Chapter 17: The Halfway Depth

Seventy-five metres. Halfway between the bottom and the surface. Halfway between fifteen atmospheres and one. Halfway between the deep voice and the helium voice, the sound of the chamber splitting the difference, the men's speech settling into an intermediate register that was neither the squeak of full saturation nor the bass of the surface but something between — a transitional voice, a decompression voice, the voice of men who were leaving one state and had not yet arrived at the next.

Kwame heard it in his own speech. The words came out at a pitch that he had not heard from himself in three weeks — lower than the helium register, higher than his natural register, the voice of a man at seventy-five metres, at eight and a half atmospheres, the voice of a man in transit.

He was in transit. The decompression was the transit — the passage from depth to surface, from the pressurised state to the atmospheric state, from the chamber to the world. The transit took five days because the body could not tolerate a faster transition, the helium requiring time to diffuse, the tissues requiring time to release, the physics of decompression demanding the same patience that the physics of compression had demanded, the body's tolerance for change limited in both directions.

You could not go down too fast. You could not come up too fast. The only safe rate of change was the slow rate, the controlled rate, the rate that the schedule specified and that the Life Support Technician maintained and that the diver endured, the endurance a form of surrender, an acceptance that the body's chemistry was in charge and that the mind's desire to surface — to be done, to be out, to be free of the chamber and the pressure and the helium and the confinement — was irrelevant.

The mind wanted to surface. The mind had been wanting to surface since the decompression began, the mind's orientation shifting from the depth to the surface the way a compass needle shifts from south to north, the pull constant, the desire steady, the body's slow ascent frustratingly insufficient for the mind's urgency.

But the body set the pace. The body always set the pace. And the pace was three metres per hour at depth, gradually slowing to less than one metre per hour near the surface, the rate a function of the gas solubility and the tissue half-times and the gradient for diffusion, the mathematics of decompression governing the timeline with the indifference of mathematics for human impatience.

Kwame lay in his bunk and thought about mathematics. Not the mathematics of decompression — he had studied those, understood them well enough for a diver who was not a physician, the basic principles of gas absorption and elimination that underlay the decompression tables. He thought about the mathematics of his life. The arithmetic of absence that he had performed before — the cumulative months in the chamber, the cumulative years away from Accra — but that he now performed with a different quality of attention, the attention of a man who had decided to change the numbers.

The numbers were these:

Eighteen years since he left Accra. He was eighteen when he left. He had been gone for exactly half his life. The symmetry was precise and unintended and painful, the kind of numerical coincidence that meant nothing and meant everything, the numbers describing a life that was evenly divided between the before and the after, the home and the away, the son who was there and the son who was not.

Six years since his last visit. His mother had been fifty-eight when he last saw her. She was sixty-four now. Six years of her life had passed without his physical presence, six years during which she had aged and changed and developed the arthritis and the hypertension and the new medications and the difficulty with the stairs and all the incremental developments that time imposed on a body that had been young when her son last saw it and that was now, at sixty-four, entering the territory of decline, the territory where the changes were not improvements but depreciations, the body's systems wearing, the margins narrowing.

Six years of letters. Approximately 280 letters, at one per week with occasional gaps. Two hundred and eighty blue aerogrammes, each one a week of his mother's life compressed into the space the aerogramme allowed, each one a dispatch from the world he had left, each one carrying the weight of the ordinary — the market prices, the weather, the neighbours, the church, the medication, the household repairs — the ordinary that, accumulated over 280 letters, constituted the extraordinary, the complete record of a woman's life as observed by the woman herself, the autobiography written one week at a time, addressed to a son who read it in batches and who had not, until this rotation, written back.

He had written back. The letter was in the system. The letter was, by now, probably in Accra — the transit time for airmail from Aberdeen to Accra was five to seven days, and the letter had been posted four days ago, and the postal system, whatever its inefficiencies, was reliable enough that a letter posted in Aberdeen on a Monday would arrive in Accra by the following Monday, the words crossing the Atlantic in less time than it took the diver to decompress from 150 metres.

His mother might have the letter already. She might have received it today, this morning, from the postman who delivered the international mail in Osu, the postman who had been delivering Kwame's occasional letters for eighteen years and who knew Efua Asante by name and who would have handed her the envelope with the brown paper and the Aberdeen postmark and the handwriting that was not her son's — no, the address was in Sarah Webb's handwriting, the LST having addressed the envelope — but the letter inside was her son's handwriting, the handwriting she had asked for, the proof that her son had a hand and that the hand could hold a pen.

She might be reading it now. At this moment, while Kwame lay in his bunk at seventy-five metres, his mother might be sitting at the kitchen table in Osu, the letter open on the table, the pages unfolded, the handwriting visible — his handwriting, the large, imprecise letters of a man whose hands were calibrated for welding rather than writing — and she might be reading the words he had written at 15.2 bar in a steel chamber in the North Sea, the words that said I am going to come home and I love you and I owe Yaw an apology and all the other sentences that had been compressed inside him for years and that he had finally released, finally let go of, the words decompressing from his chest onto the page and from the page into the system and from the system into her hands.

He did not know if she was reading the letter. He could not know. The chamber was sealed. The communications were limited to the intercom and the chamber phone, and the chamber phone was for emergencies and brief personal calls, and Kwame did not want to call — did not want to use the transitional voice, the seventy-five-metre voice, the voice that was neither his own nor the helium's but something between — to ask his mother if she had received his letter. The asking would diminish the letter. The asking would convert the letter from an act of writing into a transaction to be confirmed, a delivery to be tracked, a package to be signed for. The letter was not a package. The letter was a letting go. The letter had been released, and the releasing was the point, and the confirmation could wait.

Everything could wait. Everything was waiting. The decompression was waiting — the remaining seventy-five metres of pressure reduction, the remaining sixty-odd hours of controlled ascent. The letters at Crown Street were waiting — five or six blue aerogrammes on the floor below the letterbox, each one a week of his mother's life. The flight to Accra was waiting — the flight he had not yet booked but that he would book the day he surfaced, the first available departure from Aberdeen to Accra via London or Amsterdam or wherever the routing took him. The door of the house in Osu was waiting — the wooden door with the paint peeling and the lock that Yaw had changed two years ago and the key that Kwame did not have but that Yaw would give him or that his mother would open from the inside, the door that was the last barrier, the final hatch, the threshold between the distance and the presence.

Everything was waiting because waiting was the condition of decompression. You waited. You lay in your bunk and you waited. You read your book and you waited. You ate your meals and you waited. You breathed the atmosphere that the system provided and you waited for the atmosphere to change, for the pressure to drop, for the numbers on the gauge to descend, for the voice to deepen, for the food to regain its flavour, for the body to release its stored gas and return to the surface state.

Waiting was not nothing. Waiting was the work of decompression. The body worked during the decompression — the tissues metabolising, the blood circulating, the lungs ventilating, the molecular machinery of gas exchange operating continuously, the helium molecules diffusing across the membranes, the process of release requiring energy and time and the patience to allow it to happen at the rate it needed to happen.

Kwame was not good at waiting. He was good at working — at welding, at diving, at the physical and mental engagement of tasks that demanded his full attention. Waiting was the absence of these tasks, the empty hours that the decompression imposed, the hours in which the body worked but the mind did not, the mind left to its own devices in the chamber's unchanging environment.

The mind, left to its own devices, went to Accra.

It went to the house in Osu. It went through the door that he had not entered in six years. It went into the corridor with the coat hooks and the shoe rack and the photographs on the wall — his father's photograph, the formal portrait taken for the church directory, the face that Kwame could see in his own face when he looked in the mirror, the jaw and the forehead and the spacing of the eyes, the genetic inheritance that connected him to a man who had died twenty-two years ago and whose tools were now in Yaw's hands and whose trade was now Yaw's trade and whose house was now their mother's house.

The mind went into the kitchen. The table. The chairs — four of them, though only one was regularly used now, his mother's chair, the chair by the window, the chair from which she could see the compound and the street and the mango tree. The gas stove that Kwame's money had paid for. The sink with the tap that Yaw had fixed. The counter where the bread and the butter and the tea things were arranged in the order his mother preferred, the order of a woman who had maintained a household for forty years and who knew where everything should be and who placed everything there with the precision of a person for whom domestic order was not a preference but a principle.

The mind went up the stairs. Twelve steps. The railing on the left, the wall on the right, the steps worn in the centre by forty years of feet, his mother's feet and his father's feet and his own feet and Yaw's feet, the wood dipped in the middle of each tread by the accumulated traffic of a family's vertical life.

The mind went into his room. The room his mother kept. The books on the shelf — school books, novels, a Bible that his grandmother had given him at his confirmation. The football trophies on the dresser — three of them, small, cheap, the kind given to every player on the team rather than to the winner, the trophies of participation, of showing up, of being there. The bed, made, the bedspread washed and folded, the pillow in its case, the room maintained in a state of readiness for an arrival that had been pending for six years.

His mother kept this room the way Sarah Webb kept the chamber atmosphere. By attention. By maintenance. By the refusal to let the conditions drift, to let the parameters wander, to let the environment degrade. The room was the chamber. The room was the sealed space in which the atmosphere of Kwame's presence was maintained in his absence, the air of the room treated and preserved and kept at the set point — the set point of expectation, of hope, of the mother's belief that her son would return and would need the room and would sleep in the bed and would see the books and the trophies and would know, by the room's readiness, that he had been expected, that the wait had not been passive but active, not an absence of action but a sustained action, the action of keeping.

Kwame's mind moved through the house and found his mother in every room — in the kitchen by the table, on the stairs by the railing, in his room by the bed, in her room by the window. The house was full of her. The house was saturated with her, the way the chamber was saturated with helium, every surface and every space and every molecule of air carrying the trace of her presence, her attention, her care.

He opened his eyes. The chamber was around him. The gauge read seventy metres. The voice on the intercom was Sarah's: Chamber pressure seven-zero metres. PPO2 zero-point-four bar. CO2 zero-point-three per cent. Temperature twenty-eight degrees. All parameters normal.

Normal. Everything normal. The decompression proceeding. The pressure falling. The men ascending through the numbers, the gauge counting down toward the surface, the destination approaching with the slow certainty of a thing that could not be hurried, could not be accelerated, could only be waited for.

Kwame got up. He went to the table. Mac was there, reading — page 215 of the Tom Clancy, Kwame noted. Mac was accelerating. The decompression was affecting his reading pace, the anticipation of the surface translating into a faster consumption of the pages, the mind's urgency expressing itself through the one variable Mac could control — the rate at which his eyes moved across the printed words.

Kwame sat across from Mac. He said: Tell me about your mum's house.

Mac looked up. He considered the question. Then he said: Two bedrooms. A kitchen. A sitting room. A garden with a shed. My dad built the shed in 1978. It's still standing. The shed's better built than most of the houses on the street. My dad was a joiner. He built things to last.

He paused.

There's a clock on the mantelpiece, Mac said. A carriage clock. My mum wound it every Sunday. I don't know if it's still running. Linda might have wound it. Or it might have stopped. Four years ago. The day she died, the clock would have run down, and if nobody wound it, it would have stopped, and the time on the clock would be the time it stopped, the time of the last tick, the time when the energy my mum put into the spring ran out.

He looked at Kwame.

That's what I'm afraid of, Mac said. Going in and seeing the clock stopped. Seeing the time on the clock face. Knowing that my mum wound it and that the winding ran out and that nobody wound it again because nobody was there to wind it.

Kwame said: Wind it.

Mac said: What?

Kwame said: Go in. Wind the clock. Start it again. It doesn't have to show the right time. It just has to be running.

Mac looked at him for a long time. Then he said: Aye. Maybe. Maybe that's what I'll do.

They sat in the silence that followed, the silence that was not empty but full, the silence of two men who had told each other something true and who were sitting with the truth the way you sit with a completed weld — the work done, the joint made, the metal cooled, the connection holding.

The decompression continued. The hours passed. The gauge dropped. Sixty-five metres. Sixty. Fifty-five. The rate slowing now, the schedule specifying a reduced rate of ascent as the pressure decreased, the body's tolerance for change narrowing as the surface approached, the margins tighter, the risk of bubbles greater at the shallower depths where the ratio of the gas tensions in the tissues to the ambient pressure was most critical.

The last twenty metres would be the slowest. The last twenty metres would take more than twenty hours. The body at twenty metres was still carrying helium in its slowest tissues — the fat and the bone, the tissues with the longest half-times, the tissues that absorbed gas slowly and released it slowly, the reservoirs that held the last molecules of the deep, the final traces of the depth that the body was reluctant to surrender.

Kwame understood this. The slowest tissues. The deepest reservoirs. The things that took the longest to let go.

His mother was his slowest tissue. His mother was the reservoir that held the deepest trace of home, the trace that had been absorbed over eighteen years of letters and memories and the accumulated data of a son's love for his mother, the love dissolved into his bones and his marrow and the slow-exchange compartments of his heart, the love that would take the longest to release because it had been absorbed the deepest.

But he was not releasing his love. He was not decompressing from his love. He was decompressing from the distance. The distance was the gas. The distance was the helium. The distance was the thing that had been dissolved in him by the pressure of absence and that was now, slowly, being released.

The love would remain. The love was not helium. The love was not an inert gas that dissolved under pressure and expanded on release. The love was the tissue itself, the structure, the bone and the muscle and the organ, the thing that the gas was dissolved in but that the gas was not, the thing that remained when the gas was gone, the thing that endured.

The distance would decompress. The love would remain.

This was the mathematics he needed. This was the arithmetic that balanced the account. The distance was temporary — a state, a condition, a pressure that could be released. The love was permanent — a structure, a tissue, a part of the body that no decompression could eliminate.

He wrote in his notebook: Day 24. 55 metres. The decompression is working. The voice is returning. The food has flavour. The body aches in the joints — the helium leaving, the bubbles forming and dissolving, the small protests of a body letting go. Three more days. Three more days and I will be at the surface, at one atmosphere, in the air. Three more days and I will read the letters and call Yaw and book the flight and go home. Three more days.

He wrote: The distance is decompressing. The love is not. The distance will go. The love will stay. This is the mathematics I have been missing for six years. This is the arithmetic that makes the return possible. You do not have to stop loving the depth to return to the surface. You do not have to stop being the diver to be the son. You do not have to choose between the pressure and the air. You decompress. You release the distance. You keep the love. You surface.

He closed the notebook. The chamber hummed. The gauge read fifty-three metres. The men were ascending, slowly, together, the six of them rising through the numbers toward the surface, toward the air, toward the world where the letters waited and the doors waited and the clocks waited to be wound and the sons waited to return and the mothers waited to receive them.

Three more days. Seventy-two hours. The pressure falling. The voice returning. The body releasing. The distance decompressing.

Kwame lay in his bunk and felt the ascent, the slow rise, the gradual return, the patient physics of a man coming up from the deep.