1000 PSI left.
That may sound like a lot. But when each breath of air takes 3-5 PSI of the oxygen strapped to your back and you’re breathing at over 30 breaths per minute…
You do the math.
You’re over two hundred feet beneath the surface, and this far down, nothing is the same.
Not even you.
Your best friend came up with this idea and you’ve both been planning this cave dive for months. Regulators, lifelines, tanks, depth gauges, underwater lights, cameras, and even infrared video, should it come to that. The entire never-before-seen underwater cave is to be yours, your legacy, passed on to the world. For a price.
You know the risks. Nitrogen narcosis. The bends. Running out of air. Stalactites. Stalagmites. Rockfalls. Cave-ins. An extra oxygen tank hanging on the safety line every 50 feet. Synchronized depth gauges. Carefully consulted dive tables. Neither of you have ingested anything but light food and some water for well over 36 hours, flushing any impurities from your blood.
As you descend into the blackness, cathedrals built by the earth itself open up before you, lit in bobbing sections by brilliant Hollywood lights. While you’re lowering them, you don’t really think about the splendor awaiting you while you’re trying so hard to maneuver gear through tight spaces and around spikes with hardly enough room to let you squeeze by, let alone the equipment you’re lugging. It requires concentration, and when the lights are set, your first priority is to make the surface, not follow them down, because at that point you don’t have enough breaths left to make it down and back. So later, when you get to the bottom of your safety line again and the lights down deep and really take a look around…
Wow.
750PSI.
You’re operating the camera while your best friend goes first. Explaining the sights to everyone watching at home, voice punctuated by bubbles. He’s right to be amazed. The fruit in his voice isn’t plastic. It is real, organic, fascination at this unreached corner of nature. This part of the world that next to no one will ever see in person. The excitement is contagious, and your world shrinks to the camera frame, and keeping your friend centered in it. You can almost hear the dollar signs in his voice and you allow yourself to believe in them.
By this time, his world has shrunk to the camera lens and the untold millions at home, while yours has shrunk to the view finder. As you get more comfortable in the space and the nitrogen in your blood builds, you both begin exploring. Even exceeding the reach of the movie mounted lights and having to switch to flashlights and the video camera spotlight doesn’t bother you.
500PSI.
You don’t have to worry now. The rest of your life is mapped out for you. You will take perhaps 100 more breaths. After that, you’ll suck on the vacuum in your best friend’s tank as long as you can, before everything goes black down here, lost, separated from daylight, warmth, air, and life.
You won’t be panicking. You and your best friend have already done that when you realized where you were, and that you had no idea how to get out. You claw at the tons of rock wall, continuing to dig through clouds of your own blood. You dig through your fingernails, then your fingertips. Eventually, you can see the bones peeking out. But finally, you both realize, if rock beats scissors, fingers don’t have a chance.
That is when you stop being friends and become obstacles.
All you know, is this prick and his delusions of grandeur led you both out of the light, away from the safety line, and this is his fucking fault.
You mention how you don’t have much air left, probably from lugging that damn camera around down here.
He counters with the fact that you are relatively new to cave diving [his experience ecliPSIng yours by all of three months] and that you should have controlled your breathing.
You point out this entire expedition and the decision not to have anybody above water was his fucking idea, and if he didn’t want to share the credit, he shouldn’t mind taking the blame.
He lunges at you, grabbing at your mask and regulator, attempting to wrest it from your mouth in order to supplement his own dwindling supply of oxygen. You struggle, attempting to break free before you see a flash of bright steel in one hand and really realize your best friend is trying to kill you.
You feel him seize your throat and attempt to stab you. You grab the wrist of the hand holding the knife and kick out, catching him in the groin. He drops the knife and your throat, his eyes wide, precious air bursting from his mouth as he howls in pain. Like a flash, you catch the knife bury it in his chest.
150PSI in my best friend’s tank.
My air tank is long empty, discarded on the bottom. For the hundredth time, I push my former dive buddy out of the way as his body bobs in front of me. His eyes are still open.
135PSI.
You can’t help but wonder who you’d rather be. Your best friend, floating and sightless, or you – doomed to live only another handful of moments on the air you took from your best friend whom you murdered, after he tried to kill you.
Eventually, these lights will all go out, and you’ll all be dead, down here in this cavern. Perhaps one day you’ll be discovered. Maybe you’ll rot before then. Or maybe you’ll have only rotted halfway the next time anyone sees your sightless eyes when they turn their own movie lights on and venture down into this cavern from hell.
85PSI.
70.
55.
35.
Faster as it gets closer.
20.
5.
.
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