Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

(Wrongfully, I withheld from her my developing interest in room theory. For example, how many more rooms did two persons in occupation of a one-bedroom need in circumstances where (i) the two persons were almost never simultaneously in the one-bedroom; (ii) on the rare occasion that the two persons were simultaneously in the one-bedroom, almost always one or both of them was asleep and therefore unconscious; (iii) on the still rarer occasion that the two persons were simultaneously in the one-bedroom and simultaneously conscious, almost always one person was in the bedroom and the other was in the bathroom or the living room? (A footnote: when we quarrelled, which wasn’t often, we would be in the same room. After a while, I’d tire of the quarrel, and I’d exit the room and go to the other room, in order to be by myself there. Jenn would follow me in, in order to continue saying things, and eventually I would leave that room and go back to first room, and again she would follow me, and finally I’d have to go to the bathroom and lock the door, and still she would come after me, standing by the door and following me into the bathroom vocally, as it were. That happened consistently, which is interesting, because when we were not disputatious an opposite dynamic was typically in effect, namely, that if I entered the same room as Jenn, she would quite soon leave that room, as if the point of an apartment was to ensure that its occupants lived apart from one another. (This partly explains my resistance to moving to a larger place and thereby enabling our mutual dodging, whereas it was my hope that one day we would enjoy being in the same room together. It wasn’t right to keep this motive secret. The right thing would have been to mention to Jenn that I resented all the dodging, and let her know where I stood, emotionally, even if my previous attempts at this kind of communication had not been productive, very possibly because of my own inadequacies as an emotions-communicator. (As it happens, my wrongdoing in this specific instance — i.e., resisting a move to a larger place for reasons kept secret — turned out to be consequentially good, because we were spared a conflict about how to dispose of a jointly owned property. To that extent, all’s well that ends well.))))

So there it was: we had agreed on a plan. When Jenn turned thirty-three, we made the premeditated reproductive effort; sexual intercourse became focused and timeous. After six months, Jenn elected to receive fertility treatment. This necessitated that she self-administer certain drugs. The drugs made her depressed and anxious and paranoid for a week of each month — an especially disconcerting turn for her, because she naturally tended towards emotional efficiency. These painful symptoms bothered her for three consecutive months. During the third, something bad happened at work the details of which Jenn would not reveal but which involved, I gathered, strange behaviour attributable to her artificial biochemical state. Soon afterwards, she said that she didn’t want to take any more fertility drugs. I said, OK, we’ll do without them, and Jenn said, No. I can’t do it any more. She was very upset, as far as I could tell, or perhaps very relieved, or both. There can be little doubt that her family background complicated for her the issue of children, among others. I said, OK, let’s think about it again in a little while, OK, love? and she said, OK. We said no more about it. Then Jenn turned thirty-five and said she wanted to try again. It was now or never, she said. She said that there were no two ways about it, we had to find a bigger apartment, with more rooms. It was financially ridiculous not to, apart from anything else. I said, OK, even though by this point I had lost my cameral idealism and room-wise was on the same page as Jenn, i.e., my interest in our being in the same room together had waned. To quote an old, possibly wise, legal colleague: There comes a point when there comes a point.)

At Dibba were dhows and inflatable speedboats loaded with diving equipment. Our group disbanded in teams of two. Some headed for Lima Rock, some to Octopus Rock, some to the Khor Mala Caves, some to Ras Qaisah, others elsewhere. Ollie and I were assigned the Ras Lima headland. The decision had been made to cover the well-known dive spots, even though Ted Wilson had become a legend precisely for his avoidance of these sites, which furthermore attracted so much scuba and snorkelling traffic that it was hard to believe that a findable diver in distress would not already have turned up. It wasn’t until our boat was in the water that I began to feel preposterous. Ollie and I looked like Dumb and Dumber in our yellow flippers and matching short-sleeved O’Neill neoprene shirts.

I said, ‘So what’s the plan, exactly?’

He made a grimace. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

We toppled ass backward into the Gulf of Oman.

Everything beyond ten metres was lemonade murk. I was tense; I had forgotten about the unlimited expectancy that is a feeling of being in the sea.

Ollie went along a shallow trough. I followed. We had dived this site before, and soon I recognized a grove of lavender coral. On we went, through enigmatic marine vales. The blue-and-white-striped fish were out and about, as were the small black triangular dawdlers, as were, in a disorderly shoal, the innumerable now-glossy, now-dull colourless guys that are the pen pushers of the reefs. My Fish Identification Course did not cover these little fellows, and in fact the whole enterprise of human discernment, of passing what is sensed through the sieve of what is known, is more or less annulled underwater. Perhaps for this reason, I’ve never been able to dive without loneliness — and never could have gone into the water like Ted Wilson, without human corroboration. Always I would need to sense, close by, friendly foot fins idling in the deep. And yet while looking for Ted Wilson’s body, if that’s what we were doing, I hardly felt companioned by my intermittently effervescent old buddy. We were present as searchers, not sightseers, and I felt a terrific pressure of intentionality. The sunbeams in vertical schools, the alien phyla, one’s unnatural litheness — I was used to submitting without thought to these marvels and to their incalculable Welt . Very few human ideas survive in this implacably sovereign element; one finds oneself in a world devoid not only of air but of symbols, which are of course a kind of air. There are moments when even the sunniest diver has forced on him or her certain dark items of knowledge, among them, if I may extrapolate from my own diver’s experience of being simultaneously a vessel and a passenger, that one is a biological room in which one is the detainee. None other than Cousteau, as I learned from watching his Odyssey , understood that a corollary of his oceanographic adventures was the contemplation, inevitably gloomy, of the processes of decomposition and disappearance that finally govern organic life and, for that matter, the lives of civilizations, ancient traces of which are apparently plentiful in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea in the form of coins and urns and ruins. None of this is to propose a special category of submerged truth; but there is no point in denying that diving changes things.

We came to a drop-off and went down.

Right away we saw a leopard shark, at rest on the white sand. On another day, I would have been overjoyed. Convulsively, I kicked away from the animal, from the abominable sound of my breathing, from the inertness of everything. I have to think this was provoked by the fraudulence of my situation; but in any case, panic displaced all notions except that of surfacing. I signalled to Ollie. We went up without delay.

‘I can’t do it,’ I said, gasping. ‘I’m not breathing right.’