Playground, page 5
It was the boldest message Didier Turi had ever sent, either as mayor or as a private citizen. He doubted he had the power to dictate terms to anyone. He couldn’t imagine that the President or the French or the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley cared two shits what the few dozen people in Didier’s electorate thought. The ministers believed they had your approval.
Jules Amaru used to say that power was a thing more given than taken. But the old mayor had also known when to bluff.
Didier changed and unchanged a few words, hit send, and instantly wished for an unsend button.
He sat back in the teak chair, having just bet his political career on a few words. In fact, he had bet considerably more than his mere career, which he would have happily traded away for a couple of six-packs of Hinano. He had also bet the island, all on the unspoken threat that Makatea now had a state-of-the-art cell tower. If need be, he could tweet out an SOS to the community of nations. Governments of countries much more real than his had been hung out to dry by the collective outrage of so-called social media. Should Papeete decide to call his bluff, Didier Turi’s lone ace in the hole was the planet-sized megaphone.
........
ON THE DAY I GOT MY DIAGNOSIS, I took myself out to dinner at the best Ethiopian restaurant in San Jose. I felt like eating with my hand. Maybe I wanted to do that one more time in public, where it was socially acceptable, before I started to do it in places where it was not. I had no idea what the disease would bring.
For a long time I’d ignored the symptoms: constipation, dizziness, loss of smell. Shortness of breath after climbing the stairs—first three flights, then two, then one. Tremors. Stiff joints. Muscle spasms. Lots of little things that might have been nothing at all. I suspected Parkinson’s. But when the transient visual hallucinations began, and when I got lost in the cereal aisle of the neighborhood grocery store, I had to admit I was in trouble.
Even an old Debate Club champion who could turn black into white and peace into war couldn’t argue for long with an MRI, a polysomnogram, and single-photon emission computerized tomography. I’ve always trusted machines more than I trust people, and the machines laid out a strong case against me. Of course, they say the only definitive diagnosis is an autopsy. But I’m not holding my breath for that reprieve.
By the time I sat down to that memorial Ethiopian dinner, I was done with Denial and was working my way through Resentment. I’d rolled enough dice in my life to know how chance works. My life’s luck had defied the odds. It was time to regress to the mean.
Dementia with Lewy bodies: One out of every three-hundred-and-some people in this country suffers from it. One in thirty Americans with dementia of one kind or another—one in ten my age or older. If you count all kinds of cognitive impairment, one in five. That’s not an exclusive club. Too many members for a mathematically literate person to bother asking, Why me, Lord?
The social worker suggested I might want to get my affairs in order. In the next breath, she warned me about a temptation to isolate myself. She didn’t seem to know who I was or how hard that would be.
Anxiety? Agitation? Anger? A feeling of bottomless loss? Maybe if the news had hit a few years earlier, when it wasn’t yet clear whether my life’s greatest gamble would pay off. But I’ve seen my work fulfilled beyond my wildest dreams, and who gets that? I’ll go out on a high note, while my parting gift to the world still feels like a miracle.
The social worker also warned me that DLB often involves apathy and declining interest in ordinary activities. So I figured my peaceful acquiescence that night was just another symptom.
That evening at dinner, my chief feeling was odd relief. Relief that my symptoms made sense at last. Relief that I now knew what was coming. Relief that I’d brought in the harvest before winter. Relief that I didn’t have to stick around to witness the grim consequences of my team’s total triumph or confront those many people who would want to kill me for bringing that triumph into their lives.
I admit to feeling a fair amount of fear. I’ve always been a coward about the unknown, and the unknown now ambushes me every few hours. “Fluctuating cognition,” my health team calls it. Spontaneous variation in my ability to tell what the hell is really going on.
They say I may die of pneumonia, the complication of no longer being able to swallow. Lots of folks with DLB die from falling or losing control of their body. I may die of sepsis or a heart attack. But no matter how I go, it will be the death of a dazed animal.
“We’ve detected this early,” my neurologist told me. “You may have plenty of good time, still.” She did not say whether that meant weeks or months or years.
She warned me that no two sufferers from dementia with Lewy bodies can expect the same fate. She hinted that there were plenty of people whose symptoms were worse than I could imagine. “This is one of the strangest diseases there is, and we know so little about it.”
I pushed her until she confessed that the mean run is five to seven years after diagnosis. She worked up my meds, had her staff give me the list of local support groups, and told me she’d see me again in six months.
So I sat that evening on the terrace of one of my favorite restaurants in San Jose, looking out on the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains as the Teslas hummed up and down Saratoga. I made a list in my head of all the loose ends I needed to wrap up while there was time. And I tried to estimate how much wrapping-up time I had.
I folded the sheet of injera and used it to scoop up the most delicious wat I’d ever tasted. Just yesterday, I was at the height of my powers. One of my companies was about to reveal a product that would rock the world. Life was beyond satisfying, beyond enjoyable, beyond good. And today, I had dementia with Lewy bodies.
Who could I tell how inexplicable this all felt? I only had this instant. The next day this impossible feeling would begin to seem ordinary. The week after that, I’d begin to forget that anything needed explaining. Then more episodes, lasting anywhere from three seconds to days at a time, when explaining anything to anyone would be harder than I could manage.
I needed to start recording everything. Telling someone. That’s where you come in.
The waiter, whose name I once knew, came by to check on me. “How is everything?”
“Remarkable.”
He smiled at my satisfaction. “Will there be anything else?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Probably not.”
Later, he followed me out to the parking lot to see if the size of my tip had been an accident.
Halfway through the twentieth century, in a cold northern city on the other side of the globe from Makatea, a father threw his weighted-down twelve-year-old daughter into the water, hoping she would sink to the bottom.
Forty pounds of metal pulled the girl downward. Twisting in animal dread, she looked from the world she’d fallen into back up into the world she came from. Through the shimmering layer in between, the girl saw the quicksilver outline of her father stabbing a finger toward his own face and mouthing, Tu n’as qu’à respirer.
All you need to do is breathe.
MONTREAL, 1947. LATE NOVEMBER, bleak winter, when every trip outdoors after five p.m. felt like suicide. On that night, an engineer for the Air Liquide Company, Canada, drove his daughter from their Vieux-Rosemont apartment to the corporate offices in the Quartier Hochelaga. Back then, it took no more than twenty minutes. They drove in a prewar McLaughlin-Buick, with Evie Beaulieu riding shotgun next to her excited father. A timid child, a child consumed by dread, she shouted at her father every few minutes.
“Papa, too fast. Watch out for the streetcar.”
Even seated, the girl stooped over. That year’s growth spurt had left her half a foot taller than her classmates, so she hunched forward, shrinking herself. Every other day her mother berated her. Stand up straight. You’ll turn yourself into a hunchback. The word curled her spine even more.
A constant bruise purpled the right half of the child’s upper lip, where she chewed on it. Everything frightened her. Almost two years after VE Day, she still imagined German tanks rolling down Rue Sherbrooke the way they rolled down the Champs-Élysées in the Pathé newsreels. She feared that another telegram like the one about her uncle four years earlier would send her mother back into shock treatment. She was sure that her little brother Baptiste would die of pneumonia. At night, she went to bed terrified that the Virgin Mary might explode out of her armoire while she slept and spatter her with revelations.
Her father’s work spooked her, too. His boss, Monsieur Gagnan, had left Paris for Montreal after the war, for reasons no one would say. M. Gagnan was kind to Evelyne, but she found him scary and brooding. During the Occupation, when the Germans stripped France of fuel, M. Gagnan’s gas generator regulator had attracted the attention of Captain Cousteau. Together the two men built the CG45 Scaphandre Autonome.
Evie liked Captain Cousteau—his playfulness, his singsong voice, his tobacco scent. But his invention felt sinister. Just the name of it: like some mechanical kraken living in an underwater cave off Newfoundland, feeding on cod fishermen.
Maybe she was jealous of how much attention her father lavished on it.
“We’re opening three-quarters of the planet to human beings. We’ve cut the umbilical. The whole game of human life is changing!”
“Shh! Papa, please. Just . . . drive. Chauffez le char.”
Her father chuckled, sledding down the borough’s boulevards. The dull, brute hum of the city outside the windows assaulted the girl. Déneigement crews were out, stacking the snow into great canyon walls on both sides of the streets. All the way down Rue Rosemont, Evie gripped the dash and steered the car through patches of verglas on nothing but her twelve-year-old will.
“Every month, we make it better. Lighter, smaller, safer, longer lasting. And that’s where you come in, mon chouchou. We need to see whether even a willowy girl like you . . .”
Willowy meant scrawny. Too skinny and too tall. Stand up straight. Be proud of your height. You’ll turn into a hunchback before you’re a teenager. Hunchback and teenager: the twin sides of that monstrous coin of her future.
And now her father wanted her to be the first girl ever to test the Scaphandre. “You’ll be part of history!”
The thought hunched Evie over even more.
She got them down Rue Viau to the corner of Rue de Rouen on sheer telekinesis. Her father steered the car into a snowbank. Evie opened the passenger door and plunged out to the curb. Winds from the high Arctic hammered her. Father and daughter punched their way through drifts to the Air Liquide building and entered the maze of offices, storerooms, and labs that formed her father’s warren.
The test pool waited for them. Her father retrieved a pile of equipment from his workbench in the corner. Evie took off her coat, jumper, and dress, stripping down to her swimsuit. She piled her shed clothes in a heap by the wall. Every item, wool. Pure laine, like her mother, Sophie Dupis Beaulieu, a poor Catholic girl from Saint-Henri, de souche, old stock, with a family tree rooted in earliest New France. But her mother had married a mongrel engineer.
Emile spoke English like an Anglo, had Anglo friends, and traveled to the States a few times a year. Sophie, though, forever badmouthed Ottawa, lobbied for a new provincial flag, and voted for Camillien Houde even after the city’s mayor went to prison. Emile thought Houde should have been shot for what he did to the country. Family dinners were tense affairs, with Sophie Beaulieu wandering nightly into soft sedition while Emile carried on about the promise of the aqualung and an open ocean beyond all politics. Evie and Baptiste stayed mute and nonaligned.
The small pool was warmed by the heat of generators on the floor below. Evelyne dog-paddled while her father fiddled with the Scaphandre’s hoses and regulator. The girl had a swimmer’s build, with surprising strength, but her rapid growth hobbled her. She hated swimming laps, afraid of crashing into walls she could not see.
Evie sat on the pool’s edge, where her father helped her into the mask, tanks, and hoses. She eased back into the pool, still clutching the rim. In the water, the tanks were more manageable. Emile Beaulieu mimed to his daughter to insert the mouthpiece. “All you need to do is breathe.”
Her lips tensed around the hardened rubber. She whimpered into the mouthpiece as her father coaxed her fingers from the pool’s edge. Her brain bucked, and the mass of steel strapped to her back dragged Evie down. She lay on the pale blue tiles, opened her eyes, and surrendered to drowning.
Through the membrane that separated the two worlds, her father signaled madly: Tu n’as qu’à respirer. Lost, she inhaled. And with that breath, she drew in all her life to come. A miracle: her lungs did not fill up with liquid. Trapped beneath a dozen feet of water, she was breathing. She had grown gills. She had turned fish, eel, octopus—some submarine creature that had never given the idea of water a second thought.
Her lungs expanded on command, and for the first time she knew how glorious it was to breathe. To breathe underwater. Her gangly body uncurled, surprised that it worked better down here. A whole new grace came over her, confirming something she had long suspected. She had never felt at home up there, above the surface, with its noise and politics and relentless verticality. She had been made for water, gliding through a place edgeless and muffled, free of the blows that had always assaulted her in the world of air.
Water cradled her in its great, kind palm. The tanks she carried now felt weightless. She rolled over on her back like a playful porpoise and looked up. Everything she needed lay down here, and she wished to stay submerged forever. She could move with the smallest flicks of her limbs. She did not have to do another thing. Only breathe.
Her body rose and pierced the surface. She grabbed the pool’s edge and spit out the rubber mouthpiece. A sob of joy rose in her throat. Life had just revealed itself, and she was in a hurry for more.
“Oh, Papa. It’s perfect. Don’t change a thing!”
Pleasure on her father’s face turned into confusion. “What do you mean, don’t change anything? I’m an engineer!”
YEARS LATER, EVELYNE BEAULIEU would learn what her father didn’t tell her that night at the Air Liquide test pool. Only weeks before, Cousteau had sent a diver down in a test in the Mediterranean off the coast of Toulon. One hundred twenty meters down, First Mate Maurice Fargues gave in to the euphoria of nitrogen narcosis, the high-pressure derangement that leaves a diver indifferent to the real. Fargues lost consciousness and never recovered. He died in the “rapture of the deep.” The infant aqualung almost died with him.
And yet, Emile Beaulieu had sent his daughter on her own test dive. Half the age of the youngest person to have used the equipment, a girl afraid to step on the cracks in the sidewalk, and he’d tossed her into the water strapped to a prototype.
That night, on the other side of the Atlantic, a Norwegian was writing a memoir about crossing the Pacific on a handmade raft. Four hundred miles down the Atlantic coast, a pair of men working late stumbled upon the portal to the electronic age. And a little girl who would help save the ocean came up from her first dive.
IN THE CAR, EVIE NO LONGER policed her father’s driving. She looked through the windshield onto a city that glinted now like the most magnificent bauble. She was thinking of that astonishing book she had read with her father the year before—William Beebe’s Half Mile Down. The terrifying, fantastic adventure story had just turned real.
“Papa? Most of the ocean must get no light at all.”
Emile Beaulieu made the calculation. He nodded in happy agreement.
The girl frowned. “It will be pitch-black down there. Full of strange things.”
“That’s certain. We know nothing about the ocean. . . .”
“Not even the shallow parts. . . .”
“Because no one has ever been able to stay down there and look around!”
Father and daughter fell silent. Their eyes dodged then found each other. They burst out in a shared, manic laugh. No one, until now.
They stormed back into the apartment on Vieux-Rosemont, still giggling in conspiracy. It was past Evie’s bedtime. She should have been creeping off to sleep, timid even in the safety of her home. But the girl had changed, underwater.
Her mother was alarmed. “What’s gotten into you two? Secrets and laughter. Eh ben, vous voilà comme larrons en foire.” You two are as thick as thieves!
“It’s incredible what they’ve made, Maman. Papa, more testing, please!”
Her parents shared a look that should have told her everything. “Yes. We’ll do that soon.”
“Tomorrow night. Je t’en prie.” Pretty please.
She dove again, sooner than that. She dove and stayed down, under the waves, all night long in her dreams.
EIGHTY YEARS LATER, on a crystalline afternoon in a calm patch of the South Pacific with the sun coming hard across the sky and nothing on any horizon but endless saline blue, a gangly ninety-two-year-old woman pitched backward over the gunwale of a five-meter dive boat and sank wakeless into the sea.
Curled up like a fetus from the plunge, she relaxed, unfolded, and surrendered to sinking. She dropped face-upward through the bright top layers of the photic zone. The weight around her waist pulled her down. Pressure built against her frail frame, and the surrounding water darkened.
She looked upward through that undulating membrane between two worlds as it receded ten, then twenty feet above her, and she realized what should have been obvious to her, that first night, eighty years before. Her father had lied.
He had not brought her to the Air Liquide test pool that night because he and M. Gagnan needed someone her size and weight to test the company’s lighter, better CG45 Scaphandre Autonome. He had tossed her into the water in the simple hope of building her confidence.
The experiment worked. In the run of her long life, she had addressed the UN and pressured two Presidents into taking emergency action. She’d overthrown more than one of humanity’s cherished beliefs about the ocean and confessed her most private stories to a million strangers. Confidence had long since ceased to be her problem. Her only problem now was time. She needed six months of dive-ready health and her work on this water-world would be done.
