The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (3 page)

Nadia’s frenzied blows brought him to his senses. Her pale face was gleaming with sweat, and a lock of red hair fallen free from her cap streaked her forehead like blood. David backed up, gauging the window’s solidity, the door’s steel frame. At first glance it all seemed terribly solid, capable of withstanding even a truck at full speed without cracking. But that was just an illusion; he was much too close to the surface now for the dream world to
stand up to the materiality of the dreamer. All he needed was a little speed and the glass would crack like the safe had just now … but what about the consistency pills? Wouldn’t they help reinforce the density of the armored glass? In which case he was running smack into disaster. Nadia was still shouting, but he couldn’t hear her anymore. The din of the alarm filled his ears. From sheer nerves, he kicked a sofa, which pulled back like a jellyfish. The jewels on display had an oily gleam, the pearls seemed to be melting like dabs of butter in the sun. He could afford to wait no longer. Clutching the bags of jewels to his chest, David tensed his muscles and dove headfirst through the glass, flying right over the display. In real life, he’d never have been able to pull off a stunt like that without winding up in traction, but in dreams his body rarely betrayed him. It was a well-oiled machine, ever faithful and reliable. Or almost …

The armored glass exploded the moment his skull hit it. The shards weren’t sharp at all, and showered soundlessly onto the sidewalk. David rolled to a stop at Nadia’s feet, his hair covered in crystalline dust. He spat out a few pieces of glass, noticing they left a minty aftertaste—maybe because of the greenish tint?

Nadia helped him back to his feet and dragged him toward the car. He barely felt her hand on his biceps. He wondered if the vehicle would bear his weight, or if he’d find himself sitting in the street. With the change in density, you had to be ready for anything.

“You’re slow,” Nadia groaned. “Did you take all your pills?”

“Yes,” he confessed, getting gingerly into shotgun.

Nadia always took the wheel when it was time for the getaway.
As a diver steadily approaching wakefulness, he was afraid that at the first turn he’d tear the steering wheel right off the column with his increased density.

Nadia turned the key and pulled away just as the red lights showed up down the avenue. “Five-O,” she said in a flat voice. David shriveled into the seat, not daring to move for fear of tearing through the vehicle. Luckily, the car held together, and the metal hadn’t yet taken on the gelatinous look that signaled imminent waking.

“They’re in hot pursuit,” Nadia said, swinging the muscle car into an alley. The tires screeched at every turn, and the smell of burning rubber filled the car.

“Gonna be tight,” the redhead muttered. “You took too long. Lost focus. Scared me. I should’ve come with you.”

“You can’t, you know that,” David said softly, putting a hand on her arm. “That’s now how it works. No changes to the ritual. I always have to go alone.”

“That’s why it keeps getting harder and harder. Your guilt’s getting stronger. Somewhere deep down, you want to fail and come back empty-handed.”

“No! That’s not true!”

“C’mon!”

They were being shot at. Short bursts hammered the bodywork like a hail of ball bearings.

“We’ll be OK,” said Nadia, letting out a breath. “How deep are we?”

“Six hundred fifty feet,” said David. “Waking any minute now.”

“You take care of yourself up there, OK?” she whispered. “In the real world, I mean. Down here you always make it through, but up there … I’m scared whenever you go away. When will you come back down?”

“I don’t know. In a week, if I can.”

“That’s a long time. When you’re not here, I can’t stop thinking about all the dangers waiting for you up there: diseases, accidents, hit and runs … what a terrible world.”

“Terrible,” David agreed, as the back windshield burst into pieces from the bullets. Nadia popped the glove box with one hand, grabbed a grenade, yanked the pin out with her teeth, and tossed it through the missing windshield.

“Diseases scare me the most,” she said. “There’s the—what do you call it again? The flu?”

The grenade exploded, tossing a police cruiser into the air. It landed heavily, blocking the street, belching out curls of smoke and flame.

“The flu’s not that bad,” said David. “Except if you’re old. Don’t worry about the flu.”

He looked over his shoulder. Some cops were struggling to get clear of the twisted chassis. Others ran through the night frantically waving their arms, human torches, their screaming mouths the only dark spots on their bodies.

“You could die even if you never left the house,” Nadia was saying. “You could slip on a bar of soap in the shower and crack your skull on the edge of the tub. Promise you won’t shower too much? It doesn’t matter if you’re filthy. There are no smells in dreams.”

No one was chasing them now. Nadia was still going pedal
to the metal to the edge of town. “We made it,” she said, turning toward David with her eternally pained smile.

“It wasn’t an easy job,” he said sadly. “I have to do better next time. We can’t keep going on like this.”

“Don’t let those people up there get to you,” Nadia objected almost immediately. “You gotta be in tip-top shape to go lower than three thousand feet. No point tempting fate. If I hadn’t been there tonight—”

The car was now rolling through a landscape of empty lots cluttered with unrecognizable shadows that stood out against the horizon like the plywood flats of a set. Nadia slowed down. The race was over now.

“Jorgo’s coming for me,” she murmured. “The cops can’t trace this back to us, even if they find the car. I stole it this morning.”

David opened the door and got out. The sun seemed too soft, jellyish. Nadia ran to his arms and pressed her lips to his. Her lips were always too hot, possessed of an unhealthy heat, a kind of chronic fever that alarmed him a little. David wanted to hold her close, but his muscles were melting away, losing their flattering volume. Suddenly his clothes hung loose on him, and it occurred to him he must look like a child in his father’s raincoat. He tried to hunch forward and found his pecs had completely disappeared. He was nearing the surface; the process was irreversible. He knew if he stuck his hand in his pocket for his revolver (a huge Kass-Wrengler .357 magnum, blue steel with a ventilated rib and a stopping distance of …) he’d pull out something weird, even absurd: a water pistol, a suction dart gun for kids, maybe even a half-peeled banana. Or just a handful of sand. Or a tiny creature,
very fragile and almost dead. A kind of hairless kitten, blind and deaf … blind and deaf.

“I’m taking off,” he gasped, grabbing Nadia by the shoulders. “Hold on to me!” But his fingers sank into the young woman’s flesh, meeting no resistance. All he held now was a ghost.

“Remember!” Nadia cried, her face shrinking. “Diseases, accidents—don’t stay up there too long!”

He wanted to say something in return, but the pull from the surface sucked him into the sky just as Jorgo came tearing through the empty lot on a motorcycle. He closed his eyes. He was waking up, and that wasn’t the least bit reassuring.

David was suffocating under sheets that covered him head to toe. He jerked instinctively, tossing them off. He hated coming back to reality under a shroud; it always made him feel like he’d woken from being buried alive only to slam his head against a coffin lid firmly nailed shut.

All he managed to emit—mouth gaping, neck muscles distended with effort—was a barely audible wail. He milled his arms and legs about in the middle of the bed in something like the crude breaststroke of a drowning man trying desperately to stay above water.
Swim!
cried a voice somewhere deep in his head.
Swim or you’ll drown!
Awash in sweat, he tossed sheets and pillows around, dreading the cramps that might seize him any second
now. He didn’t want to drown, to sink like a rock into the mattress whose supple depths terrified him.

His eyelids were stuck shut as if sewn to his cheeks with the catgut of his lashes. He had to use his fingers to pry them open. His vision was still blurry, and he made out shapes in the room around him only through a flickering fog. The uniformly blue walls, the furniture and sheets of the same color, all contributed to an atmosphere of deep sea depths, and for a moment he thought he was still
down below
 … he was beached on his back, sideways across the bed, legs hanging off the edge, still kicking weakly, from reflex. The blue sheets stank of sweat … and something else. An indefinable odor.
Electric
. Dumb, but it was the only word that came to mind. An electric smell. Something reminiscent of copper, ozone, the air after lightning. It was a clear sign he’d brought back something of value. This time he’d ascended without letting go of his booty from the depths. He wanted to stand up, but it was all he could do to roll over on his side. His head was spinning. There it was
—the thing
—at the foot of the bed, a prisoner of the crumpled sheets, palpitating faintly. He couldn’t make out its exact shape. David reached out for it, but it was too far away. He sighed. He rarely ever saw them. He was the one who gave them life, but they always felt the need to hide beneath sheets, blankets, like frightened animals. What was it that scared them? Light? He’d carefully painted the room dark blue from floor to ceiling. Even the nightstand, the wardrobe, the rug were blue. When sun shone through the curtains, it was like being in a sea grotto. Very relaxing, conducive to sleep.
They
should have felt right at home …

“Are you awake?” Marianne said sharply, opening the door. “About time, the fridge was almost empty.”

As usual, she had pulled her dark hair back into a teacher’s strict bun and planted her thick tortoiseshell glasses on her straight nose. She was still young, and without the lips she always kept pursed, as if afraid of accidentally swallowing something, she might have been pretty. She came over to the bed, a thick novel in hand. David noted that she kept a finger in the book to mark the page. No, it wasn’t a novel—rather, some technical study or clinical report. Marianne never read fiction. She leaned over the young man, took his pulse with a finger on his jugular. David pushed her away.

“How is it?” he whispered, pointing to the object struggling under the sheets. “Tell me.”

Marianne shrugged and picked up a metal box from the floor. It was like a steel coffer for transporting cash. A complicated lock kept it shut.

David, trying once more to rise up on an elbow, begged, “Describe it to me—”

“Please,” Marianne cut him off sharply. “Stop acting like a first-time mother. This second phase of the operation in no way involves you. You know quite well that mediums are advised against maintaining the slightest emotional connection with their products. Close your eyes and let me do my work.”

Deftly she lifted the covers, grabbed the thing, and slipped it into the steel box. Its lock clicked like a gun being cocked. When she dropped the sheet again, David saw she was wearing gloves of surgical rubber. He strained to hear a cry, a whimper, some tiny sob from the coffer, but there was nothing. They were said to be
mute, to neither speak nor sing, but how could you ever really tell? Marianne came and sat beside him for his checkup.

“You were bleeding,” she said coldly, wiping around his mouth and chest. “I’m getting the feeling that materialization is becoming harder and harder for you. And your object was quite small.”

“But is it beautiful?” David asked, pushing away the blood-flecked compress.

“I’m not authorized to evaluate the artistic qualities of dream objects,” the young woman replied at once. “I simply see to the medical side of the work. Relax, and let me do your physical. Did you feel any pain on waking?”

“No,” David lied, “the ascent wasn’t any harder than usual.”

Marianne pursed her lips in annoyance. She hated diving slang. Words like
ascent, decompression, deep-sea
made her furious. In her small, precise handwriting, she set about noting her patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, reflexes. Atop the medical chart he could read:
David Sarella. Medium materializing ectoplasms of persistent duration. Date of entry into service …

How many days had she spent in the apartment, waiting for him to emerge from sleep, to … “ascend”? Every time David decided to dive, she came over with her baggage, her severe-looking raincoat, and camped out on the very premises of the operation. That little black suitcase of hers—how he loathed it! The well-waxed suitcase of a priest, a plainclothes nun. He knew she always brought sheets, never trusting the cleanliness of his own. She would set up shop with her outmoded travel clock, probably passed down from some provincial aunt, her toiletries, her little
slippers in their embroidered pouch. She perched the edges of her buttocks on the edges of chairs, eating with her own cutlery, drinking from a silver tumbler engraved with her initials. David had the hardest time picturing her sleeping in the guest room. Did she circle the bed for hours before deciding to go to sleep, an eye out for germs swarming in the folds of the pillowcase? As he, the professional dreamer, lost consciousness, she was free to come and go as she pleased in the old apartment: opening drawers, leafing through old letters, examining photos. She probably conducted her sneaky little rummagings with her fingertips, hands carefully gloved in surgical rubber, for fear of disturbing some virus dozing in the corner of a shelf.

As usual, David began in a glum voice to recount the twists and turns of his dream, which Marianne noted on the routine form. He spoke, his mind elsewhere. Through a part in Marianne’s white lab coat, he could make out a big, shapeless sweater and a threadbare gray skirt. He’d barely said a dozen words before she interrupted him with an exasperated click of her tongue.

“I’ve asked you before to refrain from using that vocabulary with me,” she said, stabbing the notebook with her pencil as if she wished to wound it. “Consistency pills, realism powder—they don’t exist. They’re inventions of your subconscious, symbolic warning signs. You know quite well you didn’t ingest any pills. Try to keep in mind that what happens ‘down below’ has no existence in reality. There is no down below. Don’t go lending these fantasies any substance, or you’ll wind up a schizophrenic. The police pursuing you were simply a manifestation of your guilt. This … Nadia, on the other hand, is symbolic of your negative
impulses. She’s a bad example, urging you to commit crimes. She’s the secret leader of a gang you think you lead—which you like, since in feeling forced to obey her, you feel freed from ordinary moral obligations. In a way, she clears you in your own eyes. You can claim you’re only following orders.”