The Shell Collector

by Hugh Howey

  “Let’s get your weight belt on,” Ness says, “and then your tank. You can sit on the platform to do your fins and mask.”

  I look at the platform. It’s only wide enough for one person at a time.

  “I’m not going in first,” I say. This is a statement of fact. Not a complaint. Or question. Or suggestion. To my editor, I would say that this has been properly vetted. It is a true thing. I am not getting in this water, nearly out of sight of land, all alone.

  “You’ll be fine. Ladies first, right? I’ll be in right after y—”

  “No, not ‘ladies first,’ Ness Wilde. Not ladies first. I am not getting in this ocean before you do. Do you hear me? I’m dead serious.”

  Ness studies me for a moment, and I can’t tell how this is going to go down, if we’ll have to take the boat back to the dock, if I’ll have to sit here while he dives alone, if I’ll end up snorkeling, which would be damn fine with me. But then he smiles, and it feels like the most genuine smile I’ve seen from him. The happiest I’ve seen him. Me telling him he’s dead wrong about this me-getting-in-the-water-first business that he’s suggesting.

  “Okay. We’ll get you situated on the dive platform, and I’ll go over the side. We’ll make it work. I’ll be in the water waiting for you.”

  I barely hear what he’s saying. It takes a moment to process. But my pulse eventually stops pounding in my ears, and the sun doesn’t beat down quite so hard. I realize I’m sweating inside my wetsuit, which is soaking up the summer morning heat. I finally nod and agree to his plan. He helps me cinch the heavy weight belt around my waist, then lifts my BC, and I get my arms through, do the buckles myself. Ness has me sit on the edge of the swim platform, my legs dangling in the water, and I put my fins on one at a time. I dip my mask in the water, and not wanting to take chances with it fogging, I say screw it and spit on the inside of the lens and rub it around, just like my mom taught me. I dunk the mask again to rinse it and put it on my forehead, then turn to see how Ness is going to get in around me.

  He already has his BC on. Balancing on one leg at a time, Ness kicks on each of his fins standing up, the boat rocking gently beneath us. He grabs his mask, tests his air, and then sits on the side of the boat, his back to the water.

  “See you in heaven,” he says. And then he rocks back, tipping dangerously, his tank and the back of his head flying toward the water, and I can’t see around the edge of the boat, but there’s a mighty splash, and I’m wondering what in the world he meant and if I can figure out how to crank the boat and get back to the dock by myself, when Ness bobs up by my feet, pulls his regulator out of his mouth, and flashes that famous smile.

  “That seemed violent,” I say.

  He holds the platform beside my thigh to steady himself. “Don’t try to go in slow,” he says. “You’ll hit your tank on the platform, or you’ll hit your head on the outboard. You want to fall forward. Tuck a little bit and hold your mask to your face with both hands so it doesn’t fall off. Look to the side if that makes you feel better.”

  This feels dumb. Like the worst way to get in the water ever. I start to ask if I can’t just turn around and descend the ladder, but I’ve spent enough of my life in fins to understand how poorly that would work. I trust him. Maybe not with anything else, not with the fate of the world, or with the truth, but I trust him in this moment not to get me killed. I fully appreciate the insanity of this paradox, but I accept it anyway. And letting go of the boat, and a decade of fear, and all the thoughts and worries that plague me, and my concern for my mortal coil, and any connection I have with the world above the sea or with the cosmos that sustains me, I tip forward and crash into the Atlantic Ocean, and she wraps me in her soft embrace.

  21

  All I see are bubbles—both from the turbulence of my entry and my panicked exhalations. The regulator is half out of my mouth. I wrestle it back in. And then the buoyancy of my suit and my frantic kicking and remembering what Ness taught me by the dock about bubbles going up—and I break the surface, sputtering and cursing and spitting out my regulator to take in huge gulps of air.

  “Not bad,” Ness says. His hands are under my arms. I almost feel lifted out of the water by his steady kicking beneath the surface. But from the waist up, he is still and calm. I cling to his neck for a moment, then force myself to tread water with my arms. As a defense mechanism, I remind myself that he’s done this with a hundred reporters over the years. This is new and dangerous for me but not for him.

  “How the hell are we supposed to get back in the boat?” I ask. The white fiberglass hull bobbing in the sea beside us looks like the snowy face of Everest. I am already imagining us dying here, that we forgot some crucial step. Like a crane, or a handful of stout deckhands.

  “We shed the tanks in the water,” Ness says, still holding me with one hand. “Don’t worry. I promise, everything’s gonna be okay. Now, do you want to swim around a bit? Breathe through your regulator?”

  I spit and sputter as one of the small swells rocks the boat and spray kicks up in my face. My mask is fogging. Repeating in my head are the words: I told you so I told you so I told you so. Bad idea, Maya. Dumb idea.

  “Swim toward the bow with me,” Ness says. “I want to check the anchor.” He fishes my regulator out of the water, hits the button to expunge some air, and presses it into my hand. I bite down on the mouthpiece and take hissing lungfuls of air. As another swell lifts me up—and my head begins to sink down below the surface—I emit a half-swallowed scream. I’ve snorkeled a thousand times in my life without ever feeling panicked. It’s the heavy weights around my waist. The wetsuit, which I hate wearing anyway. The tank and the tangle of hoses. All are conspiring to drown me—

  “Right here,” Ness says. “Look at me.”

  He holds my head, a palm on either side of my face, steadying me but also forcing me to look at him, mask to mask.

  “You can breathe,” he tells me. “Up here, down there, on the moon, anywhere. Just breathe.”

  I try. My hands are around his wrists. He is not a person, not the subject of a story, not a mentor nor a guide. He is a small island. I cling to him.

  “Ready?” he asks.

  I nod as much as his hands will allow. I blink back tears of worry.

  “Here we go.”

  Ness stops supporting me, and I don’t fight the sinking. A part of me is resigned to my fate. I know in this instant that I will die here, and some truncated and indiscernible version of my life flashes before my eyes, just like they say it does. I see my parents, and then my sister. I see a beach that is somehow the sum of all the beaches I’ve ever visited. A memory of driving with the windows down, music blaring, hair whipping in my face. I see a newspaper with my byline. And then the water covers the regulator in my mouth, covers my mask, closes over my head, and a miracle happens. The impossible. The turbulence and noise and rocking boat and beating sun are replaced with a near-silence. A near-weightlessness. A floating of mind and body. I breathe in and out, just like by the dock, and air fills my lungs. Bubbles flow. I make another odd sound, a muffled squeal of delight, a noise like I’ve heard dolphins make, because I’m doing it. I’m diving. Floating in the great and wild open sea.

  Ness holds my hand, and for a moment, I think he’s going to guide me around like this, but he’s pointing at my wrist, showing me the face of my dive watch. The depth gauge reads ten feet. I glance up, and the surface of the sea is a shimmering wall of quicksilver overhead. White foam spits around the hull of the boat as it rocks in place. The outboards jut down with bright props like old-timey circulating fans. Ness points toward the bow of the boat. The mooring line is there, angling through the water, and I can see the anchor lying on the sand far below. He kicks toward the line and motions for me to follow. I do. I also fumble for the air fill controls on the BC and experiment with adding air and releasing it again, getting a feel for how it controls my depth. I keep a nervous eye on the readout, both to see how deep I am and also how much air
I have left. Between my lessons earlier and getting off the boat just now, I’ve already used a third of my tank.

  When we reach the anchor line, I grab hold of it, eager to have something solid to cling to, some way of knowing I’m not sinking nor bobbing toward the surface. Ness flashes the okay sign as a question, and I flash it back in response. He motions for me to stay there. Okay, I signal. He turns and kicks to descend down the line, and I notice the wreck for the first time, this great and unnatural manmade form resting on the seafloor. It looks like a container ship, lying almost on its side. A giant steel reef, portholes unblinking like the eyes of the drowned.

  No … not a container ship, I see. The deck where the metal boxes would go is laced with thick pipes and large round hatches. It’s a tanker. I know this wreck. The name is on the tip of my tongue. And then I see that the name is also there on the side of the ship, faded but still legible: The Oasis.

  This tanker went down before I was born, was en route to the Saint Lawrence Seaway when it broke up in heavy seas. It’s part of a long list of oil tanker disasters in US waters: Argo Merchant, Bouchard, Valdez, Mega Borg, Westchester, Eagle Otome, Oasis, Shinyu, Aponia. I can only remember the names if I recite them in order, sing-song, like we learned in grade school eco class. And here it is below me, an ignoble piece of history. But it looks so calm. The water is crystal clear, the destruction a memory. Fish swirl around the ship, an explosion of life, like bugs swarming a rotting corpse.

  Ness checks the anchor and swims back up to me. Okay? he asks. Okay, I signal. He points at the wreck. Okay, I signal again. This is the extent of my underwater vocabulary. In truth, I’m far better than okay. I’m dizzy with excitement. I don’t know that I would have the words even if I were able to write them. We have entered an inhospitable and alien world, and I can survive here.

  I kick after Ness, and we float down over a large school of what look like amberjack. The fish undulate as one—the most fish I’ve seen in a single school in the wild. Only in aquariums do fish like this exist. As we pierce the school, they seem to divide and meld around us. We continue down, my wrist telling me thirty, forty, fifty. We’re now level with the jutting tower of the Oasis. The deck is much farther below, but I won’t be going any deeper. I swim toward the tower, which is at a lean. Several of the windows are busted out. There are fish inside, and barnacles along the hull. There’s more reef here than I’ve seen practically anywhere since I was a child. More sea life than I’ve ever seen in one place. Ness signals for me not to go any deeper, and I see that I’ve drifted down to sixty-five feet. I put some air in my BC and check my tank supply. I also check the time. We’ve been in the water for twelve minutes. I could stay forever. I could live here.

  Ness descends further. He slides down the sheer cliff of steel to the sand floor, where a scattering of rocks and kelp-like plants break up the desert sameness. I watch him search along the base of the wreck. Only a few minutes left to enjoy this. I kick toward the tower until I can reach out and touch the barnacle-rough rail. A monster fish swims past one of the windows, and I grunt a veil of bubbles. A reef shark. The black mark on the tip of its fin tells me what kind. They feed at night, I hear my father say, consoling me.

  The black-tip reef shark disappears into the tower, and I decide to back off. Only a quarter of my tank left. A few more minutes down here, that’s all I have. I search below for Ness and see him rising up to join me, trailing a veil of bubbles. Together, we kick toward the surface, this thing I’ve avoided all my life taken away from me far too abruptly. I remember to exhale as we ascend. I exhale the entire way up, letting out this swelling breath that I’ve held for years and years.

  22

  “That was amazing,” I say as soon as we reach the surface. “Unbelievable. Like being a fish.”

  Ness treads water beside me. He has me inflate my BC and then helps me unbuckle the clasps and shrug off all the dive gear. The tank and all the hoses float on the surface of the water. I see how it works now, and also why you don’t get in without putting the gear on first. Sorting it out in the swell would be a pain in the butt.

  He holds my tank for me while I kick off my fins and sling them into the boat. Now it’s just like snorkeling, and I’m a pro. I haul myself up the swim ladder, hold the boat with one hand, and take my tank and BC from Ness. When he gets his off, I take that as well. I feel like an equal partner in the dive now. I’m ready to go again. I want to know when I can go again. And deeper next time. Stay down longer. I have a fever for this. It’s more immediately addictive even than surfing.

  Ness throws his fins into the boat, has his mask up on his forehead, and climbs up to join me. “How was it?” he asks.

  “Over too quick,” I say. “I want to do it again.”

  “You should get certified.”

  “I will.” And I plan to. I’ll even let Michael know. Maybe see if he’d want to go on a dive sometime. As friends. I’d like that.

  Ness hits a switch on the console and pulls up one of the hatches to the livewells. Water is gushing inside, filling the area where the bait is kept. I watch as he lowers a canister into the pool of water and releases something. A shell. A fly-specked cerith. Tiny. I have to stoop to see it. And then I see the pink foot of the slug inside.

  “It’s alive,” I say.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ness says, watching the creature. “Ceriths have done well around here. There’s a professor at Stanford who spends a few weeks every summer on this wreck. She says the spill set these puppies up for success in the ocean we have today. They adapted to a toxic environment that’s becoming more and more the norm. In a weird and tragic way, the wreck and the spill were good things. She’s had a hard time getting her papers published, of course. Nobody wants to hear about the life around the ship.” Ness closes the hatch.

  “This isn’t the sort of shelling I thought we’d be doing,” I say.

  “I’ll show you another spot on the way in,” Ness promises. “We can switch tanks and I’ll just free dive. There’s a fissure a mile off the beach where the good shells get trapped. Still some museum pieces along there. Nobody else has found the spot yet. Of course, I’ll have to blindfold you if you want to go.”

  “Absolutely,” I say. And I’m pretty sure he’s kidding about the blindfold.

  “Are you hungry?” he asks.

  It’s not yet eleven, but I’m starving. Boats and sun and swimming do that to me. “Famished,” I say. I watch as Ness unzips his wetsuit and peels it down to his waist, allowing the empty arms to dangle. It’s impossible not to admire his physique. Ness has a swimmer’s body: powerful arms, shoulders that taper to a narrow waist. Tan and lean like a surfer. The boat sways beneath us.

  “Tahitian black pearl,” he tells me.

  “I’m sorry?” I shake my head and meet his gaze.

  Ness touches the small object around his neck, held there by a leather cord. It’s the necklace I caught a brief glimpse of the other day. “It’s a black pearl,” he says. “From Tahiti. You looked like you were unsure.”

  “No, that’s what I thought it was,” I say, pretending that was indeed what I had been looking at. I step closer. The pearl is oblong and puckered on one end. Imperfect. A hole has been drilled through it, the cord knotted on either side.

  “Probably not worth five dollars,” he says. “But I found it on a dive with my mom. It was one of our last days together.”

  I don’t have to ask. I know the story. His mother died in a boating accident in the Pacific. It’s the first time I think about what we have in common, that he might have been just as scared to go on without her as I was to live a day without my mom. Ness turns away from me and pulls the cooler and the basket out from one of the storage benches.

  “Let’s eat,” he says.

  I grab my sunglasses, squeeze the water out of my hair, unzip my wetsuit, and cinch the sleeves around my waist. I make sure my bikini top is in place. The small boat bobs up and down on the gathering swell, and birds circle nearb
y, showing us where the wreck is. The Oasis. A ship mocked for its name back when it was full, but now living up to that moniker in the form of an empty shell.

  Part III:

  The Monster

  23

  I have underwater dreams that night. Dreams of reefs and caves and swirling sharks. But they are peaceful dreams. I am not drowning. I am flying, and the ocean is the sky. Beyond the ocean, the old sky is some inhospitable realm, some outer space. Only the flying fish and the dolphin dare leap so high. For the rest of us below the sea, that shimmering plane is our ceiling. We catch wavering glimpses of people peering down at us from the other side. We pay them no mind.

  When I wake, I realize I’ve slept later than I did the day before. Partly out of exhaustion, I think. Partly because I don’t want to leave these dreams. And partly because of the hypnotic beat of the rain on the metal roof above.

  The sun is already up, but the sky is a dark and heavy gray. This is the antithesis of what I saw the morning before. Yesterday began with perfection and ended with dinner on the dune deck, a moonlit night, another incredible bottle of wine from Ness’s cellar. Is this storm an omen of what today might bring?

  Rain patters the roof and hisses against the windows in gusty sheets. A trickle of a breeze descends from the widow’s watch, and I remember that I cracked a window up there the night before. Throwing the sheets off, I rush up in my underwear and crank the window shut. The floor is wet. I move some of the books around, see a copy of Treasure Island, and set that aside to look at later. Grabbing a towel from downstairs to mop up the rain, I imagine that this is when Ness will appear, with me dashing around a glass house in a pair of full-bottomed cotton panties and no bra. I dry the floor and hurry back down to get a robe on. Glancing up the boardwalk toward the house, I see no movement, no sign of Ness. The rain is torrential. Maybe we’re waiting it out.