The Night Swimmers

by Peter Rock

  That was an early lesson for me in the dangers of language, of reading metaphors literally and not recognizing figuration. This is a practice, a tendency that continues to trouble me.

  - 44 -

  I descended from Mrs. Abel’s loft; I locked the door behind me as best I could, then returned through the woods, which was more difficult and took longer than walking on the lake. The wind gusted, and icicles chimed together, breaking off to knife down silently into the snow around me.

  By the time I reached the rental car, my feet were numb, my jeans covered in ice to the knee. The sky was darker in the trees, away from the glow of the lake.

  The cow path up to the bluff was drifted in, impassable, so I drove around—up our road then onto the highway, doubling back on the road above.

  There was no sign to Mr. Zahn’s place, but I knew which driveway it was, and it was drifted in, unplowed. I parked on the road, walked toward the house. As I came around the trees, however, there was nothing but an open field of snow in the moonlight, glowing faintly blue. There was no wreckage, no marks where the foundation had been—the house had disappeared, and everything was so silent.

  I walked out into the field, across the glowing snow, into the space where that living room had been. I walked the perimeter of the house, tamping down the snow where the walls had rested.

  I floundered, then, through the deep snow, to the edge of the trees. Under them, there was no boat. I kicked at the frozen ground until finally I dislodged some boards with faded paint on them, the wood all perforated with the teeth-marks of porcupines.

  The cold moon shone down. The tires of the rental car spun, caught, and I drove back toward our road, through the trees, where my Aunt Dee’s house stretched dark against the lake.

  Long and narrow, the house has been expanded since my grandparents’ time; it has windows on both sides, and I could see straight through it, the haunting white of the ice.

  I found the hidden key, unlocked the door, then gathered my few things and carried them inside. I switched on the lights, turned on the heat, and kicked off my frozen boots.

  The floor in the entryway was green slate, as it’s always been. On the walls, photographs of Dee’s grandchildren, and her children, my cousins, and even one or two of me—standing in shallow water, wearing a diaper, laughing or shouting. A note on the table welcomed me, explained how to use the complicated espresso machine, told me the password for the internet. I glanced up, across the sunken living room with its shag carpet; above the piano, a painting of my mother with Dee and their older sister, Sally, from sixty years before, when they were girls.

  In the dark kitchen, I drank a glass of water, looking out at the ice, white beneath the moon. And then shadows shifted—a movement on the beach, through the sparse trees. I leaned forward, my forehead against the glass of the window. A shadow, a dark shape, hidden behind the tree. I hurried out of the kitchen, around the table. I unlocked the door, stepped out into the snow in my stocking feet.

  “Who’s there?” I called.

  A scrabbling of stones on the beach, a crashing into the underbrush. A tangle of dark limbs resolved itself into the shape of a deer just as it bounded away.

  Back inside, I found my computer, opened it, turned it on, and connected myself to the rest of the world. Emails from students about setbacks they were suffering, messages from colleagues about upcoming meetings, another from my wife about a hike she and our daughters had taken, a story about the girls disappearing deep into a cave, and a picture of a note they found inside a hollowed out tree trunk:

  I took off my coat; the house was warming up.

  Searching the web, it didn’t take me long to find out what had happened to Mr. Zahn’s house. I suspected that it had merely been demolished, making way for a wealthy Chicagoan’s summer castle, but in fact it was being moved, relocated. A museum in Minnesota had purchased the house and had carefully taken it apart, piece by piece. They planned to reconstruct it exactly as it had been, to gather his far-flung carved animals and to repopulate those rooms.

  Next, I carried my things down the short hallway, past the laundry room where we used to steal warm Fresca, where the badminton rackets were always kept. In the room where my grandfather once slept, blankets were piled high and thick on the single bed. I undressed and slid in beneath them. I closed my eyes and thought of Mr. Zahn’s house, the pieces of it all stacked somewhere, waiting to be put back together. I wondered about the museum workers, and I doubted they’d know about the secret compartments, that they’d understand where to press so those lions’ jaws would open. When the house is put back together I’ll go to that museum; I’ll wait until the security guard is distracted, and I’ll climb up and open that lion. I’ll see if there’s a message or story inside, waiting for me.

  I switched on the bedside lamp and began to read The Hollow Tree, aware that my grandfather—wearing a cardigan sweater, golf slacks, maybe smoking a pipe—might have, years before, written the words in the very room where I was reading them.

  He jumps from Montaigne (patron saint of all digressers), to Darwin, to something my mother said when she was five, to Spinoza, and then writes, “One thing that has always fascinated me is how big (in feet and inches, in pounds or stone) were the people I read and read about in history? What did they look like and act like precisely? Their biographies sometimes give some general specifications, usually not.”

  His attention drifts in currents, crosscurrents, undercurrents. On the next page: “I’ve read many definitions of Zen. Here is a new one, ‘Merely becoming what we already are from the beginning.’ Below this in my journal is ‘The map is not the territory.’ That also sounds as if it means something.”

  For two days I asked everyone I talked to—at the post office, the Piggly Wiggly, the AC Tap—but no one had any news of Mrs. Abel. If anyone asked me why I was looking for her, I told them the truth: that I believed she was looking for me.

  And if I do an internet search for Claire Abel, I find nothing, no helpful results at all. Even if I pay the search engines (as I have: PeopleFinder, anywho.com, Intelius, etc.), I only get people who share her name, who are not her age, who have children and spouses she could not have, who live in places she could not possibly be.

  six

  —

  - 45 -

  On January 7, 1934, Charles Burchfield writes in his journal: “Since then, the strange abstract dream-quality of this Storm over the Lake has remained with me as some remnant out of my boyhood, when natural events loomed larger than they do now. Perhaps it is even some vague memory from my first years of life at Ashtabula, some storm perhaps that made an impression on my infant mind, forgotten till now it turns up in a dream. For I believe that an impression once received, whether consciously or unconsciously, never leaves the mind.”

  When I first read about the psychic photographer Ted Serios, I was in high school. I found the mystery so attractive; I was drawn to the inexplicability of how a man might cast something (even or especially if he couldn’t be certain what it was) from inside himself and into a camera, onto film: to make it visible outside himself.

  A related and deeper attraction (and one reason the images Serios made continue to haunt me) is the promise this suggests: that what is lost and hidden inside us might be projected outward and surprise us. This lost and hidden matter waits for us, available, hoping to surface, to be summoned, if we can only learn how.

  I feel the presence of what the person or persons before me had left behind, in this tight space, in this salty soup that holds me. Shadowy figures, shards of other times, glimpses into thickets of trees, rooms of houses I’ve never been inside; I begin to think of the actual people in the tanks around me—so close, just on the other side of the wall, suspended naked between sleep and wakefulness—and how their memories and fears and lives are seeping and bleeding into my own, sliding through the darkness, that in-between space. />
  Mrs. Abel’s strokes, always so calm, in rhythm, the water blackly slipping around her. I’ve never seen a swimmer disturb the surface of the water less than she did.

  I imagine her swimming across Death’s Door, those miles between the tip of the peninsula and Washington Island where so many ships went down; when I envision how she held her breath and swam down through their rusted, broken husks, it reminds me of a Hemingway story, “After the Storm,” and a passage I copied from it, that summer:

  I took off my clothes and stood and took a couple deep breaths and dove over off the stern with the wrench in my hand and swam down. I could hold on for a second to the edge of the porthole and I could see in and there was a woman inside with her hair floating all out. I could see her floating plain and I hit the glass with the wrench hard and I heard the noise clink but it wouldn’t break and I had to come up.

  The long hair floating in the aquatic wind—that’s what attracted me, stayed inside me. Or was it the inability to reach the underwater woman?

  - 46 -

  I moved to California, after that summer of 1995, to work on my writing in the company of other people. It surprised me to find, in the packet of letters she sent me, that I’d continued to write to my old girlfriend during this time. Still reporting on my daily life, sending stories for her to read, needing her reassurance and intelligence, trying to maintain her interest in me.

  [Sent from Palo Alto to Toronto, 1995]

  September 9

  Been missing you, unpacking things (like this) that have been in boxes for a year and a half or whatever. Yes! I have a new home . . . My days of searching were desperate, hopeless, not even close . . . I don’t have a real stove and my shower’s in the kitchen, but I can get with it.

  October 1

  It is nice in Palo Alto, almost too nice. It’s hard to know where the campus ends and the city begins; everywhere people are sitting at tables outside, eating bagels and drinking espresso. Also I saw some people walking around naked on the campus, very free and Californian. Sounds to me like you’re a success. Took one of your iron pills (packed with the spices), so perhaps I’ll follow suit.

  When I met my wife, I lived in Palo Alto and she lived in San Francisco, an hour away. She had a job in a neurobiology laboratory, running tests on frogs, and I could not see her as often as I desired. I wanted to see her every day, all the time. I’d sometimes drive to her apartment and wait for her to return from work. (She’d given me a key!) I’d climb out the window of her apartment, up the ladder to the rooftop of her building; from there, I could see the swaying eucalyptuses of Golden Gate Park, twined with fog. I squinted out toward the ocean, over the rooftops, and felt that weather inside me where suddenly everything was possible. I knew that I had never felt this way about anyone, and that this might be my last chance to learn to be with another person, to not be alone.

  Those days I would walk into Golden Gate Park, surrounded by others on the green grass above the playground, the Carousel. Down below, homeless people with dogs at the end of ropes walked past, pieces of bicycles in their hands; they clustered, they disappeared into the bushes and eucalyptus trees. And one man I recognized—about my age, always shirtless, wearing long tattered shorts. He shouted from the base of the hill, unhinged and beset. “Super girl! Where you at?” Bending down, he turned and looked through his legs at all of us, sitting on the hill, his face upside down and watching us, slapping his ass in time as he shouted: “Su-per Girl! Where you at, Super Girl? I love you, I love you, I love you! Su-per Girl!”

  Email, back then, was something one might access at school, or at work. It wasn’t something anyone had at home. No one had cell phones, either. People were more difficult to locate, to reach.

  I wrote her letters, this woman who would become my wife; I wrote her stories, in fact, of one or two pages. They were more autobiographical than anything I’d written—a way to introduce myself, to share impressive facts about my past and, by also sharing less impressive ones, to demonstrate how comfortable I was, exposing my weaknesses to her. I wrote about my family, and working on the ranch in Montana, about eccentric people I’d known. When I read through these stories now I remember things I’ve forgotten, and notice omissions. I see how I wanted my wife to understand my past, and me. In these stories I’m a dreamer with unlikely skills, a romantic who had been preparing for her, who had been traveling toward her for years and years. That’s actually how I felt, how I feel. But in these pages I’m also a person who never knew romance, never had other girlfriends, never had much to do with women at all.

  It would be simpler, clearer to focus on where I am now, and with whom, not returning to those mysteries and confusions—those times, places, and people that I’ve avoided talking or even thinking about for so long, that I’ve hidden away, that I’ve evaded. And yet to avoid, to forget is a kind of betrayal, pretending that there’s no continuity between myself then and now. I feel both ways.

  In these stories I sent my wife (before she was my wife) I wrote about being a security guard in the art museum where I was not allowed to touch anything or talk to anyone, where I was forbidden to sit down or write anything, where I always felt so encouraged to turn the corner and see Giacometti’s “Walking Man.” I wrote about how I sank deep into pictures and paintings, how I furtively took notes, circling the galleries, how I held as many stories in my mind as I could.

  Yet I did not mention how I’d walk down the long hill from the museum, after work, to the tall house where I lived, and how I lived on the fourth floor with my girlfriend.

  Just the other day, I walked down that hill while I was floating in an isolation tank twenty years later, and I walked to that tall house and went around to the side porch, where the mailbox was; inside the mailbox were envelopes addressed to me, in my own handwriting. I opened them, standing there in the fallen snow. They were rejection letters from magazines that didn’t like or “couldn’t find a place for” the stories I’d sent them.

  The letters I wrote, that my old girlfriend sent me, came bundled in a black ribbon that she often wore in her hair. It seems fitting that the last letter in the bundle begins this way:

  [Sent from Palo Alto to Toronto, 1997]

  June 4

  Hello! Hope this finds you well. I should have been in touch before now; I’ve been pretty scattered, and things are not really settling, even now. What’s up?

  You may have heard that I’m getting married. That’s true. It’s still a little shocking and hard to visualize. A strange kind of levitation. It kind of overwhelms or puts into perspective everything else.

  Not so long ago, my ex-girlfriend wrote to say,

  I also have come to a place where I want to be direct with people, where I am (finally! At this age!) trying to be in the world as I am inside, where I have finally noticed that telling the truth and being vulnerable and not knowing are not as frightening as I have always thought.

  She told me she thought I’d like a talk she’d recently given at Cornell, about the ineffable in writing; this morning, sitting here in my basement, I watched it on YouTube. There she was, tiny on my laptop screen, wearing a red shirt, her voice I hadn’t heard for so long, her hands out in front of her, gesturing with enthusiasm as they always had.

  The talk was titled “Telling Secrets,” and in it she described the vulnerability, the risk-taking of putting one’s own storytelling process in view of strangers, of being turned inside out this way. She told how the writers of the television show worked together, sharing stories from their lives—memories, insights, mistakes—and combining them with other stories, turning them into something new. She describes authorship as a collection of voices, a state of being held captive together until “you begin dreaming each other’s dreams.”

  While she was there in upstate New York, giving the talk, she’d returned to our old place, the house where our apartment had been. The house looked a littl
e derelict, but had been repainted. She was perplexed about where the doors were—whether they had moved since our occupation. She sent me a picture; the mailboxes have been moved from the side of the house to the front. The long stairway that climbed to the screened porch in back had disappeared entirely.

  Her questions about the doors felt crucial. All the ways of egress seemed to have shifted; escape has become difficult, return impossible. She wrote:

  I wish I could have talked to you more back then about important things, and even talked about the future together, which we never really did. I think now I knew then that our future wasn’t together and it seemed unnecessary and messy and painful to discuss it. But I also think now that sometimes talking can change those things and I wish I had known how.

  Seven

  —

  - 47 -

  Running through clothes drying on a line, my grandfather wrote. I can remember the clean smell.

  It’s the scent of cedar that hooks me right back to Wisconsin. My father would put fresh boughs in the fireplace and the scent of ashes disappeared, as if it had never been. I smell cedar and I am back under those trees, running the secret paths with knives in my pockets, heading toward my secret forts.

  I was given the run of those woods, in my childhood. If I wasn’t fishing, I was in the trees—climbing them, or scrambling beneath them, crawling through the underbrush. There were always paths through those woods, to connect neighbor to neighbor, and there were always forts and hideouts. When my mother was a girl, she and her sisters built Horse Hideout, a maze of interlocking paths all bordered with piles of white rocks, shards of limestone. My favorite part of Horse Hideout was near the top of the slope, a bed-sized stretch of moss. Deep green, soft and velvety. Sometimes I stretched out, there, and gazed up through the trees’ branches, into the blue sky, the distant waves in my ears and echoing off the bluff, the moss so cool and so soft against my bare arms.