Swimming (27 page)

Destination Destiny

I train, lobbing up and down the lanes, not bothering to change in the locker room, driving home so slowly cars honk.
Man is not a reasonable creature
. I stand in front of the mirror, lopsided and moody, no equal sides, no equal angles. I sip a batch of record-losing grimlock, massage my feet with a mixture of rose oil and geranium, am Indian to myself for fifteen minutes, read a chapter of Bud Lancer’s
Europa
I do not retain. The stars are out. I stare at their patterns begging like a leper, go inside to meet my destiny.
Man is but a deed undone
. I don’t even look at it, stepping up with flexible toes, grabbing a nail file from the box I’d thrown on the shelf above the ever-reflecting mirror, slip, catch myself midair, slip again, falling as softly as a Manchurian crane in a dive bomb, until I hit my right shoulder blade on the edge of the bathtub, breaking it with a snap like a wing. This is what I see as I fall: a wide white world opening its jaws to swallow me.

My car takes me to the emergency room, pulling up quietly to the door. My feet take me inside, slapping the floor loosely like flippers. A squinty intern explains that ninety-nine percent of all accidents in General America happen in the home when Americans are doing something they assume requires no active thought. I try to explain that I am not general, but my words are absorbed by an ocean of drool-streaked blood and my teeth feel like they’re dancing. At first they think my jaw has simply been dislocated, but then they realize it’s broken and wire it shut for my own good.

I’ve felt this before. I’d sit in my pleated blue skirt and white blouse observing the kids with no dead people in their heads. I’d watch them eat pizza on pizza day, the entire cafeteria bathed in navy blue and white, mouths quietly chewing, minds blank. I was hungry to chew with blank pleasure-filled eyes while no one I knew was silently decomposing under the snow shoeless, in a sparkly sweater, a nice pair of jeans, a pair of my socks, without a good winter coat over her bones. The nuns are expert pizza chefs, use a blend of three cheeses that pull out in hot unbreakable strings you have to cut with your teeth. I wish I could see old Sister Belly throw one up now. I close my eyes, follow the flat Frisbee of dough as it wobbles up sideways like a spaceship, twirling flour as it falls in slow motion, gently, beautifully, back to earth and earth’s waiting hands.

When I wake up, the Superior E. Mankovitz is standing at the window looking out at a nothing sky. My jaw is wired shut, my mind churning out fog. I pull him closer with one finger, say:
Where’s Dr. Bob?

He says:
I honestly don’t know
.

His normal face has been replaced by an old one.
What did you do to your face?

He pulls a hand through his ginger-gray hair, says:
Nothing
.

I grab his arm.
Where’s Dr. Bob? Where did they go?

He says:
I don’t know
.

When I wake up again, he’s still there, sleeping in a chair with a magazine over his face. I almost hit him when I throw my breakfast tray against the wall, causing great mortal pain to my shoulder. He doesn’t even jump, just stands up and asks:
Who’s this Dr. Bob?

I get to thumping and convulsing:
He forgot everything he ever knew, then he died like a baby
.

He says:
It’s time we talk
.

Time? I
shriek.

Cosmic Drama

A droopy ponytail assembles itself at the nape of my neck; my shoulder wraps itself up in a clean white sling. The Superior E. Mankovitz stands directly behind me with steady, Supercoach eyes.

I thank the world through clenched teeth.
Thank you very much for everything
.

Then I retire, lying on a series of couches from Glenwood to California until my jaw heals. I’m twenty-eight. That’s fourteen twice.

The Secret Glenwood Recovery Plan

Roxanne’s standing behind me wearing a pair of black glasses with a broken rim she’s repaired with tape. She’s sucking hard on a Tootsie Roll.
I want a smoke
. My jaw’s still wired and I’m on the cusp of a bad mood, a pair of wire cutters lying next to me on the couch just in case. I’m in a bad mood, speak between my teeth like Clint Eastwood before he kills.
You’re supposed to be my fucking nurse, so don’t fucking smoke because that means we’ll have to deal with you fucking quitting again
.

She’s in a bad mood, says:
I won’t fucking smoke, but that doesn’t mean I don’t
want
to fucking smoke
. The telephone rings. We ignore it. Mom’s upstairs under the cover of bed. The chubby sheriff is out bringing in the bad boys of Glenwood. It rings again. She looks at it.
You know that’s Dot
. I don’t look at it.
I’m not in the mood
. I’m busy watching the world do things inside the screen, anything: car races, shark attacks, tennis-playing tennis players who grunt like ogres every time they hit a ball, golf-putting old/slash/youngish guys who squint when they slice, midgets from Brazil chasing midgets from Spain across a long, grassy field. The more I watch, the less human I become. The legs that run the length of the couch are legs I do not know. The arms that sprout from my shoulders are arms I do not know. My brain is churning. I can feel it.
Was it not okay to look dead people in the face?

My bad mood fizzles out. I look up at Roxanne.
All this isn’t going to finish well
.

She says:
All what?

All this
, I say, pointing to the screen.

Roxanne has theories that come from marathons spent in front of the Nature Channel watching sea turtles hatch under miles and miles of burning sand and then try to reach the water before being demolished by an army of crabs. Roxanne’s theories are reinforced by seas full of fluffy young penguin corpses smothered in inky oil, strangled fish found with strings of plastic in their mouths, the Bornean clouded leopard munching down on a gazelle. Roxanne finds absolute proof in kitten-devouring dingos, jackals with squirrel pulp between their molars, harrier hawks swooping down on a litter of baby field mice. A largemouth bass eats a trapped chipmunk, an elephant falls on its side and the earth gives, a monkey picks its teeth with bamboo, sea turtles sleep at the surface of the wild Sargasso Sea, killer whales plunge into dark arctic water, harbor seals bathe on warm craggy rock, fur seals wait for club, as Roxanne’s eyes gather information about this horrible world.

Roxanne thinks: Plastic floating in ocean path; fish eat plastic until life finish. Heroin sitting on table; Roxanne shoot heroin until life finish. Door in bedroom; Mom shut until life finish. New self-help book sitting in self-help store; Dot buy self-help book until life finish. Water flowing through world; Pip dive in until life finish.

That’s not a theory; that’s a series of stupid thoughts. Life isn’t about hatching sea turtles
, I say.

She looks at me, annoyingly straight-faced the way some ex-almost-dead addicts can be, says:
Some don’t even have a chance to hit the water. It’s over before it begins
.

She’s wearing blue overalls, has done something normal to her hair, which has done something normal to her face. I almost believe her.

Speak for yourself
I say, sipping frothy grimlock through a straw.
Dot and I saw old sea turtles, new sea turtles. They were swimming. Perfectly healthy. Graceful. You should quit watching the Nature Channel. It depresses you
.

I like the Nature Channel
, she says.
It depresses
you.

You’re not supposed to like the Nature Channel
. Since my jaw’s been wired shut, I’m easily excitable, spitting droplets of grimlock on my T-shirt.
It’s depressing. Those fucking turtles. Those baby deer. The baby lions. It’s fucking awful
.

She takes off the black glasses with the taped-up rim.
There are sweet moments. It’s the way things are
.

No, it’s not the way things are
. I grab a blanket, wrapping it around me like a pastel muumuu.
It’s some guy filming animals at their best and most sweetest possible moments, then when they are getting mashed into a bloody paste by animals we have seen in their best, most sweetest moments. Those nature guys want to freak us out; that’s part of their job. There’s no one to root for unless you prefer tree snakes over toads, panthers over zebras. That fucking octopus slipping through the crack in that disgusting aquarium and trying to run away … I thought I’d barf
.

You should see a psychiatrist
. She looks normal again, but I know that she isn’t.
You really should, you know
.

I’ve seen tons of psychiatrists
, I say, lying back down.
They’ve given me a unanimous go-ahead. Thumbs-up. All systems go
.

You’ve got to be kidding
, she says, putting her cracked glasses back on.
I wish I had a fucking smoke
.

Disappointing Atlanta

I fade quickly into a professional world-class elite motivator, someone so capable of motivating I waltz into a room, grind my voice down, look unsuspecting people in the forehead, and make them mine, no hopping necessary

NBC grows sorry for me, wants me to comment on the action in Atlanta with my own microphone and an orange face. I want to want to do things so I say yes. For the first time in twelve years I watch the Olympics like the rest of the world, commenting with the celebrated Sherm Russel. He and his wife just had twin girls. She calls him every break, panicked. He says the same thing every time:
I’ll be home this weekend, hon. Hold on, hon. Don’t cry
. He reads the morning news with a frown slicing his face in half like a handsome priest concentrating on difficult passages in the Bible. I don’t read the morning news but frown anyway as Jolie, the hair and makeup expert, sprays our faces with a silver pump that blows a beige film over our skin. I look like a biscuit, but later, when I look at the monitor, I look like all TV people, sane, healthy, relatively happy. When I sneeze, Jolie runs over and sprays parts of my face back on. Sherm says:
God fucking bless
.

Sherm comments. I comment back. Sherm comments again.

What would you say she is feeling at this very second, Pip?
Sherm has a voice people listen to even if they don’t want to.

Well, Sherm, I’d have to say by the way she’s tossing her arms around the place that she’s probably feeling a bit sickly
, I say, tossing my arms a little bit to prove the point.

Sickly.?
He’s raising his famous eyebrow.

Nervy. Look at Lindsey Lions; she wants everyone to think she’s a tough
guy by sneering and flipping that towel. Now look at South African Hayley Glennon, who is being very quiet, just pulling on her toes…. Toe pullers are by their very nature rather difficult to pin down and South Africans definitely have some things to prove. After looking at her stats, I’d say she has the best chance for the gold today. There’s maybe even a world record in it for her
. I know one hundred percent exactly what I mean.

Interesting, Pip … because she’s pulling on some toes. You can see a world record in that?
The eyebrow again, but this time he’s smiling.

There are codes, Sherm, swimming codes that are invisible unless you crack them…. When I was rehabilitating, I spent about eleven months reviewing races, cracking the codes…. The truth is in the … You’d be amazed, Sherm
, I say, my hands flying like birds.

I think we’re all amazed, Pip
, he says, then we take a break.

His wife calls and he says:
Don’t worry, hon, hang in there
as I stare at my orange face in the mirror. I shouldn’t have done this. There is nothing worse in the world for a tense world-class swimmer in the early throes of retirement than to watch other tense world-class swimmers swim without her. And tense world-class ex-swimmers should never be given an expensive set of binoculars to capture detailed action. I hold the binoculars to my eyes: Sonia Westerholm from Sweden sucks her thumb underneath her towel like a little baby. Hanna La Font, the Parisian chick, tries to psych out Californian Susie Jenks by making scissors out of her fingers and cutting her up. The devout Susie ignores her, praying as openly as a Dark Catholic. I watch them pull their suits out of their butts before standing up on the starting blocks, watch them thrust their bodies into the air, their inside faces finally free, teeth bared. They seem better than regular humans. Every single one of them. Even that nasty chick from Omaha who keeps telling me I’m her hero with a fake smile. There is no empty space where I should have been; all the spots have been filled. It hits hard, like sound physical punches to the solar plexus. I look in the mirror, still orange, still human, still tall, still loveless.
That’s it, then
.

Because Sherm is a woman’s man, he notices things. He leans over and whispers:
Try to take it down a notch, Pip, and enjoy; it’s your sport at its best
.

I am enjoying it, Sherm
, I whisper back.
Really. Very much. But it’s as though I never … like does it …

I wanted to be a baseball player, you have no idea … I get a twinge in my gut every time I cover the Series …
He’s still whispering.
But you, Pip, you were the baseball player. You were only seventeen years old when you knocked over poor Milt, who used to interrogate Ali, by the way—you should have seen them, anyway. You have eleven Olympic golds. A career that spanned three Olympics. Look what you did in Barcelona. Eight! I had tears in my eyes
.

Twelve Olympic golds, Sherm. And I didn’t punch him exactly
, I lie.
I pushed him. I swear that little guy was …

He died last year. Cancer
. He takes a sip of that vitamin water he likes.
We used to laugh about it … said he saw his life flash
.

I … he was … that was … I’m sorry
. I don’t like it when people die.

Don’t be sorry
. Sherm is chirpy again.
Highlight of his career. And he went fast. Anyway, you were the baseball player
.

Yeah, I was the baseball player
.

It was great, wasn’t it great? He’s
curious now.

It must have been great
, I say, thinking.
But I was training hard and my mother, she was … she had this … dark people fed her grimlock through a straw because she was so … you wouldn’t believe it … my sisters … and … Leonard. He had this favorite research bat, Rosy. Later they shipped her to … I … California seemed … I had this dog, Manny, the truest dog you ever could know, all dogs pale … like it went by … so no, yes … actually the only dog I ever had. June. June was. Sherm, it must have been great, but I was filling up time, playing it safe, you know, until something else happened, like, I probably won’t know this is great until I’m dead or so old I can’t … maybe …

You look just fine now
. He’s smiling.
You can’t even tell you broke your jaw
.

I only feel it when it rains
.

Then take it easy; enjoy
.

I change the subject.
I’m not the one with twins
.

He sighs.
It doesn’t even run in my family. I’m the first
.