Short Stories
vol.3The 4:05 Weather Chart for 4:05（1/6）
Things like that don’t happen often in life. At exactly the same moment as I face death, my trusty, super-slim Seiko alarm clock, which has accompanied me around the world for more years than I care to remember, stops precisely, dutifully even, at 4:05, even though the battery is brand new; and as if that weren’t hackneyed enough in itself, the clock falls from the night table where I placed it earlier and lands flat on its face. Of course it’s just a coincidence, but that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.
It is not until around 5:30, after my body temperature has risen and I have regained consciousness, after I have washed my hair and am sitting down, thinking Well here I am, alive, although I certainly wasn’t alive for a while there, so now I suppose I know death, that I realize my alarm clock has stopped. While wondering who on earth could have interfered with it, I remember that several people were in my room, presumably worried about the rate at which my temperature was falling, but when I ask them, they all reply rather indignantly that they haven’t touched it. If they are all telling the truth - and I have no reason to doubt them - I can only assume that my little clock intended to die with me. I wrap it up in the palm of my hand like the shell of a dead beetle.
The man from the TV crew handed me the underwater camera on the boat as we bobbed up and down on the surface of the water. He assured me that it was “A very compact model, really easy to use, you’ll be fine”, but to me it felt as heavy as a rock, and even then I wondered if I would be alright; but I let the matter pass, figuring I’d be able to manage once I was underwater, and jumped, without an anchor rope, into the limitless depths of the ocean trench.
It was my fourth day in Taiwan. I was on an assignment to observe the daily life of the Tao tribe, accompany the men of the tribe on their tasks ? cutting down trees in the mountains, tying them together to make boats, and skin diving in the ocean for fish ? and package it all up in a TV documentary. My guide was Syaman Rapongan, a writer and a member of the Tao tribe himself.
The mountains were just about manageable. The ocean turned out to be a tougher adversary.
Syaman made his first dive beside a small triangular island jutting out from the sea in the shape of an almost perfect acute-angled pyramid. The island was surrounded by unfathomably deep water with a current so strong that whirlpools formed visibly around the coastline. Syaman managed to find a small stretch of coast that was not being buffeted constantly by waves, and jumped in. I followed him while the TV crew and our interpreter watched nervously from the boat. Their anxious faces formed silhouettes on the surface of the water, looming darkly over my near future.
If I had been just a little braver, I might have put a stop to the whole thing, but the charter fee for the boat can’t have been cheap for a start, and besides, I was already fitted out in my diving gear and Syaman seemed keen to get in the water, so there wasn’t really any time to hesitate. These moments occur thousands of times in life, and I had experienced plenty of them myself. Moreover, I was an experienced scuba diver with more than two hundred dives to my name; all of them a long, long time ago.
Syaman ties a five or six kilogram weight around the waist of his thin wetsuit, covers his hair in a cap, and with a handcrafted harpoon that has been passed down through generations of Tao in his hand, he pushes himself off the boat and enters the water without a splash. I follow him, but there is no anchor rope to guide me down and the current is strong. I don’t have enough weight. I try to kick my fins, but the persistent water of the ocean surface laps continuously at my heels. I jackknife a few times, forcing my head under the water, and finally I’m on my way down. The camera is switched on, and all I need to do is capture Syaman spearing fish with his harpoon.
When I have reached a certain depth, I straighten my body, but as I do so, the camera thuds painfully against my chest. I think I hear the regulator in my mouth creak from the inside, like the beams of an old house creaking during a typhoon. I imagine it probably hasn’t been serviced since the summer, and it is December now. Air is still coming out, though. It’s thin, but it’s OK. When I point the camera downward, my body rotates and breathing becomes easier.