by Robert Lopez
He’d eat if he were ever hungry and he drinks when he’s thirsty.
He still can feel thirst, and for this he is grateful.
The friend says, If during a particular revolution around the television dial, as I click from one to one hundred, a full revolution up and down the dial—if I can count twenty women on the television that I’d kill the mailman to have sex with, I tell myself to leave the house.
The man says, You can always count on wanting to have sex with the weather women.
Both men raise their glasses and say, To the weather women.
The man says, I was just talking about the mailman we had growing up. I think he meant the world to me.
The friend says, I doubt that.
The man says, You’re probably right.
The friend says, Only sometimes.
The man says, You were saying.
The friend says, I was, I think, yes—there is no reason for this to be a reason to leave the house. But this is my reason. I leave it up to chance.
The man says, What are you talking about?
The friend says, Leaving the house because of what’s on television.
The man says, That’s right, the weather women.
The friend says, Once out of the house, I sometimes realize I’ve no business being outside like this.
The man says, Subject to people and bitter weather.
The friend says, The only thing that will keep me in the house is a submarine movie. Doesn’t matter which one.
The man says, I’m with you there.
The friend says, Reverse the starboard engines, right full rudder, man overboard port side, all back full—I can’t get enough.
The man says, It’s like when I was a submariner.
The friend says, You were never on a submarine.
The man says, I thought about it. I can reverse the starboard engines and go all back full with the best of them.
The man never once considered joining the navy or any of the armed services.
His father, Jasper, had served in the Army and was stationed overseas for two years.
The man was never sure what his father did in the Army.
He thinks he was a private or a corporal and did whatever privates and corporals do. He never served in a war, but was on active duty when a president was assassinated.
The friend says, Aren’t you afraid of the water? Didn’t you almost drown once?
The man says, What’s all back full mean?
The friend says, It’s when they have to slam on the brakes.
The man says, Amazing what you can learn from watching television.
The friend says, How did you almost drown, again?
The man says, It was in the river. The current.
The friend says, That’s right. What were you doing in the river?
The man says, Drowning.
The friend says, I mean were you on a boat, were you fishing, were you….
The man says, I was on a boat and coaxed into the water.
The friend says, Fuck you and the coaxing.
The man says, The lesson is, boats are dangerous, as are planes, cars, horses, any mode of transportation.
The friend says, Who coaxed you into the water?
The man says, An old girlfriend.
The friend says, Was she trying to drown you?
The man says, There was that side to her.
The friend says, It’s exciting, when a woman tries to kill you.
The man says, They are always trying to kill you.
The concept of an underwater boat has roots deep in antiquity. Although there are images at the temples at Thebes of men using hollow sticks to breathe underwater while hunting, the first known military use occurred during the siege of Syracuse (about 413 BCE), where divers were used to clear obstructions according to the History of the Peloponnesian War. At the siege of Tyre in 332 BCE, Alexander the Great, according to Aristotle, again used divers. Later legends suggested that Alexander used a primitive submersible for reconnaissance missions. This seems to have been a form of diving bell, and was depicted in a sixteenth-century Islamic painting.
Although there were various plans for submersibles or submarines made during the Middle Ages, the Englishman William Bourne designed one of the first workable prototype submarines in 1578. His idea ultimately never got beyond the planning stage. The first submersible to be actually built in modern times was constructed in 1605 by Magnus Pegelius.
The first successful submarine was built in 1620 by Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel, a Dutchman in the service of James I of England. It may have been based on Bourne’s design. It was propelled by oars and is thought to have incorporated floats with tubes to allow air down to the rowers. The precise nature of the submarine type is a matter of some controversy; some claim that it was merely a bell towed by a boat.
The men drink from the whiskey and chase it with beer.
Neither man notices a fly buzzing behind the curtain of the window they are sitting under.
The fly found its way into the house through a hole in the screen door yesterday afternoon.
The woman had left the door open in order to get some fresh air into the house.
She was outside in her garden, tending to the tomatoes while she was airing out the house.
The man was elsewhere, probably in the park trying to read a story about the local baseball team’s struggling first baseman. He was distracted by a woman practicing yoga, though, and couldn’t concentrate on the story.
The woman proved a fine distraction. Her body was lean and angular and looked beautiful and elegant in every pose.
The story the man couldn’t concentrate on quoted any number of team officials supporting the struggling first baseman. They all said they were confident the struggling first baseman could straighten himself out at the big-league level. There was speculation they’d send him down to the minors, but they were trying to avoid this scenario if at all possible.
However, they did admit that at some point something had to change.
The first baseman isn’t a good baseball player, is the problem. The organization was fooled into thinking he has potential because he has occasionally hit a series of meaningless home runs over the past two years.
The struggling first baseman has horrible mechanics at the plate. He holds his hands too low and has a significant hitch in his swing, which prevents him from catching up with high fastballs. And the struggling first baseman can’t hit a curveball to save his mother’s life, which was in peril last year due to a bout with breast cancer.
Today she is in remission.
In fact, she is back on the courts today, playing tennis again for the first time in a year.
Her oncologist, who also plays, gave her the green light to start exercising again.
She has good ground strokes and is solid at the net. But she has a herky-jerky motion while serving that is as awkward-looking as her son’s flailing swings at curveballs in the dirt.
Every day the man hopes to hear that the team has sent the struggling first baseman to the minor leagues.
He’s certain that once this happens the struggling first baseman won’t be heard from again.
But of course, he hopes the struggling first baseman’s mother stays in remission and leads a full and lengthy life, her only disappointment being her son’s fleeting major league career.
The origins of the fifteen, thirty, and forty scores in tennis are believed to be medieval French. The earliest reference is in a ballad by Charles D’Orleans in 1435, which refers to quarante cinque, and in 1522 there is a sentence in Latin, “We are winning thirty, we are winning forty-five.” However, the origins of this convention remain obscure. It is possible that clock faces were used on court, with a quarter move of the hand to indicate a score of fifteen, thirty, and forty-five. When the hand moved to sixty, the game was over. However, in order to ensure that the game could not be won by a one-point difference in players’ scores, the idea of “
deuce” was introduced. To make the score stay within the sixty ticks on the clock face, the forty-five was changed to forty. If both players have forty, the first player to score receives ten and that moves the clock to fifty. If the player scores a second time before the opponent is able to score, they are awarded another ten and the clock moves to sixty. However, if a player fails to score twice in a row, then the clock would move back to forty to establish another “deuce.”
Another theory is that the scoring nomenclature came from the French game jeu de paume (a precursor to tennis, which initially used the hand instead of a racket). Jeu de paume was very popular before the French Revolution, with more than one thousand courts in Paris alone. The traditional court was ninety feet in total, with forty-five feet on each side. When the server scored, he moved forward fifteen feet. If he scored again, he would move another fifteen feet. If he scored a third time, he could only move ten feet closer.
The origin of the use of “love” for zero is also disputed. It’s possible that it derives from the French expression for “the egg” (l’œuf) because an egg looks like the number zero. This is similar to the origin of the term “duck” in cricket, supposedly from “duck’s egg,” referring to a batsman who has been called out without completing a run. One possibility comes from the Dutch expression iets voor lof doen, which means to do something for praise, implying no monetary stakes. Another theory on the origins of the use of “love” comes from the acceptance that, at the start of any match, when scores are at zero, players still have “love for each other.”
This last theory seems entirely ridiculous.
The man never played tennis as a young man but thinks he might like to pick it up as a hobby. There are courts nearby, and whenever he sees people out there playing, he thinks he might like to himself.
It’s doubtful he will ever buy a racket, let alone play tennis with other people.
The man says, It may’ve been my wife.
The friend says, What may’ve been your wife?
The man says, That coaxed me into the water.
The friend says, You don’t remember?
The man says, I’m trying.
The friend says, How can you not remember something like that?
The man says, It’s a problem.
The man is conflating two events again, as he often does.
The day he almost drowned in the river took place a full week before a major catastrophe altered the lives of everyone in the community.
Two terrorists blew up a bus in the middle of morning rush hour, killing several and wounding dozens.
There is a memorial at the site of the explosion, commemorating those lost.
This day, there were several bystanders, many of whom were wounded. One, a twelve-year-old boy driving a bicycle on the sidewalk, succumbed to his wounds a week later. He became something of a poster child.
The man almost drowned in the river a week before all of this happened.
Why it comes to mind is that he drove right by the site on his way to the river. Of course, he only remembered this in retrospect.
It is true the man was coaxed into the river, and it was the woman who was about to go away who did the coaxing.
At this point, though, the man didn’t know the woman was about to go away. He learned this months later, or perhaps it was years.
The man always has a hard time with chronology.
The woman going away, who coaxed him into the river, grew up in Poland or Romania or even Slovakia.
She spoke several languages and the man was impressed by this.
They were meeting one of her Polish friends, who had a German boyfriend who had a boat. The four of them were to go boating up and down the river.
They had coolers filled with beer and soda and sandwiches.
At one point the women stripped off their outerwear, revealing blue bathing suits.
One was in a one-piece and the other a bikini.
It’s not important which was which.
Let’s say for now that the woman who was about to go away was in the one-piece, as she was always modest.
The man watched the two Polish women swimming in the river. They were laughing and splashing and having a grand time.
This is when the woman who was about to go away coaxed the man into the water.
She said, Come on in with us.
He said, The water looks dirty.
She said, It’s fine.
He said, I didn’t bring my trunks.
She said, You have on boxers, yes?
At this point, the other Polish woman joined her friend in coaxing the man into the river.
The man hadn’t swum in over twenty years and had never tried swimming in a river.
The man thought nothing of it, though. He thought it must be like riding a bicycle, which is another thing the man hadn’t done in twenty years.
The man jumped in and started drowning at once.
He had never experienced a current before and it immediately pulled him down and away from the boat.
The man tried to remember what swimming entailed, the various motions of the arms and legs. There was awkwardness, confusion, frustration.
The man couldn’t remember anything.
Nothing went through the man’s mind as he started to drown. There were no memories, no regrets, no thoughts at all other than trying to remember how to swim.
Of course, the man was terrified during this time, which lasted five seconds or years.
The man would’ve drowned had the woman who was about to go away not dog-paddled over to rescue him. She came up and under him, hooking his arms with her own, and dragged him to the surface. Then she paddled over to the boat and helped him in.
Neither said a word as the man gasped for breath on the deck.
They were both trying to be nonchalant.
It’s unclear if the Polish woman still in the water or the German piloting the boat were aware of what had happened.
No one said anything about it for the rest of the afternoon.
The woman immediately returned to the river once the man caught his breath.
He thought this was somewhat callous of her, but he was grateful she saved his life at the same time.
Of course, had she not coaxed him into the water, his life wouldn’t have needed saving.
This made the man think of something his father used to tell him: that you should never bang your head against the wall just because it feels good when you stop.
Percy Bysshe Shelly, Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan, J.J. Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim, Grigori Rasputin, Hart Crane, Virginia Woolf, Arky Vaughan, Mary Jo Kopechne, Josef Mengele, Natalie Wood, Jeff Buckley, Spalding Gray, and Rodney King all drowned.
The friend says, Sometimes I get on a bus.
The man says, When?
The friend says, During the day.
The man says, I thought we were talking about drowning.
The friend says, I thought we were finished. Do you have anything to add?
The man says, I don’t recommend it.
The friend says, Neither do I.
The man says, I thought you said you didn’t take the bus.
The friend says, I never take the bus two blocks from my house.
The man says, You take another bus, then.
The friend says, Yes.
The man says, What goes on there?
The friend says, You wouldn’t believe it.
The man says, Tell me.
The friend says, The dregs, the rabble.
The man says, Dregs and rabble.
The friend says, Robots, zombies.
The man says, So, that’s how it is on the bus.
The friend says, This is it. This is how it works.
The man says, I always wondered.
The man has never wondered what it was like on a bus. The man has contemplated or speculated about a great many things, but never this.
Sometimes the man will say something in conver
sation that’s intended to be funny or keep the conversation moving.
The man remembers dinner last night at the Italian restaurant his wife’s new nudist friend recommended. He considers telling his friend about the dinner, but thinks better of it.
The friend was well acquainted with his wife’s nudist friend and in fact had some kind of dalliance with her last year, before he met his wife, Janice.
Dinner was at a restaurant not far from where the man works. He’d walked past this restaurant many times and never realized it was there. The man never looks around or pays attention when he’s out walking in the world. There is too much information to retain, he’s decided—too many buildings and offices and restaurants and shops and none have anything to do with him. This is why he tries to keep his head down at all times, so he doesn’t have to know anything that doesn’t pertain to him.
He enjoyed his meal and so did his wife. They ate and drank and talked as they have countless times before. The food was good, as was the service. There were many others in the restaurant eating and drinking and talking. The man did not pay attention to any of them and they paid no attention to him, either.
One couple two tables over was discussing the conditions of their divorce. They wanted to handle this on their own, like adults. They didn’t want to involve lawyers. They didn’t want this to be acrimonious. One of them said Surely there has to be and the other said I couldn’t agree more. There was awkwardness, confusion, frustration. From the beginning the man did what he was told, what he thought was right, and the woman resented him for this. Or else it was the other way around.
They did the math right there at the table. One of them said I’m not sure we can make this work. The other said Maybe we should stay together.
So they decided to try one last time.
The next morning one of them packed an overnight bag and left the country. This one left a note on the kitchen table that said, You can’t argue with the math.
