The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome Read Online Free Page B

hair back into a teacher’s strict bun and planted her thick tortoiseshell glasses on her straight nose. She was still young, and without the lips she always kept pursed, as if afraid of accidentally swallowing something, she might have been pretty. She came over to the bed, a thick novel in hand. David noted that she kept a finger in the book to mark the page. No, it wasn’t a novel—rather, some technical study or clinical report. Marianne never read fiction. She leaned over the young man, took his pulse with a finger on his jugular. David pushed her away.
    “How is it?” he whispered, pointing to the object struggling under the sheets. “Tell me.”
    Marianne shrugged and picked up a metal box from the floor. It was like a steel coffer for transporting cash. A complicated lock kept it shut.
    David, trying once more to rise up on an elbow, begged, “Describe it to me—”
    “Please,” Marianne cut him off sharply. “Stop acting like a first-time mother. This second phase of the operation in no way involves you. You know quite well that mediums are advised against maintaining the slightest emotional connection with their products. Close your eyes and let me do my work.”
    Deftly she lifted the covers, grabbed the thing, and slipped it into the steel box. Its lock clicked like a gun being cocked. When she dropped the sheet again, David saw she was wearing gloves of surgical rubber. He strained to hear a cry, a whimper, some tiny sob from the coffer, but there was nothing. They were said to bemute, to neither speak nor sing, but how could you ever really tell? Marianne came and sat beside him for his checkup.
    “You were bleeding,” she said coldly, wiping around his mouth and chest. “I’m getting the feeling that materialization is becoming harder and harder for you. And your object was quite small.”
    “But is it beautiful?” David asked, pushing away the blood-flecked compress.
    “I’m not authorized to evaluate the artistic qualities of dream objects,” the young woman replied at once. “I simply see to the medical side of the work. Relax, and let me do your physical. Did you feel any pain on waking?”
    “No,” David lied, “the ascent wasn’t any harder than usual.”
    Marianne pursed her lips in annoyance. She hated diving slang. Words like
ascent, decompression, deep-sea
made her furious. In her small, precise handwriting, she set about noting her patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, reflexes. Atop the medical chart he could read:
David Sarella. Medium materializing ectoplasms of persistent duration. Date of entry into service …
    How many days had she spent in the apartment, waiting for him to emerge from sleep, to … “ascend”? Every time David decided to dive, she came over with her baggage, her severe-looking raincoat, and camped out on the very premises of the operation. That little black suitcase of hers—how he loathed it! The well-waxed suitcase of a priest, a plainclothes nun. He knew she always brought sheets, never trusting the cleanliness of his own. She would set up shop with her outmoded travel clock, probably passed down from some provincial aunt, her toiletries, her littleslippers in their embroidered pouch. She perched the edges of her buttocks on the edges of chairs, eating with her own cutlery, drinking from a silver tumbler engraved with her initials. David had the hardest time picturing her sleeping in the guest room. Did she circle the bed for hours before deciding to go to sleep, an eye out for germs swarming in the folds of the pillowcase? As he, the professional dreamer, lost consciousness, she was free to come and go as she pleased in the old apartment: opening drawers, leafing through old letters, examining photos. She probably conducted her sneaky little rummagings with her fingertips, hands carefully gloved in surgical rubber, for fear of disturbing some virus dozing in the corner of a shelf.
    As usual, David began in a glum voice to recount the twists