Juli Zeh - Decompression

I went back inside, shaking my head. I hadn’t taken care of the gecko yet. I tore off part of a paper towel, picked up Emile’s cold little body, carried him into the bathroom, and threw him in the toilet. He wouldn’t flush down. I covered him with toilet paper, flushed, waited, flushed again. Until he finally disappeared.

They were both standing in front of the house. I hadn’t reckoned on more than one of them. On this morning, as on every morning, they waited at the foot of the Casa Raya’s front steps while I backed the van across the sandlot. Jola wore a red dress with a swaying skirt that I hadn’t seen before. Theo looked like he wasn’t awake yet. I got out of the van, walked up to Jola, put my hands on her waist, and kissed her on the mouth. I didn’t know why I did that. I hadn’t planned it. Nor did it feel good.

“Whoops!” said Jola.

Theo looked past us, gave a slight nod, and smiled.

Some fuse in my head must have blown overnight. In the van, I gazed at Jola from the side and stroked her cheek with my forefinger. I put a hand on her knee. She seemed happy, but also a little mixed up. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere. At the dive site, when she turned her back on Theo and me to take off her dress and get into her suit, I had to keep my hands still. I felt like a boy forbidden to test out his new toy, even though it had so many functions he’d yet to discover. Theo was suddenly full of questions about technical diving. Only then did I remember that tomorrow was the day I’d been waiting months for. My fortieth birthday, one hundred meters underwater. No matter what the wrecked ship’s original name had been, I was going to rename it after myself. A few more preparations remained to be made; there were tanks to fill, various pieces of equipment to check, calculations in the dive plan to be gone over one last time. The impending expedition seemed far away to me, like something I’d already lived through and concluded. That perception had to change. I needed my full concentration. I answered Theo’s questions without properly listening to myself. While I was explaining that helium, even under high pressure, had very little narcotic effect, and that this was the reason why divers at hundred-meter depths breathed a helium-oxygen mixture, I looked at Jola, who was standing a little away from us. She returned my gaze with her head slightly tilted to one side, like someone contemplating a piece of furniture, uncertain about which room to put it in.

I thought about how urgently I needed to make a few decisions, and this immediately put me in a bad mood. Then I reflected that such decisions were best left to fate, and my mood improved. I said that the thermodynamic law of ideal gases didn’t take the interaction between gas atoms into account, and that therefore it was advisable to fall back on the van der Waals model when using helium. I thought that I had as valid a right as anyone to follow the laws of logic. Which meant that if Theo, Antje, Antje’s girlfriends, Bernie — if the whole island — assumed that I was having an affair with Jola, then it was only logical that I should actually have the said affair. The thought appealed to me. A man who didn’t want to lose his reason had to make sure that idea and reality were coextensive. As a general rule, one adapted ideas to reality. Sometimes the opposite method was the simpler one. An affair with Jola would ease the sting of Antje’s unjust accusations, give my conviction a retroactive basis, and put me back at the negotiating table. I’d had enough of feeling that I couldn’t explain anything because no one would believe me no matter what I said. I composed a text message to Antje in my head: “Just slept with Jola, so you can stop thinking I’m a liar.” Let her try to get over that.

Jola watched me as I thought. She appeared to know what was in my mind. I smiled. She smiled. I laughed. She shook her head. As though she couldn’t rightly believe what she read in my thoughts. Come to your senses , her look seemed to say. All the same, she’d been coming on to me for days. It bordered on the miraculous that a woman of her caliber was prepared to go to such obstinate lengths to get a man.

I’d apparently broken off my helium lecture at some point in the middle; nevertheless, the Boltzmann constant and Charles’s law of volumes were still hanging in the air somehow. Theo looked unsatisfied.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go for a dive.”

Three hours later, when the dive was over and we were back in the van, Jola asked me, “Do you own a dinner jacket?” I said I didn’t. “Then a clean pair of jeans and a white shirt will have to do,” she said. “But with long sleeves!”

She hadn’t asked me whether I wanted to go out with them.

“Dinner on the Dorset, ” Theo explained. “Aperitifs at seven.”

I gave some brief consideration to what Antje might be planning for dinner, but then I recalled that Antje wasn’t home. My aversion to parties was irrelevant in this case. Theo and Jola were scheduled to depart on Saturday. The time remaining until then must be utilized, deliberately and thoroughly. Relishing the thought, I swung the van through the open gate and onto my property.

“Would you like to come in?” I asked in Jola’s direction, addressing her as casually as possible. Theo burst out laughing and left the van. Jola extended an index finger, poked me on the nose, and got out too. Her sports bag dangled jauntily from her shoulder as she walked over to the Casa Raya and disappeared inside.

With his back to me, Theo was standing on some indefinite spot between the gate entrance and the sandlot, approximately where the sidewalk would be in a German village. As he turned around, I could see a cigarette between his lips. He was crying. It was a weird sight: the forty-two-year-old man with the old face, the burning cigarette, the tears. Like a still shot from a movie that Antje would have liked.

“When we were children,” Theo said, “we wouldn’t have imagined we’d come to this one day.”

His flamboyant talk of the past few days was still in my ears. I’ll put up with you banging her , he’d said. Just stop denying it . As my mother would have observed, there’s no pleasing some people. Right there and then, I found Theo repulsive. He wasn’t only smoking and weeping, he was also smiling, all at the same time.

“Just imagine,” said Theo. “Seeing that drowned swimmer didn’t bother her a bit. It was almost as if she was enjoying it.”

He wiped his face with his cigarette hand. With the other, he made a regretful gesture, as though sympathizing with me about something. You had to hand it to him — he certainly had a knack for producing shock effects. Without turning around again, he crossed the sandlot and entered the Casa Raya.

Jola wore a silver-white dress that gave off a pale, liquid shimmer and reacted to her slightest movement. Her dark hair was braided and wound around her head like a wreath. She was breathtakingly beautiful.

She had made sure we’d arrive fifteen minutes late. As we went up the gangway, she took my arm. The conversation on board fell silent. Theo walked behind us. I felt ashamed to be wearing jeans.

It was a moment I’ll never forget. Bittmann, tuxedoed and filthy rich, stared at us wide-eyed, as if he were standing on a raft while I steered a luxury yacht in his direction. Because of Jola, my jeans suddenly presented no problem; on the contrary, they seemed like a clever gambit.