Robert Silverberg: A Sea of Faces

It’s very much like dying, I suppose. That awareness of infinite descent, that knowledge of the total absence of support. It’s all sky up here. Down below is neither land nor sea, only color without form, so distant that I can’t even put a name to the color. The cosmos is torn open, and I plummet headlong, arms and legs pinwheeling wildly, the gray stuff in my skull centrifuging toward my ears. I’m dropping like Lucifer. From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day; and with the setting sun Dropp’d from the Zenith, like a falling star. That’s Milton. Even now my old liberal-arts education stands me in good stead. And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, Never to hope again. That’s Shakespeare. It’s all part of the same thing. All of English literature was written by a single man, whose sly persuasive voice ticks in my dizzy head as I drop. God grant me a soft landing.

“She looks a little like you,” I told Irene. “At least, it seemed that way for one quick moment, when she turned toward the window in my office and the sunlight caught the planes of her face. Of course, it’s the most superficial resemblance only, a matter of bone structure, the placement of the eyes, the cut of the hair. But your expressions, your inner selves externally represented, are altogether dissimilar. You radiate unbounded good health and vitality, Irene, and she slips so easily into the classic schizoid faces, the eyes alternately dreamy and darting, the forehead pale, flecked with sweat. She’s very troubled.”

“What’s her name?”

“Lowry. April Lowry.”

“A beautiful name. April. Young?”

“About twenty-three.”

“How sad, Richard. Schizoid, you said?”

“She retreats into nowhere without provocation. Lord knows what triggers it. When it happens she can go six or eight months without saying a word. The last attack was a year ago. These days she’s feeling much better; she’s willing to talk about herself a bit. She says it’s as though there’s a zone of weakness in the walls of her mind, an opening, a trap door, a funnel, something like that, and from time to time her soul is irresistibly drawn toward it and goes pouring through and disappears into God knows what, and there’s nothing left of her but a shell. And eventually she comes back through the same passage. She’s convinced that one of these times she won’t come back.”

“Is there some way to help her?” Irene asked. “What will you try? Drugs? Hypnosis? Shock? Sensory deprivation?”

“They’ve all been tried.”

“What then, Richard? What will you do?”

Suppose there is a way. Let’s pretend there is a way. Is that an acceptable hypothesis? Let’s pretend. Let’s just pretend, and see what happens.

The vast ocean below me occupies the entirety of my field of vision. Its surface is convex, belly-up in the middle and curving vertiginously away from me at the periphery; the slope is so extreme that I wonder why the water doesn’t all run off toward the edges and drown the horizon. Not far beneath that shimmering swollen surface, a gigantic pattern of crosshatchings and countertextures is visible, like an immense mural floating lightly submerged in the water. For a moment, as I plunge, the pattern resolves itself and becomes coherent: I see the face of Irene, a calm pale mask, the steady blue eyes focused lovingly on me. She fills the ocean. Her semblance covers an area greater than any continental mass. Firm chin, strong full lips, delicate tapering nose. She emanates a serene aura of inner peace that buoys me like an invisible net: I am falling easily now, pleasantly, arms outspread, face down, my entire body relaxed. How beautiful she is! I continue to descend and the pattern shatters; the sea is abruptly full of metallic shards and splinters, flashing bright gold through the dark blue-green; then, when I am perhaps a thousand meters lower, the pattern suddenly reorganizes itself. A colossal face, again. I welcome Irene’s return, but no, the face is the face of April, my silent sorrowful one. A haunted face, a face full of shadows: dark terrified eyes, flickering nostrils, sunken cheeks. A bit of one incisor is visible over the thin lower lip. O my poor sweet Taciturna. Needles of reflected sunlight glitter in her outspread waterborne hair. April’s manifestation supplants serenity with turbulence; again I plummet out of control, again I am in the cosmic centrifuge, my breath is torn from me and a dread chill rushes past my tumbling body. Desperately I fight for poise and balance. I attain it, finally, and look down. The pattern has again broken; where April had been, I see only parallel bands of amber light, distorted by choppy refractions. Tiny white dots —islands, I suppose—now are evident in the glossy sea.

What a strange resemblance there is, at times, between April and Irene!

How confusing for me to confuse them. How dangerous for me.

—It’s the riskiest kind of therapy you could have chosen, Dr. Bjornstrand.

—Risky for me, or risky for her?

—Risky both for you and for your patient, I’d say.

—So what else is new?

—You asked me for an impartial evaluation, Dr. Bjornstrand. If you don’t care to accept my opinion—

—I value your opinion highly, Erik.

—But you’re going to go through with the therapy as presently planned?

—Of course I am.

This is the moment of splashdown.

I hit the water perfectly and go slicing through the sea’s shining surface with surgical precision, knifing fifty meters deep, eighty, a hundred, cutting smoothly through the oceanic epithelium and the sturdy musculature beneath. Very well done, Dr. Bjornstrand. High marks for form.

Perhaps this is deep enough.

I pivot, kick, turn upward, clutch at the brightness above me. I may have overextended myself, I realize. My lungs are on fire and the sky, so recently my home, seems terribly far away. But with vigorous strokes I pull myself up and come popping into the air like a stubborn cork.

I float idly a moment, catching my breath. Then I look around. The ferocious eye of the sun regards me from a late-morning height. The sea is warm and gentle, undulating seductively. There is an island only a few hundred meters away: an inviting beach of bright sand, a row of slender palms farther back. I swim toward it. As I near the shore, the bottomless dark depths give way to a sandy outlying sunken shelf, and the hue of the sea changes from deep blue to light green. Yet it is taking longer to reach land than I had expected. Perhaps my estimate of the distance was overly optimistic; for all my efforts, the island seems to be getting no closer. At moments it actually appears to be retreating from me. My arms grow heavy. My kick becomes sluggish. I am panting, wheezing, sputtering; something throbs behind my forehead. Suddenly, though, I see sun-streaked sand just below me. My feet touch bottom. I wade wearily ashore and fall to my knees on the margin of the beach.

—Can I call you April, Miss Lowry?

—Whatever.

—I don’t think that that’s a very threatening level of therapist-patient intimacy, do you?

—Not really.

—Do you always shrug every time you answer a question?

—I didn’t know I did.

—You shrug. You also studiously avoid any show of facial expression. You try to be very unreadable, April.

—Maybe I feel safer that way.