J. Ledgard - Submergence

‘My God, it’s Bernhard,’ the hostess said.

Everyone fell silent.

‘Bernhard!’ she called out, at which the bird warbled, bowed, and flew off.

‘Excuse me,’ the hostess said, ‘I must call Europe.’

Sure enough, she was informed that the prince had died a few minutes before.

What form might he take in death? If he could appear to Danny, he would be a small African owl, fluttering at her porthole. If he could only send a message, some sign of the afterlife, he would return to her the inscription she had written inside the cover of one of his books, from Job:

Have you entered the springs of the sea? Or have you walked in the depths? Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Or have you seen the door of the shadow of death? Have you comprehended the breadth of the Earth? Tell me if you know all this?

He would have messages for his family and friends, but the passage from Job would be his sign to her.

The Kaaba was the empty space to which all Muslims directed their prayers. He was sceptical — Catholic, English, he desired a New Atlantis, a windswept All Souls College — still the Kaaba caused him to shudder. If he were allowed a supernatural instruction, it would be for her to achieve a dispensation to study the microbial life inside it.

He was standing in the creek washing himself. Ablution, with no rhythm, no conviction. He saw it coming a few seconds before it hit. The colours on its snub nose were the same maroon as the flashes 1 Para wore on their right arm. It was his colour. It was coming for him.

How it twirled towards the ground. He was transfixed. He thought of a helter-skelter, circling down on hessian mats heavy with sand, those colours going round and round, ‘Helter Skelter, feare no colours, course him, trounce him!’

It glinted. It burned from its tail. It was an astonishing creation. Entirely human, wholly American. It had been fired over the curvature of the earth from a submarine off the coast of Somalia. The viscosity of seawater at so many fathoms, the loosening of rocket motors in flight, the load of explosives, the Coriolis effect as it applied at the equator, all of these considerations had been accounted for by minds and machines, yet it was impossible in the final moment not to see the missile as something more.

Machine guns were fired.

‘I’m bleeding out,’ someone cried in Arabic.

‘ Allah u Akbar! ’ was the last utterance heard.

He dived into the creek. With all his strength, he kicked to the bottom. Addition, subtraction. His mind stopped like a roulette wheel. His last thought, peculiarly, blessedly, was of the wool markets in Langland’s Piers the Ploughman . The wine merchant calling out ‘Wine from Alsace! Wine from Gascony! Rhine wines!’

The surface exploded like a star. The sides of the creek were thrown up into the sky. The noise was so loud it became silence. Then there was that secondary platinum light that turns bodies to ash.

The sun went so fast, the stars faster, yet not as fast as young More’s body to the earth. He came up for air in bloody gaining waters, with cooked crabs, with martyrs. He looked at death, went under again, and swam away, towards the Boni, towards Kenya. In this sense, at least, his submergence was shallow.

3088 metres … 3120 …

‘There it is now, Danny,’ Étienne said, with feeling. ‘Your Enki.’ They went slowly towards a column the size of an office block. The chimneys on it billowed like so many Turks setting back their heads and expelling cigarette smoke through their nostrils.

It was in the style of Gaudi; pitted, knobbly, rust-coloured from oxidation, black in places, in others mottled white with mats of bacteria. Amphipod danced at the edge of the vents. Tubeworms swayed like heavy cocks. There were mussels and other bivalves. Blind fish circled. The Turks sat very still, smoking, regarding them.

After some time at the base of the column Étienne lifted the Nautile and piloted it to where the floor of the earth was cracked. There was no fire, no hearth. The magma was glassy and cool. The light broke against heavy drifts of marine snow; it was useless to think the abyss could be illuminated by thallium iodide. She was excited, intent, but at the same time thought, the places we will have to dwell as a species are terrible. We will have to accommodate ourselves to realms for which we are not evolved, to lodge ourselves in them, to articulate our bodies from inside a suit of titanium and the other materials. She felt the metal hollow inside the submersible acutely — the stale air, the sweat of Peter and Étienne, the smell of vomit, bleach …

With great care Étienne set the Nautile down at the edge of a crack. They extended the robot arm to scrape bacteria from its interior. She adjusted her weight on the bench and the craft in turn settled on the fine silica mud, on the diatomaceous ooze of dead creatures that on land was used as scouring powder.

Étienne turned off the spotlights.

‘Testing systems.’

They did not speak. There was just the sound of their breathing. She touched her forehead to the quartz. Outside, viscous black flowed into black. My God, it was a trance, it was the most consuming painting. A powerful sense of vertigo overcame her, of a kind she had not experienced since the day she tried to follow James into the wood on the grounds of the Hotel Atlantic. She felt the Nautile was too close to the edge, that they were teetering, and would fall into the underworld, the true underworld. She felt that the Nautile would break apart, the three of them would fall out, and she herself would tumble down, like Alice, but not into Wonderland. Her body would be a puff of life, gone, instantly, with no possibility of ascent, and the same for Peter and Étienne; each of them cartwheeling into a chemical soup.

You lift off to heaven, you sink into hell. You rocket into space, you drown on a slave ship. The encompassing sea of Abzu made more sense than any astral plane put forward by the great religions. Why not a sea behind the universe, making fast the stars?

She admired the musculature of ballet dancers, but understood that they were liquid beings, trailing tendril lives. The gas bladders of fish burst and filled their mouths when the net was winched up. Salp lost structure, died and became indefinable at the surface. All living creatures were at some point disassembled. It was only a question of where the parts ended up and were made into something new. The volume of life in the deep, its complexity and self-organisation, would over millions of years take in the disassembled from the land as it crumbled into the sea and was washed away by rivers and rains. It was too dramatic to say damned souls cooked in agony while satanic whores scored them with fingernails and others with flaccid and scaly bodies dashed them against the shiny obsidian …

It was tranquil, in a way. There were no storms, no swells, the water was very calm. Did the abyss sing of itself? Seen from below, the surface looked like heaven. Seen from heaven, she thought, it was a roiling sea, a darksome air infernal. Human beings were between worlds, they were inbetweeners, who did not know where light dwelt or where darkness had its place.

Her eyes adjusted. There were again the soft glowing switches, like the smoking signs on old airliners at night; the association with seamless life, the comfort of collective awareness, common nostalgia. She could make out Étienne, leaning forward. Her sense of vertigo left her. She felt that she more clearly belonged to the present.