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I am wearing a floor-length ivory dress with a long, gauzy train. I am also wearing a snorkeling mask and clinging to an orange life ring, floating somewhere off the coast of Mexico. It’s day two of a music video shoot. I’m working with a three-man team: the director, DC, is in the motorboat idling nearby; the cameraman, Alex, is swimming somewhere below me with a GoPro in a waterproof housing; and Ricardo, who we call Ricky, is in the water beside me, explaining how this next task must be done. We are constrained by a tight budget, a tight deadline, and the fact that I don’t really swim.
Ricky speaks slowly, calmly, and in accented English—English made slightly adenoidal by his own mask. “Right now you are going, like, twenty centimeters below the water, you swim only a little, and then you are on the surface again.”
I nod vigorously. I am frustrated and sunburnt and increasingly unable to tell the two apart. In the shots we’ve done so far, I haven’t managed to swim deep enough for Alex the cameraman to swim above me, as planned.
“You must swim down,” Ricky says. “You must do like this: float on the water with your face down.” He holds his tanned hand flat above the water, a little puppet for my body. Then, abruptly, he folds his fingers down ninety degrees. “You bend at the waist. Then you start swimming with your arms, and your legs will follow.”
I nod. This makes sense.
“Listen. This is not possible to do with air in your lungs.” Ricky begins to hyperventilate, to demonstrate the correct technique.
Beneath our lesson, on the sandy ocean floor, there’s an underwater sculpture garden. Dozens of human figures, cast in concrete, stand with upturned faces, their blank eyes trained in the general direction of me and Ricky.
An artist named Jason deCaires Taylor has become famous for creating these underwater museums. They serve not only as art installations, but also as conservation projects: deCaires Taylor and his team submerge the sculptures in strategic locations to draw tourist traffic away from threatened reefs. The sculptures themselves are designed to be overcome by aquatic life, eventually seeding an artificial reef as coral grows over the human forms.
I have come here to shoot a music video for a song called “Sound the Bells.” In the storyline the director DC and I wrote together, I swim among the statues and eventually become one myself. We’ve already made arrangements to cast my head in plaster and outfit a mannequin in my dress to shoot her underwater. I’ve never filmed on location before—the idea would usually be preposterous on an indie budget. But during a recent corporate shoot in Mexico, DC had managed to forge some local contacts willing to take on a passion project. All it took was a few texted images and I was ready to board a plane to meet him there; I’d never seen anything like the underwater exhibition deCaires Taylor had created. I pitched to Lazerbeak with all the persuasive skill I could muster and all parties agreed to a budget of $5,000—more than I’ve ever spent on a music video, more than I’ve ever spent on a car. That figure has to cover the airfare for me and the director; the rented boat with the bored captain at its helm; the gasoline for which he will double-bill us; the white dress and the chiffon tacked to it for the train; the aspirin and the sunscreen; the small bribes for the police; the air in scuba tanks; and two days’ work from Alex the shooter, who swims below us now, dreadlocks tucked into a neoprene hood, waiting for me to learn to hyperventilate.
What the budget did not include was swimming lessons. But back in Minneapolis I have a membership at the YWCA, so for the past couple of weeks I’d been practicing in the pool. At first, I just worked on floating, trying to suppress the trill of anxiety that rang through me every time a wave pawed over my nose and mouth. Then I practiced treading water, panting and swearing at the wall clock. Knowing that I’d have to shoot some scenes submerged, I tried sinking but found myself too buoyant to sit on the bottom of the pool. (At the time, I attributed this failure to the higher fat content in a woman’s tissues, even went so far as to blame my breasts for serving as bothersome floats.) Some of my efforts alarmed the Y’s teenage lifeguard. While his other wards dutifully swam their laps, the woman in Lane 10 attempted to drown herself in the afternoons—though with mercifully little skill. At the end of my practice sessions, I leaned on the edge of the pool to practice just holding my breath, watching the loveless arc of the red second hand. I held my breath at home too, walking around the apartment, to simulate the oxygen cost of swimming. Even in my one-bedroom, the feel of a spent lungful of air was terrible—without breaking the seal, I’d fill my cheeks with the air from my lungs, then re-inhale it, trying to wring out a few more seconds before panic opened my mouth, a crowbar at my teeth wielded from within.
Ricky takes four fast breaths and forcibly expels all the air from his lungs. He then begins to sink, the waterline rising up the features of his face and then closing over his slick dark hair. That’s the trick: I’m supposed to go down empty.
He comes up again, slings his arm over the life ring with me. He says, “Your body, it will do like this”—he simulates a reflex that I know well: the spasm of the diaphragm in an involuntary gulp for fresh air. The sucking reflex tightens the tendons in his neck, deepens the suprasternal notch, the divot where his collarbones meet. But, he says, “This is not because you are out of oxygen. This happens when there is CO2 built up.” Ricky looks hard at me to make sure I understand this distinction. “You will still have more time.”
For a recording artist in her midthirties, it’s easy to worry about running out of time. Commercial music careers are often very short, singers launch and drop like mayflies. Yet all my life I’ve been sure—sure that if I sacrificed enough, if I worked through the weekends, through Christmas, through my childbearing years, I’d make it big. I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but when I committed to becoming an artist, I had an innate belief that if I dedicated myself completely, somehow I’d get the resources I needed to stage ambitious performances; I’d appear on famous stages around the world; I’d make musical contributions of real magnitude; I’d get to talk craft during a heartfelt conversation with Terry Gross while fighting down the thought I’m having a heartfelt conversation with Terry Gross.
All that still feels very far away. It’s not that my career is in trouble, really: the crowds are steadily growing, the critical reviews are getting better. It’s just moving far too slowly. It’d take another sixty years to get where I’m hoping to be, and by then Terry Gross and I will both be dead.
I’m already old for a rapper. Jaclyn told me that a woman’s elbows always reveal her age. No matter how fit or trim or smooth the rest of her might look, the elbows don’t lie. My eyes, my hands, my tits, they’re not lying either—they’ve all become real conscientious lately. Although I am sleek in this dress, I can really only hold this look for a week at a time. I know how many calories are in a grape, in a stick of gum, in the peanuts they serve on planes. I know that drinking ice-cold water burns calories as your body works to warm it; I know compounds in green tea hold promise as metabolic boosters; I know that grapefruit is sometimes used to suppress appetite. There is an Encyclopedia of Vanities in my head—the only knowledge I’m not proud of having.
I do not know, however, how many calories are in the éclairs that they sell at Amoco, because I eat those only after I’ve given up on counting, alone in my car, sometimes two at a time. When I am home again, after this video is shot, I will put on several pounds before the tan fades.
Santigold had her big break at thirty-seven. I keep that fact in a lockbox for safekeeping but take it out every so often to turn over in my hands. Numbers have no natural predators, they can overrun the mind and choke out other thoughts. If you’re not careful, a music career can get reduced to a video game: just a bunch of scores to keep and beat. The headcounts, the downloads, the likes, the streams, the follows, the charts, the stars (is this three and a half out of four? Or five?). Like some sad-case at the casino, you sink your fortune into a blinking machine one coin at a time, and when your hand hits the bottom of the empty paper cup, you are not sure which meal you’ve most recently missed or if this is how fun is supposed to feel.
Music videos are like little advertisements for songs; they’re supposed to be released right before or right after an album drops. “Sound the Bells” has been out for well over a year—it’s much too late for any strategic promotion. But I came to Mexico hoping to be defibrillated, to be jolted out of the numeric and back into aesthetic: to let go of all the numbers and be a part of something beautiful. And to let that be an end in itself.
“Here.” Ricky hands me a mask. I won’t be able to wear it in the shot, but it will help me review the route I’m meant to swim.
I slip the band around my head and turn my face down into the water, still holding the life ring.
With my feet floating in clear water, many feet above the bottom, I’m struck not by a fear of drowning, but by a fear of heights. Then, off in front of us, I see them, the crowd of people. They are dark figures against the light sand. Coral has already begun to grow on them, softening their silhouettes. Someday they will be the heart of a reef. Tiny particles drift with the current, sparking in the sunlight like fine snow.
Still submerged, I turn to give Ricky a wide-eyed look of awe. He nods and lifts his head out of the water. He’s in the awe business.
I hand back the mask and he asks, “Ready?”
He gestures to Alex below; it’s time. I take four deep breaths, another for good measure, then press it out, hands on my ribs to squeeze them empty. I close my eyes and float flat, facedown. I bend at the waist. Swim with my arms. My legs go up in the air, like the tail of a whale, then follow me down. And down. Within a few strokes, it’s nothing like the fumbling in the pool, trying to stay on the tile. My body descends easily. There are no bubbles because I haven’t taken any air with me. My chest begins to burn, but I still have time. My ears suddenly crack, loud and startling. I turn toward the surface and kick. I rise past where the surface should be. My diaphragm spasms. I kick crazily, spending all my oxygen, break the surface, and inhale hard enough to engage my vocal cords with the whoosh of air—making the sound of the animal I’d be if human culture hadn’t intervened. My wet hair makes a dark tent around me. I claw it away from my eyes, and spin in place, treading, looking for Ricky. He’s close, already bringing the life ring to me. He gives me a smile, the swell of his cheeks dammed by the mask, and a thumbs-up. Once I’ve gotten hold of the ring, he begins to swim against the current, easy with his flippers, back to where we started. The train in the water billows like a sail beneath me.
“Now we do it again.”
Challenging an axiom is like trying to catch a fish by hand—it’s tough to get ahold of the thing, let alone lift it out of the water and inspect it properly. Axioms, when they settle into their natural tessellations in our heads, form the paradigm through which we see the world. And looking through your own paradigm is like looking through plate glass: you don’t even know it’s there until you walk into it, or through it.
In the performing arts, the masterful execution of a familiar idea can be deeply moving—a great performance of a favorite song, for example. But the art that really blows my mind usually violates an assumption I didn’t even realize I’d made, eliciting some variation of Holy shit, I didn’t know you could do that. When David Foster Wallace endnoted the endnotes; when I first heard a backward snare hit; when I first saw a violist play with her bow belly-up, the wooden side tapping on the strings; when Jeff Buckley held that last note of “Hallelujah” for an hour; when I discovered that Sigur Rós wrote lyrics in a language with words but no meaning; when I first heard an overtone singer throw his voice to the roof of a chapel. Funny thing is, it’s possible for a person to learn to do almost all of those things—the hard part is thinking to try them.
All this time at the pool, I’d been practicing exactly the wrong thing. I’d been filling myself with as much air as I could and holding it as long as I could stand to. But really, the trick was to un-hold one’s breath.
We take the shot again and Alex the shooter successfully captures footage of me swimming over the statues, my train billowing a few meters over their heads. A passing boat points at me and yells something in Spanish I can’t make out. Alex, who’s surfaced for a moment, removes his regulator to translate: Mermaid. The three of us climb back onto the boat, my sodden train slung over my shoulder like a fourth, drunk companion to head to the last location for the day. In shallow water, less than three meters deep, there’s a lone statue of a seated woman. She’s been recently submerged, so her features should still be sharp.
The motion of the boat makes me sick. I close my eyes against the rocking horizon. Our captain isn’t sure exactly where to find this woman—paper printouts are passed hand to hand, GPS coordinates searched for. I swallow my vomit.
We arrive in the general vicinity of the statue, and both Alex and Ricky swim off to find her. I jump into the water to escape the tossing little boat and the viscous dizziness it induces. Immediately the nausea lifts and I think how strange that the sea would provide a cure for seasickness. A shout turns my head—Alex has found her. The little boat motors over and I grab hold of its small ladder to hitch a ride.
Alex is leaner than anything native to the water—the striated muscles of his forearms more resemble tree roots than the sleekness of a fish. He is from Barcelona but has lived in Mexico for many years with his German girlfriend. In his accent I try to detect this history, like a geologist labeling layers of sediment. “Give her the mask,” he tells Ricky.
I dip my face into the water to see the other woman. She is naked, with her legs pulled tight against her chest, arms around her knees. “You know what to do?” I do, we’ve talked through this shot already.
Alex goes under, camera in hand. Ricky stays above to make sure I don’t drift with the current. My right foot catches a bit of coral, a pink puff of blood. I close my eyes. I take several deep breaths, exhale hard. Begin to sink.
When my feet touch the bottom, my knees bend beneath me. I kneel in the sand, facing in what I think is the direction of the statue, hoping I’ve not turned or drifted away from her. I lean forward and open my eyes to the blur and the burn of salt water. Neither of us can see the other, because one of us is cast in marine-grade cement and the other one doesn’t come equipped with the necessary nictitating membrane. But we hold, regarding each other until one of us breaks for air.
At the bar that night, the team drinks mescal, which tastes like tequila that’s just finished a cigar. DC, me, Alex and Ricky, and both of their slender women sit at a small bar. Ricky’s girlfriend speaks almost no English, but is so beautiful that it’s hard not to stare. It takes a compelling man to keep a woman like that.
I let on about some of my recent professional ambivalence. Alex is indignant to hear it—art is a domain for passion, not pragmatism—and in this way he is every bit a Spaniard, with no trace of the mellowing Mexican influence or the reserved Germanic. His long-limbed blonde girlfriend is more sympathetic. She herself chose to dive less, she says, because it took too much out of her. “Like what?” I ask.
“Oh, the wrinkles. The joints start to hurt.” Alex leans in to take over the thread of the story as she finishes her third mescal.
“Every diver you see is like this.” Alex holds up his pinky.
“Thin,” says his girlfriend.
Alex says that the nitrogen a diver breathes underwater stays in his bones at the joints. His girlfriend says it hollows a person, they age early, wrinkle. Since she stopped diving so frequently she has filled out a little. I cannot imagine her having been less substantial than she is now, without pulling teeth.
She says that when Alex stays on land for a couple of weeks, like when they visit her family in Germany, she can see a youthfulness returning to him.
“Ah, but then I miss the water,” he says.
Later I’ll look up the hazards of deep diving. It’s nitrogen that’s responsible for the bends, the condition suffered by divers who surface too quickly to properly decompress. The dissolved gases in their blood form bubbles, which can be lethal; the human body is not designed for effervescence. But over the course of a career, even well-controlled dives can lead to osteonecrosis—bone death—and potential damage to the retinas, the ears, brain. I think of ballerinas and their broken toes, pop musicians playing themselves deaf, and the pitchers on the mound who muster enough power to throw their arms apart. There is a price to pay for excellence.
Alex is a good drinker. The rest of us sip and listen. His favorite dive was in the arctic, he says. There, he’d been able to walk upside down in the water, hiking on the frozen ice above him.
Then we drink and listen to Ricky. He was recently hired by a female champion free diver from Chile. He shows us pictures of her in repose in a bikini, lying on the seafloor as if she were a sunbather. He shows us pictures of the human skulls that lie at the bottom of the freshwater caves. He’s training to become a better free diver himself, he says, by lowering himself down a guide rope. At sixty feet, it gets easier, he says, because the remaining air in your lungs compresses and “the ocean starts to suck.” If you took a breath from another diver’s scuba rig while you’re down there, you’d die on resurfacing—the air would expand as you ascended, until it burst your lungs.
As the night blurs, DC takes out his cell phone, sets it on the table, and leans back. On it he has queued up a ten-second clip of the shot with me and the statue woman.
We watch around the tiny screen. “Again.” Everyone gets to hold the phone and play it once. Ricky is last. He cocks his head to give me a look, holds my eyes to make sure I understand him. The four of us have made a beautiful thing. I do not know if the whole video will be beautiful or if it’s only these few frames—and in any case it feels like such a small thing to be so proud of in the presence of ice-walking genuine adventurers—but calculating on six ounces of mescal, five thousand dollars seems like such a small sum to pay for these ten seconds. It is art and it is good art, and no, I do not think it will be a sound investment or win an award—though a corner of my heart hopes it might. Living as an artist is fundamentally speculative; there’s a permanent uncertainty about where you’ll be hired next and how long that work might last. But really that’s true of most parts of our lives; the pension, the marriage, the mortgage are all friable, all fallible. We don’t own much, and what we do own we certainly can’t keep indefinitely. Every breath is borrowed by the lungful; you can’t save them for later or hold a single one for long. And even a chestful of air is too much cargo for some trips. Some places you have to go empty.