Hello and welcome back to The Madison Review’s web series, the Extended Cut, where we showcase exceptional work that was not selected for the Fall or Spring editions of our journal. This week, please enjoy “Are You Ready?” by Blair Benjamin, a short story following a man as he saves drowning children.
Blair Benjamin’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, North American Review, Atticus Review, Bluestem Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Spillway, Sugar House Review, and Typehouse, among others. He is the Founder and Director of the Studios at MASS MoCA, a residency for artists and writers at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA.
Are You Ready?
The first drowning kid I saved had fallen out of a canoe. He stood up and tipped it right over. That’s how dumb people can be.
I was walking to the train station, just a Tuesday morning in early summer, taking it slow to prevent blisters from my new Santoni limited lace-ups. The two ludicrously blond boys in the canoe—one a full head taller than the other—were alone on the pond at this early hour, having a brotherly duel with their paddles, like extras in some Norwegian folktale. I found myself watching, drawn to the biblical fury in their voices, even before the little one shouted what was probably his first Fuck You, stood up for a full-force swing to bat the other’s head off, and sent them both into the drink.
When only one of them swam easily to shore, leaving his boat and his brother behind, I thought, come on, are you really gonna make me do this?
The little one didn’t scream or scissor his arms like someone stranded on a desert island calling for help as an indifferent plane passes overhead. His struggle was quiet, almost as if he were resigned to his destiny. That’s how I knew he was drowning.
I sprinted to the water, letting my Bosca leather messenger bag fall from my shoulder to the grass before I charged into the shallows and dove. I’ve never been an especially avid swimmer, despite the lessons my back-to-the-land hippie parents forced me to take at the old community pool in Ithaca. But as I freestyled out to the little boy, I felt made for the water, like a merman suddenly discovering fins where my legs had been.
“You’re gonna be fine,” I said, and gently swung him onto my back. “Hold on tight, like a leech.” I swam for the water’s edge, his fingers digging into the flesh between my neck and shoulders. He stayed clung to my back, legs wrapped around my waist, as we rose from the pond.
I had to peel back his hands and legs to deposit him on the ground next to his wide-eyed brother. Their empty canoe still floated 50 feet out in the pond. I headed back out into the water to retrieve the boat and felt for a moment like an actual pond-creature returning to my watery home after an awkward sojourn on land.
I guided the canoe back to terra firma, urged the boys to be more careful next time, picked up and brushed off my bag, and walked off casually, almost as if I would just go on with my day like this sort of thing happened all the time.
***
The door swung open, and I found myself facing two short, bony forty-somethings; my first thought was, I could probably fit them both inside one of me.
The man’s handshake was clammy, as if moments before he had been cupping his palm tight under his armpit. The woman reached high with both arms to give me an unexpected hug, but gripped my neck a little too hard, steadying herself on tiptoes.
We found little to say for small talk as they welcomed me inside. “That was quite a thunderstorm last night,” I commented.
“Our sump pump could barely keep up,” the man said.
The woman offered me seltzer from a half-empty SodaStream bottle. I wondered if it was left over from the day before; I didn’t hear any release of gas as she turned the lid.
Sitting at the dining room table of this dull middle-aged couple in matching earth-toned Gap t-shirts, so much about their house reminded me of my parents: the split-level ranchiness of the layout; a mishmash of boots and sandals and tread-worn sneakers scattered alongside the baseboard heater next to the door; the mis-matched cloth napkins on the dining room table. They had probably stopped seeing the peeling green paint and rotten slats of the shutters. Did they know they were the sad house of the neighborhood?
After our lives intersected, I had read the articles and learned a few details about this family. The dad was an elementary school music teacher. The mom ran a frame shop, or at least worked at one, having failed as an artist, I presume. They had a single child, a little girl, who was still alive thanks to me. One of the articles quoted the mom saying her daughter had been at the pond catching turtles. She loved science and had come up with experiments to learn how turtle behavior responded to different forms of popular music—clearly a breakthrough area of study.
“We’re just so grateful you were there to save our little biologist,” her mom actually said with a straight face, while plating an unappetizing squash casserole.
“You bet,” I said, nodding. “There’s such a need for more women in science.”
I glanced over toward the kitchen and saw a large aquarium on the island. It was empty except for two small lumps of turtle shell: this was the family laboratory as well as where my dinner was made.
“But no more going to the pond by herself,” the dad added, more like a question than a statement, as if appealing to his daughter who wasn’t even in the room. Had this concept of parental supervision not occurred to him before? His meekness reminded me again of my own parents the last time I saw them, a few years ago. That was the day my long-dead brother would have turned twenty-five and I trekked upstate, and we looked at some baby pictures and they said my Alfa Romeo 4C Spider was beautiful, but I could detect the slight roll in their eyes. Then I hit a deer on the Taconic on the way home and wrecked it.
“Can we pay for your dry-cleaning bill?” the mom wondered, surely aware I wouldn’t let them. For Christ’s sake: they ate off Target dinnerware and drank tap water from glasses purchased at a tag sale school fundraiser. They didn’t seem to realize my little dip had not just muddied my suit but cost me yet another pair of Santoni limited lace-ups, too.
***
I saved the second drowner on my way home from the train, so at least I wasn’t late for anything and had already worn that day’s suit and shoes.
I had been walking slowly past the pond ever since the first incident, not out of vigilance, but simply curious whether someone would notice me there and applaud my recent heroism. Why shouldn’t they? A local reporter had tracked me down, arranged a little reunion next to the pond, and my picture had appeared on local news feeds, standing with the neglectful single dad and his Twinkie-haired sons—the younger boy looking up at me as if wishing I could be his father.
This time, a group of kids splashed around in the beachside swimming area of the pond, no canoes in sight.
It was a weeknight, after seven o’clock, and our rich but penny-pinching town only paid for lifeguards from nine to five.
The kids were playing a game. Several with eyes closed, hands out in front of them, reached blindly for the others, while smaller ones shrieked and evaded the pond-zombies. Nearby, the moms sat on blankets, drank wine, ran their toes through unnaturally white sand, and chattered.
Was it dumb luck that I happened to notice the littlest one back away from a seeking pair of hands, and step into deeper water, his head submerging like someone had pressed it down? The hands of the larger kid kept grasping at air, as if trying to embrace a ghost.
Without even waiting to see if the child would come up on his own, I dashed toward the water. Moms shrieked as they saw me charging into the pond toward their children. They must have jumped up and begun to follow, but I was already chest deep right where I’d seen that mop of brown hair break the surface. I bent, waving my arms through the water, up and down, left and right, more like a Sweatin’ to the Oldies workout than a panicked search. And in a few seconds my hands grasped an arm, then a waist, and I lifted him out.
His body was still at first, and then he coughed and spit out water. I carried him to his waiting mother, her arms outstretched to me like she might fall to her knees and embrace me around the legs. Our eyes, our tensed bodies, met briefly as I gave her back her child.
That night in bed—after my girlfriend and I had finished a nice Brunello di Montalcino and talked about how crazy it was I had pulled not one but two drowning children from a single pond just days apart—it was the raw energy in the young mother’s eyes, and her arms reaching for me, that I pictured.
***
“You don’t owe me a thing,” I said. “I’m just glad to be able to do something useful.”
Saving children had taught me gallantry. I knew what the girl’s parents wanted to believe: that I, a soul-less ex-Wall Street trader, had discovered money is not the meaning of life.
The girl—the young Jane Goodall of reptile relations—walked from the hall into the dining room, dangling a worm from her fingers like a hellish tumor. I could only assume she kept these worms in her bedroom, populating a dirt pile in her closet.
“Trudy, dear. Mr. Smith is here,” her mom said, as if Trudy weren’t walking right towards me. “Won’t you say hi?”
She said nothing, went right past me, completely ignoring my presence. She wore a stopwatch on a lanyard around her neck like a track coach and carried an off-brand smart phone in one hand. She approached the glass tank on the kitchen island, and she dangled the worm above it as she looked down at the phone and began scrolling.
“She gets very focused,” the dad said.
“Are you married? Do you have children?” the mother asked me.
“Oh, God, no,” I said. “I’m single. I find babies and all their vomiting and diaper-changing kind of gross. No offense.”
It made my stomach constrict to think of having been a kid once, a helpless human, a little shitter whose hapless parents wiped his ass but let his baby brother die just from lying in a crib.
Trudy found the song she was looking for, dropped the worm into the tank, started the stopwatch, and turned on the song.
***
After I’d saved a third kid—a case of undiagnosed cold urticaria that caused an otherwise healthy pre-teen to pass out and sink beneath the water while I was walking around the pond again—the local NBC affiliate did a segment in which this latest boy I’d saved said “Thanks, Mr. Smith, for being a hero.”
The guys I worked with on the commodities prop trading team thought this was hilarious. We were all feeling under the gun lately, amid a wave of layoffs at trading desks at other firms; they were all getting cut down to just a few nerds who kept the computers running. Everyone’s humor turned darker than ever as we awaited our turn. Now, when someone’s trade went under water, he would stand up and make pathetic swimming motions and plead, “Oh, help me, Mr. Smith, I’m drowning.” I didn’t see why this was funny.
The ax fell a few weeks later, around the time of my fourth or fifth save, and it felt like a relief to leave those assholes behind. I had a fat severance package that could last me at least a year.
By then, no one still thought this life-saving aptitude of mine was just coincidence. People in town—people all over the world, really, because how could anyone with access to social media, or even just the evening news, not be fascinated by my story?—began to suspect some sort of copycat scenario. But opinion was split. Some thought it was the kids living out a Harry Potter fantasy, wanting to face down death, be picked by providence to live. Others thought I was the copier—somehow casting illusions like a crazy single-trick David Copperfield, turning harmless fun at the pond into another life-or-death drama in which only I could emerge the hero each time.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” my girlfriend said, sitting across the table from me, trying to look me in the eye, I suppose, but I was gazing past her, scanning the edges of the pond for any sign of human movement. In the distance, a muskrat slid into the water and I momentarily stiffened.
At this point in the summer, it was getting dark by eight o’clock, and I had begun insisting that I eat all my meals at the Basswater Grill restaurant, with the patio that overlooked the pond. She was welcome to eat with me.
“I guess it’s a gift,” I said. I paused, heard my stomach growl to be fed. “You know, like a calling.”
“But it just doesn’t seem physically possible,” she said. There was such disbelief in her voice, as if she too thought I was making this up out of self-aggrandizement.
But others seemed to see me differently. There were literary and Hollywood agents after me, convinced it was only a matter of time before I could land a massive book or movie deal, maybe an Amazon series. The assistants to several megachurch pastors were sniffing around, too, hoping to either document a miracle or expose a devil.
“Drowning is the second leading cause of death among children 1 – 4,” I said. I had seen this statistic in many of the articles written about me.
“Well, sure, drowning is physically possible,” she said. “It’s common, even. So how can it be on one guy to save them all?”
I loosened my tie, which felt uncomfortable edging up against my sunburned neck. I still put on an Italian suit every day, even though I was unemployed and only went as far as to sit by the pond (with an occasional fully clothed plunge in the water), because now it felt necessary. People joked that I needed to suit up—like in a superhero cape and tights—so I was prepared to do my job. And after each save, I dropped another $2,500 on a new pair of Santoni limited lace-ups. At first, it was just because I felt I deserved a pristine pair of those goddamned fine leather shoes, but after a while, the shoe replacement felt like more than vanity, like maybe the new shoes were an essential ceremony and sacrifice to maintain whatever good favor I enjoyed.
“Don’t you think if I can help put an end to child drownings I have to try?” I said.
A kid on a bike turned the corner onto the road that ran alongside the pond. I tracked his progress, imagining the accident that could result in the kid being propelled a nearly unfathomable distance into the water, how he might somehow survive a high-speed side-impact by a runaway truck but suffer a brutal concussion. Someone had to be ready.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” my girlfriend asked.
I finally looked at her. I would have taken her hand, said her name gently, rubbed her palm until she could feel the sense of purpose in my saving fingers, but my head was so full of drowning scenarios I honestly blanked on her name. For a moment, I couldn’t remember if it was Sarah, or Sandra.
***
Taylor Swift began to pulse from a cheap set of Best Buy Bluetooth speakers.
Little Trudy sat down on a stool at the kitchen island, leaning her face toward the turtle tank.
I took another bite of the casserole. Around me, the dining room walls were covered with dozens of paintings, all wildlife portraits, and all with the same spirited but formulaic brushwork that reminded me of an old guy on PBS who taught viewers to paint happy little trees, you see, that lived right there in the paintbrush and only needed your help to be pushed out on the canvas, or some shit like that. It had to be the mom’s own art. How else would they not only possess, but proudly display, so much of it? Behind the glint in the animals’ eyes, I sensed a resentment at being so misrepresented.
“That’s kinda loud,” the mom said. “Could you turn it down a bit?”
The girl didn’t acknowledge the request or pick up the phone to lower the volume. Her hair’s snaky ringlets swung to the throbbing bass beat. I could see a distorted reflection of her stern face in the glass.
I had been known at work for my admirable lack of emotion, my imperturbability, my I-don’t-give-a-shit-how-this-makes-you-feel-because-feelings-don’t-win demeanor, but this girl was next level. I started to feel that saving this one was more than just a thing that I do.
***
That winter—months after my last rescue of the summer season, after I had started thinking I might reach out to a few headhunters, after Sarandra had packed up her last dog, cat or cockatoo throw pillow and left for good—I took to the ice on a brand-new pair of Roces Italian skates with the finest carbon steel blades.
Considering the kind of money I had made trading on sheer ego and nerves, you might’ve thought I was a college hockey player once, possessed of violently elegant skating skills. But no, I was new to this, trying to teach myself grace in the fitted suit I wore beneath a Fendi blue wool and cashmere two-button overcoat and Salvatore Ferragamo scarf.
It’s not that I wasn’t an athlete. I was a top high jumper once. I have the kind of height that leads people to say, “How’s the weather up there?” and to joke about getting my head out of the clouds. People always said I should play basketball, but I became a high jumper the day I saw a documentary about Dick Fosbury, this tall young man with an unhappy home life and a dead little brother, who chose not to dwell on the past but instead invented an unlikely skill of such singular originality and effectiveness that it would forever bear his name. Performing a perfect Fosbury Flop became like a drug to me, and it took me years of medal-winning to realize I would not be satisfied merely copying someone else’s achievement.
To get the hang of skating, I started with long straight runs across the wind-blown middle of the pond, end to end. I wasn’t surprised to find I was a natural at gliding along upright on the surface of a body of water.
There had been no time or purpose for a haircut since losing my job, so I felt the pull on my dark, shoulder-length locks billowing behind me. My new beard warmed my face against the cold.
Within a few weeks, I was carving series upon series of elaborate curves for hours at a time, often entire days. I worked my way around and across the pond, guided by intuition more than design, my gaze constantly moving along the horizon so I could take in practically the entire panorama at once. The ice-fishermen had never seen such devotion to skating, must have wondered at the strangeness of my endless circling around them, but to an informed viewer far enough above, my lines would have composed a brilliant piece of abstract art, reminiscent of those last Dynamist paintings by Umberto Boccioni.
Before that winter, you couldn’t have found anyone who remembered a child ever breaking through the ice on our town’s single pond, but to absolutely no one’s surprise on four different days I pulled fortunate sons and daughters from the suddenly and almost seismologically exposed and frigid waters of our dangerous miniature sea.
Sliding on my belly at a hole’s edge, I reached out for hands that waved in convincing distress. But no one believed they might not truly be saved, and I began to wonder if this—these dramas of a few chilling moments book-ended by so much cold quiet—could be all my calling was ever going to be.
It was after that sobering realization, while out on the pond in the privacy of my skating, that I first composed my thoughts for a post to the /r/ChildSaver subreddit. Already this community was thousands strong, with a national following. For months, people had been sharing news stories, celebrating my heroism, “investigating” alleged mismanagement by officials in the town’s Department of Parks & Recreation, claiming cover-ups and conspiracies, sometimes even suggesting that I was in on the obviously massive fraud ring.
I had no interest in defenses and denials. I only felt the urge to share what had become clear to me while circling the ice in search of my next save. I didn’t think about what excitement my entry into the forum might generate. I didn’t consider at all whether they would glorify me, or debate if I was who I claimed to be.
Calling myself u/RealSaver, I posted a stock photo of a huddled gathering of tired old ice fishermen who looked as wrinkled and glassy-eyed as the Grateful Dead after a farewell tour concert. Above it, I wrote: Do you not realize you could be fishers of men?
***
Taylor Swift filled the shabby house with her righteous voice. She kept telling me to look what I made her do, look what I made her do, look what I made her do.
Her notes ringing off the walls of the room felt almost palpable, like the shape of a face you could touch—like Taylor’s own face going up to each of the mom’s animal portraits to look it right in the eye, as if the portrait were not just real but the only real thing that mattered to her. And yet this voice was able to gaze equally into all the animals’ eyes in the same instant.
The girl on her rotating stool turned in half-circles back and forth, staring through the glass of the tank.
“She’s a handful,” the mom said. “Always soaking herself in that darn pond. She can’t leave it alone. It has like a strange gravitational pull on her.” She looked at me. “I guess you know about that kind of thing.”
“Maybe this scare will put an end to that,” the dad said.
But I could tell the mom already knew she would fail to prevent her daughter from returning to the pond. She was that resigned to her powerlessness in the face of a complicated, capricious world.
I watched Trudy sway to the music like a charmed cobra.
In the tank, two little turtles faced each other, heads slightly protruding from their shells. The worm lay between them, but the turtles both seemed to side-eye the girl rather than watch the worm, following her movements with their eyes. Their bodies remained still as corpses.
***
Weeks passed. My ice patrols continued, and I didn’t return to the /r/ChildSaver subreddit until the morning after what turned out to be my last save of the winter. This was a particularly challenging rescue. A kid in an army fatigue coat and hat had ventured to the south end of the ice, approaching the narrow spillway channel where unfrozen water formed into a gentle stream emptying from the pond. I was a good hundred yards away when I heard the ice crack and saw the small human shape go under. There was hardly a splash. The camouflage pattern didn’t re-surface, and the small patch of water returned to a glazed flatness, as if the pond had swallowed this life like a pill.
I raced across the pond, my mind processing all the physics involved. By the angle and location of the kid’s entry through the ice, I apprehended the speed and direction he must be moving beneath the ice, and precisely where he would be when I arrived moments later. Without slowing, I crouched and then leapt off the ice. I lifted my knees and reached high with my arms, like the first rising beats of a Fosbury Flop. But instead of flipping backward over a fiberglass crossbar, I executed a simple quarter turn at the peak of my ascent. I knew that the further my momentum carried me toward the spillway channel, the thinner the ice beneath me. I brought my feet together, channeled the full weight of my large body down. I willed the carbon steel blades of my skates to shatter the ice on contact.
I broke through the ice and shot down to the bottom, pressed skyward, and surfaced with one arm clasping the kid who was right there as if waiting for me. My impact had cracked open the thin ice for a 10- or 12-foot radius, all the way to the opening of the spillway stream. I swam there, brushing aside the tiny icebergs I’d made, pulling the child with me, to where we could finally crawl into the shallows of the stream. We stood up and wobbled out of the water on our skates.
I came down with a fever that night, but by early the next morning I felt perfectly lucid. I found a stock photo of an adult and a child in a canoe, smiling at the camera. It looked like they were stuck on rocks in a river too small for their craft. I uploaded it to /r/ChildSaver and wrote: The stream is the door. Walk out of the stream.
***
I stood up and walked over to the aquarium so I could look down into it, towering over the transfixed child.
There were no rocks or miniature logs for the pair of turtles to climb on, no water in the tank, not even a dish for drinking. It was just floor and walls of glass, and the three living creatures inside, like a modernist interrogation room.
The worm made no attempt to hide or avoid attention. How could it? It wriggled around like a fish on a dock, noiselessly screaming to be dinner.
“So you caught these guys in the pond?” I said.
“I invited them,” she corrected, not looking up at me. “They’re my guests.”
“Catching sounds so aggressive,” her father explained loudly, proud to inform me of his daughter’s linguistic precision. “We don’t like to use that sort of language about it.”
It was endearing how these parents loved every oddity in their little girl.
“Sure, I get it,” I said, laughing. “Sometimes I like to invite a trout to hang out on a hook with a fly.”
It might have been part of the song, but for one quiet beat I thought I could hear the faint suction sound made when the worm lifted part of itself off the glass and then pressed back down.
“Someone should put you on a hook,” the girl said. Her voice was flat, and she didn’t flash a malicious look at me. I could almost believe she thought I might like that.
***
As Winter faded into Spring, and with no children on the pond to be saved, I passed the time reading ancient scripture from the Bible and the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, and throwing darts for hours at a time, and thinking often of my estranged parents, how selfish they were not to even reach out about all the attention I had been getting, not to wonder how I was holding up under this pressure.
I also found myself on long trips to the supermarket stocking up on ingredients for complicated meals I rarely made. I kept picturing how I might run into one of the families I’d saved from despair—these people whose fragile lives I’d glimpsed, a few of whom had written me thank you notes or left a fruit basket—and that I might casually invite them to join me for the gourmet meal I happened to be preparing.
But I didn’t see any of them again. I went on reading about gods and prophets, and threw my darts, and spent more time on the /r/ChildSaver subreddit, which continued to grow in popularity. Mostly I watched what others were saying about me: I could see I was a blank canvas for their own hopes, misunderstandings, humor, faith, lies, threats.
u/BacheloretteBeverly began all her posts by writing Let’s Speculate Wildly! and then proceeded to make claims like: Do you think it’s a coincidence the birthday of the last drowner is the date Russia annexed Crimea? Not a chance.
Above a GIF of a collapsing human pyramid of cheerleaders, u/MutualAnxiety asked: Are 10 children just the tip of the iceberg?
u/BestBody133 announced: Hello Fellow ChildSaving Enthusiasts! I could use advice on choosing a new saving suit.
It seemed inevitable that a dozen or so men would fashion themselves my disciples. They let their hair grow. They posted selfies taken while hiking the edges of ponds. They wore business suits on these hikes. I think they mostly didn’t have business careers, but worked construction, and retail, and food service, and minor technology jobs. They probably had a single wedding or funeral suit they wore repeatedly for these selfies.
I found them pathetic, and occasionally I didn’t stop myself from saying so online. Once, I posted a stock photo of groomsmen standing beneath a gazebo in front of a pond, and wrote: Woe to you, blind fools. Which is greater, the suit, or the man who makes the suit sacred?
I had noticed something: the more I lashed out in the forum, or wrote inexplicable musings, the more I was admired.
Another month passed without any rescues, and I even wondered if my gift had departed as suddenly as it arrived. Until the warm day I saw the girl in overalls with a net and a bucket, walking on the stone wall where some reedy shallows fade to a depth of at least five feet. Every yard or so, she put down her bucket, squatted, and leaned forward with her net to skim as deep in the water as possible.
She looked attentive and sure-footed, but I saw she was approaching a segment of the wall where one of my previous inspections had revealed the mortar was flaking away and the stones had come loose. For a moment, I wondered why I hadn’t pointed this out to the town, or even fixed it myself, but that hadn’t occurred to me before.
She stood straight, lifted her bucket, took another step or two onto the looser stones and set her bucket back down.
“Hey, kid, look out!” I yelled. “You’re gonna fall.”
I’d surprised her, and she turned to me with an angry look. Her center of gravity shifted slightly toward the edge of the wall, she lost her balance, and fell into the water. I knew her heavy muck boots must be weighting her down. I saw that she continued to grip her net, even in the water, which must have made it harder to swim. I didn’t wait for her to scream or call for help. I jumped in the water, reached her in a matter of moments, and hauled her quickly to a shallower spot where the depth was only to my waist. Placing her back onto a safer part of the wall, I felt that lift to my ego I’d missed for months.
I thought she might burst into tears and run off, as I had seen other children do upon being saved. But she brushed wet curls from her face, turned away from me, and went right back to her bucket. She picked it up again, moved another step further out on the wall, and leaned down to scoop the water with the net she had never let go.
I felt water dripping down my neck beneath the collar of my dress shirt and tie. If I were a turtle, I would have retreated into my shell. I turned and walked away.
I was surprised when I got a phone call from the girl’s mom, not only thanking me for all I’d done, but asking if I might like to come to their house for dinner, which was the least they could do.
As we ended the call, I pulled up my parents’ number. They didn’t have cell phones, as far as I knew, and didn’t even seem to have an answering machine. The call just rang and rang.
***
I looked down at Trudy on the stool next to where I stood—this girl who seemed indifferent to me, or even hostile, although I had saved her from drowning.
I didn’t picture picking her up and shaking her by the shoulders and saying, Can’t you even feel a little gratitude. What I pictured was picking her up and holding her above my head like a trophy, so that she could have a new, elevated perspective on this precious life I had allowed her to go on living.
But I didn’t pick her up. I reached into the aquarium and ran my fingers down the ridged back of one of the baby snapping turtles.
“Who’s a good boy?” I said playfully, as if petting a puppy.
Trudy looked up at me with cold eyes. She didn’t speak, but I knew she had decided the turtle must be a girl.
I backed up from the tank, stepping on something I hadn’t noticed before.
“Watch out,” the dad said, but it was too late.
As I lost my balance and stumbled, I glanced down and thought first what I’d tripped on was a snake—as thick around as my big toe—loose in the house, an escapee from some other experiment. If it were a snake, it would have bit me as I fell, but it was only a short wooden handle, the same color as the brown carpet, and detached from its net.
Look what I’d made her do, look what I’d made her do, Taylor continued imploring, so tired of all the haters.
I stood back up.
Behind their thin glass walls, the heads of the two small turtles both shot forward at once. Their beaked faces almost met, as if in a kiss, their mouths sucking up opposite ends of the same sacrificial worm, disappearing it without a trace.
“Shit, that’s some way to go,” I said. And I meant it sincerely. I had seen crazier things. I could imagine being split in two and devoured in a flash.
The girl ignored me still, clicked her stopwatch and held it high, turning to look at her parents in triumph. “See! I told you!” she shouted. “I told you!”
***
Pond Sunday, the town’s annual Spring opening of our well-manicured beach, comes every May. It’s usually a bore, doesn’t even warrant a mention on the town’s website, and is lucky to get even a sandwich board sign in the drunken handwriting of the town clerk to herald the celebration. But this year, there are flyers everywhere.
Shouldn’t I be looking forward to people’s return to the pond, a chance to revel in the work I was sent here to do? Instead, I feel like I’m slogging around with the turtle girl’s sad house on my back, like it all shrank around me while I was inside with those people, and only my head fits out the door. Nearly a week has passed, and I still can’t shake the weight of the house off me.
I don’t feel guilt. There’s nothing I did wrong. And I wasn’t rude, didn’t slink off just because the girl was unfriendly. I stayed for dessert. I heard about the adventure they were planning to Montreal and its ever-renewing Biodôme. As I left, I gave Trudy a wave and told her to keep studying those turtles. She looked down at her stopwatch, as if noting the drawn-out length of my stay.
By Friday, I’m thinking I might not even go to the pond again. Maybe I’ll just get in my car and head off to the desert southwest and take up with some blissed-out beatniks selling jewelry on the side of a road. I figure I could find the best stones, probably double what they’re making. But then the mayor texts me to say she’s planning to include a little ceremony as part of Sunday’s festivities, just a way to honor all I’ve done for the people of our town, and she assumes I’ll be there, of course.
So I wake up Sunday, dutifully put on another suit, and try to muster the motivation of a hero.
As I’m getting set to walk down to the pond, my doorbell rings. I had once mentioned on the r/Styleboards subreddit, under a different username, how much I admired the red Vespa 946 Emporio Armani with hand-stitched grip covers. It turned out several of my sleuthing disciples had followed my online tracks to that comment, and then organized a successful GoFundMe campaign, discovered my address, and are now waiting with the scooter outside my door.
I come out to find myself surrounded by a cheering crowd. A smiling guy who resembles a shorter and fatter version of me—like an under-exercised kid-brother gazing at me with awe—guides the Vespa to my side. I smile back as I adjust my suit pants, hiking them up enough to throw one leg over the gleaming chrome of the Vespa. People hold up their phones to take pictures.
I drive slowly, as if on parade, so everyone can keep up at a walking pace. I scan faces, still half-expecting-half-longing to see my mom and dad somewhere in the crowd, but I don’t see them.
Members of my entourage seem to think this is an occasion for hand-made signs: We Rise Again; Save the Children; Trust the Saver. They hold them high. I’m not surprised a few unsmiling old-timers have their own agendas and wear their favorite stained poster-board proclamations on ropes strung over their shoulders: Are You Ready? The End is Nigh.
More cheers erupt as we approach the bustling beach.
The mayor walks up and greets me with a hearty shake. “Thank you for your service,” she says, handing me a silver whistle on a lanyard as red as my Vespa.
Several town lifeguards in tank-tops escort me the short way across the sand. TV news cameras are filming. Applause rings as I climb the white-painted wood of the lifeguard chair. Strangely, I feel smaller than I’ve ever felt before, like a servant-child mounting a throne. I sit facing the still water, put the whistle in my mouth, and blow. Small wet-suited humans race into the cold water.
I look down from my perch. I still don’t see my own parents, but my expansive gaze takes in many other parents grateful for this chance to partake in their sons’ and daughters’ pleasure; and takes in the faces of several fearless children I’ve plucked from death once before; and takes in the faces of others still too anxious to enter the water but who might yet venture there soon enough, knowing I’m at my watch.
I try to relax into the watching, letting my body become a vessel for attention. My preternatural sight takes over, widens out from this single scene, captures multiple realities coming into focus. With one eye, I see myself lifting a limp child from the water moments too late, a tragic loss even I can’t avert. With the other eye, I see angry people whispering to each other, looking my way, whipping up belief in an imagined crime for which I must pay a price.
And even my third eye is now blinking itself awake. It can see both the joyful pandemonium in front of me and note the distant splash of a returning mallard land on the water, slide across its surface, quickly change its mind before stopping, and fly off again.
An end is nigh—I know that much, at least. But like the old high jumping Dick Fosbury, I have to live in the present, forget that humans only stay aloft so long, and reach to the outer limit of this one skill at which I transcend all others.
“Lily Pond Bridge” by US Department of State is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.