Nitrogen

***

The air flies out of my jacket and the water rapidly covers my head. It is still cold from the winter. I press my nose and blow to compensate the pressure in my ears while I descend to the sandy bottom six meters under the water. My friend Kostas is already down on the ground on his knees, as if praying. Bubbles come out of our masks. They fly like silver mushrooms to the surface.

*

*
Kostas checks my equipment under the water. 200 bars of air pressure in the bottle. Every strip is well adjusted. We swim slowly down towards the depth and the rocky wall. The wall is more than 90 meters deep. We descend to 15 meters. My forehead hurts for some reason. Kostas waives at me and I press the button to gain buoyancy. I think I made a mistake but am not sure what. I have too many led weights in the belt. The wall falls into darkness, I feel like a climber on a free fall.

*

*

At 40 meters the water is dark, I hold on to a hole in the wall. A hand comes out of the hole and pulls me in the cave. `I was waiting for you', says a man with a long white beard. `How come we can speak under the water?', I ask Mr. Marx. `Take off your mask, you do not need it', he says.

*

*

Karl looks at me with a grave look in his eyes, `I need to ask you a question'. I listen to him while I gaze around the cave. It is full of books and shelves. An octopus crawls over Althusser's 'Ideology and Ideological State Aparatusses' and a compilation of Kropotkin's essays. A group of clownfish parade in formation around the table. There is one of those depth monster fishes in the space between Freud's Theory of Psychoanalysis and Adorno's books. It probably waiting for some small fish to catch.

*

*

Karl lights his pipe. I wonder what is he going to ask. What happened to his dreams and so on. I quickly think whether to talk about revolutionaries becoming burocrats or to be elusive. I mean, the old man looks happy in his cave, should I really tell him about globalisation, international terror, civilization clashes and so on?

*

*

*

He exhales a cloud of smoke in the water and says `Could you help me fix the internet connection down here? I haven't found a provider willing to dive down here for the cable instalation'.

*

*

I check his laptop. `But how come we can talk normally down here? This contradicts all scientific theories, including your dialectic materialism', I say.

*

*

`Dreams are made of water', Kostas says while he hands me the yellow emergency regulator and holds both of us five meters deep to spend eight minutes of emergency decompression. The rays of light fall straight passed our bodies down to the depths of the rock wall and a few bubbles full of pipe smoke ascend gently from the bottom.

*

***