Noah Hawley - Before the Fall

“Okay,” says Scott, “I need you to hold on tight and I’m going to pull you to shore. Can you — do you know how to swim?”

The kid nods.

“Good,” says Scott. “So if you fall off the cushion I want you to kick real hard and paddle with your arms, okay?”

“Dog and cat,” says the boy.

“That’s right. Dog and cat with your hands, just like Mommy taught you.”

“My daddy.”

“Sure. Just like Daddy taught you, okay?”

The boy nods. Scott sees his fear.

“Do you know what a hero is?” Scott asks him.

“He fights the bad guys,” the boy says.

“That’s right. The hero fights the bad guys. And he never gives up, right?”

“No.”

“Well, I need you to be the hero now, okay? Just pretend the waves are the bad guys and we’re gonna swim through them. And we can’t give up. We won’t. We’ll just keep swimming until we reach land, okay?”

The boy nods. Wincing, Scott loops his left arm through one of the straps. His shoulder is screaming now. Each swell that lifts them adds to his sense of disorientation.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s do this.”

Scott closes his eyes and tries once again to feel which way to swim.

Behind you , he thinks. The shore is behind you .

He rotates carefully around the boy in the water and starts to kick, but just as he does moonlight breaks through the fog. A patch of starry black is briefly visible overhead. Scott searches desperately for constellations he recognizes, the gap closing quickly. Then he spots Andromeda, and then the Big Dipper, and with it the North Star.

It’s the other way , he realizes with a sickening vertigo.

For a moment Scott feels an overwhelming urge to vomit. Had the sky not cleared, then he and the boy would have set out into the Atlantic deep, the East Coast receding behind them with every kick, until exhaustion overtook them and they sank without a trace.

“Change of plans,” he tells the boy, trying to keep his voice light. “Let’s go the other way.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. That’s good.”

Scott kicks them into position. The farthest he has ever swum is fifteen miles, but that was when he was nineteen, and he had trained for months. Plus the race was in a lake with no current. And both of his arms worked. Now it’s night, and the water temperature is dropping, and he will have to fight the strong Atlantic current for who knows how many miles.

If I survive this , he thinks, I’m going to send Jack LaLanne’s widow a fruit basket .

The thought is so ridiculous that, bobbing in the water, Scott starts to laugh, and for a moment can’t stop. He thinks of himself standing at the counter of Edible Arrangements, filling out the card.

With deepest affection — Scott.

“Stop,” says the boy, afraid suddenly that his survival is in the hands of a crazy person.

“Okay,” says Scott, trying to reassure the boy. “It’s okay. Just a joke I thought of. We’re going now.”

It takes him a few minutes to find his stroke, a modified breaststroke, pulling water more with the right hand than the left, legs kicking hard. It is a noisy mess, his left shoulder a bag of broken glass. A gnawing worry settles into his gut. They will drown, both of them. They will both be lost to the deep. But then somehow a rhythm presents itself, and he begins to lose himself in the repetition. Arm up and in, legs scissoring. He swims into the endless deep, ocean spray in his face. It’s hard to keep track of time. What time did the plane take off? Ten p.m.? How much time has passed? Thirty minutes? An hour? How long until the sun comes up? Eight hours? Nine?

Around him the sea is pockmarked and ever changing. Swimming, he tries not to think about the great tracts of open water. He tries not to picture the depth of the ocean or how the Atlantic in August is the birthplace of massive storm fronts, hurricanes that form in the cold troughs of undersea gorges, weather patterns colliding, temperature and moisture forming huge pockets of low pressure. Global forces conspiring, barbarian hordes with clubs and war paint who charge shrieking into the fray, and instantly the sky thickens, blackens, an ominous gale of lightning strikes, huge claps of thunder like the screams of battle, and the sea, which moments ago was calm, turns to hell on earth.

Scott swims in the fragile calm, trying to empty his mind.

Something brushes against his leg.

He freezes, starts to sink, then has to kick his legs to stay afloat.

Shark , he thinks.

You have to stay still.

But if he stops moving he’ll drown.

He rolls over onto his back, breathing deeply to inflate his chest. He has never been more aware of his tenuous place on the food chain. Every instinct in his body screams at him not to turn his back on the deep, but he does. He floats in the sea as calmly as he can, rising and falling with the tide.

“What are we doing?” the boy asks.

“Resting,” Scott tells him. “Let’s be real quiet now, okay? Don’t move. Try to keep your feet out of the water.”

The boy is silent. They rise and fall with the swells. Scott’s primal reptilian brain orders him to flee. But he ignores it. A shark can smell a drop of blood in a million gallons of water. If either Scott or the boy is bleeding they’re done. But if not and they stay completely still the shark (if it was a shark) should leave them alone.

He takes the boy’s hand.

“Where’s my sister?” the boy whispers.

“I don’t know,” Scott whispers back. “The plane went down. We got separated.”

A long beat.

“Maybe she’s okay,” Scott whispers. “Maybe your parents have her, and they’re floating someplace else. Or maybe they’ve already been rescued.”

After a long silence the boy says:

“I don’t think so.”

They float for a while with this thought. Overhead the fog begins to dissipate. It starts slowly, the clearing, first a hint of sky peeking through, then stars appear, and finally the crescent moon, and just like that the ocean around them becomes a sequined dress. From his back, Scott finds the North Star, confirms that they’re going in the right direction. He looks over at the boy, eyes wide with fear. For the first time Scott can see his tiny face, the furrowed brow and bowed mouth.

“Hi,” says Scott, water lapping at his ears.

The boy’s expression is flat, serious.

“Hi,” he says back.

“Are we rested?” Scott asks.

The boy nods.

“Okay,” says Scott, turning over. “Let’s go home.”

He rights himself and starts to swim, certain that at any moment he will feel a strike from below, the razor grip of a steam-shovel mouth, but it doesn’t come, and after a while he puts the shark out of his mind. He wills them forward, stroke after stroke, his legs moving behind him in figure eights, his right arm lunging and pulling, lunging and pulling. To keep his mind busy, he thinks of other liquids he would rather be swimming in; milk, soup, bourbon. An ocean of bourbon.

He considers his life, but the details seem meaningless now. His ambitions. The rent that is due every month. The woman who has left him. He thinks of his work, brushstrokes on canvas. It is the ocean he is painting tonight, stroke by stroke, like Harold and his purple crayon, drawing a balloon as he falls.

Floating in the North Atlantic, Scott realizes that he has never been more clear about who he is, his purpose. It’s so obvious. He was put on this earth to conquer this ocean, to save this boy. Fate brought him to that beach in San Francisco forty-one years ago. It delivered to him a golden god, shackled at the wrists, battling the ocean winds. Fate gave Scott the urge to swim, to join first his junior high swim team, then his high school and college crews. It pushed him to swim practice every morning at five, before the sun was up, lap after lap in the chlorinated blue, the applause of the other boys’ splashing, the kree of the coach’s whistle. Fate led him to water, but it was will that drove him to victory in three state championships, will that pushed him to a first-place medal in the men’s two-hundred-meter freestyle in high school.