The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (6 page)

“Well, of course,” Marianne had told him bluntly. “Dreamers can’t derive any pleasure from contemplating their dreams. You don’t experience sexual arousal when you see your naked
body in a mirror, do you? Well, same goes for the dreams you’ve materialized. Other people might derive a certain pleasure from them, but there’ll always be something like an incest taboo between you and your own dream. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” Yes, he understood: he was like those miners who dig gold from the depths of the earth for a large conglomerate. He labored, while others’ hands fondled the ingots …

“Yours is a lot smaller,” said the watchman, tugging David’s sleeve. “Plus they’re not done running tests on it yet. It might even die before it hits the market.”

These words were uttered without a trace of meanness; he was just a man used to life’s hard knocks. Giving David a shove as if they were old friends, he ushered him into a room filled with the hum of incubators. A greenhouse swelter reigned; sweat sprang to their brows. Just like everywhere else, lighting was reduced to a strict minimum, and it was hard to get an exact idea of just what was being stored in the incubators. The fat man checked a chart and tried to orient himself among the rows.

“Over there,” he whispered. “The vet isn’t done vaccinating it yet.”

David leaned toward the bell jar, ringed in a halo of moisture. For most dreams, the mandatory quarantine was a terrible ordeal. Many of them couldn’t stand up to the numerous injections and samplings the boy butchers at the lab believed it their duty to inflict.

“You never can tell,” Marianne would utter with an erudite air whenever David let his indignation show. “Dreams come straight from sleep, so they could be vectors for sleeping sickness.
A few troubling cases of a slowdown in bodily functions have been recorded among collectors who spend lots of time contemplating their acquisitions. Yes, in some cases even trance state and memory loss. Dreams aren’t as harmless as you claim. We must be very cautious.” Being cautious meant pricking that wondrous skin with long needles, slicing into it with scalpels, scarifying these organisms until they finally shriveled up and disintegrated. “If they croak before making it out the laboratory door,” asked the watchman, “do you still get paid?”

“You get a kill fee,” David replied mechanically. “It’s not much, but enough to carry you till the next dive.”

“And if it goes to auction?”

“Ten percent of the selling price.”

The fat man frowned and leaned over the incubator. “It’s not very big,” he observed. “That’s not gonna make you rich. Strictly for small savers. My sister-in-law, owns a deli? She loves these things. Her mantle’s covered in ’em.”

David blinked, but the condensation inside the bell jar kept him from clearly making out the contours of the dream. He recalled the two bags of uncut gems he’d taken from the safe in the jewelry shop down below, and the crunch of raw diamonds against his chest … that had been the symbolic image allowing the dreamer’s attractional energies to be concentrated. A sort of fictional target you focused on before casting your net. Deep in the incubator was something pink and plump, with soft, gentle curves. A little netsuke, perhaps, a blissful and mysterious sphere that emanated a kind of harmonious satisfaction, a
soothing radiation. No, that wasn’t it at all, it was … oh, what was the use? No one ever managed to describe the oneiric ectoplasms, anyway. No two people ever saw them the same way. A round and stretchy Buddha? A hairless cat, sleeping in a ball, a—damn it! Did he have to go seeing some kind of link between its morphology and the symbolic image of bags snatched from a safe? Psychologists rejected any connection, but psychologists reasoned according to theories, clinical reports. Not one of them was capable of diving into the depths of sleep and bringing back something solid, something … alive. Not one of them had the
power
, and that very thing made them hostile, that impotent jealousy.

“C’mon, move along,” the watchman ordered. “Can’t loiter around here or you’ll get caught. You’ve seen it now, so, what? Feel better? It’s not like it’s a baby, right? Hey, you look like a first-time dad who’s just gotten a secret glimpse of his kid behind his wife’s back. Weird, isn’t it? You mediums, you’re not quite normal. But then you never claimed to be!”

David didn’t claim a thing. He thought about the little dream imprisoned in its incubator. “Don’t say
dream
,” Marianne said whenever he used the word. “It’s an incorrect and stupidly sentimental term. It’s not a dream, it’s an ectoplasmic product a sleeping medium has materialized from an oneiric image haunting his brain. The dream allowed you to create this
object
by stimulating your imagination—that’s all.” Was that really all there was to it? David didn’t believe it for a second. These
objects
were cut from the very skin of dreams; for him, they were proof that down below
a woman’s flesh was softer than anywhere else. A woman’s flesh … Nadia’s. Especially Nadia’s.

“Don’t come ’round here again for a while, OK?” the fat man whispered to David as he escorted him out. “I don’t think this is good for you. Tell yourself it’s like a deformed kid you were forced to leave at child services. Better that way in the end, right?”

Upon leaving the museum, David realized that it was Sunday, a day he’d long associated in his mind with activities like ritual visits to cemeteries, hospitals, or public parks full of retirees taking in the sun. When he was ten or so, he’d decreed one fine morning that in coded language the word Sunday meant “the day of the dead,” because the empty streets seemed to bear witness to a sudden embolism in the city, shops stood padlocked behind metal shutters, and the rare survivor you ran into here and there had the gait of a convalescent, quite unlike the weekday pace that sent people charging toward subway entrances as if an air-raid siren had just urged them toward shelter in rail tunnels. David hated Sunday, a day of anemic languor when the streets seemed suddenly to be short of blood, only the odd car circulating, or, worse yet, bicycles.

He wandered across the esplanade. Luckily it wasn’t very nice out, and the city was still enveloped in a vague fog that made its hard angles bearable. He decided to walk to the clinic that cared for dreamers with work-related injuries. The establishment was on the other side of the bridge, in the compound of the former marble depot where sculptors once came looking for raw material for their work: stone slabs hewn from state quarries. The main room on the ground floor had been summarily converted, divided with folding screens and curtains on great sliding tracks as in a medieval hospice. Meant as a “temporary” setup, it had dragged on for several years already. At the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, no one really cared about broken-down divers whose strange afflictions were the despair of the medical profession and profoundly annoyed doctors.

David crossed the bridge and had lunch in a bistro cramped as a concierge’s quarters, where a fat man was cooking up an enormous pot of onion soup on a little hot plate. He tried not to think too much about the veterinary quarantine room and his dream, imprisoned in its muggy incubator. He wondered if he could maybe grease the watchman’s palm and get him to personally oversee the growth of that overly fragile little thing slowly coming into its own under its bell jar. Couldn’t it be spared a few tests if its charts were hidden, or even tampered with? Sure, it’d cost a lot of money, but David told himself that was the price of making sure his work survived. His last few dreams had died in quarantine, poisoned by ham-fisted vets who thought they were still working on plow horses and jabbed at dreams as if inoculating hippopotami.

He lapped up his soup, brooding over the idea, downed two cups of very sweet black coffee, and headed out toward the marble depot. The compound’s great courtyard was still littered with useless chunks no one would ever come for now, and these rain-soiled slabs had ended up forming a kind of miniature mountain range firmly rooted in the muddy ground. Just past the main gates, you found yourself deep in a labyrinth of abandoned megaliths richly slathered in pigeon shit. It was like a garden of stone, a pagan cathedral of menhirs raised to the sky. The ruins of some unknown disaster lost to memory. Wandering among these forgotten monoliths, David wound up convinced he was crossing the wreckage of a bombed-out city reduced to its bare foundations. He found the sheer enormity of the slabs somewhat frightening, and hastened his step toward the far side to exit the oppressive enclave.

Upon entering the building, he flashed his card at a sullen orderly who waved him along, stifling a yawn. “I’m here to see Soler Mahus,” David explained. “They haven’t moved him?”

The orderly rolled his eyes as if he’d just been asked a particularly moronic question, and dove back into reading his paper. David hesitated at the room’s threshold; on the heels of the stone labyrinth was now one of curtains shivering in the drafts. It was as if they’d hung a gargantuan load of laundry out to dry … or the sails of a ship. David ran his gaze over the canvas expanse, trying to pick out a mizzen, a jib … He gave himself a shake. They weren’t sails, just rough, thick curtains. Numbers had been painted on them to help you find your way around. When would he get over the annoying foible of always seeing things in other things?

Once a week, he came to see Soler Mahus, an old diver who’d
suffered a serious decompression accident. Soler’s brain was deteriorating as the months went by. He had gone prematurely gray, and the prolonged bed rest had melted his muscles away, reducing his body to a skeletal schematic wrapped up in cellophane skin that would tear at the slightest scratch. David had nothing to say to him, but Soler liked to soliloquize before a willing audience. The accident had stripped him of his powers, and he no longer lifted a finger to fight his illness. The doctors paid him erratic visits, not knowing what cure to prescribe, content to cram him full of sedatives while waiting for his EEG to flatline.

David went up the central aisle. The worn, porous stone had been sprayed down with some milky disinfectant still stagnating in the cracks between slabs. After getting it wrong twice, he finally found Soler’s cell and pulled back the curtain. The old man didn’t move a muscle, didn’t even wink to greet his guest. For two months now, his facial muscles had been almost completely paralyzed, and he spoke in a curious ventriloquist’s voice, without moving his lips. No sooner was David was seated at his bedside than he resumed his monologue, as if the young man had simply slipped away for a moment. Maybe he didn’t notice the passing of time, and believed his visitor had just returned from the bathroom?

“Did I ever tell you about my Bengal safari?” he murmured, his face not betraying the slightest expression. “It was Prince Rajapur who had summoned me. Twelve elephants, a veritable army of beaters. The tiger was a great male, a child-eater ravaging the villages of the region. They’d been trying to corner him for a year now, but he was a sly beast, extraordinarily cunning, orange as
flame, with stripes of camouflage that made him almost invisible to the naked eye. But his breath was atrocious, and …”

David wasn’t really listening. Soler’s imaginarium didn’t really overlap with his own fantasies, but he knew that every dreamer haunted his own territory. In his youth, Soler Mahus had been weaned on tales of adventure and big game hunting. He too had once owned a library full of twopenny pulps. From these storybook memories, he’d built a world made of jungles and vast rivers cleaving sunburnt lands in two, savannahs, all-devouring deserts, through which he tracked fantastical beasts, legendary animals whose atrocities local tribes recounted in fearful whispers. Mahus hunted down the white rhino, the white gorilla, the white tiger … ghostly creatures, each the only living one of its kind. Wild monsters whose white coats contrasted strangely with green forests thick with sap.
Down below
, he’d been a great hunter bristling with bullets, sporting an anaconda-skin hat. A formidable stalker of the savannah who made his own cartridges, whose catchphrase—no matter the adversary—was always “Boys, don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes!” He’d faced down the fiercest predators, felled at point-blank range elephants driven mad by a poisoned assegai. He’d had every tropical disease there was, every fever, every pox. He’d eaten quinine by the fistful, sewn his wounds shut with his own two hands. His body (his body down there) was but a quilt of scars, an appallingly stitched figure no white woman could gaze upon without immediately hiding her eyes. The negresses were the only ones to lick his wounds, and they did so with the tips of their tongues, naming him a great warrior, knowing what they gazed on was indomitable courage.
But Soler cared little for women. He came and went, content with a virgin offered up by some unworthy kinglet during a quick halt; then once more he was the ascetic hunter of endless expeditions. The mad monk whose rifle was loaded with bullets he’d carved Xs into. He sought the white beast, the one he had to kill at any price and throw over his shoulder if he wanted to go back up with a trophy …

“Did I ever tell you the one about the lion of Magombo? Or the panther of Fijaya?” His monologues always started out the same way. He never bothered waiting for an answer, and dove right into an endless, convoluted tale, full of backtracking and contradictions. He’d once successfully hunted down a tiger in Africa—it hadn’t posed him the slightest problem of believability.

“Or the Raja of Shaka-Kandarek’s safari? And the great massacre of the mad gorillas? And the tale of the leopard with the golden claws?” Stories, so many stories. Down below, he was Majo-Monko, He-Who-Slew-Like-Lightning. He had his friends, his chief spear-carrier: Nemayo, a prince of the savannah, sole survivor of a tribe wiped out by a terrible civil war. Nemayo, an athlete slender as an assegai, his face covered in ritual scars and his body in inscrutable tattoos. Nemayo knew the lair of every legendary beast, was never scared of any taboo; he alone remained, faithful, when the whole troop of porters had scattered in the jungle at the first roar.