With tanks, the tours would last only an hour. With tethers, we can stay in the dark for days and days.
Food is constipating bricks sewn into pockets in our suit's inner walls like the illicit goods of a dishonest man. When we've spent two weeks sleeping only brief snatches on our feet, we check the same empty pocket three times. Bladders full of clean water press to our chests like the breasts of the wives we've left behind. If those empty before the tour is up, we reach above our heads and tug our tethers and a cup's worth will come down the air pipe, washing over us if we aren't ready with our chins tipped up mouth open, turkeys waiting rain. Some green divers do this intentionally because it feels like bathing, because they aren't yet dead to the smell of themselves and don't know the water will pool in their boots, unreachable. When our tour is up and we're let back in the ship to crack ourselves out of our suits like insects leaving their carapaces, the green of us leave the skin of our feet behind.
It's a lesson long in learning. We spend so little time shipside.
All this world is ocean. All this world is darkness, save the lights. Little balls of light drifting through dark water, as erratic and beautiful as jellyfish, luminous even through the suits' tinted faceplates. Slow, too, thankfully, because otherwise none of us could catch them in these cumbersome suits heavy with water bladders, our skin soldered into the seams.
We catch the lights like children netting butterflies. Gently. Gently they go into special cases, and with a twist of the wrist the cases' CO2 decompresses and they shoot away, bound for the faraway surface, and this world grows a little dimmer. Everything in here is so gentle, which we suppose it can be because nothing is alive, just endless halls of water and drifting lights and the soft silt of the sea floor beneath us. No predators. The only threat is a kinked line, or the bone-crushing pressure of the dark. Catching requires no strategy, so we don't have radios. We talk to the echoes in our helmets and attribute these words to each other.
Often, we tell ourselves we think the lights are getting faster, that they're outrunning us more often now, dodging and diving, and that means that they are alive, that they think. Often, we ask in return why we are always doubting, always checking good things for bad seams. When we were hired they said the lights were only proto-life, caught in the first day of eternity, let there be—!
We don't know why we don't believe. The ship doctor says it's a symptom of the work—so long without the sun, without voices or touch that isn’t self-inflicted. A body is only made for so much, for so little. When the tours are over, we strip off our suits and emerge like nothing human. Pale as slime, with legs that bend like wishbones, shanks shit-caked if the constipating food bricks have failed us. The green of us scream at our feet.
Though it's not approved, the doctor—especially a new doctor, not yet desensitized, who doesn't know the dark and what it takes—will crack open a case and let us light-bathe (do not look directly into the light) until we are clutched in a rictus of ethereal glee, as, incidentally, our joints stop singing, our legs straighten, our trench foot and rosacea and phantom itches slink away. We clutch each other laughing laughing weeping-screaming-laughing as, in turn, that little falling light dims and dims and then goes out. The doctor fills out a form that attributes this lost light to administrative error, accidental waste.
Shrinkage, the doctor says. The official term.
The glee lasts for a few weeks, the result ultra-productivity. We go back down, we drink our water bladders, we eat with our newly regrown perfect white teeth. We trade stories with ourselves-each-other about those on the other end of the shipments, the ill children bathed in healing unalive light, whose futures will not end at the tint of a faceplate. In those weeks we don't worry about the lights getting faster, running away from us, about what happens when there are no more lights to catch, about the phantom notion that we can't quite shake: Have we found heaven and we're clearing it out? About Losos who, after weeks and months of tours here in the dark, one day caught a light with one hand and then, with the other, unbuckled his helmet and cast it away in a boiling maelstrom of bubbles.
It haunts us, in our uneven gasps of sleep. For one moment Losos was perfect, his hair drifting around his brown eyes like sea kelp, the light in his cupped hand illuminating his face like he was the first man to foster fire. Then the side of his head crushed in. His left eye popped – the pressure, they warn us always about the pressure. Still alive, he stared deep into the light's star heart, laughing laughing weeping-screaming-laughing and his remaining eye burned white, and though we were feet away and had smelled nothing but our own stink for days, we swear we could smell his retina burning. Blood drifted out of his nose, red as ink before it joined the dark. And while the light uncrushed his skull like an artist smoothing him out from the inside what looked like his liver slithered up out of the neck of his suit because his suit was crumping in like a fist squeezing foil, crushing his waist, his chest, his skinless green feet.
Pressure.
We could read his lips before the light went out, before this dark bleak world killed him with a crunch we could feel in our new teeth.
Shrinkage! he screamed. Shrinkage!
We have lost so many to shrinkage.