legends · 4 min read ·
Decompression
Two divers on a decompression stop see a helmeted figure rise on the line, and cut a hose that does not lead to the surface.
I have dived the *Corvina* nineteen times. She is a steamer, sixty-two metres, lying on her side at forty-six metres in cold green water off the north coast, and she is as good a wreck as the country has. You go down the shotline in a blue cold, and at thirty metres the hull appears below you like a long black ship in a drawing. You swim along her flank, over the portholes, past the winch. You look at what is left of the lives.
The thing nobody tells you about decompression is that it is boring and that boredom is a danger. At forty-six metres you have a bottom time of twenty minutes. Then you come up, and at six metres and three metres you hang there on the line, with a blue screen of water around you, for thirty or forty minutes, off-gassing nitrogen at the speed your blood allows. There is nothing to do. You look at your computer. You look at your buddy. You watch the sun move on the surface like a coin in a pond.
My buddy that day was Martin, who had been my buddy for six years. We had done the wreck together twice. He was a solid, quiet, bearded man who read the tables like scripture.
We finished the penetration of the aft hold, where the cargo was still stacked in rotted crates. At twenty minutes we began to ascend, along the line, with the long steady discipline of divers who have done it often. At twenty-one metres we paused. At twelve, we paused. At six, the real stop.
I watched the bubbles go up past me in silver strings. I breathed. The water was seven degrees. I watched Martin's regulator working. We had not spoken. Divers don't. We touched fingers when we wanted to check. We were in that peculiar peaceful haze you get at a stop, when the mind goes soft.
I looked down.
Below us, along the shotline, in the green dark, there was a diver coming up. I took it for another team on the same wreck. Strange, though. There was no light. There were no bubbles. He rose slowly and steadily, hand over hand on the line, in an old suit, a rubber one, with a brass helmet and a hose going up and up through the water above.
Martin saw him too. I saw him see. He put his hand on my arm and I felt it tighten, all through the thick neoprene.
The helmeted diver reached our depth and stopped. Politely, as one does. He hung on the line three metres below us, and his faceplate, a round brass window with a rim of green, was looking up. There was nothing behind the glass. Just water, as though the suit was a vessel being filled from below.
For a quarter of an hour we hung there. The computer counted: ten minutes, nine. I could not stop watching the diver. And little by little I saw that his hose went up, not to a ship, but to us. The line ran up past us and into the surface light, but wound once, loosely, round my own tank valve.
I looked at Martin. He had seen it too. He was shaking his head.
I want to say what I did next was brave. It wasn't. I took out my knife, a small steel blade strapped to my calf, and I cut the hose where it touched me. There was no resistance. It parted as easily as a strand of weed, and the free end drifted off into the green.
The helmeted diver turned his head to look. And he sank. Slowly, politely, back down the shotline into the dark, until the brass of the helmet was a gleam, and a speck, and gone.
We completed our stop. Neither of us touched the other again. At the surface the boat crew pulled us up, all grins, passing the weights, and the skipper said, "Good dive?"
"Yes," said Martin.
I said nothing. I took my mask off, and I rested my forehead on the gunwale, and breathed the real air, which tasted of diesel and salt.
It was only as we motored back that Martin sat down beside me with a coffee and said, very low, so the others would not hear, "The hose."
"I cut it."
"I know. I watched you do it. But it wasn't going up to a boat, mate." He had gone grey. "I followed it all the way to the surface with my eyes. It didn't go to a boat. It went up through the surface and out, into the air, and then it went on up into the sky."
He looked at me. "Whatever was at the other end," he said, "was breathing for him. And you've just cut him off."