The Last Dive

by Bernie Chowdhury

  Omi lived in Wannsee, a district where the large lake called the Wannsee is located; connected to it is a smaller lake. Sailboats and powerboats dotted both the large and small Wannsee, and sight-seeing ferries would take passengers for trips all around the city, across various lakes connected by canals. Though the specter of the infamous Berlin Wall and machine gun-toting East German guards in their watchtowers loomed above us, Omi and I were undisturbed. During that warm summer, Omi and I would go to the nearby Stölpchensee, the same lake where my mother and her twin sister had learned to swim in their youth, and I would frolic in the water for hours, jumping on an air mattress and seeing if I could stand on it. Omi would sit at the waterfront café and chat with friends over coffee.

  Seeing how much I enjoyed the water, Omi bought me a snorkel, mask, and swim fins. On our next trip to the little lake, I taught myself to snorkel. The fins made me feel like a fish as I glided rapidly, almost effortlessly, through the water. With fins on, I had a fresh confidence in the water and felt as though I belonged—a new feeling for a child who by birth and breeding had felt like an alien in every environment, a scout sent out to master the customs and language of a foreign territory. Although there wasn’t much to see in the turbid lake, it thrilled me just the same when I dived a few feet down and saw a plant sticking out of the muddy bottom. Life could occur even in such a dark and unfriendly place.

  Diving connected me in other ways to my German past. On my various trips to Germany as a youth, my relatives would talk after dinner about their experiences during the world wars. One of my distant relatives, an elderly lady, had a picture in her living room of her husband in uniform, and next to it sat his gleaming parade helmet from the First World War, complete with a spike protruding from its center. As the Germans say, he fell in that war. My other relatives had fought on both fronts, either in the air or on the ground. Omi told me that my grandfather, Alfred Krüger, had been an aeronautical engineer in the Luftwaffe, and had conducted high-altitude flight experiments long before the Second World War. She told me that the bonus pay he received for the risky altitude experiments brought relief from the restricted life caused by a depressed German economy. My grandfather fell in 1944, and I always felt pangs of loss that I never knew him.

  My uncle, who married my mother’s twin sister after his first wife died of cancer, had been a rear gunner on a Stuka dive-bomber. Even after the war he retained his enthusiasm for flight, and he loved to fly model airplanes with me. He would frequently come over during my visits to take me to the park, where we would fly our toys, like two little children. My great-uncle, who knew five languages, had been in the army, had fought on both the eastern and western fronts, and was wounded twice. When I was eighteen, he told me about his war experiences over a bottle of wine. His images of the bitter-cold Russian front—his putting motor oil on his nose and ears to prevent them from freezing—never left me. The stories I heard did not relate to the murderous Third Reich and its agenda of war and genocide; instead I was hearing stories of individual skill and survival.

  Although I never met any of my relatives who had been in the German Navy, I was nonetheless fascinated to learn after I started diving that there were freighters and warships off the New York and New Jersey coasts, not far from my home, that had been sunk during the world wars. And I learned about the German submarines known as U-boats that lay offshore. I determined to get the skills and equipment to safely dive them, and in doing so I would be touching a piece of my personal history and of world history unchanged by human hands since they had gone to their doom, years ago.

  Dr. Hunt observed that my experiences in Germany were the closest I had come to feeling as if I belonged somewhere; even though my Indian features clearly did not fit in with those of the fair-skinned German people, my language skills did. My grandmother loved me unconditionally, and as a result I felt closer to the German people than to any other people. Since I was a young outsider with a mixed background, Germany was as close to a country I could call my own as I had experienced.

  After I taught myself to snorkel in Berlin, we moved from my native England to Canada when I was eight years old. The decline of the British economy during the sixties made my father decide that there were better opportunities to be found in other countries. We crossed the Atlantic to New York City on the Queen Elizabeth, the December voyage on the luxury ocean liner a great adventure for me, and settled in Kitchener, Ontario. In Canada, my London accent again set me apart, and once more I felt like an outsider. After I had finally developed a Canadian accent and started to fit in, we moved to the United States, and, as Dr. Hunt observed, I was again an outsider, struggling to fit in. Only many years later, when I took up diving, did I feel I belonged; my experiences underwater resonated with the childhood satisfaction I’d felt snorkeling in Berlin as Omi stood guard. Dr. Hunt had uncovered some of my personal puzzle, but I knew there was more that might help me avoid another underwater accident. At the end of our second encounter, I knew I still had a lot of exploring to do, as I worked to understand what motivated the magnetic pull I felt for the underwater world and how other divers and I might live to love it more.

  My interview with Dr. Hunt was interrupted as Diana called out, “Excuse me. Gil wants to say good night.”

  Gil walked over to me and smiled at Dr. Hunt. This woman had been a complete stranger to him when she came to our apartment for the first time a month ago, but she had not taken me away on a stretcher, as the paramedics had, and he must have felt a little more confident that his father would not again vanish. I too had some fresh confidence that I might be hanging around. Neither Gil nor I could know that Dr. Hunt’s interviews and intervention would drastically change our lives and bring my son and me much closer. She would help me save my life—although others would not be so lucky.

  Gil smiled at Dr. Hunt, then turned to me and with a big hug and a kiss said, “Good night, Daddy. See you in the morning?”

  9

  Iron Coffins

  DECEMBER 1991. WALL STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

  THE ROUSES WERE CONCERNED and intrigued by my accident. We spoke often on the telephone during the months I strove to walk like a normal person and test out my reflexes and my hearing. I told Chris, “When I was in trouble on the Northern Pacific, I thought to myself, ‘Well, I can either try looking for the anchor line until I drown, or go up, get bent, and get choppered to a chamber.’ I just figured everything would be fine once I got into the chamber.” I hadn’t counted on watching my spirit leave my body and having to decide not to die.

  Chris was fascinated. “Man, what a decision. I would have done the same, though. I’d rather take my chances in the chamber than drown!”

  His words would come back to haunt me.

  Chris and Chrissy questioned me in detail about the accident and about my progress recovering, as if by recounting the story I could get past the trauma, and by hearing it they could inoculate themselves against my mistake. “Bernie, when you’re ready to dive again, come on over and stay with us,” Chris Rouse said repeatedly. “We’ll go to the quarry and dive with you to make sure you’re okay.” He told me that he imagined how psychologically difficult my first dive would be—returning to the scene of the crime, as it were, with every intention of returning as much as possible. Neither of us doubted I would dive again. “Whatever you need, any gases, any equipment, anything, don’t worry about it,” Chris reassured me. “We’ve got everything here. And what we’ve got, you’ve got!” I was touched by his offer.

  I told Chris about Dr. Hunt’s theories that unconscious unresolved conflicts in our past could be reenacted underwater, with possibly dangerous consequences. I didn’t know if there was anything to her approach, I said, but after meeting with her I was starting to examine my own history to see what might have spurred me to dive when I shouldn’t have, and to keep pushing it even when I was down there.

  “Whatever it takes to make you a safer diver, Bernie, go for it,” Chris replied.

/>   “Do you think there’s anything to the theory?”

  “I don’t know, man. It sounds like a bit of a stretch to me. But what do I know?” Chris Rouse’s shrug of a response didn’t surprise me. For better or worse, he was a man whose character was defined by how he acted, not what he thought about his actions.

  In December 1991, six weeks after my accident, I was able to return to work, heading down Wall Street to put in a physically unsteady but mentally intense day doing staff analysis. At this point in my life my financial industries job still ensured my livelihood, notwithstanding the ever more magnetic pull I felt toward deep water. Just as Dr. Mendagurin had assured me, my brain was developing a new neural pathway to send the signals to my body that enabled me to walk without falling over. Gradually, I could walk and turn my head so that, for example, I did not get dizzy and lose my balance when I crossed the street. I could sit and work at my computer but had to take frequent breaks to avoid blurry vision, headaches, and lack of concentration. My manager empathized and assigned me a light workload so that I could continue my recovery.

  But now, as a diving survivor, I viewed things differently. A year earlier, when I was a systems analyst supporting the technology needs of traders and commodities brokers, I had always marveled that they needed to compare their activities to being at war. Wall Street traders and businessmen like to think of themselves as locked in battle, but I knew that they did not risk their lives and that the worst consequence of a trade gone bad would be the loss of their jobs. And even that would happen only in the most extreme cases—for example, if they violated the company’s trading guidelines, which were implemented to limit the company’s exposure to excessive financial risk. Certainly a stock market crash affected people around the world, yet such an event was well beyond the control of any single trader. And even if the market did crash, people didn’t die from that alone.

  Unlike the Wall Street traders with whom I worked, my cave-diving instructor, Marc Eyring, had been a Green Beret, inserted behind enemy lines in Vietnam. Eyring knew what being at war meant; he had been in real battles, risking his life and seeing some of the men in his outfit killed. And I, as a diving instructor and deep diver, knew that every time my students and I went underwater, the risks included death and paralysis. I prided myself on teaching my students so thoroughly that they would all have the tools to survive while using their life-support equipment in the alien underwater world. Though my students frequently joked that I drilled them like a boot-camp sergeant, many of them came back long after they had gotten certified to talk with me after they had had some harrowing underwater event, and thanked me for my thorough training, which had enabled them to save their own lives. I felt that the traders, by comparison, were playing at risk, with little more at stake in their physical well-being than if they lost a game of Monopoly.

  Now that I had come so close to death from the bends, I felt that the war analogy so frequently made in the business world was even more childish. I became resentful that I had to spend time playing at a game with so little at stake. And I knew that at my job I was only a cog in the wheel, easily replaced if I stumbled. As I looked around me, I knew that I could not make any real difference in this environment; I would not be increasing our collective knowledge about ourselves or our world by compiling silly reports about things like our division’s spending on personnel, or the success of our college recruiting efforts. The way that I could make a difference in this world was by training people and motivating them to explore underwater, and also through my personal explorations. Like the Rouses, I wanted to find new forms of life underwater and participate in expeditions that would give us all more knowledge.

  Now, while I struggled to make a full recovery from my accident, I took breaks from my mundane work to look out the windows and focus on the world seven stories below. If I could navigate the maze of New York City streets as well as I had before I got the bends, couldn’t I penetrate deep water again, wisely and safely? For now, I could only wistfully look down from my desk whenever an ocean liner or freighter floated up or down the Hudson River and wonder whether I would ever again be able to see the likes of such ships that had met their fates underwater.

  Chrissy Rouse’s life was getting more and more wild as he struggled to forge his own path independent of his parents. He was spending less time at home and more time with his friend Tim Stumpf, who lived not far from Underwater World dive shop, where Chrissy worked. The atmosphere at Tim’s was like a fraternity house, with people dropping by casually and partying during the week, as if to keep themselves in shape for the weekend-long festivities. Chrissy would often stay over at Tim’s, and in the spring of 1992, he moved in. He had just turned twenty-two and was living apart from his parents for the first time.

  The young men and women who regularly hung out at Tim’s were, like Chrissy, mostly divers. They lived fast and hard, which Chrissy liked; life was meant to be an adventure in the water, on land, and in bed. Chrissy found he could easily meet and mingle with women, especially since most of them were interested in his diving stories, which gave him something to talk about. Being at Tim’s house gave him a venue where he could connect with women more privately than he could with his parents just down the hall.

  Still, he was enough his parents’ child to make sure to call his mother every day. It was apparent to everyone who hung out at Tim’s that Sue Rouse and Chrissy were a very close mother and son. Even in the middle of a raucous weekend party, Chrissy would withdraw from the proceedings long enough to call his mother, if he had forgotten to do so earlier in the day. Tim would hear Chrissy say, “I’m fine, Mom. That’s why I was calling you, to let you know that everything’s okay. I’m just here with a few people, relaxing a little bit.” He’d wind the phone cord around himself as he paced the floor, winking at a woman sitting amid the laundry and pizza boxes. “I’ve already had a few beers and, no, I’m not doing any driving, Mom. Don’t worry about me!” He’d groan jokingly. “Yeah, I know, Mom. That’s why I call you to let you know I’m okay. You don’t need to worry about me. Yeah, I love you, too.”

  Chrissy had started seeing Julia, the flirtatious, leggy blonde whom he had met in diving class a year earlier while he was assisting the instructor during the pool training sessions. Although each of them had been in a serious relationship with someone else, their other romances had ended, and now they had started dating casually. Julia worked not far away from the dive shop, and from Tim’s house, and she would stop over frequently both at the dive shop and at Tim’s to see Chrissy; she was able to relax and have fun with him in a way she had not found in her previous committed relationship. Each of them loved the other’s adventurous nature.

  Chrissy’s rigorous nonchalance was contagious. At first, Tim had found it a bit odd that his new housemate had the early-morning habit of walking into the bathroom, sitting casually on the side of the bathtub, and chatting while Tim was relieving himself. But even more curious was that Tim’s girlfriend had picked up the habit. Then Julia would feel free to join in the group discussion, and soon it seemed that the whole house was crowded into Tim’s bathroom while he was seated. It became so frequent an occurrence that Tim and the rest of the people in the house eventually thought little of it. Frat-style living, it seemed, could be a coed team sport.

  The sport extended to fun underwater, where the terms of adventure were far riskier. Chrissy could be a casual gladiator. He loved to play a game called bumper scooter, in which he and another diver would try to ram each other with their diver-propulsion vehicles, maneuvering to knock the other off the controls and send him crashing to the bottom, like two knights jousting on horseback. John Reekie, the Canadian who loved to dive with Chris in Florida’s caves, enjoyed the game with Chrissy whenever the two were at the quarry, or even to amuse themselves in a cave while on decompression. Whenever Chrissy tried to play the game with his father, the senior Rouse did not cooperate, and only got annoyed, shooting his son a furrowed-brow glare from behind
his diving mask. The elder Rouse thought diving was too serious and the consequences of missteps too great for divers to play around underwater. After all, someone could get knocked unconscious if he got rammed in the head with the scooter, or if he crashed into a hard object and hit his head. If that happened, he could drown before the other person knew what was happening. Chrissy shrugged off his father’s cautions, even after John Reekie performed a deft feint in the quarry during bumper scooter and Chrissy crashed hard into a railroad car that had been purposely sunk to attract divers. When he surfaced, Chrissy figured that either he or his father could fix the broken scooter, and the bump on his forehead would resolve itself.

  On June 25, 1992, Chrissy went diving with his housemate Tim Stumpf on a wreck called the Double East, whose scattered remains 61 feet below sea level seemed worse to Chrissy than a junk pile. In fact, he later noted in his logbook, “Biggest pile of shit in ocean. Clear and calm. Tried to kill Stumpf out of boredom.” The maze of metal was no fun, and there wasn’t anything worth retrieving on this, his 594th dive. To pass the time, Chrissy decided to make things more interesting. Spotting Tim rooting among the wreckage, Chrissy snuck up on his friend, grabbed his leg, and used his knife to start cutting a hole in Tim’s drysuit. The hole would let the cold water in, which Chrissy knew would be harmless at this depth—in spite of what he wrote in his logbook—on a dive where they would not need to decompress.

  Although another diver would have been furious, perhaps even worried that his life was in danger, Tim and Chrissy always played outrageous pranks on each other, and Tim knew immediately that Chrissy was playing around. Tim turned and slapped Chrissy’s mask, which promptly filled with seawater, temporarily blinding him. When Chrissy’s hands went to reposition his mask on his face and purge it, Tim drew his own knife and went on the offensive, sawing a hole in Chrissy’s suit. His mask on and clear of water, Chrissy grunted and grabbed Tim’s arm to stop him from cutting his suit. The two wrestled underwater, gasping and laughing, each holding a knife in one hand and spinning in somersaults like a scene from a James Bond movie. Soon, their antics winded them; they laughed at each other and headed for the surface. Back on board the dive boat, soaking wet from the holes they had cut into each other’s suits, they kidded around about their new ventilation systems. The holes, they knew, would be easy enough to repair, and soon their suits would be almost as good as new. They’d had fun, and the risk wasn’t big; they knew better than to accidentally slice each other’s hoses or stab each other by mistake.