The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome Read Online Free PDF

purpose, or what? Is it some kind of provocation, is that it? Do you want to drive me crazy? Is that it? There was no ‘job,’ no ‘jeweler’—that’s all smoke and hot air, immaterial images.”
    David gave up arguing. Insisting would have been awkward; assistant psychologists were obsessed with schizophrenia. Their mouths were full of phrases like “loss of any notion of reality,” “obsessive oneiric constructs.” He had to avoid fanning the flamesif he didn’t want to end up in a clinic with an IV drip and electrodes all over his scalp.
    “Just kidding,” he apologized cautiously. Marianne glared at him, suspicious. She had a tomato sauce stain on the back of her lab coat. What had she been doing for five days, while he was drifting in a deep trance? He tried to picture her, tiptoeing in her careful, mousy way around the winding hallways of the large, awkwardly laid-out apartment passed down when his parents died. It was in an old building so damp the window frames were swollen shut. Carbon monoxide from the street had slowly upholstered the panes with a gray fluff that greedily filtered out the light. There reigned a shut-in smell, commingled with that of dust and stale frying oil; David had gotten used to it. The permanent gloom did not bother him, not in his line of work. He’d slathered everything in blue paint: the shelves of the massive library, the old upright piano, the Renaissance buffets, even the hallway flooring where a lack of rugs left the floorboards bare. The apartment as aquarium. Of course the rooms were weird, oddly-shaped, hard to furnish. Their too-high ceilings made them look a bit like corridors clumsily converted into lodgings, but it was his domain, and he loved it. For five days, Marianne had wandered through these rooms with her little pursed mouth. She’d deemed the decoration in bad taste, the books infantile. All those silly pulp magazines carefully slipcased with maniacal care, as if they were valuable!
    More than anything else, David’s library must have plunged Marianne into abysmal consternation for there, on overloaded, sagging shelves, he kept all the books and magazines he’d satedhimself on ever since he could read. The paperbacks were organized chronologically, not by date of publication, but by the date David had first discovered them. A little label thumbtacked over each row specified the age range its two feet of shelf covered:
8–10
,
10–12
 … At twelve, crime series began to appear, with their violently gaudy covers, bare-shouldered women with outrageously slutty pouts, cigarette holder in one hand, revolver in the other. Secret agents had replaced the musty gumshoes of romantic American noir. The first adventurers of the technological era, they weren’t so conceited as to fall back on their fists alone in the face of every menace. Gadget men, the appliance salesmen of intrigue, they traveled the world, their pockets, shoes, hats, and ties jam-packed with felt-tip torpedo launchers, ballpoint blowtorches, fountain pen transmitters … They kept poison in hollow teeth, bombs in their fake heels, bazookas in their artificial limbs. With them, it was deception through and through. A shoe-radio gave them a direct line to the president of the United States, a pair of x-ray glasses let them see through solid walls … David had adored this fictional world, prodigious fodder for afterschool daydreams. Those dog-eared little paperbacks whose cheap paper went frightfully yellow the minute sun hit them—he had but to brush them with a finger, and he saw himself at twelve again, curled up on the living room rug behind the rampart of an armchair that insulated him from the real world, his sweaty hands gripping the adventures of Agent BZ-00, aka The Liquidator, who at this very second was leaving for Hong Kong in the company of an Asian lady “too almond-eyed to be trustworthy.” Despite the years, the armchair hadn’t budged from its spot. The part of therug