Chapter 2: Raptures of the Deep

All at once I’m in the kitchen getting ready for a dive. It’s like this when the infernal timer is abuzz in my brain; I move around in a fog. I decide to leave a note for Sol because she might arrive this morning as per the old schedule. {How can we be soulmates}, I write, {if I don't have a soul of my own?} I pin the note under a fridge magnet before I can chicken out.

Our slow falling-out is hurting both of us. The timer inside my head and my oneiric visions have given birth to a secret third presence. Like a fat black Buddha sitting cross-legged between Sol and I, it keeps growing and pushing us apart. But maybe that’s for the best. Sol awakens in people a thirst for life they never knew they had.

Sol; her skin baked to a golden-brown heaven so every time she smiles there’s the jarring contrast of pearly teeth. I can never resist freediving for those underwater gems that beckon for three-minute breath holds. A part-time influencer and full-time vet in an animal shelter, Sol’s Filipina with more than the average Spanish in her blood. She got ahead of her time when she bloomed bigger and faster than the other girls. It’s like she just woke up one morning a full-grown woman and had over the night outgrown and burst wider the skimpy Daisy Dukes she was wont to wear; but naturally most of her pairs had been bought pre-ripped. She gives as an excuse a special skin condition that exempts her like a malamute puppy in the tropics. And though it’s true she looks more at home on the beach than anywhere else, there should be a law against her walking around the hut in only her bikini, carrying two ice-cold bottles of beer, distracting and irresistible.

Sol’s a bit old-fashioned in her belief in soulmates, which I guess is a good thing for me except when she treats me like yet another rescue cat in her shelter. She can be ultra-altruistic too, only too willing to sacrifice her own happiness so I can search for mine. And I know she has a streak of the gothic in her from all the works of Radcliffe, Shelley and the Bronte sisters that she devours. This is what made her gravitate towards my music in the first place, when we were university students and I was still playing in Eve Serrated.  

But if she could be just one thing, Sol’s a secret stretch of beach one discovers through a crevice in the cliffs. On our dives together, I’d feel blissfully content to linger a while and just watch her rise back up to the surface. Her tiny belly grinding, her body hanging down amid sunbeams breaking through the veil is an affirmation from heaven, bringing tears to my eyes inside the goggles. Sol, my personal, spiritual hideaway.

I steer the motorboat to my favorite dive spot. It’s after the swift diffusion of morning and the light’s just now starting to get warm. I drop the anchor and turn off the engine. I go about the business of stab jacket, tank, wetsuit, weight belt, and mask. I find myself more methodical in my movements than usual.

As I dive through the surface, my breath’s stolen away by the world underneath. It’s too easy. I lose myself in the visual feast and long to coexist with its broken time. I touch the multi-hued coral reefs, glide with the manta rays, drop by a shipwreck frozen in time and just marvel at the vibrancy and color of life around me. Dives like this one make me believe that if I wished hard enough, I could grow gills.

After some time, the flashing light in my dive computer tells me decompression has started. The decision comes to me in a split-second: I tear off my mask and toss my regulator over my shoulder. Land’s the farthest place in my mind and there’s nothing remotely strange about the thought of giving up and accepting my fate. There aren’t any serious consequences for me, not even the possibility of losing my life and never seeing Sol again.

Once an eerie calm takes over, all sensations go through a sieve of extreme clarity. Every tiny experience becomes more vivid than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. It’s like my body had been transformed into this microphone tuned to a lone pair of lips. A veil has suddenly been lifted and I’m seeing the world exactly as it’s meant to be seen: raw and in all its terrifying splendor. I become a bystander to my own body, which is presently taking the greatest abuse.

I barely notice I’ve been holding my breath till the instinct for self-preservation kicks in. I dismiss the urge and resolve to break through my pain threshold. My eyes bulge and start to feel like pincushions.

When I inhale at last, saltwater freely enters my voice box. It cuts a burning path. I cough and swallow more. As my throat goes into spasm, involuntarily blocking the invasion of water, I begin to panic and feel my consciousness dimming. Through all the terror and chaos, there’s one myth I manage to prove for myself beyond the shadow of a doubt: flashbacks of my life flit inside my head.

I see the toddler orphans laughing at my antics… {a younger me playing the electric guitar and making a death growl… Sol smiling at me spotlit among the audience…}

{…as though she was the one performing I see…}

{…death not as an end but a beginning, like being born backwards}

The next thing I know I’m being dragged upwards. My mind’s protesting but my entire body’s limp.

{Must be one of those damned fishermen…! Sto—} 

Aboard a boat (mine? his?), my rescuer gives me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and tries to jumpstart my quiet heart. I have a very vivid image of him as an old man though, in my current state, it should be impossible for me to know this; nor the sensation of seawater dripping off his wizened face and all over me. Rather like the cartoonish slobber of a St. Bernard.  

After a while, the looming certainty of the outcome frustrates the old man and he delivers a mighty, perfectly vertical, all-knuckle blow to my left breast. Unfortunately, this last-ditch attempt still fails to clear my lungs of water. I realize with a confused sense of relief that I’ve crossed a point of no return, and a great icy coldness settles upon me.

The old man looks on horrified and shaky. At this precise moment, Death comes for me in earnest.

Now I can tell everyone from experience: Death’s made up of these black, amorphous yet consistently bird-shaped, fluttery things. Like iron fillings that bristle when you pass a magnet underneath them, their sharp edges and talons cut my skin. They mob and press me downwards and deeper, persisting till the bottom of the boat creaks.

These curious, amorphous birds are chattering inside my head in that oh so familiar entomo-mechanical chatter. My mind-breaking nightmare brought to life. As these Hell-spawned birds close in on me, the noise gets louder and louder till it’s a deafening roar. Despite my ice-cold terror and the spreading warmth of pee in my wetsuit, I laugh.