The Night Swimmer

by Matt Bondurant

  No, I said, it’s nice.

  All the bits are ruined over here, she said. On the other side they’ll be beautiful again.

  I raised my hand and steadied a swaying fragment of a picture book, torn in half with a hole in the middle and a loop of wire passing through. The wind was only slight here, buffered in the natural depression, barely shifting through the trees, and toys clinked together lightly like wind chimes.

  I don’t understand, I said.

  It’s for the children of the sea, Ariel said. The ones who passed through.

  She was beaming, her wide face open and glowing.

  You’ve seen them, out in the water, on your swims. You’ve been close to them.

  Who?

  Lost at sea, Ariel said. All thems that are lost.

  * * *

  That afternoon on the long finger of Blananarragaun I scrambled down the black rock, crabbing myself through the boulders to where the swells dashed their full height. The water was thick with feeding pilchards, the air full of terns and auks. A few puffins gazed from their rock niches out to the western sun. Above me the cliffs thundered with echo and shadow. I slipped in and let the current push me quickly seaward. I felt a thousand motes of light on the water, the gentle churn of creatures about my body, the ebb and pull of tides. The sea throbbed with life around me as I drifted from land.

  * * *

  That spring Fred and I adopted a regular schedule whereby I would spend four days on the island midweek and then return on Thursday for the weekend. As the bird-watchers clustered in the harbor looking for passage to the islands, and other tourists came in to holiday on the beaches of Sherkin, Hare, or Long Island, or to take walking tours of Clear, the Nightjar began to do more business. Fred banged around the kitchen and started making up large batches of soups on Friday mornings, and I delivered food, cleaned tables, and ran the dishwasher when the pub filled up in the afternoons. He started selling Highgate’s cheese, using it on our toasted sandwiches. Its salty, earthy taste was unmistakable, but I’m not sure if our patrons enjoyed it. We still did a smaller trade than the rest of the pubs, but it didn’t take much to break even. I don’t think Fred or I ever thought of this enterprise as a way to make money, but we needed a cushion for when the gale season came around again. Fred still made the occasional trip into Cork in the Peugeot for pub supplies and materials for Highgate’s farm.

  * * *

  I told O’Boyle that I wanted to do the Fastnet swim again, soon.

  He was drinking a deep bowl of mutton stew in the Five Bells, whiskered and hungover. He put down his bowl and stared at me.

  Why’d you want to do that? he asked. Wasn’t it bad enough last time for ya?

  I was sick, I said. I can make it if we have good weather. I need the boat out just in case.

  The builders mumbled at the bar, nose deep in stout, a few chattering birders, the groaning whine of floorboards and stools, the hiss of a pan in the kitchen. O’Boyle sat perfectly still, watching me. He was thinking, hard.

  Can I ask ya not to do it?

  No, I said. You can’t.

  * * *

  I flung myself into the ocean and hacked away for hours at a time in a red heat, my underarms, neck, and groin chafed to bloody rags, the muscles of my back and arms shredded and knotted with cramps. I wanted to be prepared. I would drag myself out of the water and shudder with exhaustion, and in those moments I forgot that my marriage was coming apart, the layers peeling away like pieces of a broken satellite reentering the earth’s atmosphere. It was only a matter of time before we exploded into a fiery flower of carbon and cinders.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I was relieved to see Dinny’s boat alongside the quay in the Ineer, the engine thumping a slim trail of smoke, O’Boyle standing on the foredeck in his sandals, hands in his pockets gazing out to sea. It was overcast, the sky slate gray, but the sea was light, an undulating field shimmering in the glare. Fastnet was clear and unshrouded by fog or spray. I tossed my bag into the boat and stripped down to my suit.

  Where’s Dinny?

  Ah, he wouldn’t come.

  Why?

  Just wouldn’t, is all.

  O’Boyle stepped around the pilothouse and hopped down on the deck. He fiddled with the throttle. I took some latex gloves and began applying lubrication.

  I’d really rather we didn’t do this, he said.

  Look at the water, I said. It’s perfect. I’ll be done in three hours.

  Still, he said.

  I snapped the gloves off and worked my cap onto my head. There was no breeze, the air temperature in the sixties, water temp mid-fifties. I walked down the steps and sat to spit in my goggles.

  It’s not safe, he said.

  I can do this swim, I said. I’ve done longer distances. I’m in shape, the conditions are perfect. Just relax.

  O’Boyle riffled in an old rucksack and produced a battered thermos.

  Care for some tea?

  No, thanks, I said. I’m keeping it simple this time. Just water and toast.

  He continued to hold the thermos out to me with a wide-eyed look. I shook my head. He tossed it in the sack with resignation and sat on the stool with slumped shoulders. I stood on the bottom step, the water lapping around my waist, and began to stretch my arms and shoulders. O’Boyle rose off his stool and turning to me seemed about to say something when he froze in a crouch, one hand raised toward Fastnet. He closed his eyes and tilted his head to the side slowly.

  O’Boyle?

  He moved his lips, mumbling something, a frown of concentration on his face.

  Noises, he muttered, sounds, sweet airs . . .

  He shook his head and straightened up, looking around as if he was lost.

  You all right?

  Yeah, he said. I’m just . . . just a little knackered you know.

  He rummaged around under the wheelhouse and came up with a can of Old Peculier. He snapped the top and took a deep drink, then took a cassette tape out of his pocket and snapped it into the player he had lashed to the center console. Robbie Williams.

  Is that the only tape you have? I said. Kind of annoying.

  O’Boyle gave me his long, rubbery smile.

  Got your kit aboard? he said. Then let’s go.

  He put the boat in gear and pulled out into the middle of the Ineer. I cinched my goggles down and stood and stretched for a moment before diving in. I felt strong, and the water was smooth and comfortable.

  The glare reduced visibility under the water, but I quickly locked into a nice five-stroke breathing pattern, focusing on the long reach, rolling my shoulders, my fingers stretching out before my eyes just under the glassy film of the water. Then the angle, fingers together for the catch, elbow out and pull through, a five-beat kick and a snap of the wrist to the release and my hand out and swinging low over the water, elbow high. I wanted to go fast, not only to make sure I beat any weather coming in but also to show O’Boyle that there was nothing to worry about. I did a quick sighting every fifty strokes, keeping the finger of Fastnet dead ahead. It was easy without much in terms of swells; every time I looked up, the lighthouse was there. O’Boyle puttered along up to my left, perched on his stool and drinking beer, one hand steadying the wheel. I felt calm, fast, and completely assured, and I cleared the first mile in twenty-five minutes.

  The roar and slush of the water, the cavernous inhalations of my breathing, the plunk and drum of bubbles, all of those things faded into a kind of white noise and I was left with the machinations of muscle, sinew, tendon, organs, the electric pulses of my mind going about its subtle tracings of thought. All these normally background sounds came to the fore, and by focusing on them individually I could hear the fracture of tissue, the slow grind of a ball in a socket, the drip of pooling lactic acid in my arms, the push and ebb of blood to my heart, the pleasant whir of my mind calculating and displaying a memory. It was easy to while away the time immersed in this pleasant suspension, and when I raised my head above wa
ter the rush of the external came back like a daytime phantasm in which swaths of time and space had passed through my fingers. The stone column of Fastnet, its yellow eye gently spinning, rose up before me.

  The sky had darkened, a scattering of clouds, but as the seas kept to a gentle roll and pitch I wasn’t worried. Underwater the stray filtered beam of sunlight created twisting tunnels into the deep, my hands stretching out into their dusty light. Another hundred strokes and the swells began to rise up, heading nearly due east, right into me. My sight line was still decent, and O’Boyle chugging away, the sound of Robbie Williams singing a dramatic ballad drifting over the water, but the increased swells made it tougher going. My hands started slapping the coming waves and as I crested the peaks my upper body started to rise out of the water, then crash down the slope. I stopped and treaded water for a moment, trying to get some read on the sky, what it was planning to do. The cloud cover was lowered, bending down into the horizon, and there were strong curving streaks of black above Fastnet, which was not a good sign. O’Boyle was idling the boat up to my left, standing at the wheel and watching me over his shoulder. He made a beckoning gesture, to come to the boat, then pointed to the clouds, but I shook my head and pointed at Fastnet. I had maybe a half mile to the lighthouse and in fifteen minutes I’d be on my way back. My shoulders ached slightly, but other than that I felt great. I cleared my goggles and put my head down, intending to churn it out to the lighthouse then cruise back as the weather stacked up behind me and pushed me in. I began to raise up to sight every thirty strokes to make sure I wasn’t pushed off course, and soon I could see the crashing spray on the rocks. The water was now black and took on the oily consistency that comes before rain.

  I couldn’t help but think of the first time out and the way strings of light wound themselves from the depths, how the water seemed charged with gold. But the second time it was all blackness, no movement, nothing. I knew from the charts that around the lighthouse the depths get near a thousand feet.

  But I began to feel something. I thought it was my own heart at first, a regular resonant thrum and echo that I felt through my chest and up into my head. But it was coming from below me. Then it was as if I could see this sensation radiating from the ocean bottom, thick halos like smoke rings, ascending in concentric circles. They seemed to grow as they ascended, and multiply, until they were everywhere. I thought I was suffering from sea blackness, a form of simple hallucination not unlike when you close your eyes and stare at the black of your eyelids and all sorts of shapes begin to appear.

  I stopped and got my bearings, just a hundred yards from Fastnet, the weather growing worse, the swells setting up and topped with hard winds that pushed spray in raining sheets in my face. As I was treading water I saw the rings bursting on the surface, all around me. They were rings of bubbles, air or gas from somewhere down in the deep. The air was suddenly thick with the warm, sweet smell of blood and must. For the second time in my life I felt real fear in the water.

  I lit out for Fastnet at top speed, suddenly desiring land, to get out of that water. I felt like I was being buffeted by underwater forces and I figured I was feeling the currents off the rocks. When I was a few yards away, at the base of an egg-shaped boulder the size of a house, I let a wave carry me onto it, and when my body slapped on the rock, I gripped it spread-eagle with my arms and legs, clutching handfuls of barnacles, and when the wave retreated I hauled myself up before the next swell could tear me away. As I climbed I saw my arm was a mask of blood, my suit tearing and snagging, and I knew that I was cut badly all over.

  I looked up, the tower of the lighthouse rising above me, and that was when I saw her, clinging to the side of the lighthouse. She was at least a hundred feet up, hair whipping in the wind, naked, a white form on the gray rock. A small child. She was looking right at me. She seemed to nod, then plying her limbs like a lizard she began to climb up the tower, circling it to the left, moving faster and coming around the other side, moving with impossible speed, like film sped up. The sky was now completely black, as if the entire day had gone, and I turned and hurled myself back into the water.

  I had the vague bulk of Cape Clear on the horizon and I made for it with everything I had. I was screaming as I breathed, sprinting even though I knew that I had more than three miles to go and needed to conserve my energy. Underwater currents tore at my legs and I struggled to stay on line with the island. There were sounds in the water I hadn’t heard before, long groans and whines, and I couldn’t tell if they were from me or something else. Suddenly the sea seemed to bulge, and I had the sensation of being lifted up in the water, as if something very large was rising underneath me. Then the water dropped and I was sucked down at least ten feet and pulled forward in an invisible wake. As I struggled to the surface I saw shapeless patches of white moving at terrific speed, a flash, and then the swell of water subsided as the white patches disappeared into the murk. Where was O’Boyle? On the surface, straight ahead I could see Cape Clear, still a couple miles off, lights on the hillside, the harbor mouth.

  Then I saw the fin, triangular and black, at least six feet high, surging through the water at a terrific speed, moving past me. Then two more, like dark sails, the tops of the fins slightly curved, and a broad back of black skin with a mottled white patch broke the surface. I was treading water and my face opened up and I screamed, staring hard at Cape Clear, desperately hoping, for the first time in my life, that someone would save me.

  There was a crash and a surge of water, and I cowered as a shadow rose up. Something knocked me in the head, a loop of heavy rope, an iron craft with tall black sides topped with stooping cranes and tackle. I grabbed the rope and was yanked from the water and over the side of the ship like a gaffed tuna, landing in the arms of an enormous man. He was so large it didn’t seem real, but I clutched his neck. He cradled me for a moment, then I was set down on something soft and other men were there, hovering over me. I saw the man who caught me stand up and look at his arms, slick and shining with blood. Conchur. Broad floodlights were pointed at us from the pilothouse, casting the deck and the other men gathered around talking in Irish in a harsh black-and-white negative image. They seemed confused and tried to avert their eyes. My suit was torn to ribbons and I curled into a ball and someone threw a blanket over me. I convulsed hard a few times, then vomited a sheet of green water and bile. The men cursed, and I was picked up again and carried somewhere into the interior of the ship. I hid my face in my hands, wishing to be as small as possible, wanting to be dwarfed by the arms of the man who held me.

  * * *

  Conchur Corrigan’s salvage craft was long and wide and flat-bottomed, with all manner of cranes, cables, winches rigged like webbing along its length. Essentially a low iron box, it seemed like a boat that should not be able to move, much less float. The men aboard looked like the survivors of a mining disaster; the bleak pallor of their skin contrasted with the blackened smudge on their faces and hands, their stained canvas jackets.

  Conchur sat beside me while we steamed back to Baltimore in the streaming rain. He was an outsize man in every sense of the word; his head looked like someone had hewn a set of eyes, nose, and mouth into a block of speckled pine, his chin squared, lantern-jawed. He was nearly seven feet tall, and broad in the shoulders. The men clustered around chattering in Irish, and Conchur grunted a few syllables in reply. They were all inspecting me carefully. Where was O’Boyle? Did the boat swamp? Was he safe?

  My teeth were chattering hard, despite the blanket, and I wasn’t sure if I was going into shock.

  Conchur finally addressed me in English:

  What the fuck were you doin’ out there?

  Swimming, I said.

  He looked at his compatriots and they all shrugged and raised their eyebrows.

  Where?

  To Fastnet. And back.

  That set off a string of Irish.

  Conchur leaned in close. The one item about him that was off: his eyes were small, deep-se
t, vaguely pinkish, like the eyes of a pig.

  Don’t do that. Swim. Out here.

  He put a large hand on my shoulder, his thumb at the base of my throat and forefinger curled over my spine. He could have wrung my neck like a chicken.

  You should stay in Baltimore, he said. Or even better, back where you came from.

  He wasn’t hurting me, but I started to cry, ducking my head and sobbing into the blanket. Conchur gave me a pat, then took his hand off my neck. More rattling Irish with his comrades.

  Did you see them killers out there? he said.

  What?

  Them killers. Killer whales. Sea wolves.

  I think so, I said.

  Almost had ya, they did.

  Where’s the little girl?

  Conchur squinted at me.

  She was on the lighthouse, I said. A little girl.

  Conchur turned and said something in Irish to the men, and that set off a new round of curses. I was shaking and crying, my flesh swelling as it warmed. I couldn’t shut my eyes.

  There’s nobody out there, he said. Just you.

  * * *

  Conchur dropped me on the quay in Baltimore and before I turned around they were already backing the salvage ship off, the smokestack belching gouts of black smoke, heading out into Roaringwater Bay. Conchur stood at the rail, and when I looked at him he shook his head and raised one giant hand and waggled a finger at me. Bad girl.

  The sky behind him, over Roaringwater and out into the Atlantic, was broken with blue, the winds calm and the seas mild. The storm had come and gone in less than an hour.

  When I staggered into the pub, wrapped in a blanket, Fred was setting up a round of drinks for a small crowd of people. Standing at the bar I saw the shaggy form of Gus the German, Akio, and Magdalene. Patrick stood off to the side with the American girls Stacy and Sara. He was describing something and building shapes on the bar with his fingers. Fred saw me and started to smile, then his eyes widened and he rushed around the bar.

  Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Elly!

  I’m sorry, I said. Please don’t be mad.