The Swimmer

I hadn’t even begun to take it all in—the beach, the sunshine. A gull screams overhead like a broken siren. Somewhere, a transistor spits static, and a kid’s plastic shovel scrapes rhythmically, a tiny excavator digging toward China. Diesel fumes drift in from the boardwalk, mixing with coconut oil and hot dog water.

But here I am circling my life like a half-interested shark—just curious, no poking or sampling the wares.

The swimmer in me is, of course, relieved. I had seen the photos. The gnawed bum, the lacerated abdomen. Eighty-nine stitches and then he was all sewn up!

Hurrah! The old college try was enough.

“Darling! Do me a favour?”

I turn towards her. The only one. That ever mattered. She’s the right side of pink or orange or whatever. A spray tan was her preparation for her try at being sizzling bacon.

Then I realize that I’m only half awake and my shoulder hurts. Something had crawled across my legs. There’s a tickle where that thing went. I hoped it didn’t leave me something to remember it by.

I propped up on my elbow and stood to for what was next: My arm is a tent pole for that heavy, doleful countenance. That would not do. I shoot for that amazing me, but come up short. Our water bottle tips when I shift; warm liquid spreads, mixing with a smear of lotion into a pale galaxy I stare at like it holds the answer.

The smell of lingering sunscreen was my initial topic of conversation. But that failed, like always. She had a curious grin as she sized me up.

“Oohh my back! Do my back, will you?” she moans.

Lise, I almost say—but her name feels suddenly foreign on my tongue.

So I lather up a gob of sticky goo, working my hands as a machine might, folding and unfolding the muscles of her back. She hums—off-key—to the tinny jingle leaking from the next towel’s boombox.

But it’s that guy on the next towel who becomes me. As if I could be him, yet still be me.

There he is. Encouraging, talking to nobody, earpieces like white slime dripping from his ears. A compass tattoo on his shoulder doesn’t point north; it spins lazily in the heat. Looking right through me, I suddenly know that all the while he was talking, I was part of his secret—the denouement to that mystery. The getaway vehicle should be parked nearby. Down the shabby street, its motor running in tune with the gravel that other vehicles kick up. The DJ’s voice crackles: “Polar bear plunge in five, folks! Who’s brave enough?”

Earlier, we had talked about art and painting. The place that creation has in the art of living. Not the science, the how tos. Or the what-you-need-to-know, and the must-do.

Not the shared annoyances or the wonderful contrivances. The coincidences and the laughter at someone who fails to amaze. The eternal me-me-me that plays solitaire.

I imagined it all. So real. Half-buried in the sand near their cooler, an abandoned canvas—someone’s sunset, colors bleeding into the tide.

But then he, too, receives his orders. The black rectangle goes away. The ocean is calling him.

Yelling, he jumps up as if whatever sampled me has attacked him. I feel such compassion. Oh, to be your own man!

I want to join him. Kick up a seashell. Turn over a new leaf. It’s as if there were a planned gathering, so that it could be on some app. Which then infected thousands.

Like that fungus that makes ants willing prey to further a plant’s development? Or the spider that sacrifices itself to give birth to baby wasps? Such an indulgence.

But his friends are having none of it. They laugh at him.

“Fool! Don’t go in the water with your earpods on!” The DJ echoes: “Last call for the plunge!”

I garner pointers from those friends. They’re like a springtime of freshly washed life, planted between hilly sand castles.

Yet, as these directors cue him, he dances to their amazement and explodes into action. Throwing earpods at his towel, whoever thought such things could fly? They land beside the canvas, white against bleeding orange.

Not me. However, I’m suddenly restless, like birds that fly. A flock short of a migration, I am kin to the jabbering Canada geese in flight—the tickle returns—sharper. I slap my calf, flick a sand-crab toward the ruined painting. It scuttles, vanishes.

So, I tug on her turgid hand, which uncurls to sprinkle sand all over her oiled back.

“Marcus! What are you doing?”

Our eyes meet. With a start, she sits. Her sunglasses are askew, her bandana off her head. She cups her eyes to see me, as I'm coming out of the sun. Then she stops humming that damn jingle.

I beckon to her like a bronzed god. Half slaked on dizzy heat, sweat beading the crown of laurels on my head. With my finger, I trace SWIM in the spilled lotion-water, then smear it out before she sees.

I am the eternity that has meaning in the here and now. I take both of her hands.

“Oh no! You’re not getting me in that water!”

She leans back, luxuriating in the omnipotence of weight compounding the geometry of half standing, yet falling, frozen in my hands.

I could humor her. I should cease. I should desist. A court order, some restraint, please? Yet from 100 yards…The noise of my jabbering would never be.

We’re all eighty percent water, I want to say. Dried and stored, we amount to a hill of dust in the eyes of some scientists. But I’m off my head.

That guy is already halfway in. His earpods lie in the sand like tiny white bones. The water smells of diesel and algae now, close enough to taste. So I turn away—only a heading and ideas to guide me.

Of what should be even though there isn’t anything. Only waves and yearning.

“Where did you say you learned to paint?” I half-whisper, loud enough for the wind. That man turned his head. His friends were drinking beer. They couldn’t hear us. Lise tilts her head, shrugs, and goes back to humming.

For the roaring waves and crashing surf. That wasn’t quite real.