Do not fill your lungs too full when you first put in your mouthpiece or you’ll be overballasted and it will be harder getting down.
Michel is slowly showing me his wrist, and through the glass of my mask and the glass of what I don’t see is his timer, it seems to say we are down thirty-five meters. The girl has gone below us to the floor of the gulf and from under a three-foot bivalve she is unearthing what looks like a piece of pottery. Now, if we’ve come down thirty-five meters I don’t know where all that space has gone to. I figured us a while back for ten or twelve meters at the cleft where we leveled to cut brown-spined sea urchins off the rock and carve them open for the tiny orange meat at the center which we fed to the little light blue fish that hang around and dart at your palm. But from there, past the fifteen wheeling almost inter-cogged arms of three brick-red starfish stuck to a slanting ledge, we’ve angled down through the cleft to no more I would think than twenty meters; and I’m just headed off, hands at my sides, toward something pale thinking it may be the primrose-yellow coral called parazoanthus which you find at twenty meters in the Mediterranean but I’ve seen only in a book in a close-up stuck to a sponge at one end of the polyps’ vegetal stalklet whose free end has opened into sharp, fragile feelers — when Michel taps my heel and pulls my fin, and when I turn back, cool and with my tank and my belt of weights weightless so I’m forgetting which is up and which is down, Michel extends his wrist for me to see.
The girl zooms slowly at us from the green gloom of what I’m thinking must be forty meters if Michel and I are thirty-five. (Dagger is sitting on the surface with the boss in a gray rubber raft, we are maybe fifty yards from the anchor line that seems to hold them down up there.) My room softens and opens, my cartridge does not get mushy, it swells out of capsule hardness to hear the never recorded words of the Bonfire night in Wales: What is here is elsewhere; what is not here is nowhere.
You think at first when you go down you will not have enough air, and you breathe too fast and your heart is as loud as the world. You die and live again. You are the only wind in this dusk. The limbs go free, but you must not swim your arms. No one you know in London has plongé avec les bouteilles. Not Geoff Millan, well ballasted as he is, whose work will no doubt achieve the condition of music. Not the three or four English couples who in their late thirties have taken up sailing. Not Dudley Allott, who still pursues that New York fire and perhaps can never be a friend but who tells you things which have become more interesting over the years as his life has become more clear. Not even formidable Mary who is from Inverness and whom you only met this week, who can show point by point why she sees in the male menhirs of southern Corsica an early outpost of the hero, bound out toward his patriarchal system away from the Majestic Mother, her terrible body, its sea of magic nights. I breathe the water, I hear my other heart like a mechanical thing I’m learning to be further and further away from. The cartridge opens at a hundred gills. My mask has taken in three grains of water; Michel has shown us how to blow it clear even under water but I can wait, my nose and eyes like a brain sequestered from other functions is apart from my mouth to which my air hose runs. My window films a little.
Why film? Why not negative New York, blow her up into far-flung frames, detonate the notion of New York so it will go away and leave me alone in London with Lorna, an anesthetic TNT to soften New York into a mere remembrance of what the future used to seem. I breathe now a message from my tank and I make the adjustment, I reach back past my right shoulder for the valve understanding that it wasn’t meters on Michel’s left wrist-dial but minutes — now more than thirty-five. But now with an ache in my jaw I can’t see where all that time went.
Michel unmouths his mouthpiece no hands, the girl’s yellow tank like some ridable creature rises below me, and Michel is warbling the Marseillaise in tinkly bubbles. Up in the boat he said he’d sing it, it’s part of your fifty francs plus a titillating encounter with the resident anemone of Ajaccio Gulf. The girl extends to me slow-mouon her find — an ashtray from one of the cruise ships.
Michel undoes his rubber crotch-flap — the encased eyes the more ribald with his dimpled mouth transfixed by the hose. He signs to me do I want to do the same for some purpose?
We are not building the Brooklyn Bridge in 1872 in the watertight caissons so unintentionally menacing to all the sandhogs who risked “the bends” (so named by those very men after some Grecian pose then a ladies’ fad in New York). Some came up too fast after ten hours raising cubic acres of muck to clear the bedrock for the towers which let you today admire on high, not think downward, to that dread dreck toil prey to pressure and flood and gas leak — days those immigrant workers did a century ago neither exactly brave nor at all crazy but needing work, and one victim of that so-called caisson disease (which has nothing to do with bullet boxes or artillery wagons) whose name alone survives was John Roebling’s son and collaborator Washington, thus crippled, who watched the rest of the job through a telescope and cannot have found in the sandhogs’ nickname for decompression sickness much of a joke.
The writing here is at least as good as the cartridge proper that Jenny typed and liked so much, perhaps even as good as the Marvelous Country House about which when she typed it the first week in August she said not a word.
The girl rises before me. I reach for the back of her temperature-less thigh and in answer she puts her palm back on her butt where her rubber jacket-tail seals her neatly, even overlapping as well the fold or two of flesh, and fastening like mine in front with two plastic cotter pins. We rise through the gray-brown cleft at forty-five degrees, or do you translate that into some bomber-pilot’s two-o’clock? pass the three predator stars, and find the tall and luminous anchor line.
Slowly treading we follow the line up into a verdant slush of light and just before I slip into the surface there seems much more air coming through my mouthpiece though there isn’t. But it is good to get my teeth out of it and get it off my gums. Dagger is saying so Rasputin ate the cyanide cupcakes and drank the glasses of cyanide wine and nothing happened when Yusupov’s dog Nabosco came in and Rasputin handed him down the last of the poisoned cupcakes — I lift my mask up to my forehead and the man in the gray rubber boat with Dagger interrupts him, points at me, and says in French to blow the blood all out.
The girl is smiling beside me, I do not know her name. Michel’s hair is as blond as that of the man who stepped off the fortress curb toward us and was recalled by the bald man and whom I saw watch us and enter the scuba trailer after the boss started our outboard and we were running out between the lines of power boats, and not only did I not call Dagger’s attention to this but I did not tell him I saw he saw and wasn’t telling me.
An English female voice — not the kind that has helped to keep me in England these many years — behind us in the evening (but of our group) asks what type of palm these are along the boulevard. They’re date, replies an American male, but they’ve virtually given up bearing. From a distance by daylight the tops look like feathers slowly exploding from party tubes tricked up by a children’s magician, but the trunks tonight are a formal avenue past the casino toward the center, stately or even to a tropical tourist stunning but, if one thinks also of the muscular indolence of Corsica, as idiotically official as Napoleon’s hat in colored lights.