If a tiny baby is submerged beneath the water, it can breathe. Through hard training and psychological determination, it is possible to breathe there again. That is what his father told him long ago.
’Obsession’, a short story by Daisy Johnson
If a tiny baby is submerged beneath the water, it can breathe. Through hard training and psychological determination, it is possible to breathe there again. That is what his father told him long ago.
He believes, without even an instance of doubt, that humans evolved from aquatic apes who did not hunt on the plains but gathered oysters, urchins, mangrove crabs and periwinkles from the shallows.
This evolution explains the hairlessness of humans, their webbed fingers and toes, their preference for copulation lying down.
Within each person there is hidden aquatic potential.
The water is soft and white with limestone, the bed of the quarry has cracked open, and it is possible to swim down and down and down, although they do not know how deep it goes. The morning light is waxy and yellow.
The sides of the quarry rise like skyscrapers and along the stony beach the film crew occupy tents and portacabins. For the diver, there’s a green houseboat on the surface of the water; it is here that he sleeps.
In the mornings he can be glimpsed atop the flat roof, near to naked, moving through his paces, steam rising from his chest; from his feet where they touch the freezing roof; from his curved open mouth, misting the glass of the goggles atop his head.
A morning god, capable, they say, of swimming down 200 meters without air, into the freezing depths where no one should go, where no one but he dares to go; and he will do it here, for the film, if only they can catch it.
He comes, afterwards, in his frayed, white dressing gown, to the catering tent. There are men in hats and black parkas breaking the ice on the water with long poles. There are metal trays of steaming baked beans and over-easy eggs, conveyer-belt-machines of toast, urns of coffee.
If the aquatic ape were among them, suddenly, there, at the plastic trestle table — beside the costume designer sewing even as he cuts his omelette, the actress painting her creamy toenails, the assistant director going back for thirds, the teenage bride with her sunken eye hollows creeping in and then out again — what would he eat from the strips of congealing bacon, the rows of sausages? The diver, unembarrassed, eats like the dolphins. Off menu.
Knuckling the spines out from sardines, leaning thoughtfully forward to sever the muscle holding the oysters in their shells. In the long vase of his throat there is the truth of this doomed place, this accursed film. The assistant director gazes at the diver’s exposed neck as he eats and does not see the future, sees only the beauty of the diver’s skin, translucent and silvery, and feels a crashing of lust, almost too much to bear.
The actress watches the diver too and is revolted by the column of spine and gullet. Who wants to swim?
Who wants to be able to breathe in the darkness? She wants to run through the doorway this film will open for her into the world. She does not care about the water, she does not care how far he can swim down, she does not care, even, if he comes back again. No one speaks directly to the diver. He sits in a little cave of silence and they look at him and wonder what he is thinking. Is he thinking about the water? It is said he thinks only and always about the water.
The catering tent becomes busier and busier. They eat their breakfast and they stare openly at the diver whose dressing gown has parted at the collar, revealing the smooth ceramic of his skin, they lust after him, they dream of becoming him, they are glad they will not be called upon to swim. Without warning the clouds tumble out of the sky and cover the quarry. The air is wet and seething. It is possible to see only the flash of lights, sudden expulsions of human forms colliding with one another.
Even sound seems muffled in the density, voices far away and then, slap, bang, up close.
The director comes out of his cabin where he has been working all night, writing feverishly, eating nothing.
He puts on his thin glasses but there is nothing to see.
He calls out into the fog. To me, he calls, to me, his voice becoming vicious with necessity. To me, to me. He is the lighthouse now. They stumble their way towards him, linking arms with other lost souls, following the beacon of his words. He puts his hands in his pockets to keep his clever important fingers safe from the moistening air. There is a conference. How has this happened? It was not forecasted; we could not have predicted.
The director does not believe in randomness, in chaos, in a life unknown. He believes in the power of his own voice to cleave aside this sudden derelict fog. To me, he calls, and the film crew keep gathering closer.
To me, he calls, and the actress comes to his side, takes his outstretched hand. We will persevere, he says to them, and then, casting his eyes out to the place where he knows the crevice opens up beneath the surface: tomorrow.
There is nothing to do but wait. It is possible that the film camera can see inside of them, can discern their thoughts and worries, perhaps even their souls; but it cannot see into this fog.
The director gathers a close crowd in his personal rooms and turns the lights up high to banish the unease among them. The director is a cautious man who has had many violent stalkers and so there is an elaborate locking system on the trailer doors and windows, a series of codes, which he activates now.
They drink wine from his own fridge and listen as he speaks quietly from the centre of the room, turning to take in their gazes. At times he calls upon the actress to rise and act out something that he wants to make clear to them.
Look, he says, I am the actor and she is the camera, look how she is high now and then low down, look how quickly she moves, this is how we will film it. He kisses the actress on the cheek in thanks and speaks to her in her mother tongue, praising her.
