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| No. 9 |
Summer 2005 |
John Parras
The Sad Early Days of a Famous Scuba
Diver
He could hold his breath longer than the seals and penguins at the Central Park Zoo. His mother often took him there on rainy autumn afternoons when Papa was working and she tired of staring out the windows of the flat on 130th and Broadway at the fruit-sellers and the endless stop and go of car traffic. On these outings she'd wear high heels and her off-white raincoat, and with her hair up in a bun and a touch of green eye shadow and of rouge she looked more beautiful than Zelda the Mermaid. They'd take the subway to Columbus Circle and walk east past the carriages, the pungent mares shrugging at their harnesses, the smoky eyes of the livery drivers brazenly tracking her approach and passing. Her heels clicked their Morse code on the chilly sidewalk. In November her slender fingers, tipped with welt-red polish, were cold in his small warm hand. During the show the seals stuck their snouts in the air and gulped down the fish tossed to them like assiduous students learning bits of ancient Greek philosophy. From those lithe wet bodies Jacq learned that water loved smoothness and grace, and that to swim one had to be like water itself. When no one was looking, he dipped his fingertips into the edge of the Polar Bear Sea.
He learned to swim in a pool surrounded by concrete and cracked plastic lounge chairs. Mother wasn't to be bothered as she sunbathed, so he climbed into the water by himself, clinging to the silver ladder and flinching at every splash. The pool had neither a deep end nor a shallow end, his feet touched neither here nor there. He clung to the ladder the way one clings to love, moving aside and watching with envy as the other children slipped past him down the ladder and swam off into the pool's expanse.
His mother hardly moved for an hour, only once to adjust her sunglasses, which had large, dark-blue frames in the style of Jacqueline Kennedy. Her suit was one piece and black, and she had one leg bent at the knee. She wouldn't go swimming today, she'd said earlier, and when he asked why not she waved, a little angrily, a small pouch in front of his face. She tucked the pouch into her purse like a secret she was annoyed at having to keep.
Finally Jacq closed his eyes. Held his breath. Finally let go. He floated adrift from the ladder like a piece of seaweed to the middle of the pool and thought of astronauts, their slow-motion swims through the soup of space, the white umbilical cords tying them to the mother ship. Jacq saw legs and the bright colors of bathing suits. He heard the pool-water disturbed by movement and laughing. He sank to the concrete pool bottom and spied the miraculous silver shining of a dime. It was the most beautiful moment of his life until he ran out of breath. He raised his head but not high enough. He flailed desperately, a salamander beyond its depth. Choked horribly on the chlorinated brew.
A stranger -- a man with a bald head and a hirsute potbelly who happened to be standing in the water nearby -- pulled Jacq out by the hair on his head, and he lived. His bathing suit was as red and wet as peach skin in a bathtub.
Sabina was the swimming instructor at the West Side Y. His mother entrusted him to her twice weekly. Sabina was a lifeguard and a teenager and wore a snug blue one-piece with the orange insignia of a lieutenant on the left shoulder strap. Sabina's hair was straight; she seemed to comb it with the water. The first time she'd seen him swim, she told him later, she'd known immediately he'd be exceptional, for he swam with his eyes open like a pair of goggles and his teeth exposed.
"My teeth?"
"You were smiling," Sabina replied, and gave Jacq's wet hair a quick tousle. They were standing in the pool together facing one another, breathing heavily after laps. The water was up to his chest, her belly button. "Now swim through my legs," Sabina challenged him, spreading her thighs out and straightening even her feet and toes. Jacq could make it through without touching her, but at the last instant he let his fingertips graze across her calves. The skin was firm, and when he came up behind her she turned, a smile on her face as bright and mysterious as a filter-softened photograph.
Sabina taught him the freestyle, the butterfly, the breaststroke, the backstroke and the dolphin, and how to dive from the meter-high board. It took her two years, just enough time for his parents to divorce, and he must have been twelve or thirteen when she first undressed for him. The indoor pool was steamy, the January Manhattan sidewalks outside dirty with ice. They'd swum late, and when they finally stood in the shallow and raised their heads they saw through the fogged windows that it was night. They were alone in the pool atrium. It was quiet except for the soft splashing of the pool water against the tiles in the hollow space. The heated air was humid and the chlorine smell strong. The beautiful Sabina, looking at Jacq with wet eyes but not saying a word, raised her fingers to her shoulders and pulled down the straps of her blue swimsuit. She let the top fall forward and her white breasts appeared just above the water line. Water splashed across her chest and she smiled like the Madonna Jacq prayed to on Christmas and Easter holidays. His mouth opened like the mouth of an Etruscan urn, lucent with darkness.
After his parent's separation, Jacq was shuttled to a boarding school abroad, in the Dolomites. He felt out of place in the mountains, like a nail in marble. The curved roads upset him; they were conversations going pointlessly back and forth. The distances were too big, and the great rocks on the peaks loomed threateningly. He felt so far from sea level his lungs ached like a pair of rotten eggplants.
Yet he found, like a broken plow on a defunct farm, at 2300 meters near the Swiss-Italian border, the fossil of a seashell along the crag, and he hugged a big black mountain dog like a lost mother.
The lakes were cold, the waters leaden, yet he was amazed at their depths. A diving master from the Czech Republic recognized his potential and fit him up with her brother's scuba gear, which she presented to Jacq as a gift. Her name was Jana and she had hair tinged burgundy with artificial color, an accent as strong as cherry schnapps, and magnificent irises that flashed mahogany promises. Her long limbs made her awkward on land, but she slipped into the water and swam like Olanda, daughter of Tir, showing Jacq the various water plants that edged the lake and leading him to the underwater stream where glacier water seeped into the lakebed. Treading water in the spot where that ice-cold current drained into the warmth of the volcanic lake, with Jana long and slender beside him, her bosom buoyant, Jacq felt his thighs and groin bleeding with happiness.
But later, diving near the center of the lake, Jacq saw the bed drop away so abruptly into its volcanic crater he panicked, slipping off his air tanks and rushing to the surface like a battered pear. The bubbles that accompanied him carried within them the lost notes of a throaty Viennese love song that had sunk with the Tyrolean vessel Timber & Thistle ninety years earlier. That afternoon, when he encountered Jana among the pines and spruce edging the lake, he resolutely pulled her toward him and felt behind her teeth with his tongue, giving her that song, and the next day he conquered his fear, diving so deep into the center of the lake he felt as though Jana were pressing her watery image onto his eyeballs with her thumbs. When he finally stopped struggling, when he composed himself to float calmly in the cold, dark bowl of the lake, he could feel thin tentacles of warmth rising from the lava kilometers beneath him. He was awed at the weight of the water, enough pressure to crush an aluminum can. He felt it pressing on him like two tight hands on his chest, and he realized that the water was holding him together. While on land he was often struck by an irrational fear of normal activities—going to the bank, buying soap, driving. When he did such things he felt unsettled, as though the fog of atoms that comprised him were dispersing, the fibers of his being floating in too many directions, like a school of fish no longer swimming in tandem. On land he had the strange sensation that he was leaving a piece of himself behind everywhere he went, the way you leave your keys or sunglasses at a diner.
Before he left the mountains, Jana shared one more secret with him.
He dove all the great reefs of the globe. Florida, Bermuda, and the wide Sargasso Sea. Glover near Laughing Bird Caye, Belize. Mayotte of the Comoros archipelago in the Mozambique Channel. Sumatra, Indonesia. Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Bora-Bora of French Polynesia. The Kingman Reef of the Palmyra Atoll near Line Islands, Kiribati. The Great Barrier off Queensland. The Spratly Islands, South China Sea. Hawaii. The Virgin Islands.
He dove to escape the noise of everyday life, the screech of cicadas in the trees in the morning like a bad hangover, ringing telephones, the loud opera music of trams. He dove to escape people who shouted forced greetings at one another across busy streets. He was essentially misanthropic. But when he was underwater, the oceans hugging him sternly like lost fathers, he felt he'd successfully left his other life behind, that other world of the earth where shopkeepers bickered peevishly in the streets and his two feet could carry him only in circles, like glass bottles spinning on concrete.
One brutal afternoon at the Red Sea, thick with salt and exhaustion, he encountered a striped fish with the voice of Moses who told him to go home.
Jacq found a job feeding sharks at the Maryland Aquarium. He got to know them each by name, and swam among them like a married man looking at strange women. In the long history of the marine park, no one had ever been as successful as he with the great whites. The last man who had tried swimming with them had received a gash in his thigh as ugly as a smashed pumpkin.
But the dolphins feared him. They could smell on him the rank putrefactions of the predator, and whenever he came near they would bare their tight, crooked rows of teeth like desert dogs.
At night after the aquarium closed, in the invasive beam of a silver flashlight, the horse-fish floated in their tanks like bittersweet dreams of watery oblivion. Jacq saw in the seaweed among which they rode the unloosed hair of his love for landed mermaids and idle prostitutes twirling their locks beneath the bridges.
In his spare time he offered swimming instruction at a Baltimore youth club, once in a while coming across a student who reminded him of Sabina and her young breasts in the pool water. Mostly they were Polish or Salvadoran children whose parents worked cleaning the hallways and classrooms at Johns Hopkins University. He loved the kids, but grew so bored of lessons a fungus took hold in his groin and underarms, and he was forced to quit. The bus back to his meager apartment leaked exhaust fumes as sickening as the breath of alley cats.
At night he freelanced for the BPD, culling muddied rivers for sunken boats and cars. It was like swimming in vats of cold coffee and old radiator water. He had to proceed slowly, his pike pole in front of him like a blind man's cane.
Once he was sent to a lake in the middle of the night. They'd discovered a car pushed off the end of a rickety wooden dock. Half a dozen police cars, their siren lights dizzying him with their red and blue strobe, cut the night air with their headlights and squawking radios. As Jacq donned his gear, the cops bowed their heads and watched surreptitiously, with something like regret.
Even through his wetsuit the water was cold as yoghurt gathering mold in the back of the fridge, and the 400-watt spotlight was so dim in the murk Jacq could barely visualize the end of his pole. When he finally hit the car with his pike at 9 meters, the sound was like Poe's count banging his wine bottle against the catacomb wall.
Jacq thought at first the car's headlights were on, but it was a watery illusion. The light was of course only a reflection of his own spotlight beam. He swam around the car once, gauging its condition. It was an old Chrysler four-door sedan, maybe 1988, and it was lodged in the mud by the front bumper at a sharp angle, almost perpendicular. Reluctantly, Jacq approached the driver's side window.
The woman's hair was loose, the strands floating like sea plants, and her skin was as white as the full moon. The open eyes seemed to stare at Jacq with the pity of a mannequin of the Virgin Mary. She still had her seat belt on and both hands gripping the wheel.
In a strange, bitter lake current Jacq floated toward the rear window. The back door was ajar, he found, and when he placed his fingers on the handle the door fell open and a little dead girl flopped into his arms.
Jacq attached a big metal hook to the Chrysler's suspension and left the scene as the police dragged the car with its two corpses out of the lake. He didn't go home. Instead he headed for Baltimore's famed harbor, walked to the edge of an industrial pier, and jumped into the black ocean. And swam, which was all he knew to do.
The lights of Baltimore, tinged orange and unfocused beyond the shore, receded into the distance behind him. A cool shine of light hovered above the city, but as he swam further out to sea the glow of the moon -- a bold, sloppy mezzaluna hanging in Lyra -- prevailed. He no longer felt the water. His body was as cold as the water was warm, the water as cold as his warm body. The ocean, black with night and depth, encompassed him like a dream.
He struggled to find a rhythm, found it and lost it and found it again. His strokes cut the water which he took in his hands and pushed behind him, cupped and pushed, cupped and pushed, urging himself to one woman while leaving one woman behind, kicking at one end and reaching at the other, torn forwards, just skimming the surface of what were unimaginable fathoms, the underwater crags and shipwrecks of the Atlantic Ocean. To swim, he realized, was to stroke nothingness and come up with energy, for what his fingers couldn't hold and his fist not contain yet propelled him from desire to desire, from west to east, from woman to woman, yes to yes, to yes, to mother.
For a long while it seemed he made no progress. He was suspended in the middle of the wide waters, the deep dome of the sky above him unmoved. Only when a rogue wave submerged him did he slow his strokes and stop. Treading water, he looked back toward the Baltimore shore but saw nothing.
He was breathing heavily, and salt curdled on his lips and face and eyelids. He was dreadfully aware of his feet dangling above a fearsome depth of water. The moon had hidden herself behind a low heavy cloud and the wind was picking up, skirting the ocean top with small whitecaps. Was he halfway to somewhere? Should he turn back and start again, or was it too late?
He spun himself so many times in indecision he lost his bearings. Hoping to steer by the moon, he'd lost sight of the shore, and now that the moon had forsaken him he turned again in his panic, and again.
Finally, the wind saved him. Revealed an edge of the moon's dress behind the clouds, a brief beige light that disappeared almost as soon as he'd seen it. But he'd seen it. And he swam on, a message in a bottle bobbing across that dark, impossible immensity.
Copyright 2005, John Parras nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program
at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.