For no reason I pictured raccoons, that under the water and through the wormhole there would be a society of talking raccoons, who smoked pipes and laughed at the happenings on what they called The Upper World, meaning my world. I would live with them for a while, and the queen, older but not too old, imperious but not unkind, would fall for me, and insist on my being her male concubine, and all in that regard would be just fine, the perks impressive and life in general very good—until she tired of me one day when another prospect arrived, a Jordanian man via a Dead Sea passageway—
But why doesn’t this water fill us up—why doesn’t the water come through our ears and drown us? The hissing is the ocean’s rage at not being able to drown us. But what prevents our overflowing? Are we so pressure-packed? I believe that we are. Oh, shut up.
When I broke into the air again there was a woman with us. She stood near Hand. She was the woman from dinner. The miraculous woman from dinner.
She was laughing at something Hand had said. She wore a one-piece bathing suit, white. Her skin looked more perfect in the dim light, and her teeth shone as she laughed.
We were standing in water waist high.
“Hello,” she said to me.
“Hi,” I said.
“Your friend, he says you were hiding from me.”
Hand was grinning. I told her I wasn’t hiding from her.
“You’re ashamed your face,” she said.
“No,” I said. “He is, though.” I nodded to Hand. He bit his upper lip with his row of lower teeth. “He’s ashamed of my face.”
I was shaking. I didn’t know how she could be here with us.
“You two are very far from home,” she said.
“I guess,” I said.
She fell to her knees and soaked her head.
“You are, too,” Hand said.
She was Annette and from Paris. She was with her family, she said, two young boys and her husband. They’d been here for six months, since her husband was sent here by their doctor to cure a persistent strain of bronchitis. I didn’t know people still did that kind of thing, had the time and money to move for so long to a climate softer on one’s trachea. She imitated his cough, a deep hacking thing, and then laughed. This was a European thing, I thought—at once decadent and loving and weary, this laughing about your husband’s cough.
It was too cold to stand, so we all dropped to our knees. Only our heads rose above the surface and we were warm.
“You two are gay?” Annette asked.
She was serious. We told her no. She smiled.
“It’s good to meet you,” she said.
We nodded.
“Look at us. We’re a bunch of heads!” she said. “Just our heads. Frightening!” Her voice was full but coarse at its edges, honey sprinkled with sand. Her eyes, when she faced me straight-on, were wrong. They leaned left and right, strained outward, slightly, so that only when you looked directly at her and she at you, could you notice that she couldn’t focus on whatever was directly before her. Her vision parted around you like wind.
Hand dove forward and away, showing Annette his stroke. We watched and I told her I sometimes thought about swimming without any legs. Which I did.
“Swimming without the legs,” she said, tipping her head back to wet her hair. “I like that. That would be spectacular.”
I sunk under again, to soak my head. While under, water hissing, I debated whether I should come back up, and if so, in the same place. I could grab her legs. I could bury my face between her legs. I could push my way underwater far away, and surprise her. But while debating I ran out of breath and came up in the same place.
“So we are part of the club,” she said, nodding to each of us, Hand and then me.
“Yeah,” Hand said. “We’re in room four-fifteen.”
“No,” she said. “Not this club.” She laughed. “Not this hotel. Out here is our club.” She darted her eyes left and right.
“Oh right,” Hand said. “Like the Polar Bear Club.”
“No, no. You shush,” she said, pointing to Hand. “You keep jumping to the answers! I am saying I came out here and you came out here to be alone. Or where the other people are not. They are inside sleeping and we are here.”
“We really wanted to swim,” I said.
Annette looked at me for a long moment and then threw her head back into the water, soaking it again. She was not human in the way we were human. We were real, of skin and hair, uneven and unfinished, but she had been carved and sanded and—
“My mother,” she said, “this is what she called the Fourth World.”
“What? Senegal?” Hand asked.
“No, no. Not Senegal,” she said, her head gliding toward his. She stopped when about a foot from his face. “You are one so misunderstanding easy!”
“Fine,” Hand said. I was grinning and Hand saw me grinning. We didn’t know this woman, but she knew things about us.
“Not the first world,” she continued, “the world we are from, not the second or third world, so many people treading water. This is different. The fourth world is voluntary. It is quick small steps from the other worlds.”
I ducked my head into the bay again. Underwater, I couldn’t get a grip on her accent. Her syntax was off but her vocabulary was impressive. I tried to remember how much I’d drank at dinner. I half expected her to be gone when I rose again. I broke through and she was still there, her silhouette like a teardrop inverted.
“Everyone is sleeping and we are here, in the sea. That is the fourth world. The fourth world is present and available. It’s this close. But it’s different. It’s passive. We are make the action here. We come and then we create things that will happen. The fourth world is half thought, half actual. It’s a staging ground.”
I moved closer to the two of them. Now our three heads were within a few feet of each other. She could tell we were confused.
“Okay. For instance, what brought you to Senegal?” she asked.
“It was windy in Greenland,” I said.
A small school of fish threaded between our underwater torsos.
“The main point is,” she said, trying to contain her frustration, “that we have to cut from hope of continuity. Momentum. We must to see each setting and moment as whole. Different, independent. A staging ground.”
Why does she keep saying “staging ground”? I will ask her. No, don’t. Why does someone whose English is imperfect know a term like this “staging ground”? Because her mom made such a big deal out of it. Oh, right. Where is her mother? Should we ask? We should not. Women of this age lose their mothers.
Hand opened his mouth to speak, but only water came out, dribbling down his chin and then neck before rejoining its source.
“How old are your kids?” I asked. I didn’t know where else to start. A cruise ship, full of buttery light, was moving along the horizon, much more quickly than I expected.
“Seven and twelve,” she said. The whites of her eyes were much too white in the dark. I looked away.
“Those are good ages,” I said.
From the ship came a flare, or a single arcing firework.
“That is a decision,” she said, nodding her chin at the ship. “To get on the boat is a decision. But the decisions after that choice are limited. My mother she urges me to have a chance for the fourth world at all time. You have to forget about momentum and start again, and again, and again, and again.” She said again about twelve times. She was a little batty. “And from here you can go all into Africa!”
She dove into the water and swam a few perfect strokes away from us, toward the shore, her shape clean and unresistant. She stopped, unfolded herself and stood. “Now I join my babies again,” she said, then shushed to the sand and buried her face in a towel bearing the pattern and texture of a gazelle, faded.
“It was good to meet you,” Hand said, his voice carrying to her quickly and loudly over the hard still water.
“I will see you again, I am sure,” s
he said. “Our world, the one you love now, is not so big.” She turned and jogged up the steps, her nimble feet leaping and striking the sand like a match. She ducked through palm fronds and was gone.
Hand and I floated on our backs, letting the water hiss in our ears and come over our faces. You could see all the stars. You could feel, under us, huge fish wanting to eat things, maybe us. Far off, across the water, someone was kayaking. It was well past one in the morning.
At that moment I was sure. That I belonged in my skin. That my organs were mine and my eyes were mine and my ears, which could only hear the silence of this night and my faint breathing, were mine, and I loved them and what they could do. There was so much water in so many places, rushing everywhere, up and down, the water on top moving so much faster than the water below it. Under the water was sand, then rocks, miles of rocks, then fire.
But I was getting tired. We needed to get out of the water before we mistook it for a bed. I was sure that was how people drowned; not with a fight, not with thrashing but with thoughts of rest.
Hand was asleep in seconds. The room was split-leveled, his bed in a nook above mine. I could hear his breathing, uneven but distant, like an insect fighting a screen door. The fan overhead spun wildly.
There was bustling in my library. I felt the staircases shake with the running of feet, librarian feet, hooved and carrying files. I closed doors, I shut off the elevator. I climbed my own stairs and ran across my valley, escaping the coming information—
I forced my thoughts away from Oconomowoc, plugged my fingers in the dike. I jumped from Wisconsin, from North America, and summoned Africa. I moved through Africa, imagining rivers crowded with small skiffs transporting food. People in the most brazen colors unloading goods from boats. I wanted to count the packages. I concentrated on the details of the vision. I needed to focus on the scene, counting things, noting things, living in this scene and not going back. The river was smooth. The river was straight. The river was brown. Then red. The river was soaked in blood. There were bodies floating, bodies jamming the river like logs. This was Rwanda. Why had Hand and I wanted to go to Rwanda? To see. We had a responsibility to see. To see what could be done. Were we them? Or were the Rwandans really someone else? Their backs facing the sun in the thin brown water. Church to church, under nave and pew. Fuck them. That we wanted to end their slaughters but had to know the number, 800,000, and have no ability whatsoever to take back that number. Fuck them for giving that to us.
We wanted him to speed but Jack would not speed. He drove with his hands perfectly at ten and two, which was fine and afforded him the most control, especially in time of danger, but still it blocked, completely, his view of the speedometer. So every few seconds he would have to raise his thumbs, as if giving a double-thumbs up, granting himself a view of the gauge. It drove us nuts. Hand and I wanted to go at least seven miles over the limit, because everyone knew you could do at least that without getting caught. We would say, “Jack, when are you gonna open this baby up? You got a V-8 here, my man!” And he did, even if it was in a station wagon, the same one his mom drove and then his sister Molly drove, and now he drove, stopping at every stop sign, a full stop even if there wasn’t a soul for miles.
So when I first heard, heard it was a car accident, for a second I was relieved because I knew it was a mistake, because Jack could never have been driving fast enough for that. I pictured car crashes involving only cars going very fast, two cars colliding, both at top speed. But it was not that with Jack. He was driving in the right lane and had been going the speed limit, or below. The truck came from behind doing 80, downhill, sees Jack’s car, moving too slowly, a speed which would be, to the truck, as if it were standing still—as if Jack and his car were immobile objects. The truck hits the car but doesn’t bump it; the momentum drives the wheels up and over Jack’s, grinding it flat as it passes, twelve wheels at once practically, all of it happening in half a second, then the truck runs off, veering right, it jackknifes, falls into the median, driver is thrown against his side window, giving him a concussion and nothing more.
—I know your name, trucker fuckhead.
—I was forgiven by your friend’s family.
—I forgave nothing.
The smell in the storage cell was a cold smell, cold wood, cold aluminum. I was on the ground, before I went out for good, and I thought an explanation would come. I was there, on the cold wood planks, already bleeding from the mouth and with my ribs throbbing, wondering if they’d punctured my skin, and I was thinking of an explanation. I was so curious. I had to have the answer. Was it something among his things they wanted? I had to know. I wanted to kill them and soak in their blood but first I wanted to know why.
—Why did this happen?
—We were there, you were there.
—Give me an answer.
Hand was gone, upstairs asleep. How could he be asleep in Senegal? I wanted to wake him but didn’t. It was his fault. It was partly his fault. Everything was partly his fault. The world was partly his fault. I stood and found another blanket high in the closet and put it over me and closed my eyes again.
—Shit, Hand.
—Sleep, friend.
—Fuck. I want out of this fucking head.
—Have something to drink.
—What? Where?
—Relax. Breathe.
—Why didn’t we kill those fuckers?
—We tried. We waited. We looked. Then you didn’t want to go back. You didn’t want to call the cops and then you didn’t want us to go back.
—My heart’s been jumping since, fluttering up and sinking down—that’s no goddamned way to exist.
—It isn’t.
—Nothing cures it.
—Time will.
—I can’t wait.
—Will, this happens.
—I can’t be alone with my head, Hand. I fear it. My own head! There was a time when I wanted and loved time alone with my mind. Now I dread it. I used to do gardening—
—I know. Mrs. Yorro. I worked for her, too. We were thirteen.
—When she left me to myself in the pakasandra I would sit on the mat she would give me—an old car floormat—and I would see the pakasandra and see the weeds among them and I would drift. My hands would reach for the neck of a weed and I would pull, slowly, feeling the base, taking the soil with it, the gentlest of pulls, causing the faint snipping sound of the roots breaking; then it would come completely, I would fall back the smallest amount, the weed would bring soil with it, and shower the pakasandra with black as I shook clean its roots. Then I’d toss it into the pile and move to the next weed. Some required two hands. Sometimes I could do two at once. I was being paid by the hour and wanted to be in the pakasandra indefinitely. I was more thorough than I needed to be. By the end I was spending five minutes hunting for weeds remaining. I parted the pakasandra leaves to see if there were weeds beginning underneath. The dirt was so black and moist. She watered it often. And all the while I was caressing every wall of my head. I was wandering around my head, teary with joy, wistful even, loving the surfaces, the many rooms, the old rooms and empty rooms.
—Listen, Will …
—But slowly these empty rooms are filled. Filled with things so wretched and brutal that you could not have conceived of them at thirteen. And soon you find there are too many rooms, too many occupied rooms, too few empty ones. I walk through my corridors and I open doors and now it’s so hard to find a room unoccupied or not full of screaming clouds.
—Oh cut the shit.
—They live in these rooms. They breathe there, I hear their laughter. I try to keep them in the rooms I don’t enter, but they move, and I forget where they are, and when we’re in a room together I vibrate, I have too much within me, I cannot contain my desire—death for them and even me, I will tie my blood to theirs, a line to anchor, whatever it takes, they make me want to end my brain.
—I can’t listen.
—Don’t you see that as we’ve tra
veled, nearly every minute, they have been with me, they have been with me always? I have given you a small insignificant indication of their presence with me. When you shake my hand you shake theirs. When I place my elbows on tables to eat, to look across a table and talk with you, they eat with me, they talk through me.
—I didn’t know.
—The only times they are not with me are those times when speed overwhelms, when the action of moments supersedes and crowds out. When my movements stop they come. When my eyes are fixed they come.
—Hand you will help me avenge and then I will rest.
—Who? Who are you after?
—The fuckers at Oconomowoc. Them first.
—There are others?
—Of course there are.
—Who?
—The trucker.
—Stop.
—The fucker at the funeral home, the one who did that to Jack.
—He did his job. And we closed the casket.
—You want it too. You want to throw that man around.
—No.
—You said you did!
Out my window and beyond the sprinklers, there was the sound of giggling, a small voice emitting tiny laughs. Then a door closed. I put my hands between my legs.
—I brought all this upon us, Hand.
—Don’t start.
—We beat up kids. We pushed them down ravines. We ran by the retarded girl, Jenny Ferguson, and we tore her dress on purpose. Remember that, asshole? We did that and this is retribution. There is balance. Everything lives in perfect Newtonian opposition.
—You are fucked.
—I will have more coming. I acted too often with unprovoked aggression and now it is enacted upon me. I have done other things. Things you don’t know about.
—Your father started this.
—Let’s wipe these fuckers away.
—Who?
—These pigs. From Oconomowoc. They have eclipsed all my years. I’ve tried too long to grow again into the world and now I’m being sent back. I don’t want to remove myself again. I spent so long away and finally rejoined the world and now I can’t be here. It’s too much to walk around with this skin and this blood—it all hisses at me. I sink into my blood and it hisses at me.