What We Lost in the Dark
“Oh,” I said. “So it shouldn’t be that bad, if you’re fit. And we’re pretty fit.”
“If it was just your heart and your lungs and your legs, and your flexibility and your strength, it wouldn’t be bad at all,” Wesley said.
“What else is there?” Rob guessed. “Your ears?”
“What’s between your ears. It’s all about your head. Because the fear factor is real. You have a whole lot more oxygen in you than you realize, but if you start to freak out, your body is going to demand to breathe. You have to overcome the buildup of carbon dioxide that makes you want to … well, gasp for breath. Any person in good shape can endure apnea for two minutes or more. But after that, when your body tries to take over, it’s a head game.”
Rob nodded. “That’s why people hyperventilate before they free dive. I saw it in a French film.”
“You watched a French film?” I said. “You watched a French film about diving? Because knowing you, the only kind of French film you’d watch …”
“I’m a cultured person,” Rob replied, batting his long lashes at me. “These divers were world champions. And they basically huffed and puffed multiple times …”
“That was a movie. Divers do that if they’re extremely stupid instead of just extreme, if they want to die,” Wesley said. “You can throw off carbon dioxide that way but you risk an SWB.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“A shallow water blackout,” said Wesley.
I asked the obvious, as I was slipping into the blade-like fins as long as my arm. “Why did it happen in shallow water, like … why would you fall in the last part of the race?”
“The body is tired. You’re depleted mentally. And there are other science reasons.”
Wesley’s use of terms like “other science reasons” didn’t exactly inspire soaring confidence. The side of the ledger with black marks ticking off Ways I Definitely Do Not Want to Die began filling up.
“You can have a deep water blackout, too. Either way, you just drown.”
Hmmm.
Either way, you drown. For every point in the ledger of going water wacky with my beloved, there were now ten points in the other column.
Wesley smiled. “That’s why you’re supersafe when you free dive for more than a couple of minutes. That’s why you have someone with scuba gear to check you out as you go down, and stay with you. No one’s going to let you drown, Allie.”
Hmm. This removed maybe … one black mark.
Lake Superior’s Titanic-sinking coldness was actually to our advantage. If you put your face in a bowl of cold water, or even splash cold water on your face, your heart rate and circulation slows, because of this evolutionary inheritance called the mammalian diving reflex. It’s the reason that small kids can sometimes be revived after long minutes at the bottom of a pool. In cold water, the need to breathe, at least the physical need, is actually decreased. I thought for a moment of the little boy in the shallow lake. That had been cold water; nobody was even supposed to be swimming. The fathers were fishing, hoping to catch dinner in water that was crisping at the edges with ice. It would have seemed such a simple matter for the older guy to jump in and pull the little kid out … how could the older boy have died so quickly in such cold water? With the family all there thrashing around? The mammalian body knows how to conserve the oxygen for the tissues that need it most—mostly the brain. Hence the autopsy, I guess … I dragged myself back to the water at hand.
Wesley was saying that if we were going scuba diving, we’d need dry suits to withstand the epic cold down there because we’d be cruising around, looking at the ribs of dead boats. But for a free dive, we’d only need ordinary wet suits, masks, and these huge blade-like fins to get us the farthest down with the least amount of kicking—which depletes oxygen.
For now, we just practiced sitting on the bottom of the pool with a weight belt on that wasn’t heavy enough to keep us from kicking to the surface. Which I did. I kicked to the surface after fifty seconds and air never felt so good.
“Rob must have unusually large lungs for his body size,” Wesley said, as Rob edged past a minute. “What he’s doing is what you have to do, Allie. You have to clear your mind to the edges.”
As if.
Another twenty or forty points in the Do-Not-Want-to-Die column.
As I stood there shivering and staring at Rob, sitting contentedly underwater, Wesley told me about a Russian diver, Natalia Molchanova, who could hold her breath for eight minutes. In 2009, she finally became the first woman to break the record of free diving a hundred meters (that’s more than three hundred feet, folks). She actually dived one hundred and one meters, just for insurance. According to Wesley, an American woman, Sara Campbell, had done it first. But Campbell didn’t get to keep her record. The rules say (and who made up these rules?) that you have to remain conscious for sixty seconds on the surface after you make your dive. Sara Campbell got back to the surface, took two breaths, and passed out.
Fifty more points in the No-Way-in-Hell column for that kind of anecdote.
“As breath holders go, Sara Campbell isn’t really great,” Wesley said. “Five minutes maybe.”
“What about you?” I asked, teasing, trying to avoid thinking about Rob, who had now gone over two minutes without breathing.
“Me? Three minutes maybe? I’m about the dive and what you see, not the immersion.”
Wesley reached into his pocket for his phone and showed me a picture of Sara Campbell at the bottom of the sea, wearing a dive suit that had a single huge fin. She looked exactly like a mermaid, but with a sleek hood and mask instead of the fabled flowing locks. She was looking straight at the camera, calmly. It was like one of those pictures where you try to find the hidden drawing of a shell or a ruler except instead of there being something there that shouldn’t be, there was something missing. People photographed at the bottom of the sea usually have on a breathing apparatus or are in agony or are obviously dead.
“If you read about Sara Campbell, she passes out pretty often,” he said, shoving his phone back in his pocket “She doesn’t really mind it. She says she kind of likes the feeling.” He paused. “She says that she thinks of being in an Alpine meadow. Puts a whole new perspective on death, doesn’t it?”
And ten more black marks in the Ixnay ledger.
“That woman who can do it for eight minutes? What does she think about?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Wesley.
“Like meditation?”
“No, really nothing at all. You have to be so still that some people free dive with their eyes closed.”
“Now, that sounds like a ton of fun.”
“Not for me, but they dig the concentration experience. Thinking about nothing is not easy,” he said. “Like, during meditation, you’re free. You can breathe or move. It’s only frustrating if you break out of your trance state.” Why had I ever doubted that Wesley was a meditator as well? He could probably meditate while holding Vrksasana. “When you free dive, if you break the focus, you don’t just get annoyed. You could get hurt.”
That we were able to have this whole conversation while my boyfriend was underwater, not breathing, seemed only to prove to me that Wesley was in his own trance state. Just when I felt I would scream, Rob finally surfaced, not even really lunging. He slapped the water as though he’d medaled in the 200-meter free.
I stretched out to kiss him. “I was a little scared, honey. How did you do it? What’s in it for you?”
“Power,” Rob said. “I have power over this body that’s always had way too much power over me.”
I never loved him more than right then.
SO, ALTHOUGH I wasn’t psyched the way I was with Parkour, I decided to start trying to build up my own—this sounds weird—daily apnea practice. I was ready to try something new, something that really did have nothing to do with Juliet or Garrett Tabor, or the death I encountered nightly at my volunteer job. There is something undeniable about the d
ream of youth, of being young. I saw it in Wesley’s eyes, the way he looked at us with wistful longing. You can store old pain that pulses new every day, like a solar cell—and, at the same time, spellbound by your own body and blood, you arch eagerly toward the future.
We agreed to come on Thursday and Saturday nights, when I didn’t work. Rob and I would start by sitting on the bottom, looking into each other’s eyes. Then we’d cruise back and forth on the bottom in the deep end, trying to expend as little energy as possible.
At first, I had to fight off hysteria.
Gradually, though, I learned to think of nothing, as Wesley had advised. Thinking of nothing refreshes you, although it is hideously hard doing it. Maybe it was a sort of trance state. The closest thing I can compare it to is hypnosis, which I’ve never experienced. Still, bit by bit, I grew to crave that power over my body that so beguiled Rob. We grew closer, with that sense of tribe we’d loved with Parkour—the supreme, almost smug, thrill of being us: close together and in the throes of something fierce. And I began to crave the real thing, beyond the pool.
Our nights assumed a kind of purposeful rhythm, based on the desire to dive in Lake Superior before school started again for me.
Wesley warned us: be patient. We wanted to be not ready, but more than ready, when we actually tried a deep dive. “The future comes soon enough,” he said.
If only it never had.
6
NIGHT LIGHTS
My twenty days of volunteer service ended.
I had, however, done a good job: the ultimate frozen lemonade made from the ultimate lemons of life.
With Dr. Stephen’s permission by proxy (he was still away in Bolivia), Bonnie hired me as a junior assistant, several nights each week until school resumed at the end of January, and then Friday and Saturday nights during the school year. It was good money, and while most girls wouldn’t want to spend four hours of their weekend nights in a morgue, I wasn’t most girls.
“I told you good would come from this,” my mother said.
“I would have rather had it come on a different train,” I told her.
Still, it wasn’t all bad. Bonnie was smart and kind, as was mortuary Melissa, whom Rob referred to as Morticia. I loved the awe-inspiring poignancy and responsibility that came with answering questions the dead would ask, if they could. Bonnie taught me practical things, such as all the things that petechia could mean, from mononucleosis to alcoholism to lupus to death by strangulation, and how those things sometimes got mixed up. She taught me that hydrogen cyanide can be very hard to detect after death, unless the investigators find residue. A man who had moved to Iron Harbor with his wife from China had slowly poisoned himself accidentally by ingesting arsenic. Over the course of years he had eaten great quantities of rice grown near arsenic-contaminated wells. His wife was fine. She simply didn’t like rice.
Each morning, after I got off work and before we went to sleep, together or separately (both our parents politely looked the other way), Rob and I trained. We did yoga, for balance, strength, and concentration. We did “apnea walks,” to teach ourselves to cope sanely with the feeling of oxygen deprivation. We’d do a big “breathe-up,” (or filling a lunger), followed by a short breath and hold, all at rest. Still holding our breath, we would then walk as far as we could until we absolutely had to breathe. Since both of us were athletes, we could go almost a hundred yards that way, our muscles getting more and more accustomed to working without oxygen.
We also ran and sang, simultaneously. We’d learned that this was a good way to build your lung capacity.
Down the back roads of Iron Harbor, up onto the ridges, past the unoccupied summer houses, we ran, sometimes on crusts of snow that melted away in the still freakishly warm winter weather. We sang our way through classic Motown, newer Motown, old ABBA, even older CCR, anything with a beat that required holding a note, from Boston to Beyoncé to Bruno Mars. Finally, we worked our way up—or down, if you want to look at it that way—to show tunes. That didn’t last long. Garret Tabor didn’t hang around anymore very much, but he would show up some nights unexpectedly at the medical examiner’s office. One night, I heard him whistling “The Sound of Music,” and I knew it was meant to telegraph to me that he knew what Rob and I were doing. That very thought was appalling. Did he watch me all the time?
NOT LONG AFTER that night, about four in the morning, we were running on Shore Road. We were past Tabor Oaks, down on one of the little beaches along that same stretch of highway, when Rob quietly put his hands on my arm.
“Stop running and be quiet,” he said. “Just fade back behind that little bit of birch and look over there.”
Far to our left, we could see what appeared to be a diver.
There could not be another human being as melon-ball nuts as Rob and me. What was somebody doing out in the lake alone in the middle of the night? It wasn’t a rescue diver, because there were no lights or vans or any other equipment set up. And who ever dived alone? Crouched quietly, we watched the distant person make what Rob called a shore entry (the other kind of scuba entry, which was tipping backward or taking a big scissor walk out of a boat) and slip away into the dark water. The only sign of the person was a series of lighted flats that were presumably tethered to buoys. We watched for a long time, but our heated-up muscles were starting to knot up painfully, and even in winter, night doesn’t last forever. So we turned and jogged back to Rob’s Jeep and headed toward home and a hot soak before sleep.
THE NEXT NIGHT, at the pool, I was mermaiding along the deep-end bottom when suddenly, it hit me like a piano dropped from the penthouse.
Rob thought I was in trouble when I started pointing to the surface like a crazy person, dragging on his arms, finally pinching him.
When we broke the surface, I gasped, “I know where he keeps them! That was him! That’s where they are!”
Although he knew what I meant, Rob had a cooler head than my own. “Okay, sure. Allie, I’ll think that over.”
“Think it over? We have to go down there!”
Wesley appeared at the side of the pool. “What? You guys find buried treasure?”
Rob said, “Oh, no, man. It’s nothing. Just … some things we lost in the dark one night.”
7
THINGS YOU’D RATHER NOT KNOW
That night, as we drove home from the Y, we were both tired and famished. Swimming hunger makes you deranged: I could have killed a deer and roasted it on the hood of the car. I wanted to curl up at 9 P.M. with my blankie in the middle the night like some Daytimer. Still, my realization at the bottom of the pool had opened a pure adrenaline IV. Had I tried to lie down for a nap, all my conjectures would have kept on gyrating around the ring in my brain like electrons in a synchrotron until I glowed.
Most stereotypes are obnoxious, but a few have earned the gold standard of truth. One is that girls do talk more than guys do. Our brains seem to issue press releases every few minutes whether we like it or not. It’s our way of trying to figure out the trajectory of the universe so that we can alter it. Girls firmly believe this is in our power, whether it requires intellect, pure force, stealth, or berry lip stain. Rob once told me that guys don’t talk as much because guys are here now, in the present—like Zen-ing. They’re watching the passing parade. He said that men think of the universe and time like an escalator. They’re on it, and it’s either going up or it’s going down, but they can no more control its course than they can see who’s running the machine. Any girl would consider that foolishness.
So, as soon as Rob and I got into the car, he wanted to talk food and I wanted to talk homicide. Crackling with frustration, I waited until we were in Rob’s mother’s kitchen.
Soon, we had assembled double-stuff pimento cheese and pickle sandwiches and potato soup so thick it was like a colloid, and I then became absorbed with my stomach’s primal demands. When those were satiated, and we’d gone up to Rob’s place, Rob got interested in other primal demands and was persistent and s
killful enough so that those demands became urgent for me, as well.
AFTERWARD, LYING UNDER the sweep of stars in bed, it would have been so easy to dismiss all that nasty jazz about cold and watery tombs. But Rob didn’t love me just for my body. Although my preoccupation with other people’s, the blue-white and decomposing kind, wasn’t a particular attraction.
“Hey you,” I said. “What Wesley said about the structure, all those sunken boats?”
“What?” he mumbled.
“Rob! That’s where he hides things. People. Dead bodies. That’s Tabor’s stash. He was that diver. You know it.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Allie. If Tabor didn’t want to get caught, he’d scatter the bodies all over the hills. I hate to say this, but a part here and a part there—”
“No, no!” I broke in, sitting up under the covers. “Don’t think in terms of regular person sense. A regular person would think in a different way. That’s what they do. Serial killers like having a habitat. They visit their kills. They dig them up and sometimes they even …”
Rob actually paled. “If what’s coming is what I think is coming, do not go there. I don’t have your capacity for mayhem. I’m going to major in computer programming.”
I almost smiled. “Okay, but see my point? He was going to visit those corpses. So many of them do that. They’re driven to.”
“Allie, what I love about you is you’re just so damn cuddly, aren’t you? All roses and pink ribbons.”
“Pardon me. I didn’t know those were your expectations.”
“Let’s just let it go for a little while, Allie Bear. I just want a little nap.”
Juliet had called me Allie Bear. Rob might have thought he was pouring on the soothing syrup, but on this girl’s fire, it was lighter fluid.
I was desperate.
I got up and put on Rob’s shirt.
Here is another stereotype that may not bolster the image of young guys as fragile emotional beings able to conquer their desires in most circumstances, and yet it’s a stereotype that glows with authenticity. One hour after running the Death Valley marathon, a guy will stand to attention for a girl wearing his shirt over nothing else.