Noah Hawley - Before the Fall

He had done this swim before too, back in 1955. Alcatraz was still a prison then, a cold rock of penitence and punition. Jack was forty-one, a young buck already famous for being fit. He had the TV show and the gyms. Every week he stood in simple black and white wearing his trademark jumpsuit, tailored skintight, his biceps bulging. Every so often without warning he would drop to the floor and punctuate his advice with a hundred fingertip push-ups.

Fruits and vegetables, he’d say. Protein, exercise.

On NBC, Mondays at eight, Jack gave away the secrets of eternal life. All you had to do was listen. Towing the boat now, he remembered that first swim. They said it couldn’t be done, a two-mile swim against strong ocean currents in fifty-degree water, but Jack did it in just under an hour. Now nineteen years later he was back, hands tied, legs bound, a thousand-pound boat chained to his waist.

In his mind there was no boat. There was no current. There were no sharks.

There was only his will.

“Ask the guys who are doing serious triathlons,” he would later say, “if there are any limits to what can be done. The limit is right here [in your head]. You’ve got to get physically fit between the ears. Muscles don’t know anything. They have to be taught.”

Jack was the puny kid with the pimples who gorged himself on sweets, the pup who went sugar-mad one day and tried to kill his brother with an ax. Then came the epiphany, the burning bush resolve. In a flash it came to him. He would unlock his body’s full potential. He would remake himself entirely, and by doing so change the world.

And so chubby, sugar-brained Jack invented exercise. He became the hero who could do a thousand jumping jacks and a thousand chin-ups in ninety minutes. The muscle that trained itself to finish 1,033 push-ups in twenty minutes by climbing a twenty-five-foot rope with 140 pounds of weight strapped to his belt.

Everywhere he went, people came up to him on the street. It was the early days of television. He was part scientist, part magician, part god.

“I can’t die,” Jack told people. “It would ruin my image.”

Now, in the water, he lunged forward using the flopping butterfly stroke that he’d invented. The shore was in sight, news cameras massing by the water. The crowd had grown. They spilled over the horseshoe steps. Jack’s wife, Elaine, was among them, a former water ballerina who had chain-smoked and lived on donuts before she met Jack. “There he is,” someone said, pointing. A sixty-year-old man pulling a boat.

Handcuffed. Shackled. He was Houdini, except he wasn’t trying to escape. If Jack had his way he would be chained to this boat forever. They’d add a new one every day until he was pulling the whole world behind him. Until he was carrying all of us on his back into a future where human potential was limitless.

Age is a state of mind, he told people. That was the secret. He would finish this swim and bound from the surf. He would leap into the air, like a boxer after a knockout. Maybe he’d even drop and knock off a hundred push-ups. He felt that good. At Jack’s age, most men were stooped over, whining about their backs. They were nervous about the end. But not Jack. When he turned seventy he would swim for seventy hours pulling seventy boats filled with seventy people. When he turned a hundred they would rename the country after him. He would wake every morning with a boner of steel until the end of time.

On shore, Scott stood on tiptoes and stared out at the water. His parents were forgotten. The lunch he hadn’t liked. There was nothing on earth now except the scene before him. The boy watched as the man in the swim cap struggled against the tide. Stroke after stroke, muscle against nature, willpower in defiance of witless primal forces. The crowd was on its feet, urging the swimmer on, stroke by stroke, inch by inch, until Jack LaLanne was walking out of the surf, newsmen wading out to meet him. He was breathing hard, lips turning blue, but he was smiling. The newsmen untied his wrists, pulled the rope from his waist. The crowd was going crazy. Elaine waded out into the waves, and Jack lifted her into the air as if she were nothing.

The waterfront was electrified. People felt like they were witnessing a miracle. For a long time after, they would find themselves believing that anything was possible. They would go through their day feeling elevated.

And Scott Burroughs, six years old, standing on the top step of the bleachers, found himself undone by a strange surge. There was a swelling in his chest, a feeling — elation? wonder? — that made him want to weep. Even at his young age he knew that he had witnessed something unquantifiable, some grand facet of nature that was more than animal. To do what this man had done — to strap weight to his body, bind his limbs, and swim two miles through freezing water — was something Superman would do. Was it possible? Was this Superman?

“Hell,” said his father, ruffling Scott’s hair. “That was really something. Wasn’t that something?”

But Scott had no words. He just nodded, his eyes fixed on the strong man in the surf, who had picked a news reporter up over his head and was mock-throwing him out into the water.

“I see this guy on TV all the time,” his dad said, “but I thought it was just a joke. With the puffed-up muscles. But man.”

He shook his head from wonder.

“Is that Superman?” Scott asked.

“What? No. That’s — I mean, just a guy.”

Just a guy . Like Scott’s dad or Uncle Jake, mustached and potbellied. Like Mr. Branch, his gym teacher with the Afro. Scott couldn’t believe it. Was it possible? Could anyone be Superman if they just put their mind to it? If they were willing to do what it took? Whatever it took?

Two days later, when they got back to Indianapolis, Scott Burroughs signed up for swim class.

He surfaces, shouting. It is night. The salt water burns his eyes. Heat singes his lungs. There is no moon, just a diffusion of moonlight through the burly fog, wave caps churning midnight blue in front of him. Around him eerie orange flames lick the froth.

The water is on fire , he thinks, kicking away instinctively.

And then, after a moment of shock and disorientation:

The plane has crashed.

Scott thinks this, but not in words. In his brain are images and sounds. A sudden downward pitch. The panicked stench of burning metal. Screams. A woman bleeding from the head, broken glass glittering against her skin. And how everything that wasn’t tied down seemed to float for an endless moment as time slowed. A wine bottle, a woman’s purse, a little girl’s iPhone. Plates of food hovering in midair, spinning gently, entrées still in place, and then the screech of metal on metal and the barrel roll of Scott’s world ripping itself to pieces.

A wave smacks him in the face, and he kicks his feet to try to get higher in the water. His shoes are dragging him down, so he loses them, then forces his way out of his salt-soaked chinos. He shivers in the cold Atlantic current, treading water, legs scissoring, arms pushing the ocean away in hard swirls. The waves are quilted with froth, not the hard triangles of children’s drawings, but fractals of water, tiny waves stacking into larger ones. Out in the open water they come at him from all directions, like a pack of wolves testing his defenses. The dying fire animates them, gives them faces of sinister intent. Scott treads his way into a 360-degree turn. Around him he sees humps of jagged wreckage bobbing, pieces of fuselage, a stretch of wing. The floating gasoline has already dissipated or burned down. Soon everything will be dark. Fighting panic, Scott tries to assess the situation. The fact that it’s August is in his favor. Right now the temperature of the Atlantic is maybe sixty-five degrees, cold enough for hypothermia, but warm enough to give him time to reach shore, if that’s possible. If he’s even close.