Chapter 19: Thirty Metres

At thirty metres, the decompression slowed to a crawl.

The rate was now less than two metres per hour — the schedule tightening, the ascent braking, the body's slowest tissues dictating the pace. The fat and the bone. The reservoirs that held the deepest helium, the gas that had saturated into the body's densest structures over twenty-one days and that was now, molecule by molecule, making its way out through the blood and the lungs and the exhalation valve, the release as slow as the absorption had been, the physics symmetrical, the patience required in both directions equal.

Kwame lay in his bunk and felt the time. Time at thirty metres was different from time at 150 metres and different from time at seventy-five metres and different from time at the surface. Time at thirty metres was the time of the last stretch, the time of the approach, the time when the destination was close enough to see but not close enough to reach, the time when the body was almost at surface pressure but not quite, the almost more difficult than the distance had been, the proximity more frustrating than the separation.

The gauge read twenty-eight metres. Two point nine atmospheres. The number was close to one — closer than it had been in twenty-five days — but it was not one, and the distance between 2.9 and 1.0 was, in decompression terms, approximately thirty-six hours, thirty-six hours that stretched ahead with the particular density of final hours, each one heavier than the hours before it, each one containing more waiting, more anticipation, more of the specific impatience that came from being able to feel the surface without being able to reach it.

The voice was almost back. Kwame's voice at twenty-eight metres was recognisably his voice — deep, measured, the Ghanaian-inflected English that his mother would recognise if she heard it, the voice that the helium had taken and that the decompression was returning, the voice that had been pitched up for three weeks and that was now settling back into its natural register the way a river settles back into its bed after a flood, the water finding the old channels, the flow resuming its accustomed course.

Mac's voice was back too — the Scottish accent restored to its natural depth, the burr and the vowels and the particular rhythm of Mac's speech returned from the helium wilderness, Mac sounding like Mac again, sounding like the man Kwame had first met five years ago at a dive briefing in the company's Aberdeen office, the voice that had said, You must be Asante, and Kwame had said, Kwame, and Mac had said, Mac, and the partnership had begun with two names and had continued for five years and three hundred days in the chamber and uncountable hours at depth and the particular intimacy of men who had breathed the same gas and worked in the same dark and shared the same steel and were now, together, ascending.

The food was good. This was the unexpected gift of the final decompression — the food, which had been cardboard for three weeks, which had been the helium atmosphere's version of nutrition, was now, at twenty-eight metres, recognisably food. The trimix atmosphere at this depth — the helium reduced, the nitrogen reintroduced, the oxygen adjusted — allowed the flavour compounds to reach the taste receptors in something approaching their intended form, and the curry tasted like curry and the fish tasted like fish and the tea, the endless tea, tasted like tea, and each meal was a small homecoming, a gustatory return, the body's senses recalibrating to the world of flavour that it had been separated from.

Kwame ate his breakfast with the attention of a man who was tasting for the first time in weeks. Eggs. Toast. Bacon. The bacon was the best thing he had eaten in twenty-five days — the salt and the fat and the smoke cutting through the residual distortion of the atmosphere with a directness that made him close his eyes, the pleasure of the taste a physical sensation, a warmth in the mouth, a comfort.

He thought about the food his mother would make when he came home. The groundnut soup, thick with peanuts and chicken, served with fufu. The jollof rice, the rice stained red with tomato and pepper, the grains separate and fragrant with the spices — thyme, curry powder, the bay leaves she bought at the market. The kelewele — fried plantain, the pieces coated in ginger and chilli and salt, the outside crisp, the inside soft and sweet. The food of his childhood, the food of the house in Osu, the food that his mother made with the same precision she brought to her letters, each ingredient measured by hand, by eye, by the knowledge that had been passed from her mother to her and that she had not passed to Kwame because Kwame had been sent to a welding school rather than a kitchen, the transmission of knowledge following a different path.

He would eat her food. He would sit at the table and eat the groundnut soup and the jollof rice and the kelewele and he would taste them with the full capacity of his senses, at one atmosphere, in the air of Accra, the flavours uncompressed, undistorted, the food tasting the way food should taste, the way food had tasted before he had spent eighteen years eating it in pressurised chambers and offshore mess rooms and the flat on Crown Street where he cooked for himself without skill and ate without attention.

His mother's food would be an event. His mother's food would be the flavour of home, the gustatory equivalent of her handwriting — unmistakable, specific, carrying the identity of the person who had made it, the taste as individual as a fingerprint, the recipe as personal as a letter.

The hours passed. The gauge dropped. Twenty-five metres. Twenty-three. Twenty-one. The rate slowing further, the last metres the slowest, the body's tissues releasing the final helium with the reluctance of a substance being extracted from the place it had settled.

In the chamber, the mood was valedictory. The men were finishing things — Mac finishing his Tom Clancy (page 289 — he would finish it, Kwame now believed, before the decompression was complete, the reading accelerating to match the ascent), Tomasz finishing his last crossword book, Sean finishing a story that had been developing for four days and that had reached, at last, a conclusion involving the priest, the horse, and a revelation about the timing of the wedding that Kwame had to admit was, despite the length of the telling, genuinely funny.

Davy was looking at his calendar. Three Xs to go. The calendar was almost complete, the grid of dates almost entirely crossed out, the few remaining blanks conspicuous, the white spaces where the Xs had not yet been placed standing out like the unpainted sections of a hull, the unfinished part of the job, the last touches before the work was complete.

Fraser had cleaned everything twice. The equipment was stowed, the suits hung, the helmets polished, the bailout bottles checked. Fraser's thoroughness had reached a level that bordered on the ceremonial, the cleaning not a practical necessity but a ritual, a farewell to the equipment, a final act of maintenance before the chamber was handed over to the next rotation.

Kwame sat at the table and opened his notebook and read through the entries he had made during the rotation — the technical entries (the weld parameters, the inspection data, the dive times) and the personal entries (the thoughts about his mother, about Mac, about the distance, about the arc, about the dark, about the letter he had written and sent). The notebook was the record of rotation forty-two, the document of twenty-eight days at depth, and it contained, Kwame realised, more personal writing than any previous notebook — more words about his mother, more words about Accra, more words about the distance and the return and the things he had been thinking about and the things he had decided.

The notebook was a decompression record of its own. The entries tracked the release — the slow opening of the seal, the gradual letting go of the things he had held, the words escaping from his chest onto the page the way the helium escaped from his tissues into the atmosphere. The first entries were technical — pressure, temperature, weld parameters. The middle entries were mixed — technical and personal, the seal cracking, the personal leaking through. The later entries were personal — the letter to his mother, the conversations with Mac, the decision to go home. The progression was a decompression, a descent of the numbers on the gauge of his reticence, the pressure of the unsaid dropping entry by entry until the words flowed freely, until the writing came without resistance, until the notebook was full of the things he had carried and released.

He turned to a blank page. He wrote:

Day 25. 21 metres. Thirty-six hours to the surface. The voice is almost back. The food has flavour. The aches are fading — the helium leaving the joints, the bubbles resolving, the body accepting the transition. The decompression is working. The system is working. Sarah is watching the numbers and the numbers are right and we are ascending and we will surface and we will step out of the chamber and into the air.

I have been thinking about what Mac said — about the house, about going in, about winding the clock. I have been thinking about my own clock. The clock in my mother's house. Not a physical clock — the house does not have a carriage clock on the mantelpiece. The clock I am thinking about is the one that stopped when I left. The clock that measures the time between my leaving and my returning. The clock that my mother has been winding every week with her letters, keeping the mechanism alive, keeping the hands moving, keeping the time even though the person who set the clock has been absent for eighteen years.

She has been winding the clock. Her letters are the winding. Each letter a turn of the key, a tensioning of the spring, a renewal of the energy that keeps the clock running. Without her letters, the clock would have stopped. The mechanism would have run down. The time between us would have frozen at the moment I left, and the frozen time would have become permanent, the distance fixed, the separation final.

But she wound the clock. She wound it every week. Two hundred and eighty times she wound it. Two hundred and eighty turns of the key. And the clock ran, and the time moved, and the distance between us remained a distance rather than a wall, a space that could be crossed rather than a barrier that could not.

I owe the crossing to her. I owe the possibility of return to the woman who maintained the possibility by writing to a son who did not write back, who kept the clock running when the clock's owner was at the bottom of the sea, who refused to let the mechanism wind down, who wound and wound and wound with the patience of a woman who understood that the keeping was the thing, that the maintenance was the act, that the winding was the love.

He closed the notebook. He looked around the chamber. The chamber that had been his home for twenty-five days. The bunks, the table, the television, the shower, the toilet, the medical lock, the trunk hatch, the pressure gauge, the intercom speaker. The components of the system that had kept six men alive at fifteen atmospheres. The steel and the equipment and the atmosphere that had held them and sustained them and confined them and protected them for twenty-five days and that was now, gradually, releasing them, the pressure dropping, the atmosphere thinning, the chamber's grip loosening as the decompression proceeded.

The chamber had been a good chamber. Kwame did not sentimentalise the steel — the chamber was equipment, industrial equipment, maintained and inspected and certified by the regulatory authorities, a pressure vessel subject to the same engineering standards as any other pressure vessel. But the chamber had held him. The chamber had held six men for twenty-five days at pressures that would have killed them if the chamber had failed, and the chamber had not failed, and the men were alive, and the decompression was proceeding, and the surface was thirty-six hours away.

He would not miss the chamber. No diver missed the chamber. The chamber was not a place you missed. The chamber was a place you endured and inhabited and adapted to and eventually left, the way a chrysalis was a place the caterpillar endured and inhabited and adapted to and eventually left, the leaving a transformation, the emergence a change of state.

He would emerge. He would change state. He would go from the pressurised state to the atmospheric state, from the sealed to the open, from the confined to the free. And the emergence would be, as it was on every rotation, a shock — the sudden vastness of the world, the sudden availability of space, the sudden ability to walk more than twelve metres in a straight line, the sudden presence of weather and sky and the sound of the wind and the feel of rain and the smell of the sea and the million small sensory inputs that the world provided and that the chamber did not.

The shock would pass. The adaptation would come. The surface would become normal, the way the chamber had become normal, the brain recalibrating to each new environment with the flexibility that was the human animal's greatest gift and greatest vulnerability — the ability to adapt to anything, to normalise anything, to make any condition the default condition, including the condition of absence, including the condition of distance, including the condition of not going home.

But he was going home. The adaptation to absence was ending. The normalisation of distance was being reversed. The default was being changed, the settings updated, the calibration adjusted. He was going home.

Eighteen metres. Seventeen. Sixteen.

The night came — the chamber's version of night, the lights dimmed, the ventilation quieter. Kwame lay in his bunk for the last full night of the decompression. Tomorrow night would be the last night. The night after that, he would be at the surface, in his cabin, sleeping in a bunk that was at one atmosphere, breathing air — real air, nitrogen-oxygen air, the air of the world.

He did not sleep immediately. He lay and listened to the chamber. The sounds were quieter now, at eighteen metres — the ventilation less dense, the atmosphere less thick, the sounds travelling at a speed closer to their surface speed, the acoustic environment approaching normal. He could hear Mac breathing — not the helium breathing, not the high-pitched exhalations that the first week had produced, but the near-normal breathing of a man at 2.8 atmospheres, the breath almost at its natural depth.

He could hear his own heart. The heart that had been beating since before he was born, the heart that had beaten through forty-one rotations and twelve years of diving and eighteen years of distance and six years of absence. The heart that had beaten in the chamber and in the bell and on the seafloor and in the flat on Crown Street and at the airport in Accra when his mother's hand was on his cheek. The heart that did not stop. The heart that did not defer. The heart that did not choose between the surface and the depth, between home and away, between presence and absence. The heart that simply beat, and beat, and beat, the rhythm the only constant in a life that changed with every rotation, with every descent, with every bell run and every decompression and every letter received and not answered.

Until now. Until the letter he had written and sent. Until the decision he had made. The heart had been beating toward this, all along. The heart had been maintaining the rhythm, keeping the clock running, winding the spring with each contraction, the cardiac muscle doing what cardiac muscle did — persisting, repeating, refusing to stop, the heart as patient as his mother, as reliable as Yaw, as steady as Sarah watching the gauges, the heart a Life Support Technician of its own, monitoring the parameters, maintaining the atmosphere, keeping the man alive.

He slept. The sleep was shallow — the decompression sleep, the body's adjustment to the changing pressure, the tissues releasing, the joints aching faintly. The dreams were surface dreams — not the vivid, helium-altered dreams of saturation but the ordinary dreams of a man who was almost at the surface, almost in the world, almost at one atmosphere.

He dreamed of the airport. Kotoka Airport in Accra, the arrivals hall, the heat hitting him as he stepped off the plane, the heat that was not the heat of the chamber — controlled, regulated, maintained by the life support system — but the heat of West Africa, uncontrolled, unregulated, the sun's heat, the earth's heat, the heat that was the climate rather than the atmosphere, the condition of the place rather than the condition of the machine.

In the dream, Yaw was at the airport. Yaw was standing in the arrivals hall, in his work clothes — the polo shirt, the trousers, the boots — and he was holding Akosua, and Akosua was looking at Kwame with the curiosity of a child seeing a stranger who was, she had been told, not a stranger but her uncle, her father's brother, the man in the photographs, the man who sent the money, the man who lived under the sea.

In the dream, Kwame walked toward them. The distance between them was the distance of the arrivals hall — perhaps twenty metres, the length of a bell run, the length of a descent from the bell to the seafloor. He walked the twenty metres. He walked them at the pace of a man who was not in a hurry but who was not stopping, the pace of a man who had been approaching this moment for six years and who was now, finally, close enough to arrive.

He reached Yaw. He reached Akosua. He stood before them — his brother, his niece — and the standing was the thing, the being-there was the thing, the presence was the thing that the phone calls could not provide and the money could not provide and the letters could not provide and that only the body could provide, the body that had been at the bottom of the sea and was now here, in the arrivals hall, in the heat, in the light, at one atmosphere, at the surface of the world.

In the dream, Yaw said: You came.

Kwame said: I came.

And Akosua, who was four, who had never met her uncle, who knew him only from photographs and from the stories her father told, looked at Kwame and said: Are you the man from under the sea?

Kwame woke. The chamber was light — the fluorescent tubes on their daytime setting. The intercom was speaking — Sarah's voice, the morning reading.

Chamber pressure one-four metres. PPO2 zero-point-four bar. CO2 zero-point-two per cent. Temperature twenty-seven degrees. All parameters normal. Estimated time to surface pressure: twenty-two hours.

Fourteen metres. They were at fourteen metres. The depth of a swimming pool. The depth that a recreational diver would consider shallow. Fourteen metres from the surface. Twenty-two hours from the air.

Kwame sat up. He put his feet on the deck. He breathed in the chamber's atmosphere — trimix now, the helium reduced to a fraction, the nitrogen dominant, the oxygen at its surface-approaching level. The air was almost air. The breath was almost a surface breath. The body was almost at one atmosphere.

Twenty-two hours. Less than a day. Less than one rotation of the earth. Less than the time it took for a letter to travel from Accra to Aberdeen. Less than the time it took for the tide to go out and come back. Less than the time that the last distance required, the last metres, the last hours, the last slow release before the hatch opened and the pressure equalised and the chamber breathed the same air as the world.

Kwame stood in the chamber — the chamber he had entered twenty-five days ago, the chamber that had compressed him and held him and sustained him and confined him and that was now, in the last hours, releasing him, the steel letting go of the man the way the tissues let go of the gas, slowly, reluctantly, the release a process rather than an event, a gradual opening rather than a sudden break.

He was ready. He had been ready since the letter. He had been ready since the five words in the notebook. He had been ready since Mac told him about the clock and Kwame said wind it and meant go in and meant go home and meant the keeping is the thing and the winding is the love and the door is not locked and the house is warm and the mother is there and the return is possible and the decompression will work and the surface will receive you and the world will hold you the way the chamber held you — completely, without judgment, without release.

Without release. No — with release. The world would hold him and release him. Both. At the same time.

Twenty-two hours. The gauge descended. The pressure fell. The surface approached.

Kwame waited. He waited with the patience of a man who had been waiting for twenty-five days and for six years and for eighteen years and who was now, in the last hours, finding that the patience was not a burden but a practice, not a hardship but a discipline, the discipline of a man who understood that some things could not be hurried — the decompression, the return, the repair of the things that distance had damaged — and that the slow rate was the safe rate, and that the safe rate was the only rate that the physics of the heart permitted.

Slow. Steady. One metre at a time.

The surface was waiting. The air was waiting. The world was waiting.

He was almost there.