Punk and Zen (46 page)

I tipped my ashes into a nearby ashtray and looked out
over the pool. Nice. It was a good sixty or so feet long, vaguely
lozenge-shaped. Diving board at one end, and, according to the dark numbers set
into the white tiles, it went from five feet to twelve. Most of the light came
from the building behind me, the rest from the sky. I wondered if the water was
warm and carefully kicked off my boots—a new pair I’d gotten in England. What
the hell. I took my socks off, then walked over to the table and grabbed a
towel. I sat down again, just staring at the water, and untied the red tie that
was still around my waist.

Fuck it.

I slid my pants off and folded them neatly, took the
jacket off, and peeled off my top, then put the jacket back on. I grabbed the
towel and walked around the pool to the diving board, just looking at it,
thinking of nothing except that it had been a long time since I’d been in the
water. I hung the jacket on an entry stair railing next to the board, put the
towel on the ground, and climbed up a couple of steps to the diving board. I
walked to the end and hung my toes off the edge. A good racing start. I
shrugged my shoulders a little, loosening them up, and hung them past my toes,
letting my back stretch out.

Finally comfortable, I set myself into a starting
crouch, my eyes focused on a patch of water that shone several feet in front of
me, and sprang, through the air, into the water.

I’d forgotten that I normally would immerse myself
before I dove in, and the water was an electric shock against my skin. It was
warm, blood warm, and I let myself glide under for a while, using the lightest
of kicks to propel me. Finally, it was time for air and I ABC went up.
Everywhere my skin broke the surface, I chilled as I pulled my way through the
water to the other side. I could see just enough to make out the wall before
me, and I pulled myself up in time into a flip turn, again enjoying the dark,
silent world I glided in before it was time to breathe again.

This time when I came up, I flipped onto my back, put
my hands behind my head, and just stared at the sky, kicking lightly every now
and again to maintain my position.

I could understand Candace looking out for her
Ann—that made sense to me. The rest didn’t, though, not really.

I kept thinking about it. She’d said at the time that
she and her girlfriend were “on-again/off-again,” and Fran had said they’d had
“an arrangement.” So what did that mean? That they slept with other people? Or
they got to test-drive the other’s new model first?

I had to look deeper into this. I flipped over again
and swam a few strokes, enjoying the feel of the water gliding over my back.

There was one thing, I mused, that was hard to fake
with another woman in bed, and that was just how ready or not the body was. I
felt a laugh rise in my throat and surfaced quickly so I wouldn’t drown.

Pussy don’t lie. Mouths do, hearts do, even the eyes,
but the pussy wants what it wants and nothing else. Either you are that
something, you get that something, or ain’t nobody getting nothing, I thought.

What was it my first girlfriend had said? Oh yeah,
solving the mysteries of the universe, especially the ones about sex. Maybe
that’s where all the solutions were, too. This time, I really did laugh.

God, I hadn’t had any in weeks. I didn’t even have
time or the privacy to take care of myself, as if that would have helped. Pussy
knows what it wants—and I knew exactly who mine wanted.

Shit, man, I had to get out of the pool; my brain was
starting to get waterlogged. It was time to get out before, well, I don’t
know—maybe I’d stay there all night and float. No, not an option, not really,
anyway, not with a trip and a show the next day.

I swam back to the diving board and the ladder next to
it and did something I love to do when I climb out of a pool—just grab on to
the bars and pull myself up, kick and jump over the wall. It’s like flying for
a moment. As I got to the top, ready for the kick, it hit me, hard. Samantha
had tried to kill herself. For me. Over me.

Candace had asked if I’d seen those scars. Of course I
had; they crisscrossed my mind when I closed my eyes. I and my fingers could
still feel them—their sharpness, the angles, the ankh burned over them. Christ.
Those angry lines on her wrist spelled my name.

I didn’t complete the jump. I let go and sank down
hard. I gulped before the water closed over my head and let my knees bend when
my feet touched the bottom.

I exhaled and forced myself down until I was sitting
and the world was black and warm, the only sound the water itself, heavy and
moving me slightly as the filters worked. Even they were quiet.

I closed my eyes and the darkness was complete, not
even the slightest bit of shine from above as I fought lightly against the pull
of the filter to remain on the bottom and wondered. Wondered what it was like
to be dead, dead and still. I’d almost died once; at least, I thought I had.
That had been like swimming too, like dreaming.

What would have happened if I’d stayed in the dream?
Did everything just go black? Did you know it? Would you care? Did a black wave
crawl up on you, licking at your edges until it wiped you out and you exploded
into space, or heaven, or something? Maybe you just lay there, forever,
unknowing, unfeeling, the world going on and on and on like some giant fucking
hungry machine, eating us up and spitting us out, and dead was dead like the
meat on my plate or the dirt on the ground and everything still eating and
feeding and dying forever and nothing ever came of nothing because it all
became dirt until the universe itself blew apart into the great silence…

Better to end it now, right? End it because nothing,
nothing would ever change; everything born to die and die again and again and
again, the endless grind mowing it all down, the grass and the trees and the
people I knew and everyone…dying as they breathed, dying as I looked at them, I
was dying at that second and had been since the day I was born.

It was all one huge waste of time—because it would all
be nothing but hydrogen and protons one day, a day we would never see because
we’d have been so long gone that perhaps our atoms would have worn out,
half-lifed into nothing.

If life was survival, then it made sense that the
ruthless succeeded. If there was nothing but the ever-waiting darkness, then
someone doing whatever they needed to do to ensure their continued survival was
right—not necessarily ethical, but right according to the law of eat or be
eaten.

You could take power—and even then, for what? Still
the same black song waited to sing over you for the nanoseconds of cosmic time
you bought.

End it now and stop fighting a useless, foregone, and
lost battle. It would be easy. All I had to do was exhale and inhale, as simple
as breathing, and then? I wouldn’t anymore.

It was almost a song in my head, a clear whisper in my
ear.
Do it
—didn’t I want to know what it was all about, anyway? Samantha
had tried—and would have succeeded had someone not saved her life, according to
Candace. Was I any less than Samantha had been? We would all die anyway—did it
matter? There was no such thing as eternal light. That was the eternal lie,
because one day, even the stars would burn out; the light they shed was the
evidence of their dying.

My eyes snapped open in the dark. I’d reached that
point underwater where you think you’ve been breathing, but you’re not, you’re
definitely not, and I was seeing my nightmares close around me—those giant
shadow hounds that had started to haunt me. Only this time, instead of
searching, they were circling.

Those words that had just passed through my brain
didn’t sound right. I mean, okay, they did in a very logical way, but the
argument didn’t sound like me, didn’t feel like me. The half-life of protons
was a theory, like every other theory out there.

I remembered a little factoid a physics professor had
left on the bulletin board for anyone that was interested—a photocopy of a
New
York Times
Science Section article. It wasn’t just a theory, it had been
proven.

“Photons, subatomic particles that are the ‘building
blocks’ of light, travel at various speeds. Once they reach a critical number,
they do the unthinkable: they gain mass.” The article had gone on to say that
not all of them did it, and no one knew why, but it was the ultimate marriage
of the macro (space) and the micro (quantum). Energy to matter. Matter to
energy. Neither can be created nor destroyed—but apparently they gave rise to
one another.

Even in a vacuum full of nothing but waste and dust,
even if the universe went cold and still, my photons would travel on until some
of them gained enough speed to become something, or they would shine forever in
the darkness.

Fuck the whole eternal-darkness thing. Of course
everything “ate” everything, at least in my head—I was starving! Fuck, no, I
didn’t want to die, and twice fuck no in a pool. I’d been a fuckin’ competitor,
dammit; there was no way I was going to drown some like some negligent parent’s
accident.

My legs had started to cramp, and I straightened them
with a vicious kick that sent me surging to the top. I gasped as I broke
through and decided to swim to the shallow side and walk around instead of
going back to the ladder. I’d been an idiot. You weren’t supposed to swim alone
anyway. I needed a good meal. Funny how weird your mind gets when your blood
sugar is low.

I walked in water not quite shoulder-high when I got
to the end, and I dipped my head quickly one last time, to sweep my hair back
and off my face. Water streamed down my spine.

I stepped out of the pool and walked around the edge
to the other end.

I hadn’t noticed anyone else come out to the yard, but
they waited at the other end, holding the towel out for me. I recognized Graham
as I strode toward him, naked and wholly myself under the starlight.

“You’re right,” he said with a glance at my chest that
had absolutely nothing lascivious in it, just a pure appreciation that I didn’t
mind. He firmly raised his eyes to the sky as he handed me the towel.

“Right about what?” I asked as I took it from him. I
dried myself off quickly, then wrapped it around my waist and took the jacket
he held in his other hand.

“Look, I’m a Brit. We don’t have the obsession you
Americans do with mammary glands, but it really
would
be a shame to
cover a chest like that. You have to have those shoulders to carry it!” he
chortled, not removing his gaze from heaven until I was covered.

His comment was respectful and I appreciated that.

“You can look now,” I said dryly.

Still he stared up at the sky while I went back to my
lounger and picked up my clothes. I put the tie around my bare neck where it
flowed down my chest, nestling between my breasts, a bloodred stripe across my
pale skin. I rebuttoned the jacket correctly, then slipped my boots on. The
jacket hung about two, maybe three inches below whatever it needed to. Hey, I
was dressed, at least. My ass was covered—it looked like I was wearing a suit
dress or something like that, anyway. I put whatever was left into my gig bag,
grabbed my butts, and hefted my guitar.

“Graham, I’m ready, it’s totally okay,” I assured him
as I walked over.

Finally, he looked at me. “Holy Jesus Christ—stop!” he
gasped.

“What?” I stopped, confused and vaguely alarmed. Was I
about to step on a snake? Was there a spider hanging from an ear? I wasn’t
familiar with the local fauna, after all.

Graham walked up to me, stopping about five feet away.

“I have never,
ever
, seen that jacket look so
good!” he said. I’d never seen Graham looked so amazed.

“Graham, you’ve been drinking, haven’t you?” I asked
him, taking a step forward.

“Hell no, girl!” he expounded as light flared from the
doorway that led back to the hotel corridor. Guess someone else was coming out
for a swim. “You look fucking hot, fucking sharp—”

“Like a Razor?” Candace’s voice drawled out into the
hot night air.

I snapped my head at the sound to see her backlit by
the door. Her eyes flashed a moment in the light before it swung shut behind
her.

“She told me you’d be out here,” Graham said. Dammit.
Was there
anything
Candace didn’t know?

“I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you, ABC Graham,”
I apologized to him.

“It’s all right—sometimes, things come up.” He
grinned. “Do you want me to get you out of this,” and he jerked his chin over
at Candace, who walked toward us, “or shall we try again tomorrow?”

Tempting as it was to take Graham up on his offer, the
fact was that I might never get a chance to face Candace again—and there were
things I still wanted to know.

“Good luck and good night, then. I’ll see you in the
morning?” Graham asked.

“Of course.” I smiled back. “There’s only one boat a
day!”

“And don’t you forget it!” Graham reminded me, shaking
a finger at me with mock severity.

He nodded politely at Candace as he walked past her,
and this time, I found another table instead of opting for a lounger.