The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome (7 page)

BOOK: The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome
12.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“Kid,” Soler whispered. “I was happy down there. I hunted the great white beasts. It was hard—terrible, sometimes—but that’s life, real life! Know what I’m saying?”

David understood. For a long time, Soler had worked as a packer in the basement of a department store, hiding his power for fear of being persecuted. Changing fashions had delivered him from this hell, making him a star overnight. The great white beasts … how many had he killed? Monstrous gorillas, taller than trees, which once brought to the surface had become magnificent works of art. Oneiric ectoplasms (as the psychologists would say) of sufficient size to be displayed in public spaces. For Soler dreamed grandly, majestically. For ten years, he’d been the toast of every museum and collector. His dreams were too meaty, too robust to have anything to fear from being put through quarantine. At the mere mention of his name, auction prices shot through the roof, buyers went into a frenzy.

“I was so bored up here,” he kept saying, “up top everything was ugly, just horrible. My real life was down below. You’re like me, you know what I’m saying. Plus whenever I stayed up top for too long, things would start to go bad in my own personal Africa, the tribes would start fighting, poachers would go around slaughtering game with machine guns. Nemayo would say, ‘You must not go, bwana. No sooner do you leave for the surface than misfortune falls upon us, all goes wrong, epidemics ravage the savannah.’ Plus it killed me not to know how they were doing. You feel that way too, right? The sudden desire to ring them up on the phone. Sometimes I’d open my mailbox automatically, hoping to find a muddy, dirty, wrinkled envelope inside with an African stamp on it. But there was never anything. They can’t write to us. That’s the hardest part: exile. My health got worse, the doctors
wanted to keep me from diving. They said, ‘You’re staying too long down there, Mr. Mahus. It’s bad for your brain. You have to limit your forays into dreams, your last scan wasn’t very good, there were shadows …’ I didn’t give a damn about their shadows. I told them, ‘But it all goes to hell down there as soon as I turn my back! It’s obvious you don’t know the colonies! There’s this tribe, the Mongo-Mongos, cannibals who come down from the mountains and snatch children away because they’re tenderer than animals. Everyone’s afraid of them except for me, me and Nemayo. But Nemayo won’t do anything if I’m not there, those great stoic savages can be so abominably fatalistic!’ My words fell on deaf ears. They gave me drugs that kept me from dreaming. Stuff that fills your brains with lead, cement, that sends you tumbling into a barren sleep, imageless, the sleep of plants … Yeah, that’s probably how salads sleep, and cabbages too. And potatoes. The sleep of morons! Don’t ever let them drug you, kid! Ever! Even if they say you’re sick, even if they say you’ve got deep-sea diver’s syndrome. That’s what they call the jones to go back down. They claim divers who’re hooked really just want to go to sleep down there and never come back up. Bullshit. They’re just jealous.”

Sometimes he would stop to rest his throat muscles. At such moments, he looked like he’d fallen asleep, vanquished by exhaustion, but soon he’d start talking again, cursing doctors and psychologists.

“Drugs are poison. When I dove again, after a year’s rest, I was terrified by what I found waiting for me down below. The drugs had poisoned the rivers and the trees. The animals had died.
Deep in the heart of Pandaya, crocodiles were floating belly-up downstream. Even the vultures wouldn’t eat the rotting hippo carcasses. The whole jungle was festering, polluted by sedatives. It pained me to see what had happened to Nemayo. I found him sitting atop a hill. When I tried to walk up, he cast stones at me. He had leprosy—the tranquilizers had made him a leper. He’d eaten of the moldering flesh of the dream, and he himself had begun rotting too. He wept, hiding his mutilated face beneath a zebra hide. ‘The white beasts were the first to die,’ he sobbed, ‘and their cadavers infected the entire jungle. The earth began to decompose. You were gone too long. You should have come back, bwana. As soon as you left we grew weak, our bodies became feeble, unable to fight off illness. We were overcome with dejection, and weariness. We remained inert, sprawled on the ground, staring at the sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. Men no longer made love to their women, and predators lost their appetite for their prey, and the grass no longer had the strength to grow, and the fruits were without flesh or flavor. It is you who give us the will to live, you alone. Why did you stay up there so long, on the surface? Is the tobacco there more flavorful? Are the women they give you more beautiful? Do they save you better parts of the hunt?’ He was a savage, kid, but it pained me to see him in such distress. I told him, ‘I’m here to stay, Nemayo, and you’ll heal, the earth will heal, and all will be as it was before,’ but he just kept weeping. He said, ‘It’s too late, all the great white beasts are dead, woe is upon us, and even the girls are no longer born virgins.’ ”

“I struck out deep into the jungle with my faithful over-under
Gambler-Wimbley, my bandoliers full of bullets, and enough food for a week, but he was right, the great white beasts were dead, and their corpses were sinking into the earth like rotten aspic. A gooey snow—can you picture that? Snow like runny marshmallows. That’s all that was left of the mythical creatures. Right then I got so scared that the nightmare tore me from my dream and I shot right up, straight past all the decompression stops. I thought my head and my lungs were about to explode. I tried hard to hang on anything I could—trees, rocky outcrops—but the nightmare had done its job, forcing me back up. I hit the surface screaming.

“At the hospital, they told me I had an effusion in one of my cervical lobes, a blood vessel had burst. I shouted, ‘It’s because I came back up too fast,’ and they said, ‘It’s from overwork.’ Not long after that, my brain started hardening. I know it’s because of the drugs, the medicine. The dead dreams are drying out, setting inside my head. The dead bodies of Nemayo and everyone else have ossified my brains. They’re in there, I can feel them. They just keep getting heavier, pulling the nape of my neck into the depths of my pillow. It’s no tumor, it’s a whole dead world, a jungle with its animals and tribes. It’s everything from below in necrosis, with its rivers poisoned by tranquilizers. Don’t ever let them treat you, ever. If they give you drugs, spit ’em out. They claim they’re trying to help us, but actually they’re waging war on our people, our worlds. A dirty war whose damages you won’t even see right away. If you’ve got people down below who are dear to you, protect them. Don’t make the same dumb mistake I did.”

Every time Soler fell silent, David couldn’t help looking at the sick man’s head sunken deeply in the pillow. It was said that the brains of divers with the bends slowly calcified, taking on a porcelain aspect. One day Marianne had insisted on showing David a pathological brain sample floating in a jar to persuade him of the realities of the risks he was running by stubbornly attaching too much importance to the dream world.

“Looks like a piece of a soup dish,” he’d snickered, trying to stay composed, but the brittle brain hitting the sides of the jar with a sound like rattling plates had terrified him.

“They should’ve written me,” Soler was mumbling, “they should’ve warned me about what was going on down there. But Nemayo didn’t know the language of white men. Maybe he tried calling me with the tam-tam? I must have mistaken the beating of my heart for the pounding of jungle drums. Oh, I should’ve paid more attention! That’s the terrible part: this exile. The impossibility of holding even a semblance of conversation …”

Slowly, David rose to his feet. A nurse had just drawn back the curtain and signaled that it was time for Soler’s treatment. What kind of treatment did you give a man whose brain was turning to porcelain?

David slipped quietly away without so much as a goodbye from Soler. “And now I can’t go back down there anymore,” the old man had once told him. “When I try to dive, all I can see is a bottomless black hole, which frightens me. Then I get vertigo, and I stay sitting on the edge of my springboard, here in reality.”

David left the marble warehouse, staring at the tips of his
shoes so as not to see the bogged-down slabs. Back home, he checked his mailbox automatically, to make sure Nadia hadn’t written him. He shut the mailbox immediately, thinking,
That was stupid
.

Yes, stupid … but he hadn’t been able to help himself.

[
5
]
The … Days? That Follow/The Flour of Dreams

He had to eat. In the kitchen, the big fridge plundered by Marianne’s passing gaped wide like an empty wardrobe. David, who filled it whenever the young woman was to assist him on a dive, remained dumbfounded by the psychologist’s astounding appetite. How did a body that severe, whose veins and tendons traced branchings a blind man could’ve read with his finger like a page from an anatomy text in braille, manage to wolf down so much food without putting on an ounce of fat? For David was sure that naked, Marianne would offer up the spectacle of a nun smugly steeped in her own deprivations. A hard flesh, stripped to the bare minimum, a machine flesh designed to ensure precision work. As for David—stark muscles tautly rolled around rods of bone, all wrapped up in the tightest-fitting skin, a skimpy suit from a
close-fisted tailor cutting costs and corners—he distrusted cadaverous foods. Red meat, fish, the sallow flesh of fowl gave him the creeps. Usually, he lived on buttered bread and coffee with milk. He’d stuffed his cupboards to bursting with bags of coffee, a phenomenal array in flavors harsh and delicate. In the fridge, he kept a slab of butter as yellow as ancient gold, from which he detached fine shavings by means of an iron cable strung between two sticks of wood. He sat down to eat as if to a ritual, picking up a great big plate—thick and heavy, its enamel cracked. His greatest delight consisted of slicing the bread with a knife sharper than a razor blade. He liked watching the bread fall, hearing the crust crunch and crackle. First the knife would labor at that browned hide, then the barrier gave way and the blade plunged into the divine marrow of the close, springy crumb. Serious as any specialist, he required bread that was dense as a sponge, able to sop up great quantities of liquid. More than anything, he hated bread that was full of holes, overtormented by yeastly effervescence. At the first hint of moisture such bread fell to shreds, failed to hold together in the mouth. Two quick bites and it came apart, obliterated when the pleasure was just beginning. High priest of breakfast, David conducted a ritual at once epicurean and austere, banishing jam, croissants, and even brioche, which for him represented an extremity of depraved sybaritic decadence. For a while he’d tried making his own bread, obeying some strange inner stubbornness to live off the grid, depending as little as possible on others. Fermenting yeast had given him too much trouble, and he’d been forced to give up. At first it had upset him, since he had a hard time finding a bakery with bread that met his standards. People
today were fine with any old subpar product, and the bakehouses of yore had become automated factories where an artisan’s barely flour-dusted hand was reduced to pushing buttons. David had wandered from bakery to bakery, sullen, despairing of ever finding the spongy bread that was his one and only fare, when he’d met Madame Antonine.

Antonine was plump and pink. A butcher, you’d have thought, raised on glazed ham, but her being a baker led you to liken her skin to the marzipan of her cakes. Antonine reigned over a bakery of blue and gold that the hot breath of ovens filled with the aroma of leavener. She was a widow. A little widow with the shoulders of a wrestler who’d left the ring and let her muscles be sweetly sheathed in fat. Right from the start David had pictured her bare-knuckled, battling the raw, rebellious, clingy dough. He knew kneading called for a great deal of physical strength and quickly gave you arms of steel. Antonine was a warrior princess of the ovens who’d let herself get a little chubby, so as not to frighten customers. She wore her potbelly as a polite disguise, but one punch from her could’ve laid out a junkyard mutt. Her apprentices feared her, and it was said she never thought twice about raising a hand to the pastry chef. When her authority was questioned, she drew herself to her full, fearsome height over the mixer tub, her face white with flour, and sent a ball of raw, gummy dough hurtling right between your eyes, knocking you breathless and almost smothering you. Antonine smelled like flour, David had noticed the first time she’d led him into her bed. As if her body were powdered head to toe and slid beneath your fingertips, almost silky, talcumed. She could’ve crushed David in her wrestler’s arms, but
she let him do as he wished, going with the flow, let herself be docilely manhandled.

“I want you to knead me,” she said. “Go ahead. Use your fingers.”

David obeyed, seizing her great white breasts, her thick belly, with delectation. He worked her as if she’d change shape when it was all over, be reborn in another form. Antonine had blonde hair and milky skin. Out of some inexplicable vanity, she shaved her pubic hair. She shared her lover’s passion for breakfast. Like him, she hated cakes, creams, icings, candied fruit, preferring instead the austere nobility of peasant bread and butter with sea salt. In the tiny apartment above the bakery she made coffee the old-fashioned way, her mother’s way.

“Filtered through a sock,” she said, astoundingly strong, two cups knocked you flat on your back in bed, heart hammering in your chest.

“You’re my artist,” she cooed at him inanely, slicing thick hunks from the bread she’d made especially for David. He liked making love to her above the sweltering bakery, in the smell of fresh batches, when warmth exalted the fragrance of yeast, blending it with that of the baker’s cunt.

“I’m the only one who knows how to make the bread you love,” she murmured to him. “Without me, you’d starve to death.” She was right, in a way; apart from his unending breakfasts, all David managed to choke down was a few spoonfuls of soup.

“Out in the country, soup is a part of breakfast,” Antonine assured him, trying to prove that accepting this substance was in no way a breach of his strange code. She loved feeding him
in bed, patting his cheeks, settling the great tray of unfinished wood over his knees. Then she would sit at the foot of the bed and butter the slices almost devoutly, a pudgy geisha with astonishingly graceful gestures. David stuffed himself, sinking his teeth into the chewy inside, glutted with café au lait. Then they would make love again, among the crumbs, and Antonine climaxed with a graceful little yelp, for this woman, with her lavish body, was discreet indeed in expressing her pleasure. She yipped, nose buried in David’s shoulder, kneading the woolen mattress with her stubby fingers. A castaway washed up on his mistress’s belly, David would fall into a light sleep while heat from the ovens erupting below came up through the floorboards, threatening to bake them both where they lay.

BOOK: The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome
12.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Quivering Tree by S. T. Haymon
The Hidden Years by Penny Jordan
Homestretch by Paul Volponi
Lindsay McKenna by High Country Rebel
Dead Six by Larry Correia, Mike Kupari
What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg
Captive Heart by Anna Windsor