Breach

“They were watching, out there past men’s knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.” Cormac McCarthy

I had no experience with violence so my arms thrashed in fruitless desperation for the surface. There was a slow numbing of my body, toes to skull, and then my eyes lost focus. Everything reminded me of shape-shifting amoebas under a microscope.  

The day’s chaos began with a horrific and turbulent thud. I did not learn until later that the pump switch had failed, the motor had not shut down. Necessary if you wanted to hook up the pool vacuum. The pump cap hit and catapulted me into the cold, slicing water, and I felt like my hundred- and forty-five-pound frame was being diced into human scraps. The flap of skin above my eyes freed my insides, slipping into the dirty pool. Despite the blood shooting in all directions like fireworks my mind was consumed with one idea; that I had failed to do what I was told to do. Yet, again. The seeping turned the green algae into a slippery, brown silt.

The music of Aerosmith was playing earlier that muggy morning in May, the first hot day of the year, before I saw the girl named Aimee, who lived next door. She appeared and prepared to sunbathe. It was hard to believe she was the granddaughter of a southern Baptist minister. It didn’t seem to matter to her that the sky was a mottled blue-gray with barely a hint of sun. Standing in her red bikini, transistor radio blasting, she repeatedly barreled toward me as she lubricated herself in baby oil.  She was a pretty enough girl if you liked that sort of thing. The high school boys soaked up her every move when she walked to the bus each morning. She flaunted her sexuality with great drama, her act was a combination of guitar riffs, scat-like words, and raspy static. She reminded me of a car crash, how your eyes search the scene to make sure no one has been killed.  She acted out the song and when the lyrics on the radio blurted out “a missy who was ready to play,” her breasts pushed forward and her hips swiveled. “Hey there, Roo, come on over here,” her sudden call shocked me as I wondered how she knew my name. She was older than me, but she seemed childish, fake. When she did not get a response, she walked away to the refrain “walk this way, walk this way,” her red bikini disappearing into the crack of her ass like she had put a tampon in the wrong hole.

The owner of the pool stood in her house, backlit behind off-white curtains. She was clearly not prepared for my visit. Mrs. Laughlin moved back and forth as if her only purpose was to alternate between a cigarette and a drink; you did not need to be an expert to see her sadness. She made no effort to greet me; but her gestures did the talking. Amidst this tension of silence and sound, I returned to the only place I felt sanity; my mind.  I managed to repeat my dad’s words through the cacophony of Aimee’s radio and Mrs. Laughlin’s screeching window A/C. There are eight steps, Roo, just follow each step and you should be fine. Like a prayer, I chanted you are on your own today and you got this hoping to calm my nerves and make sure I would appear to be an expert pool cleaner. To this day, I wonder why my dad made such reassurances knowing I was unable or unwilling to follow protocols of any kind.

It is important that you know I was a thirteen-year-old self-proclaimed pool cleaner in a town of six hundred and eighty-five people with only two pools, but I can explain. I was desperate to do something other than mowing lawns which I found to be macabre since I seemed to run over more squirrels than grass.  It also partially justifies why towns folk referred to me as “a bit weird” and why they questioned the reasoning of a “squirrel-killing-kid” who thought it made sense to clean pools in a town known for its quaint, tourist-attracting lake.

Yet there I was at this two-story gray and white house, an out-of-place Cape Cod in southern Wisconsin. Located just off Main Street and a block from the middle school with its yellow and blue cupola and two blocks from the water tower, standing lonely in the distance.

 I was on the eastern end of town and when I paused to open the gate, I looked west. A row of shops lined the slope of Main Street from the bank to the bakery and the furniture store, followed by a car dealership and feed mill at the bottom of the hill. Gradually the road began to rise again at the Curve Inn where Main Street made a sharp right curve and became Highway 12 & 18 before putting you on the path to Madison.

I entered the pool area and found that it had been uncovered all winter. With a sense of resignation, I knew I was to spend time and energy clearing branches, leaves, and other debris from around the pool.

The water, if you could call it that, was thick as quicksand. Looking at the mess and consumed by Aerosmith’s percussive and teeth-chattering guitars, I flipped the pump’s switch.  Immediately, the metal lid slammed and gashed my forehead, deep wounds I would spend the next fifty years inspecting. The force threw me into the hardening sludge, giving way only when the impact made me pass into the silence of the underworld.  

Seriously, I hated everyone and everything when I was young, especially the people and places that were the mosaic of my hometown. Could I hate anything more than Aimee and strange Mrs. Laughlin? Yes, yes, I abhorred the years spent in school.  So, it was absolutely odd in the overwhelming silence as I plunged to the bottom of that pool, that I thought of my fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Russell, her black hair with streaks of gray you would notice when she stood near the window reading to the class. She was infamous for a missing ring finger on her left hand, shaved off in an old, hand-cranked pencil sharpener when she was five. The absent digit caused her pinkie finger to stand straight out as she turned the page of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book, or any book for that matter. When she read aloud with her annoyingly nasal Wisconsin accent, she turned words like that and there into dat and dere as if we were nothing more than Midwestern rubes.

“It’s pronounced “bayleen”, Roo, not ‘bahleen”. Her correction to my book report shamed me in front of the class. “You have to pretend dere is a “y” or “i” dere to make what seems to be an ah, an ai.” There I was at the bottom of a filthy fucken pool, sucking algae and sludge, and all I could think of was my fourth-grade book report on blue whales! Just as I was thinkin’ for fuck’s sake, what?, the first stabs of pain harpooned my stunned body. If I had been able to cry my tears would have disappeared into the bubbles unnoticed. Underwater, I was deaf to the blaring radio and malfunctioning air conditioner. Even though I had been embarrassed by Mrs. Russell in front of my classmates, all had seemed to listen to my report on the whales. Their possible regard made me more confident and I thought, fuck, I can swim like a whale under water for sixty minutes and I can pretend my teeth are baleen plates and will filter out the gross crap so I don’t choke. Most importantly, I could use the silence underwater to listen for creatures just like me who could help. Thinking back on it now I can see the absurdity of this jumbled logic. If I had stopped working like the pump switch, well you would not be reading the same story. 

Turns out pretending to be this Leviathan kept me alive. I must have gasped when the lid slammed into my face because I had enough air in my lungs to slow my breath and relax my slender, injured arms. Tiny blobs of pinkish jelly, blood, swam by me, and I mustered just enough strength to push upward and breach the surface while fully aware that the water and algae would fill my mouth. Then I thought, if the blue whale could take in huge volumes of water and six tons of krill for an hour without a breath, I can do the same for a minute.

Weird how the smallest of things saved me. Mrs. Laughlin’s stupid poodle Bruno heard the explosion and ran to Aimee next door. With great persistence, Bruno jumped, licked, and barked until Aimee finally shut off the radio, got up from the chaise, and followed the dog, bouncing like a paddle ball tethered to its wooden paddle. Miraculously, she found me face down with legs and arms splayed on the water.

Sound re-entered my world, and my disoriented eyes finally located Aimee there above the sludge, her arms waving and mouthing words I could not yet comprehend. She had put on a yellow and black smiley face t-shirt, and I knew the words “Have a Nice Day” were splattered across the front. It was a shirt she wore often; barely big enough to cover her breasts and on most occasions left me wondering why she bothered to cover that red bikini at all.

I remember kissing the sweet air at the water’s surface. My throat was filled with crap, but oxygen flooded into me like a redemptive blue light. Aimee used the long-poled skimming net and was pantomiming directions. Even if I could understand her, I could not act, as my hands had turned white from the icy water and my arms were numb. Somehow, the net grabbed hold of my limp body, and Aimee guided me to the shallow end of the pool, slowly turning me over much like a nurse would have for an imperiled patient. Despite the cold water, blood was oozing from my head and a suffocating taste of iron and putrid algae filled my throat. She took off her t-shirt, wrapping it gently around my head. We were close to the cement ledge; my face and head were held between the wall and Aimee. In her arms, I felt more like a blob of jellyfish than a whale. She dropped her rehearsed, slutty ways and began to talk to me like a normal human.

“You need to let your head rest in my hand, Roo. If you don’t hold steady, I won’t be able to apply enough pressure to slow the bleeding.”  I could barely hear her over the dilapidated A/C, and I was beginning to have a hard time distinguishing between the pain of sounds and the pain of the wounds.  But I managed to speak: “I’hm tryin’ bud the paein isstarrin tofrobb. Lik’ spikes,” flooded out of me as the syllables collided and I continued anyway, “lik’ knives all ove’r my bodee.” 

No myths from those days existed that allowed girls to save boys, at least in my public school. Thinking back on it now, most boys would have gotten a boner from Aimee’s rescue, but not me. I was grateful, but she remained a skinny, desperate girl with green, bloodshot eyes like the olives that floated in my dad’s martini.

If only the story ended here. 

The throbbing felt like a series of waves each time I tried to move. I was thirsty and could tell my lips were cracked and scaley. A bitterness settled in my mouth, most likely from the antiseptic. Never having had a keen sense of smell, the intensity of cleaning fluids and sandalwood was unnerving.

It was not the first time I woke up with an erection. But it was new enough that I immediately felt embarrassment. When I realized I was lying on the rumpled paper they roll over the table and discard after you leave the doctor’s office, I began obsessing to myself how did I get out of my clothes and when did my body get covered in a pale pink dressing gown that left my bare butt exposed.

A terrifying stillness filled the room and entered my body. It was the kind of quiet that normally made me fidget or run, but the pain paralyzed me. The anesthetic was wearing off, and I stared. The four sea foam walls began closing in pinching me together like pounding waves trapped in a fish tank threatening to break the glass. As I struggled to figure out where I was I felt for the first time the tightness in my forehead that would ache endlessly in the coming weeks. The pain of being sutured together, the pain of being fixed, at times overwhelming.

Through the window I could see the water tower standing as useless as Mrs. Laughlin behind her curtain and the hickory nut tree looked like her wrinkled skin, leafy patches hung like people parachuting from the sky. The machines around me were primitive by today’s standards. A tray of once organized instruments now lay disorganized and without any purpose.  

I focused on the familiar. The little white ceramic sink where I had watched doctors wash their hands before and after they interrogated patients and performed dangerous vivisections that lead to my belief that all doctors were monsters. But the familiar was unfamiliar. My breathing belabored, as if I had just reached the surface of the pool again. I hit the rewind button in my brain and after a long pause the kachunk, kachunk followed by the whirr of going back in time took me to the pool face up on the water, my head flayed, muscles above my eyebrows exposed. I was jolted into the awareness of disfigurement. The compulsion to reach up and touch the gashes in my forehead took over. My fingers caressed the bog of swollen skin, still wet with blood and the fishing line that now held me together, when something moved in the room, and I looked up expecting to see Aimee again.

Standing at the foot of the exam room table was the doctor. His pants and what lurked beneath were pressing against my right foot. Slowly shifting from right to left allowed his hips, in a deliberate, methodical fashion, to rub against me until I could see the outline of his cock through his polyester khakis. I remember the rush, the way the chemicals in my body took attention away from my head and into my pelvis. Adrenaline is a gateway drug. There was a deliciousness in being aroused, the way everything moved in one direction. The tightening of my legs, the prickly sensation below my nipples, and the way my toes curled made me feel attractive, at long last.

His muddy brown eyes hunted in the half light.  He was not a big man, his blond and slightly tanned, hairless arms poked through the sleeves of his white jacket. His fingers were long. He possessed a rough and rugged masculinity I didn’t have. I tried to avoid his stare, but my swollen eyes would not close. My temples drummed and his continued rubbing an insistent metallic beat in my brain. My lips felt like worn out strings, making incoherent sounds roughly plucked and useless for communicating. My belly heaved from the explosive ejaculation. My nostrils filled with this emptying, this purification.

I memorized his words, “I sewed you up and now you can keep our little secret.” I memorized his fucking words, honored his lies and half-truths, how he stitched everything into one, big made-up story. The breach was complete when, in the days and months to come, I continued to return to the back door of the clinic whenever I craved knowledge of that darkness lurking below.

“What did you do to me?” I have asked out loud as if he was there, “What in the hell did you do to me?”