Joshua Mohr - Fight Song

“Aren’t you cold?” Bob says, pointing at his Speedo.

“I’m Nordic.”

“Don’t remind me. How’s she doing?”

“She is accepting the ocean as another home. And it is accepting her.”

Bob fights back laughter. Why is it that the first thing through Coffen’s stupid mind is a wisecrack? Here his wife is going on forty hours straight of treading water and all he wants to do is say something snide to Gotthorm: How is a heated indoor pool anything like the open ocean?

He stops himself, embarrassed. Why can’t he focus on what’s important? He catches himself, composes himself, then says to Gotthorm, “She’s going to do it this time.”

The coach snorts. “Too soon to know. She’s made it this far before.”

“This time’s different. I can tell.”

“Fish swim forever,” Gotthorm says.

Wednesday looks a lot like Tuesday. It’s a bit after high noon. Coffen has run into the locker room to shower, shit, and brush his teeth, and then flees back to the pool deck to eat another Mexican lasagna — a snack that doesn’t age well. Each bite a chore. Each bite probable food poisoning.

Jane’s just crossed the fifty-hour plateau, which puts her nine hours away from her personal best. Nine hours away from uncharted waters.

That night, Gotthorm doesn’t come out to talk to Bob, which he takes as a bad sign. Coffen’s up on the lifeguard chair, peering in at them. The coach looks worried, leaning down and talking a lot to Jane as she treads. The African pompano has been thrust to the side. This can’t be good.

Erma, Margot, and Brent have gone home to get some sleep. The same judge is there, alert as always, clipboard in his hands.

Coffen channels his inner Gotthorm, thinking to himself, Why would a fish need any words of encouragement to keep on swimming?

Through the binoculars, Jane appears no different. Her eyes are closed. She paddles and sways her limbs with the same nimble fluidity. She breathes her puckered breaths.

But Gotthorm’s shift in demeanor has Bob flustered, and a flustered Bob Coffen isn’t known for shrewd decision-making. Pretty soon, he’s creeping up toward the window. Pretty soon, he’s pantomiming a big thumbs-up with a simultaneous shrug of the shoulders to Gotthorm, who responds only with pursed lips and a shaking head.

At 5:00 AM on Thursday, Jane’s been treading for sixty-seven hours, and this is the moment when her eyes pop open. The skin tone changes, going pale. Her rhythmic, puckering breaths go into shallower, almost panic-stricken sucks of air. Her head slips a bit under the water. She catches herself, rights her stroke, but it’s the first slip she’s made.

Coffen sees all this through the window. Face pressed right up to the glass.

Coffen sees this and wants so badly to whisper in her ear: You’ve come this fa r. You can do it. You can do anything in the world you put your mind to .

Gotthorm comes out to the crowded pool deck at 10:00 AM. He has the exhausted look of a surgeon who’s been doing his best to keep a patient alive, but whose tireless efforts might be in vain.

“Have you gotten any sleep?” Bob asks.

“We’re at seventy-two hours.”

“She’s really struggling, it looks like.”

“She’s exhausted.”

“Will she make it?”

“I worry she’ll cramp soon.”

“And that’s it?”

“Fish swim until they die,” says Gotthorm.

“Before you said that fish swim forever.”

“Nobody can wiggle a mackerel’s tail but that very fish.”

“Is there any way to help her?”

“You are in your own competition, like Jane and me,” Gotthorm says. “You’ve been here as many hours as us. You’ve been competing. I’m impressed. You are stronger than you look.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“She needs more strength. She’s used up all her dedication to me, used up all her personal willpower. She’s drawn all the fuel she can from having your children present. Now it’s up to Jane to keep her humanness shut off. She has to stay aquatic or she’ll give in to fatigue.”

“Maybe her fish-ness has gotten her this far, but she needs her humanness to cross the finish line,” says Bob.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Gotthorm says. “Only the ocean can baptize her. Those of us trapped on land, we are powerless to help.”

It’s certainly not the intention of Gotthorm to plant any seeds in the head of a certain Bob Coffen. That’s the last thing the coach is trying to do. What is he trying to do anyway? Why does he keep coming outside acting chummy with Bob? All Coffen can figure is that he’s impressed Gotthorm with this round-the-clock peeping and has miraculously weaseled into his good graces.

The seed that has been planted in Bob now drills down into his cranium and an idea grows. Time lapse. The seed is buried and the sprout shoves up out of the soil in one fell swoop. The seed itself is in these previous words from Gotthorm: “Those of us trapped on land, we are powerless to help.” And the idea growing inside Bob’s head is this: If the coach’s fish philosophy seems as if it’s failing, really failing — Jane’s head going underwater, Jane seeming as if she’s going to come up short of the world record — if this happens, then Bob Coffen has a plan to help her with some good old-fashioned humanness.

“I need to get back to her,” Gotthorm says, starting his Speedoed strut back toward the indoor pool. “The sea can flick a catamaran like it’s a cigarette butt. The ocean can hack up a submarine like a wad of gristle from a fat man’s throat after the Heimlich maneuver.”

“I still say she has some human in there,” says Bob.

“I pray not,” Gotthorm says.

The club closes at 7:00 PM, which happens to be the eighty-one hour mark. At midnight — when the plock strikes its only time — she’ll have broken the record.

Once the outside deck clears of other club members, Coffen climbs back up on the lifeguard perch to get the best view. Jane’s once lovely rhythm is shot. Her puckered breathing seems more like someone waking from a nightmare. Stunned. Scared. She is pale. Her eyes are wide open, blinking lots.

Erma, Margot, and Brent are no longer there. Gotthorm sits on the side of the pool and says things to Jane — words Bob so badly wants to hear. He so badly wants to help. On one hand, sure, he wants to respect her wishes to stay away, yet also he wants to disassemble those wishes. Obviously, they’re not the right ones. He hasn’t been near the pool and it’s clear to anybody’s eyeballs that she’s about to go under. She’s about to lose. And Bob Coffen isn’t about to let that happen, not without a fight, not without trying to help her.

Jane is not an urchin.

Jane is no manatee.

She’s not an anemone or a dolphin or a cuttlefish.

Jane’s no shark.

She is a human, a woman, his wife. This is real life, and she needs to hear real encouragement, needs to know her family believes in her. Whether Jane knows it or not, she needs her husband to be there.

Coffen throws the binoculars down, hops off the lifeguard chair. He runs toward the door to the men’s locker room. It’s locked. Of course. They’ve shut down for the evening. He knocks on it. Nobody answers. Duh. He slams his shoulder into it. Twice. Four times. Six.