From the Depths

Excerpt from the novel "For the Record"

30 feet under, your blood turns green. While most would argue that getting your hand cut at such a depth, with an eternal possibility of sharks sniffing around nearby is a most stupid idea, I beg to differ. It’s brilliant. You will never experience the whole range of feeling in the face of utter bewilderment as when you see the blood of your hands dripping out like seaweed gasping for air.

We live our lives knowing for a fact, beyond any doubt, without even questioning it, that our blood is red. So what am I, when I dive? Does my body liquefy and sea water corrupt its insides, its green painting me the way a colour-blind painter does? Are my arms twisted, without me feeling it? Are my eyes truly that easy to fool? Am I that easy to fool? Does 30 feet mean that much? I wouldn’t know, I measure everything in meters. On a cosmic scale, are 30 feet worth the shock they give a first-time diver, on his first injury?


Oceans are not mirrors, to be still and show you what you expect in every day of their perpetual shivers. Lakes might achieve a perfect surface, on windless dawns in mid-winter. The same way the ice freezes from cold, it can freeze in time and show you a side of it where you meet a new you on the other side of a very strange mirror.

Head down and body free, you only need a moment’s strain before the water helps you on your way down. Born in the right country to the right snobs, I may have had the chance to fly and float into space and feel my feet lose tension, feel my back relax for the first time in its ungrateful existence as the sole reason of my pains. But no money ever came for me to board a plane like that. And once I dived deep enough, I didn’t need it. All that depth, all that distance between you and surface, between you and earth, between the darkness and the nothingness below and the chance of light and air above. There are no mirrors in the ocean. Only for you to see them.

I was born on the wrong side of the mirror.

Smoke, fire, crashes, flight. There is nothing underwater faster than your eye. Light travels up to a point, then it’s just you and seeing and feeling and breathing. Underwater, you breathe in so deeply, you feel your lungs will explode. Wine never gives you such joy, whiskey never takes you that high. We drink the wrong stuff and smoke to make up for it, but it’s a deep breath a million miles underneath to salvage that tiny shred of innocence within you from the fires up above.

Yet the dark… I’d look ahead of me and see nothing to fix myself or set myself against. Nothing around with edges or curves or shapes that never changed. The kanji for curve has no curves; the deep waters have no shapes. The only places I could dive in were too deep for my eyes to see the bottom and it was thrilling, in a deathly way. I had a cord to keep me going straight and I pushed myself downwards, on and on, my eyes taking in the growing dark, pupils dilating and heartbeat slowing down. How incredible, for us dry frogs to be able to see the ocean in his coldness.

Nobody is there to tell you when to stop, when you have enough air to come back up, when it’s too cold or too deep or too dark and you should go back up, to safety. There’s no one. No one underneath the mirror. You go down and you don’t breathe, not yet. Your body turns to negative, your lungs are different from how you remember them and the water helps you slide, down and down, between layers and layers of gas with such strange connections. Maybe it’s plasma, so hot, it feels cold. Sometimes, your skin breaks open, blooming with shades of blue and green, veiling you in new waves of light the surface never sees.

And then you stop. You don’t have to, but a voice tells you to. Mine always does. My head always turns to the right and then I know something will come out of the never-ending veil of sand and salt. The water would change, currents would bash against my chest, passing through me. Easily. It’s hard to keep your shape when everything is shapeless. From the darkness, you hear a long call, the way lighthouses would tell sailors where they were, the way the guy you like whistles on the corridor. It’s calling to you, sound waves slowing down. You shouldn’t hear it, yet you do. It’s always closer to you than you’d like.

Then one after the other, you see them. Long layers of fish-bones, thick as your arms, longer and wider and taller than anything you thought could possibly exist. Then its head, its body, its tail. You see them barely, faintly, behind the head, so far away, you just imagine. Too much water in between. A whale breaking through the veil, watching you through sounds so short and tiny, you strain to understand. Its gigantic head fills your horizon and your eyes can’t look away, because there’s nothing else to look at.

It passes over you, hours and hours of oil and flesh and bones larger that a lion’s pride, cutting away the light, until you see just a silhouette, pressed against the sun. People dream of whales flying in the clouds. But they are flying. From a thousand feet below, their fins are leather-wings, their bodies unrefined products meant for speed against the wind. You can start climbing back up now. It won’t pass before you’re up.

So small you are. You’re smaller than a spec, you’re barely worthy of being a virus, a bacteria thrown out of its natural habitat. How dare you stand so close to it? Bow your head and let the water crush you, for above you looms the Voice of God.

A thousand years ago, I’d float a thousand feet below and watch the sun disappear behind the waves, the thin clouds of fish, the cumulus of tuna, the cumulonimbus of dolphins, the rain drops of sand. Too deep for sounds, everything was echo, resounding for the depths of the world, from the core of beings dead a million years. No words, no shapes, nothing with sense. You cannot cry underwater, you cannot be angry. Emotions are not wasted, time is numbered and felt and you cannot go away. I’d try to close myself in, but she wouldn’t come out. No switches, no fear, no memories. Water remembers shapelessly. Humans alone ruin that amorphous beauty with limits and contours. Why do I have to be only as much as my body? Why can’t I leave it to her, why am I the one with just one shape, an eternal mockery of my desire to be free?

Underwater, I would have laughed. I would have giggled and sobbed openly over it. Underwater, I could never bring myself to leave this body. For what’s more liberating that the sounds of a body at last in harmony with the echo of the world?