The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  Her face was lit, flickering, and her hair was in two thick braids, one hanging down her back, the other in front of her shoulder, its tip almost brushing the piano keys.

  When I knocked, the music stopped, and after a moment the door jerked open.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Did you want to swim?”

  “It’s not me,” I said. “I mean, not swimming. It’s Mr. Zahn. Something’s happened.”

  Mrs. Abel’s face was so calm, looking into mine. Gray strands showed among the black in her braids.

  “He’s—” I said. “I think he’s dead.”

  “Show me,” she said.

  We didn’t speak; I don’t remember if we spoke as we hurried through the dark forest, along the road, up the path. I do remember what Mrs. Abel said, as soon as we were in that screen porch where Mr. Zahn had been waiting.

  “Oh, Robert,” she said.

  “You know him?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

  A fly buzzed around the ceiling, the screens, and I watched it, afraid that it would land on Mr. Zahn, settle on his face, crawl into his ear or nose. The buzzing was so loud and I stood there, uncertain how to stop it. Finally the fly landed on the screen door, and I stepped quickly to open it. The sound was gone.

  “Are you leaving?” Mrs. Abel said, turning toward the door.

  “No,” I said. “It was the fly.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “What should we do?” When she said this it seemed like she was asking herself, or Mr. Zahn, not really expecting an answer from me. “He does have children,” she said, after a moment. “None that live too close.”

  She glanced over at Mr. Zahn as if he might disagree. And then at the same time as it seemed he might interrupt us, startle himself back to life and resume his carving, it also began to feel familiar, a situation that was not unexpected.

  Mrs. Abel stood; she reached out and for a moment it seemed she was going to touch him, but instead she touched the carved headrest of his chair. She ran her hand along the top of a small table, its drawers and feet carved to look like lions’ heads.

  “I think he’s been here, like this,” I said. “I didn’t know. I saw him the other night, but I thought he was sleeping. I didn’t know.”

  She had stepped closer to me, and I thought I felt her touch my bare arm, but then it seemed she was not that close, too far away to reach me.

  “It’s more sad,” I said. “It’s sadder, that he was sitting here, these days—”

  “It’s all the same,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to him.” After a moment, she said, “You should go.”

  “I can stay.”

  Mrs. Abel crossed the room, slid the knife from the old man’s gnarled fingers, then folded the blade away and put it in her pocket. She looked up at me.

  “Go home,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I’ll take care of this.”

  I glanced back once, from the cow path. Mr. Zahn still sat there in his plaid shirt and suspenders, his tangled white beard and hair. Mrs. Abel pulled a chair up and sat next to him, the two of them facing out, motionless, staring through the screen and into the dark trees of the night.

  Two

  —

  - 14 -

  The painter Charles Burchfield once buried a dead bird with a note that read Music exists in other forms. In his journal, he writes, “I saw a reflection of a falling cherry petal in a window and thought how like it was [to] the bird’s life.” He imagines that a “fairy, building a house of the wings of a moth, might use the transparent spots in the wings as windows. What would flowers look like seen thru them!”

  My daughters are always looking for fairies, scouring our neighborhood, searching for signs, evidence of these creatures’ existence.

  The other day, a dead hummingbird appeared, resting on its back, on a small table just outside our window. I saw the girls pick it up and carry it around; they were talking to it, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  I stood inside the house, close against the curtains where they couldn’t see me, and watched them. They leaned their faces close to the bird, whispering. They set it gently down.

  Friends of mine once belonged to a church in Montana whose beliefs described how we come from beyond, and live many lives. One of their practices was to listen carefully to a child’s first words, and to hesitate in correcting them. Our tendency is to try to bring a child’s understanding into alignment with this imperfect world, when their understanding, incomprehensible to us, is coming from a truer place, or may speak from the experiences of a previous life.

  I watched my girls with pride and tenderness, it’s true, but also with envy. I knew that if I slid the glass door open, their whispering would stop; they would look up at me with innocent exasperation and quickly cease whatever they were doing.

  Later, I found the grave where they’d buried the hummingbird, back against the fence, next to the rhododendron. A plank of wood leaned there, a heart drawn on it with black marker.

  - 15 -

  The day after I left Mrs. Abel with Mr. Zahn on that screen porch, I went to her house. I felt what had happened, that shared experience, had changed things between us, somehow, perhaps deepened them.

  But she was not there.

  That night, I swam back and forth in the dark water off her pier. No candlelight flickered in the windows of her cabin.

  On the second day it was the same, and on the third, at dusk, I followed the paths through the woods again; I didn’t knock on her door—instead, I went along the side of the house, down the slope that led to the lake. I unhooked the open padlock from the wooden doors and stepped into the darkness. Shadows eased to reveal the black triangles of the flippers that hung on the wall. The dull glint of the masks’ round faces, the dark crooks of snorkels.

  Closing the door behind me, I fumbled for the rungs of the ladder, then began to climb. The trap door was unlocked, and I eased it open, its weight heavy in my palms, along the top of my head. If she were sleeping, I decided, I’d go inside; quietly, so as not to wake her, and then I would wait until she did awaken, and I would be there, and we would talk.

  I lifted the trapdoor only a few inches, just enough so I could see through the gap, my eyes at the level of the floor. I hesitated, expecting to see her moccasins step into view, standing there, the rest of her hidden, above, awaiting some explanation. I listened. There was nothing, no movement, not even the sound of breathing.

  One end of the spiral rag rug lay heavily atop the door; when I lifted, it slid away, and then a chair tipped over, bouncing on the floor with several loud cracks. I waited, the trap door still balanced atop my head, and let the silence settle. Then I slipped in, slithering on my belly and standing up quickly, turning a slow circle to be certain I was alone.

  The room felt crowded, and there was a chemical scent in the air. I rested one hand on the cool rung of the ladder to the loft, its wood worn smooth by her fingers. My eyes adjusted to the light. There—in the corner next to the piano stood a side table; closer, I recognized it as the table from Mr. Zahn’s screen porch, the lions’ heads carved on the drawer pulls. I ran my hand along the dark, smooth wood.

  Gray light eased through the windows; voices still called from the lake, and the sound of motorboats, the last waterskiing before dark.

  On the piano I noticed a blue can of WD-40, which accounted for the smell, and walked into the kitchen, opening cupboards—her few mismatched glasses and canning jars, chipped plates—and jerking open drawers, the sound of clattering silverware filling that small space. On the counter stood a pitcher of water, two apples in a bowl; taking one, I bit into it as I turned and walked back into the other room.

  And then I knew that I’d been mistaken, that she was in the loft, sleeping silently or merely being quiet, seeing what I woul
d do.

  “Hello?” I said.

  Slowly, I climbed that short ladder, peered up into the loft. It was empty, only enough room for the mattress. I reached out and touched the worn blue blanket, pinching the fabric between my fingers. Stepping up a rung, I sank my face into the one pillow. Its case was pale yellow, and it smelled of bleach, not of Mrs. Abel. Did Mrs. Abel actually have a scent? Would I recognize it?

  I heard a sound—footsteps, out on the gravel driveway.

  Quickly, I climbed down.

  When the door opened, when she stepped into the room, I was standing awkwardly next to the table with that half-eaten apple in my hand, not sure what to say.

  Mrs. Abel only nodded, as if she expected to find me there. She looked tired, older than I thought of her looking. One of her braids had come half undone.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  We stood there for a moment, silence settling between us.

  “I’ve been talking to his family,” she said, and her voice was so soft that I thought she might cry, but she did not. “Some of his children, explaining what happened.”

  I expected her to light candles, the kerosene lantern, but she did not. She sat down at the piano and played a scale, high on the keyboard. The silence shifted, then settled again. Out the window the sky was turning darker.

  “His table,” I said, to say something. “How did you get it down here?” I reached out and pulled on one of the wooden lions’ heads, but the drawer didn’t open. It was locked somehow.

  “Here.” Mrs. Abel stood from the piano bench, brushed past me. “See.”

  She demonstrated how the drawers worked; they stayed locked unless you gripped the sides of the lions’ jaws, and then they slid open easily, smoothly. One drawer was empty, and the other held the pocketknife I’d seen her take from his hand. Silver at the ends, with a brown-and-white bone handle. I picked it up, heavier than I expected, and opened the sharp, shiny blade.

  Without a word, Mrs. Abel took it back from me, folded away the blade. She set the knife in the drawer again and slid the drawer closed.

  Other lions were carved down lower, on the table’s braces. Bending to one knee, I grasped their jaws and slid open the two small, secret compartments. Both empty.

  “I’m so tired.” Mrs. Abel stepped away and stood there, next to the ladder that stretched up to the loft. “Too tired to swim, if that’s what you wanted. I need to sleep.”

  - 16 -

  The creatures come to life. The wooden birds with their jerky wings, the deer with its blue beach-glass eyes, its stiff legs kicking the walls as it rattles around the room. Inside Mr. Zahn’s house, and I am in it, too, caught in the center of the room while I am asleep. It is as if the animals can’t escape; shining wings, serrated, cut from the lids of cans, scratch the walls, the ceiling. Wood splinters, cracks. When they brush against me, I feel feathers, not metal. I feel fur, not painted wood. A badger with human dentures for teeth scurries over my feet, a tiny sea captain with nails for hair totters past. Fishing boats the size of boots sail across the floor, up the walls, along the ceiling. The birds rise in a flock, spinning and collapsing tightly together, wheeling, and I stumble through to open the door to let them loose.

  And I open my eyes, expecting the dark shapes of bicycles above me, hanging upside down in the Red Cabin, the shadowy windsurfer sails, twisted around their masts. Instead, there’s the sound of my wife breathing beside me in the darkness, the curve of her bare shoulder, her familiar shape beneath the blankets. Down the hallway, the rustling of the guinea pigs in their cage.

  I try not to awaken my wife as I cross the bedroom, open the door, head toward the kitchen. Once the coffee is started, I check my email; there’s a message from an old girlfriend I’ve not heard from in some time. She writes:

  Yesterday I was in a sensory deprivation tank and experienced six very vivid brief hallucinations, each like a still photograph. One of them was of the small strip-mart where we did our laundry and ate brunch, in Ithaca, I think. Was it really called Suds Your Duds? I could see the edge of the truck and your hand on the steering wheel and little golden hairs sticking up on your wrist, and then part of the sign. It was a very strange brain event. I still have every letter you wrote for when you donate your literary papers to the Beinecke. Love to you and yours & hope to see you sometime soon.

  When I admit that I no longer have the letters she sent to me, she writes:

  I wish you’d burned my letters in a fit of rage! I wish you were angrier at me, because it would make sense of things a little more, but maybe you were then, and you would have mellowed now anyways. I have a very difficult time understanding what and how I thought of the future during that time. I sincerely have about as much access to my state of mind during those years after college as I do to my cat’s.

  The end of that relationship—that was just before the same summer I’ve been trying to recollect. For some reason, in trying to recall what happened with Mrs. Abel, I’ve hardly thought about or I’ve tried to avoid the fact that I was slipping away from, had been slipping away from, a relationship that had lasted for years, from college in Connecticut to Montana to upstate New York. I’ve not even considered the momentum that carried me into that summer. I wrote to her:

  I’ve actually been thinking about that time, that summer after we parted, looking through artifacts, trying to figure out what was up with me or who I was, then.

  Trying to write about what happened with us?

  Not exactly.

  Should I send you the letters?

  The ones I wrote, you mean?

  I’d want them back, if I sent them to you.

  The letters were in a box in her house in Toronto, and she now lives in Los Angeles, where she’s a successful screenwriter, television writer. Her renter in Canada could not easily find the letters; in the delay, my feelings about reading them began to change. I began to wonder if my attempt to understand the past was merely encouraging and allowing bad behavior in the present. I lost sleep over this; in the end, I thanked her for keeping the letters, and asked her not to send them to me.

  She wrote back:

  After you left did you ever think we might reconcile? Is it true that the words “breaking up” were never spoken between us?

  Reconcile is such a strange word. I don’t know that we really broke up (not that we’re still together!). I wasn’t really thinking of us as at a moment where we had been a couple and then we weren’t a couple. I just kind of felt we were moving in different directions—literally. Is that too vague and slippery? I really didn’t know, even then, about a future that was far away; all I knew is that we were going to be apart with no plans to get back together. It was months later, when I was in Wisconsin, and I distinctly remember walking around outside the cabin with a cordless phone, and you were in Canada saying (I feel bad about this) “Everything else in my life is clear and it’s good, except this thing with us. Did we break up? Are we breaking up?” and I was like “I guess so, I mean, I don’t know when we’ll be in the same place.” I was moving so intuitively and wasn’t right for a while, to be certain. Maybe it would’ve been much healthier if I understood how to break up? For me to know what I wanted, though, might be too much to ask at that time.

  Was it that you met someone else, that summer?

  No. It wasn’t anything like that.

  - 17 -

  The passages I copied down from books that summer—I still have the notebooks—largely revolve around and concern themselves with love and longing. I can see the jagged excitement of my handwriting where I transcribed these lines from Rilke:

  For one to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final product and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation . . . Love does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person . . . Rath
er, it is high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for another’s sake.

  Those words resonated as some kind of promise inside me as I churned through that black water, as I stalked through the dark woods with the wind roaring in the night branches, far overhead, as I climbed the trees and rode out the storms that came across the water, as I stood on the edge of the bluff and looked over the thick treetops shifting and swirling in the wind like another, greener lake.

  (Was I “becoming world” in those days? What would that even mean?)

  - 18 -

  We swam into the black water, through it, over the depths. When I breathed to my right, I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Abel’s bent arm, the stars, the distant islands and horizon. I breathed to the left and saw the lighted windows of the cabins along the shore.

  Inside those cabins were our neighbors, and they were talking, in those weeks after Mr. Zahn’s death, about the news that Mrs. Abel had purchased his house, along with everything in it. This, of course, sped chatter all up and down the shoreline.

  Our strokes slow and steady, we swam, parallel to each other. A mile from shore, the lake remained calm, though still undulating, rising and falling in long, wide, breaker-less swells; beneath us, the lakebed might be thirty or forty or a hundred feet below, rising and falling, and the black currents twisted, fish shuttling away as we crawled across the surface. Though I knew that Mr. Zahn was already buried, up in the Moravian cemetery, as I swam I imagined his body somewhere below me, spinning in the currents, a knife glinting in one hand, his white beard floating smoothly around his face. (As if he’d been buried at sea; again, from my notebooks of that summer—a passage copied from Chekhov’s “Gusev”: “He went rapidly towards the bottom. Did he reach it? It was said to be three miles to the bottom. After sinking sixty or seventy feet, he began moving more and more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though he were hesitating and, carried along by the current, moved more rapidly sideways than downward.”)