Hugh Howey - The Shell Collector

I realize I’m still clutching him for balance. “Oh, right.”

I let go, and Ness grabs the joysticks on either side of his seat. He pushes them to one side, and I feel a sense of acceleration as we move away from the mothership. The fat hull of the research vessel recedes until it’s swallowed by the black. Just before it disappears, the view reminds me of looking up at Ness’s boat while diving, but on a completely different scale.

“What does that do?” I ask Ness as he adjusts some knobs.

“It controls our rate of descent. We drop at about fifty meters per minute. We should touch down in a little less than two hours.”

“TWO HOURS?”

I immediately regret shouting. Every sound is amplified in the small metal sphere and the headsets. Ness raises an eyebrow.

“What happened to sixty feet, ten minutes?” I ask. “Sixty feet. Ten minutes. What happened to that?”

“We’re going a lot deeper for a lot longer,” Ness explains. “I promise you it’s safe. I’ve done a hundred deep dives in this baby, and she’s done thousands more without me.”

“But two hours just to get there?” I now understand why Ness insisted I use the bathroom after breakfast and why he told me to go easy on the coffee.

“Yeah, and we run on battery power, which we need to conserve. I’m going to dim the lights for now. The heater has to stay on, or we’ll freeze in here. But let me know if it gets too cold for you.” He flips switches, and the banks of internal lights go off. There is enough left from the dials and indicators to see around us. Ness seems to study one readout after another, checking things. All I see is the inscrutable cockpit of a jumbo jet wrapped around us.

“There’s a bag on the shelf behind you,” Ness says. “A couple of apples, granola bars, some juice. Go easy on the juice, but if you have to relieve yourself, there are ways.”

“Do I even want to know?”

“Probably not. Oh, and I packed your book and borrowed a reading light from one of the bosuns. It’s in there as well.”

“I can read about the hunt for Moby Dick at the bottom of the sea,” I say in perfect monotone, so he knows just how enthused I am.

“Spoiler alert,” Ness warns. “Down here is where the Pequod ends up.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Yeah, well, it’s how it gets there that’s interesting. You should read it anyway. Great book, even if no one recognized it at the time.”

“Is that what you’re up to?” I ask. “Is that what this is all about? Being remembered as someone great, even if it’s only after you’re gone?”

Ness laughs. He turns and looks at me in the dim light of the indicators. “Really? We’re going to do this here? At…” He checks something. “Two hundred meters and falling?”

“Why not? I’ve got you here for the next two hours. Interview on.”

“Five hours, if we spend an hour at the bottom.”

My bladder clenches. “Five hours,” I say, mostly to myself. “So tell me, what did you mean by redemption on the plane last night—”

“That was off the record,” Ness warns.

“Okay.” I try to think of how to rephrase what I want to ask. “How about this? Why do you want to show me whatever led you to the creation of these shells? Do you expect me to rewrite my story so that it’s mostly about this? Are you trying to be remembered differently than your father?”

Ness doesn’t reply immediately, which makes me think he takes the question seriously, is at least introspective enough to consider this as a possibility.

“I don’t care how most people remember me,” he finally says.

“ Most people?”

“That’s right. But I do care what Holly thinks. And she sees me the way you do.” He turns to me. Is back to his serious self. And from what Victoria told me, this is the Ness that I believe. Not the smiling and laughing man—not that he isn’t capable of joy—but there’s meat inside that shell; it’s not all rainbows and sunshine in there. “Holly won’t care about any of this now, maybe not for years, but I want her to know the truth someday. I don’t care if you write that truth. In fact… you want to know what I think this is about for me?”

“Yes,” I say. “Are you just realizing it right now?”

“Yeah,” Ness says. “I am. I think this is a test—”

“You’re testing me? Why do you care what I think?”

“I don’t. I mean, I do. What I mean is that I’m not testing you . I’m testing myself. Seeing what would happen if I told people the truth.”

I laugh at this.

“I’m serious. Because I could get into a lot of trouble. I could spend the rest of my life in jail. But I want to tell Holly someday. I want to explain myself, tell her why I wasn’t around as much as I should’ve been, why I drove her mother away, why I—”

He turns to the porthole on his side of the submersible and is quiet for a while. When he speaks again, his voice breaks. “Why I tore the family apart. Because it’s gonna take a lot to make that worth it. And if she thinks it was frivolous, that none of it mattered—all the hours I was gone—then she’ll hate me for the rest of my life and then keep on hating me for the rest of hers. And I’ve felt that hate in my own heart. Felt it toward my dad. And my granddad. Which is why when my granddad passed, and his journal fell into my possession, and I saw how wrong I was… that’s when I knew I had to leave something behind for Holly. That I couldn’t do everything in secret. Not forever.”

“Do what in secret?” I ask.

“Soon,” Ness says. “Soon.”

“Look—”

“You’ll know everything in a few days,” he says, cutting me off. “And then you can decide what to write, if you write anything at all.”

He turns to face me. Even in the dim light, I can see that his eyes are filmed over with tears. “I was familiar with your shelling pieces back in the day, and I read some of your more recent stuff before you came over that first night. I trust you. And it’s even better to see that Holly trusts you. That means the world to me. She might be angry with us for a few days for not being in love, but when she reads what you have to say—if you have anything to say—and sees the truth instead of all the lies out there about me, that’ll go a long way with the healing.”

“That’s too much to put on me, Ness. I have to be objective. You can’t use her like that to make me write what you want to see. And you can’t use me like this hoping I’ll write something nice about you. I hate to break it to you, but I’m a resistant cuss. If I like you, I’m just as likely to rip you apart to prove I’m capable of being fair.”

“No, you’re right. It’s too much to ask. And I don’t mean any of it like that. It’s just… I can see how this all plays out, how it has to play out, and I guess I’m thanking you in advance. I shouldn’t do that, I know. Now I’m the one skipping to the end.”

“Yeah. And you should be prepared for me to disappoint you, Ness. Because I probably will.”

Ness adjusts one of the levers on his side of the sub and settles back into his seat. “I don’t think that’s possible,” he says. “I don’t think you can.”

Flying commercial as often as I do, I feel trained for this journey to the bottom of the sea. The sub is far more comfortable than coach in a 797. More leg room, better snacks, and no one behind me coughing and sneezing. I read for an hour, wondering when these people are going to get to sea already and get to whaling, and I take occasional breaks to gaze out at the pitch black beyond the glass.

The only thing I see out there is the small bubbles forming on the portholes; it looks like we’re in outer space but with stars that can’t sit still. As we plunge down and down, the sub makes creaking sounds, which Ness tells me at least a hundred times is perfectly normal. He says the military subs do the same thing, that it’s just the metal settling against the phenomenal pressure outside, that at this depth, a watermelon would instantly become the size of a grape.