The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (2 page)

BOOK: The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome
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The square of frosted glass gave off a blinding white light, demanding that the first phase of the identification process begin immediately. If no hand was placed on its surface in thirty seconds, it would set off a general alarm. Finally overcoming his disgust, David grabbed the hunk of flesh by its sticky end and slapped the palm on the plate. It hit the glass with the wet smack of a bird flying into a window. The machine purred, gathering information. The retinal scanner blinked in turn, betraying its impatience. With his free hand, David uncorked the vial where Nadia had dropped the jeweler’s left eye, so carefully enucleated an hour ago. He swore. The gelatinous ball was slippery between his fingers. He didn’t dare squeeze, for fear of popping it. One false move, and he’d find himself imprisoned in the airlock, reduced to waiting helplessly for the police. Silently counting off the seconds, he finally got control of the eyeball and raised it gently to the level of the glowing lens. He knew he had to get it right side up; Nadia had made him practice the action at length, showing him how
to tell if the organ was upside down from a few markers on the back. Fingers trembling, he held the ocular orb up to the black rubber eyepiece. The machine hummed again, and then the door to the boutique unlocked with a hiss of hydraulic pistons. David wrapped the body parts in the bloodstained handkerchief, stowed it in the briefcase, and entered the boutique. His legs felt weak, and he would have given anything for a glass of whisky. Getting in had been accomplished with extraordinary consistency—no loss of control—and in his delight, he passed up a glance at his depth gauge. The pill had made his mouth pasty and numbed the underside of his tongue. To double-check action of the drug, he slammed the big key on a showcase full of necklaces. This time, the impact produced a clear, shapely tinkling sound: no ebbing or wobbling. Sometimes noises would go into an endless quaver like a cassette tape run too slow. That was usually a bad sign. He slammed the showcase again, savoring the crisp clink attesting to the solidity of the world around him. He crossed the boutique without glancing at the jewelry on display. What he’d come for was always deep in a safe in back, far from prying customers. Another fundamental rule, not to be argued with. No matter the shop, the safe was always the same: fat, black, oafish, and anachronistic, with a huge dial in the middle of the door. A forbidding cube that never rang hollow, that no crane could have lifted or budged so much as an inch. The perfect safe … Once in back, he reached a door with a brass plate that said
PRIVATE
. The big key let him in. Behind it was a sitting room with heavy red draperies, cluttered with bronzes and sculptures. The safe was at the very back of the room, its big black door guarding the entrance to a
forbidden citadel. David took his stethoscope from the briefcase and began sounding out the door. The dial rattled, amplified by his instrument. David focused on the clicks rising from the cast iron. Now, more than ever, he needed a musician’s ear. Abruptly incongruous images formed in his mind, and he saw himself in a doctor’s office, leaning over the abdomen of an obese patient. As if following suit, the safe let out a burp, painfully vibrating the stethoscope’s diaphragm.
Enough!
David thought, as if that naïve magic word were all it took to restore order. Now a great big heart was beating behind the reinforced door, making a dreadful, unbearable racket, masking the clicking of the dial. Then the safe began saying, “33 … 33 … 33 …” with the regularity of a clock bent on running forever. David tore the stethoscope from his ears and swallowed another consistency pill. He was perspiring freely now; sweat trickled in an unbroken stream from his armpits. Without thinking, he patted his jacket pocket, where he kept a dime bag of realism powder. He could sniff it on the glass-topped desk right here and now, but even though the powder curbed oneiric drift, it also hastened the ascent: a side effect he had to keep in mind. He fingered the bag, hesitating. Too much realism and he could take off right in the middle of the heist. He didn’t relish the prospect. Better to try to push forward through the parasitic drift, keeping his eye on the prize. He turned back to the safe and began listening again. At first all he heard through the chestpiece was intestinal gurgling, and he had to strain his ears to make out the faint clicking of the dial as it turned.
Click … click … clack!
said the lock.
Screw you!
the chorus of tumblers retorted.
Take your hardware and scram!
added the armor plating. They were
chanting in rhythm, spinning off endless variations on their simple theme, the singsong harmoniously dovetailing like an operetta with a strangely metallic aftertaste. Each click of the dial was another note the iron choir fell in tune with. David shrank back, his face slick. He mopped his forehead and palms with the starchy handkerchief. A scratching sound from the desk made him turn around. With some anxiety, he saw the jeweler’s severed hand had escaped from the briefcase and crawled across the blotter adorning the desktop. It had grabbed a pen and was now writing in large, tremulous letters,
My dear man, you’ll get nowhere tonight. Beat it before the police surround the building
. The eyeball was floating in the air, peering at the statues and bronzes; sometimes it swooped down and froze over the ledgers, hovering like a helicopter. David pressed his forehead against the safe’s icy door. He couldn’t back out; it was an easy job. Nadia had said so. Besides, there was no way he could go back up empty-handed; these last few weeks he’d already dived three times without bringing anything back. If this unlucky streak dragged on, they’d soon be accusing him of incompetence. They’d even go so far as to claim his powers were wearing out.
I’m rising
, he thought as panic seeped in.
Yes, we’re going up
, the severed hand feverishly scribbled on the blotter.
Fifth floor: women’s lingerie, silken trifles; sixth floor, children’s department
—frantically, David grabbed the dial. The door to the safe let out a loud sigh.
Why, Doctor, what icy hands you have!
the lock snickered.
I’m too light
, thought David,
I’m flying upwards. It’s like my feet aren’t even on the ground anymore. My pockets are full of bubbles
. Echoing this last thought, a heavy cut-glass inkwell rose from the desk, wafting gently over
the books and the clock. As a phenomenon, weightlessness meant the world of the job was in the process of losing its initial density. Objects hollowed, grew friable, fragile as papier-mâché. A thick leather-bound tome took flight next, joining the inkwell. David touched the door. The metal had changed textures too; now it felt like something between terra-cotta and stucco.
Might as well
. David steeled himself.
What are you waiting for?
He made a fist, drew it back, and punched the safe with all his might, as if trying to flatten a giant in an unfair match. There was an eggshell crack as his fist hit the steel door. Off-balance, he fell into the cube, his arm shoulder-deep inside the safe. His fingers blindly groped the shelves, fumbled crunching bagfuls of loose stones. He came across bags like that in every heist; the psychologist said it was negative thinking. Objects with a precise shape, however convoluted, would’ve been worth more. The bags invariably meant a small take. He grabbed them anyway.

His heart was beating way too fast. The veins in his left arm were beginning to ache, a painful blister throbbing on his wrist, right over his pulse. He leaned on the desk to catch his breath. He had to stay cool in the face of a nightmare, or else the dream would eject him without regard for decompression stops. He mastered his breathing. If he gave in to the nightmare, the excess of anxiety would result in a brutal awakening as his consciousness tried to flee unbearable images by snapping back to reality. If he wasn’t careful, he’d take off right from where he was standing, literally sucked up toward the surface. He’d rise straight into the air, clothes and shoes tearing away, punch through the ceiling and the whole building like an arrow through a lump of clay … he’d lived
through it once or twice before, and it was a horrible memory. The feeling of suddenly becoming a human cannonball, tearing headfirst at the most terrifying obstacles: walls, floorboards, ceilings, rafters, roofs … Each time he was sure his skull would burst open at the next impact, and even though that never happened, hurtling through buildings of slime was still a disgusting experience. When the dream stopped short, the structure of things weakened, the hardest materials took on an ectoplasmic consistency like raw egg whites or jellyfish. He’d had to make his way through that cloacal mire, arms over his head to streamline his ascent, mouth clamped shut to keep from gulping down the gelatinous substance of a decomposing dream …

Nightmare ejected you without a care for the demands of your mission, subjecting you to the stress of an emergency procedure that left you empty-handed. Whenever it happened, the ascent was too swift to hang on to your haul. Jewels, stacks of bills, bags of precious stones—the pressure inevitably tore them from your grip. Your clothes split at the seams, you felt in every abused joint like you’d been torn apart by wild horses. And then there was the friction of water on your body: a pleasant silken caress that grew ever more painful as the speed increased. When you woke up, your skin was red as if it’d been sandpapered, with open wounds where the friction had been greatest.

David forced himself to breathe slowly. Clutching the bags of diamonds to his chest, he groped his way toward another consistency pill. He slipped it from the tube onto his tongue, swallowing to force out saliva and dissolve it. Three pills: he’d reached the maximum dosage. Any more and he was in danger of what divers
called
the bell
: an extreme inertia that slowed your every move and forced you to make countless calculations before lifting so much as a finger. In his early days, David had made that mistake once or twice; he’d found himself literally paralyzed by a maniacal obsession with measurements. While sitting in an armchair, he’d suddenly been plagued by an insane need to determine at once the exact resistance the seat offered the weight of his body; then to derive the equation governing the translocatory motion that would take him from the armchair to the door. After that, he’d furiously calculated the pressure his fingers exerted on every square inch of the porcelain knob. He’d wound up abysmally lost in estimating the perimeter and volume of the room, trying to determine the specific resistances of the materials that composed it. He woke just as he was beginning a new series of computations to ascertain with the greatest possible precision the number of years—centuries?—it would take rain to erode the walls and reduce them to the thickness of rolling papers. The bell was a holy terror. A kind of mental vertigo that hurled you down a well of mathematical formulae and equations. Three pills was really the max, if you didn’t want your brain to turn into a crazed calculator.

His heart was beating almost normally now. The punctured safe was no longer singing. Only the severed hand kept twitching on the blotter. Suddenly it threw itself at David, trying to claw his face, put out an eye. He flung it aside with the back of his hand and hurried from the room. He was almost to the airlock when he remembered he needed the body parts to get through it again. He eyed the metal plate that concealed the two scanners. If he wanted to get out of the boutique, he’d have to go through the exact same
steps he’d used to get in. He needed what Nadia had removed from the anesthetized jeweler. The image came back to him: the man reclining in a barber’s chair, all leather and upholstery tacks (a rich man’s fancy), with his oddly truncated arm wrapped in a towel, and a gauze plug stuffed in his empty eye socket like an out-of-place cork. “He didn’t feel a thing,” Nadia had said. “I left him instructions for when he wakes up, and a little something for the pain.” But where was the hand now? And the eye?

David retraced his steps. The severed hand was scratching at the blotter like a mad beast, raising a cloud of pink dust. The eye was floating high above between the pendants of the chandelier. “C’mere!” David ordered stupidly, taking a step forward. The hand sprang from the desk at once and scuttled under a chest of drawers. David got up on a chair to try to grab the eye, but it hugged the ceiling, remaining out of reach. He took another swipe, but the legs of the chair went rubbery and the seat tore under his weight, throwing him to the ground. The back of his neck struck the corner of the desk, but it was painless; even the desk was now soft as marshmallow. The deterioration was getting worse. He checked his watch. The glowing face read
1,650 feet
. He had to get out of the shop at any cost; that was how things worked. If he woke up before he got away, he’d lose the haul and surface empty-handed. Violent blows shook the shop window behind him. He turned, nervous: it was Nadia, slamming the armored glass with both fists to get his attention. “I can’t get out!” he yelled, exaggerating the words so she could read his lips. “I lost the eye and the hand.” Nadia puckered up, blew mist on the glass, and began writing something backwards. It was slow going, and
she messed up a few letters, but soon David could make it out:
Doesn’t matter for you now. Dream breaking up. You can make it through. More solid than me
.

Instinctively, David felt himself with his hands. She was right. Dreamers were always denser than the dream worlds they moved through. The difference was negligible when the dream was in full swing, but useful once things started falling apart.

“You can make it through!” Nadia was yelling on the other side. “You’re more solid than the glass! C’mon!”

David started backing up to throw himself through the pane, but the fear of hurting himself stopped him cold. For a moment he had a vision of glass shards shredding his face, severing his carotid. No, he wouldn’t make it; the shattered window’s razor-sharp fragments would rip his throat open. He—

The howl of the alarm made him start. He realized the jeweler’s hand must have set it off, just pressed a button hidden in a drawer, sending a signal straight to the nearest precinct. The alarm wailed like a cow being tortured … or a ship heading out to sea. David shut his eyes. He could smell the sea again, his feet were in the sand, and his hands were clutching pebbles … 
No! Dammit! Not pebbles: uncut stones! Raw diamonds!

BOOK: The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome
12.99Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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