Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

When you go back into the water to finish your swim, the water no longer tells you to stop. You have a good workout, doing a set of ten fifties on the fifty easily, until you see state troopers walk onto the pool deck. They look stiff in their uniforms and overly dressed compared to the swimmers on the team, who wear their low-backed practice suits, and compared to the coach, who wears a team tee shirt and shorts. You see the coach tell the swimmers to keep going on with their set, and then she talks to the troopers. You wish you could hear what they are saying, but of course you cannot. Swimming in the pool with everyone now doing a kick set makes it difficult to hear anything but splashing, and also the music is blaring away. It isn’t until you are out of the water and grabbing your bag to go into the showers that you overhear one gray-haired trooper, with a nose that looks as if it has been bashed in more than once, say that he was on the original case years ago when a young nurse was murdered at the same rest stop, and since then, he says, there have been several other women murdered, and he thinks the cases are all related. Even though you are warmed up from doing your swimming, you suddenly feel cold, as if the facility’s skylights have opened up suddenly, letting in a cold draft that runs over your wet skin and makes you shiver and makes you walk quickly to the locker room and into the warm showers. The boy in the wheelchair is in the next shower again. He is repeating “water, water, water,” and his aide is telling him again, “Yes, you’re right. We’re in the shower. This is the water.” You close your eyes under the hot shower, and an image of Paul comes to you, and then you know you must wipe the image away. I will not think of him anymore, you tell yourself. “Water, water, water,” you hear the boy in the wheelchair say, and then to stop yourself from thinking of Paul you say to yourself, Stop, stop, stop, and somehow, for a while, it works, and you do not think of Paul.

T his is Mandy sweeping the facility deck, thinking how can so many people, who must have some money because they can afford the facility membership, be such slobs and be so careless? There are candy wrappers left in the lockers and a pair of brand-new sneakers forgotten under the benches. Where she’s sweeping now, on the other side of the glass wall where one can see the lazy river, there’s a wad of chewed-up gum some pig spit onto the floor. Even if there are some members who haven’t been raised with money, at least they should keep their facility clean and throw away their garbage. While she’s trying to remove the gum from the broom’s bristles, a little boy comes up to her and asks her what is under the big metal grate at the bottom of the lazy river. “That? That is the entrance to the tunnel that leads to where I live!” Mandy says. “Really?” the boy says, and Mandy nods, thinking she misses when her daughter was young and gullible, and she reaches out to pat the boy on the shoulder and reassure him it’s all right when the boy runs away screaming, “She’s going to kill me!” and the boy’s mother marches over to Mandy and tells her, “Don’t touch my child ever again,” and Mandy, holding the broom, thinks how she’d like to shoo the mother away with the bristles of the broom as if the mother were a mangy cat who had wandered inside the doorway. Now this is Mandy sitting in the facility director’s office being read the riot act, which she doesn’t listen to, instead looking at framed photographs on the wall of skiers going down mountains that look too big to be in this country, and she wonders why an aquatic facility director has pictures in his office of snow-covered mountains, and not pictures of large bodies of water that are tempting to swim in. This is Mandy not being fired, but being close to fired, and going back into the locker room to mop, but then going into a bathroom stall instead and sitting down on the uncovered seat while still wearing her jeans. She shakes her head, and cries a little, and then shakes her head some more. She cannot help but think of the girl Kim, who was murdered. Mandy has stopped at that rest stop many times before, usually when she and her husband were on their way to the lake for the weekend. She remembers the girl, Kim. She always smiled at Mandy, and said hello when she saw her. Mandy thinks how the next time she drives up along that stretch of highway with the rest stop, she will stop and leave a bouquet of flowers in a vase. Maybe she can even get her husband to make a wooden plaque with Kim’s name on it and the date of her birth and death.

The dancing hippos enter the locker room noisily. The dancing hippos are a group of older women who take a swimmercize class. No one likes the dancing hippos, because they could just as well do their workout in the smaller pool with the lazy river, but instead they come into the competition pool and take up lanes and space and their hair spray gets mixed with the pool water and the cloying fumes get inhaled by all the lap swimmers. In the locker room they talk about Kim, how awful they feel for the mother, how they have told their own grown children to stay off the highways at night and, whatever they do, never to stop at a rest stop. Then they start chatting and laughing about something you don’t want to know about. They can carry on that way for long stretches of time, discussing inanities such as where they bought a potholder or how to rid the garden of blight, all the while blow-drying their hair at the sink and spreading on lipsticks the colors of corals and flamingos and baby blankets. You don’t have a garden, and anything to do with gardening usually makes you sleepy right away. You don’t know how to recognize different plants raised for eating unless the fruit or the vegetable is hanging right off them. You don’t know you need stakes for tomatoes or twine for training snow peas. You don’t care. Why don’t the dancing hippos just shut their mouths for once? Why are they always so loud about nothing? Why do they take so long to get dressed? Don’t they have families to go home to and chores to be done? You know that the minute you enter the door at home you have to start cooking dinner and feed the dog that will be barking continuously until you do. You know you have to empty the dishwasher to load the dishwasher before you even have enough counter space to be able to chop the vegetables and start the dinner for the family, and your girls will be starving, of course. They’ll tell you they are starving, and if you tell them to be quiet, they will tell you how many yards they have swum, and it will be in the thousands, and then you will feel bad for them because it is such a long way to travel, all those yards, without eating. Sofia will tell you exactly how far she has swum. She has been tracking how far and recording it in cyberspace. Already she is rounding the southern part of the island of Saint Kitts, and heading back north. You imagine her really swimming in the Caribbean. You see her amidst the blue and green clear water. You see her from up above. She is smiling. She is not concerned with taking out her first fifty faster, the way the coach has been telling her to do. She is just swimming at her own pace, occasionally turning her head to the side, admiring a nearby breaching dolphin, a pelican’s impressive dive.

The dancing hippos cackle, at least that’s what you hear, a high-pitched cackle that sounds like blackbirds or angry seagulls. You wish you were back on your vacation at the equator and not in the locker room with the dancing hippos, who are now talking about church. At the equator, from a great height overlooking the ocean, you saw a pod of whales that looked just like a breeze ruffling the water here and there. You ate a strange red fruit that looked like the inside of a fig when you bit into it, but almost tasted like a tomato. You used soap on your body provided in the shower that was in the shape of a seashell. You never wore a sweater at night or a wrap. You saw a snake rising from its own coiled body on the driveway to look at you in the headlights of your rental truck. You picked up a crab on the beach with a body as yellow as the sun and legs the color of Japanese eggplants. You stepped on stingrays that slid out from under your feet and made you jump on your surfboard and paddle hard away from them in any direction you could. You breathed in the air deeply while watching stars, and thinking what you were breathing in was some of the light from the stars as well. They were vast, expanding breaths that you thought made you think more clearly.