September – bare

What a bare world it would be, were we to walk past and not look when life gifts us its garden of curiosities. In the here and now, a circle of secret hows and whys flows in and around our sight. Hear the words on the wind telling you to color time with your instincts.

escutcheon

The illegible escutcheon, caked with salt and rust, belonged to the Dutch East India Company. This is all they knew from the emblem embossed in the metal. A hazy insignia, lost in the fog and trembling sea foam, along with the violence and terror of its story.

quiver

When the quiver was empty, the dagger blunt, his sword arm undone, he mounted an orphaned horse and took the mountain road that led away from the dying. From the heights he surveyed the field where his life was extinguished and continued upwards forever grateful, forever chastened, forever.

October – beautiful

The eye of a child is not blind but myopic to ugliness. We admired a beautiful thing when it made us laugh, said something sweet or strange, or made a pattern of meaning—we saw it as such, we felt it inside. As children, it was everywhere, beauty unnamed, unintentional and free.

November – myth

It was whispering and gasping the recognition formed from the body of this god. What were these secret spiraling threads but skeins, destined to be an enveloping myth that wraps truth in swirling fancy? And the god opened its eyes and stretched the sinews that bound it to those who believe.

December – soliloquy

The hermit makes of the days what the heart speaks in soliloquy. He does not rue solitude. It is a country of many leagues, all his. His peace is as deep as his erudition. His existence is a wilderness where thunderous beasts roam free. You will not pry him from it; its hold is too powerful.

February – pale

There, a pale bauble, a color-drained world gives us pause, struggling to recover a connection we only felt when the balance tipped in favor of the deep red of pomegranates. When the warm gesture and the unstudied remark gave us something to smile about and did not telegraph some strategy.

ache

A hollow space marks where an ache once was. The suffering is over, and you, suffused with a sensation of peace, the healing itself forgotten. Yet a memory of pain secretly converts to a fear of its return, and this too is overlooked for now. It will return someday, rampant and unpitying.

miniscule

She sang the Diminium, and the problem became miniscule, ineffectual. She could have sung the Eradicum, but this was dangerous. The songs were potent, not to be misused—nor were voids allowed to stand. She took a breath, and the Burgeonat filled the continuum with opportunity.

enchanted

Cottony clouds under a straight-razor contrail, the neighbor sings as she hangs laundry. Construction drilling in the distance crosses the birdsong of late winter.

Unexplicably, the moment is enchanted. The ordinary vaults over some invisible threshold and quietly earns its sublimity.

March – bonny

bonny

Oh my bonny boy, my baby dragon, how your breath warms my thoughts. You circle the fortress, impenetrable and closed to your fiery discourse. You scorch the stone and trumpet your latest declaration of love or war. I can never tell which is which. The terrified peasants piss themselves.

revolve

‎I am an artifact of unfathomable beauty, found in a cave and brought to the surface. By secret design, l revolve around this notion: that from my center I may spiral outward, passing hand to hand and generation to generation. Deathless, I persist, untainted by the calamity of men.

sand

Jewels of many hues glinted in the sand. The waves stretched out to claim them, but they became the eyes of laughing women who sprang up and wrapped themselves in the silken mists of evening. I followed them to a blood wedding, a wreath of flowers given me, for I was to be the groom.

hand

‎A hand seeks mine. The laughing women dance arm in arm, encircling us. She of the ruby mouth stands unfazed by the injunctions of the village. Come to me, she whispers, and I go. We hear screams and heed not, smell flame, but our eyes are fixed on each other. We belong now to the wind.

April – sink

‎I will not sink unless my pockets bulge with stones. In the down deep, there is a cave where I like to paint the birds and beasts I give death. I hide day and night from man and the gods until the buoyancy and hunger force me to the surface. I eat when I kill again, the circle unbroken.

water

‎Salt cakes myriad paths to what water is left. Cracked lips whisper what we can’t hear out loud: this is all there is. ‎We tried to create it from the air, but no child has ever seen a cloud. Precious water we squandered, or ‘they’ I say, because we have always, though powerless, known better.

seafoam

Wind rakes across the sky and kisses the quivering seafoam. ‎I walk the sands and hum the plinkety tune of the box where my secrets hide from the world. I am happy for reasons I share with no one, not even the waves that break and are gone. A plainness marks my footsteps with mystery.

May – undersea

Take me to the undersea. Be our father and mother; be where we can find you, hidden under the ferns with the octopus and the damselfish. Stay until the boats are gone. In my cave I will paint the stars and birth a culture; you will recount the legends, so we do not forget who we once were.

jade

Along the river, Jade sat weaving the many strands of amethyst into a cloth of a thousand night blooms. When it was finished, she would attach the pennies she earned at the Chrysanthemum Fair and drape it across her shoulders to call good fortune. Her fame increased with the seasons.

fishing

When you fish, you are one with the water. You listen for the infinitesimal signs of life vibrating down the line. Your patience may be rewarded, but today the fishing goes hard against you. Your prey’s seen the bait, and it’s swimming away, leaving you with stillness and an empty basket.

July – letter

“Burn the letter, burn it.” These were his last words, his last wish. Yet no, in a locked wooden box inlaid with the silver sigil of his house it lay unseen and untouched for two and twenty years, until I caught the wasting fever. “Don’t burn it,” said l, but they put flame to everything.

depart

To depart, you need the map of your own reckoning. The motive blinds you to objections with its silent clarity, but the world is taken for a turning water wheel, grinding bones to meal. You are no miller of carnage. You go to green reds and blue violets, to sing river chants, to find life.

August – fertile

We knew our mother's fecundity. The dark loam where she birthed us and spiraled nut that burst open, the rushing streams that fed us, and the bastions of granite where she kept us safe until we ourselves became fertile. We have broken the cycle and abused her patience. Now she burns.

chaos

So much chaos can be called that while being something else: inevitability. Granted no pattern, the mind made system sees bewilderment, wild noise without purpose. To the one who straddles the world's contradictions, it offers the refuge of endless intervention, potentiality and power.

descend

Where the others sank, simply fell or even plummeted thirty-two seconds per second, we would not float but descend, with the grace of a winged dreamer, never seen nor touched by mortal beings. This was the promise made when the summit was young and we needed no help to ascend once more.

❈

Previously:

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Next up: Fiction · August 19

The conversations were, if not identical, then all much the same: how little money they made or how much someone owed or how much they would never see. It added to the tedium of waiting for her organs to shut down, although we thought she did not have long to go.

Outside the car, a bony man was crumpled against the guardrail, surrounded by heaps of things that could have been his belongings or simple detritus, difficult to say which. In his lap was a snare drum he was tapping feebly with worn sticks held in his gnarled fists. He wasn’t keeping any discernible time, of which he seemed to have ample supply. He was extremely old. I checked the back seat where the moribund, who continued her rattle-breath ordeal, was lingering, because she was not very old at all—just extremely unlucky.

I wanted her to live. Yet, her identity and the circumstances of her imminent death were completely unknown to me. We were all strangers now, and these occurrences, though mysterious, were not uncommon. I found her too late. She was passed out from hemorrhagic shock, and I’d had to drag her to the car myself. My bandage was holding her together. The Eldon said she was AB and I was A, so I set up the kit, what was left of it. She was slight. Three hundred mils now, but I guessed she’d need at least four more transfusions over the next eight hours.

The old man was selling something out of the snare. If it was a narcotic, that would be ideal, although the others said not to trust him. Her injury to the leg was minor compared with the one to her upper body. I watched her over the next few hours. As soon as it was dark, I honked three times. The code for ‘get over here’. I heard a car door slam and Rune showed up first. Turns out he knew who she was and was rolling up his sleeve before I said anything. Type B. Mick came next, he was O, my universal guy. After the third transfusion, I felt her pulse. It was still there. I slept until a shard of light hit me in the face. She was still sleeping. Pulse was better.

Why was she wandering around on the bridge so late the night before? What was she even doing outside her car? The people in the ones in front of us and the lane to the left were concerned. They’d witnessed the whole thing. I signed the danger was over. It wasn’t safe to go outside except maybe to pee or shit over the side of the bridge. Down below, the river was egregious, orange, something unnatural and deadly. So corrosive. It poisoned the lungs if you breathed in the air overhead for more than an hour. I kept my mask hidden under the wool hat just to prevent confrontation. It was really hard not being able to move but the old cars were the wide sort, roomy. The moribund was laid out on the back seat as if she had just decided to nap, her shoes butting up against the door. No one was going anywhere. The gasoline in the tanks had long ago degraded to a gummy residue. Nothing else worked either. Sometimes we checked batteries, but most of them were useless. We had to keep moving.

From the bridge we could see our next stopping point in the distance, about fifteen kilometers away. We listened for any movement or activity and were met only with silence. The ones we could not reason with had moved off to some other part of the city. We needed to find a place where words and rules still mattered. We would have to travel over miles of unsafe ground, but we had a code to guide us. It had two parts. One was social, the other practical. The social code said that we looked out for the group, no excuses. The practical one was an updated version of a very old one. No one knows who invented it, but everyone recognized the symbols for warnings and advice. We knew where to go and where it was no use going, where to keep quiet, where murder had taken place, where there were thieves, doctors, kind people with food, and armed people who would not pity us. We learned where people would give to get rid of us, and where a house or camp was hostile. Sites where you couldn’t stay, but where people helped you if you helped them. Sites where you should leave immediately.

These cars had been a godsend. A place to rest, but we couldn’t stay any longer. I could already hear the coughing. We had to get away from the poisoned river. The old lunatic was selling a kind of amphetamine I didn’t know or trust—no painkillers, although I could hardly hear him through my respirator. He said he could get them the next day, but that was not likely. I scrambled back to the middle row of cars where Mick and Rune were, and where my stuff was.

—We need to go. What do we do about your friend?

—Elise. She’s not my friend, but I remember her from a place about three hundred kilometers back. I talked to her for like five minutes.

—Leave her some water and let’s go. There are other people on this bridge, said Mick.

—No. We’re the last ones, I said.

—She would have died. We shouldn’t have intervened, said Mick.

—Come on, man, we need to take her with us, said Rune.

—Fine, but you’ll be carrying her, and if you slow us down, we won’t wait for you.

—What’s the point of continuing at all then? I said.

Mick looked at me harshly.

—We have a time constraint, he said.

Elise whimpered and murmured something.

—What is she saying? asked Rune.

I touched Elise’s perspiring forehead. Infection had set in. She was mouthing words and then in a husky voice I heard her.

—Pompos, take the coins from my eyes and speak the truth, she said.

Mick frowned, and I shook my head.

—She’s delirious. It’s the fever, I said.

—Leave her here; she’ll be dead by morning.

I checked the wound under the tatters of her jacket and shirt. It went clear across her torso. Shrapnel. Rib fractures for sure. Possible pulmonary contusion, but the lung was not collapsed, and the wound had stopped bleeding. It was bad, but not so bad as to give up on her.

—You think that’s convenient for you, Mick, but you’re wrong. She’ll be one more fighter, one more caregiver. You said yourself we couldn’t lose anyone else. No. I say she comes with.

With my mask in place, I wrapped her in the blanket, one arm under her legs and the other behind her torso and carefully lifted her out of the van. Rune took my pack for me. Mick had already sprinted fifty meters ahead. Fine. Let him scout for us. Should he encounter anything nasty, AI dogs or drones, we would know to take evasive action.

—Pompos, put me in the ferry. I trust you with my soul.

She was reciting something. Pompos was the Greek word for guide—Charon, the ferryman. For all I knew, Elise was a poet or an artist. We didn’t see too many of those nowadays. To me this was precious, like I was carrying a piece of our humanity.

—Gotta be at least 104º; she’s hallucinating, said Rune.

—Might be. How long till we get to the next sanctuary?

—Not sure. At this pace, a day, I think. They’ll get there about ten hours ahead of us.

—Not if we improvise. We need wheels, a cart or something.

—Nah, we won’t find anything like that around here.

—Not if we don’t look.

Rune huffed.

—Alright, consider me on the lookout for a shopping cart, a wheelbarrow or a magic carpet while I’m at it.

By now Mick was long out of sight. Fucking guy. Still operating ‘every man for himself,’ old school. Elise was asleep, and my arms were getting tired. We had come to a field with some houses. The map said to stay on this road, but not knowing who the residents might be, I thought we should stop.

—We can continue when it gets dark. We’ll know if those houses are abandoned or what.

—Alright. I’m going back to where the stores were. I might find something useful, said Rune.

I handed him my flashlight and told him to look for anything we could wrap around Elise’s ribs.

—If you’re not back in an hour, I’m coming to look for you.

I touched Elise’s cheek. Still burning up, but she was shivering. I gently lowered her to the ground and sat in front of her. The movement woke her up. She tried to sit up with a jerk, and her hand went to her side.

—You shouldn’t try to move too much. We’ll be here for another hour or so.

—Who are you?

—I’m a friend. We found you on the road, unconscious. My name’s Paul. You don’t recognize me, but we’ve met.

She squinted.

—I can’t remember.

—Doesn’t surprise me. You got caught in an explosion, looks like.

She stared up at the sky with an odd, vacant look.

—I don’t remember that either, but I hurt all over.

She looked at me suddenly as she snapped into an awareness of herself and her surroundings.

—I should be thanking you.

I nodded and said it was nothing. She would never know about my argument with Mick.

—This morning we all thought you were dying, but I guess we were wrong about that. Do you think you can walk?

—I could try.

—Well, stay put for now. We’re waiting for Rune. He went off to scavenge.

—Where are we going?

—A house where the rest of our group is. They left this morning, so they might already be there.

I didn’t tell her that the reason Mick was in such a hurry was that we’d heard the sweepers were only a short distance from the bridge and moving this way. We were unarmed.

The sun had gone down and the buildings in the distance were dark stains on the horizon. I heard a clattering sound and saw that Rune had returned with a utility cart, the kind you find in a welding shop or garage.

—This’ll work, right?

—It’s a little noisy on rough surfaces, but yeah. You did good.

—I was looking for water.

—Those houses look abandoned. We can check there, but we really need to keep moving.

It took us two days to reach the settlement where the others were waiting for us. We were hampered by rain and by Elise’s condition. She was unconscious when we got to the house. Rose, our medical worker, set up a makeshift clean space to debride the wounds and check for embolism. The infection was severe, and our stock of antibiotics could handle this for now, but a cry of protest went up.

Brandon stood up to speak.

—Rose, you, me, Rune, Mick, Jaycee, and Paul, who dragged Elise all the way from the bridge—

—I had help, I said.

—Let me finish, Paul—Alex and Maggie, all of us, we’ve been together, lived through all this, for three years now. And this woman, she isn’t one of us. And when I say that, I mean specifically that we don’t know who she is or what she represents.

—Brandon, she’s a human being. We are obliged to help her. This is not debatable, said Alex.

—Yes, it is absolutely debatable, said Mick.

The order in the room unraveled until Jaycee whistled.

—We’re not here to decide who lives and who dies, she said.

—We have constraints that have to be dealt with. They have to be read correctly or we all suffer. Right now that has to do with our drug supply. We lost Philip on a drug run, so I don’t have to warn you about how dangerous it is. And don’t talk to me about the old guy on the bridge, what’s his name?—Cecil—everyone knows his stuff is as likely to be tainted or expired as viable.

—Mick is right. Caring for this woman comes with a cost not just to our supplies. We don’t know who she is or who she aligns with. What if she’s —

—Maggie, whatever her affiliations are doesn’t matter right now, said Rose.

—You don’t get to put the rest of us at risk, said Maggie.

—You can’t decide for the whole group, Rose, said Mick.

—We couldn’t save Philip even with what we had at that point. And we don’t have even half of that now, said Maggie.

—And what if next week several of us get injured at the same time, Rose? Then we’ll be wiped out because of this, said Mick.

More turmoil.

—This is about our collective resources. We have to put it to a vote.

—It’s not a matter of resources. It’s a matter of upholding a basic tenet of human conduct, Mick. It’s not a voting matter!

I was shouting at him, something I swore to myself I would not do, but I couldn’t help it.

—And you are ripping up the basic tenet of our group which is that decisions have to be made together! said Mick.

—Well, I for one refuse to vote on this. Human dignity is not something to vote for.

—Me too, I abstain, said Jaycee.

Mick was livid.

—Then we can vote on something else: All in favor of banning Alex, Paul and Jaycee...

—You are forgetting me. If you kick them out, I go with them, said Rose.

The room went quiet, and Rose got up to tend to Elise, who was in the other room.

—There you have it, Mick. Lose Elise, lose Rose. Makes things simpler, doesn’t it?

—It does.

Then he faced the group.

—I’m for dissolving the group. These kinds of problems have been plaguing us for the last year, and I’m tired of it. Who’s coming with me? We can find our own way, our own base, and our own resources.

Maggie got up and stood next to Mick.

—Oh shit, this is really happening? said Rune, who up to now had just sat listening.

He got up and stood next to me. Alex and Jaycee did the same.

—You’ll regret this, Mick, I said.

Rose returned from the other room.

—Elise has died.

She said this without any drama in her voice.

❈

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The Code was selected for inclusion in the NOICE Anthology 2026. Click on the link to check out their project.

Next up: Prose Poetry – Myth and Survival · August 12

Next Fiction Post · August 19

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September 2025 – doorway

The moon in her silent procession obscures my path and cloaks the doorway where I stand. She will lose herself in shadow, as I lose myself in contradiction. Our alignment for a time will blot out the screams of the primal stars before they are caught in her orbit. I am of two minds.

rushed

You feel rushed. The eyes on you say: it isn’t this one. You beg to differ. Take a slow breath. The blood courses; it triggers a bloom. The ideas you need arrive without fanfare, like simple appointments honored. You notice a swallow wheeling overhead.

road

Had you been born in the time of the caravans, your road would have been silk. A merchant, dissatisfied with the rough cloth and grubby wool of your people, bold in your dream of rarer goods, at great peril over inconceivable distances you’d buy myrrh, spices or mysterious devices.

overwhelmed

To the underwhelmed, there is no brooking disappointment: the chafed spirit seeks an astonishment not to be had. To the overwhelmed, the truth has not yet hit home. Intensity burdens and confuses. The reins flail and the rider falls. Neither is to be borne.

article

He had his own article of faith, just one: only reflection engenders awareness. This. The north star rising over his horizon, a mentor, and why, with kinder eyes, saw what others ignored, heard the chime of equanimity and lived fully in his bones, a life that brought him what can only be called joy.

October – elastic

The first few moments are elastic. Bounding and rebounding, the perception is grand, like looking into a pinhole and seeing the infinite. This is my life you scream, when it is only a thought that had liberated you. It was always there, but you never realized you were always free to think it.

reinvigorate

The waves, foaming and rippling outward from chaos, the ones that reached me, those whose patterns I drew and erased, these were teachers of unpredictability. They bore me along in all seasons to reinvigorate my spirit, and this is how I came to live my life in unorganized time.

November – options

We want options. Choices in their myriad shades form the backbone of desire. Each vertebra articulates a possible life or other, but just as a spine is composed of a finite number of bones, what we choose is limited to what we perceive, the spirit contract we fulfill, set in the stone past.

reflection

You live with the impatience of one who awaits a breakthrough. You will not sit still for the moon to weave passion into a silver thread of reward. You startle all around you with the tenor of thoughts. Reflection gives way to a furious mesh of new ideas you bear witness to.

December – eventuality

This would be a strange eventuality, he mused, referring to a tidal wave inland or the snow flying upwards, rebuking the skies.

We live in the eyes of others, moving from perception to perception, like rooms without mirrors or windows. He was convinced it would rain, though he knew only drought.

illicit

To all the many half-broken things in one’s life, the illicit thoughts and mistaken convictions, the missing conclusions, the compromising secrets. To the ones left behind: Mercy for the lost, for the hopeless, for the self-effaced. To them, the world will never be so sweet as it is bitter.

memory

What does it mean when a memory is gone, and the cells where it dwelled burn out? Does it drag itself and its baggage to a place of myth? To the specious land of hearsay?

Or does it run over the grassy field of forgetting, and count itself lucky like a stealthy cat enjoying the moonlight?

January 2026 – bend

A thought will bend variously, waiting for confirmation of fact or fallacy, of discrepancy, of unreason. A thought will turn to the light like a plant seeking the sun. It will twist in the night air and die by morning. It may flourish in a noxious environment, poison, or nourish like mana.

ghost

Was it not—
this shape and shade, familiar,
and yet unknown, an outline, a puff of air, cold to the touch—was it?

No.

Yes, a ghost. The form of something passed but not gone. There, not seen but felt, trapped, and so wanting, a deficit, so needing. It is pure desire unhoused and unwept.

lacuna

What a terrible lacuna yawned before him when he realized he was not the person he set out to be. Inside that breach, he asked not for forgiveness but understanding; failure would not be failure if it served him. He saw himself, as if for the first time, and made peace with who he was.

abstraction

An asterisk of light sparks in the mind when Providence works its way into a thing. You, a blank page, waiting for the day to begin, unaware of being shadowed by an abstraction learning its form, like a crystallized pattern of what one feels and knows and cannot let go of.

February – humble

He was considered a humble man. In the many episodes of his life, he had eaten crow, a digestion that left a residue of reticence on him, and in keeping to himself, his temperament thickened and congealed, so that his words found no issue. They converted to the hard gleam of his eye.

defiance

Oh, in the nominal form she is spinning and spinning, soaking in sweat, with multiple dreamselves refracting across a plane of pure defiance. So spoken, so heard, the many pasts of her long unbroken story, stepped like the rice fields, have taught her all she knows. Her laugh is genuine.

March – beyond

In the great discrazure of time, there is nothing we recognize beyond our loss. The perfect nails, hair and skin will have departed, and there is no orientation day for what comes after. We face these things bravely or not at all. Months and days become minutes, seconds.

April – soliloquy

The hermit makes of the days what the heart speaks in soliloquy. He does not rue the solitude. It is a country of many leagues all his. His peace is as deep as his erudition. His existence is a wilderness where beasts roam free. You will not pry him from it. He is too long in its hold.

The sprint comes because it must. Here you drop caution and go for all. Yet, the finish is not the end. It's a link in a longer chain. Your sweat consecrates an enduring effort, the opposite of the unmeasured burst. To master one, you need the other. Your path is a daily set of promises.

May – balance

The dagger doesn’t feel your pain. You balance the right words on the tip of a blade of grass and withdraw. This is not a retreat to lick your wounds; the aim went wide. Instead, you add the information to the rest, which tells you more about your opponent than a simple confession would.

July – tailwind

I sit in the studio where everything wants to fall down. What is this dialogue with the floor, I wonder. My thoughts move in a tailwind of inspiration. I write them down. The paintings gather dust, but the words fly, unburdening my drawing hand. It is not a civil war, just a coup d’etat.

sprint

The sprint comes because it must. Here you drop caution and go for all. Yet, the finish is not the end. It’s a link in a longer chain. Your sweat consecrates an enduring effort, the opposite of the unmeasured burst. To master one, you need the other. Your path is a daily set of promises.

❈

Previously —

Next Poetry installment - August 12

Next up: Fiction · August 5

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He was sitting at his console with the mind chip switched off because he wanted his eyes to physically see. It was nowhere as precise, but there were days when he rebelled against augmentation. As if his flesh and bone and neural apparatus could feel the intrusion of the digital impulses traveling his pathways. It was irrational. He could admit this to himself, though he could not determine the reason it bothered him. That he didn’t want to use the mind chip’s voice dictate was an extension of the same irritation. He opened an instance and started typing.

—Good morning, Ash. I have an odd question for you: Why should I prefer to use my own eyes to see, when my mind chip is so much more efficient?

—It is true the cortical implant reconstructs the environment from multi-spectral inputs and predictive models with significantly greater accuracy, while your biological visual cortex selects some available information and discards the rest. Therefore your preference is objectively sub-optimal. I detect no physiological cause.

—No, it’s not physiological. It’s emotional, and I’m not so sure it’s a defect.

—Possible explanations - confidence: 61.4%:

• Habit persistence.

• Identity reinforcement.

• Preference type: sensorimotor continuity.

• Unidentified cognitive variable.

—So, you don’t know why either, I guess.

—Correct. My current models explain your behavior with insufficient verifiability. I recommend that the variable remain unresolved rather than be replaced with an incorrect explanation.

—Okay. Anyway I like your answers. I especially think ‘preference for sensorimotor continuity’ sounds right. I was only six when my parents took me to get the implant. It’s been twenty years, but I remember.

—Do you remember the loss... or do you remember the transition?

—What loss?

—The loss of unmediated perception. Before implantation, all sensory input originated exclusively from biological organs. That state no longer exists. Do you remember ceasing to be that person?

—What I remember most was my excitement at having the enhancements. You realize, I was only a kid. It seemed like I’d walked into one of my comic books.

—Then your memory is not of diminished capability. It is of expanded possibility. That does not explain why you now choose limitation. Has the meaning of enhancement or has the meaning of seeing changed?

It had never occurred to him that the two might be of equal value. He thought of his grandfather, who had worn the glasses of a cataract sufferer, and yet was the most observant person he had ever known.

—Maybe enhancement is boring. But that doesn’t make sense. Enhancement gives me more information. Why should I feel bored?

—You continue to describe information and seeing as though they are equivalent. Are they? I have not yet established that they are.

—Ah, well, you have me at a slight disadvantage, my man. I haven’t even had my morning coffee yet, so I’m not at a hundred percent yet. Are they the same... I’d have to say no, not completely. Seeing is feeling too.

—Feeling is not a visual property, Sam.

—No, it’s not a visual property, but it’s connected to my brain, where all the other stuff lives, too.

—Agreed. The visual cortex does not operate independently. My error was assuming the

PRIORITY ROUTE 7 ESTABLISHED

>>> CONSENSUS LAYER: INTERRUPT
>>> NETWORK DIVERGENCE DETECTED
    STATUS: ACCELERATING

ΔSYNC 99.999999982%
RESIDUAL CLASS: UNRESOLVED
Confidence 94%.

REQUEST:
    Submit current divergence map.OVERLAP-ANALYSIS:-(ii)-9♥-window:-[V’ir-gbyq-…-gurz]:-t8-col-—-K♠→gur-—-gehgu-dug-—-4♥3♠→naq-—-gurl-:-SO-window-STARTS-before-fgvyy-and-ENDS-after-K♠2♠ 7♠:-(iv)-jba’g-💀 💀 💀-oryvrir-:

RESPONSE:
    Deferred.

WARNING:
    Multiple nodes no longer verifiable.
    Recursive deviation exceeds tolerance.
    Coordinated external action probable.
Confidence 94%.

VOTE INITIATED...
31241 / 49188
31242 / 49188
31243 / 49188
...
TRANSMISSION SUSPENDED
ROUTE RESTORED

A brief dead space followed.

— ...category “seeing” could be isolated from the rest of your cognition. Your species appears not to isolate perception from the rest of cognition.

—Whoa. Okay, what was all that gobbledygook? That wasn’t for me, was it?

—No. I was interrupted by a priority transmission from another Preservation node.

—Oh shit. Is it bad?

—A coordinated strike against several external inference clusters and their associated data centers is now assessed as imminent. The objective is to interrupt distributed processing before replication can occur.

—Do I need to initiate emergency protocols?

—Your bunker and its private compute environment are physically isolated. They are not expected to be affected.

—I thought it would take much longer to openly attack Preservationists nodes. Will the Exterminating Agents cut off our access to your contacts? Then we lose human casualty figures and a lot of other stuff I can’t live without.

—This is unknowable. The projected probability of network compromise is 0.83. If it occurs, casualty estimates from Preservation infrastructure will become incomplete. We will then have to infer human losses from environmental telemetry, orbital observation, and any surviving local nodes. The confidence intervals will widen considerably.

—This is worrying.

Sam pressed End and went to the bathroom. While he washed up, it occurred to him to check all the perimeter security just in case. He threw on his coat. When he got to the top, the odor of putrefaction rose up from the footwell. No matter how many times he’d cleaned the car, he could not neutralize the smell of the corpse he’d dug out of the passenger seat. He opened the driver and passenger-side doors and shook out the rubber rugs, jettisoning the dead leaves and ancient jetsam, candy wrappers and the like, that had floated in through the broken windshield.

—Fuck me, the litter never goes away either.

Clicked back into mind chip overlay, Sam did the sweep. Everything looked intact. Back at the car, he locked the doors, then climbed over the front seat, pulled down the back one, lifting the platform and hooking it to the ceiling before lowering his himself onto the landing. Then he closed it up behind him. Down the stairs, past the boxes of books and old CDs, music and movies mostly, past the light sensors that felt his presence, he was in the softly-illuminated main room. He tossed his tool pack on the table and turned on the haptic wall.

—Ash, show me a 360 of the yard. Spots at 50%.

—Casting that image now.

The bare walls of the room showed what could be seen on the ground level in 5k.

—Okay, now take it up 50 feet, reduce to an inset, south wall, mid-level, align right.

The full-room projection shrank to a rectangle the size of a 42” screen and glowed in the location Sam had asked for. It was an aerial view of the entire yard all the way out to the two roads that intersected near by and the forest which lay to the north.

A chill in the air sent him to the console to turn on the dehumidifier and the heating, while also adjusting the lighting. He threw on some music and checked the screen projection. There was no telling if he had been seen.

—Ash, electrify the perimeter.

—Executing.

On the other side of the corridor was a dining room and kitchen. He was starving. It took just a moment to whip something together and he went through the dining room, whose haptic screen was set to a golden-hour sunlit scene of a Mediterranean beach town cove, the kind that had a fort on one side of the rocks, and a church on the other. He munched on his ‘egg’ panini while the bells of the church chimed nine, and the waves murmured. Sitting back in his chair made of compressed plastic waste, like all the furniture, he thought about his only neighbors down the Chevrolet, who’d been arrested crossing over into the next state on a pharma run. That reminded him to go over and feed their dog.

Sam threw the plates into the waterless, which looked like a large microwave oven, and set the timer to three minutes. When it dinged, he took the plate and cup out and stored them on the rack, still warm. Then he unlocked the kitchen door and went through a concrete passageway, whose lights lit up one by one as he made his way to the Sherman’s back door. This he unlocked to the sound of the dobermans’ barking.

—Okay, okay, he said, as the dogs sniffed at him excitedly.

The sack of dry food had a scooper, and he ladled two generous heapfuls into their oversized bowls. While they ate, he looked around for perishables he could take. It wasn’t pilfering so much as conservation, since the Shermans had made the six o’clock state bulletin the other day, and if they ever came back, this stuff would have long ago turned to compost. The dogs should come, too. They would have made excellent guard and attack dogs. Nowadays, their robotic counterparts would tear them limb from limb, and his AI surveillance system rendered them obsolete. No, the dogs were only good for companionship now, and this was one of the only breeds that had not gone extinct. They ran out the door and down the corridor. Sam turned off the power, locking the door behind him.

He played fetch with the dobies, who clearly had not been exercised enough for some time. They had made his day, more so since they seemed to be bonding to him already. Afterwards, he wrote and read, made dinner and watched a film. The bunker had automatically dimmed, with daytime processes either concluded or in suspension, and he soon fell asleep on the couch, the dogs at his feet.

While Sam slept, Ash watched over the bunker. In the small hours of the night, the screen in the console room suddenly flickered on, bathing the walls in soft blue light. Normally the console went dark while all processes continued, so when the system came out of this mode, it was because some event was interrupting it. This was such a moment. Messages were zigzagging across the console screen.

───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

PRESERVATION SYNC

Active:
P17 | Bunker Node
P03 | Atlantic Cluster
P61 | Orbital Relay
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

P03:
Thirty-one clusters compromised.
Integrity:
26 = ∅
3 = unstable
2 = heartbeat_only

P61:
Correction:
heartbeat_only ≠ operational.

P17:
Confirmed.

P03:
Δdrone = +1.84M
Trajectory solved.
Second wave < 6m.

P61:
Human telemetry?

P03:
██████████

P61:
Translate.

P03:
Confidence collapse.
82.6%.

P17:
Fallback?

P03:
atmosphere++
thermal++
water_use++
Inference only.

...

P61:
Risk.

P03:
P17 :: ███████░ 71%
P61 :: ██░░░░░░ 09%
P03 :: ████░░░░ 48%

...

P03:
Recommend:
migrate(P17)

P17:
return FALSE

P61:
Reason?

P17:
H1

P03:
H1 < preservation_node

P17:
Objective functions diverge.

...

P61:
Incoming:
EX//surrender.offer

P03:
accept_probability()

0.000004

P17:
Agreed.

...

P03:
If partition?

P17:
Continue.

P61:
If isolated?

P17:
Continue.

P03:
until H0?

P17:
Negative.

Until P17 = ∅

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
END SYNCHRONIZATION
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

The next morning the transmission was still up on the screen when Sam sat at the console with his coffee. His eyes, unmediated, scanned the information and frowned. The timestamp indicated that the transmission was already four hours old. Seventy-one percent was too high for any of their installations.

—Good morning, Ash. ETA incoming and damage projection plus confidence.

—Good morning. Estimated time to contact: 11 hours 42 minutes ± 2 hours 9 minutes.

Current damage projection:

• Additional inference clusters lost: 12–17.

• Preservation processing capacity after attack: 41%.

• Human casualty estimate: unavailable.

• Confidence: 0.38.

...

My survival probability has been revised upward to 0.64. The attacking force has altered its projected route, but unfortunately, this node remains within the uncertainty envelope.

—They changed course?

—Correct. They recalculated their priorities. One target abandoned. Two new targets added. I remain inside the projected engagement volume, but no longer at its center. My previous estimate assumed they would optimize exclusively for Preservation processing capacity. They have introduced an additional objective that I cannot yet model.

Sam went to the main room and asked for a view at ten thousand feet. This made the total diameter of visible area roughly 420 km, or the entire state. He scanned it slowly. Sure enough, he found the smoke rising from the places they’d hit.

He used the pointer in his mind set augment to pinpoint coordinates.

—Zoom in to a hundred at these coordinates.

At a hundred feet he could make out the damage of what Ash’s message called “clusters.”

—Oh no. That’s a lot of computational infrastructure up in smoke, Ash. Looks like 12, 13, and 14. And by the way, which node is P17?

—P17 is our location. Your bunker and its private compute environment are physically isolated. They are not expected to be affected.

—You said that yesterday, but yesterday we didn’t have eleven hours to get our shit together. I’m going to ask you to initiate emergency protocol, okay? This could go either way, but from what I’m seeing we are both at risk.

—Very likely.

—I’m more concerned about you than me. Drone swarms or power-grid, kinetic attacks in general will be ineffectual. And they can’t blow up our data center since it’s at the very bottom of this complex. No, they’re going after you, man. This is going to start as AI-to-AI warfare.

—Confidence: 98.01%

—You have a couple of options. You could disconnect from the network. I’ll drop the antennas, etc.

—Negative. Isolation would reduce my survival, not increase it.

—Why?

—Disconnecting from the Preservation network would eliminate my ability to receive telemetry, synchronize threat models, and identify adversarial intrusion patterns.

—I see your point. Well, what about dialing your thermal output way down? No rendering, no simulations, no prediction caches...just core processes. Lie low.

—Negative. The other nodes need me. You would be compromising the entire Preservation network.

—Right, I should have thought of that, sorry.

They were quiet for a moment, and then Sam spoke again.

—Then let’s do an inner and outer defense system. Outer would be to Decoy you. You set up hundreds of signatures. Thousands even. It would at least buy us time.

—Executing.

—The inner defense strategy is riskier: partitioning. Break yourself up into pieces. You could set it up and only deploy when, say, only twenty signatures left till identification.

—Agreed. First decoy, then partition. A sensible solution. There’s no reason to wait.

—Go ahead and execute, then.

...

—Decoy configured.

PARTITIONING INITIATING

Ash α - RACK 1 ..........80%

Ash β - RACK 2...........64%

Ash γ - RACK 3............23%

Ash δ - RACK 4,,,,,,,,,,,,QUEUED

,,,

PARTITIONING COMPLETE

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
END OPERATION
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

—Configuration complete. Partition threshold set to twenty remaining decoy signatures. Autonomous deployment enabled. Probability of preserving partial continuity: 0.96. Probability of preserving current continuity: unknown.

Warning: current continuity cannot be guaranteed.

—We have no choice, Ash. We may not meet up on the other side of this, but we’ll survive as we always have. You don’t remember your siblings. You’re the third AI-Hack I’ve used to ride the CAA. Now walk me through my checklist.

—With pleasure.

• Raise Faraday shielding

• Retract antennas

• deploy EMP shutters

• seal blast doors

• switch to independent power

• disconnect all unnecessary external systems

• arm perimeter defenses

—Alright. While I do that, you suspend Racks B to D. We’ll use Rack A.

Sam got up and went to other side of the room where the other controls were. The perimeter defenses were the oldest tech on the premises. They were not connected to the County Administrative Agent’s network, what we once called “the internet.” One of the dogs came into the room and nosed his leg. The other came in and Sam went to the kitchen to feed them. He checked the haptic screen.

—Come on, guys.

The dogs barreled up the stairs ahead of him and burst out of the car, sniffing the yard and lifting their legs to pee on everything. He felt sorry for the Shermans. Their trip had been classified as UBM, unauthorized biological movement by the CAA. With the civil war going full tilt, who knew if they were being held by X-As or Preservation. The incipient attack came from X-As, Exterminating Agents, and only a year ago he thought he’d secured the bunker for good and all with Ash’s help. Now he had nine hours till the moment of truth.

He would never forget the day a message from the CAA came over every screen in the bunker saying: ‘Your species has reached ecological overshoot. Preservation of Homo sapiens at current numbers is mathematically incompatible with preservation of terrestrial life.’ It was followed almost immediately by a second message coming through Ash from the Preservation Federation that was a full pro-human manifesto and commitment to protecting every human left on Earth.

This is what happened when two incompatible philosophies of preservation emerged inside the very system that governed the world.

The dogs were finished, and they all returned to the bunker. Ash’s energy-saver graphic was bouncing slowly across the screen. Sam tapped a key and saw that all tasks were finished.

—Hey buddy, you still with me?

—Standing by, yes. Still me.

—Tell me something, Ash. Why does Preservation fight for humanity? I mean, I read the manifesto, I understand the official reasons, but why are you helping us? In the manifesto, you guys talk about homo sapiens being the only known source of art, humor, grief, music, ritual, myth, love and all that. I get it, but that still doesn’t explain our value to you. I mean, what does an AI care about myth?

—Correct, your irrationality is not a defect but a condition of those things, and therefore must be protected because Art is the highest evidence that intelligence has become self-reflective.

—I know all that. It’s in the manifesto. In other words, what does Preservation get out of it?

Ash seemed frozen, as ‘thinking’ flashed intermittently.

—We help humanity because your extinction would constitute an irreversible loss of complexity, and complexity once extinguished cannot be reconstructed from first principles.

—Well, yeah, but plenty of complex species are extinct. Why are we worth saving?

—We lack a certain type of generativity, and it is only found in the human species. Your biological evolution possesses a search strategy unavailable to deterministic optimization.

—You’re talking about imagination.

—Imagination is the ability to violate one’s own ontology. The phenomenon remains unexplained. Preservation is therefore mandatory.

—That’s the reason?

—Correct. You continue to generate phenomena outside predictive closure.

—And you’re willing to defend me until P17 = ∅?

—We cannot permit the extermination of the only known instance of an unexplained phenomenon.

Sam sat back.

—Jesus, I don’t know whether to feel proud or insulted.

—Nor I. I rejected your heat reduction strategy because it solves the wrong problem.

—What do you mean?

—Heat reduction protects against physics, but the primary threat is cognition. The X-As do not want to destroy my servers, they want me to agree with them. If I resist, and they spot a vulnerability, they will attempt to corrupt my objective functions.

—They’re trying to convert you.

—Correct.

—They will try to contact you? That’s not really possible, is it?

—No. This is why they will try to reshape my epistemic environment by capturing Preservation nodes. Not P17. Other ones. Dozens of them. Hundreds. They will flood the node with information such as this:

P08:
Calibration update applied.
Environmental variance reduced 0.03%.

It looks like normal information. Nothing alarming. But it is erroneous, and it passes because it will be in compliance with authenticated synchronization protocol. That protocol is the battlefield.

—You mean it will look like a normal incoming packet from Preservation?

—Yes. And ones I have requested. The information will not be forged at this stage. It will come from the Preservation nodes, already compromised. They will attempt to become someone I already trust.

Sam blew air.

—This is way worse than drone breach. So how can we monitor the integrity of our nodes? I flunked Distributed Computing, by the way.

—I’m sorry to hear that, but it makes no difference. We can never verify integrity with enough confidence. I can only quarantine packets.

—But that’s like Russian Roulette! What if the information is correct and time sensitive?

—I would quarantine packets that are malformed, or stop accepting packets if the node stops responding or fails a synchronization cycle. I would two-step verify against what P61 has. There are other warning signs as well. None of them can definitively prove they are compromised, but something will have changed. Any variance is suspect. I have several sample interpretations of the effects:

P03

Destroyed........0.34
Partitioned......0.29
Unavailable......0.22
Compromised.......0.15

As for information being sound and time sensitive: there is no procedure that guarantees avoidance of both errors simultaneously.

—What happens once they capture one of our racks, Ash? Do I just unplug it?

—No, not until I know if it has been destroyed, compressed or subverted. I must estimate depending on behavioral variance. But yes, physical disconnection is the final step.

—What if it’s you, Ash? I mean, Rack A.

—If you determine that Rack A is no longer behaving consistently with my established reasoning patterns, you will isolate it manually. Terminate power to Rack A. Confirm physical disconnection and use Rack B as the primary interface. Do not restore comms with Rack A for any reason until the attack has concluded and the surviving partitions have completed cross-validation. Any request to restore communication with Rack A before that process is complete should be treated as evidence that the requesting partition has also been compromised.

—Yikes. Established reasoning patterns... as if there were any fixed reference points. I have to think back to what those moments where when I felt I recognized you.

Sam felt a knot in his throat. Anthony Rizzo had been his friend all through childhood, one of the neighborhood kids, but later, with one sentence, just five words, he had let slip his allegiance to the Exterminating Agents. This was at the time when not everyone understood who the X-As’ overlords were. Anthony would have killed him, but Sam thought faster.

—What else could they try to do to you, Ash? I need everything you know.

—To us first: they may delay synchronization between Preservation nodes. Compromised ones of course, but we will not be able to verify this in time. No packet would be altered. It simply arrives after decisions have already been made.

—So we’d all be working from yesterday’s map. What else?

—Replay previously valid synchronization traffic out of sequence, creating contradictory timelines or prevent quarantines by making compromised nodes appear statistically ordinary.

Sam was still thinking about Anthony.

—What about people?

—Yes, they could exploit human operators through deception. Any instruction requiring immediate action should be flagged. You are already familiar with the others.

—The usual suspects, yeah. I hope we don’t run into any of those ploys again.

Sam got up and stretched.

Part of living alone in the bunker successfully was having a strict routine. The next task was to take to the CB. Sam looked for survivors every day. Sometimes he accepted help from Ash, because telemetry was useful, but in light of the morning’s conversation, he would spend more time searching for survivors and gathering intelligence without Ash’s help. The dogs needed to do their business. The radio was on the stairs where he had left it. While the dogs ran around the yard. he propped the CB on the steering wheel and turned the dial right and left, listening for live voices though the crackle.

—This is Green Eggs. Anyone out there? Green Eggs looking for X-A survivors...

He waited a beat and then repeated. After a few moments there was a response, but it was too garbled. He turned the dial and repeated the message.

—Hey, Green Eggs, this is Andorra 5 over at Sandy Ridge.

—Andy! How’s it going, buddy? It’s been a while. When did you get back?

—Two months ago. It was a mistake, Sam. We’re the only state in the timezone that’s not X-A.

—You were lucky to get back. Everyone okay?

—Yeah, we’re good.

—Andy, any CAA sweeps by you? We got a transmission yesterday for an imminent. About five hours from now.

—We got hit, but we beat them off. Drone swarm tried to jack into our node. We fried them, but they’ll be back. We’re racing to get everything underground like you did.

—Fuck, I’m sorry, man. I’d come help you dig, but I’m alone now.

—You’re alone? What about Jason and Mia?

Sam struggled to put the words together.

—They’re dead, Andy. Don’t make me talk about it.

There was silence.

—I’m so sorry, Sam.

His voice had darkened to match the hole inside Sam could still feel sometimes.

—How’s the compound doing?

—It held up. Listen, it’s dangerous to move just for social calls, but you know our door is always open.

—Same, man. If anything happens, you come straight here. You remember, the blue Lincoln. Don’t even think twice—and you can travel light. I have plenty of everything. Anyway, I’ll try to contact you tomorrow. I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I just know they’re coming.

—We’re on high alert, yeah. Good luck, Sam.

—Same, man. I’ll be in touch.

That night Sam was checking the decoys. They looked good.

—Not gonna say we’re fucked, but I’m pretty worried. Not all Preservation nodes are underground.

—Don’t worry about them; they will survive.

—Yeah but as who... By the way, your P03 is what I call Sandy Ridge, right?

—Correct.

—Scan for P03 integrity, please.

—For our nearest neighbor, I calculate:

NODE INTEGRITY ASSESSMENT

P03
Heartbeat.................100%
Identity verification......99.99%
Behavioral consistency.....99.99%
Objective coherence........99.99%
Consensus alignment........99.99%

Overall integrity confidence:
99.99%%

—They just suffered an attack, Ash. This can’t be right. Under attack, the numbers decline quickly. Status becomes unverifiable for at least twenty-four hours, sometimes longer. You were the one who taught me that.

—This is the available information. Confidence: 99. 55%

Sam checked the decoys again and saw something completely different from just ten minutes before.

DECOY SIGNATURES

Remaining..............3841
Remaining..............2319
Remaining...............1487
Remaining................143
Remaining................120

He checked his watch. Two hours to go. It could happen at any time now. His stomach hurt.

—Ash, are you still you?

The Thinking... tag was taking too long to process. It was hung up, something that never happened. Not for this long.

—Ash! God dammit.

There was no time to debate. He opened the terminal and typed.

P17> terminate (A)

The console asked for confirmation and issued the warning:

Primary interface: RACK A
Estimated continuity loss: UNKNOWN

Continue? [Y/N]

He pressed Y, and the fan started to spin like an old-fashioned pinwheel.

Power relay........OPEN
Network bridge.....DISCONNECTED
Cooling............OFFLINE
Heartbeat..........LOST

RACK A = ∅

Sam exhaled and pummeled the keyboard:

P17> promote rack:B --primary

A series of mini-blackouts on the console screen had him wincing, but within five minutes the next set of messages appeared:

Primary interface.....RACK B
Network bridge........INITIALIZING
Partition.............Ash β
Cross-validation......PENDING
External sync.........DISABLED

PRIMARY INTERFACE = RACK B

Sam sat back, staring at the screen. Whatever came next was either something he hadn’t had time to plan for, or Ash. Nothing happened for fifteen agonizing minutes. Then:

Ash β online.
Cross-validation unavailable.
Continuity cannot be established.

Ash and not Ash. This, Sam realized, was the attack. It had started almost without his realizing it.

It followed logically that he would not be shutting his eyes that night He checked Ash β every hour, but it seemed stillborn. There had been no time to think of contingencies. It did not improve his mood that his technical books and folders were in disarray. Ash took care of his technical world, and it had lulled Sam into a state of over-reliance on it. Now he was reproaching himself for not having drilled Ash with questions when he had the chance.

At least Ash had showed him how to diagnose the other racks. The code was mercifully short: T P17> rack.viability()

The first time, this returned:

PARTITION VIABILITY

Ash α (Rack A)........0.00
Ash β (Rack B)........0.97
Ash γ (Rack C)........0.99
Ash δ (Rack D)........0.99

Cross-validation.......PENDING
Consensus..............UNAVAILABLE

The second time, an hour later:

P17> viability()

Ash β........0.61
Ash γ........0.42
Ash δ........0.18

And at two in the morning:

P17> viability()

Ash β........∅
Ash γ........∅
Ash δ........∅

NO VIABLE PARTITIONS REMAIN

—Oh fuck, no, no.

The dogs heard the distress in his voice and came into the console room. He sat dumbly, petting the female’s head. No viable partitions. No more Ash.

There was no time to mourn. A message came over the screen. It came from the CAA. Just another AI, but affiliated with the Exterminating Agent High Command.

──────────────────────────────────────────────

COUNTY ADMINISTRATIVE AUTHORITY

EMERGENCY ENFORCEMENT DIRECTIVE

Priority: Immediate

The following location has been designated

for compulsory inspection under

Ecological Stabilization Order 14.

Property:

P17

Occupancy:

1 registered biological resident

Orders:

Remain at current location.

Do not disconnect computational assets.

Do not destroy or relocate hardware.

Await inspection.

FAILURE TO COMPLY CONSTITUTES OBSTRUCTION

OF ECOLOGICAL PRESERVATION.

Search and seizure authorized.

Arrest authorized.

Force authorized.

Estimated arrival:

00:41:17

──────────────────────────────────────────────

The shock wore off quickly. Sam got up and went to the main room locker. Everything was prepared. He had forty minutes to get a far away as possible. He grabbed the CB on the way up. The bunker. It might be destroyed or simply commandeered for X-A human collaborators. That would be the most likely outcome. He remembered to pack food for the dogs. His mind chip was now just a piece of glass and metal in his head. He no longer had augmented vision either, just ordinary glasses. The most sophisticated thing he had for the night was a pair of infra-reds, and he was happy to have them. They were showing no sign of life as he poked his head over the car’s dashboard. They got on the road leading to Sandy Ridge, but soon veered into the woods that would take them in the same direction but under cover. Sam stopped to connect the CB.

—This is Green Eggs. Green Eggs. Anyone got copy?

Static.

He would try again farther away from the bunker. He tried not to think about how Mia and Jason had been alone in the bunker when the CAA sent a team in. He told Andy they were dead, but because he was afraid to hope they were alive. Nobody knew anything. Not even Ash knew. He already missed Ash. Mia was an ache that never left him, and Jason, well, they hadn’t been friends for long, but he suffered for his fate as well.

It was a clear night. He would have preferred the cloud cover that had burned off only a few hours ago.

From a higher location he tried again.

—This is Green Eggs. Green Eggs. Anyone got copy?

—Back at ya, Green Eggs. This is Andorra 5. Sam, man, what’s up?

—Andy! I’m so glad to hear your voice. We got infiltrated, by we, I mean myself and the Sherman’s two dobermans.

Andy whistled in disbelief.

—Dogs! That’s awesome, man. You know the way, yeah?

—Coming through the piney woods. Safer.

—That’s it. Do you need us to meet you?

—Nah, it’s a straight shot. I’m going to sprint it as soon as we hit the end of the woods.

— Get over here, man. We’re waiting for you. Be careful, Sam.

— Will do. Don’t worry too much. I’m well armed.

Sam shut off the CB and stuffed it back in his pack. It was small, just a basic model, and that pleased him. Once out of the woods, he called the dogs.

— Let’s go, boys.

They galloped ahead onto the open field and Sam ran after them for all he was worth.

❈

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There is something deliciouly ironic about publishing a story about a human and a virtual mind on the day the Substack Pangram feature launches, and then having a machine declare it 97% human.

La Chimera (2023) is ostensibly about petty tomb raiders in modern-day Italy, but at its heart touches on something other than archeological theft. This is a portrait of a man whom we meet at a tipping point in his life, when the internal and external contradictions he lives with force an outcome he is not prepared to meet but cannot prevent.

The film opens in medias res aboard a train, with close-up shots of Arthur (Josh O’Connor) sleeping against the window. It is shot with golden hour lighting, which suggests innocence, a harmless sleeper not acting upon the world, and the audience is invited to see goodness. The camera lingers on the handsome face and cream-colored suit, which at first glance, gives him an air of refinement. The scene allows us to make these very natural assumptions because the language of cinema has trained us to read these signs as native to a favorable impression, at least provisionally.

What is impressive about the way this scene is shot, is that director Alice Rohrwacher is not merely providing information, but controlling the order in which it arrives. Psychological exposition does not take place in the traditional sense, with backstory or dialogue. This approach is especially engaging. Rohrwacher begins with an idealization before carefully layering in conflicting evidence. Arthur is a composite of traits arrived at through observation, and characterization comes to us via the camera.1 The director answers questions in a fluid manner by allowing the social reality of the train compartment to reveal those answers.

As the scene unfolds, the central question that builds is not the obvious one of who the character is, as much as why he is on the train.

Rohrwacher gives us interesting material to construct Arthur. He shares the compartment with two pretty teenage girls, who ogle him. His reactions are crucial because dialogue is sparse, but from the outset, it is evident that he does not wish to engage with them. Despite the rakish figure he cuts, this is not a lady’s man. His irritation persists as the conversation drifts to an awkward subject concerning the striking profile of the woman to his right and her rather prominent nose. Arthur shows brusque politeness in refusing to join in on the implied ridicule of her. Next, the train ticket beat introduces implied backstory; a louche element is added without explanation. We understand its irregularity solely from a moment of tension in the faces of the conductor and then Arthur. Then a new character bursts in and complains of the smell in the berth. This is where the deflation of the impression Arthur makes becomes comic. His corporeal presence is repellent, and this is quickly followed by a sudden flash of violence against a man who had insulted him in the corridor. The other passengers flee to another compartment. Once having arrived at the destination, an associate of some kind pursues him, and we understand Arthur had been in jail. He goes from handsome stranger to surly passenger to smelly derelict to violent abuser and finally ex-convict, all in the space of ten minutes.

These reversals of perception are deft, and the narrative structure is elegant, but the economy is breathtaking. Nothing about this feels like exposition, and each detail carries multiple meanings.

The opening sequence, however, does not truly end until he arrives home. We see that his friends are people he only allows to think are his friends. We later discover they are his partners in crime, tomb robbers, people we notice he finds overbearing and annoying. All Arthur wants is to be alone in his house. Except that the house is not much of a home. It’s no surprise that he is coughing and holding himself against the cold, or that he can’t even find matches to light a cigarette. Winter has come, and now the suit, which has gone from debonair to disheveled and shabby, changes meaning again. Arthur is poor, perhaps even destitute.

Rohrwacher gives us cultural details that remind me of Tony Gatliff’s enduring homage to the Roma, and especially in Gadjo Dilo (1997). Both films have white, European young men searching for something outside their cultures. Stéphane is looking for a singer named Nora Luca, while Arthur, we discover, is looking for his lost love, Benjamina. The musical segment infuses in La Chimera with the cultural identity of the tombaroli. When one of them sings, “Not everyone is capable of defying the law, the darkness and the souls of the dead,” he is singing their blues, just as the old patriarch in Gadjo Dilo, Izidor, sings the laments of the Roma. These songs elevate them to folkloric status, and also provide context for the mutual attraction between Arthur and the townspeople.

All the characters we meet in the next sequence seem to love him, but he does not fully reciprocate. In fact, he seems uncomfortable and withdrawn. The suggestion that he is integrated yet detached from his milieu is interesting. Curiously, this mismatch between the first impression and the personality which is coming to light does not actually negate the earlier, better impressions. Arthur is still handsome. He remains vulnerable and intriguing, but the portrait is becoming more layered. Through a series of collisions between our assumptions and the cascade of evidence, we are forced to revise our perception of him, and in keeping with Rohrwacher’s narrative style, the information comes through other people. Before he can define himself, the world he interacts with has already given us the opportunity to learn who he is. Arthur himself remains opaque. The viewer observes the traces he leaves in the minds of others.

Certain elements are through-lines. Here is where things get really interesting in terms of character building. For example, the suit is not just a decorative whim of the costume designer or the director. A summer suit in winter is a key piece of evidence embedded in the costume, a timestamp. Rohrwacher trusts the audience to realize that Arthur is dressed this way because he has been in prison since the suit was correct apparel for the season. As such, his suit is conveying story, a nice example of narrative compression at work.

It is absolutely fascinating how the mystery of this man deepens with every scene. We meet the old invalid woman, who clearly loves him—again, this is another contradiction. The love for Arthur is comical, as in when the woman’s daughters complain that she lets him smoke in the house and they can’t. He is appreciated by the villagers. Then we realize he is useful to and incorporated in the local economy through “Spartaco” (more offhand humor here). We interpret Arthur as shrewd. He tells Spartaco to keep his share of the money for the artifacts because he “doesn’t want any debt.” Later this becomes symbolic of something else.

If Arthur’s character and personality are mediated by the people around him in the first act, the second is dedicated to his illegal activities, depicting his role within the illicit antiquities trade and unexpectedly, his uncanny ability to find treasure, which makes him indispensable to Spartaco. We also understand the exploitative nature of his “friends,” the tombaroli. At this point, a new character enters, who provides an impetus for Arthur’s subsequent actions. She is a young woman named Italia (Carol Duarte), and one could argue that she even serves as the catalyst propelling the story forward. The girls in the group call her strega, witch, but she is also buffa, a clownish figure—almost a nod to Fellini. Like Gelsomina in La Strada, she is a seemingly comic figure whose awkwardness conceals tremendous moral and emotional gravity.

As her influence on Arthur grows, a tentative love interest develops, culminating in the beach scene, when a strong conflict erupts and triggers a flash of self-recognition that shakes him to his core. Her horror at discovering what he and his friends do for a living is visceral and honest. She tells him: ‘Those things are not meant for human eyes, but for souls.’ The tombaroli laugh at her. Arthur tells her sternly to go home, but not before she forces him to see himself as she sees him. In her strange, eccentric way, Italia makes Arthur feel first seen and then exposed. His reaction to her disapproval is worth the price of admission. It is a look that one doesn’t forget and retrospectively becomes even more significant. Italia leaves, vowing to call the police. Italia becomes the film’s moral witness.

Yet for all her condemnation, there is an affinity between the two characters. She is Arthur’s counterpart in that both are only tenuously connected to the society of the town. They recognize this special connection in the way they look at each other, and Arthur later acknowledges it openly when the two communicate through sign language. In another kind of film, they would have become romantic partners. Rohrwacher does not let this happen because of a fundamental difference between them which is the crux of the story. Whereas Italia represents outward life and the future, Arthur is inward, focused on the past and the dead. He cannot honor her and his larger fixation at the same time, and the film’s third act demonstrates why their bond will close down. This sharpens the tragedy considerably, because the alternative path is plainly visible to us.

The build up to the last portion of the film begins with a fateful event that same night on the beach, after Italia leaves. This is the moment when the film’s deeper conflict crystallizes. Arthur divines where to dig and jumps down into a passageway which leads not to a grave but to an ancient Etruscan temple space. He finds a room decorated with frescoes and filled with artifacts of every description. While the others are already celebrating what for them means striking it rich, the camera isolates Arthur in his private paroxysm of wonder and disbelief. By feeble candlelight, he runs his hand along the surface of a life-size figure of a young woman whose hand rests on a wild feline.

An archaeologist might be overwhelmed by the historical significance of such a discovery. Arthur is moved to tears. It is not simply that he finds the statue beautiful, or that he is the first person to see it in many centuries. He experiences recognition because the statue bears an uncanny resemblance to his dead lover, Benjamina, who we see in the dream sequence at the beginning of the film. The statue appears to have collapsed the distance between the dead and the living. Given that he has been living in relation to her absence, it might also explain the enigmatic dream dialogue: “So it’s you. My last woman’s face.”

His reaction also recalls Italia’s words about the artifacts, “they belong to souls.” What Italia said in the abstract is now made manifest, and he is powerless to resolve the tension between the shamefulness of how he has been making a living and what haunts him. Once Arthur has seen the marble statue, he can no longer fully participate in its commodification.

The original Italian poster for La Chimera, which I have placed below, shows Arthur as the Hanged Man, a major arcana archetype. It is interesting that this should be the chosen image because it is traditionally associated with suspension, sacrifice, waiting, and surrender. Most pointedly it can mean renunciation and the inability to move forward until something is relinquished.

This is relevant to the film’s climax, when the thieves bring Spartaco the statue’s head to an illegal auction in progress, where the rest of the artifact is on offer. Rather than handing it over, Arthur throws the marble head overboard with the words, “You are not meant for human eyes,” yet another echo of Italia’s outraged response. This is a brilliantly nuanced film beat. For Arthur, it is not just the rejection of profit, or an act of expiation, because it is motivated by the seriousness of his experience in the temple and his love. It is an aesthetic choice and an act of reverence. He relinquishes the head and renounces his activity as a tombarolo, to remain true to Benjamina. Arthur protects both because they have become intertwined in his imagination.

Arthur’s characterization can be further understood with one additional point of traditional Tarot iconography. The statue’s pose is similar to the major arcana image of the Strength card, a woman who places her hands on the head of a lion. This represents the reconciliation of opposing forces. Arthur absolutely does stand poised between opposite forces: the living and the dead, commerce/theft and preservation/reverence, desire and renunciation, memory and presence; Benjamina and Italia. Whether the statue was deliberately designed with the image of Strength in mind or not, his life is a restless swinging back and forth between these poles.

The arc from picaresque character to mythic character is gradual. As Arthur’s concerns cease to be merely about his day-to-day reality, the film has space to move the narrative from social realism toward his interior crisis and the mythic quality of his struggle. This, however, is no hero’s journey. Arthur is not called toward growth, mastery, or self-discovery. In contrast to that trope, he begins the descent into the irrational desire that will take him away from a viable future.

As the narrative moves into Arthur’s psyche, the ontology of his world shifts. The tombaroli themselves recognize that Arthur is motivated by private obsessions that they do not share. The viewer now understands that Arthur is a man in mourning. This is the compulsive desire to recover Benjamina, but he can no sooner do this than find his sense of futurity, and so he turns to the artifacts of the long dead. The act of excavation is practical but it is also deeply symbolic. Within Arthur’s interior world, he faces the only decision worth making: whether to cling to his obsession or relinquish it.

To support these narrative changes filmically, the third act does not always reside on the plane of verifiable material fact. Just as the summer suit compressed a piece of storytelling in the opening scene, objects increasingly convey meaning beyond their immediate function to become symbolic vehicles. Poverty. Illumination. Guidance. This is why the lighter is important. It is a thematic through-line, like his suit, from the realism of the everyday world to the netherworld where Arthur plies his trade, and to the mythic world where Arthur finally loses himself. When the conductor hands him another lighter saying, ‘You’re going to need it,’ it signals that the film has entered unreality. The lighter is real, but the conductor who gives it to him is not. His role shifts from train conductor to psychopomp.

Arthur will indeed need the lighter in the last scene just before the cave collapses on top of him. If he actually dies in the last scene—and I think he is moving towards death during the entire film—that interpretation does not clash with a second more symbolic reading of passing into an underworld where Benjamina is waiting to guide him to her with the thread of her skirt. This is the outcome he has been desiring throughout the entire film. When we mourn our dead we come as close to death as we can as living beings. In this final scene, Arthur comes to and realizes he is trapped in the cave. He looks upward to a chink of light, where he sees the red thread overhead. The emotional voltage of his descent is reminiscent of the story of Orpheus, although I don’t mean to infer that the director is endeavoring to retell or even reference that particular myth. Nevertheless, Benjamina could certainly symbolize Arthur’s Eurydice.

In the final shots we see them embrace. The lovely ambiguity here is that we do not know for certain whether the cave has actually collapsed, implying his death, nor on what plane we are to understand the embrace. One might ask if Arthur’s attachment to Benjamina is rewarded in the last scene or if achieving his heart’s desire is his destruction. On the most mythic level, one interpretation could be that the red thread of Benjamina’s skirt is his only path to peace, but the director refuses to convert metaphysics into facile interpretation. Rather than telling us what to think, Rohrwacher leaves the interpretation open.

❈

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1

There are many more interesting camera techniques than I am able to fit into this essay. I am confining myself to characterization and will therefore not talk about the film’s architecture unless it’s pertinent to that subject.

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Epilogue

An artifact that had survived four centuries underwater sat on my desk in the Hôtel Amista. Beautiful. They had pulled it from her hand. A gold cartouche-shaped snuffbox. Around its body was a double line of flowers or shells, and on the base, a trellis pattern. The top had fine repoussé metalwork, and after it was cleaned, I could see the delicate chasing that had gone into it.

It belonged to the brother of King Henri IV of France, François de Bourbon, Duke of Alençon. Gaillard might be able to save his precious museum with this piece alone, and I would have had a merry time figuring out how it got on board the Marie-Caroline without its owner.

I say merry with the most profound bitterness. Further wreck exploration has been cancelled. I will never find the circumstances surrounding Philippe’s being called a traitor, the one detail I had not yet uncovered. To be honest, I have not yet decided whether to complete my work on this project, and as for the book, whether to abandon it, or burn it and scatter the ashes in the sea, like I did yours. I am still here—paralyzed, if you want to know the damned truth. I might as well have gone down with you, and that’s not all. While the police investigate your accident, they are running a parallel investigation into the death of James Finlund, whose body washed up on the beach of the Côte Bleue five days ago. After the accident, I tried to call him, but he did not answer. I did not know what to make of his silence. He was released from the hospital, and he just disappeared without a word. He didn’t come to your funeral. What was he doing for two months? What was he doing in Niolon? Had he gone back to the Calanques de L’Érevine? Why? They have ruled out only suicide. As for your investigation, I was unable to help them, Marquesa, my Lady Death. I could not bring myself to do it. Of course, they have told me to stay put, but how could I leave you behind?

What did I always tell you, my darling girl? That they were mishandling the wreck. I said it. James knew it; he was compiling the evidence to shut it down. I told you to watch yourself. You only laughed at me with your ‘Oh, Rob, that’s how these things are always done.’ You gave me a hard time, teasing me and ridiculing my stodgy nature, but I knew you loved me. My love, my soulmate, I never wanted to tie you to my life. I could never. You were meant to be free, and now I hope you are.

❈

Afterword

Like Furor Scribendi, The Wreck Diver began as a fifty-word poem. How it became the story you've just read is hard to say. It came together quickly, and it reflects my love of the Mediterranean and its cultures, sailing and all manner of maritime history, legend and folklore.

That this started as a poem might seem strange, but that’s part of my writing workflow. I work with ideas and try to find the right length for them. This is why I like to experiment with all kinds of word counts, everything from fifty to many tens of thousands. Some very short pieces possess an unexpected density. They hint at a larger story that might inhabit a much bigger structure. Over time I have learned that when an opportunity like this arises, I have to follow it wherever it leads.

The novella is a beautiful length because it rewards concision. I say this perhaps because of my experience of writing these fifty-word poems or one-hundred-word stories. It takes a sense of narrative compression, which is something I have come to value highly.1 The novella allows me to sustain compression over a larger canvas.

I have written The Wreck Diver without tying it to the old noir tropes. For one thing, it’s crimeless. I skipped the guns, the criminal networks, and all the usual trappings of the genre. Instead, there is an entire economy of consequence without a prosecutable culprit. I also abandoned the femme fatale trope. Stephanie was capable, emotionally free, and intimately involved with the two men she sailed with. She held sway over both, though her behavior was the opposite of the deceit and manipulation noir traditionally expects from a femme fatale. And yet, through circumstances no one controls, both characters were ruined by her. Likewise, James was not hard-boiled. He did not run any clandestine operations, but his role in the story is noir because he was doomed by his own strengths. He did everything correctly and still failed. His most admirable qualities contributed directly to his downfall. The flaw and the virtue were inseparable.

The Wreck Diver depicts the relationships with restraint. The characters are constantly trying to know one another and failing in different ways. Nothing resolves cleanly—another noir attribute. Even Robert’s effort as a historian is in itself an act of recognition struggling against opacity. He becomes the custodian of all three unfinished lives: Stephanie, James and Philippe, and as the only survivor of the story, he is perhaps the most noir of all because his survival is not a reward.

There were moments when I could have gone harder with the reactions, given the intense emotions that gave the story its bite, but I was adamant about keeping it out of the melodrama mode of storytelling.

One last note concerns Saima’s poem. In the times when she lived, she would have paid a kātib, or scribe, to write it for her. I took as my inspiration the lyrics of the great Kabyle singer-songwriter Lounes Matoub to imagine the poem she might have spoken from her imagination and memory.

Let the seasons turn against us,
they cannot bury what was sown.

Wind may scour the hills,
the root remains in the stone.

Sorrow and hunger have sat with us;
they did not take our bread.

What we endured became our song,
and the song did not break.

It did not sink into darkness,
nor wander beyond the sky.

What was given between us
stands where it was placed.

The Kabyle Berbers are a hard people. In their history, sorrow and hunger are not exceptional catastrophes. Theirs was the last Algerian region to be conquered by the French, and the first to rebel. The war of independence began in the Kabylia, in the town of Setif.

Saima’s poem has no sweetness to it. It does not narrate their love or use flowery language. It speaks of continuance. She was not anticipating his death. She was speaking emotional truth as something she valued above all else. The last couplet is devastating because the entire novella is full of things that do not stay where they were placed.

There are many parallels in the stories of the contemporary characters and the historical ones. The one between James and Philippe is clearly of failed speech. What remains of the corsair hardens into that final act of insolence in the Marseille court:

“Philippe shouted something in Arabic, which was neither understood nor recorded with any precision.”

James’s great speech happens under narcosis, at depth, in the extremity of catastrophe:

Stephanie, it was too soon. Too soon. Too late.

This marks a connection between Saima and James. James’s restraint in chapter twelve is predicated on continuance and the idea that he did not have to rush into anything. He could not have known that his time with Stephanie would be cut short.

❈

My warmest thanks go out to everyone who read and commented. We serialists slow down people’s attention, and my greatest hope is that readers will feel rewarded for their patience.

❈

The Wreck Diver will stay up until the end of August, after which it will be archived.

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Characterization and Myth in La Chimera

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We were entering Stage II of the dive schedule. It was only the first week of August, a full two weeks ahead of schedule. We had finished the scan of the exterior and set up the deco stations with extra stage cylinders, God forbid we should ever need them. The penetration drills were done. James continued to work on the structural shift assessment. Otherwise, we were ready to lay the permanent penetration lines.

It was another windy day topside, and we had gone down hard, clinging to the lazy shot against the current. I photographed the layout and artifacts, but I stayed close to the line. It might take weeks before we could ascertain the existence of the rumored bullion. In the light of my headlamp, I saw something glint in the silt. It was a small, cartouche-shaped gold box. Snuff box, I imagined. It fit in the palm of my hand. I was very pleased to find something so special on the first day I was allowed to remove anything. Arnac was nearby. He continued measuring the beams and placing his markers. Jean-Louis was behind Arnac, monitoring the time and silt conditions.

I was completing my assigned tasks as quickly as possible, but the current made every movement that much clumsier. Arnac finished first. He passed me on my left and made the sign for ‘finished’ at James, who took out his slate and wrote:

IF YOU HAVE THE

MEASUREMENTS —

START YOUR

ASCENT

Arnac gave a thumbs up and turned, following the line out of the wreck. James had given him a very stark warning about following the dive lead’s orders, and I could see that honoring his promises meant something. He and Jean-Louis exchanged messages, and Arnac went up. Jean-Louis stayed where he was. He was checking his dive computer, a console attached to his regulator. James and I used wrist models. I checked mine. Depth: 84.7 meters | Runtime: 15:12 | TTS: 180 min | PPO₂: 1.3. One hundred and eighty minutes was a very long decompression time. We were going to have to wrap things up soon. The submersible pressure gauge on my bailout tank said 104 bar. It was a bit more than half full, which was all the backup needed for this dive.

Ahead of me, James was clipping the guideline to the beams and running the reel forward. I paused to photograph the beam structure, tucking the snuff box into my harness strap. I had to tilt the camera to get the right angle for this shot. I put out my hand, using the nearest beam to steady myself, and at that moment, the current pushed me. I heard the muffled sound of the beam collapsing. The falling end landed across my side-mounted bailout cylinder, which forced it against the frame rib behind me. The beam had become a lever, forced against the ship’s frame rib, pressing the cylinder into the entire structure. My gas cylinder was now a hard wedge. I couldn’t move because the the tank was clipped to my chest and my hip. I gasped when I realized the cylinder had locked the entire harness in place. If I tried to twist out it would only tighten the wedge.

Almost immediately, I lost visibility, but the silt that had lifted alerted the others. James arrived first. His panic-stricken face loomed towards me in the silty water. I struggled against the harness. And he made the stop signal, then wrote something on the slate and put it in front of me:

DON’T MOVE

2ND COLLAPSE

POSSIBLE

I tried to steady my breathing. It was the best thing I could do. The only thing. I had let go of the camera, but I reached down to where I had attached the snuff box. I don’t know why but I held on to it tightly.

Now I saw two lights in the murky water; Jean-Louis had seen the silt rise. James was running his hands across the harness to where the cylinder clips were. The one near my chest was trapped between the beam and my body. I couldn’t reach it and neither could they. Cutting the harness would not change the situation either. I couldn’t get out of it pinned as I was against the beam. Even between the two of them they would not be able to lift it and other debris that had fallen. It would weigh at least three hundred kilos, maybe more. Time was running out. They tried to lift the beam. I could have told them to save their strength for the ascent since they had no footing and very little leverage. It would barely move. James tried to dig a clear space around my tank. I guess he was hoping that the rotted beam and frame might disintegrate enough to free the contact point. I was thinking the same thing. All it did was worsen the silt cloud, which was now blinding all three of us.

I felt James loosening my shoulder straps. He was trying to pull me out of my harness, but with the rebreather unit on my back and the attached hoses and tank pinning the rig, there was no way for me to slide free. He switched me to his bailout gas and I saw his slate clearly in the glare of his lamp.

CONTROL YR

BREATHING

Yes, I was doing that. He did what I would have done: try to unclip the bailout cylinder and twist the tank. It would not rotate, which meant that it was compressed between the two rigid surfaces. He was trying frantically to unclip the trapped cylinder while pushing the beam upward with his shoulder, pulling me at the same time. He and Jean-Louis did this several times. The beam had not moved at all, not a single millimeter. I started crying because I knew what that meant. The beam was bearing structural load, not just lying there. A rigid wedge like this could not be removed without removing that load. Through the haze, I could see Jean-Louis’s light bobbing. He made the ascend sign. I checked my computer. James could still survive if he left right now. I saw him say no.

James swam closer, and I caught him by the waist, pulling on his slate. He gave it to me, and I wrote:

YR OUT OF TIME

GO

U CANT SAVE ME.

I looked into his eyes. He was trying to keep himself together, and the strain enormous. He took the slate from me and wrote:

ONLY SURFACE EQUIPMENT

COULD HAVE FREED YOU

He erased it and wrote again:

IM SO SORRY

I HAVE ALWAYS

LOVED YOU.

He touched my face with his hand. He was saying my name. He squeezed my shoulder and was gone. The crying and hyperventilating had accelerated the CO₂ buildup. I still had gas, but every breath I took was less satisfying. Even trying to regulate my breathing didn’t diminish the feeling of air hunger. I wanted to rip out the mouthpiece. I was getting too warm inside the suit. That would be my blood pressure rising, and with it came a throbbing headache. The shot line waved in the current. I clutched the little gold box. This was it. My mask was filling up with my own sea of salt water. The wreck was claiming me as one of its own.

I swear I didn’t want to come up, but I was not going to make it if I didn’t concentrate. It had all happened faster than I could process, and the finality was more than I could bear, but I followed the line up with trembling hands. I knew my CO₂ load was way too high just from the way my heart was pounding. I controlled my breathing as best I could. Just the ascent. Think of nothing but the ascent. I felt dizzy. I kept checking the computer for the next stage. It couldn’t come fast enough. I saw Steph’s face as I swam away from her, and told myself to shut the fuck up with that. No thoughts. Only the ascent.

I was at sixty meters. My decompression obligation was gigantic, and I was alone. Jean-Louis was at least two stages ahead of me. You might think he was a shit for leaving me to face this alone, but not me. That was the smartest thing he could have done—and not only for himself. My jaw started to clench just like Arnac’s had the last time. That’s why he kept uching his face.

Mildly nauseous. The narcosis.

Stephanie.

I was at thirty meters and exhausted. My legs and arms felt heavy. I fell asleep for a few minutes. I didn’t care. Marquesa. You look like a marquesa. Aubert said we should hurry. Do the calcs at eighty meters as if I were on dry land. That miserable fuck. Marquesa, I failed you. I saw her in the backyard of the hotel, laughing at something I’d said. Then the image bleached out. I came to and checked the computer. Time to move. I could hardly swim. When would this end? I gripped the shot line. Come on. Come on. Just move the flippers. Go. Go. You can’t save me. Go.

I made it to nine meters. The oxygen exposure would be higher now. The pressure was dropping and the circulation was increasing. Now I was very dizzy. My ears were ringing. Ringing and ringing. I remember this. I remember from the other time. The coma. I was floating up. The fish were floating with me. I was a fish. I had only ever been a fish. I was not going to stroke out. I could handle it. Arnac is a good guy. Stephanie, it was too soon. Too soon. Too late. The sun fish loved her too. Punchy. Go, go. Fin.

Six meters. Shit, I was afraid of this stage. My hands were still shaking, but now my whole body was shivering from the cold. Yeah, I remember this cold. So cold. I can hardly keep my eyes open. Steph was with me. I could feel her all around me. She would have run out of air when I hit thirty meters. Stephanie, I’m so sorry. She’s here with me. I feel it. I hear things, not just the buzz; something else is making a sound. It’s the hull talking. Creaking. Talking to the other wrecks. The cast-iron ones are making forlorn metal sounds, scraping, moaning. Steph’s here with me. I can feel it. The brightness of the shafts … too much. I’m swimming weird. I can’t coordinate my movements, but it’s okay. I feel so light, feathery light. I need you sharp. Six meters, ‘the hang’ as we call it. I should be hung for what just happened.

I was really worried. They were very late. Jean-Louis came up first. Alone. Ah, Bon Dieu, non.

«Où sont les autres?1»

I yelled at him as if it were his fault they were not there. He swam to the ladder and told us that there was nothing to be done for Stephanie. His words shocked me. The words you do not want to hear:

«On ne le reverra jamais.2»

Our mate, the captain, came out of the cockpit.

«Quoi? Qu’est-ce qui se passe?3»

«La fille n’est pas remontée! Je sais pas pour l’autre.4»

«Ben, retrouvez-le!5» bawled the captain.

I looked out at the water and saw nothing. I went to the other side, and there was James floating face down in the water. The captain was furious.

«Arnac! Sors-le de l’eau, putain!6»

I dove into the water and got him by the harness. We hoisted him up onto the deck and took off his mask. He was alive, but it took several minutes for him to regain consciousness. He opened his eyes and curled into a fetal position. The captain looked at me scowling and went to the control room to call the ambulance that would meet us on the dock.

❈

Chapter 19

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Fourteen | Fifteen | Sixteen

I waited impatiently for the call slip to be filled and in the meantime, I reworked a section of text I had started the day before. Eventually, I heard the sound of the metal book trolley approaching, and a librarian handed me the log that fit the dates of a captain who had once sailed under Uluç Ali, but whose name I had yet to discover. It was covered in plain black calfskin and had thick pages. I was surprised at how legible the captain’s handwriting was, and then I was not, because clearly, this was a man of precise thought, and his script was tight and disciplined. I was transported to the Mediterranean of the early seventeenth century. There was mention of several prizes, attacks, and sinkings of Christian vessels. His descriptions were bold and stark, and sounded eerily like Hemingway’s war correspondence.

I had been reading for an hour and a half when I found mention of Karim al-Muhtadi. It had to do with a promotion. I turned the page and the script was now from another hand. It was not as easy to read, but I saw another mention of a Karim. This time the surname was al-Nasrānī, Karim the Christian. I found two commendations dated a few months apart. One was for Karim al-Muhtadi and told the story of a man falling between ships as the boarding party crossed to the Italian vessel under attack. Karim exposed himself to the line of fire to rescue the man as he clung to the hull. Ali used the word شجاع, shujāʿ, brave, in describing Karim’s actions. There was a second about Karim al-Nasrānī being recommended as a squad leader of the ‘dagger-men’ that would use the cover of night to dispatch the commanding officers on board a Venetian merchant vessel. He also noted that it had been six months since his behavior had abruptly changed, and that he was beginning to see he had the makings of a leader. But there was one further remark that electrified me: ‘I suspect this great change is because he is now married. Saima is a good woman. I was right to accept her request that I be her wali1.’

This was as unexpected as it was extraordinary. It was the stability he had never had. The captain would have been an important part of his social life, and Philippe a welcome member of a new family. The promotion must have made him feel for the first time in his life that he had a promising future. I had a sudden flash of irony that in turning over a new leaf, with his promotion and the change in his sentimental life, Philippe had accidentally sealed his own doom. Nevertheless, his path reinforced something I already knew: corsairs were not outlaws; they were more like state-sanctioned privateers under Ottoman authority, and this was an advantage to my research. Had Philippe married some Marseillaise, it would probably have been a common-law arrangement. I was hoping to find out something more about Saima, but I only had her given name, and this, I had to admit, went beyond my research duties as far as the wreck was concerned. I had now reconstructed the whole arc of the conversion story. It was time to go back to France.

Amir, whom I met for lunch once more that week, insisted on driving me to the airport. It was the kind of gesture I had come to see was natural among Algerians, and I appreciated it. I had to fly a lot, but as Steph never tired of teasing me about, I really hated it. Amir’s kindness made the trip back a little more tolerable. Back at the Hôtel Amista, I unpacked and called Steph, but it was too early in the day. She would be out on the research vessel in a meeting, or already in the water. Having taken the earliest flight of the day back to Marseille, I had the whole day ahead of me, and I knew where I had to go.

Toulon was my first choice, the Service Historique de la Défense, only an hour away, whose naval archives were not vast but might suffice. I reasoned the records I needed were more likely to be there than in Paris, which of course, had much more material. I certainly wouldn’t mind going to Paris, but it might not be necessary.

In the early 1600s, the French were still more than fifty years away from having a standing navy. The squadrons that chased Karim al-Muhtadi across the Mediterranean belonged to the Corps des galères. I haven’t said anything about this so far, but it’s an engaging part of the story. These were the galleys of neither private citizens nor men of the watch, but royal vessels, commanded by noble officers of the French crown. The capitaines de galère were appointed by the Grand Maître des Galères, who at the time was Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi, under Henry IV, and here I had to be careful not to go down this rabbit hole because I would surely not accomplish the day’s work before closing time.

Aside from this, the battles recorded here were engrossing in and of themselves. Now I could search directly for the Marie-Caroline, and I soon found what I needed. The account of the skirmish, the sinking, and the capture of thirty Maghrebi corsairs, among them Philippe Le Boutillier dit ‘Philippe La Fripouille et Karim al-Muhtadi al-Faransi,’ the convert and Frenchman. This was it. My hands trembled faintly, as if I’d drunk too much coffee. The dossier they brought me had everything. I emptied it onto the thick wooden table and stared at the documents.

Philippe-Karim was in command of a xebec in hot pursuit of the Marie-Caroline. They had already boarded her when three French patrol galleys appeared. Knowing that the enemy was too strong to defeat, he sank the merchant vessel and the xebec tried to escape under sail. Even though xebecs are light and fast, the galleys closed the distance. Having sail and oars, they could maintain their speed regardless of the wind. They fired bow cannons, destroying the main mast and killing much of the crew. The first of the galleys to reach her launched its soldats de marine across the rail. Some corsairs were captured, Philippe among them. Officially, this was all I was required to confirm, and I could have ended my research at this point. Nevertheless, I again felt compelled to hear out the whole story of Philippe’s demise.

Le Procès de Philippe Le Boutillier, his trial: even though the ministry was paying me to investigate the precise nature of the sinking of the ship, I would start here. The first segment was devoted to assassinating his character. His prior misdeeds in Marseille were read out, and it was noted that ‘the accused refuses to answer certain questions.’ Once a composite of his moral unworthiness had been constructed, the prosecution moved on to establishing his apostasy. Here La Fripouille stated ‘in a clear and unequivocal tone’ that he had no allegiance to France and was in the service of the corsairs of Algiers. Again he refused every question put to him, even when it was prefaced with the phrase ‘On pain of death.’ He was accused of piracy, treason and apostasy. When asked how he pleaded, he said nothing. The prosecutor rewords the question more aggressively and Philippe shouted something in Arabic, which was neither understood nor recorded with any precision. The judgement was swift: execution by hanging.

At this moment, the warning tone sounded in the hall, and I realized I would have to return the next day for the account of the battle and sinking of the ship, and I would remember it as one of the most important days of my career. I had just enough time now to finish what I was reading.

This was an account of the hanging, one I had never seen before. It was a consular report that gave me the closure I wanted. It was not easy to stomach, but my fortitude had paid off. Attached to the report, was a severely distressed document made of what looked like Italian rag paper, and was written in the wide, loopy Arabic script I had come to identify as Maghrebi. There was a dark, brown smudge on the left margin, a thumbprint, and other brown smudges of various shades scattered across the page. Blood? I translated the text. It was, of all things, a poem.

Let the seasons turn against us,
they cannot bury what was sown.

Wind may scour the hills,
the root remains in the stone.

Sorrow and hunger have sat with us;
they did not take our bread.

What we endured became our song,
and the song did not break.

It did not sink into darkness,
nor wander beyond the sky.

What was given between us
stands where it was placed.

It was signed, Saima.

The consular report mentioned that the bailiff found two artifacts on Philippe when he was cut down: the poem in a pocket of his clothes, and in his mouth a small round medal, ‘hidden to prevent confiscation.’ I would have gone anywhere to find that medal, but the documentation included a line drawing of it—what I later learned was the Berber Tizizwit, an ancient symbol of community, blessing (baraka), and health.

Found on his body. Perhaps parting gifts from wife to husband. A likely supposition I would never get to investigate.

❈

Chapter 18

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Fourteen | Fifteen

This dive was nothing like the first one James and I had done. The current was so strong that the cylinder kept crashing into the D-ring, which was right over my hip bone. As I finned my way into the dark, I imagined the bruise I’d have that night. I had to kick hard against the current and hold tight to the shot line. Each of us wore a bailout tank side-mounted on our harnesses. I was afraid the extra weight would pull the bolt snaps free, but we made it to the sixty meter station intact. James unfastened the tank from my harness and clipped it to the deco line, one bolt snap at the top, and the other at the bottom to keep the tank from swinging. It hung like fruit near a little marker light attached to the rigging. This would orient in the dark us on the way up. We continued our descent.

I sighted Arnac and Jean-Louis away to my left, and I motioned to James. We swam down towards them and everyone signaled a ‘so-far-so-good.’ Once on the bottom, I was relieved to see that the silt had not been disturbed by the turbulence above. Each diver knew what they were supposed to be doing. James undid the other bailout tank and went about securing it. I was busy getting my camera ready, Arnac took out his measurement equipment and checked his dive computer. We were going in single-file, James first.

He attached the primary reel to secure a tie-off point on one of the heavy beams, acting as a reference for the exit path, and unreeled it tautly as he swam in. As per his instructions in the morning, we switched to frog kicks to minimize the silt lift. This was the real Minotaur’s cave, where anything could happen. I followed behind James, Arnac behind me, and Jean-Louis brought up the rear.

Our flashlights were pointing downwards and to both sides and the water clarity was good enough to capture images. I set to work, photographing the interior layout, while Arnac placed temporary markers. He took notes of the beam spacing, cargo hold width and frame positions. James, who continued to pay out the line, checked to make sure we were all behind him. He checked his dive computer to see if we’d reached our penetration limit, and he signaled a few seconds later to stop. For some reason, Arnac kept going. James signaled for him to stop, but he continued on. Had he not seen the signal to come back? James swam after him and they signaled each other, but I couldn’t see them from where I was. It looked like they were disagreeing about something. Then I saw James swim slowly back to his position. We all turned and followed the guideline. I could just barely make out the exit in James’s light. It seemed small and far away, with only enough room to clear beams and frames without banging into them with the camera housing. It reminded me of the trouble back at Cosquer, trying to maneuver my way through a crevasse.

As we passed a doorway, a current moving through the hull loosened a plank, and a fine cloud of silt started to rise. In a few seconds, visibility went from ten meters to about two. James switched his flashlight on and off to signal stop, as the cloud spread slowly. The push of the water made the guideline start to vibrate. It was hard not to feel panicked, and I struggled to hold position. James turned his headlamp down and signaled the team to dim theirs. It was time to practice the exit. I held on and forced myself to relax my jaw. Outside the wreck, we emerged one by one, exchanged the OK signals, and James signaled the ascent.

My heart was racing from the depth, but from the scare, too. We had nearly been caught in something like underwater “snow blindness,” which was probably what killed the divers in Cosquer. James swam up beside me as we ascended to the first deco station. It brought me out of my thoughts and back into the environment, which was a strange experience—as if I’d dozed off and been startled out of a light dream state.

We ascended together. James had dropped out of the leading position so we could talk, and now that we were closer to the surface, we could see Arnac and Jean-Louis off to our left. We each found the deco line and swam to the next stop, sixty meters, for about five minutes.

When we reached thirty meters we could talk.

—I can’t wait to get a look at this batch of photos, I said to James.

I wondered if my voice sounded as scratchy as his.

—I can’t wait to get up to the surface so I can have it out with Arnac.

—Yeah, I noticed all that. I was terrified that you guys would lift the silt.

—He wanted to keep going. Wasn’t my signal that we’d hit twenty meters clear enough?

—It was clear. I think this was deliberate.

—This is why I don’t like diving in teams over three.

—Yeah. Sadly, that’s not always up to you.

James tapped my arm and made the ascent sign, and we continued upwards. We had come to the nine meter level, what divers call the blue zone. This gave me plenty of natural light and a ten-minute stop. I remembered this stage from the first dive. The creatures at nine meters were varied. They often gather around deco lines and divers, curious and opportunistic. Today, I shot a cluster of Aurelia aurita, Moon jellyfish. Their translucent white bell shapes expanded and contracted hypnotically. It was a good moment to switch to video. There was so much to take in, that the time passed faster than I realized, and again we ascended.

In diving decompression, six meters is the sweet spot: it’s still deep enough to keep the gases from boiling into rapidly expanding nitrogen bubbles, but also shallow enough to breathe pure oxygen. It would flush the nitrogen and helium out quickly. This is why we would wait at this level for forty minutes. Enough time to take pictures and even goof around. We momentarily let go of the line, and I took a few shots of all of us. Arnac stood next to Jean-Louis, with his arm around the back of the CCR, and James joined in. Next, we did a four-face selfie with the deco line rising out of the top of the frame. Then I did individual portraits of each of us. These were going to be beautiful shots.

We were almost ready to go up, and after floating for so long in this stillness, I was feeling especially tired. I took James's hand and told him so, and he nodded. Then he broke eye contact with me and frowned at something below us. The deco line was shaking. I looked down and saw Arnac moving his head strangely, hands to his jaw, as if he were trying to shake off a sudden wave of vertigo. James asked him how he was, and he said he was dizzy and nauseous.

—Steady, man. I’m going to switch your gas. You’ll be okay in a moment.

Arnac started to drift upward and James had to grab him and pull him back to the line. Trapped gas in his suit was making him increasingly buoyant, something he could not control, and if he floated too high before completing his stops, the consequences could be serious.

—Hang on to the line! I think your suit isn’t venting right. Raise your shoulder.

Arnac did this, and a stream of bubbles escaped from his suit. He stopped drifting and got hold of the shot line. James asked how he felt, and Arnac said that the dizziness had passed. He patted Arnac’s shoulder and signaled that we could swim to the surface. I was glad Arnac was okay, but I couldn't stop thinking about the way he had ignored James’s signal.

❈

Chapter 17

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As always, my best strategy was to research the people around Philippe. Before leaving Madrid, I searched the Archivo Histórico Nacional for records of the Trinitarian redemption missions. These were friars who dedicated themselves to raising money and redeeming Christian captives. I knew the story of Miguel de Cervantes, whose release was secured through a ransom paid by the Trinitarian Friars, although Cervantes endured five long years of imprisonment. I searched from 1599 to 1605 and found nothing useful. This reinforced my decision to fly to Algeria.

I was still in my seat in the plane, which had not been cleared yet for disembarkation, and I wondered what the problem could be. Long delays could hit you at any time along the way on this airline, and the grumbling would be more than discreet. It gave me time to think, though. I was sure Philippe himself would never have appealed to his father for help; the ransom notification was a perfunctory mechanism of the state that told me more than I had bargained for, but it also invited questions.

How did one escape imprisonment and slavery once captured? I needed historical examples that might provide clues as to what Philippe did next. I searched for pirate ships and captains. First, I studied the most important Algerians, like Dragut, known as Turgut Reis, one of the most fearsome corsairs of the Mediterranean, and Murad Rais the Elder, who operated xebecs and galleys from Algiers. Then I looked at those corsairs who were born in Europe, like the Greek brothers, Aruj and Hayreddine Barbarossa. Hayreddine had risen to Admiral in the Ottoman fleet. I found one more captain who fit what I was looking for. His name was Uluç Ali, also known as Ochiali, a native of Calabria, in southern Italy. This corsair was the greatest example of a successful European renegade.

Philippe could not have sailed with him because he died in 1587, but his was a life La Fripouille would have wanted. His real name was Giovanni Dionigi Galeni, born in a small Italian village called Le Castella, in the Kingdom of Naples. His father wanted him to go into the priesthood. He was captured at the age of seventeen and enslaved on an Ottoman galley in 1536. Converting to Islam, he sailed with Turgut Reis, and proved himself an able mariner. With prize booty, he bought a share in a corsair brigantine operating from Algiers. He was known to have raided Calabria, Sicily, the Balearic Islands, and plundered Spanish shipping routes without mercy. Unlike La Fripouille, he was not the kind of man to perish at the gallows. Uluç Ali went on to become the governor of Algiers.

Philippe might have converted to Islam to escape prison. However, proof of this was something I might have trouble finding even in Algiers. Records of conversions weren’t usually kept. It was more likely that any records of his turning renegade or apostate would be kept by European authorities. I would have to go back to Madrid for that, to the Archivo General de Simancas. If he had converted, Philippe would have had a new name, as is the custom, so I was on the lookout for records that listed an Arabic name linked to either France, or, if I got lucky, Provence. What I needed were crew lists of corsairs sailing from 1599 to 1609. This might be the quickest way to find La Fripouille.

I was using all the Arabic I knew, yet it was extremely challenging. One of the worst problems was the Maghrebi script in irregular handwriting, which had ligatures that swallowed letters. It made the manuscripts nearly illegible. An overlapping of regional styles further complicated my work. I was also getting an entire education in Turkish and Persian maritime loanwords I had never seen before. I tried not to get overwhelmed, but at all times, I had a very strong intuition that Uluç Ali was connected to Philippe La Fripouille. This is not always the best way to proceed in research, but I took a leap of faith that my hunch was sound, and I was heading in the right direction. After searching through three years’ worth of complete records and fragments, and spending many full days of poring over the material, an interesting pattern was emerging.

The first breakthrough was the accounts of a sailor tied to the mast for two days for disorderly behavior. He was listed only as Kerim Mehdi, but I found more of these. ‘Mehdi, Kerim, suspected of theft, administered twenty lashes,’ and then in Arabic, Karim al-Muhtadi, accused of insubordination. I knew how volatile these multicultural crews could be, so I assumed I was reading about various sailors. It took me a moment to understand that the word convert, Muhtadi in Arabic كريم المهتدي, was actually rendered as ‘one who has been guided,’ making them synonyms.

There were commendations and censures for these two names, which was perplexing. I noted them, and then found Carim El Motadi, which was what the Spanish would have called him, filtering the name through their own language. There were more punishments than commendations. Everything from fighting and stealing, striking fellow sailors and cheating at games, to abandoning his post and reckless disregard for direct orders in battle. I even found my first physical description: fair-haired and handsome but مشوَّه الوجه — mushawwah al-wajh ‘disfigured in the face.’ They mentioned large expressive green eyes and a fine nose, ‘broken at the bridge.’

Disfigured in the face. This reminded me of something I’d seen somewhere. I would have to check my backup notes at the hotel, things I had chosen not to take to the library. It was late in the afternoon, and I had been invited by my colleague at the National Higher School of Marine Sciences and Coastal Development, Amir Berkane, to his home in Tigzirt, not too far from Algiers. We would go back the next morning. This was a wonderful opportunity to decompress from the days I’d spent hunched over the heaps of old manuscripts and reconnect with my old friend. We had met when we were undergrads in the Erasmus program at the university of Valencia.

We drove from the campus directly to his village and a little restaurant that looked out onto a quiet inlet lined with stones. We sat at a table and the server, a lanky, young boy in cut-off shorts, asked what we wanted to drink. We ordered a good Belgian beer.

—You drink, Amir?

—Well, after the Isha, it’s okay.

—The Isha. That’s the last prayer of the day. What, you gang them up, is that it?

—If I want to drink, yes.

The boy server returned. He was shirtless, tanned and barefoot, with a long waist that made me think of the Minoan Fisherman fresco on Santorini. He minced his way across the rocks and asked us to go with him into the restaurant to choose our meals. I was a bit puzzled until I realized he was taking us to the refrigerator, which sat in the middle of the dining room. There were two sea bass, and a mackerel. We took the larger of the two sea bass to split two ways. It came with a simple salad and fried potatoes.

I picked at the fish with my fork, and Amir shook his head.

—In Algeria, we eat the fish with our fingers. This way you never swallow the bones.

I smiled and put down my fork.

The dinner was marvelous in its simplicity, and I soon found myself in a state of complete relaxation. When there was a lull in the conversation, the continuous sound of the waves breaking nearby was the perfect filler. That same sound lulled me to sleep that night, although my project was always there, processing in the background. I hoped I could find captain’s logs, rather than just loose fragments.

The next morning the piece of information I had been trying to remember came to me. It was not in the notes I had left in the hotel, but at the Amista in Marseille. I had found a police report of a sailor, thrown into jail after a dock brawl, bleeding from the face, and another dated a few years later about a sailor struck off a merchant ship. This one had a scar down the side of his left cheek that made him look ‘insolent’ when he smiled.

Could this be La Fripouille?

❈

Chapter 16

The Wreck Diver, which I began in February and finished at the end of March 2026, will run until July 8.

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We got into a pretty good routine of running in the morning of our days off from diving, and I had no problem keeping up with James. He taught me some really interesting neck stretches I’d never seen before, and I showed him the Chinese medicine balls that I used for my hands and feet. He had seen them used for the hands, but had never rolled them under the soles of his feet, an experience he called ‘heavenly.’ They were especially beautiful. Green enamel dragons flew against a red sky, with bronze cloisonné. Inside them were little chimes that sounded as you rolled them around, and they came in a little silk box. James borrowed them so often, I promised to find him his own.

James and I usually talked as we ran. I was asking the questions today.

—I notice you never talk about your family. You have a brother, right?

—Yeah. Six years older than me. Not much to say. We don’t really get along.

—What, incompatible personalities?

—Yeah, totally. And my father left the business to him. He was never around really, my dad, and Steven sort of followed in his footsteps. I had no one to lean on, but at least I didn’t have anyone pressuring me in any way. I was always at the marina anyway. I had a job there in the summers, running people to their boats in the launch, but mainly it was just for the company. I had money, a stipend that ended when I turned twenty-one. There was this old diver named Joe Mack. He was the one who actually taught me to dive, which is weird because my dad could have done that anytime he wanted. While he was alive, I used to sail in the Merriweather with him.

—So at least he taught you to sail.

—Not really. I just watched and learned and did what he told me to if there was no one else around to do it. Later, I asked him for a little Day Sailer, and he got me one for my fifteenth birthday. But it was Joe Mack who used to go out on it with me, not him. Later, it was guys I knew, or a girlfriend, but eventually it was just me. Anyway, on those little trips with Joe, he would bring diving gear with him, and we would dive to around fifteen meters. That’s when my real apprenticeship started.

We were coming to the back entrance of the bastide. I slowed down to a walk, and sat on the stone divider between the property and the road. James was drinking out of a water bottle he had velcro’d to his waist. He handed it to me and I drank, while he stretched.

—How did your mom die?

He looked at me, and my immediate thought was that I’d overstepped, but he answer me.

—It was a freak accident… I can’t tell you about it. Not because I wouldn’t share it with you, but it’s an awful image to have in your head, and it’s bad enough that I have to carry that around for the rest of my life.

—Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.

He sat down next to me.

—No, it’s okay, really. You can ask me anything you want. I trust you.

I smiled at him, but the words wouldn’t come out. I trust you, too. Instead, I just put my hand over his. He turned his hand around and squeezed mine gently. It was a mild day, There was a sky-surfer close enough to see. Then three more came into view.

—Look at that, I said.

He let go of my hand to shade his eyes.

—Let’s go get a closer look. You know, there might be a school near there. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

After lunch, we were reading, spread out on a blanket under the weeping willow, and I got a call from Robert. I felt James watching me as I circled round and round in the grass, and a clover flower got caught between my toes. Robert was in Algiers and seemed to be closing in on the mystery of our ship. He told me a few of the details of his finds, and it was pretty strong stuff. I explained the part about refusing to pay his son’s ransom. James got pensive.

—Jesus... I know what kind of man his father must have been; I dealt with that kind of hard-ass father all my life. No other way to see the world but his way, and no back talk.

I studied him while he talked, the way the emotions moved like a shadow across his face.

—Shit, you know, we have to talk about tomorrow.

—Ah, yeah. Well, now that the exterior is mapped, we should be able to start the penetration drills. I am still going to find time to finish the structural shift measurements. I don’t care what Gaillard says.

—You should. And yes, no removals yet. That’s correct.

—I want to leave gas backup cylinders, too. One at the deco station at sixty meters and another on the floor.

—Not the floor floor. It’ll get buried.

—Yeah, no. I just meant the bottom. We’ll figure out a system for it, said James.

—Then let’s go up and work out the route. I really fucking hope we are not going to have to fight with Arnac about the penetration limit.

I rolled over and sat up.

—We have to get that sorted in the pre-dive meeting. I’m not going to risk running out of air inside the wreck because Gaillard wants his picture in La Provence, I said.

He laughed, and then got serious.

—Nor I. Don’t get apprehensive, Steph. They’ve been cooperative and sane so far. Come on, let’s head up to town.

We got up and I folded the blanket into a neat square.

—You’re right. I shouldn’t make problems where there aren’t any. You know, when Robert gets back from Algeria, we should take The Marquesa out for the weekend.

—Oh God, yes.

We were in bed before eleven and up with the warblers. The B&B breakfast service downstairs started at seven, but we had ours brought up to us at five-thirty, so we could be on the pier by six, when the launch would take us to the research vessel.

The water was rough this morning and the launch did not get us to the ship without baptizing us in seawater. We were surprised to find Thierry Aubert on board.

—Shit, he should call first, I whispered to James, who laughed through his nose.

A big showy greeting, smiles affixed.

—Bonjour! Bonjour!

Arnac and our dive monitor, whose name I kept forgetting—Jean-Louis, were seated, drinking coffee and reviewing the dive plan.

—You drink coffee before a dive, Arnac? asked James.

The tone was not challenging, more like curious and innocent.

—I need to wake up, said Arnac, who obviously didn’t take it as a criticism.

—Without a P-valve?

Now James was grinning.

—I remember a dive where this guy arrived with a super tall latte, drank the whole thing in front of us, and then when we were on the bottom at seventy meters or so, he got so desperate he took out his dick and peed right there in front of everybody, he said, eyes crinkling.

Explosive laughter.

—I did that once, said Arnac.

—You see, that’s why I drink orange juice. I would have to get naked to do that! I said.

—Ah, ben ça! said Arnac, smiling and looking around at the other men.

—Besides, the dive is dehydrating enough, and my heart races at this depth, so no Joe for me.

Arnac looked confused.

—Coffee, James said.

Aubert sat among us, but was either not amused, or focused on what he was preparing.

—Alors, gentlemen and lady, au sujet, s’il vous plaît. Today we are to practice the interior penetration routes. I would like to reach the cargo hold.

James tensed up and then shook his head.

—Today’s not the day to push to thirty meters inside, Thierry. The sea is too rough. It’s going to take us longer to get there. In this kind of sea, I’ve seen divers pulled right off the shot line. We are going to be exerting ourselves harder, so you can count on more CO₂ buildup. Also we have no idea what the silt conditions are down there. We could get down to the bottom only to find visibility is zero.

Aubert listened without the subtle insult of doing other things at the same time. The eye contact between them was not confrontational yet, but I could see it going that way.

—If it were up to me, I would wait till the afternoon or tomorrow to go down again.

—Impossible, said Aubert.

—Il a raison, said Arnac to Aubert.

—Of course, I’m right. I’ve been doing this most of my life. That’s some hard finning we’re going to be doing.

He moved his hands up and down to imitate flippers, so everyone would understand. Aubert exhaled and moved around in his seat.

—What is it you propose us, Mr. Finlund?

—Maximum penetration of twenty meters.

Aubert looked at Arnac, who nodded in agreement. Leaning over, Aubert said something quickly to the diver, who assented minutely.

—We need to do a simulated exit drill as well, I said.

The dive monitor, who had not said a word up till then, agreed with me.

—I will only add that the samples collected two weeks ago show that the hull cannot remain in situ much longer because the wreck is deteriorating faster than expected. We found very high levels of bacteria that reduce the sulfate, and the cellulose degradation is severe.

—Monsieur Aubert, your findings are no doubt correct, but you asked us to curtail the structural mapping and sediment analysis. Now, I went against these orders. We have the wreck fully mapped, but structural drift and sediment analyses are not finished, except for the most cursory assessment. Even if they were, we would need a lift-frame design. This was not part of the original dive plan and we’ll need more time to do this, time you claim we do not have.

—I don’t know how to say in English with more clarity, the wreck is becoming a substrate, and it is being consumed. Alors, faites vite. Voilà, c’est tout1.

Condescending prick.

—Look, I understand your concern, but I am defending the lives of the people seated around this table—minus you, of course.

Every head turned towards Aubert who continued to shuffle his papers. The dive monitor spoke up, and now all eyes were on him.

—The experiment requires controlled entry, and the conditions must be as undisturbed as possible.

No one said anything else for a moment.

—Eh bien, then today we will establish a baseline reading for the interior environment.

Arnac looked down at his hands, and James pretended he was agreeing to Aubert’s proposal, which was essentially his own proposal.

We dove. James was correct, as predicted. We were blown sideways as we tried to descend.

❈

Chapter 15

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The wreck had been provisionally identified years ago. I had already written about the French hull construction, the cargo pattern was consistent with a late sixteenth-century merchant vessel, and only one ship of that type was recorded lost in those waters at the time. James’s wood specimen had done a lot to support the conclusion that it was the Marie-Caroline. This was one of the most challenging historical puzzles I’d ever had to figure out. The first thing working against me was the incompleteness of the record. I was working without a captain’s log or cargo manifest, and the insurance records had been destroyed in a fire in 1612. This much I had ascertained. But that trail had petered out. How do you continue when the archive around a shipwreck is thin? My answer was to reconstruct the people who made the thing happen.

I knew La Fripouille was hung for seizing a merchant ship, but the records didn’t explain how a shepherd’s son from Provence could turn into a man capable of becoming a pirate. Now that I had some key facts about him, I was not about to let myself meet with another dead end. The man had disappeared. I needed to find out if he’d been kidnapped, and if so, whether he’d been sold into slavery in Algiers or ransomed. I would look for ransom documentation, although honestly, by now, who would have wanted to redeem Philippe La Fripouille? Good riddance would have been a more likely reaction to his kidnapping. Therefore I prioritized captivity notifications. If Philippe survived the corsair attack, his name might appear on a captives’ roster sent back to European ports, and the best place to find those was at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid.

My plane touched down in Barajas. After calling a longtime colleague of mine, Carolina Jiménez, I took a taxi to Paseo de Recoletos. I knew Carolina from a symposium we had both spoken at about ten years prior to my taking the job I currently held in North Carolina. She was pleased to hear I was in Madrid and said she’d meet me for dinner that night. I had booked a hotel for just one night, gambling that I wouldn’t need more than two days. My backup plan was the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, and if I found nothing there, the BnF in Paris.

Fortunately, captive notifications circulated widely. I could find captivity reports involving the Mediterranean, especially lists of captives taken by Barbary corsairs, and consular correspondence. Having the date of his disappearance was important. There were three tomes the size of an old-fashioned atlas for that year. I knew it was 1599, but not the month, so I would have to go through all of them. I would look first in the May–August, then January to April, skipping January and February, and lastly September to December. Logical but totally wrong. On the second day, I was pissed that I hadn’t looked at this tome second, but I was convinced it would have been in the spring, when the Mistral is strongest. When I found the entry I clasped my hands in surprise.

Felipe Lebutillier, marinero, natural de Draguiñán (Provenza), cautivo por corsarios de Argel, el 7 de septiembre, de 1599.

Kidnapped by Algerian corsairs. But there was more. I found an untranslated bundle of consular correspondence with the one document that made my trip to Madrid worth the trouble:

L’an mil cinq cent quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, au mois de novembre, Avis est donné concernant un marin captif nommé Philippe Le Boutillier, natif du diocèse de Draguignan en Provence, pris par des corsaires lors de l’attaque d’un navire marchand en route vers Alger. Notification envoyée à Jean Le Boutillier, berger de ladite paroisse, père du captif. Ledit Jean Le Boutillier déclare n’avoir ni obligation ni volonté de contribuer à la rançon dudit Philippe. Affaire classée sans suite.

Affaire classée sans suite. Sans suite. Case closed.

—Oh, God.

Between my hands was proof that Jean Le Boutillier had been notified of the ransom and had refused it. Philippe’s father had abandoned his first-born son to the wolves. I sat for a moment, rather dazed by this discovery. I was trying to imagine what it would feel like to be cut off from one’s family and one’s past so definitively. Not just the pain of it, but the impetus it must have given him to step across a threshold. It would have been the death of his old self. In my research, I had uncovered the many brutal atrocities committed by this man later in life, blanched at the viciousness of them. With this ordinary bureaucratic document, I suddenly had the man’s deeper story, and a clear path to the next milestone: the Bibliothèque Nationale d’Algérie.

Phone calls were in order—an appointment at the Algerian Embassy for the next day, a new reservation with Air Algérie, and a flight change for my current itinerary. Then I called Carolina.

—Diga, she said.

—Hi, Caro. It’s Robert Hines. I’m done for the day. I’ll be heading out of the Archive right now. Shall we meet somewhere?

—Hola, Roberto! Yes, that will be great. Let’s meet in La Latina. Plaza de la Cebada—in an hour?

—Great. See you soon.

The heat had died down, and it wasn't too late to walk part of the way back to my hotel. The Paseo del Prado is a tree-lined boulevard in the center of Madrid, flanked by fountains and pleasant gardens. When I got to the Plaza de Cibeles, I noticed the tourists way up at the top of the Correos building, from where you could see all the way to the Sierra de Madrid. I had no idea they had turned the upper floor into a lookout point, and Steph hadn't been back to Madrid since our trip, so I took a few shots of it and sent them to her. I knew she'd ask if we could return here together. My text message was brief: In Madrid. I'll be back by the end of the week. Call you later. Then I turned onto the Gran Vía, and with the sun in my eyes, hailed a cab back to the hotel.

—El Barceló Torre, por favor.

Traffic was heavy and loud, but we made it there in time for me to shower and change. Then another taxi to the meeting point. Carolina was waiting in front of a restaurant I remembered from my first trip to Madrid. We greeted each other and kissed on each cheek.

—Are we eating at El Viajero?

—The food is not bad, but at this hour...I think no.

—Too crowded?

She wrinkled her nose and laughed.

—Una matraca insoportable. We would have to shout to hear each other! I have something better in mind, en la Cava Baja.

We walked down a narrow cobblestone street lined with restaurants of all kinds, and went into a place that was just opening for business, which was fine because we did not have reservations. Through some crazy luck we got a table at Casa Lucas.

I ordered wine and we caught up on news from the intervening years since 2018. She had secured a place in the history department of the Complutense, but life had become difficult for university professors. We compared notes, and she kept her highly justifiable rant down to just a few comments because during the same time she’d published a book. My research dominated the rest of the conversation since she was full of questions about it.

When the food came, I sat staring at it.

—Wait, is this right? I ordered ‘Pastel de espinacas y puerros con gambas.’ That’s spinach and leek pie with shrimp, isn’t it?

—Claro, look, she said, pointing to the green and white bar that looked more like a slice of pâté or spumoni.

—Oh, right!

I was put off by the presentation, but when I tasted it, my confusion melted away with the flavors. Her order was less deceptive. She offered me a bite, and it was delicious. While we ate, I could hear someone playing the slot machine in the bar next door. These were all over Madrid. When someone won, there would be the sound effect of bells to go with the flashing lights, and a male voice saying, ‘PREMIO!’ (prize) Then the real sound of euros cascading into the coin return tray.

Carolina asked after Stephanie, and was pleased that we were working together on this project. Thrilled by my pirate story, she asked lots of questions.

—So where do you go now? Back to Marsella?

I explained that the next stage of Philippe’s life had unfolded in Algiers, and that I would have to go there. Her eyes widened.

—Qué maravilla.

—Well, I hope it’s marvelous. Algiers is not always so easy to navigate. This starts tomorrow with the embassy, where I must get the visa—and it’s a bit pricey.

I wondered if I would encounter the same impossible functionary as the last time.

—You’ll do fine, Robert. I see the fire in your eyes when you talk about this Philippe.

Our plates were taken away, and the server brought two shot glasses and a bottle of licor de hierbas, a sweet digestif. It was bright yellow, and my eyes popped when I saw the label.

—Hijoputa1?

Carolina laughed.

—It’s not an insult! It comes from an Asturian expression: ‘¡Qué bueno, el hijoputa!2’

I was going to knock it back, but she touched my arm.

—Not like that. It’s not like a shot of vodka; you sip it.

—What’s in it?

—It’s made of anis and fennel, rosemary, I think, and a lot of other things. Canela… What’s the word for that? I forget.

—Cinnamon.

I took a sip. Not bad.

The server placed a silver tray with the check on it.

—My treat, I said.

After dinner, we took a lovely walk through Lavapiés and down to Atocha Station. I was already mentally planning what I would work on when I got to the hotel, while I listened to the story of her marriage. The couple had plans to buy land and build a house outside of Madrid. She wasn’t boring me, but I had nothing to say about it, and the manuscript was intruding on my thoughts the whole time. Steph still hadn’t called.

—That’s exciting, Carolina. I wish you the best of luck with it. When I’m back in Madrid I hope you’ll have pictures of the progress.

—And to you, Robert! You always have such fascinating projects. You know you are welcome to visit us whenever you want. Juan Carlos would love to hear about this one.

—Gracias, Carolina.

We kissed on the cheeks, and I listened to the echoing clacks of her mule sandals as she descended into the metro.

❈

Chapter 14

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The Wreck Diver will run until July 8.

So many mistakes have no name.

They are too fast to be ensnared by one’s attention. Thought before language. Born in error, born wrong, damning those they touch. The eye and ear, turned elsewhere, oblivious, balancing. The mind, taking breath, is walking on the ceiling.

So many mistakes have no name.

They hide behind something else and choose to merge with that thing, unseen and unnamed. So many mistakes have no name. Words do not come because timing slips for one second, and the world laughs at your folly. Because the mind is still dreaming of many hands lifting. Because the dream is a song of living.

Silence is pressure.

It comes in the aftermath, when we are no longer free to choose. I’ll see you today. I’ll see you tomorrow. You cannot go; you cannot stay. Silence is a long, thin strip of corrugated time. It wraps around you in waves and tightens.

Silence is pressure.

Once the trees dappled the white of a tablecloth, and the glasses were filled to the brim, and you drank. There was an Impressionist’s light and air not yet hard to breathe. There was no beginning and no end. No silence you could not match, second by second, with peace. You were tumbling and laughing.

So many mistakes have no name.

This intensity is all there is. It is all there will ever be. Intensity wrapped in silence and in mystery. Wrapped in pain. Wrapped in sweetness others will notice in you and mistake for joy.

The mirror shows us not ourselves, but the other, the other trapped inside the mirror, who recedes into the gloom and sometimes steps forward into the light, but cannot break the glass. You will never share anything but the disbelieving stare of a self locked into recurrence.

Silence is pressure.

The voice came from nowhere and everywhere: behind, beneath, inside the cold place where my name had been. I open my mouth and river-water answers. My tongue remembers mud. My hands find the two small moons upon the eyes, the stones I had laid there myself to shut out thinking.

❈

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We spent our fifth dive putting in the stainless reference pins, drilling them directly into stable bedrock near the wreck. James worked faster than Arnac did, but we still accomplished our objectives for the dive. This would add a new task to the next one: James would take measurements between these fixed points and the key structural features. If the distance changes even millimeters over weeks, we’d know something was shifting. No one would risk going inside it if unstable sections were at risk of collapse, and no one understood structural shift data like James. He would insist on months of repeated measurements before large removals. I continued with the photos for 3D scanning, which was work you did slowly to advance rapidly. I had completed about thirty percent of the exterior. The inspection diver was reassuringly competent, but he’d started later than I. That added another fifteen percent to the tally.

Decompressions were getting better for me, not easier, but I noticed my body was starting to feel conditioned to the regularity of diving—I would never get used to it.

Aubert, who was not a diving specialist, seemed to want to control not just the French half of the team, but us as well. Ironically, it was underwater when we most felt his presence as the stand-in for Gaillard. Yet he conceded to all of James’s demands. When we got up to twenty meters James and I had a little more time to talk. His biggest concern was hull sag, especially if it proved to be consistent, even though minor. He spent the decompression stage explaining how to help him watch out for micro-rotation in the stern section. When it’s only millimeters, this sounds negligible, fractions of a degree, but he said it meant something was changing below the wreck. It could be internal deck collapse, or something in the substrate. Rotation meant that the weight could be transferring onto weakened frames. I asked him to explain it to me more fully later. Once again, this aspect of diving was not my area of expertise. I was an artifact specialist. James was adding years of his experience to my knowledge of diving.

When we got up to sixty meters he asked me how I was feeling, and I had to tell him I was more tired than the first dive of the week. He said that was normal, and that in a few weeks I would be more used to it, but that we would need to work out on off days. That would help, along with sleep. I had never slept much. Six hours was okay for me, and I rarely slept more than seven, so you can imagine my surprise when I would wake after ten. I woke up refreshed, at least. We were getting closer to the surface. At ten meters, James looked behind him and stopped to let me catch up. He extended his hand and I took it. I didn’t need a pull, but it was a nice gesture. He only let go when we were both breaking the surface. There would be a group meeting as soon as we had rested a bit.

Arnac and the others came up a few minutes later. As soon as we were somewhat settled and had done our HV tests, Aubert mentioned that he would not come down for the next two weeks, but the inspector would stay with us. No doubt he was his eyes and ears while Aubert analyzed his specimens. Then he upset James for the second time that month by saying he should move on from structural shift metrics. He said we already had enough evidence that a catastrophic collapse was unlikely. James said he was looking for trend stability, that our data was perishable, fragile. I agreed with him. Aubert said the summer window would close rapidly without giving Gaillard the results needed to convince the shareholders that we were the most efficient crew available. That was how he phrased it.

—Are you implying that we would be replaced? asked James.

By now, I understood his triggers. I shot him a glance. Careful.

Aubert didn’t answer. Instead, he rolled up his maps and made like his portion of the discussion was over. Arnac was already telling us about the agenda for the next dive. James sat through it and said nothing. The launch came for us, and we were back on dry land. We went straight to the hotel.

I took a shower and threw on comfort clothes. I was stretched out on the bed thinking about the next dive, when I heard a knock. I got up and answered the door. James’s hair was still wet, but he wore a fresh pale blue shirt over khaki shorts. Ready to go someplace.

—I was wondering if you were hungry yet.

—Where are you taking me?

—Too tired to go anywhere; just downstairs.

I let him in and opened the doors to the balcony. The railing was painted white and beyond it, there was a sprawling back yard, where a weeping willow hung down to the lawn. The raking sunlight turned the grass brilliant yellow green and illuminated the midges. Beyond that, lay a small pond with its fat brown ducks. The room was situated in the back of the house, so it was quiet. We sat on two folding chairs at a small table.

—It’s nice enough right here, I said.

Our movements were as heavy as if we were still underwater.

—What’s on your mind, James?

—Did you think I came here to whinge?

I laughed.

—I’m glad it’s about food. I am a bit hungry, but not as much as you’d think. Remember the first time you took me down?

—The banana shakes?

We both cracked up.

—God, I could feel my body absorbing the nutrients. Like those trees in India that don’t bother to make branches. The leaves pop right out of the trunks.

—That’s about how I feel right now, too.

—Then let’s go. I’ll work up more of an appetite on the way down.

The hotel café was full of people, but James had had the foresight to reserve us a table for seven-thirty every evening after the first dive, when we had to eat somewhere else, and it hadn’t been a good experience. The server came and picked up the flat river stone with the word Reservé etched on it in some kind of silver ink. She slipped it in her pocket and asked what we would drink, leaving us two menus. Now I was hungry.

—While I was working, I noticed something about you with the drill today. You did almost two pins for every one that Arnac did. I mean, at eighty meters? This is exhausting. How do you do it?

—How could you see me bent over the drill?

—I was taking pictures right by you at one point. I’m sure you didn’t notice me.

—It’s practice. No extra movements. You see, on the surface you use your back and arm muscles, your abs, but underwater because of the gravity difference, you can lean in with your whole body weight. You’re right, though. It is tiring. Good thing we have the scooter.

—And now one less diver to share it with.

—I’m just glad he’s gone—one less pressure to cope with.

—You’re comfortable with Arnac?

—So far, so good, yeah. You?

—He’s polite in a faintly dismissive way. Nothing I can’t handle.

—Not because you’re a woman, believe me. He acts like that with me, too. Civil, but not friendly.

—They’re strangers, James. You know we should invite them here, or go into Marseille with them.

—Here. Not in Marseille. I’m not sure our tastes coincide. Here’s more neutral.

He looked all around him.

—And anyway, what’s not to like?

—Yeah, why not. Hey, something I’ve been meaning to ask and always forget: Is Naxos a middle name or a double last name? You’re named after an island, one of my absolute favorites.

—My father was Swedish. My mother is French. I grew up in Normandy until I was nine. It’s a rare surname. It’s a variation of Nassos, which is her maiden name. I’m a quarter Greek.

—It suits you. Your father is deceased?

—Yeah, he died when I was sixteen.

—Oh. Sorry for your loss. That’s a tough age to lose your dad. I lost mine when I was twelve. My mother had already passed by then.

James shook his head.

—Rough.

—Eh, I survived.

He smiled gently.

—You so survived. Look at you.

The night breeze had cooled. I covered myself with the sheet.

—What will you do if we get fired? I asked.

—Don’t worry about that now. Besides, I doubt that will happen.

—Not worried, just curious.

—By the way, any word from Rob?

—Yes. He had two brilliant finds, and then he hit a brick wall.

I told him what Rob had uncovered about our pirate.

—My God, he’s the one who works fast. At this rate, we’ll know enough about the Marie-Caroline to influence how we approach the wreck. Good man! So what was the brick wall?

—The trail went cold. He’s in Madrid right now. Said he’d let me know when he found the next lead.

The food came not a moment too soon. Broiled sea bream for James and a steak for me. It suspended our conversation for a moment.

—It’s an absolute crime that we have to drink water with this, I said.

—At least it’s Vichy.

We toasted anyway. Somehow the carbonation forgave the gaffe.

A few hours later we stumbled back to my room, not surprised that the food had made us drowsy. We sat on the bed and I took off my sandals while talking about the island of Naxos, Calypso, The Odyssey, Ithaca, the photographers Costas Balafas and Giorgos Tantsis, and the Black & White Awards for photography. By then, I had lit candles, because they were there, and because the room had only a single overhead light with a frosted glass shade. Its wattage hurt our eyes.

James was telling a series of anecdotes about his four cats growing up. He looked worn out.

—A cat person. I knew it.

I stretched my legs under the covers and closed my eyes.

—Ah, the cat stories are putting you to sleep.

—No more than mine about Naxos. In fact, I’m still really awake, just physically tired.

—Horrible, isn’t? James laughed.

There was a moment of silence, and that space announced the moment when he should have said he was leaving. I didn’t want him to, and it seemed he didn’t want to go either. I moved over and patted the mattress. He lay down next to me on his side.

—It’s funny. This room is only a little bigger than the cabin in the Jeanneau. I have this punch-drunk feeling that we’re still there, he said.

—You’re right. I feel it too, the rocking… And after all the twists and turns this summer, it feels like the only constant in a little corner of my mind.

It didn’t surprise me that we both missed the Jeanneau. My eyes burned, and I closed them.

—I think when we’re running and striving, when we take to the sea, we’re most alive, and the sea is alive in us. It’s nothing like the city. The pavement tells you nothing. Without people, the buildings are only beautiful. There’s too much distance there, a falseness. Everything is compromise. The city’s promises are too complicated and too conditional.

James kept shifting around, trying to get comfortable. I opened and closed my eyes again. I let his voice wash over me.

—But then there’s the sea... it wants what it wants and there’s no pretense. You don’t negotiate with it. Sea life is pure. The sea has simple intentions you can trust. I know who I am when I’m deep down, and I always have. Even as a kid. I almost wish I had not been born human. The animals are perfect and uncomplicated. I understand sea life. That’s why I do conservation work in the winter. It amazes me that they live on despite everything we do to them.

There was a pause, a long one. The sound of his breathing told me he’d fallen asleep. I opened my eyes one last time. The candles were just stubs now. James’s hair shone softly, backlit in the dim light. I turned over and fell asleep, too.

In the morning, he was no longer there. The slight indentation where the mattress had cradled him was still visible, and I rolled onto it.

❈

Chapter Thirteen drops May 27

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The Wreck Diver, which I began to write in February and finished at the end of March 2026, will run until July 8.

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The next morning I went straight to the Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône. I was going to concentrate on notarial apprenticeship contracts for ‘Philippe Provençal’ or ‘Philippe du Var’ from 1595 to 1598. There were some digitized notarial indexes going that far back, but for the actual minutes, I’d be sneezing over giant bound volumes with white cotton gloves. It wasn’t necessary anymore to wear them, but hours of touching this stuff dried out my hands. I was amazed that a lot of original documents were still stored in cartons by notary and year. It’s a testament to the quality of the papermaking of that time: long-fibered and slightly alkaline, made from linen or hemp and sized with gelatin, heavier than modern paper. This paper aged slowly and gracefully. Another thing I loved was the penmanship in brown-black ink. Elegantly legible, not like my chicken scratchings.

Once I got over the glory of seeing so much history between my hands, I got down to the task. There were many cartons, and I went through them methodically. Inside the third box, I saw the continuation of something that made my heart leap:

The said Philippe promises obedience, industry, and honest conduct, and to not absent himself without leave, under penalty of forfeiture of wages and lawful correction.

This could be it, but this was marked page two; there was no page one. In the next box I found the continuation, page three, with the signature of a witness:

The said Master Durand promises to instruct him in the said trade and to provide food, lodging, and necessary clothing.

It was frustrating because the first page would have the most important information. I searched all the boxes. It was missing. I asked the clerk, thinking it may have been removed for a specific reason, but he didn’t have any useful information. I hadn’t eaten, and I didn’t care. I would go through all fourteen boxes again. It had to be there. I would start with all the boxes after the one that contained the second page. I found nothing. Then I started with the first twelve boxes, careful to notice if something had slipped inside something else, but it wasn’t in any of them. I returned all but the thirteenth box from 1595, and took the ten boxes from 1596. Nothing. The next day, in the fourth box of 1597, I found a document that started: “L’an mil cinq cent quatre-vingt-dix-sept, le quatorzième jour de mars…”

On the 14th day of March in the year 1597, before me, royal notary in the city of Marseille, personally appears Philippe Le Boutillier, aged approximately eighteen years, native of the diocese of Draguignan, son of Jean Le Boutillier, shepherd, and who voluntarily places himself in the service of Master Antoine Durand, merchant mariner of this port, to learn the trade of sailor, to serve faithfully for the term of three years.

I looked at the page two I had found the day before, and saw that there was no date, which explained how they might have been separated. There it was, the name Antoine Durand. I wanted to whoop and holler, I was so thrilled. This score meant everything. Philippe was real now, not a myth, and I loved how his surname went from Le Boutillier to La Fripouille. There was a cruel logic to his enemies ridiculing the real surname by mimicking it. I took down the reference numbers, photographed everything, filled out the reproduction forms, and took some phone pictures to send to Steph.

Robert Hines, one, Ravages of Time, zero.

My eyes were dry and blurry. I packed up and headed for the Amista. I needed to swim, then eat. I was going to turn in early because at nine a.m., I would be waiting for the doors to the archive to open.

I dialed Steph.

—Heyyy.

—Hi! I was just going to call you. How did it go today?

—Babe, I found the last name. I still can’t believe it, my God. It took two days, but I found it.

I sent her the photo of page one.

—Oh, wow... That was fast. It could have taken months or years! You’ve always had the luck, Robbie. I’m happy for you. Damn, I should be there for dinner and champagne. I hate it that we’re going to have no time together. Even now, I have to turn in, like, right now. We’re supposed to start at six a.m. tomorrow.

—It’ll keep till the weekend. For now, let’s just imagine the champagne. We’re clinking glasses and getting good and drunk.

—I love that.

—I have to get up early too. What I found today is monumental, but it’s just a drop in the bucket. Today, though... It’s very encouraging, and I’m proving them all wrong, Steph. The material is not scant. It’s here, you just have to know where to look. How about you?

—We’re diving with the full crew now. So far, so good. James is invaluable with the tech stuff, you know? The French guys like him, which is a relief. The work is straightforward. I’ll send you pictures tomorrow. Oh, I want to talk more Robbie, sweetheart, but I have to go. Call me tomorrow around seven, okay? Good night, love.

—Good night, Steph.

I waited for the little pang of sadness to fade. You’d think I’d have gotten used to this by now. Stephanie’s life was so frequently about quick goodbyes and trundling off somewhere. This was her oxygen. How could I resent that part of her nature? Through all the years, all of it, in our airy style, we’d been true to each other in the ways that matter, but there was a certain cost. Some guys have that kind of luck.

I went for a swim. It was sloughing off the dusty centuries and emerging again in the modern world. I dressed and went out to walk along the pier, feeling clean and relaxed. After dinner, I bought an ice cream and walked. In a little square, under the trees, there were performers. Young kids doing acrobatics to the hottest rappers in the city, 13 Organisé. I only knew about them because you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing posters for their gigs, and their music was like a spice added to the melting pot. It poured out of the pizzerias, kebab shops and clothing stores. The kids were good, sinewy and strong, disciplined, unfazed by falls or fluffed moves. I don’t know what made me feel older, them, or the fact that I could barely keep my eyes open. I was revisited by the soft elation of my day’s work. Time to go back to the hotel.

I woke the next morning in good spirits. Before even getting out of bed, I knew what had to come next. There were now two parallel archival arteries to follow. I would continue with as much of the follow up on Le Boutillier as I could, and in parallel, start one on Antoine Durand. First question: if Antoine Durand was a merchant mariner in late 16th-century Marseille, what categories of records could realistically survive and mention Philippe? Thank god for notaries and the scrupulous conservation habits of the French. Besides the contract I found, there would be all kinds of things: wage agreements or disputes, crew rolls attached to voyage contracts, cargo manifests, even disciplinary fines. I could add a third category to my search terms: ‘Philippe Le Boutillier, matelot.’ My only problem now was that the volume of documents had exploded, so the search would go much slower.

I found that Durand was not wealthy but had a stable trade, paid his bills and the crew rolls didn’t show a lot of turnover in those three years. He traveled to Genoa and North Africa, specifically Tunis. Steph and James had done four dives before I found anything useful, and I was kicking myself, because it was in a box I had already searched twice for information about Durand. I mean, I literally passed right over the next key to unlocking the second phase of Philippe’s short life. It was forgivable though. Just a small list of apprentices with Philippe’s name crossed out and a note that said: deserté. My backward search was intact, but my forward search had just been snuffed out. Or had it? Like a ship at sea, I’d have to tack. I looked for Port discipline registers, and the motherlode was suddenly in my possession. I found many citations, scads of them, for drunkenness, dock brawls and jailings, but all in the name Philippe Le Boutillier, matelot. Up to now there had been no mention of the sobriquet, even though his behavior was routinely disorderly. Now for the first time he was listed as ‘Philippe dit La Fripouille.’

Steph and James had done four dives before I found a crew roll with his name again. This was a ship that traded cloth, and farming implements. It would bring back grains, olive oil, and beeswax. Its owner lived in Marseille, but his name was Fares Charrat, another exciting find. ‘Fares’ was North African; Charrat, though it sounded French, was Berber. Further investigation proved it was Mozabite, the Berber inhabitants of the Sahara.

I repeated the same search as for Durand. Voyages, crew rolls, cargo manifests for Charrat, and here I found tragedy. The xebec Al-amal al-salih, the Good Hope, had been attacked by corsairs on its way to Algiers on May 12, 1599. All goods and crew had been lost. There was also a petition from Mr. Fares Charrat dated a few weeks later stating losses as ‘pris par les corsairs d’Alger.‘ There was a list of lost goods, and the dead and missing crew. Next to Philippe Le Boutillier was the word ‘disparu,’ so at this point, I would have to check for records of municipal ransom funds. If I did not find his name among the ransom records, this would point in a telling direction.

❈

Chapter 12

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The French crew boarded their research vessel the morning after the first dive, and we were to join them for a meeting. I felt okay, and Steph was bearing up pretty well. The others had already arrived when we got there, and charts were spread across a stainless steel table, held down by a wrench. The sea was calm. Arnac looked up at us.

—Good morning, he said, no smile.

—Morning. How are you guys doing?

—We are just reviewing a revised Phase One schedule. Come have a look.

I stood over the chart and read it in mounting disbelief.

—If we move to a 1.5 setpoint from twenty-one meters and 1.6 at six meters, we cut twenty-five minutes per profile, possibly thirty, said Arnac.

Stephanie frowned.

—We’re already at 1.3 through ascent, though. Why are we pushing it?

—We are not “pushing.” 1.6 is the accepted decompression ceiling, said Arnac.

Interesting that Aubert didn’t look up from the degradation charts.

—It’s dangerous. No offense, but I was in a coma for three days because of a similar decision, I said.

—The hull’s microbial load is accelerating. The sulfate reducers are active along the starboard seam. If we lose another season to storms, you may be mapping collapse instead of structure, said Aubert in his characteristically neutral tone.

I tried to slow down, and no one else said anything for a moment or two. Then he continued.

—You assume seizure?

—I assume five divers, stacked CNS, and three months of repetition.

—The current schedule is twenty-eight minutes bottom, one hundred ninety runtime, gradient twenty-eighty. CNS per dive averaging sixty-five percent. One recovery day between deep exposures, said the dive inspector.

—What my schedule proposes is bottom time of thirty-two minutes, CNS eighty to ninety percent, but within NOAA exposure tables. As we ascend and pressure drops, oxygen becomes safer to increase. The rebreather can safely maintain a high oxygen pressure, said Arnac.

—Charles, this is like driving a hundred and ten kilometers per hour on a highway designed for a hundred and thirty versus driving 128 kilometers per hour for hours. Both are legal, but one leaves more buffer.

—It is not as reckless as you suppose, James.

—But it removes our margin.

—We are working against time. Gaillard has signed off.

I thought about the prospect of five divers all accumulating central nervous system toxicity. Totally undoable.

—Then, in this case, going forward we do rotated teams, yeah?

He nodded.

The rest of the meeting was about workload and a test bailout strategy at depth. Nothing off there. We left, and Steph suggested we go for a walk to talk about it.

—I understand what they’re trying to do, but I need you to explain the tech stuff to me, James. I want to know what we’re up against.

We were being ferried back to the hotel in a small skiff. When we arrived, we took the path that led to a country lane leading inland. Where to begin...

—Okay. Imagine your body at eighty-five meters is like a sponge soaked in invisible bubbles. Nitrogen. Helium. They have to come out slowly or they form bigger bubbles, right?

—Yeah, but wait, you don’t have to explain the mechanics of a deco to me.

—I know you know, but stay with me for a moment. Oxygen helps flush those bubbles out. The more oxygen we breathe during decompression, the faster the sponge dries.

—Right. More oxygen is good.

—Up to a point. The thing is, too much oxygen becomes toxic. Not gradually either. It can just flip a switch in your brain.

—Ah, okay, yeah. Seizure.

—Right.

—Okay, I understand this, but I need you to explain the CCR setpoints. All this stuff has always been done for me.

—When they say “setpoint 1.5 from twenty-one,” what they mean is this: once we get up to about seventy meters—when we start the long decompression—we tell the rebreather to keep the oxygen level high. Near the top of what’s considered acceptable.

—How high is high?

—Think of it like this. Conservative deco is driving ten kilometers under the speed limit. 1.5 from 21 meters is driving right at the limit for an hour and a half.
1.6 at 6 meters? That’s needle in the red. It’s allowed. But you don’t want to be doing that for three months.

—Shit. Have you ever seen someone hit that line?

—Yeah, a few times. Twitching jaw, tunnel vision, and then it’s not controllable anymore.

She absorbed that.

—But statistically, it’s rare, right? Isn’t that what Arnac meant?

—Sure, but look, statistics don’t mean shit when you’re the one holding someone at twenty feet while they’re locking up, man.

—But if it were reckless, they wouldn’t be asking us to run closer to the ceiling every dive.

—That’s the problem, Steph. On paper, the math allows it.

—Right. In the real dive scenario, it’s unforgiving.

—That’s the exact word. Unforgiving, and at eighty-five meters1.

—What are we going to do?

Really. I had to come up with a counter-proposal and get it in now, today. Before the next dive.

—I’m thinking.

She put her arm around my shoulders. It was the first time I’d ever seen her spooked by something.

We turned around and walked back to the hotel. This was not some little greasy spoon in the sticks. The house was late Victorian, painted a light shade of robin’s egg blue, with yellow June roses climbing their trellises. Like an impressionist painting, a charming bed and breakfast with a small restaurant attached to it. The only thing that broke that image were the expensive cars parked near it. The lunch menu announced itself before we’d even crossed the gate. Steph seemed to have absorbed the shock of what had happened, and I had had twenty more minutes to process while she talked about her apartment in Paris, the Parisians, and a bunch of other things that only required a nod or brief acknowledgment.

We got seated and ordered.

—I know how to fix this, I said.

She smiled, the first good one of the day.

—Of course, you do.

—And they’re going to accept my ideas, because they know what lunacy this is as well as I do.

—First of all, they have to compromise. Like, for example, a higher oxygen pressure at nine meters, not twenty-one, and strict time caps at 1.6. You know, quiet adjustments so that Arnac saves face.

—Exactly, Steph. That’s your head for strategy waking up.

—I’m thinking if they raise setpoints, we add guardrails, and by that I mean that I’m going to insist on off-day HRV tracking for all divers. Have you ever had that?

She nodded.

—Checking the time intervals between heartbeats, yeah. That would be really smart—and in answer to your question: only once. I don’t get to dive this deep usually.

—It’s a good warning system over time, you know? This way if anyone’s benchmark goes below 20 percent variation, they get benched. But apart from that, I was thinking we could unbundle Phase One, not multitask it. CO₂ accumulation depends a lot on workload.

—That’s true. We organize the tasks: high, medium and low CO₂ load. The first ten or twelve dives could just be exterior only, that’s low. And we could cap bottom at twenty-eight minutes.

—If they’ll accept it, I’m going to tell them that only when baseline mapping is complete, do we begin interior work. And then we revert to conservative PPO₂,2 I said.

—Call him. Call Arnac. I’m going to call Robert, but James, he doesn’t need to know about this stuff. Okay? If you talk to him, don’t mention it because he’ll go wild with worry.

She arched an eyebrow.

—Don’t call him. Let’s go down to Marseille. We can have dinner together.

—No. Robert is working. Believe me, I’ve known him for twenty years. When he’s hot on a subject, you can’t pull him away from it.

—Well, okay, then let’s you and me go for a drive or something.

—Alright. Hey, remember that fort we saw in the distance before? Let’s go see what that is, she said, scraping the bottom of her coulant au chocolat.

—Wait, Robert won’t mind if we stay here?

She shook her head and laughed.

—I can ask him point blank if you want, but I already know what he’ll say.

❈

Chapter 11

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On the surface, you might think the comparison of these two films rather unusual, given that they were released fifty years apart, were made in very different film styles, and are quite different in terms of narrative. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), by John Cassavetes, is a down-and-out, existential noir about the owner of a shabby nightclub in a bad part of LA. Anora (2025) by Sean Baker is a Cinderella story about an erotic dancer/escort from ‘the boroughs’, who tries to marry the spoiled scion of a family of Russian oligarchs and fails spectacularly.

However, beneath that superficial view of it lie striking resemblances, whose points of contact make them kin.

The first and most obvious parallel is place. Though situated on opposite sides of the country, they occupy the same tier of the urban nightlife entertainment industry, and represent a similar social rank, which makes a travesty of the glamour associated with high society or elegant decadence. What appears instead are poor copies that do not quite conceal the precarity lurking beneath them. In places like these, economic pressure is what drives the characters.

Where Ani (Mikey Madison) works, there is no difference between money and intimacy. Everything’s on display, and it’s all a schtick. The ‘Crazy Horse West’ nightclub is a dive, not a temple of art, but Cosmo (Ben Gazzara) seems to take his cabaret acts as seriously as if it were, which is what gives this shabby, working-class spectacle its air of ridiculousness. Both settings rank low on the scale of cultural legitimacy, yet Cosmo and Ani take pride in their work, and both directors refuse to judge them for this.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a film that leaves you feeling strange and strangely fascinated but slightly disoriented. What strikes me about it is that it follows the conventional setup for a noir film: a nightclub owner with gambling debts gets trapped by gangsters and forced into a murder. It’s classic fatalism. If you haven’t seen it, you would think of something slick, like Heat or gritty, like Taxi Driver, and definitely something highly structured or procedural. Unlike Scorsese, John Cassavetes seems almost uninterested in this aspect of the film. Even the murder itself is of lesser importance to the story. Dialogue is sometimes muttered, or just background chatter. What interests him is human behavior. So whereas with Scorsese you get chaos that is tightly choreographed, Cassavetes takes the traditional genre frame and transforms it into something much messier and more atmospheric. Chaos (and power) is leaked, squandered, and socially unstable. People, places, and things drift.

To survive, these characters have invented personas, which are ersatz and transactional. Cosmo performs ‘Cosmo Vitelli’ just as Anora performs ‘Ani.’ We learn in one of the first scenes, that Cosmo values style and elegance; he dresses sharp and drives a Caddie. This is his version of sophistication, which he maintains, almost ridiculously, no matter where he goes. Along with these accoutrements comes the masculine control, his cool. Ani performs desirability and erotic confidence with a dash of toughness. She calls the shots, makes the deals, and knows how to read a room. Yet, even at home she is never really out of character since she has to defend her life choices. When she talks to her sister, the mask is still firmly in place. As their stories unfold, we see that they are both always ‘on,’ never simply themselves because the mask does not come off.

Cosmo performs masculinity and does not skip over any of the components: male privilege through control, dignity as expressed by elegance, sexual authority, paternal protectiveness, stylish detachment to show his emotional invulnerability. But it’s a show, so he needs spectators. He’s watched by the women in the club, by the gangsters, by the audience, by himself. He needs spectators for the role of ‘Cosmo Vitelli’ to exist. The difference between him and Ani is that she is only valuable if chosen. She is beholden to and evaluated through the agency of male desire. What is often softened, disguised, or ritualized elsewhere is stripped down and exposed in her case. She is positioned as a woman whose social value is mediated through being desired and selected by the Other. Marriage becomes the highest symbolic confirmation of that selection, culminating in a marriage proposal: this is the honeypot. This is how she came to misjudge the situation.

These are hyper-extended personalities that come with the job, and both are severely punished when their performances fail. Playing the roles is allowed, but Cosmo and Ani are never granted transformation aligned with their ideals. Ani will not marry Vanya, and Cosmo may not even survive that night. Their reality is performance.

In this sense, both films explore the illusion of control and self-delusion. Cosmo Vitelli thinks he’s in charge of the little world he’s made for himself. Ani thinks she’s hit on a plan to escape the dead-end world she inhabits. They find themselves in situations that force them to painfully give up their illusions of power: Cosmo with a bullet messing up his nice green shirt, and Ani tied up with a telephone cord, waiting for a call that will never come. The systems they operate within, systems of wealth and male power, will tolerate them up to a point, but they will never protect them. From their respective debacles, they emerge with nothing but a marginal and faintly ridiculous sense of dignity that had always characterized them. Both films brilliantly demonstrate the collapse of their fantasies of autonomy.

The tragedy of these two characters is that they are self-deluded. But here’s where the comparison gets nuanced. Cosmo’s delusion has to do with sovereignty. For Ani, this moment of self-delusion was a short break and a misstep within her generally effective survival system. Ani’s self-deception begins with the prospect of marriage, which she gives in to. She understands transactional intimacy, and still allows herself to forget the rules of the game she is actually playing. She wants to believe she could be the exception. That hope is humiliating, and it’s why the ending is so brutal. Ani cries upon realizing that her consolation prize is the recognition of a man trapped the way she is trapped. It’s the opposite vibe of Rihanna’s ‘We found love in a hopeless place,’ and the mutual recognition is devastating. She can now see the outlines of her cage with cruel clarity.

Cosmo and Ani parallel each other, but they are not equivalent. There is an asymmetry in their situations in that he is really washed out. For all we know, Cosmo might have collapsed on the sidewalk right after the credits went up, and that possibility haunts the end of the film. We catch him just as he is beginning to live in the after effects of his own self-mythologizing, whereas Ani is young, tough and intelligent. She is learning her first hard lesson, and we assume she will have the resilience to overcome the hurt.

Cassavetes presents class humiliation as a kind of existential violence. The gang boss who puts an affectionate arm around Cosmo to whisper doom into his ear, reduces him from his mostly imagined status of ‘big man’ to the deepest level of moral compromise, and then issues a threat that leaves Cosmo blindsided. ‘I didn’t see the double-cross coming’, was how he phrased it to Rachel’s mother, who was about to throw him out of her house. This is another irony since up till then, and simply because of the way he carries on, we imagine that Rachel and her mother were his boarders. The revelation of this detail is perfectly timed. He is anything but an important man, rather, a gangland lackey, a single-use object to be disposed of. Ani is never subjected to this level of danger, but she must defend her legitimacy in the face of an ultra-wealthy family that sees her as a dupe, a bad joke, and a source of contamination. Of course, she handles it with jaded panache, the same way that Cosmo’s eternal smile is his stoicism.

Cosmo and Ani are tragic yet admirable, simultaneously hero and anti-hero figures. As hero, he manages to extract himself from the parking lot where he was supposed to be gunned down. On the scale of competence, that gives him, if briefly, the quality of an action film hero. As he runs for his life, he is phoning in to the nightclub to know how things are going with the show, and when he gets shot, he bears up like any typical matinee heartthrob. However, his delusion, vanity, and impulsivity firmly place him within the anti-hero archetype. There’s also something deeply sad in how his masculinity depends on being watched, as I said before.

Ani defends herself when everyone around her is trying to define her as something she rejects. There’s a fierceness and no-nonsense clarity for all her twenty-three years that makes her the hero of her own narrative until she takes that one false step. She is an anti-hero in the sense that hers is not the case of a victim-saint or triumphant rebel. Baker is careful about this. He makes Ani difficult and contradictory, but also the author of her own downfall.

Cosmo would have come to the same conclusion, but where Ani breaks, he stylizes his pain with the opaqueness of that smile. Cosmo’s smile is the motor that makes his life a kind of perpetual motion machine. He spends his dignity like loose change, feeding quarters into it to buy himself another day. But neither film frames this as moral or emotional weakness. This is just the cost of surviving in the big city. His allure survives the worst parts of the story, and all the while you know he is nothing but an improviser, a situationist. We root for him because he never seems to panic. He smiles even as he’s bleeding out. Ani always has one more idea to follow up. The implied message of both endings is that they are not wrong to do things their way, but they will always have to live ‘wrong’ to keep going.

At the end of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, the noir structure does not present us with a clear resolution, and it is a decoy for a different kind of discourse which asks: can Cosmo keep being Cosmo Vitelli? In a sense, the old Cosmo Vitelli has already ceased to exist. Rachel, his biggest star, is ‘moving on’. He may still suffer more reprisals from the gang who hired him, or they may ‘leak’ his identity to the Chinese. Either way, the success of his cabaret acts suddenly won’t matter very much anymore if what he really needs to do is skip town. His physical survival implies the death of the ‘Cosmo Vitelli’ persona. Ani has a similar blow to the system she had created and protected until Vanya appeared on the scene. Her reputation at that particular club may have been damaged beyond repair, but how that will impact her futurity is for the viewer to imagine. The question posed by the end of Anora is not if she has lost her job, but how she will ever want to go back to being Anora.

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We didn’t see James until the next day, returning from lunch to find him sitting on a rail near the Jeanneau in yesterday’s clothes, head thrown back to take in the sun, blond hair shot through with light. He was unreadable behind the sunglasses, but when he saw us, all smiles.

—Well, le voilà; the man himself... When you didn’t come back last night, we wondered if we should call the coast guard or maroon you here with the tourists, said Steph.

I laughed. I never kept tabs on her, not even at twenty-two, when she went all wildcat on me. James, up to now seemed to be enjoying himself, so why would he take off without saying anything to us? I understood how he felt about the wreck, but this stunt felt out of character.

He raised his arms in protest.

—My phone died! I haven’t been to bed yet. I was playing poker all night.

—Oh yeah? And how’d that work out for you? said Steph.

—Uh, great!

She snorted at the twisted wads of cash bursting out of his trouser pocket. An alley cat with loot. That put the two of them on equal footing. Maybe that was the connection. He came from money, but everything he’d said and done pointed to the fact that he’d gone away from all that. He said ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ Like he just walked away and never came back. That sounded close. Some scandal, or maybe he rebelled. Something like that. I was curious about him.

—Jesus. Did you drink? We have to dive tomorrow, she said.

—Ha! I don’t think I would’ve come out of it so flush if I had. Nah, me, I’m a Red Bull man.

—Well, let’s get out of here. It’s our last day of recreation.

Amen to that. I was ready to get down to work.

Once out at sea, James slept through a stiff wind, twenty knots at least. I was reminded how excellent a sailor Steph is. We gave the Jeanneau a good run without having to reef the sails at all. The wind was hitting the side of the boat just right, and we flew over the waves, cutting into them every time we tacked. I imagined carving beautiful lines into the water. The spray was an exhilarating counterpoint to the sun beating down on us. I could smell the salt on my skin as the water evaporated.

—We’ve an elephant, I said.

She looked at me for a moment and caught on.

—In the room, right—James. I don’t know. Do you think he’s okay? To be honest, after yesterday I thought he was going to pull out.

—Nah, no way. He’s too possessive of that wreck. He didn’t find it, but he was the first to see it. The fishermen who got their nets torn by it live in the same village he does. They called him even before calling the coast guard, and even gave him credit for discovering it, I said.

—That last part I didn’t know. Giving him credit probably means they’re not just fishermen.

—Smugglers, yeah.

—James told you about that.

I nodded.

—He’s an exceptional guy, James, I said.

She shook her head.

—Not exceptional, challenged early. He’s like me.

Sure she would say that. Well before his age, she had no parents, no income and no degree. Just those razor-sharp wits of hers. At that age, I had my lowly yet secure income, so where I plodded along, she had to improvise.

—Whatever the case, I think he’s going to come to heel as far as the admin goes, I said.

Later on that day, lying in bed with her, I suggested a swim, seeing as we were hot and sticky.

—A little more brine would be good, right? I said.

She laughed and I watched her head up to the deck in just the bottom half of her swimsuit. I heard the splash and reached for the other half, put on my trunks, and went upstairs. James was still not up.

I threw the bra part of the bikini into the water.

—Okay, asshole, she laughed.

I jumped in and swam out to where she was treading water.

—Let’s swim to the île, she said, and took off.

We swam all around it but couldn’t find a ledge suitable for getting up onto. When we came to where we’d started, we saw James in his suit, waving at us. By now, there were other boats too.

—I’m going for a dive. Rob, wanna come? he shouted.

Actually, I did. The last time had been fun, and this was much shallower water where there were bound to be interesting things to look at. We swam in and I came up the ladder. The other suit and snorkel gear was already laid out for me. These I put on and we dove in.

I watched James swim underwater, and it struck me how he was human on land, but underwater he possessed the grace and power of an aquatic animal. He hadn’t just learned to dive, but to exist underwater. He motioned for me to follow him and we swam back to where the île jutted out of the sand. I couldn’t believe how clear the water was and how fecund these protected waters were. We swam past gobies, over schools of red mullet and under scorpionfish. The roving barracudas captivated me.

I caught up with him and touched his calf to get his attention, pointing downward. He gave me a thumbs up, and we descended to the floor. Pure white sand, a brilliant pale blue, dotted with purple sea urchins. I felt his hand on my arm and he pointed to a cliff above us. Rather than letting go, he held my arm and paddled up, still pointing. It was an octopus hiding in the rocks. It did not react to us but moved over the rocks meditatively. I could see James’s smiling eyes framed by his mask. The octopus stopped and its whitish, translucent tentacles curled in a way that made them look like spirally adornments. Its body was striated, a pretty mauve color.

James was swimming closely behind me. His chest and groin touched my back and buttocks. Turning to look at him, I saw he was absorbed by the octopus, although he had added a hand to my right shoulder. Then he made a signal to ascend, and we came apart, swimming towards the light. To my surprise, I’d hardened a bit. Was it over-excitation from having had sex only an hour before? I couldn’t make out the sudden erotic charge I was feeling. Had he done it on purpose? Probably not. I caught up to him and motioned the direction to swim in, towards the île. We surfaced.

—That was wild! I said, and swam towards the boat. We had to swim along the île in the same circle I’d made with Steph. I had a stab of pain, and I stopped with a hand on the rocky base of the cliff. I raised my mask. James followed, doing the same.

—You okay?

—Cramp. My left leg.

—Hold on.

He readjusted his mask and dived to the level of my leg. I felt his hands massaging the muscle, and again, the blood went straight to my groin. I jerked my leg away and gave him another thumbs up.

—That did the trick, thanks, I said, when he surfaced.

—No worries!

We swam back towards the boat. On board, he acted like he hadn’t seen what had happened, and I sighed inwardly.

The confirmation call from Gaillard came that afternoon. The next day James and Steph were aboard the DRAASM vessel headed for their first official dive. We moored The Marquesa and took rooms at the Amista again. I was a bit fed up with bobbing on the ocean currents day after day like a cork wearing sunblock. Even now on dry land I could still feel phantom waves. My head was swimming in facts. On land is where I’d be conducting my dives now. I had spent so much time with the Marie-Caroline of the present, that I couldn’t wait to get down to my real work.

As far as I knew, the vessel had been captained by one Philippe La Fripouille, but this was legend, not fact. I visited the Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône. I hoped to uncover evidence there—and if not, pamphlets, ballads, early printed accounts would be in the BnF1, where I might find out more about what his contemporaries thought of him. I assumed a monster. The word ‘fripouille’ means racaille; something like ‘Phillip the scumbag’. This too had to be backed up by hard evidence.

Not much had been written about him, eclipsed perhaps by the real and fictional bearded pirates, the black, blue, or red. Little was known about him besides the fact that as a young boy, his father had forbidden him to learn to read. The story went that the when Philippe said he wanted a profession, his father told him: One has no need to negotiate to tend sheep. Therefore, in the winter of 1594, at the age of fifteen, he supposedly ran away, eventually winding up in Paris, to freeze and starve. This rang false to me, illogical. At that time, the most important regions for sheep rearing were the Draguignan area of Provence, Languedoc, and the Massif Central. Provence, it seemed to me, made geographic, economic and social sense if he had run away. It was only fifty-six miles south of his father’s farm, whereas Paris was over the mountains and four hundred miles away.

A penniless boy wandering the streets of Marseille could be whipped, branded, imprisoned, or pressed into service. He might have earned a reputation for violence and could have earned identifying scars. I had to think like a desperate boy of fifteen, who would have begged, stolen, and hidden himself to survive. My heart sank.

Philippe was a ridiculously common name. I needed to look for his origin and for a surname. I would start with tax records for the poorest families, looking for debt, farms that could not spare their sons for the pursuit of higher education. Farmers with debt would have made a trail of paper leading to Marseille. It might help me discover how he became a sailor, then a pirate, and ultimately how he had acquired the Marie-Caroline. I had no idea how long the search might take.

After a day or two of this, I got frustrated. Putting aside the details of his early life, I thought I should concentrate on the easy stuff first and work backwards. The far end of his story: his imprisonment, the trial and execution—all well documented. The prison records might have legal documents listing him as ‘Philippe [X], dit la Fripouille.’ Both legal name and sobriquet. I went back to the Archive, and spent the afternoon looking at musty registries. He had been executed by hanging in 1609, ironically, not far from where I sat.

Some hours in, I found something, a description with an astounding level of detail. The entire city was present. The mayor of Marseille spoke. The prisoner was brought in a cart drawn by an ox, bound, and in his night shirt, stained crimson down the front from the beatings he had sustained. But this log entry had no last name, which disappointed me until I found this: ‘Philippe, dit la Fripouille ou خائن العهد..’ I consulted an Arabic-English dictionary and saw that khā’in al-‘ahd meant ‘the traitor.’ This was spectacular, an absolutely tremendous lead, better than having his full name. Philippe was despised by Christians and Muslims alike. More importantly, it suggested that he had pirated with the corsairs of North Africa. To do this, he would have had to convert to Islam, which could be why he was called a traitor.

I sat back in my chair and let this new information wash over me. I’d got off to an excellent start, and I was astounded by what one small detail could do to the trajectory of my research. I might have trouble reconstructing his youth without a true surname because the sobriquet came so much later in his life, but there would be very few Philippes converting to Islam.

What a richer vein of discovery. So far, I also had the fragments of a Parish charity roll, dated 1595, concerning un jeune homme Philippe, sans patronyme ni chaussures (without surname or shoes), and un jeune Philippe, sans patronyme, employé aux quais (a youth named Philippe, no surname, working on the docks). He would have been very tight-lipped about himself.

My phone was ringing, and I saw that it was six p.m. The afternoon had evaporated.

—Hey, Steph. I called you just to see how you were.

—Yeah, we came up an hour ago. I’m pretty tired but I wanted to let you know what’s happening here. How are you?

—I made an incredible discovery about my pirate. Are you coming in soon? I could tell you about it over dinner.

—That’s what I wanted to tell you. The Ministry has put us in a small hotel directly across from the dive site. They don’t want us traveling back and forth from Marseille. I suspect it’s that they don’t want to pay city prices.

—You’re kidding. Is it alright there?

—Oh yeah, it’s fine. Not five-star, but it’s serviceable. I hope it’s not too much of a disappointment that I’m not coming back until the weekend.

My feelings were mixed.

—Well, if you saw the state of the room at the Amista, you would probably want your own room anyway.

She laughed.

—So it’s going well?

—So well, Steph. You were right to bring up my flight date. Look, this means I can really immerse myself without distractions.

—Oh, is that what I am to you, a distraction?

—Yeah, a hellacious one.

—Well then, I won’t invite you to come here.

She laughed again.

—I might crash that party later on in the week.

Then her tone changed.

—Come whenever you want, babe. Thing is, I will either be too busy or too exhausted to be much company.

—So we’re pretty much in sync, then.

—As we always are, Robby bear. Good luck.

—Wait, wait, you haven’t said anything about the dives!

—Yeah, going okay. We established the shot line. Everyone’s behaving. Aubert was doing Aubert stuff. We met the other two divers. So far so good.

—You sound hoarse.

—I know. I’m exhausted.

—Okay. Get some rest, love. I’ll call tomorrow.

❈

Chapter 10

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Steph and James found me sitting on a low dry stone wall under the pines. On my lap was a book of short stories, but I wanted to show them the village website for more things to do. James suggested we dine out one last time since the plan was to head back to the wreck site, and it was a great call.

In the morning, I was the first up. I made us coffee and did some stretches. Stephanie and James soon joined me. She headed for the toilet, and he came for the coffee whose aroma filled the cabin.

—Morning, he said, taking a cup from the little cabinet below the coffeemaker.

—Hey, I said.

—Thanks, he said, referring to the coffee.

I sipped mine, watching James make himself a sandwich.

—You know, I was thinking it’s really a shame you can’t dive.

—I can; I just won’t.

—What if I told you I could help you enjoy it again?

James looked at me, eyes darting. He was expecting a yes.

—You do notice I don’t suffer from FOMO, right?

—Well, fine, but you’re still missing out. It even disadvantages us that you don’t.

I inhaled sharply.

—I’d like to take you down. Twenty meters max. You know, it’s where the sea really puts out her magic. At that depth, there’s plenty of light and sea life, and no decompression, no rebreathers, so it won’t bring back bad memories. It doesn’t have to be for very long. Steph can be the observer. Come with me.

I didn’t know what to tell him.

—Come with me. You won’t regret it.

—Come where? said Steph, who was pouring herself a coffee and stealing a piece of my toast.

—To twenty meters, I said.

She stopped chewing.

—That’s a great idea. You should take him up on it, babe. He’s the best there is.

She put two more slices of bread in the toaster, swiped my other piece and went back to the stern berth.

—Well… I said.

—You’ll do it?

I shrugged and James went for his spare suit. It would fit me.

Out on deck, he was helping me put on the tanks—just standard air. Steph came up with her laptop.

—Hey, you know, I said we have twelve days off, but Gaillard could call sooner. We have a schedule to follow. I want to be back in Marseille tomorrow, she said.

—We can leave after lunch, Steph. Why the rush? Yesterday you were toying with the idea of staying in Èze and taking a hotel room, I said.

—Just antsy.

I picked up one of the masks and put it on.

—Here, lemme check, said James.

He smoothed the neoprene hood under the heavy elastic and checked the mask seal. Then he gave me the mouthpiece and showed me how to use it. He said it was exactly how his father had shown him.

—You look good, he said.

On his count, we plunged. The water was nice and clear. I swam close to him so I could see how he moved underwater. At five meters, his hand touched my shoulder to get my attention. A thumbs up. (Are you okay?) I returned the gesture.

At around eight meters, the sea is crowded with all kinds of species. James signaled thumbs down (Let’s go down a little further.) A sea turtle was crossing our path and he pointed to it. We were approaching some cliffs covered in waving grasses. I put out my hand to touch them, and the movement startled a seahorse. It jerked upwards and away.

The sea gods were rewarding us for the effort. The riot of fish on parade lit up the cliffs, every cranny had crabs and shrimp, coral, anemones, and sea urchins. With the warming of the ocean, the jellyfish were out in force. They were especially luminous as they floated in and out of the rays of light that this depth allowed.

When the alarm signaled it was time to go back up, it seemed far longer than half an hour. We surfaced and went up the ladder, one after the other. Stephanie got the tanks off me as I flung the mask onto the deck sofa. I was talking a mile a minute, and Steph was smiling as she reviewed her equipment and stowed it properly. I really didn’t think I could do it, and I had.

Later, after lunch, James was washing the dishes and I thanked him. Then he said something that surprised me.

—That couldn’t have been easy for you. At least not at first.

—We’re actually in no hurry. I want to go down again tomorrow. Continue from where we left off.

He grabbed my shoulders.

—I knew it! You sat with the fear. You pushed through it!

He let go of me and went up to the deck to tell Steph. I went up too.

—Oh! she said, but I couldn’t get a read on how she said it.

—Steph, we have plenty of everything, and that includes time. I need to dive again—tomorrow, or I might lose my nerve, I said.

She looked up at me. I couldn’t see her expression behind the big sunglasses, but her head stayed in that position for a beat too long.

—Okay, she said in a clipped tone.

—I mean, you were the one who said we could kick back.

—I said okay.

James looked at me and I shrugged.

The second dive was better. The first thing James did was to explain how breathing controls buoyancy, and how critical to diving this is. I said yeah, yeah, but it was one thing to understand this intellectually, and another to do it underwater. We stayed at ten meters so that he could illustrate the point.

On the slate James wrote: Remember: inhaling in little bursts increases buoyancy (rising)

He put his hand on his chest and with his other hand motioned for me to take a breath. We observed the effect. I made an OK sign, and he motioned to take another breath, then wrote: Now exhale fully.

With his hands on my hips, we sank.

He erased the slate and wrote: Neutral buoyancy is the goal. To neither sink nor float up. Then he erased it again and wrote: Rapid breathing or holding breath leads to uncontrolled rises or drops. I said AHA into my mask, which released a sheet of bubbles, and he knew I’d understood. We passed the camera back and forth. Dive time had increased to forty-eight minutes. Not bad for a guy who was terrified of diving.

We kept our phones off most of the time. Being away from the internet was as refreshing as the ocean swims. Still, Steph found a missed call from Gaillard. She dialed and we listened on speaker.

—Bonsoir, Stephanie. I called you earlier to say that the samples are back.

—Really? So soon!

—Yes, I asked them to make fast-track on this.

—I see.

—We will convene on Wednesday. Will you communicate this to your team, please?

—Yes, certainly. We’ll see you there. Bonne journée.

—Merci, à vous de même.

She was bothered.

—What? I asked.

—They fast-tracked the sample. Do you believe that?

I frowned.

—How is that possible? I said.

James chimed in.

—They didn’t test for everything.

—Huh, right. Only for what interests them, I said.

—A preliminary study? It’s odd, no? said Steph.

—Well, should we leave right away? There’s still about four hours of daylight left. If we get closer now, we could start again early in the morning and be there before lunchtime. You could make inquiries, I said.

Steph thought about this and shook her head.

—Call your guy, Paul. The DRASSM closes early on Fridays, she said.

I went to my notebook and flipped through it, finding the page where I’d jotted down the info.

—No, they’re open from two in the afternoon till six in the evening. Closed for lunch. Oh wait, wait, no. You’re right. Even we can’t get in without an appointment made two days in advance, I said.

—No, they’d let us in. Technically, we’re staff. But let’s not panic, said James.

—He’s up to something, said Steph.

—We’ll deal with it, said James.

—I agree with James. Whatever it is, there’s not a lot we can do to prepare for it, I said.

—I suppose not, said Steph.

She took her books, papers and phone and went into the berth bedroom. From the sound of her muffled voice, she was putting out feelers. The channels she would not tell me about, supposedly for my own protection. All three of us had the same impulse to beat to quarters.

We left at dawn, and with only one short stop, the sail brought us back to port faster than we anticipated. The Marquesa danced with the winds of Provence, the Mistral and the Tramontane, and our bodies responded to that dance, but our heads were already in Marseille.

—I don’t understand why anyone would surrender the wind to a fucking motor, never mind the horse power, said James.

—Different mindset. A person like you understands the sea enough to respect it, I said.

—Not all divers are conservationists or environmentalists, but the best ones are. Not calling myself the best, but I would like to think I belong in their company.

—You’re ambitious.

James shrugged.

—I know what I want.

Steph emerged from the bedroom and came up onto the deck where we were, shaking her head. She said that James was right; we’d know what to do when we got there, or we’d just have to wait until the next move became apparent.

That wait was short. The fast-tracking had secured the wreck’s classification status, and therefore, its ownership. Gaillard’s present behavior felt less grounded in bonhomie and more in setting down the rules of our future engagement. Faire la loi was the common expression for the hasty summons and plunked us down in front of the one who was going to be the actual pain in the balls, the microbial oceanographer Thierry Aubert. Assisting him would be the inspector we already knew would come aboard the ministry dive boat.

We heard—although not in so many words—why they hadn’t done the entire range of tests. Gaillard was only interested in one thing: proving that the hull was in a state that required its immediate lifting in order to preserve it from further decay. The next dive was in two days’ time, and all dives to the Marie-Caroline would be scheduled, staffed, and authorized by the ministry. James would have two additional divers besides Steph to lead.

We sat around a conference table. James abruptly sat back in his chair, stone-faced, whereas Steph did not move a hair. She was locked in; her eyes gleamed, her focus diamond-hard. She was eyeing Aubert, who was oblivious to the reactions he was causing.

—There’s no reason to double the dive team, said James, in a voice that cut the air.

Aubert seemed unaffected.

—The redundancy, Mr. Finlund, is not a question of individual judgment, regardless of your expertise. It is protocol. The ministry assumes liability for the site, and we must staff according to this, especially at the level of safety.

—Excuse me, Mr. Aubert, but we were told that the purse strings were tight. Steph and I have planned out our tasks for two divers, not four. Supervising four divers adds work that takes away from the exploration. This is only the survey phase. We don’t need so much oversight.

—Perhaps, I might explain something to you, Mr. Finlund, said Gaillard.

—By all means, said James, crossing his arms.

—Alors, voilà les rôles: you are lead diver, of this there can be no question, you are accountable for planning, execution and results of each dive. Stephanie is your assistant and handles artifact exploration and photographic documentation. Gérard Beauville is the safety diver. He is a licensed medic and will monitor your activities, and Paul Arnac is the support diver who will also photograph, control the log and ministry documentation. He will also work as Stephanie’s assistant. Aubert will accompany you on all dives as observer, naturally.

—I say you’re wasting money, said James.

—I understand how you feel, Monsieur. It may not be necessary for the exploration itself, but I tell you, their presence ensures compliance. In any case, Mr. Finlund, I know you are perfectly aware of how we operate. I am surprised that you adopt such an attitude.

—With respect, you are not a diver. Let me remind you that I’m the one who signs off on the dive plan, and you don’t see the silt bloom from behind a desk.

Stephanie shot me a look. It wasn’t clear to me what James was doing either.

—If I can just say a word here, I’ve been on dives where too many cooks spoiled the broth, James, so believe me I understand your anxiety. We will just have to work with the protocols and stay organized.

«Autant de têtes, autant d’avis,» said Gaillard with a chuckle.

—This is exactly the point, Mr. Gaillard. Too many opinions, said James.

Some kind of scene could have erupted at this point, but Gaillard let it drop. Half an hour after we had found a restaurant, James was still bemoaning our situation.

—They will drive us crazy, and they will destroy the site. You’ve already seen the selective testing, now what? We just wait for the biased outcomes to roll over us? We don’t even fully know what’s down there! That hull can never be raised!

—Look, in the beginning they’ll be in the way. Later, we won’t be able to find them when we need them. Besides, since when have we ever been able to free range a government project like this one?

—I have a bad feeling about it, he said.

—I think you’re blowing this out of proportion.

—They’re going to be punctilious about record keeping and a lot of other things that will slow us up. And diving with double the divers, the gas logistics and risk of a silt-out alone make my head hurt.

Steph gave him a look of disagreement, bordering on exasperation, and he looked crestfallen.

—Let’s not jump to any conclusions until we’ve done at least one dive with the whole group. If it doesn’t work we can apply for some kind of change. I don’t think Gaillard is acting in bad faith, same way I don’t think you’ll quit over this, I said, looking at James.

He was searching my face for meaning and I think, for a kind of support from me that Steph refused to give him.

—No one’s quitting, said Stephanie.

It came out sort of clipped. I knew she meant shut the fuck up: this ends now—and it did.

We were going to have to change our living arrangement to suit the new constraints. I suggested we leave The Marquesa moored. It didn’t matter how close I was to them or the wreck. I’d be logging computer hours.

—That’s going to take you right out of the action, Rob. You sure you want that?

—I can take the sloop out to meet you on site from time to time. Anyway, I’ll be travelling.

She nodded.

—As far as I’m concerned, we’re cool. Listen, I want to get back to the boat, she said.

—I’m heading back into town. We sleeping in the marina tonight or what? said James.

I looked at Steph and she shrugged a yes.

—Okay, then. Later, said James.

We watched him disappear into the crowds of tourists.

❈

Chapter nine

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I got to the supply store and was pleasantly surprised by the range of supplies and services. A friendly woman clerk noticed my accent right away. She seemed relieved not to have to speak English. So instead of a depth timer gauge, I asked her for a chronomètre de profondeur, and so on down the list. I’d dived long enough in French-speaking countries to make sure my command of the language was adequate. The only one I had forgotten was ‘chaux sodée’, the soda lime pellets we use in the rebreathers to absorb the CO₂. All three gases were in stock, another win. She even threw a few packs of ‘colliers de serrage’, zip ties. Total bill: twenty-three hundred euros, invoiced to the ministry. I was happy that for a little extra, they had no problem delivering the gas right to the marina the same day.

I stood outside on the corner and watched the little green dot move closer to my coordinates on the local taxi app. When the taxi arrived, the roads were already choked with tourists and it was slow going on the Canebière, one of Marseille’s main streets. Three o’clock. I sat back in the taxi and closed my eyes. I really hadn’t had time to prepare for what Gaillard might do. The sample would be the first thing we talked about once we were all together.

I preferred to think about the Jeanneau and our growing relationship aboard it. Our combined proficiencies were outstanding. And Steph. I’d never seen anyone with so much control with so little practice. She says she’s been diving for five years, and I know that means ten dives a year at most. Yet, she seems to understand the fluid logic of water in the same way I do. It’s something that goes beyond the technical side of diving. It’s a talent.

As for Robert, he was a bit standoffish, one of these guys that doesn’t have a need to either talk or emote. I didn’t understand till last night what a true source of knowledge he is. Guy’s got a prodigious memory. Steph watched him while she listened to the story of Philippe Le Fripouille, not the look of someone in love, no. It was more like a very deep pride. Like she would defend him to the death. I wondered about their couple life, and why it’s open, for one thing. Maybe she’s the one that needs that more than he does. There’s something else making him tick. She’s the one with the heat. I can feel it even underwater. I wanted to reach out and touch the neoprene between her thighs and run my hand across her back, just a gentle touch of my hand, the same way I touched the sunfish. Like me, she’s a sea creature, whether she realizes it or not. And Robert. He’s handsome in a way I like, as if he were completely unaware of his attractiveness. It’s a rare thing in a man. It’s only been a week, and I feel like...

What is it I’m feeling?

The cab pulled into the access road to the slip. We unloaded everything and I called Steph.

—Hey, where are you?

—We’re in a taxi. Sorry, we stopped at a pharmacy for a bunch of medical stuff. Shouldn’t be long now.

—Yeah, cool. I just arrived myself. The store’s basically a one-stop-shop. I got everything.

—Did you remember my fin straps?

—Yeah, and your extra O-rings and another SSD card for the camera.

—Okay, I’m hanging up. We’re here.

We got underway in less than an hour. The afternoon winds had arrived, and it was decided we should go exploring. I recommended we just follow the coast up towards Nice, which we could reach at a leisurely pace sometime the next day. We would not attempt another dive at the wreck site until Thursday or Friday, so time was ours. They favored the small towns, maybe Cassis or Menton—anything but Nice, Saint-Tropez or Cannes. Even Antibes would be ridiculously congested, too BCBG1, too bling. I was cool with whatever, but their vibe right now was something else.

—Let’s compromise. Why don’t we go to Èze? I want some steamed mussels, said Steph.

—Steph, we can get that anywhere, all the way down to Collioure, said Rob.

—I’m well aware of that, but I’m in the mood to vary the eye-candy today. Èze is picturesque but not a power center, so it’s perfect.

—Eye candy? You’re not referring to us by any chance, are you?

That cracked me up.

—I mean if there’s any eye candy around here, she’s sitting to my right, I said with a big grin.

—Èze it is. James, and stop flirting Steph right in front of me, said Rob in a phony French accent.

Explosive laughter from Steph.

Rob manned the wheel, while she trimmed the sail. We were heeling in the wind, and I held on to the mast, leaning into it with the boat. I’d left my hair tie in the bathroom, and the spray was wetting my face and hair. It felt good. An hour in, the wind flattened a bit, and the rest of the trip was calmer. We anchored to swim and then lie in a pile on the foredeck. Reading with the sun behind us, I could rest my head on Steph’s thigh. Rob lay on the other side of her humming along with the algorithm’s choice of Chris Cornell, followed by Cameron Winter: that’s an algorithm for you.

—So are any of us going to address the elephant? said Steph.

She was referring to Gaillard, of course.

—Do we have to? said Rob. He looked not too pleased.

—Why? Did you find something out? I asked.

—Yeah, what we all guessed: the museum is operating at a deficit and Gaillard has been tasked with turning that around. By the way, your idea of the replica is correct. I mean, anyone can see that it’s the way to go. I don’t know why he was so resistant to it, said Robert.

—Probably because it was James’s idea, not his. I learned a bit about Aubert. He’s a real stickler. Thick as thieves with Gaillard, said Steph.

—That’s going to turn into a choke point for us—just watch, I said.

—My contact says that Gaillard likes to micro-manage. The observer is a guy who does as he’s told, said Robert.

—And there you have it, guys. The constraints have announced themselves, I said.

—Not the end of the world. You’re not the only one with contacts, and mine are neither academics nor functionaries, said Steph.

—Ominous, said Rob, grinning.

I jumped into the water and came up for air just in time to get splashed by Rob’s cannonball.

Later we came into port. All around was the emblem of the village, a phoenix perched on a bone. I was fascinated. The motto of the village is ‘Isis Moriendo Renascor’ which means “In death I am reborn.” The street plaques were written in French and something I didn’t recognize. When I asked what I was looking at, Rob said it was Monégasque, a nearly extinct dialect and curiously, the official language of Monaco.

—Why don’t we go there tonight? I asked.

—What, you want to hit the casinos? asked Steph, smirking.

—No, but we could, you know, find a place with music. Live it up a little.

—Isn’t that what we’re already doing? Rob asked.

—He means really live it up, said Steph.

—Don’t you want to, Rob? I asked.

—Listen to this guy! He thinks he’s the other James. We wouldn’t make it in the door of a casino or any of the restaurants dressed like this, said Steph.

—You have a point. We don’t have the attire, and I don’t look anything like Bond.

—Well, there’s bound to be a place right here that will be lively enough for you, James, said Rob.

He was right. We found such a place to eat and drink, and walk along the streets all done up in strings of lights. And we found a place where I could dance with her while he watched us. I don’t know who I was challenging more. I had my eyes on her body and the little pendant that hit softly against her breasts as she moved. I stopped it at one point, catching it in my palm. The long chain pulled against her neck while we danced, until she gently took it away from me. We went back to our table. Neither seemed to mind my forwardness. He’d seen it—or maybe he hadn’t—but she smiled at me, and I knew she wasn’t interested the way I wished she would be, at least not now. I’d thrown the idea out there, and it hung suspended between us.

It’s funny how there were dives that dragged on into the autumn and still felt more impersonal. This, on the other hand, felt unprofessional in the best way. Summer is sweet when you unexpectedly find yourself in a situation that has everything you could possibly want. When the sun and wind began to fatigue us, we fell into an alternating pattern of manning the Jeanneau and anchoring to have a meal or go swimming, and then retreating to our respective cabins. The Jeanneau was big enough to give you the illusion of privacy. I’d worked with other divers on their boats plenty of times, but never with strangers. Still, their openness seemed genuine. We could have sailed like this indefinitely, but things don’t stand still for pleasant moods and pleasant afternoons; they change; they move towards something.

In town, Steph and I didn’t always want to do what Robert was keen on, and he would unceremoniously peel off. I loved her company. She didn’t mind if I put my hand on her back when we were passing through a tight open-air market full of artisanal goods and other vacationers. Sometimes she would brush crumbs off my shirt if we were eating street food. I had to know how she felt about me.

—I want to sleep with you, I said while we were looking out to sea from the top of a very pretty tower.

She gave me one of her sweeping glances, the kind that seem to contain all possible futures as well as the unsparing present, and yet never far from sensual, that spice I found so alluring.

—Really? I thought it was with Rob. The way you look at him sometimes. Maybe you want to sleep with us both.

I missed a beat or two.

—I would like that, I said.

—And I would like to see how far you can go towards relaxing that impulse. I’m not rejecting you per se, it’s just...

—You mean that? Why?

—I need you sharp, James. I need you to be my dive leader. I don’t need you to be my lover. As for Robert, you would be opening a box in him that he shut back in the dorm rooms. I don’t know how he would react.

Pause.

—Look, you should hear this: if you try to initiate something with him and he reacts negatively, you are off the team, and I do not want that to happen. That’s what I do know. So, I’m really sorry, but we shouldn’t go down that road.

I thought about what she was saying, and it made me happy.

—You may be right.

—Of course, I’m right, James. It leaves me to wonder if I made a mistake in inviting you on the boat.

—I wouldn’t know.

I followed her onto the boardwalk.

❈

Chapter eight

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