Swimming (29 page)

I look at the prescription.
I have twelve Olympic gold medals
.

He looks at me.
Yes! But it’s very light. Consider it a brain vitamin. You’ll feel better
.

I look at his forehead.
I thought there was nothing physically wrong with me
.

He looks at me.
That’s right
.

I look him in the eyes.
So. I’m not going to die … I’m not going crazy
.

He laughs.
Nooooo! That’s just anxiety. Anxiety can’t hurt you!

I don’t believe him, thus don’t laugh.
So … I’m fine
.

He stops laughing, looks at his watch.
Technically, yes. Physically, yes
.

I don’t look at his watch.
Healthy?

He looks at me, smiles, rustles up some papers.
Absolutely
.

I ignore the rustling.
But … what … then … I don’t understand … What … There’s no other way? I mean …

He stands up, shaking my hand with one of his dry old ones.
This will help calm your mind until you find the other way. You’ll want to do things again soon. You’ll sleep
.

I sit outside his office, the prescription sitting on the seat next to me, my Jeep idling into the air. I have to concentrate hard on my breathing; if I don’t, it will stop. I watch the cars whizzing by in streaks of gray, gray trees standing solemnly offering gray fingers up to the sky, a gray lady with gray hair licking a frozen yogurt in a waffle cone the size of a rolled-up newspaper. I look up at the sky, but it’s gone. All that’s left is an empty plate.

It takes me a full two months to construct a formal letter of apology for the unmotivated citizens of Omaha. I discuss the fatigue of a busy schedule combined with the force of an overeager mind. I discuss the vagaries of retired life, the gap training has left in my life, how the lack of a good physical burn combined with a couple of powdered sugar doughnuts at the breakfast buffet turned a perfectly normal speech into an abnormal one. I write:
I’ve been to Russia. It’s a very interesting country filled with fantastic people!
I write:
Olympic athletes are often sugar sensitive!
I write:
I’m really, really sorry! I’m taking a sabbatical and will be out of the country for one year to get a much-needed rest, but the next time I’m in Omaha, I’d love to spend an afternoon with all of you!!!
I learned my lesson, though: If you try to talk about the true value of certain mysteries without any concrete thread of universal hope while rivers of mascara bleed down your white face, people will not like it, but if you choose only the attractive, tasty words, everything you say is a lie.

Every jumbo jet I’ve ever taken had a real reason waiting at the end of it. Every day I trained had another more important one waiting in the future. I’m descending. Heading toward purgatory, which hovers over the earth, which is covered with dirt, which is death. All around me people are experiencing the incredible reversibility of nature, yet continue to mouth words to songs they do not know. All around me people are walking toward their final demise, spending lots of money on expensive shoes they shall soon replace. I am surprised by one and all, breathing carefully, quietly conserving oxygen for when I’ll need it most.

My mother calls:
I don’t understand
.

Roxanne calls:
What the hell
.

Dot calls:
You can’t escape from yourself
.

Supercoach E. Mankovitz calls:
Call me
.

Hank calls:
I’m not so sure about this
.

I vanish, sit in a metal box with unknown peoples of unknown origin looking out portholes zooming over wheat and corn and corn silos and pigs and pig huts and sheep and a mountain range and parts of the Mississippi. I fly into New York, which looks like a microchip, then get into another metal box with unknown peoples of unknown origin. I say:
Toodle do Russian fuckface
over Manhattan, falling asleep as we zoom over Greenland floating in the Atlantic like a fuzzy moth. In my sleep Dr. Leonard Ash wakes up; he’s tan, skinny, talking to me earnestly with hat in hand. On my lap is one of the original first-edition copies of
Most Misunderstood Mammals
, dog-eared by Dot. When I wake up, I look out the porthole at the lights blinking red, wishing I could hold on to the feeling that I have in the air, where the only thing expected of me is exactly nothing, just sit and do what I am told until the plane lands and the bay doors pop open. What this means is that we are all the same. Crazy.

Just Tell Me What I Am
and I’ll Be It

O Eiffel Tower, Splendid Haze, O Falter

I’m standing in arrivals watching the metal door with the black rubber mouth spitting out the wrong suitcases one by one. A short, oily man pushes past me sucking hard on a cigarette, his smoke rising into the sullied airport atmosphere mixing jet fuel and spent breath with croissants and coffee. I wave my hands in front of my nose, move behind a blonde with a jet-induced putty face who lights one up and blows it in my ear. I elbow my way past her, grab my case as it swerves down the slide, pass two customs officials busy doing nothing. They don’t even glance over as I walk by. Outside everyone is speaking a fast, liquidy French that’s too annoying to follow, it’s ugly, and one hundred and fifty people are waiting for a cab, one hundred and thirty-three of them puffing on a cigarette for dear life. I get in line, towering over them, cross my hands over my chest, stare at my gigantic feet as wisps of smoke curl their way up my nose.

I look out the window of the cab, watch the scenery careen from the unseemly to the wondrous as the ancient edifice of Paris etches itself slowly upon a sheet of gray sky. By the time we reach the inner portals of the city, my jet lag hits hard and my eyes turn to stone. I’m dropped off in front of my new address still deep in a daze, press the buzzer at length, explain who I am twice, am let in with a click. I drag myself up a creaky stairwell that winds its way tightly like the swirls in a shell. Madame Madame flings the door open before I have the time to knock, looks me down then up, yapping on and on about light, a blond cigarette fumigating her face. She takes the stairs like an invalid and I follow behind, watching as she wrestles with hundreds of keys tied together with a piece of red twine. She opens the door, walks into the apartment with one arm open like she’s selling a car, says things I don’t quite get, does some drastic Cleopatra things to her face, touching her big blond bun to make sure it’s still there, says something else, then backs out, waving like a spastic.

I sit on my suitcase and do absolutely nothing, a universal sign of secular renunciation. On the phone, she didn’t mention how the double bed is suspended above the dining room table on stilts, how you have to climb a ladder up and in, how the shower is perched in the kitchen next to a brown rickety oven, how the toilet is communal, sitting outside in the hallway behind a broken door, fuming like a dead smelly bear. She concentrated on the light, how the windows reveal a master skyscape that pulls in so much natural light, artificial light is simply unnecessary. A lie.

If one looks up, the windows hold broken rectangles of dark sky, but if one looks down, they reveal the depths of a concrete courtyard, empty but for one red bucket with a dirty mop standing in it like a tall, droopy, gray-haired, skinny guy who lost his job but does not care. I unpack my purple solar flare extra-deluxe mummy sleeping bag with hood, climb up the stilts, crawl into the bed, cracking my head so hard on a beam that my vision is replaced by a series of mangled yellow stars, and fall into the deep sleep of a crazy used-up person. When I awaken, it’s night; the city’s giving off a deep tangerine glow, proof that underneath many things are happening; electrical appliances are working full blast; a bunch of people I don’t know are alive.

Press Mute

My third night here, there are fireworks. I stand on one of the small footbridges that crisscross the canal, watch them explode. Madame Madame nabs me in the hall, informs me they are celebrating the storming of the Bastille, the dismantling of a prison stone by stone accomplished in the best of humors that rebellion naturally instills in the French, and that normally Paris is a calm, civilized city filled with calm, civilized people with a good sense of museum etiquette. She lowers her voice, gets conspiratorial when she says
museum etiquette
. I make my face act like it knows exactly what she’s talking about and she smiles. She was pretty before, has that deeply disappointed look ex –pretty people have. She’s obviously dying of boredom, keeps touching her big blond helmet of hair as if she’s afraid something bad’s going to happen to it. I don’t encourage her, wave
bye-bye
until she gets the hint and waves
bye-bye
back, then I climb up the stairs, open the door, place my chair next to the window, stare at the sky until it dissolves into my mother sighing.

This is what she does: she pulls the air into her chest where it rattles around for a minute, then she blows it out her nose like a bull. Her hair is folded into a knobby bun at the nape of her neck and she’s wearing chalk-colored lipstick. She’s standing at the automatic doors of Glen-wood’s Master Mall, her shifting weight confusing the sensors; the doors slide halfway open, get perplexed, slide halfway closed as she stares at me, both of her hands curled into tight fists. I look away, concentrate hard on the Christmas lights, blinking darkness, blinking light, blinking darkness, blinking light, and it hits me:
We were all crazy even then
.

I take showers in a ceramic box with a showerhead the size of a light-bulb swinging above, grow used to being naked in the kitchen, watching my yams bake as a lame stream of boiling water dribbles onto my head. I run out to the hallway, open the door to the smelly bear, hold my breath, and pee in streams I’ve been holding in for hours. There is not one good, ordinary, useful, or familiar thing in sight. During the day, the neighbors are gone and the depth of the buildings surrounding the courtyard absorbs the sounds of the city, but in the evening, they come back, open their windows, yell. Today the man downstairs told the woman downstairs that she was dumber than a broom and she told him that he was the hole in the middle of a great big ass. I shut the windows, say soothing things to myself in the quiet-again air like:
There, there. That’s better
.

I don’t speak. Weeks glide by in a world without words. I go to the grocery store when I’m hungry, lug stuff home in plastic bags. I sit at the table under my stilts and stare at the blank wall, the day stretching open before me like an empty hand.
No schedule, no coach, no dietician, no physical therapist, no race, no goal, no plan, no team
, destiny wrung out of me like water in sponge. I close my eyes, find Fredrinka masked in misery, muscles chained to bone. She’s mumbling things I can’t hear, her poor little beard the color of wood. Even her sidekick, that awful bitch, Dagmar, has changed; memory has pummeled her into something new. I’m wanting to wipe her out, old rage bleating in my heart:
She’s going down
, but her raisin eyes fill with bitter East German Berliner tears she’s too proud to let fall, her chin trembling like a tiny washing machine. She sits down on the starting block, staring blankly at goggles she’s holding like flowers in Virginia ham hands and pity wields its magic sword. I pat Dagmar’s veiny German ham, say:
There, there
, think:
No man, no love, no desire, no grip, no grasp, no first, no second, no third
.

Dawdle, Loiter, Stroll

I sleep during the day and wake at night and it’s awful, but then my body adjusts and it’s worse. I wake up alone on top of my stilts at dawn, one gray glare spreading across the gigantic gray face of the sky as it opens its eyes to weep. Sometimes the tears freeze to slush, slapping the roof like wet feathers. Sometimes the tears remain liquid, pounding as they fall. It doesn’t seem to bother the Parisians any more than everything else they don’t let bother them; they are in the exact same bad mood as the day I got here, carefully avoiding all unnecessary human contact and any kind of speech except the occasional
pardon
.

I stare at the white wall until I can’t stand it anymore, lace my feet carefully into shoes, open door that leads to street, sweep myself into Paris like human dust.

The French have a verb for leaving your house for no apparent reason, walking around aimlessly with no identifiable
goal: flâner
. I flâne at home from hallway to bathroom to kitchen to window to suspended bed and back again. I flâne through museums, mindlessly following someone with interesting shoes, not in the least bit interested in the things on the wall. I flâne over canals, under bridges, down weaving cobbled streets. If Ernest K. Mankovitz were capable of world supervision like God Our Immortal Father, he would thrust one mighty red-knuckled hand and pick me up, pulling me safely out of excessive flânning’s reach.

I flâne and flâne and when I flâne, light travels from my eyes, audible sound mutes into random hum, the future contracts, the past expands, Paris disappears, and Glenwood appears, bright and beautiful and dark and cold and snowy. I watch the snow. It removes itself flake by flake from a snowman I just made with my bare hands, floating softly up to the dark-starred sky. I walk backward and turn; Roxanne’s walking backward with me, face open in a way I will soon forget. She’s sticking her tongue in, letting flake after flake of snow re-form and rise. We pass through closing door as it opens, our coats grabbing on to those brass hooks Leonard hammered in one Sunday, and here I am, home. In-home silence mixed with in-home humming, in-home streaked windows and still, vacuumed air, the brightness splashing up from carpet out into night, disappearing instantly at the speed of light. I stop breathing it’s so pretty.

I fall asleep at the first sign of night—
That’s it, then—
wake up drooling in darkness to tinny zinc orchestras playing above my head as Leonard explains the elemental laws of the natural world, the pendulum swing theory, the genesis of time. When there is a storm, the windows do battle as though the walls have begun to breathe. When the windows do battle, it is impossible to sleep.

I call Roxanne at three in the morning. She sucks some kind of smoke into her lungs, says:
I liked you better when you were swimming
and
I told you not to go
when we both know perfectly well she couldn’t stand me when I was swimming and that I was going to go anyway.

The higher the ratio of your own personal fuckups, the greater the potential for relief
she says.

What?
I say.

Really fucked-up people can become even saner than regular people when they seek to find the greater relief that is inherently theirs
.

How in the hell do you know?

Rehab
, she says.

Which one?

Montreal
, she says.

My mother calls from her headquarters in Glenwood, trying to sound like a person who leaves the house.
The past is the past, Philomena
. She sighs dramatically.
I don’t know why …

I sigh dramatically back.
The past is the past, Mom, and the future is the future, but inside, everything exists. What do you think of that?

I think that one day you’ll have a daughter
, she says,
and the circle will be complete
.

I call Dot, lie.
It’s fine
, I say.
Unusual and interesting. Everything’s going really, really well
.

She gets annoyed.
Are you on drugs?

Her annoyance is contagious.
Yes, Dorothy. I am
.

Why are you talking like that, then? You sound like you’re addicted to something
. She is talking to me like she talks to the disturbed, but without the professional kindness.

Like I’d be addicted, Dorothy darling. I’ve got a great view, although it has been raining quite a bit … I do get to thinking about poor old Fergus every once in a while
, I say, feeling myself get pleasantly huffy.

She’s taking a sip of that tea she loves, green with twigs and those special flowers that tranquilize naturally.
Thinking about Fergus? Have we been drinking, Pip?
She’s blowing smoothly on her cup.

No, I’m doing very well, Dorothy. You said I’d … well, I haven’t
, I say, torturing the truth in triumph.
I’m relaxing and looking at the swimming stuff from another angle and—

She interrupts, the tone of her voice echoing off my inner ear in an annoyingly familiar way:
People are killing each other every second, children are starving, kids graduate from high school and don’t know how to read, the ocean’s full of garbage, the world’s off kilter, heading toward certain ecological disaster, life’s a big piece of shit, and all you think about is swimming. Swimming
.

I say:
Fuck you, Dot
.

She sucks in a wad of air, hangs up.
Click
.

Dead people with a healthy afterlife can listen, so I talk to them. It brings out the drama in me. I get down on my knees and say:
I’m sorry you’re really dead. I am ashamed and I apologize. I was … an asshole. I didn’t know
. Then I pull my hair out of its ponytail, crawl into bed on elbows and knees, avoid the beam, lie facedown on my pillow, weep.

They say:
That’s okay. How could you possibly have known?

I say:
Is it my turn soon? I feel like it’s soon
.

They say:
Yes, as a matter of fact it is. How did you guess?