Last Bender

Jail’s a good place for reading books. And a ship at sea. Men on submarines read a lot, and in the Antarctic. But the place I’ve read the most has been in decompression chambers, after working in a diving bell. You’re breathing helium. And there’s just nothing else you can do for weeks at a time. All you have to look forward to is a really deep dive, a dark and endless dive along a chain lit up only by your headlamp, disappearing deeper and deeper. Down there, at those pressures, only certain kinds of things can live. The seabed is a barren place they say, but I doubt it. There ain’t a barren place on this earth. I sometimes thought I could stay down there forever. It was so perfect. It scared the fucking shit out of me how perfect it was.