A thousand suns

Chris studied the width of the hatch and decided it was wide enough to climb through. With a tug on the hatch rim he pulled himself up. His helmet thudded noisily against a cross strut inside. ‘Shit!’

‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing, I’m fine.’

‘I’m fzffzf ing forward.’ Mark’s transmission crackled. Chris silently mouthed a curse. He must have given the radio a knock. There’d be a lecture coming his way when they went topside, and Mark discovered the damage.

Great.

He shone his torch down inside the fuselage. There was a bulkhead six feet back and a narrow doorway. The light picked out a cloud of floating debris hanging in the space between the blister and the bulkhead. Shreds of paper, a pair of headphones, several life jackets.

‘Some of this stuff looks like it could have been left here a couple of days ago.’

‘Yeah? I’ll be ther… a second.’ Mark’s signal was getting worse.

Chris took another couple of shots and then reached out for the short ladder leading up to what he guessed must be the cockpit. He studied the size of the opening, it was narrower, but still just wide enough to get through. Chris, much more carefully this time, pulled himself up through the opening. He heard his air cylinder scrape noisily against the edge of the hatchway and cringed at the thought of the scratches it would leave.

Mark was going to kill him.

He shone his torch around inside the cockpit. There was a lot less space than he’d imagined, and he found himself bumping and scraping on all sides. His torch panned up and across the co-pilot’s seat.

He lurched backwards. ‘Oh Jesus!’

‘What… it?’ he heard Mark call.

He took a few deep breaths to steady himself and then trained his torch back on the seat.

‘I… uh… think I’ve found one of the crew,’ he said pulling himself closer to get a better look.

The skeletal remains, long since stripped of soft organic material save for a few fibrous strands, seemed to be held together and in place by the body’s clothes and the seat’s harness. It was all there, a complete human form except for one of its hands. Chris spotted a leather flying glove on the cockpit floor. He picked it up delicately by a fingertip and a cloud of organic mush floated gently out, followed by a cluster of small white bones that see-sawed down through the water and settled on the grey, silt-covered floor.

It looked like the remains of a KFC dinner. Chris felt his stomach churn ever so slightly at that thought.

He heard his helmet speaker crackle. ‘… found?’

Chris tapped the radio casing with his torch. It crackled and hissed in response.

‘Mark? Can you hear me? I’ve found one of the crew.’

‘Jeeeez, glad you found him and not me.’ Mark was coming through clearly now.

Must be a loose wire, then.

‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘He’s not a pretty boy. I’m going to grab a couple of shots.’

‘Okay. I’m coming up over the other side of the fuselage. I can’t see any tears or breaks or any way to get in. How do I… in up there?’

‘Hatchway right under the nose.’

‘Okay, see… in a second.’ The signal was breaking up again.

Chris continued to study the corpse. He was amazed at how intact the clothing and equipment was. The only concession to sixty years of undisturbed submersion was a thin coat of grey sediment that seemed to have settled on everything. The leather flying cap still rested dutifully on the body’s skull, a solitary tuft of pale blond hair poking out from beneath it, and its radio mouthpiece dangled from the end of a short length of coiled rubber flex beside the lower jaw of the skull. The jawbone had at some point fallen away and now rested on the collar of the thick, fur-lined flying jacket.

Chris reached out slowly for the jawbone, careful not to disturb too much of the sediment. He lifted it up and placed it back as it should be and then pulled the radio mouthpiece in underneath to hold it in place.

He felt a passing twinge of guilt for messing with the body. But, it did make for a better picture, having the skull and jaw reunited again. Without the jaw it simply wasn’t a face. Chris had learned from freelancing in several war zones in the last ten years that you needed to have a face in the shot when photographing a body. People always look for it, look for an expression on it. Perhaps as a way of understanding what death must be like, what emotion is drawn at the moment it occurs.

Without a face, a body is just a bundle of clothes.

Chris unhooked his camera and aimed it at the long-dead pilot.

‘Say cheese.’ The flashlight of the camera strobed again as he hit off a few shots.

He heard Mark’s voice. ‘I can li… out seeing the…’ The popping and whistling on the helmet speaker was driving him mad. He tapped the radio housing.

‘What’s that, Mark? Your signal’s breaking up again.’