“Ooh, fun,” said Gretchen, managing a real smile for the first time since the boat hit open water.
“You’d think,” I said. “She spends most of her time talking about how companies are constantly shopping for cheaper labor. The people who actually do the work don’t get to stamp the finished product with their name and face like actors do, so it’s hard for them to demand what they’re worth when less-skilled companies elsewhere are prepared to do the job for less. And then the studios are constantly adding work to the contract—more scenes, more edits—and expect not to have to pay extra. CGI takes time so the work starts early, but then the script changes or the director goes in a different direction, and all the digital work that was already done is useless and has to be scrapped, but the contracts are structured so that the studios don’t have to pay for anything but finished product. It’s a mess.”
“Sounds like you know a lot about it,” said Gretchen, impressed.
“About as much as I do about scuba diving,” I said. “I can tell you what Gabby—my sister—bitches about, but ask me to add a troll to a battle scene, and I’d be drawing on the film with a Magic Marker. Let’s hope my diving is better.”
“Stay close to me,” said Gretchen. “We’ll drown together.”
“Terrific.”
Archimedes doubled as gear tech as well as captain, and we spent twenty minutes or more being poked and scrutinized once the boat came to a halt. He was a big guy, a decade older than the rest of us, broad shouldered, strong, and tanned to the color of tea. His black hair was silvering at the temples and he was developing a gut. He smelled, not unpleasantly, of sea and sweat and oil. As he tightened the straps around my tank, he managed to be careful not to brush against my body while still giving me a mischievous look that reminded me of the awkwardness of being so close to a strange man while wearing very few clothes.
“Now this,” he said, giving me the mask Simon had already shown me. He guided it over my face and inspected the seal. “Breathe OK?” he asked.
I tried, feeling hot and claustrophobic, my peripheral vision lost, and nodded.
“Talk,” he said, pointing at his mouth. “You can talk.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes. I can breathe.”
Talking and breathing at the same time was hard, and I had to pause, feeling my heart racing, to steady my nerves. I took longer, slower breaths and felt better. Archimedes took my hand and guided it to the airflow regulator in front of my mouth.
“This air,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the sky, then turning the switch. “This tank. OK?”
I nodded.
“Talk,” he said.
“OK,” I said. “Yes.”
I wished I could see. The scuba gear was handicap enough without me being close to blind to begin with.
“If you like this,” said Simon, “we could come back. There’s a World War II German fighter farther out. A Messerschmitt. That would be pretty cool, right?”
“A 109?” asked Marcus, clearly excited.
“How the hell should I know?” Simon quipped. “What do I look like, a historian?”
“Could be a 110, I guess,” Marcus mused. “Or a Focke-Wulf. A 109 would be neat, though.”
“Whatever, professor,” said Simon. “It’s an old plane. Who cares what kind?”
I looked at him through the diving mask, and it was like I wasn’t really there or was watching the scene on television, so I could do or say anything I wanted and they wouldn’t know. The effect gave me an oddly critical distance. Simon was joking, boisterous and grinning in a matey way, but the remark had that casual unkindness he and Brad so easily slipped into. It wasn’t malicious exactly, just dismissive, as if there were a line between what was cool and what was dorky that they instinctively recognized. People like Marcus were always straying over it. For his part, Marcus shrugged the moment off, laughing at himself, and I couldn’t tell if he felt stung.
We hadn’t actually gone far from the boathouse—a half mile, perhaps, maybe less—and I found myself both relieved and disappointed. Not that I could see the shore, but Gretchen kept checking. Everything was a blurry vagueness to me, and I suddenly wondered if that would also be a safety hazard on top of making the whole expedition a bit pointless. I considered Archimedes, and as soon as he was finished with Melissa—clad today in a vivid yellow bikini worthy of Sports Illustrated—I got his attention.
“I’m sorry,” I said, still speaking through the mask to his earpiece, “but do you have any lenses? I left my glasses at home and . . .”
“Lenses?” he said, frowning at the word.
“My eyes are . . . not good, and . . .”
“Ah,” he said, holding up one hand and beckoning me over to the stern of the boat, where a series of plastic baskets were heaped with snorkels and life jackets. He pushed things around, grunting to himself, and came up with a box of single-piece goggle inserts. He pushed it over to me and pulled my mask back.
“Sorry,” I said. “Should have done this before. Sorry.”
There were only four options to choose from, and he pressed each in turn into the faceplate of my mask. They were a little fogged and scratched, but one of them improved my vision significantly, and I thanked him, delighted. He grinned back, pleased by the improvement in my mood, then resealed the mask in place.
“I thought you were wearing contacts,” said Brad shrewdly.
“Not while I swim,” I said. “Too easy to lose them.”
Almost as easy as glasses . . .
He nodded and looked away, and I grinned to myself, glad of the way the mask hid my face. I could see. For the first time in twenty-four hours, I could see. I would happily stay here all day, scuba diving or no fucking scuba diving.
Archimedes called the dive spot Daedalus, and he asked if we knew the story of the man who had designed the labyrinth for King Minos and then built wings for himself and his son to escape the island.
“Like bird,” he said, flapping vaguely with his arms and smiling.
“Icarus, right?” said Marcus. “His son was Icarus.”
“That’s right,” said Archimedes. “He fell. Drowned.”
“Let’s hope that’s not an omen,” said Gretchen, gray-faced, worried eyes fixed on the water, as if something might emerge that would save her from going in. A submarine, maybe. I felt for her, and not just out of pity. The water looked deep, and I was suddenly sure that making a fool of myself was the least of my worries.
“Icarus,” sneered Brad, catching Marcus’s eye and shaking his head. “Jesus, professor. You teach this stuff?”
“Not my field,” he said.
“So why do you know it?”
“Just think it’s kind of cool,” he said, looking abashed. “Icarus is . . . I don’t know: aspiration and daring but also arrogance and hubris. It’s a cool story, the boy who flew too close to the sun so that the wax holding the feathers in his wings melted, but it’s also a great tragic metaphor for overreach, not knowing your limitations.”
Brad just shook his head again and made a face.
“The things you choose to care about,” he said. “Yo, Simon! We there yet? Let’s get to it!”