Light Lifting

by Alexander Macleod

  “Some people use the buildings on the other side. They look at the Renaissance Center and keep themselves in line with that. I think you’re supposed to dive down like you’re following the elevators. Doesn’t matter really. Just keep track of where you are and make sure you go in smooth.”

  There are seven of them up here on the roof of the hotel – four guys and three girls – and everyone else has already done it two or three times. It is nothing new. Kids have been jumping from this spot, the top of the Waterfront Holiday Inn, for years. The Odeon movie theatre is connected, built right into the hotel, and not long ago the two sets of owners were supposed to hook up and hire some extra security to finally put a stop to this kind of stuff, but nothing really changed. They only had enough money for a weekend guy and this is a Tuesday. Stace knows they will not be caught. Nobody is going to climb up that ladder and stop this from happening.

  The routine is simple. They start behind the line and sprint to the edge and scream as they take the last step and disappear headfirst into the dark. Then there’s a long, long moment of quiet and then the splash. After that, more waiting, a second long second of quiet, and then the surfacing, followed by screaming and clapping and shouting. Somebody always says Hoe-lee Fuck and somebody else always says Un-fuckingbelievable.

  Stace is going to do it, too. Doing is the only thing left. But it will have to happen soon. There are reasons not to, of course, obvious ones, but they seem flimsy and unconvincing right now and in the end every risk has to be measured relative to doing nothing at all. She feels it coming, though. The advance presence of a killer threat. Real danger waiting off to the side. It swirls around them like faint smoke drifting in from an approaching forest fire, but nobody else cares. What are the chances? It is the middle of summer, the night after a sunny day, and the wind is the only thing that demands real attention. A bad gust at the wrong time could mess with your trajectory during the sixty-foot drop. One of the guys sucks back a wad of phlegm and gobs over the side to test what happens to his spit on the way down.

  “WHAT DOES IT TASTE LIKE?”

  “What do you mean, taste?”

  “The water. What does it taste like? I always thought the river would taste like chemicals or like gasoline. Stingy and hot, like Javex or something you can light on fire. Know what I mean? From all the pollution and the pesticides and the factories? Does it taste like that? Does the water taste like oil?”

  “No,” Mel says. “What are you talking about?” She shakes her head, tired of the stalling.

  “It tastes like nothing, like water. I wouldn’t drink a gallon of it, but come on. Compared to the pool, compared to what we work in everyday, it seems pretty clean and natural to me. Totally fine. And it’s a river, not a lake. It’s just passing through, not sitting around waiting and collecting all that crap. I like the way it moves you and moves around you. You can feel the current pushing when you’re in there and you have to swim hard to get back to the side or it’ll just drag you away. You’ll see. When you do it, when you’re in there, it’s no big deal.”

  Going over the side is not the hardest part and everybody knows there are other problems. Like they say there’s supposed to be a homeless guy, some paranoid schizophrenic, who has made it his life’s work to toss a bunch of old shopping carts down here, right into the middle of the diving spot. He’s been doing this for years and they say there are probably fifty or a hundred-and-fifty of them down there by now, a tangled pile of steel rods and rusting wheels, waiting in the water for some kid to come slicing down head-first.

  Stace thinks about fold-down shopping cart seats, the places where babies ride as they go up and down the aisles. There’s a thick handle, a basic hinge, the plastic flap and two square holes where the legs stick out. The carts are designed to be shoved into each other. Their back panels detach and flip up when they link. She spins one of them in her mind, repositions it tilted forward, standing vertical in the water, a couple of inches below the surface. The panel yawns open like a metal mouth. This is why you have to go out before you go down. To get beyond the range of even the most revved-up psycho’s cart-slinging ability.

  “It’s fucking freezing,” Mel says. “One more and I’m done. I have to teach my Aquakids at nine in the morning.”

  She hugs herself, arms X’d across her chest, an open palm rubbing the opposite shoulder. When she stops to bring the bottle back to her mouth, Stace can see Mel’s hand shaking and hear the bones of her teeth banging against the glass before she gets her lips around the circle and swallows again.

  Mel pulls a thin towel over her shoulders and tries to wrap it around her blue, city-issued Lifeguard bathing suit with the Parks and Rec logo stencilled just above her hip bone. Eight hours ago, she was singing If you’re happy and you know it, splash your hands and blowing motorboat bubbles and splaying her arms and legs out as far as they could go to make a good starfish float. But then the evening teaching lines ended and all the kids went home and the Tuesday crew geared up for its regular run.

  That’s what they call themselves. The Tuesday crew. After the kid’s lessons from six to seven-thirty and the grown-up classes from seven-thirty to eight-fifteen and the lengths swim from eight-fifteen to nine-thirty, the pool empties out and the Lifeguards have the place to themselves. When the last customers clear the changing rooms, they lock the front doors and make sure they’re alone. Then they reach into the zippered side pockets of their gym bags, unfold their protective, cushioning towels, and pass around the warm-up bottles of Dr. McGilligudy’s Peppermint Schnapps and Absolut Vodka and Boone’s Farm screw-cap wine.

  All the energy in the place turns to what is coming. They hand the bottles around and pound it back as they rush through the required maintenance checklists from the Ministry of Public Health: Decks hosed and squeegeed, metal mirrors windexed, tests for chlorine and pH levels, eyedroppers dripped five times into tiny graduated cylinders. Spritzes of WHMIS-approved disinfectant squirted into the urine-soaked corners of the bathroom stalls, toilet paper dispensers refilled, rodent-sized nests of woven anonymous hair scooped from the filter traps. Robot vacuum cleaners tossed into the deep end and dispatched for a night’s work crawling along the bottom to consume lost Band-Aids, random coins, and flakes of discarded human skin.

  Then out for some quick food, nachos or pizza, a cross-border run to Mexican Village. Pitchers of draft. More shots, ordered by the round and served in little plastic one-ounce glasses. Sex on the beach for the girls. Macho burning Prairie Fires for the guys. A bush party in the woods somewhere behind Holy Names High School or tents set up in a circle at Holiday Beach. Maybe Karaoke. Or taking advantage of the Tuesday night dollar-drink special at Club Vertigo. Shaking in the strobe lights, flashing in and out, writhing against each other until they turn on the real lights and the bouncers in their black STAFF T-shirts kick everybody out. A cooler waiting in the trunk of somebody’s car. People pairing off and disappearing behind the warehouses. Gossip gearing up for the next day.

  Somebody says, “Don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going over the side.”

  Talk about who is in and who is out. A dangerous, weaving, over-crowded, curb-scratching drive down to the river. The darkened side fire escape that goes all the way to the top. Guys do it in their boxers or fly off the side completely naked, but girls usually wriggle back into their blue, still-soaked suits. They arch their backs and mutter as they shimmy back and forth on the vinyl back seat or try unsteadily to step into the half-open leg holes while they brace themselves, not at all hidden, against the branches of a thin landscaping tree tied to a metal pole with a twist of wire and plastic. The nylon in the suits is so cold and sticky it makes all the tiny hairs on your arms and legs pop to attention and for the first fifteen minutes, before going over the side makes everything else secondary, the girls poke their thumbs in and pull against the seams around their armpits and hips because a wet swimsuit sucks out the air and clings so tight you may as well not be wearing one.r />
  STACE SAYS, “I don’t know about this.”

  She feels in-between. As though she is standing inside one version of herself while the next person in line, the girl she is about to become, gestures from a slight distance ahead and waits.

  “Don’t worry,” Mel repeats. “Once you do it, it’s done. Look.”

  She juts her chin in the direction of the other girl standing casually by the edge talking to the guys.

  “Look. Even Krista’s done it twice.”

  Stace looks and it is true. Even Krista. Twice.

  Then Mel does one more thing. She reaches out with her open hand and places it in the centre of Stace’s back, right at the intersection where the suit straps crisscross below her shoulders. She pushes her. It is only a nudge.

  “Out of the way,” Mel yells. “Coming through.”

  Everyone turns and Brad is there, dripping in his boxer shorts and smiling. Like the rest of them, like most of the Lifeguards, like every serious swimmer, he seems purposely designed for water. He has long arms that hang down to his knees, big hands and big feet. There is a slightly green tinge in his hair and if he stays out of the pool too long, he starts to look flaky and overly dry. The team he is on practices early in the morning and again in the afternoon, four hours a day. He is capable of almost anything. Stace has watched him sit cross-legged on the bottom of the deep end, holding his breath for five minutes, without any sign of struggle. There’s a tattoo of the Canadian flag on his shoulder, an earring glinting on the left side of his head, and the stubble on his chest and legs is just beginning to grow back.

  The red light reflecting from the big O in the Odeon sign shines up on one half of him and from this angle Stace thinks he barely seems possible. He is not a real person anymore, but something more like a photo-shopped image of what the person is supposed to look like – Victor Davis at the Olympics – or the template Lifeguard character cut from the Sears Catalogue and brought to life with all his altered pixels and re-touchings. It seems like his whole torso, the bones of his rib cage and the internal organs that beat and pulsate inside of him, have been packaged like this to accentuate the way those two S-shaped slivers of muscle run lean down his sides before cutting across his abdomen and swerving – it’s ridiculous – swerving like two arrows leading your eyes down the front of his shorts. The wind continues to move over and around everybody else, but he does not shiver. He is, like her, somewhere in his early twenties, but Stace senses that his time is already passing. At the very most, he can keep it up, stay impossible like this, for only two or three more years.

  An hour ago they were dancing in the blinking lights at Vertigo. She turned her back to him, bent her knees and leaned her shoulders into his chest. She let him rest his hands on her hips and run them down over her thighs in time to the throbbing music. They swayed like that, both facing the same direction and sometimes she would reach all the way around and put her hand on his back to pull him in closer and feel his whole body coming through his clothes. Sweat dripping down from his hair and the tip of his nose, his sternum square and flat in the middle of his chest, and his already hard cock, bent sideways in his jeans. He put his fingers on the side of her face, pulled the hair away from her ear and half-kissed her neck. Though the music was loud and she could feel the beat coming up through the floor, she heard it clearly when he whispered about how he had always wanted her.

  “Always,” he said. “Since that first day, right from the beginning. I knew we would end up like this. I could feel it from the start.”

  “Me, too,” she told him, not turning around. “Me, too.”

  FOR THE LAST SEVERAL MINUTES – since they spilled out of the car and climbed to the roof – she had been trying to figure out exactly where they stand now relative to each other. She sat on his lap in the car and he put his hand on the bare skin of her stomach, in the gap between her T-shirt and jeans. On the roof, they snatched quick secret looks back and forth. In the complicated calculus of getting it on, she knows they are approaching a limit, but she isn’t sure what the line signifies, or what a step across it will require.

  A slow clapping starts up and she hears her name chanted, broken down into two halves.

  – Stay-see, the voices say.

  Then again – Stay-see and Stay-see and Stay-see.

  When the speed picks up and the clapping gets faster, the back becomes the front and all she hears is – see-Stay, see-Stay, see-Stay. Brad’s voice rumbling through under the other sounds. There is something extra in the way he calls her name.

  The added attention makes it impossible to do nothing anymore. She starts up: left, right, left, right, in time with the rhythm. Stay-see, Stay-see, before see-Stay, see-Stay. Her arms follow along, pumping, and her breath goes in and out, a bit ragged. With every rotation she is running out of space. When she plants down hard for the takeoff, she splashes into the middle of a small puddle that has formed in the jumping-off spot others have already used many times before. Even as she tries to launch herself out, she feels the slip, all her traction giving out. She knows it immediately, knows with an absolute and instant clarity, that she doesn’t have enough. There is no force behind her, no momentum to carry her forward. As she goes over the side, stumbles really, she hears Krista’s tinny, whiny voice and catches the two, sucked-in, hissing words.

  – “Missed it.”

  There is nothing in the sky. A thin whispering dark surrounds her while another one, a different dark, thicker and shifting, waits below.

  As she falls, she is surprised to find that even as it is happening – even as her voice pours out and her arms and legs wheel in the air and she rolls down so clumsily and so totally unlike a swan – even as this is happening, she is surprised to find there is time for lucid reflection and simple calculations. How did she get here, to exactly this point? What purposeful first step could have lead so directly to that last one?

  There is also enough time to think about the way something soft passes through something hard. Cheese yielding to the cheese grater. Playdough’s Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop. The garlic press. Greasy burgers dripping on the grill. The carts are a hard net waiting below the high wire act, a sieve.

  All the way out, then all the way down.

  She thinks about her arc, her way through the air.

  How far is far enough? How close too close? Her cheeks inflate, a pair of useless parachutes. The light in the water or the light in the sky turns sideways and the Renaissance Center seems to bend over and touch its toes. She tucks her eyes into the crook of her elbow, braces against the emptiness, and waits for contact.

  Before any of this, the ocean came first. It was the original problem and if you had to look for beginnings the source for everything that came later. She was seven years old, travelling with her parents on a doomed vacation in Nova Scotia and it happened on a sharp, stony beach across the highway from a cluster of brown housekeeping cottages. Each little plywood house had a clever kitchenette, a folding table, two sets of bunk beds, green polyester comforters and a supply of thin, over-laundered towels. The cupboards held place settings for four and came equipped with nearly enough cutlery. A regular tourist place, nothing special, but it comes back to her all the time, like a crime scene photograph, barging uninvited into her mind with all its black and white details. Before she took hold, signed herself up and started to turn around, almost anything could trigger an attack.

  There was – she remembers – a time a couple of years ago when a visiting license plate from ‘Canada’s Ocean Playground’ went into her brain the wrong way and her throat started to close up all on its own. Her neck felt like an arm squeezed inside a blood-pressure cuff. She started to cough and gagged and had to turn away from the street, sit down on a park bench, close her eyes, and put her head between her knees. She cupped her hands over her mouth and nose and concentrated hard on sucking back her own air until the sleeve loosened and the clenching hissed away.

  It had become a biological fact in her lif
e, like a severe allergy or a fundamental and unalterable weakness in her body. Bad news stamped out in her genetic code. Fear was an illness, a virus that forced its way in, compromised your immunity and damaged your defences in ways that couldn’t be fixed. There was a force that lived inside of all deep water – she knew it intimately – a starving, swallowing power that pulled everything down into itself. It had chased her for years, back from Nova Scotia, away from the pool parties of her childhood and the reckless Spring Break opportunities of high school and university. Even long bridge crossings made her uncomfortable and she never liked it when the airplane stewardesses, with their bored and glassy expressions, pretended to pull the tabs that would inflate the lifejacket under your seat in the unlikely event of an emergency. And those trickling sounds – the recordings of breaking waves some people used for relaxation – they gave her a twisting feeling deep in her gut and bowels, as if someone were wringing out her intestines like a wet dishcloth.

  She’d seen something like it only once before in another person, a woman in an elevator. There was no predicting it. The doors closed like they always do and the little room started its descent. But then the woman’s eyes went erratic and she made a whimpering sound and involuntary muscle spasms rippled up through her back and shoulders and neck.

  She said it quietly first, “I have to get out of here. I have to get out right now.” Then louder: “Let me out. Let me out. Open the door. I have to get out.”

  She pounded on the red emergency button and her head swivelled around the top and bottom corners of the elevator, looking for a different exit. Then there was an exhausted groan, a full submission, and she went blank and fainted. Stace caught her by the waist as she went down and when the doors opened on the ground floor she was holding this stranger’s body up. The lady’s head rested on her shoulder like a sleeping toddler.

  NOVA SCOTIA HAD BEEN wrong from the start and they should have turned back earlier. It rained for a week, seven solid days and nights. The wipers got stuck at their highest setting and even when the sun came out, they kept banging back and forth like a pair of deranged metronomes. Her father missed the turn at Rivière-du-Loup, couldn’t ask for directions, and had to double back. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. The Bluenose Schooner from the dime was out on tour and a lazy-looking moose nearly killed them when it wandered out of the fog on the Cabot Trail. They swerved to avoid her and the guard rail left a long scar across their sliding door on the passenger side. Stace broke a tooth at the Fortress of Louisburg biting into an unbuttered chunk of old-fashioned, “historically accurate” bread that looked like a cannon ball baked in a dusty forge. They drank only Pepsi and ate nothing but blond, deep-fried morsels of indistinguishable seafood served in fake woven baskets with red and white checked wax paper and little plastic cups of pale green coleslaw served on the side. When the rain finally gave up, the air still felt damp and cold.