SIX
Jacob's gone on lunch when the cop comes. He's only a transit cop, but still, he makes me nervous.
“Smells like a tomb down here,” he says—his version of hello. “What happened to the old guy?”
I point to the ceiling.
“Dead?” he asks.
“No. Lunch.”
He grunts, filling a paper cup at the cooler. “That guy's a sour old fart,” he says, swallowing. “Can’t really blame him, I guess.”
“Why not?”
“Seeing what happened to his wife.”
“He's got a wife?”
“Not anymore. She had a stroke, turned into a vegetable. I heard they pulled the plug on her last year.” He shrugs. “Sad story.”
That stops me cold. My longest conversation with Jacob was on my first day, when he gave me the half-minute tour of the lost and found from his chair at the counter. All I know about him is he's a former subway conductor, running out the clock till retirement.
“Anyway,” the cop says, leaning on the other side of the counter. “Someone called in a suspicious package?”
It takes me a second to get what he's saying. I’m still processing Jacob's dead wife.
“Yeah,” I say. “It's over here. It was found under a bench at St. Clair Station.”
I heave the University of Toronto gym bag up onto the counter. “Suspicious package” covers a lot of ground. Anything really suspicious, like a gun or a suitcase of cocaine, never makes it down to us. We only get the stuff that's borderline.
Like this. A gym bag full of gas masks.
The cop grunts. “Kinky.”
“Jacob was the one who called up. He was saying how they had those terrorist gas attacks on the subway over in Japan, some cult thing.”
He digs around in the bag to see what else is in there. One piece of advice Jacob gave me my first day: never stick your hand where you can’t see where it's going. Needles and knives, and one time a rat, are some of the nasty things Jacob's discovered hiding in bags and pockets.
“The old man's got an active imagination,” the cop tells me. “These are probably for some student protest or something.”
I shrug. “You going to take it?”
He weighs the bag in his right hand. “Guess so. I’m gonna have to haul it all the way uptown.”
As he leaves, he says, “Call me when you find something interesting—a pipe bomb, or a severed head. That I can work with.”
Then he's gone and I can relax. I guess I’m just paranoid, but I always think they know. Cops, I mean. That they can tell, the way a dog can smell fear, that I’m this major felon. The thing with the stolen toilet is a juvie crime, which means it's wiped from my record when I hit eighteen, but still—they’ve got my fingerprints on file somewhere. After they printed us, the cops gave us paper towels to clean off the ink, but all that did was smudge the ink around. When my parents came to pick me up I kept my hands fisted so they wouldn’t see the black stains. It took a good half hour scrubbing away a few layers of skin to lose the ink.
About what the cop said, it kind of makes sense now— why Jacob, who must have three decades on the job, has been exiled to this underground armpit to run out his time. He must have asked for it.
I pick a half-sized kids’ basketball off the top of an overflowing box of sports equipment and dribble down the aisle. After you tune out the rumble of the passing trains you realize how quiet it is down here. Even the sound of the dribbling gets swallowed up by the debris stacked on the shelves.
What's it like seeing someone you love die like that, in slow motion? What's it like being left with just a body, its heart still beating for no reason?
Things I can’t ask Jacob. The kind of questions that come to you working down here in the dungeon.
I try to sink a shot, using an upturned lampshade for a basket. But I just don’t have the touch. Bouncing off the rim, the ball rolls away and I have to chase it down the aisle. Digging it out from where it's wedged under a bottom shelf, my eyes fall on the boxes of lost books. The ball pulls free and I blow the dust off it. Next to my foot on the floor, the brown leather book with no title lies where I kicked it the other day.
I pass the ball from hand to hand, wanting to turn and dribble back to the counter. But somehow the command never makes it from my brain to my legs.
I'll just look and see if there's a name inside the cover, an address or something. Why, I don’t know. What am I going to do about it? Sticking the ball under my arm, I reach down and grab the book. From the date on the Post-it stuck to the cover I see it came in ten days ago.
The feel of the soft, worn leather makes me cringe—feels too much like skin.
I turn to the beginning, with the mice and the drowning times. There's no name on it anywhere. Flipping through the pages, past the newspaper clippings about the dead cats, I come across handwritten passages. A lot of it makes no sense to me; it's like he's ranting in his own little code. But then he'll string a few understandable paragraphs together.
Crack slaves and whores been using this boarded-up hotel to crash. Didn’t need the crowbar to get in. Climbed the fire escape and squeezed through a broken window. Junkies and skanks are good cover. Cops will blame them and their pipes for the fire. Using thinner this time. They'll think it's left over from the sniffers and huffers. The hotel's a skeleton, stripped. Ripe for burning.
THREE LADDER TRUCKS RESPONDING. THREE COP CARS. TWO AMBULANCES. BIG CROWD. FEEL THE HEAT A BLOCK AWAY.
There's a folded article stapled to the next page. I open it up.
SUSPICIOUS FIRE DESTROYS REGENT HOTEL, it says. Below the headline is a picture of a four-story building swallowed by flames.
The basketball falls from under my arm and rolls away. I feel a tremendous urge to rip this leather-bound book of mental diarrhea into confetti—to destroy it and the warped mind it came from. Behind the words there's this big nothing where a conscience should be, a black hole sucking you down into the dark.
And no name. Nothing to put a face on the cockroach who wrote it.
Up front, I hear the door closing. I step over to the next aisle so I can have a clear view to the counter.
“I’m back,” Jacob calls out.
My turn to go on lunch.
“So, they come for the gas masks?” he asks when I walk up.
I nod. “He said he's sure it's nothing, but he took it anyway.”
“Hah!” Jacob grunts his disgust, settling into the grooves he's worked into his seat. “Bunch of know-nothing pretend cops. One drop of sarin gas can kill a thousand people.”
I only shrug, not wanting to argue chemistry and death right now. “He said to call when we find a pipe bomb, or someone's head.”
“Now they’re comedians. Wait till something really bad happens—and it will—while they’re off busting turnstile jumpers.”
“Yeah,” I grunt.
“What's that you got there?” he asks.
I look down to see that I’m still holding the diary. Every part of me wants to flush or burn the thing, but I can’t. Right now, I couldn’t tell you why. I should trash it, but that wouldn’t really do anything. It would still be in my head, and the psycho who wrote it would still be out there walking the streets.
“It's nothing,” I tell him. “Just a blank book.”
“Whatever. You’re on lunch now.”
I nod, half hearing his words, wondering what I’m supposed to do with this thing.
SEVEN
“I’m dying, man,” Wayne tells me on the phone. He's always dying. He gets hungry—he's dying. Gets thirsty—dying. Bored—dying. “I’m burning up in here. Stick a fork in me. I’m done.”
“So what are you thinkin’?”
“Let's hit the pool,” Wayne says.
“The pool?”
“Yeah. You know, the hole in the ground filled with water and fifty gallons of chlorine?”
“It's after five o’clock,” I say. “Isn’t it a little late
for the pool?”
“Not too late for me to spontaneously combust. The pool's open till sunset.”
I used to live at the pool every summer. This year I haven’t gone once. Maybe it's the nightmares spooking me. But right now it's too hot to be scared.
“Okay,” I say. “I'll be over in ten minutes. I’m gonna call Vinny. See if he's coming.”
“He never comes. In the whole history of Vinny, has he ever gone swimming with us?”
I give him a shrug he can’t see over the phone.
“Whatever,” Wayne says. “Just hurry up. Because I’m—”
“Dying. I know. I’m hurrying.”
When Vinny picks up, he tells me what I already know. “I can’t swim.”
“Can’t swim?” I say. Anybody can swim. Before we were apes, we were fish. I don’t tell Vinny about the fish thing because his nickname in school—what the idiots call him—is Flipper. Because of his left arm.
“Okay, it's not that I can’t swim. I used to when I was a kid. It's just, I’m not gonna have everybody staring at me and freaking out.”
“Yeah, I guess you have a point.”
“Big joke, right?” Vinny says. “Flipper won’t swim.”
I grunt at that. When it comes to his arm, Vinny's always ready to pick a fight.
“Besides, there's more urine in those pools than chlorine,” he tells me.
“Thanks, you’re really putting me in the mood now. See you later.”
I knew calling him to go with us was a waste of time, but I guess I’m kind of stalling. The thought of going in the water again—even just the pool—is giving me this nauseous feeling. I almost pick up the phone to call Wayne back and cancel. But then I shake it off.
Just get over it, I tell myself.
Mom's on the couch in the living room with the big fan blasting her. Her homework takes up most of the coffee table, the scattered papers held down against the breeze with a half-dozen paperweights. The weights are flat skipping stones gathered from the lakeshore and defaced with paintings of cats chasing butterflies and kittens sniffing soap bubbles, that kind of stuff. Mom buys them at a little store on Center Island. “I can’t resist,” she explains. “They’re so wonderfully tacky.”
“What's all this?” I ask, slumping beside her on the couch to steal some of the breeze.
“I have an essay due Friday.” She highlights a paragraph in The New Geography: World in Transition.
I shake my head. “Why bother?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. You gonna be a geographer when you grow up?”
It's an old argument. Mom works part-time up at the Wal-Mart, making a few bucks over minimum. I don’t get why she takes these courses over at the community college. I mean, she's got brains, but she's not exactly on the fast track for making the faculty at Oxford or anything.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to know something new? For no reason, just to know it? Expand your mind?”
“Hmmm …” I consider it. “Well… no! I’ve spent the last decade having my brain stretched against my will. It's been stretched so much, it's like an old pair of underwear with the elastic all shot.”
“That's a lovely image,” she says, trying to finish the page she's on.
Wayne vows he'll never read another book for the rest of his life after he graduates. But then I don’t know if he's ever actually finished one yet, so that's not saying much. He invented this system where you only read every fourth page of a book, so it's only a quarter as long. But he still doesn’t know what the verdict was at the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, or what happened to Gatsby, or if the old man in The Old Man and the Sea ever made it back to shore.
“This is madness,” I tell her.
“It's the opposite of madness. You learn something new, you'll be somebody new.”
“Can I be Brad Pitt?”
Without taking her eyes off the page, Mom reaches over with her marker and highlights my elbow.
“Quit bugging me,” she says.
“Okay. I’m outta here.”
I get up and grab my shoes. As I’m putting them on by the door, I call out, “Hey, Mom. What's it called when you’re afraid of water?”
“That's…hydrophobia. Why do you ask?”
I heave out a sigh, trying to lose the queasy feeling in my gut. “No reason.”
MAXIMUM CAPACITY: 200
That's what the sign says, but I guess nobody told the guy selling tickets. It's after six o’clock, and you’d think people would be home eating dinner or something. But the pool looks like rush hour on the subway—armpit to armpit, can’t do a backstroke without whacking someone in the head.
Before you get to the pool you have to go through these outdoor showers, which for some reason they set to subzero temperatures.
I run through. But Wayne, just to show who's the man, stands under there and takes it.
“Probably the first shower you’ve had in weeks,” I say.
He makes a face. “I could stay here all day,” he says, but you can tell he's holding back the shivers.
“You’re turning blue,” I tell him.
“It's good for the heart.” Wayne's voice breaks as he steps out.
The pool stretches from the baby end, where you’re lucky if you even get your toes damp, to the deep end, where giant squids have been spotted.
Little kids are squealing and screaming.
The sun burns the shower-freeze out of us real quick.
“Okay,” Wayne says, stopping ten feet from the edge. “On three.”
It's this thing we’ve been doing for forever. We jump in synch, two cannonballs hitting the water at the same time, splashing a tidal wave out onto the sunbathers lying out of reach (they think) on their towels back near the fence. Me, I think we’re getting too old for it. But Wayne's going to be out here when he's eighty, cannonballing in a wheelchair.
A momentary space opens up in the crowded pool.
“One two three,” Wayne shouts, sprinting for the edge.
The trick is to hit the water at just the right angle, throwing the wave out in the perfect direction without breaking another swimmer's spine in the process. It's a science. One quick breath when I’m launching into the air, bringing my knees up to hug them to my chest. Then I shut my eyes and brace for impact.
The thing about cannonballing is you never get to see your own splash. It's like throwing a punch and never seeing it land. When I come back up and blink my eyes clear, I can tell our aim was good. Two bikini’d girls are sitting up, staring death at us.
“Sorry!” Wayne calls to them, but his laughter erases the apology.
“Better watch out,” I tell him. “Bigfoot's on duty.”
Bigfoot is the main lifeguard. She's here every year, way up on the tall chair, looking down on us from behind mirrored sunglasses. It's impossible to tell who she's looking at with those things on, and I think that's the point. She's all-seeing. She's not Bigfoot because of her feet; it's her legs. We’re talking hairy. We’re talking scary hairy.
Wayne pulls our locker key from the inside pocket of his trunks. He holds it up between us and drops it into the water.
“Ooops,” he says. “Dropped it.”
I roll my eyes. You know, we grew up together— Hold it, that's not saying it right. I grew up. Wayne just got older. He's the oldest seven-year-old on the planet. He's looking at me now like a puppy, waiting for me to dive first so he can try and beat me to it.
“Man, that is so old,” I tell him.
“Maybe. But we’re going to be walking home in our trunks if we don’t get it back.”
It's a standoff. Like JFK and that Russian guy in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The question is, who's going to blink first. Who's going to be the winner, the JFK. And who'll be the Russian guy.
“That's a long walk,” I say. “With no shoes.”
“And no Slurpee money,” Wayne adds.
“Oh well.” I stroke over to the side and lean an
arm, real casual, on the edge. “What’re you gonna do?”
Wayne swims to the edge on the other side. He shrugs at me. I shrug back.
“Slurpee would have been nice,” I shout over.
“It's a real shame,” he calls, shaking his head.
Bigfoot blows her earsplitting whistle at some kid trying to climb the fence to get in free. Those mirrored shades miss nothing.
Wayne's distracted, twisted around to see what's going on. So I decide to give in and play the game one more time. I dive, kicking off the side of the pool.
It's a different world down here. No more squealing and splashing. Sunlight breaks up into waving bands on the bottom.
At its deepest, the pool reaches ten feet. It only takes a few strokes to get down there; then I start searching for the silver key. I’ve been practicing holding my breath, stretching my lungs, since I was a kid. But it's been a while since I’ve been in the water. I quit the swim team last year, told them I was too busy. I figure I’ve got at least a minute before I have to head back up. Something glints by the stripe marking a depth of nine feet, but it's just a penny, left over from someone else's game.
Crawling along the bottom like a crab, I almost miss it. The key doesn’t shine like the penny did. I pick it up and start to turn for the surface when something grabs my foot.
I know it's Wayne, trying to make me drop the key. It's just him. I know that. But my heart starts jackhammering.
The sun seems to go behind a cloud, throwing me into shadow. A second later it blacks out completely, like some kind of sudden freak eclipse.
My ears pick up a sound carried through the water, too distant to make out, but building with every spasm of my heart. It grows louder and higher as it gets closer. I turn in the water, trying to break away from the hand on my foot. The sound is coming from every direction.
A scream. A long, torn-out scream.
Above me, the legs of the swimmers hang down. They’re moving limply, all together, in synch. Like there's no life in them, and they’re only moving with the waves like seaweed.
I can’t look down. Because the hand on my foot isn’t Wayne's anymore. It's too cold to be a living hand.
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