Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

It was known as “l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs ,” or “rapture of the deep.” People forgot that Loren had advanced Trimix certification for depth dives. He knew the effects of narcosis at different levels. Playing along the bottom of the reef shelf at forty feet, his anxiety left him. He looked at the parrot fish munching on coral, the sound crunching in his ears like turning gravel. Manta rays hummed through the water like bees. The absinthe whispered in his ear that Titi and Cooked would manage for themselves quite well. At one hundred feet down, already there was the relaxation comparable to a glass of wine, except Loren had pretty much finished off the bottle of absinthe, and so the effect was accelerated and intensified. Gravity took over, and he no longer had to exert himself to continue down. A miracle he hadn’t already passed out. He wished he could have a last taste of the green fairy now; drink was his closest companion these last years. As he accelerated down the wall, approaching one hundred and fifty feet, a silliness overtook him. He had to suck in oxygen to keep from laughing at the dolphin that even now swam at his side, not more than five feet separating them. Around two hundred feet down, Loren’s air bubbles started to make a funny tinkling sound like high-pitched glass bells. A pelagic music of the spheres. Past two hundred and fifty feet, it began to grow darker, cooler. Life here existed in a perpetual twilight; the sea life had larger gills, moved less to conserve energy. He was surprised that the dolphin had stayed with him to this depth. He imagined his own skin turning gray and rubbery as his companion’s. She was an attractive one. Somehow Loren intuited she was female. He imagined morphing into her mate. Side by side they would swim through the islands, having baby dolphins and playing up to tourists. Not a bad life. Possibly a beautiful life. His own movements became slower now, even though his mind raced. Every problem he thought of seemed capable of immediate solution under the laser of his expanded attention. It seemed entirely within the realm of possibility that if he surfaced he could negotiate immediate world peace. He considered taking off his mouthpiece, just for a moment, and asking the dolphin’s thoughts on Lilou … He did not … Past three hundred feet, the pressure of the water began to exert itself, as if forcing him to occupy a smaller place than his body could naturally accommodate. His ribs hurt as if the stays of a corset were being tightened around him. It felt as if the blood in his veins had become effervescent. Only once before had he attempted that depth … The she dolphin drifted away … breaking his heart. He cried, but no tears came out. Probably twenty feet separated them. The dolphin was circling and pointing upward with her wandlike snout. Pointing toward light and life; fish, squid, and shrimp for all. How could he say it any other way? She was sexy. Large aquatic eyes like liquid mercury. Was it creepy to be attracted to a fish? Loren wasn’t imagining it — the she dolphin was clearly disappointed in him. He knew female censure when he saw it. Perhaps she had thought they were playing a game, going on an adventure, and now she felt duped. She was going Catholic on him.

The capriciousness of revelation.

Past three hundred and fifty feet, the waters grew brighter and sunny again. Loren felt that this proved something he had always guessed, but then, in the next moment, he forgot what it was. The cold steel bodies of sharks passed, singly, like undertakers. A ribbon of yellow uncurled itself toward him like a beckoning hand. It was warm and translucent and inviting. He swam toward it as it teasingly moved away. Another tendril beckoned in pink. Then green. A deconstructed rainbow was winding itself around him like a cocoon of light. The she dolphin poked him from behind, sending Loren spinning in slow-motion through the water — arms and legs out like a tumbling blue starfish — when a thirty-foot shark turned ponderously in his direction. May I help you? Loren, the reticent aquanaut. The she dolphin grew agitated now. She kept nudging Loren and going away and up. Finally Loren grew irritated and slapped her side as she passed yet again. She nodded her pretty, rubbery head in hurt comprehension, and then, with a powerful flex of her muscled body like a final arch of passion, she sped upward with a good-bye flutter of her comely tail. Loren was bereft. His final chance of happiness had just swum away. The tendrils of light no longer enticed him. Their beauty was frightening, cold. It pained the artist in him that evil should hide in such splendorous guise. At his nonattention the tendrils grew faint and then went dark entirely. A truly sinister shark decided to take up new residence at Loren’s side. His skin a black that sucked all remaining light. So be it. Loren shuddered out of his flippers. He almost passed out with the exertion of taking off the straps of his oxygen tank. He drank in a last sweet, deep sip of air as delicious as the fairy in its rarity and then spit out the mouthpiece. He held the tank aloft for a moment and then let it go. It was sucked downward as if by a magnet. Unable to bear the cruel face of his new companion, Loren removed his mask. Everything blossomed into a blinding white light as he took that first inhalation of sea, that first bid at a new, fishy incarnation.

* * *

“So where’s Loren?” Steve asked after he’d tied up the boat.

“At your hotel. Didn’t you talk to him?” Titi said.

“He came this morning and took a boat for a charter. He didn’t bring it back.”

Titi walked away without a word.

Lilou looked back and forth between the two.

“Thank you for coming,” Ann said, stepping up to her. “I’m the one who contacted you.”

* * *

The men decided to break up and hit separate dive destinations to save time. Cooked and Richard would cover a private spot that was Loren’s favorite.

“We’ll be in touch by radio.”

Dex and Javi went with Steve in the hotel boat, hitting the places one took tourists in case Loren’s alibi was true and he was simply in distress. Or drunk. Or some unholy combination of the two.

Once they were gone, Titi melted down on the sand. Lilou had gone to rest, kept in ignorance of what was happening.

“What is it?” Ann asked. “What do you know?”

Titi shook her head. “I feel it in my bones. An emptiness where he should be.”

As fanciful as this explanation was, Ann knew it was the right one. She had sensed something was wrong when he left. There was the mystery of his appearance on camera, but how could she have prevented his departure? If she had succeeded this one afternoon, what about all the others that would follow? As much as it pained her, she knew it was Loren’s right. She sat down next to Titi and took the girl in her arms.

* * *

The hotel boat was anchored where Cooked had guessed it would be. Of course there was no evidence on the boat of Loren’s fate, nothing as prosaic as a note left behind, but the final intention was beyond doubt. Cooked had liked Loren but never could bring himself to really trust foreigners. He thought in the end they would always go home. This time he was proved wrong. It moved him that Loren had made te fenua his final resting place. To die in the ocean made him one of them at last. The Frenchman’s death frightened him. He was not ready to take on the mantle of leader, even of this small place, but he accepted that one never was prepared. It was like being born — you were pushed out into the world.

Cooked stood up in the boat and said a prayer over the water, while Richard looked down into the waves, praying Loren would pop up at any minute, as if this might still be an elaborate gag. Richard was suffering the naïve but common belief that nothing bad could happen on vacation, that the ordinary realities of life were somehow suspended. The rocking of the boat had set off a rocking in his stomach that Richard recognized as the beginning of seasickness. Despite himself, even in the hot sun, his teeth chattered. Cooked yanked the shell necklace off his neck, breaking the thread and unstringing the pieces into his palm. He threw bits in all four directions while he said another prayer.