Hugh Howey - The Shell Collector

“Not bad,” Ness says. His hands are under my arms. I almost feel lifted out of the water by his steady kicking beneath the surface. But from the waist up, he is still and calm. I cling to his neck for a moment, then force myself to tread water with my arms. As a defense mechanism, I remind myself that he’s done this with a hundred reporters over the years. This is new and dangerous for me but not for him.

“How the hell are we supposed to get back in the boat?” I ask. The white fiberglass hull bobbing in the sea beside us looks like the snowy face of Everest. I am already imagining us dying here, that we forgot some crucial step. Like a crane, or a handful of stout deckhands.

“We shed the tanks in the water,” Ness says, still holding me with one hand. “Don’t worry. I promise, everything’s gonna be okay. Now, do you want to swim around a bit? Breathe through your regulator?”

I spit and sputter as one of the small swells rocks the boat and spray kicks up in my face. My mask is fogging. Repeating in my head are the words: I told you so I told you so I told you so. Bad idea, Maya. Dumb idea.

“Swim toward the bow with me,” Ness says. “I want to check the anchor.” He fishes my regulator out of the water, hits the button to expunge some air, and presses it into my hand. I bite down on the mouthpiece and take hissing lungfuls of air. As another swell lifts me up—and my head begins to sink down below the surface—I emit a half-swallowed scream. I’ve snorkeled a thousand times in my life without ever feeling panicked. It’s the heavy weights around my waist. The wetsuit, which I hate wearing anyway. The tank and the tangle of hoses. All are conspiring to drown me—

“Right here,” Ness says. “Look at me.”

He holds my head, a palm on either side of my face, steadying me but also forcing me to look at him, mask to mask.

“You can breathe,” he tells me. “Up here, down there, on the moon, anywhere. Just breathe.”

I try. My hands are around his wrists. He is not a person, not the subject of a story, not a mentor nor a guide. He is a small island. I cling to him.

“Ready?” he asks.

I nod as much as his hands will allow. I blink back tears of worry.

“Here we go.”

Ness stops supporting me, and I don’t fight the sinking. A part of me is resigned to my fate. I know in this instant that I will die here, and some truncated and indiscernible version of my life flashes before my eyes, just like they say it does. I see my parents, and then my sister. I see a beach that is somehow the sum of all the beaches I’ve ever visited. A memory of driving with the windows down, music blaring, hair whipping in my face. I see a newspaper with my byline. And then the water covers the regulator in my mouth, covers my mask, closes over my head, and a miracle happens. The impossible. The turbulence and noise and rocking boat and beating sun are replaced with a near-silence. A near-weightlessness. A floating of mind and body. I breathe in and out, just like by the dock, and air fills my lungs. Bubbles flow. I make another odd sound, a muffled squeal of delight, a noise like I’ve heard dolphins make, because I’m doing it. I’m diving. Floating in the great and wild open sea.

Ness holds my hand, and for a moment, I think he’s going to guide me around like this, but he’s pointing at my wrist, showing me the face of my dive watch. The depth gauge reads ten feet. I glance up, and the surface of the sea is a shimmering wall of quicksilver overhead. White foam spits around the hull of the boat as it rocks in place. The outboards jut down with bright props like old-timey circulating fans. Ness points toward the bow of the boat. The mooring line is there, angling through the water, and I can see the anchor lying on the sand far below. He kicks toward the line and motions for me to follow. I do. I also fumble for the air fill controls on the BC and experiment with adding air and releasing it again, getting a feel for how it controls my depth. I keep a nervous eye on the readout, both to see how deep I am and also how much air I have left. Between my lessons earlier and getting off the boat just now, I’ve already used a third of my tank.

When we reach the anchor line, I grab hold of it, eager to have something solid to cling to, some way of knowing I’m not sinking nor bobbing toward the surface. Ness flashes the okay sign as a question, and I flash it back in response. He motions for me to stay there. Okay , I signal. He turns and kicks to descend down the line, and I notice the wreck for the first time, this great and unnatural manmade form resting on the seafloor. It looks like a container ship, lying almost on its side. A giant steel reef, portholes unblinking like the eyes of the drowned.

No… not a container ship, I see. The deck where the metal boxes would go is laced with thick pipes and large round hatches. It’s a tanker. I know this wreck. The name is on the tip of my tongue. And then I see that the name is also there on the side of the ship, faded but still legible: The Oasis .

This tanker went down before I was born, was en route to the Saint Lawrence Seaway when it broke up in heavy seas. It’s part of a long list of oil tanker disasters in US waters: Argo Merchant, Bouchard , Valdez, Mega Borg, Westchester, Eagle Otome, Oasis, Shinyu, Aponia . I can only remember the names if I recite them in order, sing-song, like we learned in grade school eco class. And here it is below me, an ignoble piece of history. But it looks so calm. The water is crystal clear, the destruction a memory. Fish swirl around the ship, an explosion of life, like bugs swarming a rotting corpse.

Ness checks the anchor and swims back up to me. Okay? he asks. Okay , I signal. He points at the wreck. Okay, I signal again. This is the extent of my underwater vocabulary. In truth, I’m far better than okay. I’m dizzy with excitement. I don’t know that I would have the words even if I were able to write them. We have entered an inhospitable and alien world, and I can survive here.

I kick after Ness, and we float down over a large school of what look like amberjack. The fish undulate as one—the most fish I’ve seen in a single school in the wild. Only in aquariums do fish like this exist. As we pierce the school, they seem to divide and meld around us. We continue down, my wrist telling me thirty, forty, fifty. We’re now level with the jutting tower of the Oasis . The deck is much farther below, but I won’t be going any deeper. I swim toward the tower, which is at a lean. Several of the windows are busted out. There are fish inside, and barnacles along the hull. There’s more reef here than I’ve seen practically anywhere since I was a child. More sea life than I’ve ever seen in one place. Ness signals for me not to go any deeper, and I see that I’ve drifted down to sixty-five feet. I put some air in my BC and check my tank supply. I also check the time. We’ve been in the water for twelve minutes. I could stay forever. I could live here.

Ness descends further. He slides down the sheer cliff of steel to the sand floor, where a scattering of rocks and kelp-like plants break up the desert sameness. I watch him search along the base of the wreck. Only a few minutes left to enjoy this. I kick toward the tower until I can reach out and touch the barnacle-rough rail. A monster fish swims past one of the windows, and I grunt a veil of bubbles. A reef shark. The black mark on the tip of its fin tells me what kind. They feed at night , I hear my father say, consoling me.

The black-tip reef shark disappears into the tower, and I decide to back off. Only a quarter of my tank left. A few more minutes down here, that’s all I have. I search below for Ness and see him rising up to join me, trailing a veil of bubbles. Together, we kick toward the surface, this thing I’ve avoided all my life taken away from me far too abruptly. I remember to exhale as we ascend. I exhale the entire way up, letting out this swelling breath that I’ve held for years and years.