The Appointment

A sea story found in a (digital) bottle [Disclaimer: it's fictional, and I'm fine]

Dear friend,

I haven’t gotten in touch for a while now, but it’s not because of my health, as these stupid doctors claim. They say that I hallucinate, that I believe my nightmares are real. 

They don’t know what happened. And I haven’t got in touch with you because I believed that no one in the world should know.

But now I decided to leave the choice to you, if you can believe that truth can lie within a sick man’s hallucinations.

They are not hallucinations, they are memories. My memories.

Memory can be a curse, I know. I know, as I wish I could forget, and I can’t.

Everything began with a scuba dive.

It was a beautiful one but it was over.

My dive buddy was low on air, he was one of those chain smokers, junk food addicted, who think of themselves as sportsmen for never missing a match on TV. For some inexplicable reason they believe that they must dive underwater, just to shorten their unfortunate buddies’ dives using too much air.

We ascended among the vertical clouds of other divers’ bubbles and we stopped under our boat.

The safety stop was slow but it didn’t bother me, when you enjoy something you manage to savor even separation as part of the experience.

My buddy signaled that he wanted to go up, I replied with the OK sign, and while he ascended I stopped for one last moment to look down.

I always did it, that last glance into the blue was a ritual appointment, my promise to return.

I looked down into the blue. And I saw her.

She was looking up, her eyes reflected the surface light, shining like tiny mirrors. Her hair was fair but it looked like a shade of blue and it floated like seaweed framing her beautiful face.

We made eye contact for a moment.

Her purple lips stretched and I saw her teeth flashing in a smile.

Then, in an instant she flipped and her tail thrust her down, into the deeper blue.

Don’t ask me what I thought, or what I felt.

I just remember that I dove straight down, down without thinking, without listening to the hysterical beeping of my dive computer, without turning to not see my buddy’s desperate signals.

I only tried to not lose sight of what I could still see of her, a blurred blue shadow swaying rhythmically, like enjoying her own fluid movements. I couldn’t even see her shape anymore, just a slightly different shade in the increasingly dark blue filling my mask.

I don’t know how deep I went, at one point the computer stopped giving numbers, I was out of range, you know.

I remember that the bottom of the underwater cliff was 60 meters deep and I didn’t hesitate to go deeper when I could still see her.

When everything was near dark, with nothing else but black water around me, I lost her.

I kept frantically going down, raging with frustration for losing her, then I looked around until my eyes hurt. I looked at the dive computer and suddenly I realized what I had done.

I realized that I would die, that at such depth there were no hopes of decompression.

I touched my head and felt that the water pressure had squeezed my wetsuit so much that I could feel my hair through the hood, I kept inflating the BCD just to not sink.

Then, perhaps it was my eyes adjusting to the darkness.

Whatever, while I gazed around in panic looking for some reference I thought I could see a dim light, a little deeper.

I was possessed again by the need to reach that creature and any fear or awareness was instantly forgotten.

 I swam towards the luminescence.

 Now you too will stop believing me, you too will say that it was just nitrogen narcosis hallucinations that I believe were real.

 I don’t know what to say, they’re reasonable explanations, but anyone who has felt extreme nitrogen narcosis knows that even when losing touch with reality, trained divers don’t see things that aren’t there.

 The luminescence came from inside a cave, bright enough to lighten the water around it.

 When I got closer I noticed that the cave was an opening in a structure as tall as a three storey building, with an actual tower on top of it, crowned by festoons of ripped nets swaying in the current like pennants.

 A cloud of strange fishes gathered around it, scared by the flow of my ascending bubbles. I remember that I thought of how much of my precious air was in those bubbles, at that pressure, but my only worry was that it left me little time to reach her. I didn’t think that they could be seen at the surface.

 Would I remember all this if I was intoxicated to the point of hallucinations?

 I entered the gate and the luminescence enveloped me .

Everything inside was bright, phosphorescent, the color of my watch hands.

Nah, I know what you expect me to say, but there were no trident-armed mermen guards at the gate.

But there were thousands of fishes, of the most bizarre and unusual shapes and colors , unlike anything I had ever seen in the sea, more fantastic than any tropical reef.

I swam across what looked like an atrium, raising a thin luminescent dust, and entered a small open door.

I was not dreaming, because not even in my wildest dreams I could have imagined what I saw.

I was in a hall, at least fifty meters long, fully lit with phosphorescence. The water was as clear as glass.

Two lines of columns stood at least six meters tall on both sides of the hall, covered with marine life, decorated with festoons of incredibly colorful corals and anemones, teeming with unknown and unlikely forms of life.

 I swam along the hall, between the colonnades.

At its end, there wasn’t a throne with some seaweed-bearded Neptune to greet me. There was a stair, an actual stairway, made to support the weight of human feet.

Weightless, I swam up the steep stairs and suddenly I surfaced.

I was in an air pocket, a dry cave filled with air and with the strongest luminescence.

I took down my mask and spitted the regulator, finally breathing freely. I filled my lungs with that metallic tasting air, looking around. Strangely, I was not cold at all.

The walls were so bright that they looked like mother-of-pearl.

I got rid of the scuba unit, took off my fins and walked. The floor creaked and something cracked under my boots: it was completely covered with sea shells, crab claws, fish bones. It felt like the inside of an octopus’ lair.

Then something quickly moved behind me: it was her!

Before I could turn, she had disappeared behind a darker corner, crawling on the floor.

I rushed behind her and switched my lamp on.

She turned and looked at me.

If it was a hallucination, I would have the choice not to believe my own eyes.

She was naked, but her scaled skin had the pale color of chemical burns, her greenish hair looked like wet locks of dead seagrass.

Through those hair I could see a long neck where something that could only be gills were pulsing. Her legs were long and muscular but they were like merged together and instead of feet they ended with flat, elongated stubs.

Her eyes, those eyes, they were staring at me, eyes as watery and dazed as a dead fish's eyes.

I was not inebriated, because as soon as I saw I understood.

I turned back and ran to the stairway.

I frantically took the scuba on, I strapped my mask and fins back on and I jumped into the water.

I had dropped the lamp but it didn’t matter.

A minute earlier I was ready to die to spend a moment with that creature, now I would rather die than seeing her again.

Now that I got it.

Centuries old fantasies had cloaked the reality before my eyes like a Rorschach cloud. Now the cloud suddenly dissipated and I needed to escape that insanity.

I swam back among those columns -columns!- trying not to think of the evil lurking inside, now that I knew what they were. I crossed the portal and I plunged into darkness, heading as far as possible from the luminescence. The luminescence, the heat, those deformed fishes that I had mistaken for fabulous creatures, that colossal tower. Yeah, the tower. While ascending I realized that there were numbers on its side but I couldn’t read them. How could I have been so blind? Those “columns”, the missile room in the wreck of a nuclear submarine wreck, lost at sea ages ago.

The radiation would kill me, but I needed to go up anyway, to see the sun again, to leave that horror buried in the deep. My air gauge was near zero now, I would not make it swimming.

Knowing that I would die anyway made the decision easy.

I released the weight belt swimming up like crazy and the BCD started lifting me.

It was working but when I felt that I was ascending, it was without thinking that I turned to give that usual last glance into the deep, the ritual that made the return to the surface feel temporary.

And there she was.

She was ascending with me, effortless, looking straight at me and if those empty eyes had an expression it was one of surprise and curiosity.

I screamed and swam up faster, towards the faint blue light at the surface that I could finally see. I was almost there when I turned again, and she was still there, almost mocking me, slowly waving that long slender thing that I had taken for a tail.

I forced myself to look up to the surface, the blue sun, but my blood froze when three dark shapes darted between me and the light.

They were dolphins.

I had never met them underwater before and, as crazy as it might sound now, I thought I was dreaming.

But the creature beside me saw them too.

She uttered a wild cry of joy -I felt it!- and whooshed straight after them.

I looked down horrified when she reached them, just while I reached the surface. It was somehow blasphemous to see that abomination contaminating dolphins’ perfection.

But unlike me, the three cetaceans happily joined her. The last image that I remember, before the surface light blinded me, was of her weightless dance with the dolphins. Then everything went dark.

I have only blurred memories of what happened later.

I remember being blinded by the light, the bitter taste of my cough, the full BCD’s constriction.

And then the bovine and panicked look of my dive buddy babbling something, the icy oxygen flowing into my lungs, the torment of gravity, an ambulance’s sirens, the long silence in the decompression chamber.

Somehow they saved my life.

They told me that I had surfaced more than a mile from the boat, they only noticed me because I was in the middle of a group of dolphins, jumping and flipping like trying to attract their attention. I didn’t have the heart of asking if they noticed anything strange about one of those dolphins.

I didn’t talk of the creature but I told them of the submarine.

The Navy sent a ship and they surveyed the area. They found nothing.

I can’t blame them for not believing me.

The MRI to check the brain damage from the decompression sickness found something else too.

They said that this explained hallucinations and false memories. There was no trace of radioactivity and it was already in a very advanced stage, which left no room for other explanations.

I don’t know what to say. And I don’t know if my illness was caused by radiation or if they’re right about it too. But I know that I wasn’t hallucinating.

Perhaps the submarine’s reactor core is sheltered by the hull or perhaps I drifted farther than the Navy thought. The sub must have been lost in some Cold War top secret mission, probably nobody ever knew for sure what happened. But certainly no nuclear power would admit to having lost a missile armed sub in foreign territorial waters after decades.

Some of the crew must have survived the reactor accident in air pockets like the one I entered, perhaps long enough to procreate a deformed child -perhaps even more than one. I don’t know, I can only try to imagine an explanation.

But now, in my condition, imagining explanations feels different. I keep thinking of the creature I met down there, of the delusional expectations that drove me to the deep, of my childish horror when I had to face the unpleasant reality. More than anything, I am haunted by that last image of her, by the dolphins’ perfection indistinguishable from her deformity while they played together.

My perception of her as an abomination was driven more by disappointment than the realization of what unspeakable evil had spawned her. Unlike us, she was as innocent and in a way as perfect as the dolphins, which recognized her as one of their own.

She lived the life of mythological beings created by our subconscious desires and she looked happy.

I told you already that I don’t expect you to believe me, I don’t know what I would think in your place.

But I know what I will do.

Every day I feel weaker but I won’t wait idle.

Before I lose my strength, I’ll get my diving gear and my boat and I’ll go back there.

The Navy couldn’t find the place but I know how to get there.

 I won’t anchor the boat, I won’t let them find her, I won’t let them hurt her further.

Maybe I will be able to stay down there too. Maybe the radioactivity will affect me too, maybe it will heal me.

Maybe I’ll see her again.