The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  True, I knew the lakebed I swam across, its features and secrets, yet I did not know what the black water between it and the surface where I swam, what those currents held. The surface currents pushed and pulled me, they kept me from swimming a straight line, the currents of the Great Lakes subtler and quietly more sinister than those of the ocean, hardly whispering as they attempted to pull me astray. I could not be pulled astray; I had no investment in my destination. I only wanted to be out there in that weather, playing along, knowing that rip currents would pull a swimmer away from shore and that it was always a mistake to swim against them, to panic, to exhaust oneself. You must swim with a rip current, for a time, swim across and learn from it, to be patient and aware, also, that the currents of the subsurface are likely to be moving in different directions, at different speeds.

  That is what is known as an undercurrent, that black space beneath me where sometimes I believed I saw faces staring up at me, sliding away as I swam across their ceiling.

  Currents startled each other, collided beneath my body, merged into a kind of conversation, and I imagined all the lost drowned bodies, worn down by currents, nibbled by fish caught in the weather of that deep water, of that zone between top and bottom. That’s where they often reside, the dead, sliding through the currents—they don’t necessarily sink to the bottom or rise to the top, and I swam over those bodies, those skeletons, some incomplete, bones barely held together by tendons, bones rattling slowly as they swam through that darkness with newer bodies, cartwheeling beneath me in slow motion, skin covered in white fungus.

  My eyes open that night, staring down, I could not know what would happen that summer—a foresight as impossible as seeing that a man my family knew would park behind our cabin, ten years later, and drown himself off a neighbor’s dock. I simply kept swimming, maintaining my rhythm, cutting across the swells, the breathing of crest and trough, the rise and fall of the lake.

  As I swam, I envisioned the hidden lake floor, somewhere beneath me, and my mind drifted to those tiny underwater castles in aquariums and fishbowls, the toy Poseidons with their miniature tridents, and to Sea Monkeys, which I’d once admired from the back of a comic book, convinced by the pink anthropoid family in the drawings—the leggy mother with the three-pronged head and upswept hair, the proud father with his tail covering his genitals, their underwater castle in the background (taken in also by the promise, So eager to please, they can even be trained, despite the fine print: Caricatures shown not intended to depict artemia salina.). I emptied the envelopes into water, I must have been seven or eight, and waited for the eggs to hatch; when they did, I gazed at the winged specks, hoping to differentiate and name them, finally setting the bowl on our piano, on the wooden cover that folded down above the keys. Later that afternoon, my older sister—in a rush to bang out “Toreador” or “The Entertainer” with ridiculous speed—jerked that cover open and spilled the bowl down into the keys. In time, we joked that we could hear the Sea Monkeys scream or sing along when the piano was played.

  They were only brine shrimp, my sister pointed out, and that is true, that’s all they were. Years later, I would stand up to my knees in the Great Salt Lake—the water there so salty a person cannot sink—with the woman who would become my wife. We bent down and squinted against the glare to see those winged specks, flitting and hovering above our bare feet. This was close to the Spiral Jetty, about which I once wrote a failed novel—that strange twisting rubble was underwater for all my childhood, a dark shadow visible only from a height, from a plane flying overhead. Fifteen hundred feet, fifteen feet wide, I’ve waded the length of the Jetty, around and around to its center. It is a vortex, a dimensional tornado that can take a person from one world into another, from one time to another time.

  When I surfaced that night, when I stopped swimming long enough to rest, to look around myself, I found that I’d swum a long curve, a spiral away from shore and north instead of south. Instead of being near Ephraim, I was off the shore of Little Sister Bay, where the lighted windows revealed the shapes of houses, helping me recognize them. I swam in, closer, the water up to my chest as my feet found the rocky bottom.

  The house nearest to me, shaped like the prow of a ship, all glass windows, belonged to the grandfather of an ex-girlfriend of mine. An old man with a gray beard and a temper—I’d once seen him back his station wagon over a neighbor boy’s bike, then get out cursing and throw the broken bike deep into the forest. It was said that years ago, at the beginning of the twentieth century, he’d courted my grandmother, but that relationship hadn’t taken, perhaps because of his wildness. His granddaughter had a Norwegian name that meant “quietly peaceful,” which was not always perfectly aligned with my experience of her. By the night I paused there, offshore, a few years had passed; she may have already been married to a French tennis player, had a child. Was she inside, that night, as I watched? I could see shapes, shadows, but they were not for me. I had been in those rooms, done all manner and felt all manner of things, in those spaces, but it was no longer a place for me; there were no people there for me.

  I turned back to the lake and began to swim, keeping the shoreline to my left, back toward home.

  Even out in the open water, the waves had slackened, eased. The last energy of the storm tapering away. I swam.

  Almost home, a shape caught my eye, a sharp black movement—a wing, a knife, off to the left when I turned my head to breathe, following me along. I stopped, lifted my head, treading water.

  It was another swimmer, swimming parallel to me, thirty feet away, closer to shore. We swam along again, and when the other swimmer veered away, angling toward shore, I paused again, and watched.

  The figure swam in long smooth strokes, slender arms and sharp hands, and disappeared—lost beneath the surface—for a moment before appearing again, slowing, a round head cutting the flat water in front of the thin, rickety pier in front of the Abel cabin.

  It was Mrs. Abel, and I was twenty feet away in the waves, watching as she pulled herself up onto the pier, a thin silhouette against the white of the stones, the gray of the trees. She pulled off a swim cap, wrung water from her long hair. Turning, she looked out at the lake, toward me. Could she see me? Silently, I glided closer, keeping my eyes on her, standing there. I was twenty feet away when she spoke.

  “You’re a night swimmer, too.”

  The moon shone down, the tops of the trees glowing behind and above her. Was she wearing a swimsuit? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know what to say, my voice caught up.

  “There aren’t too many of us,” she said.

  Before I could respond, she turned and walked away down the pier. Her figure blended into the shadows beneath the trees.

  I waited, for a moment, uncertain whether to follow or what to do. Finally, I swam back along the shore, toward home.

  - 5 -

  I didn’t sleep in my parents’ cabin; instead, I stayed in a shack up the slope, hidden in the woods. It had been built on the shore, a beach house where people changed clothes, and at some point it had been put on rollers, dragged up into the trees. Painted the red of a faded barn, it was named the Red Cabin, though it was more of a shack, with no running water. Ten by fifteen feet, one room, a slanted roof; its five square windows, all along one wall, were offset so they looked like a jagged row of teeth. The screen door’s spring shrieked, and no one ever rung the metal bell on the wall outside, its clapper and mouth all ensnarled with cobwebs.

  After swimming, I would walk through the woods to the Red Cabin. I’d come in to the sound of that screen door and the air was always moist, the damp smell of the straw mats on the floor, and I’d lay down on the futon that took up half the space. I’d turn over and look up at the orange-and-red Sunfish sail wrapped around its mast, various ropes hanging down, the black windsurfer booms casting wishbone shadows until I switched off the lamp. Before I fell asleep I wondered what would happen to me, and I wo
ndered about Mrs. Abel, and I had no way of knowing.

  And then sometimes I’d sit down at my little table, my hair still damp, and try to write. I had one small gooseneck lamp and in the window I could see my reflection, sitting there with a pen in my hand. I could also see through the window, up to the gravel road, where neighbors walked by in the dusk, where cars passed. I liked the feeling of sitting there, illuminated in the window. Any neighbor walking by could see me, there in that shack in the woods, pen in hand. They might comment on it, mention it to each other, to my parents, and would remember how I looked, sitting there, apparently deep in thought, writing.

  Around that time, that summer, I remember telling someone that I wanted every story I wrote to say this, implicitly, to the reader:

  I’m coming over to your house.

  I thought that was an impressive thing to say, and I said it to impress this person, this young woman; in truth, I think I also believed it, that this kind of insistence was something to desire, a necessity.

  Now, over twenty years later, my declaration has changed:

  Will you please come along with me? I would like company. I’m uncertain where I’m going and I’m a little frightened.

  I was sitting there at my red table in the Red Cabin, one night shortly after I’d seen Mrs. Abel swimming, and suddenly there she was, up on the road, walking past.

  My knees jolted the underside of the table as I stumbled to my feet; I opened the door slowly, so it wouldn’t shriek too loudly, and rushed out under the trees, after her.

  Instead of going up to the road, I stayed in the woods, running parallel, keeping her silhouette in sight. She wasn’t moving too fast, and as she walked she was singing; I moved closer, to hear, and realized it wasn’t words, but only sounds, a melody.

  I kept following, and then I sped up and got ahead—crossing the gravel driveway of my grandparents’ house, then the Glenns’—before coming out of the bushes and heading back the way I’d come, so it would seem I was walking home along the road.

  The moon was out, but the trees were tall and there were no streetlights. It was difficult to see faces.

  “Is that you?” she said.

  “You’re out walking,” I said, immediately embarrassed at the obviousness of this statement.

  “Should I be sleeping?” she said. “Walking comes easier for me.”

  “Sometimes I can’t sleep,” I said.

  We were silent for a moment, standing there awkwardly on the road, and then headlights swept around the bend, ratcheting through the trees. Anne Hobler, her white hair visible for a moment, cruised past in her old maroon sedan.

  “I saw you,” Mrs. Abel said, “I saw you sitting there in the window of your little cabin, and then all of a sudden you’re here, coming from the other direction. Or was that someone else?”

  “No.”

  “Or maybe there are two of you?”

  We stood there in the moonlight, the sharp shadows of the trees on the blacktop. She was teasing me, and it was a different way of talking, a different tone than other adults used with me. She was an adult, but she wasn’t as old as my parents; still, she was twice as old as I was.

  “And so you rushed out here to intercept me,” she said, “so our meeting would seem like a coincidence—”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess—”

  “What were you doing,” Mrs. Abel said, “sitting there in your cabin?”

  “Writing,” I said.

  “Writing what?”

  “Stories, I guess.”

  “How impractical!” she said, laughing.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m not writing much, anyway.”

  “I like that it’s impractical.” I could hear her smile in the darkness. “And what are these stories about?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Adventure stories? Love stories?”

  “I guess I don’t know what they’ll be until I write them.”

  “You’re so serious,” she said. “I’m just giving you a hard time.”

  The moon cast shadows of the tall cedars on the road; the wind gusted and the dark shapes leapt and slid around us.

  “I saw you swimming,” I said.

  “I’ve seen you, too,” she said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Have you ever swum with another person?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  “At night, I mean. Distances. It’s different.”

  As I thought of what to say, how to respond, she was already walking away from me. I was uncertain if I was supposed to follow, or if what she’d said was an invitation.

  - 6 -

  Near the end of his life, my grandfather wrote:

  As I grow older, I dream much more. Usually including problems I have difficulty solving during my dream—then, during waking hours, I continue to try to solve them. Last night, I tried to change a fuse in a house we once lived in, now with a very complicated subterranean basement full of sparkling, involved fixtures. Couldn’t find a flashlight or understand the circuit breaker. When I woke up, I went out to check if the flashlight was in its usual place.

  My grandfather excerpted his lifelong journals, his thoughts and musings, and made many copies of this manuscript, one of which he gave to me. He called it The Hollow Tree (“A Repository for my Acorns”), and in the preface he says that it is “meant primarily for my daughters, but also to help my memory retain thoughts by mortaring them in.”

  - 7 -

  That night on the road, I didn’t answer Mrs. Abel. I didn’t follow her. I watched her walk away, disappear into the shadows.

  I stepped off the road, into the woods, the trees, turning back the way I’d come. I started along paths I’ve known my whole life, and even in that darkness I knew the ground underfoot was the dark brown of dried cedar and around me the velvety leaves of sumac’s new branches, the darkness of their red cones and the prickly bushes crowding the path, bright green in daylight, bright orange when the branches were dead. Here in the darkness I followed the paths of Horse Hideout—the white rocks, speckled with black, glowing against the night, those stones carefully stacked by my mother and her sisters, in their childhood, almost fifty years before.

  I didn’t return to the Red Cabin that night. Instead, I crossed the road and started along beneath the bluff, limestone cliffs that stretched over a mile, parallel to the shore—at one time they had been the shore, the lake stretching hundreds of feet higher. All these trees, the cliffs and the caves, all of this was underwater; I pretended I was able to breathe that dark water as I walked along the lake bed, looking for the path that slanted up the cliff so I could eventually surface.

  The wide path was not easy to find; finally, I found the opening in the underbrush and headed upward. My mother wrote a poem about this path, about the past, and it hangs in the kitchen of our cabin (never happy with it, she’s always asking me to critique it, then taking the frame apart and inserting new versions, new words):

  One hundred years ago Anton Amundsen’s

  Cows ambled down the stony path above our road.

  Shadowing the side of the cliff,

  Tails flyflicking, udders swaying,

  They quickened their pace and headed toward the Bay

  Stone stepping the beach,

  They lowered their heads and drank.

  That night I swam up the path through those ghost cows, and near the top saw the yellow light, cast from the screen porch of the Zahn house, right at the edge of the cliff. Old Mr. Zahn was a widower and lived there alone, keeping to himself. He was sitting on his screen porch, twenty feet away as I passed. I knew he must see me; I waved and said hello, so he would know who it was.

  He didn’t wave back. His hands were in his lap—one held a knife, the other a piece of wood. His beard was white and suspenders
red, his face so wrinkled I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. He had fallen asleep.

  I kept on, into an open field. Mr. Zahn had cut back the trees below (not appreciated by the neighbors who owned them) so he’d have a view of the lake, which was calm now, flat and dull in the moonlight. I could also see the tops of the houses below. The closest was Mrs. Abel’s, empty now; she was somewhere else, walking by herself, further and further away from me.

  Out in the woods I’d find skeletons of bleached bones. All the bones of an animal—if the deer or raccoon had collapsed, there—all its muscles and sinews gone loose and rotted, eaten away, fur gathered by birds and mice for nests, rolled across the forest floor. More often the bones were spread out (a skull there, a shard of rib, a cracked piece of pelvis) over a wide area, pieces always missing when I tried to reassemble them.

  Another kind of skeleton I found beneath the trees were long, curved boards, bleached gray, that were the remains of old boats. People dragged them out into the woods to collapse in on themselves, to be dispersed like the bones of any other animal. And yet some were still boats, in front yards, listing to starboard in the tall golden grass along Town Line Road. The one I knew best, Anne Maria, sat adrift in the trees on Mr. Zahn’s land, its bow just peeking out into the moonlight.

  A fishing boat, its blue-and-red paint chipped and faded. Twenty feet long, with its keel stuck in the earth, so heavy that it didn’t shift at all as I pulled myself up, swung a leg over onto the deck. It still smelled faintly of fish, and of diesel, though the engine was gone and so was the steering wheel in the tiny, square pilot house, behind the scratched cloudy windows all covered with registration stickers from the sixties and seventies. Most of that boat was belowdecks—a huge compartment to hold the fish, another for the nets. I lifted the cover of the latter, eased myself down, inside, and pulled the lid over the top of me.