The Diver of the Manitowoc Wall

The wall is in Manitowoc, on an alley that runs down toward the harbor, and whoever painted it let the lake walk up into town. On it stands a figure in a diving dress of the old pattern, except that no shipwright made this suit. It is clay-red, the color of a flowerpot or of new rust, and where a working suit would carry rivets it carries ornament: a sawtooth ring around the faceplate, seed-pod joints at the shoulders, a small gold pendant at the throat. Vines have gone through it. A bloom stands off the crown of the helmet. The suit is not corroding, it is flowering, and the light behind the one oval window is warm.

Across the wall a deep-dweller has come up through the painted water to meet him, a great soft creature with a patterned mantle, and the meeting is the whole subject. One tentacle crosses three bands of green to arrive at his open hand, tip to fingertip, and neither of them is reaching to take. The small fish go by unbothered, the way the waterfowl go by the things in this archive that only men startle at.

The sheet is in the file because of the helmet. The proportions are wrong for a salvage diver and right for a man of the naturalist’s build, and the suit is grown through the way the wagon is grown through, the way everything he left is being quietly taken back. The archive holds what he left behind. The walls, it appears, have begun to hold where he went. Sightings are expected to continue.