The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  The only sounds in that darkness were the wind in the trees and my own breathing, which helped me imagine that the boat was afloat, cruising through the trees, rising and falling along the backs of great gray swells. My arms wrapped around my knees, sitting there, I felt more than I thought, imagining the fish, still alive and drowning in the air, piled high atop each other just through the wooden partition, gasping, sliding across each other. I sailed in this landlocked boat and imagined Mr. Zahn in it, not long before, perhaps singing a song as he pulled in a net full of fish and the wind buffeted the seagulls overhead, the birds trailing the boat like a broken cloud.

  The bushes outside, brushing the boat’s sides, were waves, water. The slap of a leaf was the slap of a hand, just as, later that summer—as we swam among the moored boats off Ephraim, or in Nicolet Bay, or especially in the U-shaped harbor of Horseshoe Island—Mrs. Abel would slap a boat’s hull and a half-asleep owner would emerge, shouting from the deck, trying to shine lights out across the water, shouting Who’s there? as we swam away, into the darkness.

  - 8 -

  At dusk, the day after I spoke with Mrs. Abel on the road, I lay on my bed in the Red Cabin and thought about her. I could hear her voice in my ears, inside my head, the teasing way she’d talked to me. I liked it, and I also liked how she’d looked, standing there on the end of the pier in the darkness—the slender, shadowy shape of her, looking out at me in the water as if waiting for me to come closer, to pull myself up next to her on the pier. Is that what she wanted? Did she want me to follow her, down the pier and across the beach and up into her cabin? And what would happen, once we were inside that space together? Would we talk? Would we climb the ladder into her loft?

  Standing, ducking to keep my head from hitting the masts and sails overhead, I hurried outside, through the woods, along the shadowy paths.

  I knocked on the door of Mrs. Abel’s cabin. As I waited, I leaned close to peer through the window. The table, bare except for a vase holding Queen Anne’s Lace, the piano, the couch, the ladder stretching up to the sleeping loft.

  I tapped on the window. Still no answer.

  Instead of returning to the path, home, I headed down the slope, around the cabin, toward the beach; the padlock hung loose, on the wood door to the space beneath the cabin, and I unhooked it and stepped inside, into that dark space. It smelled of dirt and old rubber; even with the door open, it took a moment for the light to seep in, for my eyes to adjust. Old fishing poles hung from the rafters, the floor joists above. Along the wall hung several black pairs of flippers, and some masks, snorkels. I picked up a mask, its rubber gasket cracked, its face cloudy; I held it up, snapped it around my head. I put a snorkel’s mouthpiece between my teeth, listened to my strange, hollow breathing.

  I took off the mask, the snorkel, put them away.

  The stairs to the trap door were steep, almost a ladder. Slowly, I climbed them. I expected the door to be locked from above, but when I pushed up I could feel that it was not. Still, it was heavy—the weight of the floorboards, along with that of the coiled rag rug—and lifted it only a few inches, then a few more, until I could see a piece of the room. Colors—blue and green—slid along the floor, near my face; bending my neck, I could see to the window, where the sun shone through beach glass. Pieces hung from fishing line, holes drilled into them, catching the light and passing it through, clustered against the window like a strange school of fish.

  It was then I heard the breathing, became aware of the sound of breathing in the room. I held still. I listened. It was her; it had to be her. The breathing was the only sound, slow and rhythmic. She was asleep, in the loft above me. Carefully, silently I let the trap door down. I retreated down the ladder, out onto the beach. I didn’t look back until I was several houses away.

  Later that night, once it was dark, I swam back and forth, short laps in the water in front of her cabin. The lake was calm; the moon was lost in the clouds. No one could easily see me.

  I was waiting, I was swimming, breathing to one side, then the other. I didn’t see Mrs. Abel come out of her house or cross the beach; she was simply there, suddenly at the end of her pier. I swam closer. I stood there, chest-deep.

  “Here you are,” she said.

  She wore a dark robe, held a towel in her hand. She dropped the towel, undid the robe’s sash and dropped the robe atop the pier. Even in the darkness I could see she wore no suit, and I turned to look away, offshore.

  She pulled a swim cap over her head with a snap. She was coming backward down the ladder, the pale skin of her leg, her hip and side, closer to me, her body disappearing beneath the dark water.

  “Did I startle you?” she said, laughing.

  “What?”

  “Isn’t that one of the main reasons to swim at night?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Skinny-dipping,” she said.

  “My suit’s just a Speedo,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Come on,” she said.

  We were ten feet apart, only our heads above the surface, the water a black line at her neck. She was silent, as if waiting.

  Finally I untied the drawstring, slipped off my suit and hung it by a leg hole from one of the posts of Mrs. Abel’s pier. Behind me, I heard her kick, the sharpness of her strokes as she swam away from me. I had no choice except to start after her, to catch up.

  We swam south—past our raft, past the Reeves’ raft, past Harbor House, past my grandparents’. Beyond Peterson’s Point, the lakebed dropped away and we fell into a rhythm, further from shore, over the deeper water.

  Once or twice we were close enough that I felt the kick, the water pushed away from her body, but we never touched, we never collided, the space between us elastic, the sky above dark gray, close, the trees onshore darker, the water darker still. And cold, cold at this depth. The only way to stay warm was to keep moving, and we did, out across Eagle Harbor, the village of Ephraim to our left, a mile away.

  I was anxious, afraid that I’d lose her, that she’d leave me, that I’d be unable to keep up, yet after half a mile or so I relaxed, breathing every third stroke, every fourth, shifting to a breaststroke for a moment to spot her, to see over the low waves.

  We moved closer together, we drifted further apart, aware of each other, not losing track. Two dark figures swimming parallel under a darkening sky, a mile from shore.

  We didn’t pause until we reached Eagle Bluff, the gray cliff stretching far overhead, the one jagged hole a hundred feet overhead—that cave was visible from our shore, almost two miles away.

  “Perfect night,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  We were treading water, gasping a little. Out by Horseshoe Island, lights slid along, boats easing into the harbor. In the other direction, the lights of the ice cream place, Wilson’s, in Ephraim, and those of the boats in the yacht harbor. The village looked sleepy; it was past midnight, only the two of us out there.

  “How old are you?” she said.

  “Twenty-six.”

  The stars overhead, we floated on our backs, drifted into each other, touched awkwardly and drifted apart, still close enough to talk.

  “When I was your age,” she said, “I swam from Northport to Washington Island, by myself, one night. There are cliffs there, at the end of the peninsula. I saw cliff paintings, once. Above the waterline, on the cliff. Someone in a canoe must have painted them.”

  “You swam across Death’s Door?”

  “Over the wrecks, yes. During the day I’d dive down, through them.”

  It was silent, then, only the sound of the water as the waves lifted us up and dropped us down, the lake’s surface breathing.

  “Did you know my husband?” she said.

  “I knew who he was,” I said. “I never really talked to him.”

  “I met my husband when I was swimming. I was far from shore, and he s
aw me, from his boat.”

  I treaded water, a chill returning to my skin.

  “I miss him so much,” she said. “I just thought we’d have more time. But walking helps, swimming helps. Distractions are helpful.”

  We started back, and I was more confident than when we’d set out. It also eased my anxiety to know where we were going, and how far. I led her part of the way, out from the shadow of the cliff, glancing back once to see the thin skeleton of the tower atop the cliff—almost a hundred feet high, but so much higher above the lake. I tried to imagine if someone atop the tower might see the two of us, now, two tiny black shapes crawling slowly across that expanse. Closer together, further apart, never quite losing each other.

  From Eagle Tower, which is in Peninsula State Park, a person can see for miles. The treetops, the islands, the boats, our cabin and our neighbors’ cabins, our white curve of rocky shoreline. Far away. Mostly it is the miles and miles of water, torn by waves, stretched tight by currents, all shades of blue and green. As a child I’d climb all those flights of zigzagging wooden stairs, past all those metal braces and bolts, and back then (like my daughters, now) I could not see above the top railing and had to squint between the lower ones. I can still feel that splintery wood against my face, my lips, the smell and taste of it, and the names carved into it, and dates, threats, and promises. (I never carved my name. I never sneaked up there late at night with a girlfriend, stripped down beneath the stars like my friends sometimes did. They showed me the splinters to verify their boasts.) I remember how the waving treetops below made it seem the whole thing swayed. Our car far below, the pale tan square of its rooftop in the parking lot.

  As I thought of the tower, swimming away from it, I was also aware of Mrs. Abel, off to my left. We swam. In the moonlight, the long curve of her back broke the surface of the water, glowing for an instant, slipping away again. Closer to the lights we swam, closer to our houses, into the shallows.

  Mrs. Abel climbed up the ladder and stood on her pier, above me. She pulled the swimming cap from her head, then wrung water from her hair. Her pale skin blended into the white stones on the beach behind her, and then she reached for her towel, her robe.

  “You’re not a bad swimmer,” she said. “You swam in college?”

  “High school,” I said.

  “Pool swimming’s so different,” she said. “The painted line on the bottom, all that back and forth.”

  I’d taken my suit from where it was hooked on the pier and was awkwardly trying to balance on one foot, to pull it on. Now that I was no longer swimming, I began to shiver. I couldn’t tell if I should also get up on the pier, or if I should wait for her to direct me, to invite me inside, or what would happen next.

  “What are you thinking about?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “We’ll do it again,” she said, and turned, walking away without looking back, disappearing into the shadows beneath the trees.

  I stayed there for a moment, long enough to see candlelight flicker in the window, and then I turned and began the short swim back to our pier, our cabin.

  The glassed-in porch was alight as I walked up the stone steps from the beach. I could see my father there, sitting at his desk, reading. It was likely he was reading economics, John Maynard Keynes; it was equally likely that he was reading Hoard’s Dairyman, or fairy tales, or had fallen asleep with Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” in his lap.

  My father can do many things that I cannot, and falling asleep easily is one of them. When I was a boy, trying to fall asleep, he read to me. He read stories to me before I could read them for myself. He read all of The Chronicles of Narnia to my brother and me, and The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down. By far our favorite was Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy. From it we learned that there are deep secrets, worlds behind and beyond this one, and that knowing your real name, knowing yourself, was a power to seek and a knowledge, if it can be found and held, to guard.

  - 9 -

  Today, I walk through the sunny streets, past a tattoo shop, a taqueria, a terrarium store, a head shop named Vapelandia. I go through a blue door and wait for my isolation tank to be readied.

  An elderly, white-haired lady tells me she’s waiting for her son. We sit together, on a bright yellow couch; a few minutes later, her son arrives: about my age, heavyset, with gray hair cut close to his scalp; his thick eyeglasses are almost like goggles, heavily bound—with duct and electrical tape—at the bridge and temples.

  “What is this supposed to do for me, again?” the mother asks.

  “What it does for me.” He mumbles huskily when he speaks, seeming unable to control his volume; he is not easy to understand.

  I listen in, taking off my watch, taking out my contact lenses, preparing myself. I pick up the notebook on the table, pretend to read the entries that previous, fellow travelers have left behind.

  “Sleep,” the son says to his mother. “It helped me. Remember when I didn’t sleep for two years?”

  I am led to my room, my tank. I take off my clothes, shower, slip into the tank that is lit by blue lights under the water; they cast my black, shadowy silhouette directly above me, as if I have left my body or it has left me. I stare up at it, so familiar and so foreign, suspended and exposed, and then I reach out, switch off the lights and slip into the darkness, the deep silence. The density of the water, it counteracts gravity; the temperature of the water, neither hot nor cold, blurs the edge of my body—there is no sight nor sound, no gravity or proprioception, no tactile stimulation, no speech. All these areas of my brain are inactive, gone dark, and beneath and beyond them, what is left?

  What is taken away is the moment, the apprehension of the present. My brain settles somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. What remains is the past, the future, the hypothetical, and all the impressions that have been hidden beneath the surface.

  I come here, I spend these hours trying to recollect, to see what will find me as I float in the black silence, a space that is not a space, where I am both naked and have no body. What I am, there and then, I don’t think there’s a word for it. A receptor, a traveler, a magnet. I drift back, I try to find a way forward. I listen to my breathing, I follow it, I try to clear that space and once I feel alone again, less crowded, I cannot escape my heart. The sound of it, and the reverberations it sends through my body, through that thick water. The sound of my heart doesn’t stop, all around me.

  What else I hear: the sound of water, and then I see the stream, slipping beneath the narrow bridge I’m crossing. A pail of blackberries swings heavy, hot in one hand. I look up and see the loose black strands of my wife’s hair, wet against her pale neck. Her legs are bare, scratched by thorns and brambles, walking ahead of me. On the other side of the bridge, we come to a tree whose thick trunk is surrounded by white slices of bread, and cinnamon rolls; dog food is scattered everywhere, and plastic pails of dark grease hang from low branches. Someone is baiting a bear, luring it here to shoot it. As we stand there, considering the tree, endangered by the whole situation, rain begins to fall in scattered, heavy drops around us. It thickens, it slaps the top of my head as I run after my wife, up the gravel road, toward the house. No one sits in the two rocking chairs on the porch, but they are sawing furiously back and forth under the weight of the rain.

  And then, blackness everywhere. Silence. My heartbeat becomes so relentless; I feel waves, turbulence; salt kicks up on my face. I lose any sense of the edges of my body. I am at the bottom of the lake, resting on my back on the lakebed, so deep that there is only blackness above me. I fold my body away; my legs first, then my arms and finally my torso, the whole thing like a thin blanket that fits there, just beneath the thin plate of my face. And then the music seeps up through that thick water, sounding, feeling like a huge creature is awakening, far beneath me, unfolding itself, beginning to surface.

  I shower, pu
t on my clothes, stumble out through the hallway with the colors so bright around me. I see the mother and son again, their hair wet, sitting beside each other on the yellow couch. I linger near the kombucha tap so I can overhear their conversation.

  “I wear earplugs all the time, now, everywhere,” he is saying. “It’s all too much for me, everything coming at me all at once.”

  - 10 -

  The second time Mrs. Abel and I swam together, we went out to and around Horseshoe Island, silently through its harbor, past the moored boats where people slept, then back toward shore, two miles in the darkness with the rolling swells pushing us along.

  When we returned to her pier, she took off her bathing cap while still in the water; she held onto the ladder and leaned back; her hair eased out and settled sleekly along her head as she surfaced. Then she climbed up to the pier. She stood there above me, for a moment, before picking up her towel.

  “Come inside,” she said.

  “I don’t have any clothes,” I said, pulling on my Speedo beneath the water.

  “We’ll find something. Come.”

  I followed her down the pier, across the beach, up the slope, around the side of her cabin. At the porch, she told me to wait; she returned with a towel and held the door open.

  I watched as she lit the candles, the kerosene lantern, then climbed into the loft. The skin of her bare back flashed white as she dropped the towel, moved beyond where I could see.

  Standing there, I was uncertain if I was supposed to, if she expected me to follow her up the ladder. I felt as I wasn’t quite in my body, or in control of it. I had fantasized about this, being alone with her in her house; here I was, and instead of doing anything I was paralyzed by disbelief.