He slipped the ring on her finger.
“I now pronounce you man and wife.”
The nuptials spit out their regulators and kissed to “Yellow Submarine.”
The dive boat erupted in applause when Serge and Molly broke the surface. People on the other boats began cheering, too. So did some of the divers who had wandered into the ceremony and surfaced with the couple. They scrambled for the artificial bouquet that sailed over Molly’s shoulder into the Gulf Stream.
There was a cake on the boat, finger food, champagne. The merriment built. People danced. Serge stomped on a plastic cup.
Before they knew it, the sun was fading and the wind had picked up. The underwater music festival neared another successful conclusion. Time to head in and continue the celebration back on land. Boat engines started; mooring clamps were unhooked. The remaining divers began surfacing.
Except one.
Down in a distant ravine between the corals heads, a diver in a black and turquoise wet suit top was acting a little strange. He stumbled along the sandy bottom with a goofy grin. The diver had logged over a thousand hours, and his experience told him something was amiss. He was too happy. He checked his watch and his depth gauge. It didn’t add up. He hadn’t been down deep or long enough for nitrogen narcosis, but there was every indication. He staggered and swayed in the current. A barracuda stopped and stared in that unnerving, teeth-bared way they do. The diver just smiled. He thought: Narcosis isn’t that bad. In fact, it’s pretty great! So this is how all the less-experienced guys get the bends or die. They’re having such a good time, they forget the fundamentals. Well, not me. Have to fight it. Must think.
The owner of Pristine Used Motors forced his mind to reach back through years of underwater training. He checked the mini decompression table on his wrist, then hit a timer button on his scuba watch. Twenty minutes, then a little air in the vest and up to the next depth for another stage. The diver was executing the procedure to perfection, resisting the natural tendency to panic and shoot to the surface, which is what he should have done with Serge’s ten percent mixture of nitrous oxide building up in his bloodstream.
He watched the sweep-second hand on his chronograph as it approached the ten-minute mark. The periphery of his vision slowly dissolved to darkness as Pink Floyd throbbed from a dozen submerged speakers.
Eleven minutes. The diver stared straight up. Tunnel vision. Solid black around an ever-tightening circle of light from the surface. Twelve minutes, the tube of light shrank to the diameter of a quarter. Thirteen minutes. An ultimately euphoric grin wrapped across the diver’s face as Floyd built to climax.
A pinpoint of light.
“…I-yiiiiiiiiii… have become… comfortably numb….”
The light went out.
27
ANOTHER TRAFFIC JAM in Marathon. The airport crowded with people. Local chamber of commerce, reporters, federal agents. A line of limos waited by the terminal. This was the day he arrived.
The largest private jet the airport had ever seen came into view. It touched down and used all of the five-thousand-foot runway coming to a stop.
Stairs rolled up. The door opened. People on the runway tried to surge forward but were held back by private security. A pair of executive attachés emerged first, followed by lawyers, accountants and a team of miscellaneous handlers in dark sunglasses. Finally… Wait, there’s more. Personal guests, local politicians and a handful of relatives, including the grandmother who had to be lowered with a special lift…. Was that it? No, hold on. Yes-men, suck-ups, professional entourage members, two “independent” experts ready to go on CNN at a moment’s notice, the unemployed celebrity golfing pal, and a woman in a bright tangerine scarf carrying a leather organizer — the highly protective traveling publicist. Okay, that was definitely it. Finally, the person they’d all been waiting for. And he comes now, confidently striding down the stairs in a lightweight gray suit tailored in Rome. Donald Greely, former CEO and chairman of embattled Global-Con, Inc.
Greely reached the tarmac and was immediately mobbed by a tight crowd that shuffled with him toward the terminal. Newspaper photographers held cameras in the air, snapping photos over the swarm. Reporters shouted questions.
“Will the company reorganize?”
“What about all the wiped-out retirement accounts?”
“Why’d you take the fifth before Congress?”
“How much did the house cost?”
“Are you going to live here permanently?”
The reporters were roundly booed by supporters from local civic organizations, who endlessly thanked Greely for his generosity. The new hospital wing, new arts center, scholarships for local teens with high SATs and the home for unwanted puppies.
With an artful and carefully rehearsed technique, the team of handlers acted in choreographed unison as a kind of giant ectoplasm, gradually elbowing, shouldering, sidestepping and jockeying the noisiest journalists to the outer rim of the crowd, simultaneously letting the most enthusiastic supporters percolate through to the inner core.
All the way to the terminal, Greely grinned and signed autographs. They clasped his hand earnestly. “Can’t thank you enough for the donation!” “Will you speak at our awards banquet?” “You’ve been such an inspiration!”
“Just trying to be a good member of the community,” said Greely. “Really, no need to thank me.” He had a point. It was all being paid for by other people’s life savings, routed through Caribbean shell corporations. Standard PR for controversial companies and public figures moving into town: Buy advance goodwill.
The crowd approached the terminal. The traveling publicist glowed. Everything unfolding according to plan. Lots of photos of happy residents greeting their newest neighbor.
Something caught the eye of one of the newspaper photographers. Out in the parking lot on the other side of the runway fence. The photographer broke from the pack and started shooting on the run. When his rivals noticed, they stampeded for the same picture, followed by reporters with open notebooks.
The traveling publicist noticed the crowd around her client getting a little lean. Where’d the media go? She looked back and saw her worst nightmare. On the other side of the fence was a lone picketer, an elderly woman with an expression of collapsed hope, barely strong enough to hold up her homemade sign written in a pitifully unsteady hand: I HAD TO GO BACK TO WORK.