J. Ledgard - Submergence

It was a clear morning. The sea was calm. The pilot climbed in first, then the other scientist, then her. Two men, one woman. She wore the same running shoes she used for the treadmill. She went up the ladder and dropped down through the hatch. It was a thick nickel sphere. There was no need for decompression: the pressure inside was a constant one atmosphere. The walls were covered in dials and switches. There were three viewing windows and three padded benches. The smell was of bleach and behind it of sick. The carpet was very thin, brown, shiny; of the kind you might find in the entrance to a prison or a military installation. She put on her ski hat. The hatch was closed above them and sealed.

The Nautile was winched down over the side and into the Greenland Sea. There was a clanging of chains, final checks, and then they sank. The colours coming into the craft changed like the colour of the sky seen by a rocket when it blasts into space, although of a different density: school ink, blue, blue-black, black. She saw charr, starfish and little whirring shrimps. The craft began to breathe. Oxygen was pumped in and the carbon dioxide they expelled was scrubbed clean by a lithium-hydroxide filter. The biggest window was for the pilot. Her window was the size of a laptop screen. She pressed her face to the thick quartz pane. She wanted to feel the trembling on the other side. She could not see much, the monitors from the cameras were a truer guide. Even so it was important to look with her own eyes. She gazed into the deep and the deep gazed back.

Nuclear submarines went windowless in the wristwatch shallows, without a care to look out — only listening, making no sound. A submersible was just the opposite. It was a seeing device: from the Nautile people had observed the hull of the Titanic .

*

‘Come on, Danny, just play the music,’ said Peter, the German scientist.

‘It’s Tom’s usual rubbish,’ she protested.

‘We have a whole day together,’ pointed out Étienne, the pilot.

So she gave up Thumbs’s compilation. The lyrics of the first track reverberated: I travel the world and the seven seas .

Étienne touched the stern thrusters. They sank, sank, sank. All the waters closed over their heads: 607 metres … 634 metres … out of the mesopelagic layer … into the bathypelagic. There was a time when the dominion of countries ended at five fathoms, the keel of a ship, the run of an anchor. Enki was at 3133 metres, 1741 fathoms.

The sphere was too small to stand up in; after an hour, her legs became numb. She wiped away their condensed breath from the window and stared out. There was another hour of descent to go.

‘Étienne, could you turn off the lights?’ Peter asked.

‘All of them?’

‘Yes, please.’

Everything that belonged to them disappeared, except the light on the switches and on the emergency lever. The water was alive with bioluminescent fish and eels. The salp and jellyfish gave themselves in disco lights when the Nautile brushed them. Down there everything spoke in light: it was the most common form of communication on the planet. The puniest fish had the brightest lanterns. There were fish who wore a cape of silver chain mail to reflect light. Transparency was another form of protection. So was casting a red light to appear black and so invisible. Or to fill one’s belly with ink and so disappear, as surely as slipping on a magic ring.

There was a slowness at that depth which matched the Ray Charles song that was playing. Here we go again, she’s back in town again .

‘That’s you, Danny,’ said Peter.

‘You wish.’

The darkness was so strong it bent her memory of summer twilight in London.

They sank deeper.

‘Can we turn up the lights now?’ Peter asked.

‘Certainly,’ said Étienne.

Everything was illuminated. The gold dolphin badge on Étienne’s beanie shone.

The sphere creaked. The microphones picked up ghostly whining, knocks, moaning, shrieks, wailing, and firing. The walls grew cold. They were wet to the touch. She began to smell the men; they might have begun to smell her. She wiped away more condensation from the porthole with her elbow; 921 metres … 1043 metres.

‘Starboard. Jewelled squid!’ exclaimed Peter.

They hovered to get a better look. She zoomed in with the video camera.

‘You’re right,’ she conceded.

The squid were white and appeared to be encrusted with emeralds and amethysts. They had a massive sapphire eye for looking about them and a tiny eye pushed into their bodies like genitalia. They swam at a 45-degree angle to make use of both eyes.

Peter was wiry, with frizzy hair; an environmental activist. Étienne was more classical, with a Roman nose, very precise; a sacristan, delighted with life, or himself.

Peter was talking about whales falling. He had a strong German accent. His voice was high-pitched.

‘I mean, can you imagine seeing a dead whale dropping past our window. It comes down sharply, like so.’ He demonstrated. ‘What a feast for those at the bottom! Just think of the weight in worms and lice in the stomach.’

1830 metres … 1832 metres. They were covered up. All of Britain could be sunk over them, the peak of Ben Nevis would not see any trace of daylight.

There were strings of bell-jar jellies with numerous transparent stomachs, all of them pulsing. The ocean was hungry. It was a mouth, and a grave.

A beaked whale has a heart attack in the Ligurian Sea and dies. It sinks and its head is mashed on the sides of an underground canyon. Immediately its cheeks are flushed with bacteria. There are worms, spider crabs and all manner of creatures feeding on a single vertebra. Gulper eels eat their body weight in a minute, then go without for weeks. Anglerfish cloak themselves so that their scales are like the glowing excrement of marine snow. Another fish tries to eat the excrement and the anglerfish opens its fanged mouth.

There was a fish with an eye covering half of its head. She saw a fish with a deathly pallor whose face was like a sponge with holes pushed into it by a pencil. Each of those holes was a sensory pore detecting the slightest movement nearby.

The Nautile stopped in a cold layer of the water. It keeled over, righted itself, shuddered, and continued to sink. The thermal layers were like a staircase going down. She said thermal layer and a lithograph presented itself of her slave ship halted on such a layer, not able to sink any deeper, instead carried forever on the North Atlantic Drift, its fire doused, its souls intact, in irons, their lungs full of water.

‘It’s scary,’ Peter said. They were talking about the deep. ‘I mean, there’s a reason hell is down there. There’s a reason heaven is up there. It’s conditioned by evolution.’

Étienne believed that, in geological terms, man was going to be a short-lived species. ‘We are poisonous. We are quick. We are the noodles of evolution.’

‘Instant noodles,’ she said. If the world kept spinning, if the waters held in, the deep would be constant until the end of geological time. Instantly made, instantly gone. If man had a sense of proportion, he would die of shame. His salvation was that he lived in denial. She had not given up, but it was in the balance. Homo sapiens was either at the start of a very long journey, or close to the end of a very short one. If it was to be an odyssey, the history which had passed since Sumer would come to seem priceless and savage. If it was to be a short venture, man’s mark would be the rubbish he had buried in the ground.

‘Even eating our way through cows, apples, everything, in our billions, you know we’re nothing compared to the life down there. That life can’t be destroyed, it feeds on death — or less than death — it reconfigures and goes further in, into hotter water.’