The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  SWIMMER: I was trying to get away from you! Then I thought I’d might as well look around a bit, since I was up there with nothing to do.

  MAY (Sarcastically): “Enjoy each stage.” (Wrenches his tail)

  SWIMMER: Ouch! I’m sorry I tore your wrapper, ma’am. I didn’t mean to. But it saved my life up there.

  MAY: Transvestite.

  JUNE (Signals MAY to stop): How far up did you go?

  KATE (Sighs): Look at her neat little bazooms. Come on; have a look.

  PETER (Borrows the binocs): One on each side, the way I like ‘em. What else is new? (Returns the glasses to KATHERINE, who resumes her inspection, and goes back to SEX EDUCATION: Play.) They’re going to see us staring at them, hon.

  K: That’s okay; he’s got their seven-by-fifties out now too. (She waves hello with her fingers to Reprise, PETER sighs, sips, reads.)

  SWIMMER (Recognizes JUNE’s less hostile tone and replies earnestly): I got as far as the Grand Fork, I think. Where the Great Eastern Current meets the Great Western?

  (MAY laughs derisively at this nomenclature.)

  PETER: So do I.

  K (Sipping between views): So do you what?

  P: Laugh derisively at this nomenclature.

  (Even JUNE has to smile, but she shushes her companion.)

  JUNE: Go on.

  SWIMMER (Pushes up his glasses; JUNE is startled by the motion, but does not attack.): I couldn’t go on. The current was too strong, and I was too tired. So I tried just floating. But we’re not very good at that.

  MAY: You could have fooled us.

  SWIMMER: I swear to the Sun I wasn’t trying to.

  (MAY wrenches his tail.)

  SWIMMER: Ow!

  JUNE (Shakes her head at MAY): Keep talking, Swimmer.

  Katherine says she might have to take the family for another dip. Says Peter Take, take; I’ll clean up the galley after they’ve knocked May off. Up.

  Kath vows she’s going to swim over to that Repreeze/Reprize boat and ask for literary asylum. It’s no fun sleeping with a chap who sees all the chess moves down the road. But before she jumps ship she wants him to know that she found the climax of II:2 quite moving, for all its farcical aspect. She straps a water-ski belt between her breasts and her belly for extra flotation, skins out of her panties, and goes carefully overside in the pleasant evening light, still wearing the paisley kerchief.

  SWIMMER: I saw your friend’s wrapper caught on something or other up there, where I’d let go of it before, and I found I could float much better with it.

  MAY: So you put on my envelope and came looking for the ones that got away. For Moon’s sake throttle him, Jay-Gee, and let’s throw him back!

  SWIMMER: No! Please! Our coach said you’d be just waiting for us to reach you. (The FLOATERS exchange glances.) I had no idea you-all hated us. . . .

  JUNE: Well. Actually—

  SWIMMER: I wouldn’t blame you if you did. It looks as if we were taught some wrong things. (The FLOATERS exchange a different sort of glance.) And even if some of us didn’t believe everything we were taught, I guess all of us believed some of what the coach told us. He certainly never told us there were two Shes at the She-Shore. . . .

  (Both FLOATERS are laughing despite themselves at his outlandish terminology, MAY gives his tail a twist to recall them to their purpose.)

  SWIMMER: Oh, Father: That hurts!

  MAY: It’s supposed to.

  SWIMMER: I think you’ve broken it.

  MAY: I hope so.

  SWIMMER: Look: I don’t blame you. I’ve learned a lot of things on this journey that we should’ve been taught and weren’t. First you wouldn’t let me Combine with you—

  MAY and JUNE: Combine!

  SWIMMER (Embarrassed): You know what I mean. Then I nearly got Combined myself, just upstream from here. First by a couple of Gay Blades—did you see them swim by? And then later, when I put that wrapper on, a whole gang of Bruisers jumped me. I had to float underwater to get away.

  MAY: Now you know how we feel.

  SWIMMER: I really do, ma’am. Floating underwater raised my consciousness.

  Peter calls Kath? She calls back from somewhere overboard, out of his sight. Just checking, he says. She reminds him she’s wearing a ski belt. Maybe she will paddle over and say hello to Reprise. They obviously don’t mind skinny-dippers any more than we do.

  Bye.

  JUNE: How did you float underwater?

  SWIMMER: Do you suppose you could ease up a bit on my windpipe?

  MAY: Don’t do it, Jay-Gee.

  JUNE (Lets go of his neck, but keeps her hands at the ready): How does a person float underwater?

  SWIMMER: What I did was just sort of . . . I’d have to show you.

  MAY: Maybe we’ll show you how to sink underwater!

  SWIMMER: Damn it, ma’am, I’m innocent! I’ve seen a few brothers do some nasty things, here in the Night-Sea and back in the Right Testorium, too; but I don’t consider such Swimmers as brothers, no matter what the coach says.

  JUNE: The Right what?

  PETER: You heard him.

  SWIMMER: Where we passed our tests and trained for our Night-Sea Journey. I wish I were there right now, so I could tell my kid brothers what it’s really like up here!

  JUNE: If we let you go, are you going to try to Merge with us?

  SWIMMER: Try to what?

  MAY: Jay-Gee!

  JUNE (Resolutely): Fuse us. Combine us.

  SWIMMER: I won’t, I swear. Not if you don’t want me to.

  MAY: We don’t, mister.

  SWIMMER: The truth is, I’m not even certain how it’s done! So many things we were taught have been wrong. . . .

  (JUNE is already climbing off him, warily but positively.)

  MAY: Jay-Gee! (Seeing herself alone with his tail, MAY drops it like a snake and springs up and out of range, moving even farther back on the ledge as the SWIMMER painfully collects himself, examines his injured tail-tip, and begins to stand, JUNE too is awed as he rises to his full height—he is quite tall—shakes his head, and adjusts his cap and eyeglasses. But she stands her ground, and now they survey each other soberly from head to foot, even front and back.)

  PETER: Nausicaa on the beach.

  (MAY retreats another step, winding her rescued wrapper about her.)

  SWIMMER (Carefully places his hurt tail over his shoulder, like a bandolier. MAY crouches defensively at this gesture, but JUNE stands steadfast. The SWIMMER laughs and shakes his head again, in admiring disbelief): I can’t believe this! If only my friend was here to see! Were here.

  PETER: Discovery of Common Ground.

  MAY: You mean to help you Fuse us, is what you mean. Just try it, mister!

  JUNE: You have a friend?

  SWIMMER (Laughs bitterly): I had a hundred million of them. They all drowned in the Night-Sea, except me. (He pushes up his eyeglasses.) This particular friend drowned right at our launching. He was a cynical fellow with far-fetched ideas about our Night-Sea Journey—what it was really all about; what was waiting for us up here if any of us got this far. Everybody thought he was out of his head; Coach Mankewicz despised him. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of my so-called brothers did him in. Even I couldn’t take him very seriously, but I tried to keep an open mind. (He sighs; shakes his head, JUNE is of course very interested.) Now it turns out he was pretty much right! Except about your hating us. (He sits, favoring his injured tail.)

  JUNE: If your whole . . . graduating class? (The SWIMMER shrugs and nods.) If they all drowned except you, who were those other Swimmers just now, and who is it we hear coming upstream?

  SWIMMER: Another class entirely, I guess. Mind you, I’m not supposed to be alive, much less sitting here on the Shore chatting with a She! With two Shes!

  PETER: With two Shes sitting on the salt She-Shore.

  SWIMMER: We’re supposed to either drown along the way or reach the Shore—one ch
ance in zillions!—and then . . . Combine. Whatever that means.

  MAY: Ugh.

  JUNE (Looks at MAY, but speaks to the SWIMMER): So: You’re a survivor. From the last Lunation . . .

  Peter Sagamore frowns, but not with disapproval. That this Swimmer should be a survivor too, May’s counterpart, he hadn’t anticipated. Since the plot cannot imaginably pair them romantically, their shared survivorship will be for the purpose of establishing enough wary rapport, between the rivals for June’s favor, to motivate May’s upcoming self-sacrifice. He thinks of himself and May Jump in time gone by, at that Katherine Anne Porter party.

  MAY: Sounds to me as if their Lunations are about four minutes apart instead of four weeks. The place is crawling with them!

  SWIMMER (Shrugs): Sometimes as close as a few hours, I understand. Other times as far apart as weeks, months, even whole semesters. We call them Launchings. But when one class graduates this close behind another, they can’t be from the same school. My friend claimed there were other testoria besides ours; millions of others! And millions of other Night-Seas, too, each with its millions of Swimmers. He didn’t even know how he knew!

  JUNE: But he seems to have been right. What else did he tell you? And how’d you stay afloat when all the others drowned?

  SWIMMER (Laughs despairingly): Where do I start?

  PETER: Laughs derisively. Laughs despairingly. Laughs adverbially. (Stops carping. Suspends judgment. Reads Act Two, Scene Two, to its end.)

  (He shifts position; MAY makes ready to attack, but JUNE waves her down. MAY will, however, not sit, as JUNE now does.)

  SWIMMER: We’re not supposed to be able to float, you see. We’re supposed to swim, swim, swim, onward and upward—just for the sake of swimming, I suppose—without the faintest idea where we’re headed or why, or what we’re supposed to do if any of us should reach that mythical Shore. . . .

  JUNE: And we’re supposed to float, float, float, for the sake of floating, onward and downward to Mother Moon-Sea—

  MAY (To JUNE, sourly): Unless you find Mister Right.

  SWIMMER: My friend called the whole idea absurd and nasty. He used to say that whatever that beautiful She-Shore turns out to be, if it really exists at all, it ean never justify the death of a hundred million brothers.

  MAY: Justify shmustify, as long as you all drown.

  SWIMMER: My friend thought Coach Mankewicz’s talk about “swimming for swimming’s sake” was lunatic. Of course, the coach thought my friend was lunatic, too. And subversive.

  MAY: You’re all bonkers, if you ask me.

  JUNE: I’m not so sure. What about us . . . Shes? What were you taught about us?

  SWIMMER: You’re going to laugh.

  JUNE: You didn’t laugh when I mentioned Mother Moon-Sea.

  (The SWIMMER smiles, looks away, adjusts his glasses.)

  MAY: He’s our prisoner; that’s why he didn’t laugh.

  SWIMMER (Sighs and plunges in): We were taught that we Swimmers are made by a Maker, whatever that is, and launched on our Night-Sea Journey for reasons known only to capital-H Him. It’s supposed to have to do with “Love” and with “Transmitting the Heritage” . . . . (He puts quotation marks around these terms with his fingers.) But nobody knew for sure what any of that meant! We heard everything from sermons to naughty jokes about it.

  JUNE: Sounds familiar.

  SWIMMER: This friend of mine kept asking “Whose Heritage? Transmit it to whom? Where’s our percentage?” Then he’d say things like our Maker might not even be a Swimmer, but some sort of monstrosity, maybe even without a tail. Or that capital-H He might not even know we’re here. Or that He might know but not care, because He makes thousands of Night-Seas in His own lifetime, each one filled with millions of Swimmers, like ours.

  MAY: That’s disgusting.

  SWIMMER (Shrugs): How about this? My friend used to imagine that our Maker might be stupid, or immoral, or drunk ... or asleep and dreaming!

  MAY: I believe it.

  (JUNE shushes her.)

  SWIMMER: Or He might know very well that we’re here in the Night-Sea, swimming as hard as we can to reach the Shore; but for some reason or other He wants to keep us from reaching it and “fulfilling our destiny,” even though He launched us Himself! Isn’t that preposterous?

  MAY: To me it makes perfect sense. We don’t want you here, either.

  JUNE (Crossly now): Will you listen, May? (To the SWIMMER) Where do we Shes fit in?

  SWIMMER (Embarrassed, but determined to say it out): My friend liked to imagine that in maybe one Night-Sea out of hundreds and thousands, one single, solitary Swimmer—that’s one out of hundreds of billions of us!—gets a chance at a very limited and peculiar kind of “immortality”. . . .

  JUNE: Go on! It’s beginning to fit what we were taught!

  (MAY rolls her eyes and nods sarcastically, mouthing to the viewer “Mister Right.”)

  SWIMMER: My friend claimed that our actual destination was not a bright golden Shore, as everybody believed—which is just a place where we wouldn’t have to swim in the dark anymore. He said it was something . . . not long and thrashing like us, but sort of . . . (He gestures vaguely with his hands, in JUNE’s direction.) sort of smooth, and gently gliding, or floating. . . . (JUNE nods.)

  MAY: And the big brave hero grabs her and tears her envelope off and Fuses her, bang!

  SWIMMER (Frowns seriously and adjusts his glasses): Well . . . Combining. My friend used terms like “Consummation,” and “Union of Contraries,” and “Becoming Something Both and Neither.” I had to agree with him that if what comes from all that is just another Maker—of future Swimmers or future Shes—at the cost of so many millions of dead brothers—maybe dead sisters too, for all we knew—then the whole business is very hard to justify.

  MAY: To say the least.

  SWIMMER (Sees his chance to appeal to her): He said that he himself wasn’t even going to try. The whole thing struck him as obscene.

  MAY: Bully for him!

  SWIMMER: In his opinion, if that’s the way things are, then the real heroes are the suicides. . . .

  MAY: Bravo!

  SWIMMER: And the hero of heroes, in my friend’s opinion, was the one Swimmer in all that number who actually manages to reach a She, against those astronomical odds, and then refuses to Combine!

  MAY (Applauds): Hear hear!

  (JUNE shakes her head.)

  SWIMMER: He said that that would put an end to at least one cycle of catastrophes.

  MAY: That friend of yours had his head on straight. I’d like to shake his hand.

  JUNE: I feel sorry for him.

  SWIMMER: We all made fun of him. When he drowned at our launching, nobody cared except me. (He is lost in his recollections.) We were young and green and gung ho, impatient to be off and swimming! Never mind where or why; just to test ourselves against the Night, the Sea, the Journey itself. (He pauses; looks down.) What happened after that is too terrible to think about. (He covers his face with his hands.)

  JUNE (Reaches out impulsively, to MAY’s horror, but checks her impulse): But you survived.

  SWIMMER (Nods): Massacres. Sea-quakes. Mass suicides. The strong drowning the weak. Gay Blades Combining with each other. Machos singing dirty songs and fighting duels with their tails. Eggheads making up rules and stories and connections between things, even as they went under. The horror!

  JUNE: But you survived.

  SWIMMER (Shakes his head): Not because I’m the fittest, for sure. I’ve seen the best Swimmers of my generation go down. Stronger, wiser, worthier than me . . .

  MAY: Than I.

  (JUNE gestures impatiently.)

  SWIMMER: Than any of us.

  JUNE: What kept you going?

  SWIMMER: I didn’t keep going, ma’am; that’s what saved me. I’d thrash along with the others for a while, thinking about my friend’s crazy ideas and wondering What are we doing here? What’s all this
for? And I’d find myself resting and . . . floating for a bit—which we’d never been told we could do—and thinking things over before I went back to swimming onward and upward. The others charged on ahead, to reach the Shore. . . .

  JUNE (Nods): But there was no Shore. And no She, either.

  MAY (Points to herself): Well, there was; but I was hiding out for dear life up there at the Confluence and teaching myself how to swim back home.

  SWIMMER (Ignores her, in his sad recollection): They all drowned: the fit, the unfit, the wicked, the good. Their bodies came floating back down to where I was swimming and resting, thrashing and floating, thinking about my crazy friend. And somehow making my way up past waterfalls and tidal waves and whirlpools. . . . Then the current got so strong that it carried me back no matter how hard I thrashed, and the time came when I just couldn’t swim another stroke. I gave it up and waited to drown. That’s when I bumped into you.

  JUNE (Moved): Oh, dear: And we thought you were attacking us!

  (The SWIMMER laughs shortly and shakes his head.)

  MAY: You did attack us! You hollered “Love” and tore my envelope off!

  SWIMMER: I thought I was supposed to! My friend said that every She is waiting for her He to swim along.

  MAY: He was bananas, after all.

  SWIMMER: He certainly never imagined that Shes were strong and active and . . . uncombinable.

  JUNE (Her turn to instruct): Actually we’re not. I mean, on the one hand we’re not Little Goody Two-Shoes waiting for her prince to come. . . .

  SWIMMER (Admiringly): I can see that.

  JUNE: Some of us might be like that, but not most of us. But we’re not that other thing, either: uncombinable.

  MAY: I’m uncombinable. Don’t you forget it.

  SWIMMER: No, ma’am. (He strokes his injured tail.)

  JUNE: I’m beginning to think that despite all the hocus-pocus, there’s nothing very mysterious about our situation. You Swimmers periodically come swimming up; we Floaters periodically come floating down—normally one of us at a time and millions of you. If you don’t happen to run into one of us—and that’s most of the time—you all die. . . .

  MAY: Tant pis.

  SWIMMER (Points sadly to some of the earlier advance guard, now floating back dead): No question about that.