The Night Divers

SHF_FA_TheSkyDivers // 01_initial

Our teenage hereo, Macelvain, has been having nightmares all week, and now he wakes up choking. He’s lying in warm water and has inhaled some of it. His bedroom is being flooded, with the water level rising very fast. He wades from his basement bedroom to the staircase, shouting both in anguish and warning. His belongings are being destroyed, his precious things. But his sister and parents in the upstairs of the house must be saved.

Running on wet feet, he first tries to wake his sister, then his parents. But none of them will be aroused. And now the water is filling the upstairs, too. He lifts his little sister, Mariella, from bed and pushes through the tide to the house’s front door. He knows the pressure inside must be too great for him to open the door, but he has to try. And the door opens easily. The pressure outside is only as great as the pressure inside. For the whole pre-dawn landscape stands in water as high as his waist, waves glinting blackly under the streetlights. 

He makes decisions quickly. The family’s little fishing boat is rising, trying to lift its trailer with it. He runs across sharp gravel in his bare feet, puts his sleeping sister into the boat, then dives underwater to release the boat from the trailer. It’s blind work, a painful wrestling with metal and chains, a stubbing of toes and tearing of his hands, but he knows the apparatus well, and after coming up twice for air, the boat lifts free, and Macelvain scrambles aboard. The boat has taken on water, but only a little and the boat now rises with the incoming lake or tidal wave — whatever this awful force is — cars and hedges disappearing first, then roofs and chimneys, then trees — his whole world and everyone he knows swallowed by a black sea from nowhere.

Thus begins a tale of mystery and adventure. Macelvain’s sister eventually comes awake. The two of them are adrift on a sea that covers everything. They are found by an old-fashioned sailing ship without sails, seeming to pilot and move itself. It steers across the partly night/partly day sea to find and rescue survivors. Everyone it comes to is a teenager. One is riding a wooden picnic table, one sits on top of a Volkswagen Beetle that shouldn’t be floating at all, one hangs in the circle of a tractor-sized inner tube. And none of them is a stranger. The ship has gathered up people Macelvain knows — his best friend Curran, his cousin Kimmy, and a schoolmate — the meanest kid in Macelvain’s school.

They find that the ship is piloted by a tall, gaunt person with a taut, unmoving face. There crew is two uniformed, dutiful, bearded men four feet in height. This Captain takes them on a long voyage, where they encounter adventures both physical and emotional. The two sailors keep them fed and supplied by diving into the sea and bringing to the surface whatever is needed — food, medicine, clothing, baseball gloves and a ball, handguns, an encyclopedia, and so on. There is definitely magic in it. The things from below are never wet. And the sky never changes from predawn. Throughout the adventure the western sky is black with a few, final stars, the sky to the east a sunrise forever about to bloom.

The kids are taken to a place where they must dive repeately, going very deep in the sea. They go down half a mile and wrestle demons that have attached themselves to teenagers. Each of these teenagers is being leeched of desire. Our heroes have learned to work together, to depend on one another’s unique abilities. None of them could have won these battles alone, but together they have every human capacity needed to thwart the spirit-consuming demons.

When they have saved these peers in far away cities, they are carried back to their home county, Mohaw, and returned to their houses, their beds, their dreams. Macelevain wakes up after only an hour of sleep, the memory of his adventure teetering on the edge of erasure. He jumps to his desk and begins writing, a trick he has learned for saving a fading dream. An hour and a half later his mother calls him, just as he finishes the tale. He has gotten down all the important parts, and he’s even made the tale a little better — fixed some of the parts that didn’t make sense, made some of the speeches a little better.

“Time for school, Mack!” 

The night tide has left behind no sign of itself. His belonging are all untouched. His parents and his sister are themselves. The world outside their house is still the not-quite-poor and not-quite-well-off subdivision it always was, the glorious world he has grown up in. His sister doesn’t remember.

At school that day his best friend doesn’t remember. And the school bully, who during the adventure had risked himself for strangers, is once again a bully.

Maclevain is despondent. As he walks home from school, a Volkswagen Beetle pulls alongside, and he hears his name called. The familiar sassy, cheery voice of his cousin. “Oh my God, Macky. I haven’t seen you in years! Get in!”

His cousin drives him home. She’s on a cross-country trip in her new Volkswagen, an experiment in 16-year-old independence. She has swung through Mohaw to see her cousins and aunt and uncle. Mack and Kimmy repeat the glad reunion they’d had the night before on their voyage in the long pre-dawn.

“I’ve been a scaredy cat all my life,” she tells him. “You remember how I was. I told myself, Kim, you gotta get over this. So I’m driving a thousand miles on my own.” She nods decisively, then laughs at herself. “A thousand miles should do it, don’t you think?”

“I think you’ve got a lot of bravery,” says Mack. “I would almost say I know you do.”

“I miss you guys so much,” says his cousin, and then she breaks down in tears.

“Take a left here,” says Mack. He guides them to a place where they can sit and talk. His cousin shows her the scars on her arms and inner thighs, the places where she has cut herself. She says she doesn’t understand her own mind. She’s happy, but she’s also miserable. She wishes life were as easy as it was when they were children, playing all day and dreaming all night and believing their parents would protect them forever. 

Macelvain says, “I feel like that, too. I didn’t even realize it until you said it, but I do. Sometimes life seems all sunny behind, all dark ahead. If I’m really honest, I wish time would just go backwards a few years and stay there.” He lets his cousin cry for a bit as he gathers more of his thoughts. “I’d like to stay about 11 years old forever. I mean, can it ever be better than that? Maybe this happens to all of us. Mariella’s still just nine. Her worries are just kid worries. But I wonder if she’s next.”

“What the F are we gonna do, Macky?” his cousin asks, crying and laughing at the same time, the same laugh he remembers from their days as six year olds. He has always remembered his cousin’s laugh as almost a piece of music, her way of making anything better. One of the talents that made the sea-rescue team in his dream last night invincible.

“I don’t know,” he says. And then he remembers a piece of advice he got from his schoolmate the bully, when it came Mack’s turn to jump into a dark, mile-deep ocean. “Dude, it’s now or never. Isn’t anything better than never?”

“But I do know what what we’d do if things were a little different,” Mack tells his cousin.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

And he tells her the dream. His self-consciousness threatens to engulf him, but he pushes through, remembering how he pushed himself beyond his limits when fighting the sea demons.

He improves the story a little as he goes, just as he had when writing it down that morning. 

“Let’s walk,” his cousin says. 

“Are you getting tired of it?” 

“No, I just need to move. But keep going.”

The story ends while they are still walking.

“Oh my God,” she says. “Macky. I think I know what you’re going to be when you grow up. You better be.”

“Are you crying?”

“Am I? I guess I am.” And she laughs her laugh. “Come on. It’s time to head back. I feel better now. Let’s run.”