Out of My Skin

What happened to me was--not me, but what happened--I'm from New York originally and I moved to Los Angeles to write about movies. Now, instead of writing about movies or people making movies, I was somewhere off the California coast, in the middle of the ocean, writing an article about sharks. A group of scientists had rigged up a fishing boat with winches and scientific instruments, and they'd lowered a stainless-steel cage into the water. They were investigating shark communication, and because I was writing an article about their investigation, I was inside the cage. I was under the water, wearing a wetsuit, and under the wetsuit there were sensors attached to various parts of my body, measuring my heart rate and brain activity, and partly I was thinking about brain activity, but mainly I was thinking about sharks. They'd pretty much guaranteed me a shark attack--something about an anomaly in the ocean current--and so I stood there, or I should say floated there, my back to the boat's hull, holding the steel handrail, listening to the air as it passed from the scuba gear into my lungs. That, plus the pressure of the water, plus the temperature of the water, plus the fact that there was going to be a shark attack, was focusing my attention.
Speckled sunlight was filtering down from the surface of the water and schools of little fish were darting out from the darkness. I noticed pieces of meat floating above the cage. The scientists were chumming for sharks, and the blood from the meat was dissolving in the water. Through the mask on my face I was scanning the water, looking for a shark, knowing the minute I stopped looking, the minute I took my mind off the idea of shark, like a watched pot, that's when a shark would appear. And because I didn't want to miss that appearance, I kept my mind focused on the darkness in front of me, not thinking about anything other than the barely visible darkness. But I must have been thinking something. And I must have been in the middle of thinking it when a white underbelly flashed by, huge and white and slightly above me.
Suddenly the bait was gone. The bait was gone and the shark was gone, but I was still there. And I didn't know what the scientists, looking at the data from my sensors, were recording, but it was probably fear. My heart was pounding and my adrenaline was pumping, and I could feel my fingertips pulsing inside my rubber gloves. I'd seen enough of the shark to feel its threat, but because I was protected by the safety of the cage, what would normally seem like fear, felt to me like the opposite of fear. Not desire exactly, because I couldn't actually see the shark. But I was aware of something, just beyond my vision. And when I say aware, I mean I was sensing, from the shark, a kind of communication. And since the most rudimentary form of communication is the expression of desire, I was sensing the shark's desire. And since one of the things it was desiring was my annihilation, I can't say there wasn't a certain amount of fear. What I was trying to do was reach out through that fear, and communicate with this thing. The human brain is capable of receiving millions of neural signals, and I was trying, from inside the cage, to send signals, to the shark. I wanted to tell the shark that I understood what it wanted, and that I accepted what it wanted, and I was just beginning to experience the freedom of this interspecies conversation when I felt the cage begin to rise. The scientists were bringing me up out of the water, and I didn't want to go out. And I tried to tell them. I tried to signal, through the sensors attached to my body, that I wasn't ready, that I was still conducting the...