Down Deep

Michael took a deep breath through his mouthpiece. Backwards he tilted and backwards he went, falling off the edge of the boat as the sky became a topsy-turvey floor beneath his wide silicone fins.

Goosebumps of delight crawled up the back of his neck as the ocean swallowed him whole.

The act of scuba was not the source of his joy, though. This fourth and final dive off the northern Keys was a means to an end, and he knew in his bones that this was it. The first three projected dive sites had been empty. This was the One.

Gentle water currents pressed against his left side, soft and barely noticeable, and Michael glanced over to see Emilie had plunged in after him. Adjusting her goggles, she offered a friendly wave and pointed her thumb downward.

“Ready to descend?”

He shaped a careless okay with his left hand, “Yep, sure.”

His strong legs kicked, the fins making an amphibian of the man. Every few yards, his wetsuit second skin felt colder. He didn’t mind. The Atlantic waters were bracing. Numbing.

Something firm smacked his thigh. Michael’s shoulders twitched with a start. He glanced over. Emilie was signaling. Her eyes were wide behind her gear.

“We need to surface,” she gave him a thumbs up to indicate her desire to rise. Her chest heaved with the effort of survival. Catching up to him had been no small feat.

Michael shook his head to decline, “No. No safety pause.”

For their deep dive, a 3-5 minute resurface was recommended to reduce the chances of decompression sickness.

She pointed, emphatically, with both hands, index fingers stabbing through the suffocating water around them.

He didn’t bother to answer, but turned and swam deeper into the velvety blue below. Ten meters. Fifteen meters. A glance behind showed his girlfriend followed, trailing in the distance, against her better judgement.

Good. Extra hands. He could make use of her hands at the bottom.

At twenty meters, even Michael had to pause. His chest was burning, no longer cooled by the increasingly frigid water. After several long minutes, a floundering Emilie approached. Her pause was more a stillness, a floating in place, as she struggled to drag air from her tube to the base of her screaming lungs.

Michael was uninterested in her recovery. His eyes were drawn downward.

Within the inky depths, he could see a framework of darker shadows. To anyone else, that would have meant dunes, or a rocky sea cliff — maybe even the skeleton of a coral reef. He knew better. He knew what waited for him, what had been waiting for him for seven long years.

Hours pouring over French and Spanish survivor logs, creating computerized spaghetti models of 1715 hurricanes, and odorous evenings splashing in a urine-contaminated PADI certification pool. All his work had led to this trip. To this singular moment.

A button on his vest activated the flashlight on his headlamp.

It was rude, dangerous, even, to descend without asking if Emilie was ready. He didn’t look back, the yellow beam of light that guided the only permission he required. If he didn’t see her questioning gesture, the confused furrow of her eyebrow, he wouldn’t need to explain himself or apologize.

Later, there would be no need to make amends for his haste. Emilie would be stunned by what he would offer her. She would fall at his feet and cry.

Everyone would.

An aching pressure built in both ears.

Thirty meters. Another pause.

His arms and legs felt noodle-like as he floated, suspended in place. He knew this was a deeper, more strenuous dive than he had trained for. He had assured the Captain of the boat, and Emilie, that they would only swim around a bit off the beaten path. Look for some pink Parrotfish without other divers crowding them out.

No need to go all the way to the sea floor. That would be deranged.

Emilie sluggishly swam alongside Michael, struggling to coordinate her own limbs. This was not the fun tropical dive that tourism videos had promised. It certainly wasn’t the romantic, isolated moment Michael had described to her on the flight down.

There would be no proposal written on a whiteboard, some deep sea photographer hidden behind a pile of kelp. They floated in place, a few feet away from one another, but truly the distance was greater than that. She was furious with Michael.

A long animal swam behind Emilie, a ways off.

Michael squinted and leaned forward. Without markers, or a horizon, it was difficult to see the fish. Maybe an eel. The eel-fish zagged and drew closer, several of its friends sliding into view. Michael pointed out the school of fish to Emilie.

Emilie turned and looked at the fish behind her.

Arms and legs pinwheeled frantically, the cartoonish gestures slowed by the seawater. Emilie clasped his pointing hand and tugged — hard — on his right arm. Michael tried to shrug her off. Bringing her had been a mistake. Some part of him had thought the discovery, his obsession, would mean more if shared.

She had been more of an anchor on this trip than a help. Now, startled by marine life. Ridiculous.

He shook his head, slow, eyes brimming with disdain. His mouthpiece hid his sneer.

“What’s wrong with you?”

Emilie’s eyes widened and her chin jutted forward. One fist punched forward into the water, across her body, signing danger he didn’t yet understand. On second glance, Michael understood her fright.

Bull sharks, an aggressive species, each up to fourteen feet long, were gliding around the edges of their territory.

Most sharks won’t attack divers. Bull sharks held no such reservations. A meal’s a meal.

Michael swallowed hard. Emilie kicked her legs to rise, back to air, back to a place where the more familiar sharks walk on two legs, but he caught her by the waist and pulled her close.

“What?” She signed. “I want to go up.” I don’t want to get eaten, you moron.

His hands tightened on her waist. In the distance, at the level of the tip of her ear, the sharks were close.

He pointed downward and gestured, “Let’s continue.”

Emilie’s green eyes followed his gaze. She could see the bottom, now, too. The outline of a ship. A mast, cracked at the middle and touching the earth at the side, sails and bodies having long rotted away into the happily eating sea. Several fish circled around the wreck. A coral reef, of sorts.

He waved a flat palm up and down, then clasped his hands together. “Calm down, the sharks won’t bother us. Take my hand.”

Emilie cupped her hands together, as though she could hold the entirety of the ocean between them, and he could almost hear her voice in his head, saying, “Boat. Back to the boat. I don’t care if there’s talking mermaids in that ship, there’s sharks. I’m out.”

Michael sighed, the slight fog on his lenses blurring her shape. His Gaelic shrug, while not formally within the international Scuba diving language, was clear enough.

“Your loss.”

Emilie stretched out her hands, eyes pleading. She placed her gentle fingertips on his forearm. Every inch of his body was known to her, but this knowledge had lived in a private place. He had never told her about his dreams of shipwreck — his tireless treasure hunt of years.

She would have laughed at his searching hopes. Or worse, looked at him with eyes full of pity.

The way she looked now. Pity for the madman.

He wrenched his arm free from her grasp to depart. In a flurry, Emilie looked behind her. The sharks appeared to be the same size, their only indication that they were keeping their distance. Perhaps they wouldn’t approach.

Michael continued his descent. Just another six or seven meters, and he would be on the deck of the ship.

His ship. Or, at least it would be his ship.

The suit pulled away from his abdomen, then snapped back into place. He tucked his chin to chest and looked several feet above him, the angle disorienting. Emilie grabbed at his suit with her other hand. She was raking her nails down his body, tugging at handfuls of flesh and wetsuit, clawing without the ability to scratch.

Muffled sounds choked from behind her breathing gear.

Don’t panic. Wasn’t that the first rule of the dive? Don’t ponder the weight of the atmosphere above your head.

Their hand-to-hand struggle was brief. Emilie grabbed whatever piece of Michael she could, wanting to get hold of the human behind the mask, desiring nothing more than to get herself and the man she loved to the safety of sunlight. Back to the surface.

The sharks looked a bit bigger, then, to Michael.

Unable to deter her with simple shoves and rude gestures, Michael raised both knees up and kicked Emilie away from himself with the force of both heels. There wasn’t much strength left in him from their descent, but it was more than enough to send her spinning away from him, several feet closer towards the bull sharks.

More than enough strength to tear whatever had been between them in half.

Emilie wrapped her arms around her narrow, bruised waist, air mask floating on a snake of tubing near her as she coughed, choked, open mouth gaping for the air he’d kicked from her body.

Michael didn’t put the mouthpiece back between her lips. Didn’t stop to watch her swim to the top. He had wasted enough years, enough meters, already.

Without a backwards glance, Michael finished his swim to the deck of the Nuestra Señora Teresa de Ávila. Bubbles were everywhere, clouding his vision when he stilled for even a moment. Annoying.

Sweat steamed the inside of his goggles and he shook his head. That wouldn’t clear it, but the movement had been instinctive. That small annoyance didn’t dampen his pride. His chest felt wide with it, his shoulders broad with it, his body swelling to encompass the simple truth that he had been right. All along, he had been correct, his location coordinates precise.

The wreck had been sitting here all this time. Sunk, fat with gold and sugarcane and silver coins, on it’s return journey to the Bourbon King Phillip V.

Once a gleaming deck, the pride of a royal fleet was now a green, fetid mess. Michael was impressed that one railing, the up tilted starboard side of the ship, was mostly intact. One delicate finger trailed along the banister and an inhabitant, a white stubby anemone, sucked its body back within itself for safety as it sensed the danger of Michael nearby.

He floated outside the first porthole, then pulled at the door handle with one hand. The last hand to tug at that bronze metal had lived and drowned 311 years prior. Michael smiled around his mouthpiece.

Poor bastard.

A rough yank not only opened the door, but pulled it off its rusted hinges entirely. He tossed it aside, a frisbee through the bubbles and sealife all around him. The door thudded along the main deck, dramatic slow small bounces that disturbed wet puffs of sand rising.

Michael shone his light inside, then swam directly for the Captain’s quarters. A hundred million motes of plankton, sand, and bubbles tried to obscure his vision, but he would not be deterred. Thanks to the diagrams of the ship, thoughtfully designed in European shipyards, Michael knew the layout of this place better than his own apartment. Small kicks with his fins propelled him along a hall that felt like home.

The door to the Captain’s rooms was wedged tight. Wood here was not as soft as he expected, still swollen with corrosive salt. Michael was unsurprised, expecting the ship to put up a fight — to keep itself sacred and safe. He braced his feet against the wall next to the door, his body horizontal to the sea floor, as best as he could tell by his orientation and the floor near him, and he pulled on the metal ring of a knob with all his strength, feet shoving hard against the frame of the door.

A cloud of small fish and bubbles surrounded Michael as the door tore free from its locked position, flinging open on miraculously working hinges to dangle on its side. Of course, Michael did not wait for the sandy muck to settle. His cone of a flashlight swung around, all the goods and boots and furniture slid to the far side of the sunken bedroom —-

The trunk. Michael couldn’t catch his breath, gasping as he swam to over to the wooden cask. It flew open at his touch, having waited for him so many long years. His greedy eyes and flashlight traced over the gleaming, shimmering, gold and silver coins and goblets. That would only be the start. In the hold, there would be dozens of other trunks, full of shimmering emeralds and priceless ingots.

The tobacco had probably gone bad. Michael giggled wetly. He plucked a strand of tarnished gold between his thumb and middle finger, and it freely waved at him, a worm wriggling in currents, as he studied the world of wealth pinched between his trembling fingertips.

He dug handful after heavy, punishing handful from the cask and filled his pockets, his tackle pouch. Having run out of available space, he tugged the edge of the suit collar away from his neck and began filling this suit with the coins that slid down into place against his body, as though made for him, made to live against him.

Darkness threatened at the edge of his vision. Michael would have realized, if he had paused for a safety breath, paused to consider what could be more dangerous than panic, because sometimes fear can save our lives, Michael would have seen the small leak torn in his air hose. Bleeding, just like bleeding, air flowing from a tank that should have lasted hours.

Michael filled himself with handful after handful of golden proof he was right all along for several minutes after the clouds of bubbles had ceased to surround him.

The burning pain in his lungs brought him back to his body.

A glance at his tank dial showed he was firmly in the red. His tank was empty. Pushing himself off the trunk, promising himself he would return later with a larger pouch, with a team, the best team that money could buy, he managed to rise a meter or two and grab hold of the door frame. He walked along the walls of the hall, weighed heavily down by his cargo as surely as the doomed Ávila had been so long ago.

Michael pulled himself, hand over hand, onto the railing upturned railing. He kicked, but could not rise more than a few feet before gravity tugged him back to the ship. He balanced on the railing, panting, as he stared up at the rippling circle of pale blue light far above him.

He needed to empty his pockets. Needed to drop weight. If he could offload enough unnecessary gear, he had a chance to kick and float his way to the surface. Pulling a tarnished coin from his pocket, Michael held the coin in his cupped hands.

I’ll come back for you.

He willed himself to drop the round escudos lima. His brain screamed for him to ditch all the coins and rectangular reales so he could swim back to the surface and return with a full tank. His fingers curled protectively around the old, gold coin.

Instead, Michael sat on the railing and looked up. A silvery fish or long shark glided between him and the surface rays as the last few bubbles burbled from around his mouthpiece. The escudo felt warm in his gloved hand.

Stay.

It had been so long. He could not leave them, could not abandon his ship, his prize.

The sharks appeared larger. Michael did not think of Emilie again.