Untitled Document

14 July 2005

Bones

In my dream I was down on the wreck. The current was not so bad, and I could make out the long gray outline of the submarine. The conning tower was broken off and one of the two periscopes was extended. The root of it was somewhere in the inky shadow that covered the twisted mass of metal where the explosion had occurred.

The torpedo that killed the boat- if that is what it was- had chunked part of a perfect circle out of the hull directly above the control room. That is where the other divers got in trouble, plunging in through the gaping hole and then swimming forward into the inky blackness behind the stout bulkheads of the pressure hull that remained intact.

It is 230 feet down to where the U-boat lies broken on the ocean floor. No one knew what it was that snagged the nets of the fishermen above. There are many hulks on the sea approaches to North America , old sailing vessels and garbage barges.

The sportsmen who found the boat dived on it without knowing what was below, a shot in the dark, so to speak. They were stunned to find the sleek shape, still armed, upright but broken in the silt.

This was a lost boat. The sportsmen called it the U-Who, since in the rush to close the books on the missing submarines of the World War, this one had been declared lost off the coast of Morocco . It almost killed the man who identified it as the U-869, and put names to the jumbled bones.

Garbled communications and missed orders resulted in it being here, off the Jersey Coast , in the approaches to New York .

That is deep for sport diving, and the disorientation that comes with depth, and the clutch of the wreck is why three men died trying to scavenge mementos from it. A dish, perhaps, stamped with the eagle and swastika of the Navy. A pair of smashed binoculars. Dials from the instruments. Bits of china and tin. Never bone.

Not much to give your life for, except for living the pulsing adrenaline thrill of the dive, and scavenging for the souvenir of the swim that can kill.

The diver who figured it out spent several years looking for the specific identity of this wreck. U-Who was a generic type of submarine until a precise serial number could be scavenged. The crew's bones lay exposed in the silt while he did it.

The Germans, for their part, were opposed to the sportsmen diving on the wreck. As far as the Embassy was concerned, the submarine is a German military cemetery, even if it was in American waters. There are around fifty sets of remains in the silt on the interior deck-plates. It is hard to tell precisely, since those who were closest to the detonation of the warhead were vaporized at their position.

Inside the wreck, the silt moves with subtle currents through the hatches blown out by the catastrophe. Sometimes a skull can appear, looking at the intruder, or a bit of dark cloth in the muck reveals itself as a sleeve with radius and ulna intact.

The divers say they made every attempt to leave the crew in peace, eschewing the temptation to reach in among the bones and look for watches or wallets. They restricted themselves to the broken machinery, convincing themselves that they were performing a higher duty in providing positive identification of the wreck.

With that, they told themselves, the families that remained would have some closure on the whereabouts of their missing sailors.

I don't know about that. Hitler threw away divisions of soldiers, and the Russians did not even bother to bury them. One young German still haunts me. His picture is on the web site of a young girl in Kiev , who began to unearth a coal-scuttle helmet that projected from the loamy soil. She tugged at it until she realized that it was rooted to the earth, and the owner was still wearing it, eye-sockets filled with dirt, sixty years after the moment of his transition.

The historians know what unit was there, in that last desperate fighting position. They might be able to tell whose bodies lay unburied. But there is no one that cares enough to try. Those are the bones of the invaders, after all.

The lost boats are scattered across the ocean floor, in random military formation. There are many German boats in the Atlantic , and there are many American and Japanese boats strewn across the vast Pacific. The veterans say they still are on patrol, frozen in the moment of disaster that transformed them from sleek machines to wrecks. Some are marked on charts and some are on the floor of the deep ocean in the blackness, position unknown except to the fishes.

The veterans who survived are almost all gone now, leaving neatly in the way we exit from civilian life. The hundred or more lost boats are slowly disintegrating into iron oxide, but they will last a thousand years. Below a certain depth, the bones will remain as well, though perhaps not so long.

During the slow swim to consciousness from the depths of the dream, I paused on the anchor line to decompress. It took only minutes to fall asleep and into the darkness, but the better part of an hour to come back from the darkness of the wreck. Coming up too fast can be dangerous; the blood can boil without slowly releasing the compressed nitrogen through respiration.

As I rose toward the surface, more light began to penetrate the darkness. The sounds of life and chaos began to penetrate the dimness, overwhelming the sound of my heart's thudding. Tax receipts are up, I think I heard, and the deficit is down. Through the bubbles, I thought I heard that a Chief Justice was in the hospital. Was he close to death? Too much ambient noise, too hard to tell.

I concentrated hard to hear over the sound of my breathing. A fifth man, they say, a mastermind is sought. There was a puppet-master to the bombing in London , and they are careful as a diver around bones to avoid raising the silt of the issue of religion.

Suicide bombers is what they were, young men dispatched by direction from Kings Cross station to the points of the compass with their back-packs. That is the way they do it in Gaza , I thought dreamily. The young die by the direction of the older ones who do not desire martyrdom.

With high-power explosives, they leave little behind. But modern forensic science can bring them back, even from the molecular level. That is because their deaths are still in the moment, and the ones that they murdered are barely cold in their graves.

My eyes blinked open, on the surface at last. I had swum up all the way to Thursday. Now, all that remained was to scavenge for souvenirs to commemorate the effort. Perhaps something made of china, or brass that can be polished to prove that I was here.