The automatic engine droned on. Down below on the shelf, Travis’s every weighted step into the muck and the mire of the Deep was a challenge to his most mature muscles. Each new step required another fresh drop of oxygen and each fresh drop of oxygen required another fresh drop of fuel. The automatic engine droned on until it gasped and sucked down the last drop of fuel and the vapors of the fuel. His blood gasped for the last drop of oxygen. His muscles gasped for the last drop of blood. The engine ran out of fuel and vapors. His blood ran out of oxygen. His muscles ran out of blood. Peacefully, in the Deep, a silent falling silhouette came to rest near his feet. The smiling face with open eyes was his buddy, Joe.
He had come to truth in the dim light of the dark Deep before all went to black.
The ripple of spider-gear and Joe’s falling body had passed into the sea. The automatic engine shut off. In moments, there were no more ripples from ascending air bubbles. The underwater current caused the bodies to drift. It, the slave ship, had grasped the U-Boat; it, the U-Boat, grasped and seized the lifeless forms.
22
“We live in a world that is defined by who, what, where, why, and how—and still that does not answer all the questions. The Deacon fills it in with some sort of razor-sharp steeliness and Manta fills in the spaces with vapor intuitions. That U-Boat, that old slaver, what the Deacon saw, what Manta photographed. Me, I don’t know—anything. It scares me.”
John Henry looked at me.
I did not reply.
She walked to the window and looked out from my place in the LION Reserve onto the sea.
She continued. “The Deacon can see into the ocean and fears nothing in it. Manta sees into the ocean and fears nothing in it. Not me. l see nothing but the water of the ocean and everything associated with the ocean scares me.”
I did not reply.
She continued. “I came here to be brave and I have always known that it was an act of forwardness. How can Deacon and Manta fear nothing?”
“One is crazy and the other irrational. You can pick A and B or B and A. It does not matter,” I said.
“But—”
I cut her off in mid-sentence and told her the truth: “One sees the sea as black and white. The other sees the sea as colorless. Neither is correct. And you… sometimes you see the sea as black and white; other times you see the sea as grey; and sometimes you are blind to the sea.
“Talk about scared! I am scared of everything that is not me and I am proud of it.
“The sea is not what scares me. What is in the sea is not what scares me. Drowned ships and drowned men are not what scare me. Nah, that stuff is for the philosopher and the wise. That thing, that morphed life form—it don’t scare me—no sir, not a least little bit. But if it is, it has to be, and there lies the inquiry.”
“What the—,” she replied.
“Look, Manta observes only. He never engages. The Deacon goes right to the conclusion. The earth has hot spots, places of volcanic action, true?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“The earth has frozen poles,” I said.
“Yes,” she answered again.
“Now reason, a Nazi U-Boat escapes and sinks twelve thousand miles directly on top of an old slaver that is scuttled off the trade routes to rest on top of an opening that leads into the ocean floor. The cargo of the slaver was misery. What was the cargo of the Nazis?”
“Atomic material and plans for a bomb?” she said.
“No. If that were the case, why stop in Ireland? Also, it would have been discovered,” I replied.
“Something caused the Deacon’s friend to drown. Something caused the wunderkinder to drown, and something caused your friend to drown.”
“Manta would not have taken pictures of a fog. The pictures had to get that way later and the Deacon is always in that miasma.”
“No, it is a something. It is an it. The question is: it is what?” I was now talking to myself, muttering as I began to walk. “It is what? I know where, the others did, too, but not the Deacon. How could that be? The who are all dead. How and why seem tied together.”
She followed as I muttered on.
“Then it comes back to what. What is it?”
The light from a gleaming knife blade blinded me.
“The Deacon always dives in the black. That is the reason he survives. He has never seen it! He knows what it is but he has never seen it!”
I stopped muttering.
“What about that creature he saw?” she asked.
“Genus and species,” I said.
“Genus and species?”She replied.
I was now in front of the Deacon’s tank.
“Genus and species, John Henry, and fear—for it has a genus and species classification,” I said.
The fish tank had always been a rock in the sand to my thinking and I had more than once stubbed my toe upon the unreasonableness of the design. The rigor was excessive and the size was nonsensical in all respects. I had often measured and kicked the tank, more to satisfy my disbelief than to satisfy my belief. The tank was real.
Then I began talking in my head to my reflection as seen in the polish and clarity of the tank. Since people do things in their best interest, what is the obsessive fixation that is in the Deacon’s fascination?
I drew a conclusion but the conclusion was not intelligent, the conclusion was not even sensible and the Deacon was intelligent and the Deacon was sensible; however, truer descriptive adjectives of the Deacon were shrewd and cunning. The Deacon was more cunning than he was sensible and the Deacon was more shrewd then he was intelligent. And, therein was the resolution to the riddle of the tank. The answer to the riddle of the Sphinx is not the smile of the Sphinx. The resolution is man’s face with a smile and head in stone in the middle of the desert. The smile is just for sages to contemplate for millennia and for fools to blabber about for millennia with both sages and fools coming to the same resolution.
The giant goliath tank that was colossal enough to contain a behemoth-type leviathan was the deceptive smile that I saw, finally.
The drowned yet living buddy—and it exceeded the rationale of the genus and species of reason. The truth of the Deacon was as unidentifiable in the tank as that stone-faced smile of the Sphinx. I knew that the tank was a lie.
We did not see Manta in the reflection of the tank. We did not hear Manta enter. Without introduction, he began. It was not his usual sing-song voluminous voice but an almost inaudible chant.
“The Deacon found Ol’Joe and the Capt’n in the locker.”
The thread that was knitting our fates together was becoming ever more heavy-gauge. We were without emotion.
John Henry began, “There is the Holy Land that draws people together.”
“Not in peace,” I said.
She ignored me. “It has us all seized in its net and is drawing us ever closer downward. You may not admit or concede this and it may not be fact and it may not be mystical but that is the truth of it. And, I am scared—”
Manta and I both interrupted at the same time. She did not acknowledge either one of us.
Manta looked into his heart and found his truth. I looked into my mind and found my truth. She looked at both of us and fathomed a certain uncertainty. We were lifeless.
23
In time, I was by myself and there was an inescapable truth to the situation. It was that only the divers searching for it met with death. Many had dived and were none the worse for the experience and, as a matter of fact, all were joyful in having survived the dive.