...

The black around the edges of my eyesight expanded. I heard roaring in my ears. And finally, I hit sweet air.

My body popped all the way out of the water. When I landed, I saw the outline of the boat. Only ten feet away.

I sucked in lungful after lungful of air. Nothing in my life had ever felt better.

It had been close. Too close.

I waited for some energy to return. I swam toward the boat.

Judd leaned over. His face showed worry.

“Ian? Ian? What's the matter?”

I waved at him. It was a weak wave. I didn't have the strength for anything else. Not even the strength to talk.

I bumped up against the ladder. I tried to climb, but I couldn't. Judd reached down and helped me out of the water.

I got onto the boat.

“What happened?” Judd asked.

I groaned.

Water drained from my wet suit and my gear. I unbuckled my tank and vest and let both fall to the deck of the boat. I limped toward a bench seat. I let myself down. I lay back, staring at the blue sky.

And I waited to see if I would die.

As I waited, I closed my eyes against the hot Florida sun. Seagulls, thinking we were a fishing boat, screamed as they flew in circles above us.

“Ian?” Judd said. “Talk to me, man.”

“I'm scared I came up too fast.” My throat was sore from sucking in air.

“What!” His voice told me he knew my fear. “But why?”

He didn't say the rest. He didn't say that only a stupid diver would come up fast.

“I think the valve went on my tank. My tank was blowing air. I had nothing to breathe.”

“You made an emergency rise?”

“Yup.” I groaned again. “No choice.”

“How fast?”

“It happened at ninety-three feet. I went up on one last lungful of air.”

“Straight up? Full speed?”

“You saw me pop out of the water.”

“That's not good,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“I don't know.” I tried to smile. “Yet.”

He knew how serious this was. He didn't need me to explain that I was wondering when the agony would hit me and curl me over into a whimpering ball.

He stepped past me and started the boat engines. Judd Warner was big. At six foot one, he had an inch of height on me and about twenty pounds. I'm seventeen. He was about ten years older. His hair was bleached blond by the sun and stringy from hours and hours in salt water. He wore shorts and a loose muscle shirt
and moved with the smooth lightness of a cat.

“We're heading in,” he said. “We've got to get you to a chamber.”

I wouldn't have argued with him. Even if I'd had the energy.

Judd put both boat motors at full speed. We bounced across the green-blue water at forty miles per hour.

I tried not to think about what could happen if we didn't get there in time.

“I'm sorry, man!” Judd shouted as we cut across open water. The wind blew his hair straight back. “It should have been me down there!”

What he meant was that he should have been the one taking the treasure chest down to the wreck. But I loved diving. It was my life. I'd asked him a dozen times to let me go down until he'd gotten tired of arguing.

“That's okay,” I said. “Remember? It was my idea to switch.”

I don't think he heard me. I was too weak to shout above the wind.

Yeah. Diving was my life. Except now, even as I took air in through my lungs, it could be my death.

As we got closer to shore, I wondered if Judd was thinking what I was thinking. Things like broken valves don't happen to scuba diving tanks by accident.

If it wasn't an accident, that left two questions. Who had wrecked the valve? And why?

There were two places Judd could take me in the Keys for a recompression chamber. One was in the upper Keys. The other was owned by the US military, right in Key West.

The military chamber was closer, and we were onshore in less than fifteen minutes.

Judd had radioed ahead, and an ambulance was waiting for me. Along with Uncle Gord and the girl who handled phone calls and did bookkeeping for the dive shop part-time.

Sherri Eaton.

As Judd banged the boat into the rubber dock bumpers, Uncle Gord and Sherri jumped down to where I was laying with my head on a towel, still in my wet suit.

Sherri Eaton was my age. Her mom was a neighbor of Uncle Gord's, and she'd been hanging around his dive shop every summer since I'd first started visiting Key West when I was ten years old.

As usual when Sherri was around, I hardly noticed Uncle Gord. First, she's tall and she's blond, and when she wears a swim suit, fire trucks and police cars could be racing each other in circles, and no one would notice anything except Sherri. And when she smiles, the sun has to take second place too.

I know I'm not the only guy who stutters when she's around.

But I'm guessing there's nobody else in the world who tastes blackberries when he sees her.

Yes. Blackberries. Much as I didn't like feeling like a freak, I guess there were some good things about synesthesia. She was
beautiful, and I liked the taste of blackberries. It was a nice combination.

Not that I'd ever let her know about it. I wanted her to like me, not run away from me.

She leaned over, frowning with worry.

I was just as worried, wondering when the pain would hit, wondering if I would die, but even with all that worry, my tongue sent the taste of blackberries to my brain. Just for a few seconds.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

Uncle Gord pushed her away. “What happened?”

He made me feel like a kid. I've been a certified diver for years, but he was almost a legend around Key West. I wanted to apologize, even though I hadn't done anything wrong.

“Broken valve,” Judd answered for me. He pointed at the tank. “It's amazing he made it to the surface.”

“What?” Uncle Gord's tanned face became a few shades darker. He's my mother's brother. They both had quick
tempers. But they were also quick to laugh. I thought the world of both of them. “An emergency rise?”

“Ninety-three feet,” Judd said.

Sherri had moved in closer again. She touched my elbow as she knelt beside me. My left elbow. Bright red flooded my vision. When it went away a few seconds later, I saw that she was still beside me.

“Ninety-three feet?” She frowned again. “Ian, tell me you're okay.”

I didn't have time to answer. The ambulance crew was on the boat. With a stretcher to take me to the decompression chamber.

“Sherri,” I said. My voice was a croak.

She leaned in. Sherri always smelled faintly of coconut oil. It was my favorite smell. For a while I had wondered if that smell was part of synesthesia too. Like the taste of blackberries. Until I'd seen her use some from a bottle.

“Ian?”

I couldn't imagine how nice it would have been if she would have leaned a little closer.

I was thinking that I might die. That I might never have a chance to tell her how I really felt about her. How much I wished just once she'd lean close enough to hug me.

“I really, really love blackberries,” I said. If I was going to die, I wanted her to know how much I liked her. But before I told her how much I liked her, I'd have to work up the courage to tell her about my synesthesia.

“Ian?”

“Blackberries. Because when you—”

I couldn't finish my sentence. Bubbles in my blood hit me so hard that I bit through my tongue. There was the copper taste of blood and the warmth of it on my lips as it spilled from my mouth.

But that pain of my pierced tongue was nothing compared to getting hit by the bends.

I put my mouth into the crook of my arm and muffled my scream.

Divers call it “the bends.” They call it that because when you get it, you are forced to bend over with pain. It is a horrible pain. It hits the joints of elbows, shoulders and legs. If it's bad enough, it can make you blind or kill you.

Uncle Gord had explained the bends to me by telling me to think of a bottle of soda. Shake it hard and quickly open the cap. Watch it bubble over. Then think of
bubbles popping out of your blood in the same way. Major pain.

It has to do with the same water pressure that squeezed the milk jug.

You see, the normal air that you breathe every day has nitrogen in it, along with oxygen. Scuba diving tanks have the same mixture. As you breathe underwater, the pressure of the water's weight on your body slowly forces the nitrogen gas into your blood. The longer you stay down, the more nitrogen is in your blood.

It's not a problem, as long as you make sure the nitrogen gas leaves just as slowly as it went in. Just like with a plastic bottle of soda. If you open the cap a little at a time, the pressure is released slowly. The soda doesn't fizz. But if you go up too fast in diving, you take the pressure off too fast. You become like a bottle of soda with the cap popped off. The pressure lets go all at once, and the gasses inside the soda make bubbles and fizz over. Except in diving, the bubbles fizz in your blood. That's bad news.

It was the same bad news for me. Instead of going up at the ideal rate of fifteen feet per minute, I had shot upward like a cork. Nitrogen bubbles were already forming in my blood.

Now, curled up in an ambulance that was racing down the streets with sirens on and lights flashing, my only hope was the recompression chamber at the end of the ride.

On the outside, a recompression chamber looks like a mini-submarine, with gauges everywhere. Inside, it can seat up to three divers.

At the military base, they rushed me inside.

I did my best not to scream at the pain as they moved me toward the recompression chamber.

They closed it on both ends, and began to pump air into it. The air wouldn't escape and it would put pressure on my body. Just like putting a cap on the top of a bottle of soda to stop the fizzing.

As long as it wasn't too late.

I had about seven hours ahead in the recompression chamber. If I was lucky and survived.

The pressure in the chamber rose to about two atmospheres. That's double the pressure you feel standing outside.

Actually, you don't feel the pressure. You have just as much pressure inside you pushing out as you have air pressing down on you. That may sound confusing, but it's like this.

When you are on a beach, the entire weight of all the air above is pressing down on you. Sure, air doesn't weigh a lot. But when there is sixty miles of it pressing down on you, it adds up.

In fact, it could crush you.

The reason it doesn't is because it also fills you and pushes out.

Still doesn't make sense?

Suck the air out of a plastic soda bottle and watch what happens. It crumples. The only reason it normally holds its shape is because the atmosphere is pushing air
into
it at the same time it is pushing air
onto
it.

In the recompression chamber, the pressure against me was countered by the pressure inside me as the air filled my lungs. At the same time, it was stopping nitrogen bubbles from fizzing inside my blood.

“How's it feel?” The voice came from a doctor outside the chamber, through a speaker inside.

“Better,” I said. “Much better.”

I was able to sit up as the pain eased.

“You're a certified diver,” the doctor said. “Right?”

“Right.”

“So you know what to expect.”

“Right.”

But he told me anyway. “In a few hours, we'll bring you up to thirty feet.”

What he meant was that right now, my body was under the same pressure as it would be if I were sixty feet underwater. I was slowly getting rid of the nitrogen that had been forced into my blood by pressure. After some of it was gone, the pressure would be reduced.

“I think you'll be fine,” he said. “We'll keep you monitored. In the meantime, there's lots of stuff to read in there.”

I nodded. I didn't mind reading. I'd long gotten used to seeing every
M
in purple and every
S
in orange. It's just the way I was. For a long time, when I was in elementary school, I thought everybody saw the alphabet the same way.