Submergence (6 page)

Six millennia ago, the air god Enlil and the sea god Enki settled themselves in the pantheon of Sumerian deities. The Sumerians believed the world was something like a snow globe. Enlil kept the air in the world together with lil, a mingling atmosphere that also lent luminosity to the sun and stars embellished on the inside of the snow globe. Behind the firmament was a deep sea, and Enki’s house was on the sea floor – a place called Abzu. It was a house made of colours which could not be seen, tiles of lapis lazuli, and encrustations of gems, most especially ruby and cornelian, that could not be crushed at those depths. The bowed cedar doors were hammered right with gold no brine could corrode. In this house Enki created a man. He mixed clay over the volcanic furnace, shaped it with heavy water, and swam it to the world. He breathed air into it there. The man failed. His body was weak. So was his spirit. According to the translation of Samuel Kramer of the University of Pennsylvania, the man was offered a piece of bread: ‘He does not reach out for it. He can neither sit nor stand nor bend his knees.’

What is the lesson? That a man-creature created in the deep should stay there: in a house without light, without a hearth.

His family had been enriched by whaling, and when he dwelled on confinement he came back to the story of his forebear, Captain John More, who as a young man served William Scoresby in the Greenland Sea aboard the whaler
Resolution
. John was a living Jonah. This is not to say he sucked down the storm with him until the ship was becalmed, or that the good captain was a prophet punished by God. He in no way brought bad luck on his crew, but made them a fortune with his
judicious mix of sober fellowship and new industrial methods. The bad luck John More had was his alone and it made him famous in his day. In the austral summer of 1828, John’s whaler,
Silver Star
, chased a sperm whale through a tempest off Patagonia’s Isle of Desolation. The whale entered a bay from which there was no escape. John jumped down into a whaleboat with his harpooner and two others. Just like in
Moby-Dick
, though years earlier, the whale rose up and smashed the whaleboat, throwing John and his men into the sea. The men were found. John was lost, presumed drowned. The whale was killed and brought alongside the
Silver Star
, where it floated for a day and a night as the crew mourned their captain. It was only when the whale’s stomach was hoisted above the deck that one of the flensers saw it pulse. They cut it open and found John wide-eyed and coughing in the gastric juices. The whale had swallowed him. There was mucus over his body and his hands. One of his feet was partly digested where the stocking had come off. He was otherwise physically unharmed.

He went mad for a week and suffered claustrophobia. He would not sleep in his cabin, but instead laid himself down on the deck. His eyes would not focus. He repeated in his speech a groaning about the celerity of the whale in rising and its rows of white teeth. When the fog closed over the
Silver Star
he took his blankets and sealskins and climbed the mast. The madness burned off him with the sun, and what he remembered in his later life was

the fleeting hold, aye, I had on Leviathan’s face, which was carved in deep cuts like them tattoos on the face of South Sea whaleman, those greasy teeth knocking me, the tunnel of a throat, aye, and of the stomach I can say it was more a tomb than was ever my mother’s womb.

He lived until old age and never again wanted to be alone in small rooms or to wake in the dark. A whaler’s voyage was always brightly lit. There was oil and wax enough to keep a constant lambency and
there was more learning than on modern vessels. Forever after he had many lamps lit before he went to sleep. He had a ladder put through the ceiling of his bedroom in the Regency house by the North Sea and in his infirmity retreated up it to the roof whenever he felt confined.

James had no such ladder. He wished for a spermaceti candle, even if it would also show the insects, the cardboard and the trench. He was desperate for something far away. A hare. Some colour in the sky. Everything etched. The fields, the hedgerows. The hare runs into the next field, into trees, then up a hill. On and on. How it runs!

Suddenly, the door swung open.

Extreme cold enables strange things to happen. For example, at the Helsinki University of Technology’s low temperature lab, in 2001, a Bose-Einstein condensate cooled near to the absolute zero of minus 273° Celsius stopped dead a beam of light travelling at 978 million kilometres per hour.

There were drifts of snow up against the walls and fences, while in other places the ground was bare and glassy as obsidian. The dunes and beach were grey with frost. Purple heather stood out and gorse. The sea was wild. A few surfers in coloured wetsuits rode the waves. She walked with her head down. It was that cold wind which searched with fingers for the rot in a jawbone. It touched a tooth she refused to have drilled. Trieste. She had visited Trieste with her parents and their guide had spoken of how the winter wind rapped at James Joyce’s broken and infected teeth when he wandered the
seafront during his long exile in the city. The guide pronounced rapped ‘rapid’.

The lighthouse stood in the distance. It was a sleeping creature, leaving no sign in the day. About it were a few villas, boarded up like wooden boats. A more modern hotel, the Ostende, stood on a promontory beyond.

A man ran past her. She watched him become smaller and smaller until he disappeared in the distance. She walked briskly in the same direction. She wanted to work up an appetite. She was determined to eat the winter menu at the hotel, which was Etruscan: golden, sweet fat of suckling pig in the afternoon; oxtail dishes, bread and wine and cake under a burnished chandelier in the evenings.

The man was running back towards her, becoming bigger, more possible. She was following his tracks and he was returning the same way. He stopped a few steps in front of her. He put his hands on his hips and breathed hard, as if coming up for air. Breath steamed calf-like from his mouth and nostrils. She caught him as he passed. He was possibly shy and she did not want to miss him.

‘Good morning,’ she said.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘You’re English, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, you?’

‘From London,’ she said, in English.

He guessed who she was. He had seen her name and title when he had signed in. Professor of what?

He held out his hand. ‘James More.’

She shook it. A big hand, chilled, the blood deep inside, but soft.

‘Danielle … Danny Flinders.’

‘Danny the champion of the world.’

Despite herself, despite the familiarity, she shone in that moment. For her it was simple. A hermit crab finds its shell, and is accommodated – so lovers meet.

It was before breakfast and the sky was slate, darker than the dunes,
descending with the weight of the forecast snowstorms. The first words they spoke to each other were rounded and slurred by the cold.

‘Only an Englishman would wear shorts in this weather,’ she said.

He was more distracted. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s cold. I’m going back.’

‘Shall I see you later?’

She could have said something less definite.

He smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Then he was gone, sprinting for the cover of the pines.

She walked all the way to the Hotel Ostende and back and bumped into him when she came into the lobby. It was awkward. But then life is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.

‘I have some work to do,’ she said, hastily. ‘I’m going to have breakfast in my room.’

‘Lunch?’ he said. He had showered and dressed. He was more winsome than he had been on the beach.

‘Would one thirty be too late?’

He batted a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
against his leg. ‘See you then,’ he said, and was gone.

The first thing she did when she got to her room was to order breakfast. She bathed. When she came out of the bathroom the food was waiting for her on a table under a silver dome. Room service was a kind of magic.

A maid was in the doorway.

‘May I make the fire, madame?’

‘Please.’

Fire was important to her. It wasn’t just that the snow had arrived outside, hiding the sky, making the room more precious. A fireplace was a focus. There was no focus in the abyss, not really. Enki’s house
had no hearth. Where magma burned in seawater it did so without colour or note. It was a volcanic heat which would burn through your craft, melt rock; it was a wellspring of life, as we shall see, but it was not fire the way fire existed at the surface; with air, the flames having shapes, volumes, and shades according to their heat.

She had the desk moved so it stood in front of the blazing logs, and not the snowstorm. She worked on equations pertaining to the speed of duplication of microbial life. Of course she worked. It was compelling, monumental. She hardly looked up when the coffee was served at the precise hour she had requested. She did not think of the man she had met on the beach and again in the reception. She jotted notes and numbers on filing cards with a fountain pen in green ink. At the end of the week she would have a stack of cards. She would arrange the cards into an order in London and when she had transcribed what was valuable from them she would shut them in a wooden drawer of the kind formerly used in libraries. Occasionally, she took a pencil and worked through calculations on large sheets of paper.