by Jim Shepard
“Why did she want me to tell you that?” he asked, after a few minutes had elapsed.
“Let’s keep our minds on our work,” I told him.
At twelve hundred feet, the fishes’ iridescence seemed to dissolve into the water. I tied a handkerchief about my face below my eyes, to keep the quartz clear of breath. Barton and I kept as close to the eight-inch windows as we could, straining to see. On the seventh dive, at thirteen hundred feet we kept the electric light going for a full minute of descent and noted two zones of abundance with a wide interval of scanty, motelike life. The transitions were punctuated by milky arrow worms, with their swift darts and pauses.
At fourteen hundred feet we were sitting in absolute silence. I was aware of the cold even through the cushions. One leg was asleep. Barton’s face reflected a faint bluish sheen. I marked time to a pulse-throb in my temples with my fingers on the icelike steel of the window-ledge.
How to explain to anyone the experience of such loneliness and isolation? How to articulate the pleasures of that sort of intensity?
The return was made in forty-three minutes, an average of a foot every two seconds. Twice during the ascent we were again aware of indefinite, huge bodies moving about in the distance. What they were we could only guess.
The Pallid Sail Fin
The night before our scheduled attempt at a half-mile dive, Miss Hollister asked if she could have a moment after our meeting on the next day’s logistics. She produced a letter which had arrived by packet. Her father had asked that I read it, in order to demonstrate his facility with English.
Brötchen,
I kiss you from across the seas. I want to make quite certain that you’re aware that I’m perfectly well. I’m sorry I was not allowed to write sooner. I have not been badly treated. The discomforts which one associates with prison life hardly trouble me at all. I have enough to eat in the mornings, with dry bread. (I am allowed a variety of extras such as jams as well.) The need to take one’s bearings and come to terms with one’s situation means that physical things lose their importance. This I find to be an enrichment of my experience, like a spiritual Turkish bath. My sole torment has been the fear that you were tormented by anxiety about me, and so not sleeping or eating properly. I hope this letter works to reassure us both.
You can imagine that I’m most particularly anxious to hear about your employer’s news at the moment. If only I could provide something that might help. There is a redheaded thrush that sings in our prison yard. I cannot remember it from any of our ornithologies.
I am thinking of you, and your work, and your naturalist friends, and I am hoping you are having many adventures,
Your Father
“‘Brötchen’?” I asked, once I’d finished. She looked away and began to weep.
“I didn’t intend to pry,” I told her.
“It isn’t prying,” she said. She crossed her arms and uncrossed them and came forward and put her head to my chest. She touched a hand to my arm, as if to steady me.
“I want to focus on tomorrow,” she said, miserably. “I do.” I heard steps in the passageway outside my door. The steps paused and then continued on their way.
“Oh, oh, oh,” she wept. I could feel her face contorting through my shirt. I closed my own eyes, against the glare of the unshielded bulb on my desk.
“We’ll do something about this,” I finally promised. “I’ll telephone Mr. Osborn.”
Her entire body responded, startling me. It was what she’d been waiting for. Mr. Osborn had been a longtime supporter, had gotten me my first employment and introduced me to everyone I’d needed to meet. As President of the Society and the Museum of Natural History, his name would reverberate overseas.
Her relief and happiness seemed to distress her even more. She clung to me. She pulled me from the door. Her weight tipped us over onto my bunk.
I regained my balance, and hers. She wiped her face. She was able to look at me again. She pressed her hands to my cheeks as if cradling a single broken egg. “I need to show you how grateful I am,” she said. She kept her voice low. “I need to show you,” she whispered. And then she left.
The Wing Bolt Shoots like a Shell Across the Deck
The next morning we sent the sphere down empty for the half-mile test dive. It came up filled with water under tremendous pressure. With the deck cleared, two of us began to unscrew the giant wing bolt in the center of the door. There was a strange, high singing, a needle of steam, another, and another, and the bolt shot across the deck like a shell from a gun. Thirty feet away it sheared a five-inch notch out of the metal winch cover. A solid cylinder of water cannonaded out behind it with a roar for a good minute and a half.
The Shrubs of the Sea Are Animals
The trouble had been in the packing around the windows. The windows themselves were removed and double-checked and found to be in perfect condition. A coating of white lead was spread over the door flange and the window seals to make the junction of steel with steel as perfect as possible. We delayed only long enough to dry out the sphere and send it down again. This time it came up bone dry.
Three National Broadcasting men were along as well, their equipment arranged on the upper deck of the tug, out of the way of flying spray. It was to be the first time that radio engineers had traveled beyond the territorial waters of the United States to broadcast a program back to their home stations. They would be hooked directly into our telephone line.
“Congratulations on the beginning of your radio career,” I teased Miss Hollister, while we waited for the second test dive.
“Thank you,” she said. Miss Crane, beside her, sniffed. Miss Crane had even shorter hair, marcelled and black.
A Half Mile Down
The time finally arrived for us to clamber back aboard. Around us for miles all was calm. A waterspout twisted and coiled far out to sea. There was a clinking as I slithered through the opening, and I realized that pennies had tumbled from my pocket. In a perfect sphere every loose object constantly sought the bottom. I had my notebook and flashlight in an open pouch around my neck.
Barton and I provided the relevant assurances but otherwise were both silent during the descent, until an enormous luminous medusa seemed to envelop us at twelve hundred feet. It had firefly-like bands on its umbrella and lights at the base of each tentacle. A hundred feet later we saw an entire school illuminated from within with pale green light.
At seventeen hundred feet there was no hint of blue remaining. We had gotten below the level of humanly visible light. With the searchlight off, Barton’s voice seemed now as unattached as something coming down the wire.
I had learned to encircle a light with my eyes and on one side or the other I began to be able to detect the body of the organism, and frequently, details of its outline and size. I found that even a momentary distraction, like an instrument check, diminished my visual powers for some minutes very considerably.
Occasionally the head of a fish would appear conspicuously against the surrounding black, illuminated by some unknown source of indirect light. Eyes especially stood out with no definite source of light visible. When teeth were silhouetted I knew it was from a luminous mucus which covered them.
Two lanternfish with pale green lights undulated past. Something else with widely spaced appendages. Here I began to become more inarticulate. Most of what I was looking at had no name; had never been seen by anyone.
The steel of the window-ledge was clammy. The quartz chilled the tip of my nose.
We were surrounded by a host of small unidentifiable organisms, most with what looked like legs. It was like being an entomologist in Hades.
At twelve hundred and fifty feet we encountered a vision to which I can give no name: a network of luminosity, delicate, with large meshes, aglow and in motion, waving slowly past. It seemed too diffuse and multivarious to be some sort of jellyfish, and too otherworldly to be anything else.
Farther down there were glowing explosions, inches wide. We
pointed them out to one another and, after a few minutes of watching, speculated. Our wildest guesses were no help whatsoever.
At fifteen hundred feet Miss Hollister requested I take a turn on the earphones.
“I’m so happy for you,” she told me.
“Yes, yes,” I said.
“This is going out over the radio,” she reminded me.
A large fish of an unpleasant white, like oversoaked flesh, something wholly unknown, swung suspended half out of the searchlight. It remained seemingly stationary, sinking with us, with only a slow waving of fins. I dragged Barton to my window to corroborate, and we did our best to describe the thing to Miss Hollister and the rest of America. It was over seven feet long. It had no lights or luminous tissue. A small eye. Long, filamented pectorals, and vertical fins that were huge and all the way back at the base of its tail.
“What will you call it?” Miss Hollister asked, when we’d finally stopped describing it. It still floated before us.
I called it Bathyembryx istiophasma, my fractured Greek way of saying, “Ghostly Sailor of the Abyss.”
The Maw of the Saber-Toothed Viperfish
There seem to be three outstanding moments in the life of a bathysphere diver: the first flash of animal light, the discovery of a new species, and the onset of eternal darkness.
At 1:12 P.M. we felt an upward tug and came to rest, gently, at a depth of three thousand one hundred feet. We knew this to be as far as we could go; the cable on the winch was very near its end. A Roman candle of individual sparks burst beside our windows. We realized it to be an abyssal equivalent of the cephalopod’s ink-screen.
Now and then my eyes peered into the distance, and I thought of all the lightless creatures forever invisible to me, even right here, before my windows.
I pronounced something suitably explorer-like for the benefit of those sitting around their hearths back home. Miss Hollister called for a check of our oxygen supply. It was fine, I assured her, without taking my eyes from the quartz.
We Emerge Again, with the Grace of Worms
There were days in my life when everything moved swiftly and emotions came hurtling along, one atop the other. From my earliest experiments, at the age of five, I felt at home submerged. It was an ancestral memory, spanning back hundreds of millions of years, from when I sang, When you were a tadpole / And I was a fish—
Billions of human beings have looked beneath the surface. Millions have descended to twenty feet. Hundreds to hundreds of feet. But only two to a half a mile.
Those Are Real Stars in the Heavens
Miss Hollister believed that I did what I did out of fellow feeling. That somewhere inside, her spark had reached mine. “I’ve never doubted your goodness,” she said, the night we spent curled in my berth. “I hope you’ve found peace where you could,” Elswyth wrote, when concluding her final letter. All those cups of water I absorbed and whirled about in my body were all steps leading toward a goal of final knowledge I’d never reach, and never could. My luck would hold, and maybe finally turn against me. When I died I’d find myself with the other fussbudgets and mote-counters arguing about phyla and condemned to the solution of problems, while the amateurs roamed at will in Elysian meadows, netting gorgeous, ghostly butterflies until the end of time. But I’d look up from my windowless carrel and remember my bathysphere, suspended in the blackness, a bubble of sanity and metal, with Miss Hollister’s voice in my ear, saying, Twenty-eight hundred feet, saying, Three thousand feet, its breath and its warmth the most durable of illusions.
JOHN ASHCROFT: MORE IMPORTANT THINGS THAN ME
Creative Self-doubt
When people have honest questions about where I stand or what I’m doing—in politics, it happens all the time—I’ve learned not to take it as an insult. In fact, I often find that their concerns mirror reservations I might have had on my own. Their honesty helps me clarify the situation. Nobody wins when anyone holds grudges.
Electability
Folks say, “Here’s a fellow who doesn’t spook moderates, who’s actually electable.” That word pops up a lot: electable. Paul Weyrich had some people over one night and we were lounging around out on his porch and he suggested that I was more than just presentable; I was a guy who could go on Jay Leno and play a couple of tunes with the Oak Ridge Boys.
Pessimists claim my only base is the profamily, religious vote. They say, “Where else can he go? The country club? The board-room?” My answer is that those aren’t the only places to look. My answer is that I’ll take my chances with the American people. I served two terms as governor in a Democratic-leaning state, I had a national profile as a senator, and, yes, I have support among what the media calls the Religious Right. In my gubernatorial reelection I carried 64 percent of the vote, the best showing of any Missouri governor since the Civil War.
My Principles
My principles are out there for everyone to peruse, and always have been. Whenever I get more than four people in a room, I tell them: You examine the record, and let me know if you find anything that’s contradictory or troublesome. And if you think you do, you come back to me, and we’ll clear it up on the spot.
In the Senate, I fought against national testing standards, activist judges, and the nomination of a pro-abortionist surgeon general.
I forced the first floor vote ever on term limits and had to fight my majority leader to do so. I wrote part of the welfare-reform law allowing states to deliver services through churches and private agencies.
I promoted the defunding of the NEA. The average guy who wants to go down and see Garth Brooks, he doesn’t get a federal subsidy, but the silk-stocking crowd that wants to see a geometric ballet in Urdu, they get a break on their tickets.
When it comes to bills, I don’t trim and I don’t pork things up, whether the doors are closed on the session or not.
And I keep reiterating, wherever I go: It’s against my religion to impose my religion on others.
Ethics
I tell people that I know about scandal. During my second term as governor, I had an overeager staffer who, when he heard about my boy’s need for some books on Queen Elizabeth for a homework assignment, called the state librarian at home and got her to open the library after hours. The press got ahold of the story, like they get ahold of everything, and I quickly took responsibility. Around the house we call it Homeworkgate and joke that we learned from our mistake. A columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote about the whole thing that, “If a state ever had a less exciting governor than John Ashcroft, I never heard about it.”
Turning Heads
I hear that I first started turning heads after the charges became public that Monica Lewinsky had turned the president’s. Most everyone in my party maintained a code of silence in the early going. I did not. I said publicly in an address to the Conservative Political Action Conference that January, “Mr. President, if these allegations are true, you have disgraced yourself and the office of the presidency, and you should resign now.”
That’s what I said. It bears repeating: “Mr. President, if these allegations are true, you have disgraced yourself and the office of the presidency, and you should resign now.”
Atlanta
If I’ve got one problem at this point in time, in perception terms, it’s Atlanta. Atlanta was a nightmare. I dropped the ball there and I’m the first to admit it.
I was nervous. I started right in, once introduced, on principles, and what I stand for, and there was a point a paragraph or two into my notes when I realized that the silverware wasn’t going to get any quieter, and flopsweat set in. I was fighting a losing battle with overdone filet mignon for everyone’s attention.
It didn’t help that Forbes was going on next and that he got about ten standing ovations for saying mostly the same things. Steve Forbes.
A nightmare. I get the shivers going back over it, I don’t mind admitting.
“Shiver shiver shiver,” Janet says, sometimes, late at night, lying n
ext to me.
Ethics
It’s fashionable, I guess, for people to talk down Jimmy Carter, but let me say this: Jimmy Carter was an unimpeachable straight-shooter who restored people’s trust in the presidency. And don’t think the American people couldn’t use a little of that particular medicine right now.
The Transports of Love
Hollywood likes to showcase the tyranny of romantic infatuation— how two people might abandon their friends, family, and beliefs all in the name of an overpowering emotion—but my father didn’t raise me that way. He wasn’t a stoic and didn’t despise emotion. He believed that delayed gratification was an essential practice for success in life. He always said, “Don’t jeopardize the future because of the past.”
A woman from a national magazine wrote that I had a Boy Scout’s haircut and a choirboy’s magnetic machismo. I wrote her a note explaining that I appreciated the joke, and that I didn’t think magnetic machismo was what we needed in a president at that particular point.
Helpmate
Janet says that after God she puts family first, everything else second, and nothing third. During the campaign for the Senate she was asked if she minded being a helpmate. “No,” she said. “The same way I don’t mind being a math professor or writing textbooks.”
Sex
Once in a diner, a fry cook said to me—I guess in an attempt to destroy his customer base—“I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not getting any tonight.” What I should have answered was something I thought as I drove away: that our country was affluent in sex, but bankrupt in love. Prostitutes have a sex life. Animals have a sex life. Human beings should have a love life.
The right results come first from working hard to make the right decision, and then working even harder to make the decision right.
Thrift
Missouri remains one of the cheapest places to buy gas in America. My staffers tease me because I’ve been known on drives home to run the tank down to near empty so I can save a few dollars by filling up on the other side of the Mississippi.
