Infinite Blue
Page 6
keeping them on track, never letting them stray where
they don’t belong. For so long, you haven’t had any lane ropes to guide you. Maybe that’s what you’re missing.”
Blythe lowered her head and leaned in. Her kindly
tone slid easily, almost gracefully, into regret. “You need to get out of my daughter’s lane, Clayton. Let her go.
It’s what’s best for her. And for you.”
“Aargh, lapsi! You are getting too close to a lohikäärme!
Move away before she sets your hair on fire!”
A startled Blythe jumped up, stumbling briefly on a
kink in the carpet, as Tuula moved between them with all the grace of a tank. The old woman held an open bottle
of water high, insisting the “dragon” keep its distance.
“Are you okay?” she murmured to Clayton.
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“Fine.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, Mummu.”
Tuula turned and faced Blythe, who had regained a
semblance of composure. “You are not in America yet?
This is taking a long time.”
“We will be there soon enough.”
“Yes, yes…I think they will be excited to meet Ash.
And I am sure they are holding their breath waiting to
meet you too.”
Blythe smiled and offered a small round of applause.
She winked at Clayton. “You’ll do what’s best for her.
I know you will.” Pulling her scarred shoulders back,
she turned on her heel and strode back to the departing
entourage.
“Goodbye!” shouted Tuula. “And speaking of breath,
I found out a large man with a vessa mouth will be sitting beside you on the airplane! He has the body odor too!
He will like you, I think!”
Clayton wrapped an arm around his grandmother’s
shoulders. “Thank you, Mummu.”
“For what? This is my job.”
“Thank you anyway.”
“No problem. You understand—this time will pass.”
“Yeah.”
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“What did that devil say, lapsi?”
Clayton let go, and together he and his grandmother
walked to the exit and into the carpark. “She said you
were remarkable, Mummu.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. Seriously.”
“Ah, she thinks I am the shit?” Tuula cleared some
phlegm from her throat. “I feel the same way about her.”
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Eleven
She was all over his social feeds. Site after site, clip after clip. She never lingered long in any one spot, but she
was never far away. Sometimes the shows were neatly
divided into segments, and the links made her easy
to find. Other times he would be forced to jump back
and forth through hours of footage, usually for little
more than yet another softball, checklist set of ques-
tions. Through it all, he collected snatches of programs with no continuity, no context, no understanding of
the key demographic they courted or the endless parade of content they dragged before the camera. Performing terriers, self-help gurus, miracle cleaning products. In slinky Versace outfits chosen by her mother, Ash walked
among them, providing five minutes of shark banter
here, a joke about Vegemite there. The endless fascina-
tion with her physique was ghoulish.
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“Your shoulders are extraordinary.”
“Do you have to get your clothes tailored?”
“What size shoe do you wear?”
She was careful to translate to us sizes. Everything’s
bigger in the States, she added. The audience whooped and hollered. Someone chanted, “YOU-ESS-AY! YOU-ESS-AY!”
They called her “beautiful” and a “hottie” and “formid-
able.” They asked her when she knew she was destined to
be a swimmer. They debated whether she could beat the
current American champ. They suggested she do movies
when her swimming career was done. She smiled and
nodded and told stories and shared feelings and projected confidence and humility. One presenter introduced her
as “the Wake.” Clayton easily pictured Blythe at the wing of the set, just off-camera, fixing the stare, but impo-tent. Ash didn’t correct the host. No doubt she would
later be coached how to do so with appropriate humility.
An offhand, crowd-pleasing admonition would be ready
for next time.
They called her Ashley Ray, double-barreling her
name like Betty Sue.
Q
Direct communication from Ash began with bundles
of excited emails, detailing sights, accents, serving sizes, 74
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cars, teeth, expectations of place both confirmed and
confounded. She promised to video-call Clayton as soon
as possible, despite the difficulties of time zones and
schedule. Within a couple of weeks, though, her updates
thinned, merely listing the endless engagements as she
was shuttled between cities that blurred into the same
dull, dry strip. Clayton offered to stay up as late as necessary to make it convenient for Ash to video-call, but she didn’t respond. Meanwhile, her public social-media feed
continued blaring the sights and fizzing with excite-
ment. Suspicions that someone else was posting these
updates was confirmed when “Ash” shared how “fab”
the breakfast buffet was at some hotel, taking care to use the hashtag #blessed.
Truth be told, Ash seemed to be struggling. Her only
positives were a few precious moments spent in hotel
pools. Getting away to a proper facility or the beach or somewhere with real water was out. Too many chaperones, not enough time. Keep smiling. Don’t stop.
Clayton’s responses—brief recaps of life at home,
work on his website, new T-shirt designs, photos, appeals for her to hang in there—fell on deaf ears.
An appearance on The Late Night Show offered a
chance for a live check-in that he could at least watch
on a decent-sized screen. Accompanied by Tuula, Clayton
watched the broadcast, perched on the edge of his seat,
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catching each moment like the last drips from a drinking fountain. Seeing her up close and in high def at first filled him with relief. She walked through the curtain, waved
nervously to the crowd and took a seat by the host’s desk, her smile bright, her eyes warm. Tuula offered a sidelong nod to her grandson.
“I think she has not yet turned American, lapsi. Her
head is still the same size.”
She added that Ash looked homesick. Clayton saw
it too—and more that his mummu could not. Ash was
washed out. And something about the way she moved
bothered him. Her typical effortless grace (almost as
beautiful through air as it was through water) came
across as stunted and stiff. She perched bolt upright on the talk-show couch and gestured thickly as yet again she answered the same half dozen dumb questions. Her voice
was hoarse, like she was desperate to clear her throat but couldn’t. There were good, rational reasons for this. She was traveling. She was tired. It was hardly surprising
that she should be longing for home and weary of the
trip and that this should fray the edges of her on-screen presentation.
And yet.
Finally the show’s host asked a new question, one
Clayton hadn’t heard put to Ash before. Did she have
a partner?
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“Partner?” said Tuula.
“Boyfriend,” said Clayton. “Or girlfriend.”
“Oh!” cried Tuula, spilling ash from her dying cigarette.
Blythe would most certainly have had a canned reply
for just such a question, but the response from Ash was
clearly not that. “Well,” she said, “I’m pretty sure my bloke at home will be watching this right now. Hi, Clayton!”
A slump of the shoulders and a comical thought-
I-was-in-with-a-chance smirk from the host prompted
honking guffaws from the audience. Ash shot a half
smile right back at the camera and held her hands up in
apology.
She was keeping it together, but Clayton could see
tiny cracks in the facade. The host threw to the ad break, and the house band knocked out a bluesy version of
“Truly Madly Deeply.” In the split second before the ad
kicked in, the camera captured Ash in a moment she
didn’t have to be “on.” She picked up a mug from the desk and drained it in one greedy hit.
Q
Clayton couldn’t sleep that night. The image of Ash
in that studio ran on relentless repeat in his mind.
Something about the odd way she had downed that drink
disturbed him. For the briefest of moments, she was
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a stranger, barely recognizable. The mug in her hand?
It was a full canteen found in the desert. She looked
frail, like she could crack and fall apart at any moment.
After hours of restless rolling left and right, Clayton
finally arrived at the word that perfectly described her.
Ash had become brittle.
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Twelve
No amount of herding between television studios, talks
with potential sponsors, free breakfasts, not even a few stolen minutes in an overheated hard-water chem-ical bath of a hotel pool, could dislodge the image
from Ash’s mind. Every time she closed her eyes, she
saw his face, pale and kissed with tiny air bubbles. He
didn’t look panicked. He didn’t struggle for air. That
serene, resigned expression on his face was the part that disturbed her the most.
Could a nightmare haunt you after sunrise?
The terror had first hit her in week four of the trip,
somewhere in the desiccated sprawl of Los Angeles. In
total darkness and air-conditioned hum, she returned
to the day they met. Initially it followed the charted
course: Clayton swimming alone in the surf before the
tongue of murky brine sent him away from land and
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brought them together at sea. She watched as he fought
the current.
“Hold on, Clay.”
His arms dragged more and more as he struggled
to keep position. He kicked and raised himself higher.
He clawed at the water as he slipped deeper and deeper.
Ash watched with alarm as the rip flung him out past the point. She swam toward him, set to intervene, ready to
escort him back to shore.
Then the ocean spoke. She heard it when she turned
her head to breathe. The voice was assertive. Urgent.
Impossible to ignore.
Let go.
The voice pierced her, penetrating deep into her
bones. Feeling a sluggishness that was unprecedented in
her swimming career, she stopped to catch her breath—a
fatal pause. Clayton lifted his arms like a diver signaling descent and disappeared. Ash plunged after him, but it
was too late. The ocean had staked its claim. Clayton was beyond reach.
Ash woke up sweating, gasping through a dry mouth,
a dull ache pulsing in her feet. The voice echoed in her mind for some time afterward, but it passed. The vision
of Clayton drifting away on the current—it refused
to budge.
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Q
Ash filled the paper cup as fat globs of oxygen rose
through the cooler.
“Man, why do they make these so bloody small?”
She drank, crushed the cup and tossed it toward the
bin, bouncing it off the rim.
“Your aim a little off?” said Coach Dwyer, clamping a
hand on her shoulder.
“Probably.”
“It’ll be done soon, champ. All this song and dance.”
“Yeah.”
“Another week and you’ll be back doing what you’re
supposed to do.”
Ash nodded and swallowed hard.
“And don’t worry too much about the stiffness in
your knees—they’re just a little out of practice, that’s all.”
“How did you know about my knees?”
“It’s my job to know.”
Eagle-eyed though Coach Dwyer was, there was
something he couldn’t know—the pain had settled in
the morning after Ash’s first nightmare. More than that, it was mobile, darting from joint to joint, gradually but assuredly spreading wider. At the outset it was subtle, like a bruise deep within the ball of her left foot. The next day 81
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it had shifted to the right. Then it vanished from her feet altogether, resurfacing in both knees, behind the knee-caps, buried in the tendons. Ash couldn’t explain this
moving target of an injury. The best she could come up
with was some type of stress embolism, inspired maybe
by her disturbed dreams, running rampant through her
body. It sounded more like a line from a movie trailer
than a medical diagnosis, but professional assistance
was out of the question. Seeking help meant sharing the
turmoil in her unconscious—that wasn’t a conversation
she was prepared to have, not even with Coach Dwyer.
No, she would deal with this on her own. What sort
of competitor was she if she couldn’t push through pain?
Ignore it, mask it, minimize it, emerge victorious. That was the distance swimmer’s way, Ash Drummond’s way.
The numbers told her she was better at it than everyone
else on the planet.
And as for the nightmare—well, that was just a
nightmare, wasn’t it? It was a lie. The day she and Clayton met was in the past, fixed in time. The truth of it could never be altered. At some point in the near future, the
nightmare would give up and go away. It would sink
quietly, leaving no trace behind.
Surely it would.
82
Thirteen
Clayton worked at his desktop, bathed in the blue glow
of a high-resolution screen. He took a deep breath.
He could hear from the other side of the wall the tip, tip, tip of the leaky shower in the bathroom, each tip taking longer to arrive than the last. He was supposed
to be editing images, working on his comic. Instead he
counted out beats between drips, the dull thuds of water on enamel.
“This is ridiculous.”
He stood abruptly, sending his chair sliding back
across the floor, and stomped to the bathroom. He
&n
bsp; wrenched the taps closed and swept his hand across the
showerhead to clear it.
Silence.
Back in his bedroom, Clayton sat again at the image
he was supposed to be editing, a new character based on
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his memories of Shaz, the woman at the world-record
swim meet. He’d refined an idea for a face with its own
center of gravity, threatening to turn itself inside out. It wasn’t working out. He was pushing too hard. Although
he liked skewering the desperate, deluded certainty of
the people he encountered, his characters were always
drawn with bemused affection. This one? This one was
ugly, angry.
He closed the image, not quite ready to consign it to
the trash but close to it. Instead he opened a new canvas and grabbed a stylus and his Wacom tablet.
“Be open to whatever comes,” he whispered.
My bloke at home.
“Let your hand go where it wants.”
It’s raining, it’s pouring.
His hand paused. He closed his eyes. He pictured
himself back in the stands, felt the baying of the crowd, heard Shaz’s ear-piercing whistle. And he saw Ash
sitting on the lane rope, hands clapping above her head.
Triumphant, content. Filled up. A far cry from the husk
now attracting views online.
He opened his eyes and watched the screen as his
hand began moving with practiced ease on the tablet.
The last thing he wanted to do was repeat the conditions under which Source01 had been created, but nothing else was working. He couldn’t draw, he couldn’t focus.
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He felt drained of inspiration, hollowed out. At least this freaky freestyle thing was something.
I love you too.
Clayton pushed harder, his hand flying faster and
faster, causing pixels to color with manic intensity on
the vertical screen. The stylus wheeled and dipped,
glimpses of order emerging from chaos on the screen.
He’d never enjoyed working this way, the gulf between
his hand working on one surface and the result appearing on another, but right now the disconnect seemed
appropriate. And he could feel something closing in,
a burgeoning presence in the room.
Said too late for her to hear.
The moment was tangible, but just out of reach.
Clayton threw himself deeper into the sketch—manic