The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (15 page)

The sky wasn’t as blue as usual, and behind its fragile layer the enormous mass of black water could be felt, waters no light had ever pierced, where even the fish proved to be blind. David closed his eyes. Would his sixth sense be up to detecting any possible leak and plugging it? Nadia and Jorgo were talking, but he wasn’t listening. Their eyes shone with a strange greed; their mouths too, as
if they fed on David’s presence, as if they were stuffing themselves on his lifeblood, stealing hunks of flesh from him to increase their own density. Vampires, the young man thought, stiffening against a fleeting reaction of disgust. One day, if he was so careless as to linger in the depths of dream, would his dear companions give into the temptation to devour him, to live at his expense? No, of course not, he was losing his mind, he had nothing to fear from Nadia and Jorgo.

And yet their eyes, like IV needles …

He shook himself, banishing the phantasmagoria of the rapture of the deep. While Nadia reviewed the various difficulties of the job, David’s mind flew off, left the garage for an inspection of the heavenly vault. There, between those clouds over there—was that a bird, or a crack? Astride the wind, he examined the world the way a sailor would the hold of a ship, lantern raised, to be sure that the hull showed no signs of leakage. He was sitting at the table, drawing up plans, determining precise timing, and at the same time he was roaming the world below, palpating the heavens, tasting water from the fountains to make sure the seas weren’t trying to infiltrate the dream. Things like that often happened down here. Moments ran parallel, time shrank or expanded. Parentheses opened in the fabric of events. Time leapt from morning to night in the blink of an eye. Nothing here worked like it did up above.

“This is a really big job,” Nadia murmured. “You know the whole museum’s under surveillance, right? Electric eyes that set off alarms at the first sign of movement? They sweep the rooms nonstop and can spot a mouse at thirty yards.”

David nodded. He recognized the speech, straight out of a crime novel he’d read as a kid, whose plot he’d entirely forgotten. He was willing to bet the name of the painting he’d mentioned earlier,
The Battle of Kanstädt
, came from the same book.

“We need a specialist,” Nadia said, serious. “Only Professor Zenios can neutralize the electric eyes. He’s a hypnotist. When he’s through with them, all the sensors will be able to see is what he wants them to.”

David was delighted. He’d never heard of this Zenios before. Wasn’t that added proof of the autonomy of the world below? He wasn’t the one who made up all the characters. They existed outside himself, had their own lives which owed him nothing, or just about.

“Let’s go with Zenios,” he said. As a child, he’d habitually relished chapters that detailed the preparations for a heist. He adored the lists of objects, the blueprints, the special outfits, the ingenious tools that came into play. Today he kept back, out of step with the others, cheated of his pleasure. He eyed Nadia with a sudden desire to grab a pin and stab one of her breasts to see the blood flow … more exactly,
to make sure she could bleed
. Marianne’s poisonous rationality was inside him; though he’d plugged his ears, something from her damned speeches had slipped through. An interpretive virus that risked perturbing him during the heist—NO! Nadia was no symbol, Jorgo either. They weren’t puppets, paper cutouts a mere breeze could carry off, THEY WERE REAL. Nadia smelled of sleep and sweat, and Jorgo grime and grease.

Suddenly, the young woman grabbed his wrist. Her eyes opened wide when she saw the figure on the depth gauge.

“You’re crazy,” she gasped. “No one’s ever gone this far down before. We’re not equipped for missions this deep into the abyss. Are you trying to kill us?”

“The sooner it’s over, the sooner we’ll go back up,” David murmured. “I know I’m putting our world in danger, but if I don’t bring back anything they won’t let me dive anymore, see? This is my last chance. I have to prove to them I can pull off something as well as Soler Mahus. If I resurface empty-handed, they’ll poison you, the sky will rot, the houses crumble, and soon you’ll be nothing but a porcelain tumor deep in my head. A tumor that will make me deaf, dumb, and a vegetable.”

He fell silent, out of breath. Nadia put her hand on his. It was warm and moist, like a real hand.

They met up with Zenios the next … day? Zenios was a little fellow stuffed into a black raincoat, with a hat so big for his head that it almost covered his eyebrows. A gray goatee and round steel-rimmed glasses hid what remained of his face. He spoke with a strong Russian accent and claimed he was capable of hypnotizing anything with a glass lens on it, from screens to electric eyes. He performed a demonstration with the help of a portable television, which he mesmerized right in the middle of a maudlin soap opera and “persuaded,” with a few bizarrely whispered phrases, to display the first three hundred columns of the telephone book.

While the names and figure skipped across the screen, he declared in magisterial tones, “The duration of the trance depends, of course, on the quality of the object. The more sophisticated the
object, the more limited the effects of persuasion. A television is an easy target, but the security system in a museum is much more recalcitrant. I will hypnotize the sensors, affirm that all they are seeing is a succession of empty rooms, but this suggestion won’t last more than half an hour. Little by little, the electronic circuits will emerge from their stupor and become aware of reality. If you’re still on the premises then, they’ll set off the alarm, and I will be unable to help you …”

They met up with Zenios the next day (or a few minutes later). He was a little fellow squeezed into a black raincoat, with a hat … they met … David was having the hardest time keeping track of dream time. Sudden lapses denied him the action’s linear progression. He would emerge from sleep right in the middle of a conversation or meeting like a sleepwalker who’d just fallen out a window and woken up in midair.

“You’re distracted,” Nadia told him. “Sometimes I feel like you’re growing transparent, fading away. What’s on your mind?”

“My body,” the young man confessed. “I left it up there, unmonitored. It’s the first time, see? No one knows I’m here, and I can’t figure out how long I’ve been gone. If something happens to it up there—”

Nadia frowned. No one, indeed, knew how time down below compared to time on the surface. The flow of time in the dream world seemed to proceed by fits and starts. Sometimes gestures stretched out endlessly like in a slow-motion scene, and at other times, it all went by very fast. Actions fled by, sped up, while conversations became an incomprehensible chirping. David wondered
if the temporal flux wasn’t governed by purely subjective criteria, the mind condensing painful or boring moments in order to protract pleasant ones instead, dragging them out until they were a kind of amber where you wound up getting trapped. It was just a theory, but he knew an hour of dream didn’t equal an hour of reality; the exchange rate was much more complex.

“I’m worried, because an hour here is almost a day up there,” he explained clumsily. “Up top they think it’s the other way around, but they’re wrong.”

“Makes sense,” the young woman remarked. “Down here you live life to the fullest, while up there your life is empty, worthless. You need a lot of real time to buy just a minute of dreams.”

“Yeah,” David admitted, “but right now my body’s all alone. When the glucose bottles run out, it’ll start to die.”

“You worry too much about it,” Nadia said with a trace of aggression. “It’s just a vehicle. Your mind isn’t up there, it’s down here.”

“But if my flesh and blood body dies,” David stammered, “will we go on living? I mean: what if we need it, like a plant needs the soil in its pot?”

“No,” the young woman hissed, “that’s just a superstition. We have an independent existence. If your body died you’d stay here forever, with us. You wouldn’t lead the double life of a traveling salesman anymore: one day here, the next at the antipodes …”

There was a hint of reproach in her voice, as if she suspected David of leading a hidden life in reality, from which he derived ineffable pleasures. As if the body he went on and on about was
but an excuse for escapades. The life of a traveling salesman? The accusation stirred an echo of vague memories in him, blurry images involving the antipodes … He gave up. The plant metaphor obsessed him. His body was the nourishing earth the dream world depended on; if that earth turned to sterile ash, they would all die. The withering of his flesh would undoubtedly lead to the necrosis of the oneiric world; they were all linked, Siamese, inseparable, unable to live one without the other. What would happen to him if he never went back up? If he
deserted
? First the sky would fade away, he thought. Little by little, the sun would lose its heat. Objects would become transparent as jellyfish; our hands would pass through them when we tried to grab them.

“Stop indulging your fears!” Nadia flared. “You’ll summon the nightmare. Is that what you want? Complete disaster?”

“Of course not,” he said, and went to the window to make sure the world was still stable and no symptoms betrayed the formation of an embryonic cataclysm. Except for a slight warping from the pressure, he noticed nothing, but he was still nervous. He didn’t like arguing with Nadia about his double life in the real world. He’d tried to tell her before just how boring that life was, but she remained obsessed by the women he associated with up there.

“That Marianne,” she’d hiss wrathfully. “She coddles you like a nursemaid. And then there’s that Antonine you’re sleeping with—”

“But that doesn’t count,” David whined. “Up there I’m
pathetic, ugly. You wouldn’t even recognize me. My face, my body are very different from the ones I use down here. I’m just a very average guy. You’ve got no reason to be jealous. That’s someone else up there, living that life. A loser.”

“I’m sure you’re exaggerating,” Nadia grumbled. “You can’t change that much just by surfacing. Besides, you’re bringing back all that loot. You’re rich. Women like that.”

The more concrete details he gave her about his everyday life, the more unbelievable it seemed to her.
Come on!
He’d try harder.
Life up there can’t be that dull, that devoid of appeal
. These conversations made David ill at ease. He was often tempted to fast-forward through them, but each time he tried, Nadia would interrupt his attempt and reestablish a slower pace, one more conducive to discussion. How many days since he’d passed out on the bed, the glucose drip stuck in his arm?

“You’re always looking for reasons to leave again,” Nadia grumbled. “You come here, but you keep thinking about what’s going on up there, while you’re away. If you really loved us, you wouldn’t give a damn what happens to your body.”

Maybe she was right, but he couldn’t let it go, and wore himself out on rough calculations in an attempt to pinpoint the temporal exchange rate between reality and dream. He always came up with the same result: the coin of reality was small change down here. It was even unpleasantly like those garishly colored banknotes from banana republics, stately on the fingers but barely enough to buy a pocketful of matches.

“Desert!” Nadia whispered to him deep in the sleeping bag
that … night? “They can’t come looking for you here. Our borders are impassable. They’ve got no way of making you come back!”

David silenced her with a kiss. Her mouth was hot. Hotter than a real woman’s. And he moved to cover his body with hers and make love.

Just as he was about to lower himself onto her, he realized they weren’t in the sleeping bag anymore. Instead, they were sitting in a parked car in front of the museum esplanade. This kind of temporal short-circuiting was very common in dreams. Whenever he found himself confronted with it, David still felt for a fleeting moment like he was trapped in a falling elevator, and his stomach flipped. Discreetly, he checked that his clothes were on right with one hand. Nadia was driving; she didn’t seem to have noticed the temporal splice. David glanced in the rearview mirror. Zenios and Jorgo were sitting in back, silent, staring straight ahead. There was something uncertain about their features, as was often the case with supporting characters. If you weren’t careful, their expressions ended up completely erased, their faces settling for standard-issue holes and slits without any personalizing elements.
David squinted to increase the definition. At any rate, he’d never really paid attention to Jorgo, and thought of him more as an amiable idiot.

“Did you take the pills?” Nadia asked in a tense voice. Instinctively, David popped open the steel suitcase on his lap and opened a vial of pills.

“Stay on top of your consistency,” Nadia repeated. “But above all, stay cool. You know how paintings are in our world; they’re nothing at all like what you have up there. So stay calm, cool, collected.”

David tapped a little distancing powder onto the back of his hand. The trick was getting the dose just right.

“I popped a nuclear suppository,” Jorgo crowed. “I feel awesome!”

“How deep are we?” Nadia asked, ignoring the interruption.

“Still 66,000,” David murmured. “And holding.”

He recalled the last time, when he’d let his fantasies get away from him, almost turning the car into a shark. That wasn’t going to happen tonight. This time he was fine. The powder had numbed his nostrils, tattooing a cold patch between his eyebrows.

“You’re up, Professor,” Nadia said, opening the door. They got out of the car and headed across the white esplanade single-file. The night was starless, oppressively dark. No phosphorescent fish crossed the sky. David felt reassured by just how real things felt. The situation was well in hand.

“Don’t overdo it,” Nadia whispered. Get too rational, and Zenios will lose his powers. A character like him can only exist in a certain dream context.”