Chapter 31: Seventy-Five Metres Again

The voice came back in stages.

At one hundred metres, the change was imperceptible — the helium still dominant in the mix, the sound still pitched above the register that a surface listener would recognise as human, the speech still the chipmunk speech, the squeak, the comedy of the deep. At ninety metres, the first shift — a lowering, a deepening, the frequency descending by increments that the ear could not detect in the moment but that became apparent over hours, the way the decompression became apparent over hours, the change too slow for perception but too real for denial.

At seventy-five metres, the voice was between.

Kwame heard it in Mac's speech first, because Mac's speech was the reference — the steady, measured cadence that did not change with the pressure, the rhythm constant even as the pitch descended, Mac's voice a clock that kept the same time at every depth, the tempo fixed, the frequency variable. At seventy-five metres, Mac's voice was recognisable. Not as Mac's surface voice — that would come later, in the final metres, in the last hours — but as a voice that belonged to a specific person rather than to the general category of helium speakers, the individuality returning, the person emerging from the pressure the way a figure emerged from fog, the outline first, then the detail, the recognition gradual.

Kwame spoke and heard himself speak and the voice was his voice and was not his voice, the sound occupying a register that he had not heard from himself in twenty-seven days, the register of the between, the transitional voice, the voice of a man who was neither at the bottom nor at the surface but in the passage between them, the voice decompressing along with the body, the vocal cords and the air column and the resonant cavities of the throat and the sinuses all responding to the changing pressure, the voice an instrument played by the atmosphere, the atmosphere changing, the music changing with it.

Sean noticed it too. Sean, whose voice at full depth had been a sustained impossibility — the Irish accent pitched up to a frequency that made his stories, already improbable, sound like the narrations of a cartoon character — Sean heard his own voice drop and said: Mother of God, I sound nearly human.

The men laughed. The laughter was different at seventy-five metres — lower than the laughter at one hundred and fifty, the sound carrying more of the resonance that surface laughter carried, the chest involved, the laughter travelling through the body rather than just through the throat, the laughter physical in a way that the deep laughter had not been, the body participating in the sound as the pressure decreased and the gas density decreased and the acoustic properties of the chamber atmosphere approached the acoustic properties of the surface world.

The decompression was at its midpoint. Three days down, two days remaining. The gauge read seventy-five metres — 8.5 bar — and the number occupied the exact centre of the range between 15.2 and 1.0, the gauge's needle at the midpoint of the dial, the symmetry precise, the mathematics of the ascent splitting the depth into two equal halves, the half that had been decompressed and the half that remained.

Kwame sat at the table. The table was the same table it had been for twenty-seven days — the same steel surface, the same bolted legs, the same scratches and marks and the coffee ring that Sean had made on day three and that had become, over the weeks, a feature of the table rather than a stain, the ring a landmark, a fixed point, the chamber's geography as specific and as known as the geography of any home. The table was where Kwame sat to eat and to read and to write, and the table was where he sat now, with his notebook open and his pen in his hand and the aerogramme that he had taken from his kitbag lying beside the notebook, the blue paper waiting, the paper that had been in his kitbag since day one, the paper that he had brought offshore with the intention of writing and that he had not written on because the intention had not, until now, been sufficient to overcome the resistance.

The resistance was not reluctance. The resistance was something more specific — the difficulty of finding the words, the difficulty of compressing the thing he wanted to say into the space the aerogramme provided, the difficulty of translation, of converting the internal state into the external expression, the feeling into the sentence, the pressure into the ink. The resistance was the resistance of all writing — the gap between the experience and the description of the experience, the gap that the writer attempted to close with words and that the words could never fully close, the gap permanent, the approximation the best that could be achieved.

But the approximation was necessary. The silence was worse than the imperfect expression. The silence was the lack of fusion — the gap between the two metals, the boundary without bonding, the joint that looked whole from the outside and that the radiograph revealed as disconnected. The letter would be imperfect. The letter would fail to say the thing completely. The letter would be an approximation, a compression, a reduction of the feeling into the space of a blue aerogramme. But the letter would be a weld. The letter would be an attempt at fusion. The letter would be the arc struck in the dark, the point of light in the distance between the chamber and the kitchen table in Osu.

He picked up the pen. He wrote the date on the aerogramme. He wrote the salutation.

Dear Mama.

He had not written these words in years. The last letter he had written was in a previous rotation — the letter that had been sent through the medical lock, the letter that Sarah had retrieved and addressed and posted, the letter that had arrived in Accra and been received by Efua at the kitchen table, the letter that had been the first incoming correspondence from Aberdeen in eighteen years. That letter had been about the chamber and the diving and the routine. That letter had been a report. That letter had described the conditions without describing the man inside the conditions.

This letter would be different.

He wrote:

Dear Mama,

I am writing this at seventy-five metres. This means nothing to you, and I will explain it. Seventy-five metres is halfway between the bottom of the sea and the surface. I have been at the bottom for twenty-five days, and now the pressure is being reduced, slowly, over five days, and I am rising through the numbers the way a man rises through water — not by swimming but by being lifted, by the process, by the system that controls the ascent and that will not allow me to rise faster than the body can tolerate.

I am halfway up. I am between the depth and the surface. I am in the passage between where I was and where I am going.

Where I am going is home.

He stopped. He looked at the word. Home. The word sat on the blue paper with the weight of a thing that had not been said for a long time and that was heavier for the not-saying, the word dense with the accumulated pressure of the years during which he had not used it, the word a capsule, a container, a small sealed space that held the meaning the way the bell held the atmosphere, under pressure, compressed, the meaning concentrated by the confinement.

He wrote:

I have been thinking about you for twenty-seven days. This is not unusual — I think about you on every rotation, in every chamber, on every dive. But this rotation the thinking has been different. The thinking has been more specific. The thinking has been about the things between us — the trunk, I called it in my notebook, the narrow space between my life here and my life there, the passage that I have to crawl through to get from where I am to where you are.

A man on my crew froze in the trunk last week. The trunk is the tube that connects our living space to the diving bell. It is ninety centimetres wide and two metres long and you crawl through it on your hands and knees. The man froze — his body stopped, his muscles locked, the space too tight for him at that moment, the confinement too much. He stayed for two minutes. Then he breathed. Then he moved. Then he came through. Then he did his work.

I have been frozen in the trunk between us for six years. The space has been too tight. The passage has been too narrow. The body has been saying stop, do not go further, do not enter the tighter space. I have not been able to name this because naming it would mean admitting that the confinement was not the chamber's confinement or the bell's confinement but my own — the confinement I created by leaving and by not returning, the confinement of the distance, the confinement of the absence.

But the man came through. He breathed and he moved and he came through the trunk and he did his work. And I am writing this letter to tell you that I am coming through too. I am breathing. I am moving. I am crawling through the trunk between here and there, between Aberdeen and Accra, between the sea and the house, between the man who sends money and the son who sits at the table.

He paused. Mac was reading. Sean was asleep, the Irish diver's capacity for sleep rivalling his capacity for speech, the unconsciousness as total as the narration, both absolute. Tomasz was doing his crossword — the crossword a daily ritual, the puzzle a form of decompression in itself, the mind working on the clues while the body worked on the helium, the two processes parallel, each one a gradual release. Fraser was in his bunk, looking at the ceiling, the look of a man who was thinking and who did not want the thinking disturbed. Davy was at the table across from Kwame, writing in his own notebook, the young diver's pen moving across the page with the steadiness of hands that had trembled and stopped trembling, the writing an act of fine motor control, the control a demonstration, a proof, the hands saying: I am steady. I can do this.

Kwame returned to the letter.

I am coming to Accra after this rotation. I will fly from Aberdeen. I will take a taxi from the airport. I will come to the house. I will open the gate and walk through the compound and touch the mango tree and stand at the door and open it and walk down the corridor and come to the kitchen.

I will sit at the table.

Mama, I have welded pipelines at the bottom of the North Sea. I have joined metal in the dark at pressures that would kill a man who was not prepared for them. I have repaired defects in my own work — ground out the bad metal, re-welded the joint, submitted it for inspection. This is what I do. This is what I am good at. I find the place where the connection has failed and I repair it.

The connection between us has not failed. Your letters have maintained it. Your letters are the umbilical — the line that runs from your table to my table, the line that carries the gas and the warmth and the communication, the line that has kept me alive in the distance the way the umbilical keeps the diver alive at depth. You have been my bellman. You have been paying out line when I moved away and taking in slack when I came back and you have never allowed the line to tangle.

But the diver must return to the bell. The diver cannot stay on the sea floor forever. The bailout gas runs out. The hot water cools. The body reaches its limit. The diver must swim back through the dark and enter the bell and sit on the bench and take off his helmet and breathe the bell's air and say to the bellman: I am here. I am back. Thank you for the watch.

I am coming back, Mama. I am swimming toward the bell. I can see the lights.

He folded the letter. He did not seal it — the aerogramme's gum would not hold, his mother had always said, and the tape was in his kitbag and the kitbag was in his bunk space and he would seal it later, when the letter was ready to go through the medical lock, when the decompression was further advanced, when the pressure was lower and the surface was closer and the letter could be sent without the elaborate procedure of depressurising the lock and retrieving the document and repressurising the lock, the procedure that converted a simple act — sending a letter — into a multi-step operation involving pressure differentials and valve sequences and the transformation of a piece of paper from a thing at fifteen atmospheres to a thing at one atmosphere, the letter decompressed along with the man, the words released into the surface world the way the helium was released into the surface atmosphere.

He placed the letter in the notebook. He closed the notebook. He put the notebook under his pillow, the thin foam pillow that was the chamber's concession to comfort, the pillow that was not enough to be comfortable and not nothing, the pillow a compromise, the notebook beneath it safe, the letter inside it waiting.

The decompression continued. The gauge moved — imperceptibly, the needle descending through the numbers with the patience of a process that could not be hurried, the rate fixed by the schedule, the schedule fixed by the physics, the physics fixed by the body, the body's tissues releasing the helium at the rate they could tolerate, the rate the cells required, the rate that ensured the gas came out of solution without forming bubbles, the gas molecules migrating from the tissues to the blood to the lungs to the exhalation to the chamber atmosphere to the exhaust valve to the world, each molecule a tiny ascent, each molecule a return to the surface, each molecule a decompression so small it could not be measured individually but that, accumulated over trillions of molecules, constituted the event — the decompression, the ascent, the return.

Seventy-four metres. Seventy-three. Seventy-two.

The numbers fell. The voice deepened. The pressure released. And the letter waited in the notebook under the pillow, the words at seventy-five metres, the words at 8.5 bar, the words pressurised, the words compressed into the space of the aerogramme the way the man was compressed into the space of the chamber, the words waiting to be decompressed, to be released, to be sent from the chamber to the surface and from the surface to the post and from the post to Accra and from Accra to the table and from the table to the hands and from the hands to the eyes and from the eyes to the heart, the letter ascending through the system the way the man was ascending through the pressure, slowly, gradually, the letter and the man decompressing together, the words and the body both rising toward the surface where the air was, where the light was, where the door was, where the table was, where the tea was, where the mother was.

Seventy-one. Seventy. Sixty-nine.

The ascent continued. The return continued. The letter waited. The man waited. The chamber held them both — the letter and the man, the words and the body, the written and the writer — held them in the steel and the pressure and the helium and the humming of the ventilation that was the sound of the system maintaining the conditions, the conditions maintained, the man alive, the words alive, the connection alive, the line running from the chamber to the kitchen, the umbilical intact, the bellman at her station, the gauges steady, the atmosphere maintained, the work continuing, the work of living, the work of writing, the work of returning, the work that was, in the end, the same work — the work of closing the distance, of repairing the joint, of achieving the fusion that the first attempt had missed, the arc struck again, the metal flowing, the gap filling, the weld holding, the connection sound.