Underneath again, finally, we look up at the mirrored membrane of our other world. When I first began, I would spend long minutes inches below before breaching, putting off the journey back. Those inches were the farthest distance I’ve ever traveled; the distance between worlds. Once you breach you can look down again, but you don’t. You don’t want to see that world as a spectator. You don’t want to feel uninvolved. You don’t want to feel like a tourist, because you are one.
Moments before we were on a heaving rocking boat under darkening skies. We sat on the outer rail and flipped backwards into the water. It is always a wonderful feeling. Because it is so disorienting it is easier to imagine you’ve jumped through some dimensional barrier; like when you are dreaming and become aware of it, the sudden rush of awareness. Now we can see droplets of rain striking through the surface of our barrier, mixing into the great body.
Naomi sinks faster than I do. We wear the same weights, but I am more buoyant. I have greater lung capacity; I’ve never smoked. Because of that I use up my oxygen faster and often must surface first.
We have chartered this dive by ourselves, for the first time. Every other time we have gone with the resort dives. The other divers are a mixed bag of mothers from Ohio burnt to resemble lobsters, rich diving enthusiasts with hundreds of devices that are unneeded and go unused, and usually one or two students on vacation or hiatus. Sometimes, God forbid, we get a Peace Corps snob.
The last Peace Corps snob we had happened to come from our small town, a full continent away. She admitted her point of origin grudgingly, preferring to say she was birthed into the world community no doubt, and told us she was a specialist in small business management. Naomi tells me this means she helps locals open souvenir shops.
At least the Device People bring along interesting gadgets: enormous diving knives in case they have to do battle with the beast from 20,000 fathoms; digital gauges telling them how much time and air they have left in so many words; state of the art cameras in case they make some discovery of great historical significance. A Lobster Mom spends the entire dive tapping her dive tank to bring everybody’s attention to every progressing detail as they emerge in Lobster Mom’s consciousness.
We go underneath to be alone. Alone together. Either. Both.
We swim with the group through coral caverns or beds of sea grass, but mainly we scout. When we find an appropriate place we indicate to our dive master which direction we will be going in. Without waiting for approval or denial we take off. What we look for is a populated crater, or simply a depression in a sunken hilly region. We swim there side by side, the silence only broken by our regulators as we loudly breathe in and out, launching thousands of bubbles.
Naomi swims like a dolphin: she elongates her body, crosses her flippers at the ankle in an X and undulates beginning with her chest, thrusting it out as if she were lifting it up to the sun; the undulation carries along her form until it runs through the tips of her flippers and she is propelled along at my same speed. I love to watch her examining things: if they are above her she stands as though she were walking upright on land, hovering a few feet above the shelled ocean floor or sometimes over a precipice, and only sometimes steps a foot up to maintain her depth; if the object is below her she kicks her heels back until she is looking straight down upon it and extends her arms like a reversed crucifixion, in this manner she controls her drift and is able to steadily inspect whatever has caught her fancy. She resembles a marionette held over a precipice as the current exerts its invisible pull. When we arrive at our location I swim down to the bottom at a diagonal; she swims directly above the spot then stops and turns her body into a dart or a pencil, her arms and legs together and pointed their respective directions. She begins a straight descent into the now settling dirt cloud I have kicked up in my clumsiness, lands, and settles without unsettling the silt.
We sit upon the floor of the ocean: I am on my knees and she sits cross-legged. We sit there willing the silence to return after our mad dash to solitude. At last the silence returns. When it arrives we feel as though we have always been in this place. The fish come back slowly after being driven away by our (my) hectic motion. We are then silent observers. No, not even observers, we have become another part of the sea.
Behind piles of rocks or outcroppings of coral we sometimes find squadrons of fish in formation, waiting silently for some unheard command before they instantly dart off. In some reefs there are thousands of these sentries; they hover alert and motionless.
The noise has been terrible. Deafening. It has been impossible to concentrate. Our scurrying in the above world. The television and internet and highway are like rats in the attic; they keep you from sleeping until you stop separating the days and life becomes a wearying marathon, ending only when you can go no further. Naomi can go no further. The toxic radiation, the air, the cigarettes, joined together inside her and created a tumor. As our world shrunk, it grew like the child we never had. It was not our child; it was the child of the above world. It fed on her, and on me through her. It metastasized. It was discovered full-blown, in the blossom of consumption.
Naomi once told me after breaching that she can feel God when she is under the water.
When we were told, our first thought was to go below. Suddenly, our lives together were almost over. Her life was almost over. We could see how it had passed by. We had weeks, maybe months, but if we could slow down time to the extent we had pushed it along before that could be ages. All we needed to do would be to feel each moment as it passes, instead of springing between them from lily pad to lily pad; it was that rush forward that took our lives and would now take her life. We needed to be in that place again where our very insignificance was what increased our individuality and duality, instead of negating it and consuming it. When you stand on the bottom and look off in every direction, you desire nothing more than to truly belong to this desolate planet; there is more warmth in its pitiless reality than in our false comfort. In these habitats we have sometimes found ourselves among a school of barracuda, or in the vicinity of a full-grown twenty-foot tiger shark. To be attacked and devoured in the below would be such a natural thing it caused us no apprehension; it would almost signal acceptance.
If I have to surface early I climb a foot at a time. There is no reference point for depth except your meter and if you rise too fast you might not get the bends but the air will expand in the joints of your knees and cause you problems. I hit fifteen feet and find my neutral buoyancy. I have to stay at this depth for three minutes. I often stay longer but sometimes it is nearly impossible to keep still at the same depth. I turn and look down, able to survey the entire landscape from sixty feet above. In the Caribbean Sea the water was so clear that from the edge of a submerged cliff I could see a giant ray skimming the bottom more than half a mile away. If Naomi is directly below me I look into her bubbles as they rise up; inside them I can see myself in all my equipment upside-down against the shimmering light of the ocean’s undersurface. Sometimes I watch the waves from beneath, the traveling negative depressions into the air, or if there is a calm I may be able to see myself full-form in the endless mirror and pass through myself into the air. I avoid watching Naomi while I wait, leaving her free to enjoy these moments where she is fully absent from any other being’s perception. I once saw a small turtle take off from a coral cavern and swim up to the surface. His sparkling green shell hovered just below the membrane and his little legs kicked to keep his head poking through. Later, when I breached, I could see his mouth breaking through the ocean’s dull cover; from there he looked like a bit of driftwood, completely lacking the lustre I observed below.
We are alone now. No guide to corral us. The boatman is far away, sleeping on his prow; an opened pale-yellow beer warms in the sun, still clasped in his insensible fingers. We are on the bottom. We look up at the undersurface, seventy feet above. Miraculous how the core of the planet draws these waters inward, retains a hold on them all about the globe; it looks as though it would take so little for the oceans to release their moorings and fly away into space leaving dry rock behind. We sit across from one another cross-legged. There are clouds crossing the sun, and where rays escape they penetrate the ocean, the bright beams appear smoky as they reflect off the innumerable miniscule particles they pass by. We have been sitting across from one another for nearly an hour. We are remembering each other. The fish are unconcerned; they pass between us on their way. We remove our regulators.