Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  Moxie looked down at his blurred reflection on the polished bar. “Okay,” Moxie said. A few moments later he added, “I guess.” Moxie’s boy was with his wife in Nassau. It didn’t look as if she were coming back.

  Matthias had another glass of Mount Gay. Moxie had another Pauli Girl. “What you say about the numbers …”

  “Yeah?”

  “It be the trut’, mahn?”

  “Sure.”

  Moxie nodded. His eyes moved toward the sea. “So what means that about the … accident?”

  “Nothing new.” That was true. What Moxie didn’t know was that they had less than eight weeks to file the appeal. Matthias hadn’t told him, not because he didn’t want Moxie to know; he just didn’t want to say it out loud. Now he hoped Moxie would talk about something else.

  But once started, Moxie couldn’t. “It happen just like I say,” he said, as he had many times before.

  “I know that.”

  “They come, they show the dive card, Brock say okay, I fill the tanks. Like always, with the door open.”

  “I know.”

  “Then how it happen, mahn?”

  That was the question Matthias couldn’t answer and Ravoukian hadn’t been able to finesse.

  “Give me a kiss,” said Chick.

  Moxie swept the room and went to bed. Matthias put the account books in the office and started up the path to the Bluff, taking the bottle of Mount Gay with him. The half-wild dogs that roamed the night heard him coming and began their savage barking; their low shadows glided through the scrub.

  There were two houses on the Bluff: Hew’s big one, where a light still shone, at the top, and Matthias’s little one halfway up. Matthias climbed the stairs to the deck, slid open the screen and went inside. Without turning on the lights, he poured a drink and sat in the small living room, looking east. His view was all sky and sea: two magic cloths stitched invisibly at the horizon. Here, at its narrowest point, the Tongue of the Ocean hooked south, extending the length of the island. On the other side of the underwater canyon, Two-Head Cay, an eroded H with the legs cut off, was the only land in sight.

  Matthias finished his drink, went into the bedroom and lay down. He felt sand on the sheets, but didn’t bother to brush it off. He was used to it. He closed his eyes. The image of Mrs. Loring’s white buttocks was the first thing he saw, now no longer vulnerable, but sexual. He opened his eyes and watched the ceiling change from black to charcoal gray.

  There was no need for the fan. Sea breezes blew around the Bluff every night. He could hear them slipping through the louvers, hear the surf pawing at the coral cliff below. These were the sounds that always prefaced sleep, but tonight sleep didn’t come. The wind and surf sounds just grew louder instead, until there was nothing soporific about them. Matthias got up.

  He sat at his desk, switched on the light and removed the file he kept in the top drawer. He took out the transcript. It opened by itself to Moxie’s testimony.

  PLAINTIFF: Describe, if you will, the events of September 2.

  WITNESS: When the two men come?

  PLAINTIFF: Correct.

  WITNESS: They ask for air. I say I need to see a dive card. Mr. Matthias, he say no card, no air. The man had a kind of card, but not PADI, not NAUI. Brock say—

  PLAINTIFF: Brock?

  WITNESS: Brock McGillivray. The divemaster. He say it be a French card, so fill the tanks. I fill them that night. Next morning, they take them.

  PLAINTIFF: Is this one of the tanks in question?

  WITNESS: What question?

  PLAINTIFF: Is this one of the tanks you filled? The stenographer is unable to record a nod. Answer aloud. Is this one of the tanks?

  WITNESS: Yeah.

  PLAINTIFF: Note that the air tank, bearing the Zombie Bay Club logo—this ZB with the silhouette of a descending scuba diver—and numbered 27, is entered into evidence as Exhibit D. Now then, Mr. Wickham, can you recall the number of the other tank?

  WITNESS: 28.

  PLAINTIFF: And where is tank number 28?

  WITNESS: I don’t know.

  PLAINTIFF: You don’t know? Isn’t it true that number 28, filled, like number 27, with poisoned air, went to the bottom of the ocean on the back of the man who showed you the French dive card? The stenographer cannot record a shrug, Mr. Wickham. Did the tank go to the bottom?

  MR. RAVOUKIAN: Objection. The witness is being asked for speculation.

  JUDGE: Sustained.

  The judge had sustained many of Ravoukian’s objections, allowing him to lop off this or that appendage of the plaintiff’s case. But he hadn’t been able to touch the core of the lawsuit: that tank number 27, belonging to the Zombie Bay Club and last filled on the Zombie Bay compressor, then rented to Mr. Hiram Standish, Jr., of New York for twenty-five dollars, had contained, according to laboratory analysis, a 7 percent level of carbon monoxide, which, because of the effect of submersion on the partial pressures of gases, had caused Mr. Standish to fall into a coma from which he would never emerge.

  How had it happened? Ravoukian had asked that again and again. The compressor was tested and found to be working perfectly, although as plaintiff’s counsel had observed, there was no proof that it hadn’t been repaired between the time of the accident and the test. Moxie swore that he had followed the usual procedure—the doors and windows of the compressor room had been opened during the fill, allowing the circulation of air. But there was only Moxie’s word for it. It was also possible that a car with its engine running might have been parked outside while the tank was being filled, and that the prevailing wind could have blown the exhaust gases into the compressor room. None of this mattered, according to the plaintiff’s attorney—it wasn’t necessary for him to show exactly how the negligence had occurred, only that it had. The judge had agreed.

  One million one hundred thousand. U.S.

  Matthias closed the file and replaced it in the drawer. He sat for a while looking at nothing. Then he turned off the light and looked at nothing in the dark.

  Later he rose and found the bottle of Mount Gay. He took it out to the deck. A front was moving in from the east. The sea breezes blew harder, merged, became a strong wind. A solid line of thick pearly edged cloud slid over the stars. Soon the only lights left were Hew’s, at the top of the Bluff, and a faint yellow flicker from the direction of Two-Head Cay. Two-Head Cay was owned by Hiram Standish’s family, a fact that Matthias hadn’t known until the trial, but Ravoukian had discovered that no one except the caretakers, Gene Albury and his wife, had lived there for many years, and that Standish hadn’t been there before his arrival at Zombie Bay.

  The wind blew. Hew’s light went out. Clouds covered Two-Head-Cay. Matthias threw the empty bottle into the darkness. It arced out of sight and made no splash that he could hear.

  Something rustled in the sea grapes; a bent form moved unsteadily on the path up the Bluff. “Nottage?”

  The shadow was still. “Don’ scare me like dat,” said Nottage in his deep, ragged voice. After a long pause he asked: “You got a drink?”

  “All gone. Maybe you should get some sleep. Krio wants grouper tomorrow.”

  “I ain’ sleepy. An’ I got my own drink.” Liquid gurgled. Nottage came closer, close enough for Matthias to distinguish his curly white Afro over the deck railing; the black face remained unseen. “Sea on fire, boss,” Nottage said in a low voice. “Sea on fire.”

  “Everything’s okay, Nottage. You can sleep on the deck if you like.”

  “Don’ wan’ no deck,” Nottage said. He weaved away up the path, and out of sight.

  It was still dark when Matthias walked down the Bluff to the beach. The dogs had gone to sleep, or maybe they couldn’t hear him because of the wind. The compressor shed stood in a grove of palm trees at the side of the dirt track leading to the dock. Matthias went inside and switched on the light. The room remained dark. He remembered Hew’s light going out. The power was off again.

  He knelt in front of the comp
ressor and felt the intake filter. It was clean, if that mattered. This was a new compressor—the old one, Exhibit A, still hadn’t been returned—and the case was closed.

  Matthias walked out on the dock. The beams creaked under his weight. A shadow moved at the far end. A big shadow.

  “G’day, Matt,” said Brock.

  “It’s night,” Matthias said, sitting beside him.

  Brock had a six-pack. They drank it and watched the dawn come up. First it lit the clouds, then the sea, then Brock’s long sun-tinted hair and the gold hoop in his ear.

  “Let’s go to the drop,” Matthias said.

  “What part of the drop?”

  “You know.”

  “You’re driving yourself crazy,” Brock said, but he followed Matthias to the slip where So What was kept, freed the lines and jumped in, landing lightly, very lightly for such a big man, as Matthias started the engines.

  The wind blew harder, disrupting the surface of the ocean with sharp-edged waves that made the bottom unreadable. Matthias didn’t need to read it. He turned north a few hundred yards offshore and cut the engines not far beyond the Angel Fingers. Brock tossed the anchor over the side. Line ran out. Brock tugged at it, nodded, let out some slack. Then they spat in their masks, donned fins and snorkels and slipped into the water.

  Matthias felt the swells raising and lowering his body; he might have been a microbe on the chest of a giant. He looked for the anchor, saw it had hooked itself in the orange forest of elkhorn coral at the edge of the wall, forty feet below. It was the same coral head that Who Cares had been anchored to when Moxie came out to see why it was overdue and found Hiram Standish, Jr., floating in the water and the Frenchman gone. Matthias took his deep breaths, stilled his body, then jackknifed down.

  In a moment he had left the surface turbulence behind. Matthias kicked with long slow strokes and kept his hands by his sides. The secret of deep diving was using as little oxygen as possible. That meant diving down in a straight line and getting the most power from the fins with the least effort. Matthias glided down past the coral head, out to the edge of the drop and looked into the deep blue of the Tongue of the Ocean, deep blue as far as he could see. He glanced at his depth gauge—45 feet—sensed Brock behind him and kept descending along the face of the wall. It unreeled upside down as he went by.

  Sea fans, yellow and pink, grew out of the rock, and at 70 feet there were lacy branches of black coral. Fish felt the currents his body made and ducked into their holes—tiny fish like purple-headed royal grammas and big ones like Nassau groupers with their thick lips and stupid stubborn eyes. At 85 feet a green Moray stretched its head out of the wall to watch him go by and then curled back out of sight.

  Now he could see the big shelf, overgrown with staghorn coral, that stuck out from the wall at 100 feet. He had seen it many times in the days following the accident, when he had put on tanks and dived the wall over and over, all the way to 300 feet, the scuba limit, looking for evidence he never found, answers to all the questions unanswered at the trial: who was the other man? where was his dive card? how had tank ZB-27 come to be filled with poisoned air?

  Twenty feet below was a smaller shelf, about the size of a king-sized bed. A big brown nurse shark was resting on it now, its still body curved gracefully, like something Henry Moore might have worked on. Matthias hung at the 100-foot level, watching it. He felt a tap on his shoulder.

  He swung around. Brock hovered beside him. He pointed toward the surface. Matthias nodded. Brock was an excellent free diver, especially for a man his size, but he didn’t have Matthias’s bottom time. Brock kicked away; the first stroke of his fins sent a surge of water around Matthias’s head. Looking up he saw the surface, a circle of light far above, and Brock rising toward it, his enormous homemade spear gun hanging from his belt. Brock was an experienced ocean diver and the best divemaster Matthias had ever hired, but like a lot of divers who had learned on the Great Barrier Reef, he dove armed.

  Matthias felt the cough reflex tickle the back of his throat. He controlled it and it went away; this was the dangerous time—the time when carbon dioxide buildup would have forced most people to take in a breath. There would be no other warning, just unconsciousness. Matthias peered down into the blue-black chasm. He saw nothing that shouldn’t have been there.

  Matthias flicked a fin and started up. He passed a big grouper on the way. Each grouper had its hole. This one had probably lived in the same one for years. Matthias looked into its dull eyes, wondering what it had seen on that September day, wishing science could dissect its little brain in some way that would tap into its memory.

  He broke the surface, blew the waste air out of his lungs and sucked in a huge breath. Gold sparkles ignited all around him. He had been down too long. He lay on the surface, inhaling long slow breaths through his snorkel. The dizziness passed.

  Matthias climbed into the boat. Brock, standing behind the console, studied his watch. “Three fifty-two,” he said. “That was a long pull.”

  “Yeah.”

  Brock looked at him. “One day you won’t come up.”

  Matthias, taking off his mask, said nothing. He already knew that the sea, free diving especially, was like a drug to him. He didn’t want to get into a discussion about it.

  “See anything?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” Brock said. “What would be left to see by now?”

  “The other tank.”

  “Right. It’s five thousand feet down, Matt. And if you found it what would it prove?”

  Matthias had no answer. Brock hauled in the anchor. Rain started to fall, first warm then cold. It washed the salt from their bodies, flattened the sea and leached all the color out of Zombie Bay. Matthias and his divemaster rode home in a gray silence.

  11

  Business had never been better. Living Without Men and Children … and Loving It was still on the bestseller list and bidding for the reprint rights had reached the high six figures. Dr. Lois Filer, with her new body, teeth and haircut, had been on Donahue twice, Oprah once, and local shows from coast to coast. She had even appeared, as the last guest and for only four minutes, on “The Tonight Show,” but she had managed, in her sweet contralto, to get off a little joke that may or may not have invoked similarities between politics and fellatio, which brought down the house and made Johnny toss his pencil in the air. Washington Post Book World had run twenty-two column inches on womynpress, accompanied by a photograph of Brenda Singer-Atwell and M. brainstorming at a famous disco. Word of Nina’s role in all this had spread. Now when she rode her stationary bike, which wasn’t as often as before because she couldn’t get her belly in a comfortable position, Nina worked at the same time, talking into a dictaphone or reading a manuscript.

  Late in October, on a Saturday perfect for tailgate parties on Ivy League campuses, Nina, in the city, worked on a proposal from a small magazine publisher who wanted to start a periodical devoted to the care and feeding of exotic birds. The proposal consisted of thirty pages of enthusiastic but vague text, five-year-old data on the numbers and demography of exotic bird collectors, and color glossies of gorgeous birds. At seven she hurried downtown where she joined Suze and a few dozen other spectators in a basement theater.

  “God,” said Suze as Nina squeezed into her seat, “how much weight have you put on?”

  “Shut up.”

  The house lights, already dim, dimmed a little more. A ragged curtain parted on a tiny stage. On the stage lay a stuffed, sleeping or dead pig. Big hooks hung from a wire above.

  “What’s this?” Nina asked.

  “Le Boucher,” Suze replied. “She’s incredible. She going to be the biggest—”

  “Shh,” hissed someone behind them.

  A naked woman entered from stage right. She had bulging muscles, a shaved head, thick hair under her arms and over her vulva. She began singing the old Cream song “I’m So Glad.” Then, holding one hand behind her back and not looking at the audience, she strode
to the stuffed, sleeping or dead pig and squatted beside it. She drew her hand out from behind her back, revealing a long butcher knife. Still singing, she proceeded to butcher the pig. The knife rose and fell to the rhythms of the song. The pig showed no signs of resistance, so it hadn’t been sleeping. On the other hand, there was a lot of blood, so it wasn’t stuffed either. Le Boucher, her magnificent body splashed with red, pirouetted in a musclebound way to hang the pieces of meat on the hooks, her feet squishing audibly in the intestines that had begun to spread across the stage.

  “Oh God,” Nina said.

  “Strong stuff, huh?” said Suze.

  “It’s not that,” Nina replied. “I think I’m in labor.”

  “Oh God,” Suze said. “How do you know?”

  “Because I just had a cramp like I’ve never had before. Kind of twisting.”

  “Maybe it’s just a bad period.”

  “Suze, you asshole. You don’t have—” Nina stopped talking. She felt something give inside her. The next moment warm liquid gushed out between her legs. She rose. “Let’s go.”

  Nina hurried from the theater, Suze close behind her. They didn’t attract any attention. On stage the performer was winding pig intestines around her body, and lots of other people were hurrying out too.

  There was a taxi parked outside but Nina was too slow and the theater critic of The New York Times beat her to it. Nina stood on the dark street while uterine flow dampened her legs and Suze hopped up and down beside her.

  “I haven’t even got my fucking ditty bag,” Nina said.

  “What?” said Suze.

  Nina’s womb churned again, a sudden, utterly involuntary movement that didn’t hurt, exactly, although Nina wouldn’t have wanted to make a night of it.

  “Oh God,” she said again, realizing that she was about to.

  “What’s a ditty bag?” Suze asked. “Maybe we can get one on the way.”

  “On the way where?”

  “To the hospital. Aren’t we going to the hospital?”

  “I guess so.” Then she remembered that she was supposed to call Dr. Berry first. She had his home number. There were two public telephones in front of a warehouse on the other side of the street. Nina walked toward them. Suze ran to the corner to find a taxi.