Evil Water and Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Even if Helen’s pregnancy is hysterical she obviously hopes to give birth to something. She is conceiving an exotic salvation for us all. If no actual, physical infant is born when she arrives at term, whatever will occur? Something strange and wonderful and wise.

  We only have another few months to wait.

  THE GREAT ATLANTIC SWIMMING RACE

  The longest distance ever swum by a human being was 1,826 miles down the Mississippi River. This was in the year 1930. However, the swimmer in question—Mr Fred P. Newton of Clinton, Oklahoma—wasn’t exactly trying to set a speed record. 27-year-old Fred spent a total of 742 hours in the water, spread over the best part of six months. His average speed was just under 2½ miles per hour.

  By contrast the longest continuous swim occurred in 1981. In that year 40-year-old Ricardo Hoffman swam 299 miles non-stop down the River Parana in Argentina. (There are no piranhas in the Parana.) Ricardo was in the water for 87 ½ hours. He averaged 3 ½ miles per hour.

  However, both Fred and Ricardo were swimming down rivers. Oceans are obviously different kettles of fish.

  The ocean record is claimed by Walter Poenisch, Sr. of the USA. In 1978 he swam 129 miles from Cuba to Florida in 34 ½ hours flat. 64-year-old Walter wore flippers, and swam in a shark cage.

  Let’s recall one other record: for the swim of longest duration. The women’s record is held by Myrtle Huddleston. In 1931 in a salt-water pool on Coney Island she clocked up 87 ½ hours. The men’s title belongs to Charles “Zimmy” Zibbelman, who was legless, and who managed 168 hours in a pool in Honolulu in 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor.

  Thus, by way of prologue to the greatest aquatic sports feat ever attempted: the sponsored swimming race across the Atlantic in 1990.

  As deputy co-ordinator of this ambitious and heroic project I intend to defend both the concept of the race and the way it was carried out. I address myself proudly to that Olympic pantheon of the ages which bestows laurels of fame on those who perform superhuman feats at whatever the cost. I also speak to that imaginary Court of History whose jury is the dead—killed by famine, by disaster, by disease, by war, by infamy. For as we all know the Atlantic swimming race aimed to raise funds for the victims of the ongoing drought in the unhappy countries bordering the Sahara.

  The route: outward from aptly named Cape Race in Newfoundland, to any part of Europe.

  The Labrador Cold Current should take competitors quickly south into the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream would nudge the swimmers along warmly in the general direction of Ireland.

  The distance: roughly 2,450 miles.

  Assuming an average speed of 2 miles per hour for 14 hours a day the swimmers ought to complete the course inside of three months. Apart from the first week or two, when thermal rubber suits would need to be worn, temperature should be no big problem.

  Naturally there were other problems which it took a whole year of preliminary discussions to pinpoint.

  Must the competitors spend all their time in the water? Must they feed in the water? Excrete in the water? If so, how? By swimming in the nude? Must they sleep in the water by using flotation collars or rubber ducks?

  Here was where the “maggot factor” emerged: a phrase coined by certain mealy-mouthed journalists.

  A body which spends a long time submerged in water eventually takes on a puffy, leprous appearance; the skin grows sick. Add to this consequence of ninety days’ immersion the “zero gravity effect”—and when the swollen swimmers reached their goal they might only manage to crawl ashore like bloated worms, hardly a pleasant spectacle.

  Obviously each of the competitors would have to sleep on board a support vessel; and since the swimmers might be spread out over many sea-miles each would need a separate support vessel, with an impartial scrutineer on board to ensure that each vessel held its station exactly overnight—something easy to check with satellite navigation systems.

  Then there was the vexed question of whether to use flippers. Walter Poenisch, Sr. had used flippers. Why shouldn’t all the competitors use an identical size and design of flipper? Indeed flippers might be the only way to keep the race within the confines of three months. Swimmers might encounter storms. Icebergs might bear down on them, compelling detours. If the race stretched out longer than three months, autumn would begin to creep towards winter, and the Atlantic would become death.

  On the other hand, what if another legless “Zimmy” Zibbelman were to enter the race?

  And how about the use of snorkels? Over such a long period constant buffeting by waves might cause tissue or brain damage. Why not swim the whole course with one’s face underwater like a fish?

  Ah! This would cause sensory deprivation (which might become a problem anyway). Hallucinations and madness could result. Swimmers might end up believing they were cod and haddock.

  In 1989 a great conference was convened in Monrovia, Liberia; a Third World venue being chosen to underline the philanthropic purpose of the race. The conference lasted for a month, and all interested parties attended: the Olympic Federation, swimming organizations, Ministry of Sport delegates from numerous countries, and representatives of multinational sponsors such as Hoffman-LaRoche, Union Carbide, Nestles, and Philip Morris, Inc.

  Gradually the final details were thrashed out:

  A maximum of one hundred competitors. A support vessel for each, with TV facilities for interviewing the aquanauts while out of the water. Sonar search in case of stray sharks. Rules for encounters with icebergs and jellyfish. Commercial and naval shipping to steer well clear of all competitors. A supertanker to be hired as a supply and hospital facility, its huge flat deck to be used as pad for a fleet of ten helicopters, equipped for aerial filming. And much else—not forgetting the international pari-mutuel gambling system for betting on the daily progress of the competitors.

  The date for the start of the race: July 1st, 1990, exactly one year to the day after the winding up of the Monrovia Conference. This would allow adequate time for preparations, selection of competitors, and training.

  Despite its romantic Arthurian name Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula—culminating in Cape Race—is usually a dour, windswept place.

  Yet on July 1st, 1990, it would have required the paintbrush of a Raoul Dufy to do justice to the offshore scene: the mile-long barrage of rafts and pontoons with the hundred support vessels moored to it, each fluttering a flag blazoned with the symbol of its aquachampion; the mile of tents and marquees gay as a medieval joust; the dragonflies of helicopters buzzing about overhead; the bright red and yellow dirigible balloon with the starting cannon jutting from the snout of its gondola.

  In the style of a sports commentator let me introduce those swimmers who were to prove most prominent during the subsequent weeks. …

  But no. Wait.

  In Newfoundland the uniqueness—the individual or national genius—of these special men and women was still disguised by their wetsuits (identical but for the dayglo numbers printed across the shoulders).

  So let us fire that cannon. Let us speed our hundred swimmers on their way. Let us jumpcut many days hence to that morning when the leading support vessels had all quit the Labrador Cold Current for the Gulf Stream, and when our aquachampions first appeared on deck at dawn to be televised to the world no longer clad in black rubber but only in their native skins (well greased), their waddling penguin-feet, and their swimming costumes.

  Let me introduce the dandy of the swimmers, Monsieur Jean-Pierre Bouvard with his slim twiddly waxed moustaches and his long tricolour maillot as worn at Deauville circa 1890.

  And tough, suave, imperturbable Captain the Honourable Jim Turville-Hamilton, gentleman athlete and officer in Britain’s Special Air Services, whose pinstripe trunks were embroidered with rolled umbrellas.

  And the “Zen swimmer”, Toshiro Tanaka, tattooed with a kamikaze headband, his ears amputated to improve the streamlining of his body.

  And the “Marxist-Leninist swimmer” from little Albania, Comrade
Zug, who wore microfilm editions of selected works of Stalin and The Collected Speeches of Enver Hoxha stapled to his brow. Through an interpreter Comrade Zug announced himself forever at war with the revisionist USSR swimmer, lovely Anastasia Dimitrova, and the neo-capitalist Chinese swimming ace, Qi Bing-bo.

  Then there was the “Jesus-Walks-on-Water swimmer”, dazzlingly beautiful pentathlon champion Sally-Ann Johnson, ex-centrefold and avowed virgin, in whose cleavage was taped a microfilm Bible. Sponsored by the Christian Majority Church, she swam for the glory of the Lord.

  And who could fail to mention Leila Fouad of the Fundamentalist Islamic Jamhuriya, whose body grease was stained pitch-black as a substitute for chador and yashmak? Her every passage between camouflaging Atlantic and her tent aboard the support vessel must be hidden behind seven veils. Five times a day the call to prayer blared out from a loudspeaker at the mast-head, and Leila floated motionless for a minute, ducking her head in the direction of Mecca.

  In all a total of ninety-six swimmers reached the Gulf Stream but it is these eight champions that we should concentrate upon: Fouad, Johnson, Qi, Dimitrova, Zug, Tanaka, Turville-Hamilton, and Bouvard. (Oh yes, and perhaps we should add the name of Rene Armand of Geneva for different reasons.)

  Let us hasten forward six weeks. Our champions are well in the lead. Fifty other swimmers are strung out over many miles of Atlantic waters.

  By now forty-odd others have dropped out, prey to fatigue, hallucination, anomie, despair, and in one case insanity. There have been three deaths: from drowning, from a stroke, and surprisingly from hypothermia. Another swimmer vanished inexplicably.

  Most of the surviving competitors are on course, though not all. A New Zealander has veered south into the lower Gulf Stream. Eventually the North-Equatorial Current will carry him back round into the Caribbean, if he persists. A Dane did not swim deep enough into the Gulf Stream; its northern branch is bearing him remorselessly towards Greenland.

  Excerpts from interviews:

  LEILA FOUAD: “I am carrying water across the desert. No, that is wrong. I am carrying water to the desert. To the great Sahara desert where men die of drought. Every mile I swim is another mile of water for parched throats. I am a Bedu: I pitch my tent every night on a different wave, but the stars are the same!”

  QI: “Mao swam the Yellow River. A mountain is shifted by a thousand hands. The ocean succumbs to a million strokes.”

  DIMITROVA: “Hope, energy, glory of the future, hands across the water. If I were a ballerina I would dance across the wave-tops. They are as wide as the steppes. I am a troika racing towards joy.”

  JOHNSON: “Praise the Lord for my muscles, praise McDonald’s for the goodly protein. If I weren’t a virgin I’d feel just like Samson with his hair cut off. I tell you all, each wave’s a new stripe on the flag of freedom. Each beat of my heart is a prayer.”

  TURVILLE-HAMILTON: “One doesn’t wish to blow one’s own trumpet, but one does rather feel like Captain Scott or Sir Edmund Hillary.”

  BOUVARD: “La question natatoire est, au fond, une question phénoménologique où l’on s’adresse à notre univers fluide contemporain.’

  TANAKA: “A particle: me. A wave: it.

  Together: existence.

  Death or splendour.”

  ZUG: “Death to the swimming dogs.”

  The number of deaths from the Saharan drought over the past decade was estimated at anywhere between fifteen and thirty million people. Since the race was first mooted, up to that moment in mid Gulf Stream, perhaps another three hundred thousand souls had succumbed: ten per cent interest, you might say, on the debt of drought.

  But this wasn’t the largest number which the media were currently bandying about. Gambling upon the progress of our champions had reached fever pitch. The total sums involved were huge; and of course five per cent of all moneys staked on swimmers was to be reserved for the Sahara Fund.

  Indeed it’s no exaggeration to say that daily betting on the race was coming to rival the world stock and currency markets in the amount of cash changing hands—and because of the emotive, nationalistic, ideological implications of rapid progress or otherwise on the part of Sally-Ann or Toshiro or Anastasia (plus the intervention of speculators), the race was beginning to cause major fluctuations in the value of national currencies.

  Thus it came about that repeated cramp and fever on the part of René Armand, sponsored by major Swiss banking interests, caused the Swiss Franc itself to avalanche; and unfortunately the whole of the Sahara Fund was held in Swiss Francs, once thought as impregnable as the north face of the Eiger. Half of the accumulated fund melted like snow in a sunny valley. But we did not dare shift it too hurriedly.

  *

  Day sixty-five: an unpleasant incident. Comrade Zug caught up with Anastasia Dimitrova and assaulted her in the water. Before her support vessel could intervene, “Gentleman Jim”—who was only a short distance ahead—heeded her cries, chivalrously turning back to assist the Russian.

  It later transpired that Jim Turville-Hamilton’s father had been involved in the incompetent post-World War Two British plot to destabilize Zug’s newly Communist homeland. Albion had tried to shaft Albania.

  Immediately there was talk of disqualification: Jim demanding Zug’s, Zug demanding Jim’s and Anastasia’s, Anastasia demanding Zug’s. Comparisons were made with the alleged tripping of American race champion Mary Decker during the ’84 Olympics by ex-South African politics student Zola Budd, following which great protests against apartheid erupted across America; these might have been more serious still if Mary Decker had been black.

  However, despite all the time we had spent preparing for a host of contingencies (culminating in the Monrovia Conference) amazingly we had drawn up no rules about competitors indecently assaulting one another in the midst of the extraterritorial ocean.

  Zug swam on, in the lead.

  Jim and Anastasia swam hand in hand for a while, to the disgust of Sally-Ann Johnson.

  Monsieur Bouvard referred to ‘un crime passionel politique’.

  Leila Fouad took to wearing huge black goggles.

  Day seventy: Captain Turville-Hamilton announced his engagement in the water to Anastasia Dimitrova; and the British Pound sagged from 50c to 35c. Speculators started to speculate about a possible future negative value for the Pound, whereby one Pound Sterling would be valued at (say) minus five US cents. Britain’s long-reigning Conservative government declared itself unperturbed. Here was an economic tool at last for cancelling out the national debt. The US government might care to apply it one day to their trillion dollar budget deficit.

  *

  Day seventy-three: Comrade Zug assaulted Leila Fouad who had overtaken him, by swimming close and snatching off her black-glass goggles while she was praying. A brief, one-sided nuclear exchange took place between the Fundamentalist Islamic Jamhuriya and Zug’s homeland, following which Comrade Zug was the only surviving native Albanian. Undeterred, Zug declared (through an interpreter) that just so long as one member of the true Albanian Communist Party remained alive, Lenin, Stalin, and Enver Hoxha were in safe hands.

  Day eighty: perhaps due to side effects from the amputation of his ears (his sense of direction being upset by parasites?) Toshiro Tanaka began to swim in circles.

  TANAKA: “Seas, a sphere of water

  In space; no land.

  Straight line is through, not across!”

  The next day Tanaka dived like a sleek seal; and did not come up again.

  The Yen also dived. Unfortunately the Sahara Fund had at last been transferred, secretly, out of Swiss Francs into Yen.

  However, Zen priests claimed that Tanaka had surfaced in the Sea of Japan. The Yen rallied slightly, then sank.

  Since all major currencies were now fluctuating wildly in response to the strokes of the swimmers, what remained of the Fund (to date) was hastily transferred by an increasingly eccentric chief accountant into a basket of minor currencies. Money for the Third World
ought to be banked in the Third World, he explained. Hence his sudden new allegiance to the Vietnamese Dong, the Colombian Peso (unfortunately, a civil war broke out in Colombia), the Turkish Lira (hyperinflation instantly set in), and the Malawian Banda (a military coup followed).

  Day eighty-five: an Irish seagull alighted briefly, like the dove from the Ark, upon the head of Sally-Ann Johnson.

  Day ninety: Qi Bing-bo stepped ashore in Ballyconneely Bay, Connemara, and criticized himself.

  Comrade Zug arrived second, an hour later, soon to disappear mysteriously into the ranks of the IRA.

  Arriving offshore, Sally-Ann Johnson declared that since Connemara appeared not to be American territory she would not set one toe upon it. She turned and headed out to sea again, to swim home. A US nuclear “stealth” submarine finally surfaced, and deterred her.

  Leila Fouad also refused to tread that soil—of infidels, soaked with alcohol.

  Monsieur Bouvard stood upon the plage of County Clare, drank champagne, smoked a Gauloise, and quoted Descartes. (“I swim, therefore I am.”)

  Captain Turville-Hamilton gallantly carried his Soviet fiancée ashore over rocks. (See the feature movie subsequently made about the young couple, the darlings of the world, starring Anastasia and an American actor closely resembling Turville-Hamilton with whom she later ran away, before returning homesick to Russia: Chariots of Water.)

  Alas, it was then discovered that besides lodging the depleted Fund in eccentric currencies, the chief accountant had embezzled large sums; and disappeared without trace.

  When the residue was withdrawn with difficulty from Ho Chi Minh City, Bogota, Ankara, and Lilongwe, and all outstanding bills were paid, and some prizes awarded, it transpired that no money whatever remained.

  This should not discourage us! The principle was correct. We need to think even more ambitiously. We need to think bigger.