The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome by Serge BRUSSOLO

Author:Serge BRUSSOLO [Brussolo, Serge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-469-1
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2016-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

[ 8 ]

Bad News in Bliss Plaza

David crossed the museum esplanade, listening to the echo of his steps under the archways. The sound always made him feel like he was being pursued by a legion of invisible men hiding behind the tall pillars. No matter how fast he turned around, he never managed to surprise these ghosts as they moved about (but how could he have, if they were invisible?). The feeling of being surrounded finally became oppressive, like a trap he couldn’t locate but knew was closing in all around. That morning, he’d felt an urge to go see Soler Mahus’s magnum opus again, the one on display in Bliss Plaza, in the open air. On the way back, he’d stop by and see Marianne in her tiny office in the medical section.

He went down the long marble steps. The great dream took up the entire surface of the former reflecting pool, unfurling its shapes and curves like a strange aerodynamic transport waiting to take flight. A living machine, a celestial seashell, or even … a cloud, maybe, a cloud beached on the ground after long drifting on the jet streams. A captive cloud? Marooned like a whale come to die on the beach, its sonar on the blink.

The sculpture burgeoned, taking up a good hundred square yards. Contemplating it, you wondered how one man alone could have given birth to an ectoplasm of such size without it costing him his life. But that was no doubt why Soler was old beyond his years, why little by little he’d come to look like a living mummy unable to so much as wiggle his pinky. His outsize dreams had sucked the marrow from his bones, withering his body, tanning his flesh into leather stiffer than jerky. His life essence was gone, consumed by dream. David knew that ectoplasms wore your body out. Each time he managed to bring something back from the depths of dream, he lost weight, as if the object expelled through his mouth corresponded to an actual portion of flesh. Each time he stepped on the scale after a dive, he was convinced he’d undergone a mysterious amputation. Something had been taken away from him, he didn’t know what; it was painless, and yet his anatomy was no longer complete. Each dream consumed an organ. Sometimes this idea took on obsessive proportions. For the ectoplasms were not made of smoke, as he’d initially believed; further veterinary studies had shown their texture to be composed of living cells suspended in a very loosely structured protoplasmic compound. Some popular science magazines had even compared ectoplasms to benign growths that developed literally outside the subject. This rather unappealing view of the process, which reduced dreams to the approximate level of mere warts, had not, however, cooled the public’s enthusiasm. David often thought of the emaciated Soler Mahus, looking like a recently unwrapped Egyptian mummy. The ectoplasms had eaten him alive. His children had carved themselves bodies from his very flesh,

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