The Divers' Game

by Jesse Ball

  ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT. THE BOY WAS TALKING. HE’S AT a house in Sarvis Park.

  What? Sarvis Park, that’s a long goddamn walk.

  Is he at Sarvis Park?

  Yeah, that’s where he is.

  Why didn’t you tell us before?

  He asked me not to tell.

  So why are you telling now?

  I guess, I figure it’s gone on too long.

  Sarvis Park. What is it he’s doing there?

  He’s with some friends.

  Which friends?

  I don’t know.

  You do know.

  I don’t know.

  Have you been to Sarvis Park?

  Yeah, sure.

  So where is it in Sarvis Park?

  It’s by the water thing—the tall water thing.

  Aqueduct?

  Yeah, by the aqueduct. It’s a big brick building, right next to it. I’ve been there a ton of times. We can go there. I’ll show you.

  Carson and Chester looked at each other. They stood.

  You better start thinking about your own hide, kid.

  He sounded almost sorry to have to say it.

  What is it? What is it?

  There’s no aqueduct in Sarvis Park.

  ANOTHER WAY OF LOOKING AT IT WOULD BE THAT A boy had been dragged out of his house, that a boy had been dragged up and down the town, that a boy had been dragged into this building and that building, and threatened and spoken to roughly, and that through it all he had just spouted nonsense like a pull toy. No matter how he was dragged, no matter where he was taken, his mouth went on mumbling anything at all. What do you do with such a boy? An embroiderer like that will just keep on embroidering. First he says to go to this avenue and then to that avenue to this boulevard and then to that. How can a boy be made to be serious when the heart of being a boy is irreverence and disrespect? How do you trick the answer out of him? Or is it just patience? Is patience a trick?

  TO A BOY EVERYTHING IS FANTASY. AND THE FANTASY of a child is compelling. It is vivid and it doesn’t feel very different from real life, except that it can’t persist. At some point it shatters, and the thing that was there all along remains.

  Maybe none of it was the way we’ve said, not exactly. Could it have been similar to that? Just similar? Maybe it was that people thought the boy knew something and they went about it nicely, just begging him to tell them. And maybe because he was afraid he thought of it that way, the way we’ve said: that he was hounded this way and that, beaten and hurt by thugs. Maybe he was just in a room, in a simple room, and people were being kind to him. The world we live in is unreasonable because however marvelous our fantasies become, real things are more marvelous still, and more frightening. Isn’t it all just too terrible even to ponder?

  MR. SPENCER SAT AT HIS DESK BENEATH A LARGE LITHOGRAPH. The print showed the scene of a hanging. Underneath there was a banner that twisted through the crowd, and the banner said in clear letters, THE DEATH OF THE HERO LAMBERT MA. You would imagine such a picture would be sentimental, but the details were all correct. The body looked exactly as a hanged body should, and the expressions of the people in the crowd were quite correct. These were people who had seen a hanging and now knew both more and less about themselves.

  The room was dark. All the things in it were of great expense. Harren Spencer had acquired them all, but he did not enjoy them. What it was he enjoyed—that was not something he had ever shared with anyone. What he did share was his resentment. He resented being branded. He resented having his thumb chopped off. He resented having to live in Row House. So he had plastic surgery on his face and he wasn’t branded anymore. He had a prosthetic thumb, so his hand looked right. He paid the guards so no one said anything ever. And he paid to make sure his son wasn’t branded either. That had been the plan all along. At some point they would move out of Row House, and he and his wife and son would live as pats. In the meantime, he was a prosperous man.

  He sat and looked at the carpet directly in front of his desk. What was there, what was on the carpet was something that was of interest to him, but it was not something he liked. There was a bench and a boy was sitting on it. He had his head in his hands, and he was crying. The noise had been going on for some time.

  Spencer’s wife leaned against the window. Occasionally she would look out it and give them news about what she saw.

  She’d say,

  The helmets are pushing the crowd back into the barriers. Pretty soon the gas’ll start. The brown gas, I think. Wouldn’t you bet on it, the brown? Not the green?

  Or,

  Looks like this little bitch is even worse than the last. I heard half the stores on Weston are broken into. The hospital’s full. God knows what will happen next.

  Or,

  Look at these people crawling out of the crowd on hands and knees. Could you imagine? On your hands and knees in a crowd?

  She hated the Day of the Infanta. Or most of it she hated; she liked the part at the end. If things went badly and they chose against her, and the mannequin Infanta was thrown to the crowd, well, that was fun to watch. If that didn’t quiet the crowd down, though—then they sometimes threw the actual Infanta down. Nobody really knew what to feel about that. It was the blood and bone of the festival itself—the heart of the whole thing. It was even especially senseless because the crowd was never calmer after they got the child in their grips. It sent it all off—and there would be riots and riots, and the guards would have to step in. Which way would it go? Of course they were safe in this house. Somehow rioters know—they should mostly destroy their own neighborhoods. And that’s why the parade always ended back in the Lackal, the worst part of Row House.

  She tapped the ends of her forefingers against one another very rapidly like type. She was nervous, and she talked when she was nervous. She was afraid, and when she was afraid she talked and talked, she talked just like her nervous self but more.

  Where was her son? It buzzed through her head like the endless paths and shafts of never shot arrows. Her son. Ollie. She was his mother; of course she should think certain things. But it wasn’t just her who thought them. Everyone agreed. Ollie didn’t want much—he was quiet, sweet, had never had many friends. Until they found Eben to take him around. That had been his father’s idea, and what an idea it was. Trust her boy to this older kid who leaves him somewhere in the city and comes back by himself like it didn’t matter. She felt an anger rise in her, but it turned immediately on a wave of fear when her eyes passing along the wall found the clock. Another hour gone and Ollie was still not there. What good was it? Probably this idiot kid didn’t even know anything.

  LET’S LET THE LITTLE SHIT GO, SHE SAID.

  She went and sat next to Eben.

  He’s a kid. She ruffled his hair. So we said he should watch Ollie. He’s still a kid. How responsible can he be. Let him go.

  Spencer watched her. He nodded.

  You’re right. If he knew anything, he’d have said it already.

  Eben stayed sitting right where he was, stiff under the woman’s hand.

  If he knew anything, Spencer said, he’d have told us. A good kid would just tell what happened. It would have been the right thing to do, and he would have done it. Sometimes people who do the wrong thing, they’re wandering along and they come to a point where there’s a chance to go back, a chance to come clean. They’ve been on the wrong road so long, they don’t think there’s any prayer, any shot left, but all of a sudden there it is. It’s good to be able to recognize that—to see when there’s space to turn back, to be admitted back into the good life that was yours. Any clue might be enough to help find Ollie. Really anything might do, as long as it is a real thing, as long it is something that happened, somewhere you were, or someone you saw.

  Eben’s eyes were closed. What was he looking at, there inside his head?

  THE REASON WE WANT TO KNOW WHERE OLLIE IS—IT’S because we love him. We’re Ollie’s family. You have a family. You know what it’s
like, said Ollie’s mother.

  Mr. Spencer shook his head slightly.

  Well, our family is not exactly like yours, she amended. Your father’s a piece of shit, and your mother’s not much better. But you understand when I say we care about one another. We love one another, we take care of one another. You came along, last year, you came along and what did we do? We took you into our family. You became Ollie’s great friend. Do you remember that? Do you remember how it was?

  THE STREETS OUTSIDE THE HOUSE THAT HAD BEEN FULL of people—they were now run empty. Like water following itself wherever it goes, the crowd had pulled its tail after it. The parade had wound its way across the city and back, and the crowd in great anger had found some streets and surrounded them. It was always that way; at some point the float could go no farther, and that was the time for the judgment. Was it a holiday? It was a kind of organized civil collapse—and just then the moment was happening, in his beard the magistrate was stating his judgment of the Infanta, and of all she had done, and beneath a tarp they had readied the double, in case it went against her, and she herself, the Infanta, stood, completely consumed by the day, with no sense of what was happening or why or to whom.

  The sun burned in the sky like a fever dream. It should have been gone already. The evening had come, but it was there at the horizon, burning on. Somehow it would not descend any further. Or was it just time stretching, as it does whenever the mind courses over the landscapes, leaping fences, climbing roofs? Our minds behold the burning sun, and the thousands of revelers, in their wild riot, the tableau from overhead, a catastrophe of arms and fists, and all of it on the hardness, the impossible hardness of cement, roads banged flat, poured flat so that they might be walked upon, a place made expressly to serve as the stage for our life’s wreck. There was music, too, some song in the throat of every last singer, an anthem for those without anthems; it was the cry of the punished that there should be more—more punishment—more cruelty—more hate. Always more, never less, that was the song, and it was sung with the whole of every heart.

  But too there was a quiet note that came when the other went—and that note was a pale feather of a thing. It did little, it only named in order all that was, each thing one after another, a list of the world’s contents, everything seen in its measure, every particle distinct.

  And somewhere there was a rushing sound, as the entirety of creation shuttered back into one person’s head, and then another’s and then another’s, a whole world for every raging member of the raging crowd, and for each one there was as much as for any other, and it was always too much—towns and roads and skies and rooms, stretching on into distances unfathomed—the world was always so much that the revelers had to flinch away, had to retire from feeling, and feel not what was before them but instead what they had felt, what they might feel.

  EBEN LOOKED AT THE WOMAN BESIDE HIM. HE SHOOK her hand off the back of his neck.

  I’m not going to tell you because of your family or whatever you’re saying, but because there isn’t anything left but to tell it, so I will. Ollie’s always making everyone do things, do this, do that. You know him one way. I know him another. He threatens everyone. He knows they’re all afraid, well, Sat and me we stopped being afraid one day and that’s when we decided we weren’t going to put up with it anymore. We told him knock it off, and so what happened. He knocked it off, he treated us fine. That’s his character. You have to make him do things. You got to know that too, I guess.

  He leaned on his hands and looked at the spot where the front of the desk met the carpet. He didn’t say anything for a while, and then he kept going.

  Yesterday we went out to the ponds, the Sisters. If you’ve been there, you know, you leave Row West and go through the gate, they toss you, give you the shameshirt, whatever, you wear it and go out into the park, and you do it because you want to go swimming. The Sisters are right there, it’s not far. They are the ponds, two ponds next to each other, one is like a tear, the other one is like a, I don’t know, like a puzzle. I mean like a piece of a puzzle, jagged. They call the first one Lamp Lake, and the second Long Lake. Neither one is really a lake. I don’t know why they call them that on maps. We just say the Sisters. Maybe you’ve been there.

  So it’s a hot day, and Ollie and me are in the street there, just out the window, and we think about going to the lake. Someone comes up with the idea, and we’re trying to suss it out. Ollie says what’s the difference, let’s do it. So we go.

  We get down to the lake, you know, it’s Ollie and Sat and me, and then Porsino is there, and a few of his friends, and a bunch of girls they know, mostly a little older. Yesterday—maybe you remember—it was really bright, just bright as hell and hot. We get in—I mean, we’ve been doing it for years. Everyone goes there. The Sisters, you know, the ponds out by Row West.

  The kids are just spread out around the lake. We usually have some people watch so we know if anyone comes. Sometimes the kids from another neighborhood will try to jump us, so you got to be ready. I mean, it happens out of nowhere, even out by the lake. But there were a lot of us this time, so, no worries.

  He swallowed.

  But the thing is—there’s something special about the ponds, and all the kids know it. It’s part of why we go. At one end, at one end of Lamp, sort of by this huge tree branch, there’s a deep part, and it’s real deep. We always dive there. There’s a way you can do it, well, you go down as far as you can go, it’s like half your breath to get there, and you find that the bottom of the pond turns, it turns, and if you follow it, if you go deep enough, there’s an opening.

  He looked around the room.

  It’s hard to believe, but the two ponds connect. I’m telling you they connect—under the ground. So we call the tunnel between them the divers’ game. It’s rough, by the time you get along it your eyes star up, I mean you’re all dizzy and seeing lights, and then you have to go mad, you have to brutalize and just kick and kick and use it all and then you end up on the surface. If you’re out of it, which I always am, then someone’s there to pull you in.

  Maybe ten people I know have done it, most people are chickenshit. I’m sure over the years other kids have. But I only know ten. Rin Lacau, Bat, Satler, me, Enid, Gan, Laranie, Stoub, Mavis, and Borman. It’s a big deal if you do it. Some of them have only done it once. But you only have to do it once. No one will make you do it again.

  Dive down. You just dive down and find the hole, then it starts. I mean you crawl. From one pond to the other. The divers’ game. Always the same direction. No one goes the other way—it’s a rule, because, I mean, what if two people did that at the same time?

  He looked at Ollie’s mother.

  You’d meet in the middle, and there’s no room to turn around. I’m always afraid of that, when I find the hole with my hands and pull myself in. What if someone’s there? What if someone didn’t know?

  The part where, I know it’s hard to see it, but, the part where you pull yourself into the hole is the worst. Because from there you just have to go on. You have to trust that the tunnel’s the same. I don’t know how many reasons there are that it could have changed, but you think of them when you’re there, at the edge of the hole. Thing is, you can’t wait very long there, because you need all your air to get through. So if you wait, then you have to come back up. Then the next time you go down you freeze a little more. You have a habit of sticking, you see? Like when you’re going to jump off a rock, but you stop near the edge. It’s harder the next time than the first time. Each time is harder if you stop.

  Anyway, Ollie was too scared to do it. We teased him, we kept at him, play the divers’ game. Don’t you know the divers’ game. He’s kind of smaller, of course, and a shit swimmer. But there’s a small kid who did it, Gan, he was smaller than Ollie, a lot smaller.

  We’d talk about it, about the roots that you feel as you pass along, and which trees they must be a part of, and he was always left out, and the more he was left out, the more we
would talk about it. We said it was the whole world, better than anything, just crawling along there. He wanted to know so badly, I could tell.

  I said to him, there’s a light down there. When you’re halfway through, there’s a rock that lets off light. It’s silver colored and so pretty you could cry. You want to just stay there in the silver light, but you have to keep going.

  Satler said he loved that light. He said he thought about it all the time, even when he was doing other things. There was nothing else to think about, nothing as good.

  I said you expect it to be dark, and it is, but then you feel your way, and the glimmer is there, the glowing, and it is almost warm, like a dream.

  Ollie asked why I never talked about the light before. I always said it was dark.

  Satler said it isn’t really exactly like a light. I agreed. It is very dark. But the light, when you see it . . .

  THAT DAY THERE’S THIS GIRL THERE, LARANIE, AND she’s a good diver, I mean, she’s better than me, for sure, and she just lays into Ollie. She hates him. Always calls him a pat. Spits on him. She’s mean. She knows the divers’ game better than anybody. She does it just for kicks. She’ll get there and dive down, go through, first thing, without even building herself up. I can’t do that.

  But she hates Ollie. Did I say that? She gets a couple others to join in, so he’s outnumbered and she’s just ragging on him, and he’s sitting there on the bank looking down in the water like there’s something there to see. I couldn’t even tell maybe he was crying.

  Some reason this time it’s too much. So he clenches his face and he tries, just like that, he dives down, and then a minute passes, another minute, and then he comes up and he’s coughing and coughing. He says it’s too far. Everyone just laughs at him. Suddenly he’s the fuckup who can’t make it to the divers’ game, let alone cross it. I mean, even kids who haven’t done it are laughing at him, probably so no one thinks to turn it on them. That’s how it works.