In Ascension

by Martin MacInnes

I still couldn’t remember everything. After falling backwards from the zodiac the water had enveloped me as an oddly neutral medium: no odour, no temperature, and with my bodysuit extending over my fingertips it made no direct impression on my body at all. I was untouched. The moment had a kind of hyper-reality. Because it felt as if I wasn’t wearing a suit at all, and yet the sea had no effect on me, my brain made the decision that I wasn’t actually in the water, I was watching myself in a film or a dream. Sealed off from the water while immersed in it, I almost had to take it on trust that I was really there. I looked out at it remotely, through a lens. The experience was uncanny, with something of the vivid irreality I’d noted in my childhood during episodes of shock. I was there and not there. I swam through the sunlight layer at the same time as I looked back on myself from some unknown, uncertain future point.