Blue-flame gaslights also illuminated the caisson. They burned pure oxygen, providing enough light to work by while emitting neither smoke nor odor. In their unsteady glow, catlike shadows shifted on the ground and in the rafters. The man looked at his watch, went directly to one of the so-called windows, opened its inner hatch, and with a grunt pushed the trunk inside it. Resealing the window, he operated two pull chains hanging from the wall. The first opened the window's outer hatch. The second caused the window's compartment to rotate, dumping its contents — in this case, one heavy black trunk — into the river. With a different set of chains, he closed the outer hatch and activated an air pipe that flushed the river water from the compartment, making the window ready for the next user.
He was done. He looked at his watch: only five minutes had elapsed since he entered the caisson. Then he heard a piece of wood creaking.
Among the various sounds one can hear indoors in the nighttime, some are instantly recognizable. There is, for example, the unmistakable pattering of a small animal. There is the banging of a door in the wind. Then there is the sound of an adult human being shifting his weight or taking a step on a wooden floor: this was the sound the man had just heard.
He spun around and called out, 'Who's there?'
'It's only me, sir,' answered a voice, sounding falsely distant in the compressed air.
'Who is me?' said the man in black tie and tails.
'Malley, sir.' Out from the shadows where two joists intersected stepped a redheaded man, short but with the girth of a bear, muddy, unkempt, and smiling.
'Seamus Malley?'
'The one and only,' answered Malley. 'You won't fire me, will you, sir?'
'What the devil are you doing down here?' replied the taller man. 'Who else is with you?'
'Not a soul. It's just they have me working twelve hours of a Tuesday, sir, and then the morning shift on Wednesday.'
'You're spending the night here?'
'What's the point of going up at all, I ask, when by the time you're up it's only time to come down again?' Malley was a favorite among the workmen, known for his fine tenor, which he liked to exercise in the echoing chambers of the caisson, and his seemingly unlimited capacity to consume alcoholic potables of any kind. The latter talent had caused him trouble around the Malley household the day before yesterday, which, being a Sunday, was a time when no alcohol ought to have been consumed at all. His incensed wife told him not to show his face until he could show it sober the next Sunday. It was this injunction that, in truth, had obliged Malley to make his bed in the caisson. 'So I say to myself, Malley, just kip down here for the night, why don't you, and none the worse or the wiser.'
'Been watching me all this time, have you, Seamus?' asked the man.
'Never in life, sir. I was sleeping all the while,' said Malley, who shivered like a man who had been sleeping in a cold, damp place.
The man in black tie doubted this assertion very much, although it happened to be true. But true or not, it made no difference, because Malley had seen him now. 'Shame on me, Seamus,' he said, 'if I'm the man to fire you for such a thing. Don't you know my mother, God rest her soul, was Irish?'
'I didn't know it, sir.'
'Why, didn't she take me by the hand thirty years ago to see Parnell himself come off the ship, practically right above our heads, where we're standing at this moment?'
'You're a lucky man, sir,' Malley answered.
'I'll tell you what you need, Seamus, and that's a fifth of good Irish whiskey to keep you company down here, which I happen to have in my car. Why don't you come up with me and I'll give it to you, provided you share a drop first. Then you can come back and make yourself comfortable.'
'You're too good, sir, too good,' said Malley.
'Oh, stop your gabbing and come on then.' Ushering Malley up the ramp to the elevator, the man in black tie pulled the lever to begin their ascent. 'I'll be needing to charge you rent, don't you know It's only fair.'
'Why, I'd pay anything at all for the view alone,' replied Malley. 'We're going to miss the first holding stage, sir. You need to stop.'
'Not a bit of it,' said the taller man. 'You're coming straight back down in five minutes, Seamus. No need to stop if you go straight back down.'
'Is that it, sir?'
'That's it. It's all in the tables.' And the man in black tie actually pulled a copy of the decompression tables from his vest, waving them before Malley It was quite true: a man in the caisson could make a quick trip up and down without illness, provided he spent no more than a few minutes on the surface. 'All right: ready to hold your breath?'
'My breath?' Malley asked.
The man in black tie yanked down the elevator brake, jerking the cabin to a sudden stop. 'What are you thinking, man?' he cried. 'We're going straight up, I tell you. You've got to hold your breath from here clear to the top. You want to die of the bends?' They were about a third of the way up the shaft, some sixty-five feet below the surface. 'How long have you been down, fifteen hours?'
'Closer on to twenty, sir.'
'Twenty hours down, Seamus — you'd be paralyzed for sure, if you lived at all. I'll tell you what it is. You take a deep breath, like me, and you hold it for dear life. Don't let go. You'll feel a little pressure, but don't let go, no matter what. Are you ready?'
Malley nodded. The two men each swallowed an immense lungful of air. Then the man in black tie started the elevator once more. As they rose, Malley felt an increasing burden in his chest. The man in black tie felt no such pressure, because he was only pretending to hold his breath. In actuality, he was steadily but invisibly exhaling as the elevator made its way to the surface. Over the throbbing din of the steam engines, the sound of his breath escaping could not be heard.
Malley's chest began to ache. To indicate his discomfort, and his difficulty keeping in his breath, he pointed at his chest and mouth. The man in black tie shook his head and waved his forefinger, emphasizing how important it was that Malley not exhale. He beckoned Malley toward him, put his large hand over Malley's mouth and nose, closing off those passageways completely. He raised his eyebrows as if to ask Malley whether that was better. Malley nodded, grimacing. His face turned redder, his eyes began to bulge, and just as the elevator reached its terminus, he coughed involuntarily into the hand of the man with black tie. That hand was now covered with blood.
The human lung is surprisingly inelastic. It cannot stretch. At sixty-five feet below the earth's surface, when Malley took his last breath, the ambient pressure is approximately three atmospheres, which means that Malley took into his lungs three times the normal quantity of air. As the elevator ascended, this air expanded. His lungs quickly inflated beyond their capacity, like overstretched balloons. Soon the pleura in Malley's lungs — the tiny sacs that hold the air — began to burst, rapid-fire, one after the other. The released air invaded his pleural cavity — the space between chest and lung — causing a condition called pneumothorax, in which one of his lungs collapsed.
'Seamus, Seamus, you didn't exhale, did you?' They had reached the top, but the man in black tie made no move to open the elevator door.
'I swear I didn't,' Malley gasped. 'Mother of God. What's wrong with me?'
'You've lost a lung, is all,' replied the taller man. 'That won't kill you.'
'I need' — Malley collapsed to his knees — 'to lie down.'
'Lie down? No, man: we have to keep you standing, do you hear me?' The taller man seized Malley under the shoulders, hauled him upright, and propped him against the elevator wall. 'That's better.'
Like most gases trapped in a liquid, air bubbles in a man's bloodstream rise straight upward. Keeping Malley vertical ensured that the air bubbles still in Malley's lungs, forcing their way through his ruptured pleural capillaries, would proceed directly to his heart and from there to his coronary and carotid arteries.
'Thanks,' whispered Malley. 'Will I be all right?'
'We'll know any minute now,' said the man.
Malley gripped his head, which began to swim. The veins in his cheeks were showing blue. 'What's happening to me?' he asked.
