Up Up, Down Down

by Cheston Knapp

  Admission is thirty-two dollars and I realize I’ve stupidly forgotten a towel, so for another twenty-four dollars I pick up a commemorative one that portrays a spacewalking astronaut. We change and grab inner tubes and head for the stairs that lead to the slides. A quick scan of the demographic reveals that we are easily the oldest people here without children of our own and, in this, we seem to charge the water park with an electric and mildly dangerous current. Families have come from afar to frolic unselfconsciously in various states of undress and our very presence seems to have corrupted this simplicity, to have turned the mood interrogative. When we reach the upper level, we find colored lines on the floor that correspond with the different colored slides, a system I know from trips to the emergency room to treat skateboarding-related injuries. James compels me to do the “Nose Dive” with him in a tandem inner tube, so we follow the green line. When it’s our turn, we hold the grab bars at our sides in the little eddying pool in front of the tube’s opening and wait for the signal that the father-son dyad who plunged before us have cleared the pool below. The bidet-like jet under the water behind me burbles upon my undercarriage in a way that is decidedly not unpleasant.

  Maybe this is what it means to grow, making myself available to experiences like this. Maybe I’m sitting at the mouth of no mere slide but a portal, a Super Mario–like warp to another world, one in which my fun force field has been disassembled and I’m able to cut loose like the good old days. The days of backyard birthday parties marshaled by Dad. This is healthy, I think. Necessary. I will consent to being swallowed by this monstrous plastic nematode in order to emerge out the other side a new man. And though we know it to be verboten, James pulls a rogue GoPro out of his bathing suit’s pocket. It is apparently his intention to film our descent.

  What percentage of the truth does video footage really tell? Does James’s tiny waterproof camera capture the anxiety I feel as we release the grab bars and are propelled gently tubeward? Or only the smile I force for the camera’s sake? Does the darkness that follows convey any of the speed and the jouncing we experience as we plummet down drops and bank around turns we cannot see? Any of the inner-ear disquietude I feel when we then debouch into an open-topped funnel structure halfway through? Or my tachycardia as we circle as though caught in a whirlpool, the jets spinning us around in such a way that by the time we enter the maw at the funnel’s center we do so backward? Can you place the moment when the timbre of my screams shifts from simulated fear to the actual thing?

  After what qualifies as an eternity, the tube expels us and we hit the sarcophagal pool of water. Relief and vertigo overwhelm me in equal measure. James hurries out of the pool and grabs our tube and makes for the stairs. He must sense my absence and turns to find me well behind him.

  “Go on ahead,” I say. “I’m gonna scope out the wave pool.” Barring extreme circumstance, like if I have to evade a predator or something, I have just ridden my last waterslide.

  He seems disappointed and whatever thrill of acceptance and camaraderie I feel at that is overshadowed by my disappointment in myself. Why can’t I seem to get out of my own way? “I and me are always too deep in conversation.” Will it take having a child of my own for me to be able to enjoy myself at a place like this again, to pay fifty-six dollars and receive something more in return than a commemorative towel and a panic attack?

  I walk over and stand on the granulated concrete of Splashdown Harbor. The waves don’t break on the shore so much as just sort of surge mellowly forward as they do at small lakes. At the back of the pool, where in real life the ocean would meet the sky to form the horizon, there’s a humongous television screen. It’s broadcasting trivia questions about water. Surrounding the screen is a mural of a US spacecraft hitting the ocean and a ship on its mission to retrieve it. The stairs on either side of the pool are encased in silos painted to resemble NASA rockets. On the wall above and to the right of the screen are the Ten Commandments. Among many other Bible verses, I once memorized these in Sunday school, but when I try to run through them now I can recall only six. A Big Brothery voice comes over the loudspeaker, interrupting the Top 40 playlist, and reminds parents to increase the frequency with which they take their kids to the bathroom. And for a moment I can almost see them, the urinous nebulae swirling about the midsections of the under-sevens.

  How many times in history has a man stood on a beach and dug his feet into the sand and gazed out at the horizon and been awed by the immensity of the ocean and the sky? Been humbled by thoughts of the starry heavens beyond? Been frightened and appraised himself as small? Why is my knowledge limited? Why my stature? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? And how many times has a man stood on granulated concrete meant to simulate sand and let lakelike swash lick his ankles as he looked out over manufactured waves and a tremendous trivia game and, over pop tunes, thought likewise?

  Everything about this place seems to encourage thinking about Big Words. History. Morality. Science. Humanity. The latter is especially difficult to avoid. I’m unfamiliar with the social codes that govern water parks, but I’m trying to use my best judgment when it comes to people watching. I’m trying my best not to stare. But there are so many bodies here, so much skin on parade. Anywhere my eyes land, there it is. Spectrally thin adolescents with ribs like monkey bars. Obese children of the sort medieval ogres would eat, with Chubby Bunny cheeks and tummies that already look like botched soufflés. Adolescent girls whose bathing suits are real close to being inappropriately loose. A man-titted grandpa wearing a Speedo is splayed out in an inner tube in the center of the pool, a buoy of self-esteem, calling out the answers to the trivia questions that play over the screen. There are a plethora of faded and bad tattoos—in startlingly short order, I spot three depicting Taz. Stretch marks on men and women both that look like shark-attack scars. Women in two-pieces when one would probably be more flattering—and as a straight man with feminist sympathies, I don’t know what my proper response to this should be. Should I be proud of these women for fighting the good fight against the impossible body standards our media propounds? Or is it sad that they’re having to fight that fight with the media’s same weapons of revelation and display? That modesty isn’t an option? And then I think I’m probably already some class of asshole for wondering this in the first place, like they need my sympathy. I know what’s called for here is an absence of judgment, but as a male animal there are some things that no matter how hard I try I cannot shut all the way down. A ropy-muscled teenager walks past me and enters the pool and his back is so full of acne that it looks like a shotgun wound. And now I also feel like an asshole for gawking at it and then doubly an asshole for feeling pity for him and then trebly an asshole for wondering whether it’s sanitary for him to be swimming in Splashdown Harbor in the first place and now I kind of just want to cry. Because what are bodies but fucked-up vessels of time, the testimony of a being’s passage through life, and so the record and messenger of private loves and joys, nostalgias and pains that we on the fake concrete sand at the wave pool’s edge cannot even begin to guess at?

  I haul my own hideous skin into the undulating pool, add my hateful body to the teeming crowd. I make my way into the breakers, where the chop is at its mild heaviest. The density and distribution of bodies force me to wade by a group of sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girls who are jumping over the waves. They’re all wearing bikinis and have their hair in sloppy and coquettish updos. As I pass I smile a smile that’s meant to be disarming and avuncular and totally unthreatening, but at that moment a wave catches one of the girls off guard and knocks her back and we seem to see it at the same time, that her bathing suit top has been set askew and her young left breast sits exposed. An involuntary and maybe autistic part of me immediately gauges the breast’s firmness and heft, cross-references the diameter and hue of the areola and indexes the ambitious nubbin of its nipple, categorizes it as nice and files it away in the basement of my id. The girl has s
een me smiling and a look of embarrassment and horror comes over her face as she frantically tries to return the breast to its papoose, but the nipple boings out the other side. My mirror neurons start firing on overdrive as I watch this, for, of course, I realize, the breast is really her breast, not part of a body but her body, the bearer of a unique matrix of time and circumstance, that is, a soul, and I’m filled with a tender sympathy for her caught in this dilemma and feel guilty for taking even a scintilla of pleasure in something that has caused her distress or psychic pain. And yet I know that the damage has been done and whatever I do now doesn’t matter. I cannot be of comfort because surely any move toward her would be interpreted as one of pervy weirdness and possibly aggression, so I turn, embarrassed now myself, and hurry away, managing that task with the run-paddle that is perhaps the least artful form of water aerobics.

  In the middle of the pool the water is warm, amniotic, and I lie on my back and for a while I rise and fall with the gentle swell of the waves. I shake off the disturbance of moments ago and my suspicions of subaqueous nebulae of urine. My thoughts then seem to catch the rhythm of the pool and there’s something hypnotic about it all. This is nice, I think. It’s soothing, feels safe. Floating in the gently rolling water like this, I experience a moment of deep respect for Human Ingenuity and seem to be approaching an almost Buddhist zone of Plenary Emptiness.

  Then the whistles are blown. The sound effects abruptly cease. The waves calm and flatten as though rebuked. I stand in the chest-high water and there is much confusion in the pool as the lifeguards leap to action. It is then I see what looks to be a Mexican man floating facedown near the center of the pool. Did I not but moments ago see him disporting gleefully? When the two lifeguards reach him, they flip him over and slide their safety orange foam tubes in place and begin the process of ferrying him to shore. They follow a protocol I’m familiar with from all the episodes of Baywatch I saw as an adolescent. A solemn and reverential mood overtakes Splashdown Harbor. Molecular clusters of children in inner tubes go quiet. Whispers and hushed concern circulate among the adults. I ask, but no one around me knows what’s going on—everyone’s as clueless as I am. What could have possibly happened here? What manner of tragedy are we witnessing? If the lifeguards are not able to save him, what story will his kids tell? And what of his poor wife? Is death experienced as somehow more real and more unjust if it happens under this Disneyfied dome? In a theme park whose many architectural features have been engineered to provoke a fear similar to that of death? Whose tubes could be said to mimic the experience of death, transporting one as they do through darkness to a different plane of existence? Other guards are waiting near the beach, holding a buoyant stretcher in place. When they maneuver the man onto it and secure his neck, they carry him out of the pool and begin tending to him on the granulated concrete.

  I then notice people around me pointing to either side of the pool and shaking their heads, their faces filled with disbelief. And there I see them, too, the small signs above the lifeguard stands. They inform us that a drill is under way, that the drama has been staged.

  Fuck.

  This.

  I wade out of the pool. I’m careful to avoid the huddle of teenage girls and pass the man strapped into the stretcher on the ground and any pity I felt for him moments ago has turned to disdain, even rage. Some delicate balance has been upset here, I feel, some social contract violated. What should remain implicit in a park like this (that is, the fear of death) has been made explicit and I could almost scream at all these budding Hasselhoffs. Spit and fart on them both. Could they not have made it more obvious that this was all pretend, make-believe, or did they want to do their best to simulate the variable of a crowded wave pool? Were we all just unwittingly duped into working for the theme park? And if so, should we not then be compensated somehow? Maybe with commemorative towels, for example?

  While the other guys continue to tube, I spend much of the rest of my time at Evergreen Wings & Waves sitting in the hot tub, luxuriating in an experience the Adult House had promised but failed to deliver. Time to time they join me, modern Marco Polos, bearing fantastic tales of their travels on the slides, reveling in the wondrous sights they’ve seen.

  “Chick in the white bikini,” Sparrow says, and stands to look for her. His back has a weal across it from the joints in the Mach 1 slide, which you ride tubeless. “Major camel toe.”

  “And this one woman in green,” Ben says. “Her bush is hanging out the bottom of her bathing suit. Needs to take a Weedwacker to that shit.”

  “It was gross,” Zach confirms.

  Is it enough that I resist the temptation to bro out over the boob I’ve seen? Does this little bit of self-denial count as a form of atonement for the pleasure I took from something that caused the girl grief? I choose instead to tell them about the staged death of the Mexican man but I must fail to convey the weight and strangeness of it because when I finish they just laugh and laugh. And after a while my skin has pruned up so much it aches. It’s like even my body is trying to retreat inside itself.

  XII.

  Portland’s all misty wet with rain when we arrive in the late afternoon. We park the van downtown, in the southwest part of the city I’m rarely ever in. For reasons that are obscure to me, I’ve decided not to tell anyone that I’ll be back for the night. And as we walk around, everything begins to take on an uncanny Rip Van Winkle quality, like I’ve been away for a generation or more. I keep feeling like I should know people we pass on the sidewalk, like I should recognize their faces, but I don’t. Or maybe it’s that I keep wanting them to know me, to recognize my face and embrace me and welcome me home, but they walk on by, eyes ahead like I’m not even there. That I can’t even get some harmless human eye contact suggests an obscure but pointed failure. Street names have an eerie, familiar-foreign ring to them. Alder. Stark. Burnside. I automatically correct Zach on the pronunciation of “Couch.” “It’s said like ‘cooch,’ ” I tell him, and everyone laughs and I’m slow in remembering why that’s funny. Sparrow asks why it’s called the Pearl District, like did they used to sell a lot of them here, and I don’t have a good answer for him.

  “How long have you lived here again?” he asks.

  “Eight years,” I say, but while I know that’s right, I’m sure it can’t be true.

  “Hey, guys,” Zach says at one point. “Remember Mo?”

  “Yeah,” Sparrow says, catching the wave of nostalgia. “Remember Pat?”

  Facundo disappears while we’re browsing in an outdoor store. After we leave, we stand around outside wondering where he could have gone. He comes out and says he’s not feeling well. It’s his stomach. James gives him the keys to the van, where he wants to lie down for a spell.

  Not Facundo, too, I think, pleading with whatever vindictive god has been lording over Session 2. He’d been looking forward to this night all week. Sushi. Fernet. Casa Diablo. Perhaps a sweetly little tête-à-tête with Kate? Given everything that’s happened, it occurs to me that in signing up for camp I might have been unknowingly enrolled in a tontine and that this week will end with but one man standing. The way things are going, I’m not sure I have it in me to be that man.

  The rain eases and the clouds clear and the sky’s high up and pellucid, the light somehow clearer and sharper because of the day’s storm and for it being so close to sundown. We hit a music store, where I pick up a handful of used CDs for James—he’ll be driving the van all summer and has only one album, Biggie’s Ready to Die. They’re dirt-cheap and I end up getting six for nine dollars, but for James it’s like I’ve gifted him a kidney, he’s so grateful.

  “For sure? You sure?” he effuses as he shuffles through the midnineties sampler I’ve picked out. “I remember my brother listening to these. Back in the day.”

  “How old’s your brother?” I ask.

  “Twenty-nine,” he says. And then he asks how old I am and looks surprised when I tell him. “Crazy. I thought you were closer to our
age. Twenty-six. Maybe like -seven at most.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and flush with pride. And while I know I’ve worked for this, taken all the little steps I’ve taken to ensure I look younger than I am, the pride I experience in the moment confuses me. Because what’s at work here really? What was fueling this initial desire of mine? The easy answer would probably stop with the obvious: in our culture, it’s better to be young than old. Go a little deeper and I think this has something to do with the fact that we’re suckers for potential, promise. To be young means that you’re undespoiled, that time has not imprinted you with the failures inherent in becoming who you are. This compliment seems to elide the past five years, implicitly returning all the possibilities that sat before me at twenty-six. Marriage, a house, a dog, a steady job. And maybe it’s all the Nietzsche, but after the flash of pride wears off, the question looms: would you do them again, these five years that have been so easily erased? I don’t really have a choice, at least according to Nietzsche. “There is a great year of becoming, a monster of a great year, which must, like an hourglass, turn over again and again so that it may run down and run out again; and all these years are alike in what is greatest as in what is smallest; and we ourselves are alike in every great year, in what is greatest as in what is smallest.” But in the moment this seems like a loop- or wormhole and I’m still trying to sort out what to make of it as we head back to the van.