One Breath

by Adam Skolnick

  —

  NICK’S TRAVEL AND competition schedule had been so packed in the past two years that he hadn’t kept up enough hours to stay in good standing with the union, and by the summer of 2013 his health coverage was about to lapse. To make up the time, he booked six weeks of work in New York, sandwiched between his pool competitions and the upcoming depth championship in Greece. But his flight home from Belgrade was delayed and by the time he’d landed at JFK, he was in danger of being late for his first day on the set of Top Five, a soon to be critically acclaimed feature written by and starring Chris Rock. Tardiness alone could cost him the gig, and his health coverage. It was early July and he needed four hundred hours before leaving town again in mid-August. He collected his bags, and sprinted toward the cabstand. It was overflowing. Then he saw a town car driver in a black suit holding a sign that read, “Hernandez.” Nick thought about it twice, and decided Obama didn’t need one more poor, uninsured bastard on his hands. “I’m Hernandez,” he said.

  “Very good, sir.”

  His six weeks in Brooklyn went by in a blur of sixteen-hour days and six-day workweeks. He fit in pool training whenever he could and on his one day off, he would catch a train to Jersey and do two days of yard work at his Grandma Josie’s house in four hours. He had no downtime. No space to socialize, though his best Brooklyn buddies, Morgan and Yas, dropped by a few times. Both were in new relationships and happily inching toward domestic bliss. Despite his training, Nick allowed himself to smoke one more spliff with Yas. Stoned, they got busted sneaking fresh grilled bratwurst into a local movie theater, so they went down to East River Park and ate dinner on the riverside like old times.

  Nick was happy, too. He had been in frequent contact with Bojana, texting and calling whenever he could. She hinted she would leave her boyfriend. He asked her to come live with him in Brooklyn or Florida, where he hoped to open his own freedive center once he got his instructor credential. She had no interest in the States, so he started mulling a move to Zagreb. She told him to give her time, and that somewhere, somehow, they would make it work. In the meantime, she said she would be on the Croatian coast filming Goran, while her boyfriend was working in the city. Nick decided to surprise her so they could be together and decode their future, and so he could get in some depth training before Greece.

  By the time Meir dropped him off at JFK on August 13, his monofin bag on one shoulder and his backpack over the other, he’d logged his hours, made good with the union, and banked some cash. There was a woman by the beach he needed to see, and he was ready to do what he did best. Dive deep. He waved Meir off, feeling light and optimistic, as if everything up to then had been preparation, and the rest of his life was about to begin.

  It was breakfast time at the Elite Hotel, a modern three-star resort in Kalamata, Greece, and Nick couldn’t bear the thought of leaving his room. He hadn’t been sleeping, could barely eat, and it was far easier to hide than to venture out. There were too many friendly faces to dodge, and the last thing he needed was more vapid catch-up chat.

  The Elite had been bought out by freedivers, with over two hundred athletes from thirty-six countries there to compete in the single largest freediving competition in AIDA’s history, the 2013 Individual Depth World Championship. The opening ceremony had been the night before, and athletes grouped with their countrymen as usual. Draped in national colors and waving flag miniatures, they paraded along the wharf led by a local marching band. The discount Olympiad vibe was delightfully corny, and precisely the type of event Nick had been thrilled to be a part of in Nice the year before, but in September 2013 it was hard to fake a smile.

  He was the only American at the competition. He’d had to pay out of pocket to come, and wasn’t given so much as a T-shirt to wear at the opening ceremony or a flag to wave. All he had that was close to the correct stars and stripes color scheme was a striped blue-and-white sailor shirt. He took his ribbing well (“Look at the Frenchman!” “What’s biting out there, captain?”) but inside he was concerned. Was this the state of US freediving? Was his sport that insignificant back home? If he had to ask, he knew the answer, so he left the parade, strolled to the end of a pier, and watched the Greek fishing boats bob in the tide.

  The next morning, instead of going to breakfast with the others, he fired up his camp stove and put on a bubbler of espresso. Coffee would help, he thought. Coffee always did, which is why he brought his own equipment. As he waited for the steam to rise on his makeshift kitchen counter (read: top of his hotel dresser), he surfed Facebook and saw that Iru was on the property. He hadn’t noticed her in the parade and smiled at the thought of seeing her again. She was the one person who could save his soul.

  Weary of the emotional roller coaster, Iru was hoping to avoid Nick altogether. He would never love her, she thought, so it was better to move along. Of course, she’d had a tough week. She’d blacked out underwater while training in Dahab, and had to be helped to the surface. As she came to she spewed blood and plasma. It was the worst lung squeeze of her life, and it threatened to keep her out of the world championship. Until his message blipped onto her phone, she’d been wondering why she’d even bothered to come to Kalamata. But Nick would understand why. He knew what she was feeling better than anyone—the burning desire to compete, the need to dive into the blue, and the lung issue that threatened to stop her. She invited him over for breakfast despite herself.

  He knocked inside of two minutes. She answered, and without a word he pulled her close. They hugged in silence for fifteen minutes, and when she felt him melt into her, she knew something was bothering him, too. They drank coffee, ate fresh fruit, and planned an arepa party for later that evening. As usual she’d brought corn flour with her from Venezuela. Nick brought her to his room and showed off his DIY kitchenette. “It won’t feel like a comp until we have arepas, Iru. You know that,” he said. But they needed fixings to stuff the thick, Venezuelan-style tortillas. Nick had an idea.

  “Where are we going?” Iru asked as he led them down the service stairwell.

  “You’ll see,” he said, breezing past perplexed housekeepers and hotel staff, until they found the stainless steel double doors that led to the hotel kitchen. He pushed open one of them and peeked inside. Breakfast service had just ended, and lunch was still two hours off. The staff was away, smoking and napping in the sun. They’d arrived at slack tide, the perfect time for a dive.

  Nick took Iru by the hand and led the way. They perused refrigerators and coolers, and explored the walk-in, where they found enough pulled pork and feta cheese for 10,000 arepas. Nick stuffed his pack with contraband and felt ten years younger, when food liberation was a matter of sustenance rather than convenience. Iru, nervous at first, couldn’t stop laughing. She’d always lit up when she smiled, and it was no different under the fluorescent lighting of a Greek hotel kitchen.

  They stashed their treasure in his room and walked to the supermarket for more supplies. This time, they’d pay cash. Along the way, Nick kept quiet. More quiet than usual, so she asked him what was wrong. He shrugged. “You are always in your head, you know,” she said. “Too much.” He knew damn well she was right.

  Nick had landed in Croatia the month before, in love and convinced he’d found his perfect girl. One problem. He’d never told Bojana he was coming. The trick had worked before with Esther, the last filmmaker in his life. This time it backfired. Bojana was more shocked than excited. He tried to play it down and told her he’d come for training and to dive with Goran, whom he’d befriended in Belgrade, but she knew the truth. She didn’t resent his coming. He was making a statement, and it touched her. Now it was up to her to decide what to do. She considered it in the downtime between her interviews with Goran, when they ate breakfast on the patio, and when they were in bed together and he was fast asleep.

  She’d been perfectly happy at home with her man until Nick showed up. It was true that she felt more passion toward Nick than with her boyfriend, but part of her thought
it was too much passion—that they would enjoy one another for a few months or years before burning out. And there were things about her boyfriend she couldn’t lose: his intellect and understanding. He loved and respected her enough to empathize when she told him she’d met somebody and was confused. He didn’t react out of jealousy. He gave her space to make her own choice. There aren’t many guys like that, she thought.

  For better or worse, Nick wasn’t one of them. Sure, he’d led an alternative, bohemian life, but he was also old school. Of late, he’d been chatting with his sister, Jen, and his Uncle Paul about how much he craved the mainstream benchmarks of a successful life. Marriage, kids, and a promising career doing what he loved. He told Bojana he was ready for all of that and he wanted it to be with her.

  The second time he proposed marriage they were naked in bed, just two days before he was leaving for Kalamata. “You should think more critically,” she told him. That was her answer. He’d laid out his heart and she was glib. She’d made her decision. She wasn’t detonating her life for Nick, and she didn’t get his antiquated need for marriage. She didn’t care if she ever got married, and couldn’t comprehend his love of the church either. She thought the world would be better off without religion. Bojana was a modern, independent woman, and knew they were mismatched. “No matter how strong the feeling is between us, in life, you must be more critical, Nicholas. What we have is the beginning of something maybe, but…think about it, it can’t work. We won’t work.” She was telling him it was over.

  Her words sounded harsh in the afterglow, but she wasn’t wrong. Truth is, neither of them had thought too critically. They’d responded to electricity in the moment and let it take them. Nick’s best friends like to say that he was in love with being in love, and that impulse betrayed him in Croatia. He showed up on his magic carpet, unannounced, just as he had in Brooklyn after 9/11, and found that Bojana had been playing a part all along, teasing Nick by imagining possible futures over the phone because she craved distraction, and loved the attention, but she wasn’t real. Nick had been surrounded by women his whole adult life who wanted nothing but to give themselves over to him, and the one he chose couldn’t or wouldn’t. His magic carpet crashed and burned.

  He left Croatia in tears, and landed in Kalamata in time to compete in a smaller, warm-up competition, or mini-comp, before worlds alongside Mike, Alexey, and Natalia. He was in no condition to compete. He hadn’t been eating or sleeping. Regardless, he donned his monofin, and tried to gut out a few training dives. On an attempt to 90 meters, he lost his mouthfill at 75 meters and couldn’t equalize, so he came up. Aside from losing air, he felt clean, and breathed oxygen to make sure his lungs were clear. They weren’t. Later that afternoon he developed a persistent cough, and with each hack he produced blood and phlegm. He thought about diving anyway, but with worlds days away, he did the pragmatic thing and withdrew. He did return to the competition zone the next day, however, this time as a spectator, to watch Alexey Molchanov attempt a world record and get the scare of his life.

  The competition zone was in a deep blue bay, two miles and a mere ten-minute boat ride from the dock, which was across the street from the hotel. The weather was perfect, too perfect. Ideal conditions in Kalamata included a thermocline that bubbled up somewhere between 20 and 50 meters, depending on the day, and enough current to keep the platform moored at the proper angle, but on that day the Mediterranean was flat as a lake. Dublin-born safety diver Steve Keenan, thirty-six, noticed something was off while Alexey breathed up.

  “The [platform’s] mooring line wasn’t stiff,” he said, “and it was going down at a strange angle.” In fact, it crossed the competition line, which could confuse any athlete, especially one who’s narced from swimming to 128 meters and back. Steve alerted officials, and there was a ten-minute delay to get the line sorted out.

  A marked characteristic of Russian divers is that they are seldom fazed by conditions or scheduling shifts, and the delay didn’t disturb Alexey. Natalia, on the other hand, was rattled. She saw it as yet another bad omen and felt that Alexey should abort and wait until worlds to do the record attempt. He’d had a cold and was congested, she said, and proper preparation was key to the deep relaxation required to hit new depths safely. Alexey shook her off. For the past week he’d been hitting 126 meters—his world record at the time—without difficulty, and had been feeling good all season, aside from what he considered to be a mild sinus issue. He’d dealt with that before and it never interfered with business. He’d been feeling so strong, 128 meters didn’t feel like a stretch for him. It felt like any other dive. It wasn’t.

  His descent was on time and went according to plan. He hit 128 meters at just over two minutes and when he touched down, most of those gathered around the competition zone cheered, but Natalia wouldn’t celebrate until she saw him on the surface, alert and healthy. As he swam back toward the light, Steve prepared to meet him below. This wasn’t his first time safety diving for Alexey. Steve was based in Dahab, where he was a full-time freedive instructor as well as a competitor, and had trained alongside the Russian for years.

  “Alexey’s not demanding with safeties,” Steve said. “Normally you can belt it down to 15 to 20 meters and you’ll see him belting up, and you’d have to start kicking hard to keep up with him.” This was a world record attempt, however, so Steve left early, in time to meet Alexey at 30 meters. When he got there, Alexey was nowhere to be found.

  “On the way up, I remember feeling dizzy. I had vertigo,” Alexey said later. He had a reverse block—a condition that occurs when mucus in the sinus blocks the air used to equalize from escaping as the diver rises. There was pain and swelling in his inner ear, which threw off his internal compass. If the inner ear is off, one can be dizzy even on solid ground, let alone underwater. Alexey couldn’t tell which way was up, and he began swimming at a 90-degree angle—horizontally into the endless blue, but that’s why athletes are clipped to the line. His lanyard stopped him, and at that point, he realized that he needed to swim up, so he shifted direction. He was rising, but not in a straight line. He was swimming in circles, spiraling around the dive line. Instead of ascending at a pace of 1.2 meters per second, he had barely eclipsed .4 meters per second. It was a dangerously slow ascent, and nobody on the surface knew why.

  Steve drifted down to 32 meters and hung there for forty seconds. His urge to breathe was building and he was getting worried. “I had that horrible situation that a safety always hates,” he said. “You can’t just stay there indefinitely, but you don’t want to leave your man.” Still, he hung on until he could see Alexey, hard as nails, fighting but struggling, and swimming around the line. Alarm bells sounded in Steve’s brain and adrenaline kicked in. He finned down to 40 meters and grabbed Alexey.

  Steve is a strong athlete. He has all the Irish depth records and one of the pool records, but he conceded thirty pounds and four inches to Alexey, who blacked out in his arms at 30 meters. Steve had already been down for two minutes by then, and now he was swimming for two. At 20 meters, a second safety, Andrea Zuccari, buzzed down on an underwater scooter and ferried Alexey to the surface. Steve was right behind.

  Although he’d been underwater for over five minutes, Alexey was revived within fifteen to twenty seconds, but he was squeezed. “I had so much extra movement and tension at depth, I injured my lungs really bad. The worst I ever had,” he said. Pink frothy spewdom came flowing out, and for the next five hours he was spitting bright red, oxygenated blood. Alexey couldn’t breathe on his own for several minutes afterward; that was the worst part for him. “I was given oxygen and I was really weak. It was a scary feeling.”

  Steve was shaken as well, but he was even more alarmed when Alexey approached him later that night to thank him. “He came to me in total denial. He blocked it completely out. ‘Oh, it was fine,’ he said, ‘just a small thing with the ear. Just a small squeeze.’ Not that he almost fucking died,” Steve said. “It just shows his resilience and determ
ination and the psychology of the strongest freediver.”

  It also speaks to the freediving culture at the time. In September 2013, two months before Nick died, squeezes were considered more inconvenience than acute injury, and as far as competitions go, Kalamata was the worst example of a culture in denial. Throughout the mini-comp and the 2013 Individual Depth World Championship, athletes surfaced with lung injuries and dove again anyway. Nick was one of them. So was Alexey, who would attempt 128 meters again in just six days, with a world title on the line.

  Nick and Iru did their shopping. They bought lentils and red wine, cold beer and avocados. On the way back he spat three times, each time spitting gobs of blood larger than a silver dollar. “Nick, that’s not okay,” Iru said. She knew he planned to compete the next day. It was the opening day of worlds, and the first discipline was Constant No Fins. Nick told her it was minor, and she let it go. But he’d soon write in a blog post that he’d been walking all over Kalamata spitting blood for the previous two days.

  I was donating blood to the sidewalk with each spit as I strolled aimlessly through town, wondering what the hell was wrong with me….two days in the same pattern. Walking, thinking and spitting….I have seen the inside of every grocery store and alleyway in Kalamata. I found where all the young people hang out and where the hardware stores are. I found many things except the answer…

  But he already knew the answer. He couldn’t stop pushing. He’d set his goals at the beginning of the year and he cared so much about achieving them that each dive became a referendum on his own value.

  …the need to achieve became an obsession. Obsessions can kill.

  Perhaps those walks did him good, because finally, on the Kalamata streets, he realized how destructive that line of thinking was and that he had another choice: