by Jim Nisbet
“It was the shark Charley was pointing at, and if I hadn’t looked I might have been the creature’s lunch. Do hammerheads attack people? I don’t know what possessed me. The wrench was more or less floating there, right between us. All I had to do was pull the trigger and ratchet the cartilaginous motherfucker right between the eyes. Actually, I’m not even sure the wrench came in contact with the shark at all. With the sound, with the eruption of bubbles, it simply vanished.
“I turned back to Charley. What could I do? The thought occurred to me that the mast was aluminum. Maybe I could prize off enough fittings to slide Charley up the mast? I drew the knife …
“That’s when Charley laughed. Charley saves my life, I’m trying to save his, and he thinks it’s funny.
“I yelled ‘fuck you’ so sincerely I spat out the mouthpiece.
“Charley got the last laugh, all right, but then he drowned. Right in front of me. I think it must be a horrible death. At first you realize you better not breathe. Then you realize you won’t be able to breathe. Then you realize you have to breathe but you better not breathe, then you realize you’re going to try to breathe anyway and it’s not going to work but you have to inhale, it’s too painful not to breathe, and anyway, that’s it, you’re not a fish, you’re drowned.
“It’s the realizing ahead of time that makes it painful. The more realizing you do, the more painful you think it’s going to be. That’s the horror. The more imagination you have, the worse the anticipation. In the event it’s not so bad. That’s the way it looked to me anyway. Charley’s eyes got big. He looked scared. He also looked amused. Then the bubbles stopped. He gaped like a fish out of water, which kind of makes sense, then he relaxed, and then his eyes stopped moving. He was gone.
“I attacked the chain and lock and mast and gooseneck. I clambered at the first fitting I could get the point of the knife to do something to, which was a deadeye that captured the becket on the downhaul block. Stupid. I cut the lines between the two blocks. Next came the gooseneck, a serious obstacle, and I worked at it, too. Eventually the head popped off a screw, but not before I broke the point off the knife. This was not progress. I watched the triangle of stainless steel and the head of the screw bounce off the deck in slow motion, through little somersaults like they were pursuing one another, and slowly accelerate into a plunge as if with every intention of spiraling straight through the 821 charted fathoms yet to go before they beat Vellela Vellela to the bottom. Four thousand seven hundred and twenty-six feet. A hundred and forty-three atmospheres. If you sent a styrofoam coffee cup to that depth, the pressure would compress it to the size of a thimble.
“How much time passed, I don’t know. Finally, working behind him, I realized that Charley’s bald head was slowly bobbing from one shoulder to the other, the strands of his tonsure wallowing willy-nilly. Then the tank gauge floated up in front of my mask. I seized it and had a look. After all of this exertion, my air was better than two-thirds gone. That was it.
“I gut-stabbed the mast hard, so hard that the pointless blade penetrated it up to half its length. And it got hung up in there, naturally. Think of a lobster trap. I used up a lot of air trying to get it back before I gave up.
“And then I bethought of the hundred feet. I looked up. There wasn’t so much light as there once had been, and this is the Caribbean, where the water is clear and light penetrates deep.
“The half inch or so of water in my face mask had turned pink. Pressure was forcing blood through my sinuses and out my nose.
“One atmosphere is thirty-three feet. The hose was one hundred feet, at least fifteen or twenty of which were involved with the compressor, the freeboard of Tunacide, and the nice overhand knot I’d taken the precaution of tying around the handrail.
“I breaststroked my way over the deck and down along the hull of Vellela Vellela. No zinc. Where’s the zinc? I had become disoriented. It was on the other side. I had to swim back up the hull, over the foredeck and back down the side of the hull, tugging the hose free of various trailing lengths of line and rigging. There it was. Screw number one. Whoops. Put the tool in reverse, stupid, and be glad you didn’t cam out the head. Screw number one. Okay. Screws number two, three and four … And just as I spun the next-to-last Torx screw loose, holding onto the rudder with the fucked up hand and the wrench with the other, the descending Vellela Vellela tore the air wrench out of my grip. End of hose. Beginning of third atmosphere.
“I retrieved the manual Torx driver from the knife sheath and backed out the last screw by hand. This is a lot harder than it sounds, in weightless conditions, but by and by, screw and cover plate soon followed the others to the bottom, and the brick was mine. No sign of the transponder, of course or the DNA. This didn’t surprise me at that point, but there wasn’t time to be brooding about it, either.
“I keep a small game bag, a kind of net purse, on the weight belt, for spear fishing. I shoved the vacuum-packed brick into it.
“I cleared the blood from the mask and blew some air into the BC. The hull descended past me, bearing with it Charley’s corpse. The sharks would be tending to it soon enough—maybe sooner, if their brains could comprehend the fact that I no longer had the ability to change their tires for them. I looked up. The impact wrench dangled about thirty feet above my head.
“I usually take a decongestant before I dive. Years of blow-induced nasal congestion make this necessary. Now I felt like I was about to lose an eardrum. I raised the mask, pinched my nostrils closed, and blew against them. This ear cleared. This one ruptured. And yes, it was painful.
“Another fuckup. I turned in the brine and watched a thin tendril of my own blood lift away from the side of my head. Maybe some shark would soon be interested in helping me feel sorry for myself.
“I added air to the BC and augmented my rise past the hull with the flippers.
“There Charley hung, slightly buoyant, belayed by his own hand to his own rigging. I could have saved the fuck. He knew I was out there. And then I thought I got it: Charley hadn’t wanted to get saved.
“Proof, I realized. Who or whatever caused this, I’m going to need proof that it happened, and a mere kilo of cocaine isn’t going to speak loud enough.
“It was about then that I noticed that the wreck wasn’t sinking anymore. Not rapidly, anyway. I blow out an eardrum and now I get time to think? We hung there, boat and I, in almost neutral buoyancy. I might have gotten a good daydream going, if for some reason I hadn’t looked up, and realized that the pneumatic wrench and maybe ten feet of hose had gotten tangled in the welter of rigging, and now this rubber thread was attempting to arrest the descent of this seven-ton boat. If I didn’t do something, there would be consequences. There are always consequences. When things go wrong at sea, things do not fuck around.
“And now I realize that not only is that fucking hundred-foot hose not going to part, it is not going to pull the fucking compressor over the side after it, either. And why not? Because two hoops of eighth-inch iron strap belay the compressor’s thirty-gallon tank to the back of the wheel house, that’s why. Not to mention, the hose is looped over the handrail. Therefore this setup has a damned excellent chance of capsizing Tunacide. Or, how about this: since her engines are still idling, maybe the load will list her sufficient to heave the intercooler intake above the surface, there to suck air instead of salt water. Either way, the weight of the sinking Vellela Vellela is well on the way to turning my fish boat into a turkey farm. All it would take after a certain point is a broach on a good swell or some green water aboard and the whole works would be underwater—two boats, Charley and me, with Charley suddenly the one better off.
“I won’t bore you with what it took to get that knife back. Suffice to say, it came away in my hands like that aluminum mast was a length of suet.
“I clawed frogwise straight up, ruptured eardrum and the bends be damned, till I was above the wreckage and all its tendrils, and slaughtered that air hose. Just get me back to Florida, I was
thinking, and I’ll buy all the goddamn air hoses and pneumatic wrenches and synthetic eardrums money can buy. Break out another thousand.
“The severed hose belched air with a robustness sufficient as to be quite audible. The bubbles expanded in size, too, violently undulating until they disintegrated into smaller bubbles, as the mouth of the severed hose released them, which in turn drove the hose around in the water like it was a demented snake. The compressor would already have kicked in, trying to keep up with the demand, and unless somebody got aboard Tunacide to turn it off, the little three pony engine would burn itself up. And the air wrench? I caught a glimpse of it far below, going down, down, down, trailing twelve or fourteen feet of yellow rubber hose like it was a strand of bull kelp.
“Break out another thousand.
“But down the Y-axis is the negative direction. I looked up. Up is the positive direction. Tunacide was safe. Slowly but surely, the hull of Vellela Vellela was getting serious about resuming its descent, bow and Charley first, as if backlit by darkness. I looked down upon that sight with these very eyes, and I will not soon forget it.
“I sheathed the broken knife, exhausted the BC, and crawled straight down after her. It felt like somebody was trying to back a Torx screw out of my ear. You get on this side of me, now, you’re going to have to talk loud. But at the time I was thinking, I knew, that the testimony of a lousy water-stained kilo of cocaine was going to fall on nothing but deaf ears. No way it would speak loudly enough. Ever.
“Now I’m thinking, what about a head? Mute, loud, rude—I liked the idea. It didn’t even shock me. Why not give it a try? What is there to lose? A head might provide, how to say, incontrovertible evidence that the stakes had elevated. What the fuck. What the fuck, and why not?
“Just like that last Torx screw, the head wasn’t all that easy. Weightless conditions.
“What the fuck, I kept telling myself, as I sawed away, descending into darkness and running out of air, with my legs wrapped around the mast and a corpse, blood not pumping but leaking out of the jugular, a surprisingly thin thread of blood. What the fuck, I told myself, it’s not like Charley needs a head anymore. …”
V
THE DROIDS OF Sí
THIRTY
EVEN WITH A FAMILY, SUICIDE IS AN OPTION; BUT IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN A family, you have to want to live.
Complex.
Without a family, suicide is simple.
These and other oddly coherent thoughts teased awkwardly his mind, even as an emergency room orderly shaved his head. A cop studiously recorded his description of the two people who had mugged him.
Everybody who came near him wore gloves. The cop had none and didn’t come near him.
His feet not touching the floor, one hand covering the other in his lap, the very picture of composure, Quentin carefully described two dead ringers for Tipsy and Red as his thin hair fell to the sheet covering the gurney upon which he perched.
“Caucasian female,” the officer read from a 3x5-inch spiral notebook. “Medium-length reddish hair, probably henna. Freckles. Pasty complexion. No makeup. Gin blossom on left cheek. Puffy facial features. Alcoholic? Early to middle forties—”
“Middle to late forties,” Quentin corrected. “Don’t sustain her illusion. On the other hand,” he reflected coldly, “drink may have prematurely aged her.”
The officer dutifully appended the correction. His pencil was a yellow three-inch stub from the Presidio bowling alley.
“Such pencils,” Quentin observed, apropos of nothing, “are designed to inhibit cheating.”
The officer looked at the pencil, then waggled it between his fingers. “First thought, best thought,” he suggested gravely.
Quentin closed his eyes and concentrated. “Stanford sweatshirt,” he continued. “Newish blue jeans, clean pink sneakers—make that low-cut dirty pink sneakers.”
The cop looked up. “You think they might have been designer sneakers?”
“No more than I think she graduated from college,” Quentin sniffed. “Let alone Stanford.”
The policeman, the black letters engraved onto whose brass name plate identified him as VENTANA, frowned. “How can you be certain of that?”
“Because I,” Quentin assured Officer Ventana with all due gravity, “graduated from Stanford.”
“Okay, okay,” Officer Ventana compliantly repeated aloud as he wrote, “probably … not … much … education.”
“Magna cum laude,” Quentin added, talking to himself. “Ouch.”
“Sorry, darling,” said the orderly. “Some of this cheveaux is pretty crusty.”
“Have you no aspirin in this facility?”
“Sorry again, darling. Only the doctor, and I’m not one—”
“You’re a movie star,” Quentin interjected.
“Screenwriter, actually.”
“Is that not just another word for autoinfantilization?” In posing the question, Quentin did not miss a beat.
“Well gobsmack the populace.” The orderly took a step back from his task and folded the wrist holding the razor against his hip. “And aren’t we in the mood for love.”
“Well?” Quentin said, leveling his gaze at him.
“Honey,” the orderly said, turning his head to one side, “what in the world would a girl like me do with an over-the-hill queen like yourself?”
“I came here to get better?” Quentin suggested.
“Now, girls,” Officer Ventana began.
“You keep out of this?” the orderly suggested back, subtending, with a coy smile, “Cupcake.”
Officer Ventana frowned. “The Castro was my beat for three years. I got called every name in the book. ‘Cupcake’ was not one of them.”
The orderly wagged his scissors. “You must have kept your hat on.”
Maybe Ventana had been trained for this. In any case, he blushed.
“Why,” the orderly lamented to Quentin, “are straight men always so serious?”
“It’s not that,” Ventana volunteered. “It’s that I just completed six months of anger management. So when it comes to the little outrages of life I’m kind of … neutral. That’s it. Then there’s my serotonin uptake inhibitors. Plus I’m still on probation for clocking a dyke on the jaw because she gave me the finger after I wrote her a citation for a lesser misdemeanor than the one she had committed on account I thought she was such a spectacular piece of ass. Next thing I know, her mouth turned the air blue around my head with a string of obscenities such as you never heard on the waterfront—when this town had a waterfront. Fucking blue collar’s been gone from San Francisco going on three generations now. If my grandmother hadn’t left me her house in the Excelsior?” He jerked the thumb of his pencil hand over his shoulder. “I’d be outta here. Point being, she called me every name in the book, but she never called me ‘Cupcake.’” Almost angrily, he elucidated, “The dyke, not my grandmother.”
Quentin and the orderly were observing Officer Ventana. “Point taken,” the orderly ventured cautiously.
“I left the syllabus in the car,” Ventana added, his voice beginning to crack. “For anger management, I mean. First title in it is Notes from Underground. But even if I had it with me I wouldn’t begin to know how to look up such a slur. Besides—I get worked up like this? I can’t read so good. The words go double and the lines undulate. Needless to say, the sentences don’t make any sense. It’s like watching the constant stream of crazy people at Mission and 16th. They’re all unique but they’re all different—you know what I mean? People are all the same on the inside, I mean they’re all made up of oxygen and hydrogen, mostly, and I guess carbon too. On the outside, they all got different rap sheets. But on the inside for sure it can’t ever be more than the ninety-six naturally occurring elements. Can it? Maybe someday somebody in some lab will clone a lifeform from some synthetic element. Lawrencium, say. After all, Lawrencium was made from Californium.” Ventana exhibited the rapid eye movement of a dreamer. “Some people are more
radioactive than others. It’s just natural. Take our former president, for example.”
“No,” everybody in the room responded, “you take him.”
“But in the end it doesn’t make any difference. They’re all the same to me, they’re all just plain crazy.” He looked from the orderly to Quentin and back again. “Not me.” His jaw twitched. “I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy at all.” He smiled crookedly. “See?”
“Crazy, man.” The orderly’s tone conveyed empathy.
“Wild,” Quentin agreed.
“Like that word you used,” Officer Ventana continued. “That big one.”
“Word?” Quentin blinked
“Autoinfantilization,” the orderly recalled.
“Very handy,” Quentin looked at him, “with the recitation.”
“Mary,” the orderly said, not without theatrical inflection, “you are so testy.”
Ventana pointed his pencil. “Spell it. So I can look it up.”
The orderly spelled it.
“Pretty good,” Quentin said to the orderly. “But you can’t look it up,” he told the cop.
Officer Ventana looked up from his notebook. “Why not?”
“Because he invented it,” said the orderly.
“Voilà,” said Quentin.
Officer Ventana flushed with anger. The flare was so abrupt that the orderly and Quentin were taken aback. “What the fuck you mean he made it up?” Ventana demanded.
“Take it easy,” the orderly said.
“It’s a, uh, I, it’s merely a combining form, a neologism. Like, for example, when Shakespeare made up incarnadine.”
“Incarnadine? Neologism?” Officer Ventana sputtered at, rather than to, Quentin, as if a preliminary to striking him. “What the fuck’s it mean? Huh, faggot? You ain’t seen—” He stopped.
“Hey, hey,” the orderly interrupted. “Talk about autoinfantilization.”
Despite a concussion, a scalp wound, and seventy-three years, Quentin drew himself up. “Did I ever suggest that I was the victim of a hate crime, Officer?”
