The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome Read Online Free PDF Page B

unfurling in its shadow would forever be gummy with cookie crumbs caught in its weave, puddles of spilled soda. David cautiously avoided that corner of the room, and even made a strict point of not looking behind the seat. Something stopped him from doing so, a vague and magical anxiety, a fear—maybe the fear of suddenly being face-to-face with himself? Of finding a wizened little boy, a kind of doppelganger freed from the passing of time, who dwelled there still, a stowaway in his own life, furiously reading without a moment’s rest.
    Marianne must have drawn a thousand less than flattering conclusions from this stockpile of popular literature. What could she possibly know about the magic of those covers hacks had hastily daubed, using only crude colors squeezed right from the tube to portray women with bombshell breasts?
    In the end, she’d probably told herself she was only rooting around for the good of her patient. To collect “material for interpretation.” He could just picture her: breathlessly opening drawers, sweating with excitement under her gray wool. She’d plunge her hands with their bitten nails into packets of letters, seize upon photo albums. Research! Just a routine investigation, nothing personal about it.
    Had she already gotten her hands on the spy cards twelve-year-old David had made with bits of cardboard snipped from shoeboxes? And the honor code, written in red ink, of the secret society founded the year he started sixth grade? The Club of the Scarlet Executioners … Three members, with their code names and passwords encrypted in a teacher-proof cipher. Yes, Marianne must have unearthed those quaint, poignant mementoes,those solemn licenses issued by some President of the Republic who wasn’t good at spelling. And she hadn’t been moved; her ugly little lips had vaguely pursed with scorn before such childishness. She’d simply thought how stupid little boys were at twelve when compared to girls, who …
    And what about the graveyard of old toys? The former liquor cabinet he’d padlocked. But it was a dime store padlock, and Marianne probably had a whole ring of skeleton keys. They probably gave them out at the hospital: a burglary kit, lock picks an integral part of the paraphernalia, along with a stethoscope and the whole array of sedatives.
    Every time he woke up, he found he hated the young woman a bit more, with her certainties and her bun. He was sure she never washed anything but her face and hands. She had a smell about her. A nasty little bitter sweat that stewed, muffled under her woolens. Where did she live when she wasn’t squatting at her patients’ apartments? Probably nowhere. She had no home of her own, a perpetual nomad, going from one building to another, camping out a week here, a few days there. She had nothing to her name but that well-worn, well-waxed suitcase. David pictured her sleeping inside it, pulling the top down over her head and sucking her thumb like a little old maid. In the end, they weren’t so different from each other … and that was why he hated her.
    He didn’t like the idea of her sticking her nose into the graveyard of old toys, rifling through the rinky-dink odds and ends. Sheriff stars that twinkled no more, having lost their gilt. Pocketknives whose rusty, spring-loaded blades folded back into the handle only with a disillusioned squeal.
    “You spat up blood again,” she said, examining the inside of his mouth with a flashlight. “You’ll need a fibroscopy.”
    “It happens a lot with mediums,” objected David. “You know that. It just means the ectoplasm’s texture is high quality, that’s all.”
    Marianne shrugged and jotted something down quickly in her notebook. “Maybe you need to take a little break,” she said. “You’re too close to the dream world for my liking. You refuse to understand that Nadia is just a substitute for a maternal image. The words you use betray this obsession. Taking ‘the plunge,’ the