– who then came toward me with a syringe in his hand.
I watched with horror as the needle went into my arm. Soon I would be unconscious, or worse.
“Allison!” I shouted. “Higgs boson. You’ve got to find out what sitar music has to do with Higgs boson! Somehow sitar music is the key.”
Then all was darkness.
I awoke lying on a narrow bed in a small space, dimly lit. I was right up against a steel wall that seemed to curve up over me. This must be a prison cell, I thought.
I tried to recall the events that had transpired before I blacked out, but whatever they’d injected me with had left my memory foggy. Had that been deliberate? Had they tried to erase my memory of…of whatever had gone on?
Only after sitting up did it occur to me that my hands were no longer bound. Why would I expect my hands to be tied down?
A swift tapping came from somewhere nearby. I looked around, blinking, then noticed that most of the light in the little area was coming from a circular panel in the wall opposite where I’d been lying. The tapping sound also came from that direction. I moved closer to the disk of light and, as my eyes focused, I realized that I was looking at Allison through a small, round window. This time, she was smiling.
The hum of a motor and a long, low hiss came from somewhere to my left, and more light spilled into my little cell. A woman I didn’t recognize entered and came toward me. She wore a lab coat and had a stethoscope hanging over her shoulder. She was young, no more than thirty, with a round, pretty face and wavy, jet black hair tied back.
“I’m Doctor Torres,” she said in the accent of a Spanish speaker. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m….” I had to stop and think about the answer. “I’ve got a headache, and my stomach doesn’t feel so hot.”
She smiled. “That’s to be expected. You’ll feel much better in a few hours. You’re very lucky. It doesn’t look like there’s any lasting damage. You probably didn’t even need to come to the recompression chamber, but your wife and the dive master thought it best to be safe, so they brought you here.”
“Here?”
“You’re still in Cozumel, Mr. Edwards. And will be for several more days, as I understand it. We’ll just keep you here for another few hours, and then you can go back to your hotel and enjoy the rest of your vacation. I don’t advise any more diving on this trip, but you can still snorkel anytime. There’s no nitrogen buildup from that.”
I looked through the little round window at Allison. Someone had just shown her how to turn on an intercom.
Doctor Torres reached in front of me and pressed a button next to a small speaker below the window.
“Merry Christmas, darling.” Allison said. “It’s almost midnight. Christmas is in about twenty minutes.”
I shook my head, trying to make sense of what she had just said. Allison began to explain things.
Apparently we’d been just coming to the end of a drift dive along a nearly vertical reef, about to begin surfacing. Allison and I had paused to look at a spectacular flame scallop when my camera strap broke. The camera, my most prized possession in the world by far, had gone bouncing down the steep slope of the reef and out of sight, and I had followed.
Allison had waited for me, keeping an eye on the other divers – there were six of them, including the dive master, Sanders, whose name I had twisted into ‘Slasher.’ They were riding a pretty fast current. On a drift dive, you really have to keep up with the group; if you get separated, you could easily get lost and end up surfacing much farther from the boat than you want to be. So Allison was growing concerned.
After I’d been out of sight for a couple of minutes, my wife decided to come looking. When she finally spotted me, her depth gauge read 130 feet, and I was at least twenty feet farther down – way too deep for a recreational dive. I waved at her as though nothing was wrong, and when she motioned for me to ascend with her, I apparently got distracted and swam off, following a procession of blue chromis, and soon I was out of sight.
“I was worried that neither of us would have enough air left,” she said, “so I went in search of Sanders. He was already sending the other divers up to the surface. I pointed him to where I last saw you, and he started down right away. I followed him for a while, but then he started waving my air pressure gauge in my face and gestured that I had to go back to the surface right away. He had a reserve tank and I didn’t, so I couldn’t go along with him to find you.”
“You went back to the boat?”
“Yes.”
“But I remember seeing you several times, always from a long distance off.”
“I was watching for you from the surface,” she said. “As soon as I got the tank off my back, I jumped back in the water with just my mask and snorkel. One of the other divers got back into the water with me, probably to make sure I wouldn’t do something stupid, like try and free-dive down and look for you. You remember John? Young guy with blond hair and beard? Traveling with his wife?”
“Yeah, sure.” My most recent memory was of his reflection in a mirror, next to Allison’s, in someplace horrible. “So…let me guess, I was out of my head with nitrogen narcosis?” I said.
Allison nodded. “Sanders says that’s almost guaranteed if you stay at those depths very long without NItrox or one of those other special blends. You might as well have been back in your college dorm, huffing laughing gas with your stoner friends. They say the experience is just about the same. And Charlie, you went down at least a hundred ninety feet before he finally caught up with you. We figure that once you lost your orientation, you kept going deeper, and that just made it worse”
Sanders appeared beside her, smiling.
“Actually, that was my depth when I first spotted him,” Sanders said. “He was down past two hundred, easily, when I reached him.” He chuckled. “God almighty, you gave us a scare. Honestly, with the currents down there, I really didn’t expect to find you. I figured if anyone ever saw you again, it’d be days later, as a floater.” He was shaking his head and grinning at the memory. “And when I did find you, you had the regulator out of your mouth and were talking to the bloody gorgonians. I’d stick the thing back into your mouth, and within thirty seconds, you’d spit it out again and try to swim away from me.”
“And once we got you back on board,” Allison added, “you grabbed the nearest regulator and wouldn’t let anyone tear the thing out of your mouth. From the little bit of your babbling we could understand, it sounded like you thought the regulator was a bottle of beer. You didn’t calm down until we put you on pure oxygen.”
Sanders said, “The only time you seemed at all concerned about the situation was when I finally caught up to you, down past 200 feet. That’s when you started to swim into a cave, and just as you got to the mouth of it, a great bloody moray eel stuck its face right in yours. Big bastard he was, pale green, with a head the size of a honeydew. Just about then you finally decided that up would be a better direction than further down.”
“And what was it you said about the coral heads?” Allison asked him.
He laughed. “You know how sometimes the coral heads are so much bigger at the top than at the bottom that two of them actually form arches? Well, there was one time, going up along the slope of the reef, when you absolutely had to swim through one of those arches. Couldn’t get you to just ascend; you insisted on swimming under. Even when your tank got stuck on the way through, you still absolutely refused to back up. I had to free the tank and push you through, and you ended up doing a couple of somersaults through the water. As soon as you recovered, you started putting your ear to the tube sponges, one after another, as if you were listening. And you were waving your hands like you were conducting music!”
A Christmas carol played faintly in my memory.
Another male voice joined them, asking, “How’s our patient?”
The pianist appeared behind Allison and Sanders. I now recognized him as Marco, who had piloted the dive boat. I had a
vague recollection of him, before the dive, giving me a contemptuous look when I was slow putting on my fins. I had stumbled, holding up the line of people waiting to get into the water. ‘Goddamned inept city-slicker college boy’ had been the message I had read into that look, but I’d probably just been overly self-conscious. Small wonder I’d thought of him when the eel confronted me. He seemed good natured enough now, though.
Up here on dry land, Marco spoke perfect English with a slight Mexican accent, and didn’t talk like Lee Marvin at all, although there really was a visual resemblance. He looked and sounded as though he’d been celebrating with a bit of libation. And he was dressed as Santa Claus.
“Were you down there with Sanders?” I asked him.
Marco shook his head. “He went down alone.”
I looked at him, puzzled. “You weren’t there? But I thought I saw….”
Sanders laughed. “Like I said when we first pulled you up onto the boat, I’m sure you thought a lot of things while you were down there. I’ve seen the rapture before, but man! Never such a heavy case of it as you had.”
“Tell him about the buoy,” Allison said.
Sanders threw back his head and laughed again. “Aw, yeah, that’s right! That bloody buoy. See, there’s this buoy that marks the end of the drift dive. It’s white, a little bigger than a basketball, and covered with algae, with a lot of seaweed