The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (20 page)

He walked three laps around the world, head tilted upward to keep an eye on the cracks in the sky. Passersby did not say hello. They even drew back as he went by, as if to keep from touching him.

“Is that the guy from the real world?” he heard once, behind his back. “His skin sure is a weird color.”

He walked on, dragging his too-heavy, too-massive body along. Rusted old armor with insubordinate joints. What was he hoping for? Exhaustion that would thrust him into sleep and make him forget his cares? But coming all this way just to sleep was stupid.

In the papers, they accused him of defacing the environment with the hideous girders he’d put up to support the sky. They expressed astonishment that a former thief could pretend to tell respectable people how to behave. Certain scandal sheets insinuated that he’d been ousted from Reality for shady reasons. They portrayed him as a wheeler-dealer working for people on the Surface.
Are we to let ourselves be governed by an outsider?
barked the headlines.

David paced to and fro, ill at ease. Even Nadia no longer satisfied him. For some time now, he’d been wondering about her. Was she really mysterious, or just skin-deep? Didn’t her opacity hide a profound, irremediable emptiness? Until now they’d only ever kept company during a heist. Her long silences, her refusal to talk about herself had seemed to him mysteries full of charm. Now that he was living right beside her, her opacity began to annoy him. The mystery became suspect. What if, in reality, Nadia was but a cardboard character from a genre series? One of those heroines drawn in broad strokes? A shadow puppet cut from paper far too flimsy … He was afraid of getting bored with her. Afraid of hearing her say the same words all the time, make the same gestures, the same faces. He was the one who’d created her, of course, but only in the context of a serial dream … Nadia could not exist outside of action. He’d thought about fleshing her out, giving her memories, a past, buried loves, but what would become of the magic of discovery if he already knew everything about her before she did? This dilemma drove him mad. Sometimes, when he embraced her, he felt like all he was holding in his arms was a drawing, a figure cut out from a magazine ad. A woman so thin she could’ve slipped through a mail slot. Could he really hold it against her? She was but one of his creatures, a quick sketch, a profile, a head of hair, a certain quality of silence and brusqueness. Secretly, he would make up a childhood for her, an adolescence, an early failed marriage with a lummox. A washed-up boxer, maybe … But what was the point of implanting these facts in the young woman’s head if her attitude wouldn’t change anyway?

Besides, he wasn’t even sure he could still pull off a trick like that. Ever since he’d started living inside the dream, his powers had grown weaker. He was melting into the crowd. Becoming ordinary.

“How about we pull a job again?” Nadia would whine when they came together at night in the hollow of the sleeping bag. “Now that you can’t have nightmares anymore, maybe we could start working for real?”

She clung to her role, vaguely guessing that outside her narrow remit, she wasn’t much of anything.

One fine morning, the flowers came up from the ground without warning. On the field of the empty lot, grass began to grow, stiff and close. Downtown, the smallest crack in the asphalt shot forth stalks of scrub still sticky with sap. Vegetation besieged the buildings, the statues. Vines covered the façade of the Museum of Modern Art, masking the windows with their hirsute cascades. Plants now hugged the vaults, festooning the sky and clouds with their villous sine waves.

“Did you do all that?” Nadia asked, yawning. “Redo the décor?”

David shook his head. For a while now, he’d been unable to accomplish these kinds of feats. He didn’t know where these upheavals were coming from either.

They left the hangar, forgetting to get dressed, and ventured
naked into the middle of the brand-new meadow. It was good grass: lush, well-nourished, almost insolently healthy.

The flowers were beautiful, enormous, dandling their corollas. They gave off thick aromas and sticky juices. The colors almost hurt his eyes.

“It’s so pretty!” Nadia enthused. “Jorgo has to see this!”

She ran to fetch the corpse from the back of the garage and set it up on a chair in front of the door.

“It’s from the starfish,” she remarked. “When they rotted, they fertilized the soil, and—”

“No,” David demurred. “The seawater left too much salt in the soil. The ground should be sterile by now. This is something else.”

They walked through town without bothering to get dressed. No one was shocked by their nudity; they were all too concerned by the mystery of the garden that had sprung up from nowhere overnight. People everywhere were enraptured. These flowers, these colors … all this grass, so alive!

“It’s spring!” someone shouted. “Springtime in the deep!”

The cry became a chorus, and soon everyone began to cheer for David, believing him responsible for this new improvement. He smiled modestly, not daring to protest his innocence. It was the first time everyone seemed happy about his presence.

“Wonderful,” said the ladies.

“Invigorating!” decreed the men.

Children were running in every direction, scaling stalks, betting each other they could climb the giant ivy vines to the sky. Their parents had to grab them before they cleared the buildings.

“It smells nice,” Nadia sighed, taking David by the arm. “Sharp, and fresh …”

Only when they reached the museum esplanade did the young man understand where the garden was coming from.

“It’s my body,” he murmured, seizing Nadia by the shoulders. “The body I left up there—it’s
dead
.”

“What?” whimpered the young woman, still wearing a smile.

“It’s rotting,” David sighed. “My rotting body is fertilizing the plants. We’re growing from its compost. I—I’m dead.”

“But what about … us? I mean, here?”

“We’ll live on as parasites. We’ll feed off my corpse like a flower off a dead animal. We’ll start fading away when there’s nothing left in the bottom of the coffin but a pile of dry bones. That’s it—that must be it. I should’ve known.”

“But …” Nadia stammered, “will it take long?”

David shrugged. He’d never really grasped the temporal exchange rate between dream and reality. How many weeks would springtime in the deep last? How long did it take a corpse to shrivel away within the walls of a box buried in the earth?

Nadia pressed herself against him. She was shivering. Fear had given her rubbery skin a certain human velvetiness. David placed his fingers on it with pleasure. All around them, springtime wrapped the city snugly in a fibrous, aromatic cocoon.

“Are you sure you’re dead?” the young woman asked. “Is that the only explanation?”

David nodded. He knew he was right. Somewhere up there on the surface, a machine of muscle, bone, and guts had given out. The decomposition of organic matter had acted like fertilizer on
the dream world. The world encysted in the diver’s dead brain had begun sucking out the powerful juices of this disintegration just like a rose thriving on the spoiled meat of a dead mole.

“It’s better this way,” David murmured against Nadia’s temple. “At least we’ll have a beautiful summer.”

“And after?” the young woman sobbed. “After that?”

David shrugged.
After?
What did that even mean? He didn’t even want to think about it. Moments were better. This way, they wouldn’t have time to get bored.

SERGE BRUSSOLO
is one of France’s most singular, influential, and perennially bestselling authors. He is most acclaimed for novels that are hypbrids of science fiction and fantasy, set in a uniquely skewed reality. But he is also one of France’s most prolific authors, producing seminal works in numerous other genres, including historical fiction, thrillers, horror stories, crime novels, and young adult fiction. Remarkably, though many of his works have been adapted to the screen,
The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome
is his first book to be published in English.

EDWARD GAUVIN
is a translator from the French. His work has won multiple prizes and has appeared in
The New York Times, Tin House, Subtropics, World Literature Today
, and
Weird Fiction Review
. The translator of more than two hundred graphic novels, Gauvin is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders.