One Breath

by Adam Skolnick

  The very next Sunday he was back at church, and this time he brought his swim stuff along. Denny noticed. When they ran into each other at the pool, she asked what he was doing there? “Just doing my Sunday morning swim,” he said cheerfully.

  “Oh, okay,” she said. She didn’t buy it. She always swam on Sunday mornings and he’d never been there once, but the next week he was back, and the week after. On the third Sunday, they walked home together and he made her promise to meet for coffee the next day. By the following afternoon she was hurting and in no mood, but as she approached his building, she saw him sitting on the front step and ducked behind a parked car, praying he hadn’t caught a glimpse. Nick walked around the car with a smile on his face.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said, sheepishly, still kneeling on the concrete. “How was your day?” She cringed and stood. Here they were. She had two choices. Cancel now, to his face, or have a cup of coffee with a cute boy.

  She had tea. Nick sipped espresso, of course. They sat on a sofa in a neighborhood café and talked for three hours, about everything: his family, his work and his diving, her upbringing in Philly, her dashed photography dreams, and her new life as an acupuncture student. They talked about holistic healing and nutrition, something that had become important to him now that he was living the freediving lifestyle. They discussed everything, that is, except her suffering. By then it was obvious that he wouldn’t bring it up and after the walk home, his suspicious Sunday swims, and a lovely afternoon of conversation, Denny felt he deserved to know, so she told him her whole story.

  They became friends, sharing texts and swimming together regularly. When he caught a cold, she made him chicken soup, and when his bad shoulder acted up in the weeks leading up to his first big competition of the season, she gave him an acupuncture treatment. He accepted her help and never bludgeoned her with pity. He was a link to life for her. Before he gently bulled his way into her world, she’d been in dangerous territory. Isolated, desperate, and miserable. She’d pushed everyone away so hard she’d forgotten what it was like to let someone in and enjoy a good friend.

  “He made me feel like I was still alive. Which is really hard to do when you can’t see, and you can’t walk and you can’t feel,” she said. “Swimming brought me back, which is why it meant so much to me, but he brought me back too. Here was this person that didn’t care about my disability, he just kept wanting to talk.” He also needed her help. Days before he was about to leave for the Bahamas to meet Ren and Ashley, he asked if she would water his plants, collect his mail, deposit his checks, and look in on his place while he was away. That meant climbing three flights of stairs several times a week. It meant challenging herself and staying connected to the outside world. “It took me a really long time to understand just how much he understood,” Denny said, looking back. She agreed.

  As Nick fell toward the plate, 100 meters below, there was a palpable tension on the surface. Everyone leaned in, on edge, as the announcer followed Nick’s movements on sonar. He touched down and there was a shout and a buzz from the crowd, though they knew the hard part had just begun. When he hit 60 meters, Ren, the first safety diver, dropped to meet him at 30. The final leg of the ascent would tell the tale.

  On his 96-meter dive he’d had a bad samba on the surface, and it had looked like he might black out, but with Will preparing for his own dive, Carla Hanson had been coaching Nick that day, and her voice pierced his haze and led him through a clean protocol and to a national record. Carla wasn’t coaching this time, and everyone wondered if he’d make it up safe and healthy.

  The answer came when after a dive of 2:45, he rose to the surface in complete control and grabbed the line as Will yelled, “Hook! Hook! Get that nose clip off!” Nick took his hook breaths, ditched the nose clip, and flashed the sign. “Say it!”

  “I’m okay,” he said, breathless.

  “Keep hooking, keep breathing,” another diver said.

  “I’m not a hooker,” Nick joked, as he continued to breathe, without any semblance of fog or discomfort. He got a big laugh, though Ashley rolled her eyes. She felt it was just another sign that he didn’t have the proper respect for the depth or the sport. In her mind, he wasn’t out of the woods. The white card hadn’t been awarded yet, and he needed to be breathing, saturating his blood and brain with needed oxygen.

  She needn’t have worried. Nick was home free. He flashed his tag, and the crowd began to cheer a bit louder, though the judges still had to confer. He hung on the line in anticipation, and when the white card came he went berserk. He held the line with both hands and shook it back and forth letting out a primal scream, while spectators splashed the water around him into a white froth. The safety divers mobbed him as he leaned back and looked into the sky, staring past patches of cottony clouds and into the heavens. He wiped away his tears. He’d done it!

  Rob King, the vice president of AIDA and the second-deepest American man of all time, called it “one of the two iconic dives in the history of American freediving.”

  Logan Mock-Bunting was taking pictures that day. “He had so much genuine emotion and happiness,” Logan said, “he was glowing. There was some chest beating. He was very excited that he’d done it, but there was genuine humility too. That it wasn’t just physical and emotional for him, but a spiritual experience. That he was not alone.”

  “God is great!” he shouted as he moved toward the platform, getting bear hugs from Will and Ren along the way. Will won the Caribbean Cup and Nick took bronze, behind Walid Boudhiaf but edging out Carlos Coste, with a final 81-meter dive in Free Immersion, just a few meters from a national record. His 56-meter dive in Constant No Fins was another personal best. Nick had progressed across the board. His first competition of the season could not have gone better.

  Iru won gold in the women’s division, setting new Venezuelan records in both Free Immersion and Constant Weight. She was proud of Nick, who always led the cheering section when Iru was in the competition zone, but she wanted more from him. At the party the night after the competition she cornered him. “Dude, you are being the most perfect person ever, why don’t you kiss me or something?” she asked. He shrugged. Something was stopping him short of romantic love. He enjoyed doting on her, he said, but what she heard was that he didn’t love her. She banned him from giving her flowers for the rest of the trip, and left without saying goodbye.

  Nick’s next stop was Central Europe, where he competed in a small pool event in Brno, Czech Republic, before meeting up with Australian freediver Tanc Sade and renting an apartment in Belgrade, Serbia, for the AIDA Pool World Championship. In odd years, world championship events crown the best individuals in each discipline, and depth and pool competitions were held in separate venues. Nick met Tanc at the LA Apnea Challenge, a small pool comp held the previous April. Nick didn’t fare well there, suffering two disqualifications and topping out in Dynamic at just 106 meters. But it wasn’t a completely wasted week because he met two kindred spirits. Vanessa Weinberg, a beautiful blonde, blue-eyed yogi and actress, was a new freediver specializing in pool disciplines. She would post the second best Dynamic No Fins swim among all American women in 2013, and she and Nick would grow much closer as the year wore on.

  Nick and Tanc, who had also burst onto the freediving scene out of nowhere, hit it off immediately. Tanc claimed two Australian records in the pool in his very first competition, with swims of 230 meters in Dynamic and 181 meters in Dynamic No Fins. He was a longtime spearfisherman and an actor, best known to American audiences for his role in the TV hit Gilmore Girls. Fit and handsome, with a mop of wavy brown hair and mischievous eyes, he’d been acting professionally his entire adult life, stitching together a living from disparate parts on American and Australian television. Nick and Tanc connected on all those levels, and they shared one more thing in common. They pushed themselves too hard, never satisfied with a depth or distance, obsessed with more. Always more.

  “What I saw in
Nick was something that was very similar in me,” said Tanc. “There was a burning desire, a sense of emptiness, a sense of feeling less than, and that this obsession with getting some sort of validation, with getting some sense of self-worth is what drove him, which is a really unhealthy place to be. And I’m the same way. I hate losing more than I like winning, because winning is just sort of expected, and anything less than that is an absolute fucking nightmare. He would lose sleep, and if he didn’t do well—what he defined as well—that was like, hell on earth.”

  It wasn’t just their similarities that drew Tanc close to Nick. It was his generosity. On the first day they met, Tanc complimented Nick’s retro Adidas jacket. He’d been looking for one just like it. Nick unzipped it and handed it over. “Take it,” he said. “It’s yours.” Tanc refused. He’d been making small talk, and was overwhelmed by such a genuine gesture. “I’d give you the shirt off my back,” Nick said.

  But something much more significant would link them soon enough. On Tanc’s last swim of the competition he tried for a new Australian record in Dynamic No Fins, and blacked out. The safety diver who had been following him on the surface had a delayed reaction, and when he realized something was wrong, had trouble bringing Tanc to the surface and laying him flat in an appropriate rescue position. Worse, Nick felt he wasn’t reacting with enough volume or force to bring Tanc out of it. Tanc was stiff and his skin was gray, his eyes open and vacant, and saliva bubbled from his blue lips.

  Nick ditched his jacket, dove into the pool, took Tanc from the safety diver and cradled him in his arms. “Breathe, Tanc. Breathe,” he said. Instead of blowing gently as the safety diver had, he blew sharply across Tanc’s eyes. When that didn’t work he gave him a rescue breath. Tanc had been out for nearly a minute, and Nick brought him back. It felt to Tanc like Nick saved his life.

  So it made sense that the two of them would room together in a Belgrade flat. When Tanc arrived, Nick vented about his previous week competing in Brno, when he failed to post even one clean dive. Only a few weeks removed from his triumph in Roatan, Nick was lost in the pool.

  You wouldn’t know it from his first attempt in Belgrade. On June 23, 2013, for his debut swim at the AIDA Pool World Championship, Nick just missed the American Dynamic No Fins record. He’d never hit 100 meters in that discipline, but when he got there this time, he felt good and kept on swimming, continuing more than two-thirds of the way to 150 meters, but by then he was too spent and hypoxic to put together a clean surface protocol and blacked out for a split second, enough for a red card. He’d hit 138 meters, one meter shy of an American record. That night, Nick was sleepless and despondent. The next day was the first round of the Dynamic competition, and breaking a national record seemed like a long shot considering what he’d posted lately. Tanc took him to the pool to get some work in.

  “You have so much fucking talent,” Tanc told him, as they dangled their legs in the water at Serbia’s finest swim center, Sportski Centar 25 Maj. It looked like a resort compared to the public pools Nick was used to. He stared past the humming fluorescent lights, toward flags from more than thirty countries dangling from the rafters. “But your [pool] technique needs work.” Tanc paced the gleaming tile deck and had him do laps. It was easy to see that Nick was kicking too hard, covering 50 meters in just five powerful flips of his monofin. “You’re using too much force, mate. You’ll be more oxygen efficient with nine or ten softer kicks.” Tanc also got him to stop purging: a hyperventilation breathe up technique that lowers CO2 in the body and delays the urge to breathe. Some divers, including Will, feel that hyperventilation makes them less efficient in the water, if a bit more comfortable, and thus it’s a net loss. They worked for hours and when they got home, Tanc gave Nick one more piece of advice. “If it hurts, keep swimming. As soon as you feel good again, come up.”

  “Why?” Nick asked.

  “Because it’s supposed to hurt, and if the pain stops it means you’re about to black out.” Buoyed by his training session with Tanc, Nick messaged Meir and Vanessa that he might push for the American record in Dynamic. When he arrived in Belgrade, Ted Harty still held that record at 170 meters, but Kyle Gion broke it on the eve of the World Championship during an independently organized record attempt in Honolulu that caught the American freedive community by surprise. Kyle had wanted to keep his attempt secret, in case it didn’t go well. Now it was news. The new record was 184 meters.

  Nick wasn’t flustered. The next day as Vanessa and Meir kept tabs from their laptops, using the tactics Tanc shared, he hit his career best mark in the pool with a swim to 187 meters, over 30 meters farther than he’d ever gone before. When the white card flashed, he thought he’d nabbed the record. He didn’t know that Kyle Gion had extended the American record a second time, to 200 meters, just before Nick pushed off.

  He found out when he got out of the water, slumping onto a bench with a towel draped over his head. “I should have gone to the wall. I should have gone to the wall. I should have gone to the wall,” he said as Tanc sat beside him. If he had, he would have made the final heat and had another crack at the record. “I don’t know why I stopped. I felt so strong.” Tanc draped his arm around Nick’s shoulders and reminded him how far he’d come after just one night working on new mechanics.

  “You cracked it, mate. You’re gonna kick ass in the pool from now on.” Tanc put up a good front but inside, he was furious with Kyle. He thought it was a chump move to extend a record during the week of the World Championship. Vanessa agreed, but Nick harbored no ill will. He sent Kyle a Facebook message as soon as he got back to the apartment.

  Congrats on your big swim, you are in the 200m club. Thank you for putting USA on the map, finally. Now at least we are not the laughing stock of the pool anymore. Are you thinking of coming to team worlds next year? You should. The pool is where we are going to win it.

  When Kyle read it he felt relieved. He’d already taken some heat online, and at nineteen years old, he’d been following the advice of his coach and making the best decisions he could. He wasn’t trying to hamstring anybody. Of all the congratulatory notes he’d received in the wake of his record, that’s the one he valued most. He couldn’t wait to compete alongside Nick in Sardinia in 2014.

  Nick didn’t have a hard time moving on from his latest competitive disappointment, thanks to Bojana Burnac, a Croatian filmmaker he met on the first day of the competition. She was in Belgrade shooting a documentary on her country’s best freediver, Goran Colak, who dominated for the cameras, scoring gold medals in all three disciplines, and capturing a world record in Dynamic to boot.

  On the day they met, Bojana was attempting to fix an underwater camera to the side of the pool. She needed to weigh it down, and someone grabbed one of Nick’s neck weights at random and handed it to her. “Freedivers are very sensitive about their neck weights,” she said. “Some believe it’s bad luck for someone to touch your neck weight before a dive.” When Nick realized it was missing, he asked for it back. She was apologetic, but he wasn’t the superstitious kind. They stood apart on the tile deck and chatted about the film business. He liked her shaggy jet-black hair, her big eyes, and her worldly confidence. She wasn’t classically beautiful, but he found her extremely sexy. She noticed him, too, and when he put on his neck weight and excused himself, she felt a sudden void she could not remember ever feeling before.

  Five minutes later he was in the pool, doing his no fins dive. The timing of it all, his easy grace, valiant effort, and near miss, set her head swirling. Who was that guy? She wanted to know more about him. She needed to. One problem—she had a live-in boyfriend back in Zagreb she’d been with for years.

  The next day, after his Dynamic swim, Nick sought her out and thus began a conversation that lasted three days. They went on long afternoon strolls with no destination in mind and dished about their families and their jobs. She was a freelance director of photography back home, and they exchanged tales from the trenches of production. They ta
lked about his blackout, too. She was a decent freediver, and always enjoyed the theater of the blackout, and how different athletes responded in their own way. It told her something about them, she said, betrayed a personality quirk or even something a shade deeper. Some woke up sleepy. Others woke up startled. Nick always came to pissed off, and in Belgrade he threw another juicy tantrum. She happily filmed it and teased him a little. He liked her sass and took it well. He saw through her humor and felt her heart. He was falling in love, and she was too.

  Belgrade wasn’t a pretty town, but Nick dug it. The streets had energy, and the architecture was a byzantine swirl of Eastern bloc schlock, Ottoman relics, and art nouveau style. Plus, it was summertime and the weather was hot and sticky, Nick’s preferred climate. They strolled the Knez Mihailova, a pedestrian promenade, to the old citadel, and found a smoky café in the Savamala quarter, which had sprouted from the ruins of Milosevic’s awful war into Belgrade’s creative bohemian nook. They rented bikes and rode along the Danube from the center of town into the outskirts, moving from an asphalt road onto a forest path until they were deep in the green. By the time they got back to town, they were famished, so they found a quiet place with candles and tablecloths and chose a back table where they kissed for the first time.

  Bojana had been struggling with her feelings, because she wasn’t just in a committed relationship, she’d been perfectly happy in that relationship. Then Nick showed up, and it was like a bomb exploded. She told him about her boyfriend, and he wrestled with the morality of that, but she wasn’t married. After dinner they went back to her place and his self-imposed four-year drought came to an end.