Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

This is Chris working on a painting in her studio. It is a painting of the killer. She makes his earlobes thicker. She is sure he has thick earlobes. Possibly, they’re the size of the pads of her thumbs. She holds up her thumb to the portrait to use as a model for his earlobe, and when she closes one of her eye’s, she sees she can wipe out the killer’s entire face.

This is the water. The temperature warm for some reason, even though the days have become colder and the winds have started blowing, carrying yellow and gold leaves off trees in great gusts that remind you of swirling drifts of snow. The pool water, though, is warm, and you think after swimming only a few hundred yards you are already so warm and relaxed you might be able to fall asleep in the water, if only you didn’t have so much to think about. Alongside you the team is having an intrasquad mock meet, and every now and then you feel a surge of water from a swimmer who has just dived into the pool. It gives you a crooked stroke, eventually disturbing your path to the point that you reach in for the pull and hit your hand on the plastic lane line. It jams your fingers so hard that in turn you kick harder, responding to the pain. When the swimmers on the deck first start to cheer one another on, you think something’s the matter, and that people are shouting because there’s an emergency. Maybe they’ve noticed that the stands with the bleachers are about to come crashing down, and everyone’s yelling, trying to get out of the way. You stop midstroke to tread water for a moment and look up to see what’s going on. When you realize it’s just the team cheering, you go back to swimming, but you can feel your heart beating faster now, pounding really, and you imagine your heart is creating small wave pulses that radiate from your chest, and that the pool is just one large body of water with pulses pushing up against one another. You hear the heart of the water now. You didn’t know it even had one. But of course it has one. It can talk to you so naturally it’s alive. It isn’t speaking now, though. It’s allowing you to hear its heart more distinctly. You hear the throbbing, the voom, voom, voom sound of its soft pulses. The pulses seem to push all of the swimmers closer to one another to form one heart, to form one beat. You know you’re jumpy because in the morning Thomas told you that Dinah had called him. He thought the phone call was for you. “For a moment, I couldn’t even remember who she was,” he said. “She wants to meet with me. What do you think that’s all about?” You shrugged and shook your head. “No idea,” you said. “Well, I’m not going to meet with her,” he said. “I told her you’d see her at practice probably later, and she could relay whatever information she wanted to you. If it’s about conscripting volunteers to work extra meets that my kids aren’t even going to be in, I’m not doing that. You can tell her that right off.” In front of Thomas was a science magazine.

“Anything good in that issue?” you said, pointing to it.

Thomas picked it up. “Oh, yes, listen to this,” he started saying, but you didn’t listen. You couldn’t listen. All that you heard was a roaring in your ears, the sound of your blood rushing to your head, the fear and embarrassment of what could happen if Dinah told Thomas about you and Paul.

T his is you, standing in the shower after a workout. In the next shower stall are the woman and the boy in the wheelchair. The boy who says, “Water, water, water.” It is the same conversation they have had many times before. The boy saying, “Water, water, water,” and the woman saying, “Yes, that’s right. This is the water.” This is the boy being wheeled out of the shower, his head at an odd angle to the side, his eyes slanted and almost shut, as if he’s on the verge of falling asleep. This is you undressing in the locker room with the boy in his wheelchair, wondering if he is looking at you, because it looks as if through his half-closed eyes he is looking your way. He is not a small boy. He is probably a teenage boy, and you dress as quickly as possible, not wanting to be stared at. When Chris walks into the locker room to change her clothes and work out, you don’t recognize her. Is it the harsh light, or does her hair look less blond? Less like bright yellow corn silk? She’s also thinner, her perfect rear not so perfect anymore. The skin on her tailbone looks pronounced and red, as if just sitting on it hurts. “Hey, Chris,” you say. “How have you been?” “Good,” she says. “Would you help me put Cleo’s new suit on? This is her second one. You were right, they deteriorate so quickly. The first one only lasted a few meets before it became see-through in the rear.”

This is Chris and Annie helping Cleo try on her new racing john. This is Chris in the bathroom stall in the locker room, lifting it up over Cleo’s rear. This is Cleo asking if it will help if she holds her breath, and this is Chris saying that it just might. This is Mandy, the cleaning lady with the crooked teeth, pushing water into the drain with a mop, listening to Chris and Annie grunt while trying to get the racing john over Cleo’s rear. This is Mandy thinking they would have better luck with lard, if they spread it over Cleo so that the suit would glide over her rear. This is Mandy shaking her head at how ridiculous it is that the parents let their daughters try to fit into such tight suits just to swim. Mandy herself doesn’t swim, not wanting to fit her body into even a loose suit, a suit for old women with a flouncy skirt to hide thunder thighs and with extra support in the bra cups. She cannot imagine trying to wear the fast skin suits these girls wear. To Mandy, even the girls look strange when they walk in the suits, and she swears when she looks at the wet footprints she mops up from the tiled locker room floor that the girls are walking only on their toes, it being too painful to walk flat-footed in a suit so tight. She often hears the girls after they’ve raced cry out in pain when they try to pull the straps down off their red and raw shoulders in the shower. This is Mandy shaking her head, wanting to think about something else, wondering if the pickup truck she drives will make it to the lake this weekend. Her husband likes to fish and she goes with him, although she doesn’t fish herself. She likes to sit in the boat and hear the call of the loons while her husband lifts and lowers the oars, rowing toward his sweet spot near a far bank.

This is Chris after the suit goes up and over Cleo’s rear, slightly panting, and saying, “Come out with me tonight. Just the two of us. We’ll see a movie. How about it?”

“Of course,” you say. Things will get better now. Maybe you won’t think about Paul. Paul will stop kissing you. He will stop putting his hand up your shirt. Thomas will get better. He will talk to you about you. He will put down the science magazines. He will stop worrying about the lab. He will kiss your lips. Dinah, even Dinah will get better. She will stop spying on you. You will not feel as though the kitchen chair where you sit to eat your breakfast is sucking you down and the only thing stopping you are the armrests you’re holding on to. You will not feel that the drain in the shower can sweep you away. You will not feel that the floorboards beneath you will split open and take you down into the ground. You will not feel that the space between your bed and the wall is really a chasm you will never climb back out of once you fall in.

“It fits you perfectly,” you say to Cleo about her suit, and it does. Her breasts are flattened by the tight fit, the straps at the shoulders have no give, and she says already the circulation around her thighs is beginning to feel cut off.