FAQs: Wearable submarines, backward feet
Uncle Marty: “You mention an atmospheric diving suit in your book. Sounds like a bunch of crap.”
Steve Stratman: I can see you’re skeptical.
“Well?”
It’s a large apparatus. A huge cast aluminum suit that you wear. You can dive a long ways underwater and the pressure never changes. There’s no need for decompression when you get back to the surface.”
“Won’t it sink?”
Do submarines sink?
“We’re not talking about submarines here.”
Same idea. It’s ancient technology, actually. Aristotle wrote about the basic premise in the 4th century BC. Diving bells, bathyspheres, things like that. Back in the day they used them for salvaging cannons or sponge fishing. I don’t know, lost bullion, whatever. The latest major development was the JIM Suit in 1969. Technically, if the suit weighs less than the volume of water it displaces, it floats. Positive buoyancy, it’s called. Then you let water in if you want to go down. That’s called ballast. Just like a submarine.
“The Jim Suit? Who on earth came up with that stupid name?”
A guy named Jim.
“How do you breathe?”
The same way you breathe. Through your mouth. I breathe through my nose.
“Are you calling me a mouth breather?”
Can we talk about something else?
“Ok. A man with the head of a dog and backward feet. It’s hard to get a visual on this one.”
Really? It’s pretty much spelled out right there.
“But what’s it mean?”
It refers to a figure from the Aztec underworld. It’s name is Xolotl. You’ve heard of a psychopomp?
“I’m familiar with the word psycho.”
A psychopomp is a guide to the freshly liberated spirit. In this case, after you die, Xolotl guides you through a field of flying knives and a river of blood filled with jaguars to the land of the dead, which is called Mictlan. It takes about four years. Roughly.
“Do you have to be stoned when you write this?”
Look. I didn’t make this up. Aztecs did. About 700 years ago. And technically they’re not called Aztecs. They’re Mexica. Aztec is a foreign appellation. Meaning, Aztec’s what a group of academics from the outside world decided their name should be. Without really asking them how they felt about it.
“Yeah, but flying knives? I want what they’re smoking.”
Yeah right. Like our version of the afterlife isn’t weird.
“It’s not.”
Um, yes. I’m pretty sure it is.