He pointed over to the right and I momentarily forgot to breathe as I turned and my torch shone on an eel, purple with yellow specks, its body heading forward in a mesmerising wave of movement. After that I struggled a bit to regulate my breathing. My legs were tingling. I very much doubted any doctors would have recommended I do this. But I’d got this far, so I swam on.
As we neared the seabed, I witnessed an abundance of life in the dark. A little school of silver fish darting in formation, their shadows on the grass and the sand below, a couple more eels weaving between the green strands of the plant, seahorses, a technicoloured sea slug. An injured fish, a grouper, leaking blood into the water.
I could see the seagrass clearly in the artificial glow of the torch. It was beautiful and eerie all at once. Long thin emerald-green leaves, going on seemingly for ever in all directions. It felt deeply important in its simplicity, as if that was the key to survival. Never flower, never progress, never complicate. Same template for ever.
Then I saw Alberto pointing towards something. Something small and gold, exactly like in the photograph. I swam towards it and picked it up. A necklace I hadn’t held for forty-five years. I saw the embossed figure of St Christopher, carrying the infant Christ across the river. I clenched it tight like lost treasure and looked for some clue as to how it had been left there. I looked for signs of trouble. But there was nothing else, and the seagrass didn’t look disturbed or trampled or distorted from a struggle.
Then, curiously, the fish and other sea creatures that had all been travelling in different directions were now suddenly headed in just one. They were heading quickly away from an unseen entity, as if in panic. I was trying to work out what was going on when another thing happened.
The light strapped to my forehead began to flicker.
I turned to Alberto in the stuttering light and saw that his was too. I think he was smiling, but it was hard to tell because of the diving equipment. And then, a second after that, the lights went off completely. Total darkness. Nothing at all. I looked all around.
I felt his hand on my arm.
Please stay away from Mr Ribas.
A tight grip.
A madman.
Getting tighter.
The one person that truly knows what happened to her.
Then he let go.
And everything changed.
Light
Suddenly, there was light.
The Cloud and the Sphere
The light I was now seeing was not coming from our headlamps. They were still very much off.
No, this light was coming from about a hundred metres in front of us. Phosphorescent. And the fast-moving fish I saw darting away from something were in fact doing the opposite. They were heading fast towards it.
A luminescent thing above the grass, a colour that seemed bright and pale all at once, that was at first in the shape of a cloud and then in the shape of a sphere. A geometrically perfect sphere. The kind Euclid and Archimedes wrote about thousands of years ago but which, on Earth, only exists as an abstract idea and not as a thing of nature. It fluctuated between indistinct cloud and precise sphere in a way that instantly felt alien and unearthly. It wasn’t particularly big – larger than a tennis ball but smaller than a football. At least at first. The size shifted – growing, then shrinking – like the movement of a lung. And colour-wise it was blue unlike any I had ever seen before. Not the blue of the sea, not quite, though the colour shifted as much as the scale and form. The fish swam into it, into the light.
I am very sorry to be so indistinct about this, but it is hard to describe something for which there is no real earthly reference. The moment I compare it to something is the moment I realise it was nothing like that thing. I suppose describing it is like describing a difficult emotion, a contradictory emotion. You will get more of those as you get older. Like the strange small contentment that can sometimes be traced to grief or tears, living alongside the pain. Or the bittersweet knowledge that all things must pass.
It was mesmerising; I can tell you that much. It was, quite simply, the most incredible thing I had seen in my life. I turned to Alberto and saw him smiling behind his mask and mouthpiece. His headlamp was working again. And so was mine. Alberto’s smile was the smile of recognition, or of pride, like a relative showing me his favourite film. And what was incredible about it was not just the sight of it but the presence of it, because it felt like looking at a feeling.
Yes. That was it. It felt like looking at a feeling.
I know that sounds ridiculous, but that is the only way I can explain it. Like somehow it was love or hope I was looking at. Or rather, an emotion we don’t have a word for but which we feel at a deep level, one we keep buried, but which connects us. I was looking at something outside myself, obviously, but also somehow inside myself.
And I was possibly there looking at it for quite a time before I noticed Alberto pointing to the cloud, and then giving me, in quick succession, the thumbs-up and an okay signal and also an open-palm signal – the latter being the kind you give to a disobedient Labrador when you want them to stay. So, I did. I stayed there. And I watched as the luminescent sphere became a luminescent cloud once more, before slowly changing shape again, elongating almost like an arm reaching out, in a clear direction as if it wasn’t random but had an intention. And that line of light approached the injured fish, the grouper, and ‘touched’ the wound. Then, almost as quickly, the light withdrew back into the oscillating cloud-sphere and the fish was left there, only now it was unquestionably healed. It was fully upright, its speckled skin intact as it swam away.
I turned to Alberto, who seemed much less stunned than me. He was still smiling, as casually as if he was at a café watching a sunset. By the time I turned back around it was already happening. The sphere became a cloud, and it stayed being a cloud but then part of the cloud became a long thin arm of light again. Only this time it wasn’t heading for an injured fish.
It was heading for me.
Free
I wasn’t able to remember all of it.
I mean, I could remember what I have told you up until now. But much of the space from that moment underwater to the moment I woke up in hospital is so strange. And because of the nature of what I am writing about, an area which traditionally has led people to either wild flights of fancy or deeply entrenched scepticism, I feel I must stick rigidly to what I actually experienced.
So, I can tell you that the blue light reached me. The arm of light, which was a very ragged, long, cloudy cone of light. And the moment it touched me it was as if the whole ocean had disappeared.
There were no creatures or plants around me. No Alberto. No anything. Just water, but a strange water. Water the colour of that illuminated and glowing and unnatural blue. And it was the most relaxing feeling. More than relaxing. Something else. Freeing. I felt free. I must have dropped the necklace at some point, but I can’t remember when.
And then, a blink later, I was on what appeared to be dry land. Amid nature. But not any nature I had seen before. There were trees that weren’t trees. Tall, thin, white-leaved. There was a beach that wasn’t a beach. A sea that wasn’t a sea. And the air was not any air I had ever known. It was so pure and sweet it made breathing feel like the purpose of life, rather than a mere prerequisite.
I saw creatures amid the trees. They were standing upright. They could have almost been human, from this distance. They were wearing some kind of clothes. Yet they seemed smudged, like figures in a watercolour, vapours leaving their bodies as they stood there. They made me feel calm. Like they were protective spirits.
The beach did have sand, but it was a burnt orange kind of colour. And the sea was blue but not an earthly blue. It was the glowing impossible blue I had seen while diving.
I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, ‘Oh, this sounds like an interesting dream.’ And I can’t conclusively tell you that it wasn’t a dream. But if it was a dream, it was like no other I had experienced in seven decades of existence. It was all so sharp. In fact, the enhancement to every sense was such that it was easier to believe that my life up until then had been a dream, and this was reality. Yes. That is what it felt like. It felt like waking up.
‘Where?’ I wondered aloud.
Just that one word.
Where?
