The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And then I opened a door and the water rushed in and I swam up through it, to the surface, and I began swimming again.”

  The windows rattled, the wind gusting around the house; the candles flickered, guttered, stayed alight, shadows leaping and falling along the walls.

  “A door?” I said. “What door?”

  “It’s impossible,” she said.

  “You could have drowned,” I said, “and I didn’t do anything. I just swam back here and didn’t tell anyone that I lost you out there.”

  “But I didn’t drown,” she said.

  “Still,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, closing her eyes. “I’ll be fine. And you, you will also be fine. Now I need to sleep.”

  I stood there for a moment; I listened as the weather beset the cabin, the windows vibrating their own conversations. I imagined how it would be if the storm kept growing, accelerating—the shingles jerking up like black tongues, then slicing away, sharp through the air, the windows shattering.

  Finally, when I could hear that Mrs. Abel was asleep, her soft breathing beneath the wind, between the crashing waves, I blew out the candles, turned down the lamp. I went out the door and started back through the woods toward the Red Cabin.

  Out in the night, through the dark tree trunks, I could see the long rows of whitecaps on the lake, surging, climbing each other’s backs, spending themselves against the shore.

  - 20 -

  Not so long ago, I swam out to Horseshoe Island, trying to remind myself of how it felt, long ago. I swam during the day, and I swam with my thirteen-year-old niece, Sophie, a swimming prodigy; my mother and my wife came along, paddling the canoe.

  Sunlight spun and angled into the depths, bright in my eyes every time I turned my head to breathe. Below me, faint shadows, spinning rays of light; above and around me, the laughter and voices from the canoe. Nothing was the same.

  On shore, my Aunt Dee had volunteered to look after my daughters. Dee lives in my grandparents’ old house. It’s now her house, up the beach from my parents’ cabin. She’s my mother’s younger sister, and is a writer of books, too. She’s an evangelical Christian writer, and while I was swimming to the island she wrote me this email:

  I’m so enjoying your precious precocious girls. I have learned so much!

  I have learned that they must wear their seatbelts or their parents might lose them to another family, and many facts about the Boxcar Children.

  I have learned that their mother wears black so as to not draw attention to herself.

  I have learned that there is no God but that the world was created when two planets collided, and that the planets were created by aliens, and aliens were created by fairies.

  I have learned that the rules in your house are that the gerbils cannot be let out of their cage and left alone, and that teasing is just plain mean.

  . . . and so much more that even bribes will not release . . .

  I responded:

  Thank you so much! We have guinea pigs, not gerbils. And I’m glad the girls got all the details about the aliens and the fairies correct; that’s what I’m teaching them . . .

  - 21 -

  The day after Mrs. Abel returned, I was down on our beach, trying to fix a wooden platform, a makeshift deck that my father had constructed years before. The waves had knocked the boards loose, pulled out the nails, and I was pounding the nails straight, trying to get all the boards back down, removing those that had gone too waterlogged and rotten.

  The sky was overcast; low waves rolled in. All down the beach, piers and docks were taken in, sections stacked atop each other. I’d helped my father take ours apart—all except the one post he liked to leave, to hear neighbors’ reports of how long it lasted, against the ice. Summer was almost over.

  I looked up from where I was working—straightening bent, rusted nails, hammering them against a flat stone—and saw Mrs. Abel approaching, walking the shoreline from her house. She wore sunglasses, a floppy white hat. Had I ever seen her before, in the daylight?

  “Looks like a project.” She sat down beside me, watching me work. Picking up a stone, she threw it toward the lake; it clattered down among the other stones.

  “Thanks for listening to me last night,” she said.

  We sat there. I could see her hands, clasped together in front of her, and the ragged cuffs of that blue oxford shirt. Her feet in their beaded moccasins, stretched out in front of her. I wasn’t sure what to say—I was trying to make sense of the previous night; it was frightening, exciting to me, how unhinged she’d seemed by whatever had happened.

  “What if you hadn’t come back?” I said. “If you drowned, and I had to always remember that?”

  “I didn’t drown.” She turned her head to look at me, her face so close, then looked away again.

  “I know that,” I said.

  “It’s just hard to explain,” she said. “Some of it I don’t know how to tell.” She paused, furrowed her brow. “I was swimming,” she said, “you were there, and then I was standing on the shoal, walking on the rocks. And then all at once I felt a hole, with my feet, an opening. I slipped into it. But I told you this.”

  “You didn’t,” I said.

  After a pause, she started again, her voice shaking, settling as she went: “I was scared, and I kicked myself up, toward the surface, where you were, and then I slipped down inside again. Into a space, a place where I could breathe. The water became so thick. And I couldn’t feel my body, the edges of it. It was so dark. And I could tell there were rooms, but they weren’t exactly rooms, and it felt so crowded.”

  “All this was under the water?”

  “And there were other people there, I think. Not exactly. I mean, yes, but not so I could see them or hear them but I wasn’t alone at all, that’s not how it felt.”

  “You said there was a bluebird that was also like a fish.”

  “There was.”

  Seagulls wheeled in the sky above the waves. They settled down the shore, hopped after each other, cried out with their terrible voices. Sitting there, I could feel our cabin, behind and above me, where my mother and father were probably looking down, watching, wondering what I could have to discuss with Mrs. Abel.

  “Did I tell you I’m leaving tomorrow?” she said.

  “You said ‘soon.’”

  “I have to go check on my parents,” she said, “in Chicago, and then some other things, places.”

  A bent, rusty nail twisted away from my fingers, lost between the stones. I’d never really considered that Mrs. Abel had parents, a family somewhere.

  “That’s what I came to talk to you about,” she said. “It’s the Zahn house—I need someone to watch it, this winter.” Her voice was formal, suddenly, as if she were already trying to move away from me.

  “But you won’t be here?”

  “That’s why I need someone,” she said. “It’s just a place to be, if you need a place to stay, if you don’t have plans. If you wanted to write your stories, whatever.”

  “I can’t tell what I want to do,” I said, after a moment. “How long I’ll stay.”

  She picked up another stone, threw it hard so it sliced through the air, splashed out in the shallows.

  “I just wanted to do something for you. To help you out.”

  “I don’t need help,” I said. “I’ll be all right.”

  She stood, then. She held out her hand; at first I thought she wanted to help me up, also, but then I realized she wanted me to shake. So I did. Her hand was cool, dry against mine.

  “I’m glad you were here,” she said. “I was lucky.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay, then,” she said, turning away. “I’ll see you.”

  I remember the sound of her voice, saying that, her last words to m
e that summer.

  Just last week I heard from someone I haven’t seen in almost thirty years—a girlfriend from high school in Utah; a woman I’d dreamed about, shortly before she wrote—and I responded:

  Maybe we should be told when we won’t see someone for twenty years or more, or ever again? A simple alert from the sky?

  - 22 -

  My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a handsome man, his gray hair swept back, wearing kelly-green golf slacks, blue Nike running shoes with orange swooshes. Or holding his monkey-headed cane with the ruby eyes, wearing a pale blue cardigan, reading glasses around his neck. Or on the badminton court, a racquet in his hand.

  My mother was just here, visiting us in Oregon, and she brought a letter she’d found, that my grandfather had written to me. It was typewritten, and in response to a number of stories that I’d written, that I’d given him to read. It is dated March 17, 1992; here are some excerpts:

  You show vivid imagination and a unique touch. You must keep at the job. Grandmother tells of the premier watercolor painter, Gerhard Miller of Sturgeon Bay: he went to New York to study under the best known teacher of the time, who advised him, “After you complete about a thousand pictures, you will pretty much know how.”

  I have few suggestions because I don’t know enough. So far I miss the nurturing love interest—that’s been paramount in my life. I need to feel more empathy with your characters.

  To put things on paper has proliferating consequences.

  - 23 -

  I stayed alone in my parents’ cabin, after they left for the winter. I swam every day through that September, even as the lake thickened toward ice. My swims became shorter and shorter; I tried not to shower or bathe except in the lake, and became progressively dirtier.

  I wrote in a letter from that time:

  On the calm days now, the big trout and salmon come into the shallows to spawn. The top of their tails and their backs stick above the surface and sometimes they rest their chins on the beach. I’m watching them, rest assured . . . The peninsula has really emptied out. It’s desolate, though allegedly people will return to witness the “fall colors.” We’ll see. Eventually the cold will force me to move in some direction. Right now I’m not feeling too fiscally strong or confident in general, but that will change. The new novel is already starting to take my sleep and I hope to get to it some day.

  In these letters, I wrote of a man I’d read about who took care of an abandoned baby calf and lifted it each day; by the time the calf had grown to a bull, the man was hugely strong, having progressed through those imperceptible increments. So I wished to heighten my resistance to cold.

  I told everyone that I’d stay up on the peninsula until the cold drove me away. It’s more honest to admit that when I left it was because I was lonely. This was at the very beginning of November.

  Three

  —

  - 24 -

  That November of 1994, I returned to Salt Lake City, where I was born and raised. I moved back into my old room in the basement—my childhood toys still in the closet—and tried to write, and tried to interest girls from my high school whom I’d scarcely known.

  Why would they be interested in me? Because I said I was a writer and had returned, in my midtwenties, to live in my parents’ basement?

  Eventually I moved to a tiny adobe house in Mount Pleasant, a little Mormon town founded by polygamists, dead center in the middle of Utah. The house was owned by a friend’s mother, who had fixed it up. This generous woman, Ilauna, encouraged me; she told me I could stay there for free, as long as I wanted, to work on my writing.

  I actually did write, in that adobe house. I started the first book I ever published, a story of a young Mormon girl who was dissatisfied with her faith, who desired miracles, and of the old man who tried to provide them for her, who lured her in.

  The girl in that book was my hopeful projection onto the smart Mormon girls I’d known in high school—I believed that they must be dissatisfied, and that someone like me could be the answer. Neither one of these beliefs was true, but still I wrote letters to Salt Lake City, trying to lure these young women in, rushing to the mailbox each afternoon hoping for their infrequent, kind, not encouraging responses.

  (Rilke, again: “I sometimes wonder whether longing can’t radiate outward from someone so powerfully like a storm that nothing can come to him from the opposite direction.”)

  I sat long hours at a rickety card table with my notebooks, my stack of books. When I wrote, the table trembled. Sometimes its legs folded, suddenly, the whole thing collapsing away, leaving me with my pen in hand, stabbing at the air. I had recently marked the seriousness of my fiction by acquiring a fountain pen—a green Waterman, made in France, that I’d convinced my parents to buy for me. I liked to think of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, where a character says that “a gold nib is very impressionable. After a while it takes on the personality of the writer. Nobody else can write with it. This pen becomes just like a person’s shadow. It’s the only pen to have. But be careful.”

  That pen lay forgotten in a drawer for years and years. I find it, take it apart; I lay the nib in a bowl of hot water. Slowly, reluctantly, the ink seeps out, holding itself separate from the water, collecting thick and black, bloodlike in the bottom of the bowl. I wanted to write this story using this pen, but the nib is too scratchy, attuned to the personality of someone I am no longer. Instead I rest the green pen on my desk, as a reminder, right next to Mr. Zahn’s bone-handled pocketknife.

  Back then, as now, I wrote everything by hand, before I typed it on my computer. That old Toshiba laptop: I had to wedge a copy of the Collected Sherlock Holmes under the screen, so it would not flop over. Beneath the card table sat my printer, a dot-matrix Citizen 120D—as it printed, I’d watch with fascination as one pass of the platen brought a jumble of marks, and the second pass brought the missing pieces of the letters; words and sentences became whole.

  - 25 -

  I met a high school girlfriend, from Utah, and we shared a glass of water. That was all. Where were we? We were both extremely thirsty and kept passing the glass back and forth, drinking, but it remained full of water.

  We met many nights later, in a house that her family sold long ago, and finally, in an upstairs bedroom, consummated our relationship. This is something that never happened in our waking lives.

  Then, a year later, in another dream, she’s working at a restaurant on a coast and I come to camp on the shore nearby. I tell her I want to be more to her than a visitor for a week, more than merely someone from her past, and she says “That’s what you said last time.” We’re talking at my campsite but a friend of hers, another waitress, is there, so we’re half-whispering and I’m uncomfortable because clearly the friend can hear all of this, and I have the slippery sense of embarrassment and failure—I know that this old girlfriend is referring to how poorly I behaved in the last dream, when we were reunited in her family’s old house.

  If a dream can actually be aware of and refer to a previous dream as a history, is there a continuity, another life, somewhere?

  Or it’s perhaps that I did not engage or resolve that waking relationship as I might have, that I was immature and hurtful, even without meaning to be, and so I must continue to live it again and again, to feel that sting of helplessness and shame at different stages in my life, to be reminded.

  In these linked dreams, I seem to be almost fifty, my current age, and yet there’s no sign or awareness that I’m married or have children, or of any experiences since high school, since my failure with this person. There are no impedances or obstructions, only the possibility to fail again, to be incapable of summoning the necessary bravery or emotions or maturity. I must experience, anew and repeatedly, the mistrust of this person from my past.

  The painter Charles Burchfield calls dreams a “strange world that seems a memory of childhood’s i
mpressions partly, and partly something that I never have experienced. I have had many such lately; there is a glamour about them that makes them seem much more desirable than real life, an agonizing feeling that they represent a world that I can never hope to find.”

  In his journal from December 5, 1961, Burchfield recounts a dream of a picnic where his family inadvertently takes and eats the food a poor family had left in a stream, to keep it cold. Apologies and reparations are made, and all ends well.

  “Dreams like the above are inconsequential,” he writes. “But what puzzles me about them is that they contain situations which I never actually experienced or thought of, and people whom I never saw in my waking moments.”

  - 26 -

  Alone, that winter, I often thought of Mrs. Abel. She was the last person I’d spent much time with—even if or because so much of that time was silent, out in that black, mesmeric water.

  My neighbors in Mount Pleasant, whose houses weren’t close, never came over to introduce themselves. However, I liked to believe that they were curious about me; I walked past their houses, slowly along the sidewalk-less, icy street to the supermarket, where I’d stand in the parking lot with the cold handset of the payphone against my face, calling my parents.

  This was before cell phones, and before email, before the internet. I had no phone in that little adobe house. I wrote letters. I wrote to the girls in Salt Lake City, and to my ex-girlfriend, and long letters to Mrs. Abel.

  Just last week, in my rummaging through these boxes, I found a 3.5-inch square diskette that had BACK UP 1993–95? written on it. I pulled the thin metal plate against its spring, looked at the black disc, there, burned with old matter.