Better Angels (18 page)

Only about forty per cent of yearly drownings occur to people who are swimming or playing in the water. Jiro meditates on this, but drowning itself is his deeper mediation. Perhaps he is destined to be the bodhisattva of suffocation in water, a being who has wakened from the painful sleeping whirlpool of births and deaths to accomplish—what?

“To die, to sleep—” Jiro says, reading Hamlet in Hamlet in their family time because Dad thinks their teenschool is culturally limited, that “teachers” have become mere “student processors” ever since education signed on to the corporate model. Seiji and Jiro must suffer heavy loads of enrichment tutorials. “To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.”

Even if most of his childhood was not spent in Hawaii. Even if it was primarily the world halfway between his mother’s and father’s, to which they’d now retired. Even if Jiro is here to take the cure, to be rehabilitated—and the weirdness has come so far, blown him out so hard, that no one in his family wanted to talk about it.

Panic, a contributory cause in almost all swimming accidents, is a sudden, unreasoning, and overwhelming terror that destroys a person’s capacity for self-help.

“It’s so good to see you,” his mother says after kissing him, gripping his left arm almost painfully tightly with her fingertips, only a hint of the perennial nervousness in her voice.

“Yes,” says his father, a man of medium height and black hair gone largely gray, “it’s good to see you.”

Seated in lotus position on the “contact platform,” Jiro removes his regulator, pinches off its airflow, and gradually blows out his air. The dolphins gather in a rosette about him, motionless. For endless moments he sits there like a drowned Buddha. Occasionally he takes a breath of air from his regulator, the dolphins lift their blowholes to the surface.

In most waters, the main threat to life during a prolonged immersion is cold or cold combined with the possibility of drowning.

On duty at the Global Atmospheric Information Agency, Dad is looking at an infrared satscan of a hurricane over the Atlantic and chanting “Coriolis rose/blossoms over night ocean/petals shatter lives” again and again when the psychs come for him.

“It’s stress,” Mom says nervously. “Job-related stress from working so hard for that damn GAIA. Your father will be all right again. He’s just under the weather.” A short sad bitter laugh.

Recognizing the drowning victim is sometimes difficult. Once a true drowning situation is recognized, the idea of swimming after the victim should be entertained only after all other less hazardous ways of rescuing the drowning person have been exhausted. Too often the would-be rescuer becomes another victim.

“Your brother is waiting at the car for us,” his mother informed him. “We’ll just go to baggage claim and get your bags—”

Seiji is two years older and better than Jiro is at most things. Except the childhood exploit of doing the dead man’s sink.

“Watch!” Jiro says. At the edge of the deep end in the Sunlite Pool, Seiji watches, prepared to be unimpressed. Jiro slides beneath the water’s surface, face down and arms outstretched before him like Superman in flight. He begins to exhale bubbles then streams of air from his mouth and nostrils—and he starts to sink. Faster and faster the air floods out of him, faster and faster he sinks. When the last burst of bubbles has belched surfaceward, he lies dead flat against the pool’s blue-painted rubbery bottom, motionless. Second after lengthening second slides slowly by, and still he doesn’t move.

“Well, boys,” Dad says as they walk onto the Park grounds, “what do you want to see first?”

“The fish,” Seiji says.

“The birds,” Jiro says.

Each boy is adamant in his choice.

“It’s always this way, isn’t it?” Mom says, shaking her head. “What now?”

Dad looks at the touchscreen map of the Park, glowing like a green sash at the waist of the city’s encircling greenbelt.

“According to the map, the Aquarium is on the way to the Aviary, so we’ll see the fish first, then the birds—”

“Yay!” Seiji shout. Dad tousles his older boy’s hair, drenched very nearly red from swimming in the eternal summer of the Sunlite Pool.

“He always gets his way,” Jiro says, looking downcast through his dark bangs.

Ten motionless seconds tick by. Seiji begins to get worried. The water lifts Jiro’s thick brown hair. Fifteen. Sways it back and forth like seaweed. Twenty.

When executing a rescue, it is good to let the victim know your intentions. Talk to the victim. Keep in personal contact.

“I don’t have any baggage,” Jiro says. “All I brought is what I’m carrying.”

His parents seem a bit discombobulated by that, but they recover. They make their way toward the car and there’s Seiji, shaking Jiro’s hand and relieving Jiro of his pack and duffle bag apologizing that he’s been out of touch, small-talking about the quality of Jiro’s flight aboard the flying wing “view front” jet from the mainland, about the contract job Seiji’s just finished at the orbital habitat, installing the first of the new macro-engineered photovoltaics up there—about anything, except why they’re all right here, right now. Jiro tries to keep a handle on his mind’s rambling, tries to keep his eyes from darting too fiercely from his head, round and about, searching his surroundings.

Twenty-five seconds. Anxiously Seiji looks around for a life guard. Thirty. He begins to wade toward Jiro. Thirty-five seconds.

“Timor mortis conturbat me,” twelve year old Jiro says, reciting words about death in a dead language, the learning of which his parents believe will help broaden Seiji and him enough so that they won’t end up weather-observers for the Global Atmospheric Information Administration (like Dad), or Food Service workers (like Mom).

Exhaustion is simply loss of energy and the resultant inability to make the necessary movements to keep afloat and make progress through the water.

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,” their father reads. “I do not think they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the wave, combing the white hair of the waves blown back, when the wind blows the water white and black.”

At forty-five seconds Jiro pushes himself off the bottom and surges toward the surface, breaking out of the water with a great insuck of breath, almost knocking Seiji down where he stands over him. Seiji’s fear and brief anger turn perversely to elation.

“Hey! How’d you do that?”

“Just blow out all the air,” Jiro says with a shrug, “and you drop like a rock down the well.”

Buoyancy of a body depends on the type of body. Some bodies are fairly buoyant. Others have marginal buoyancy. Still others have no buoyancy at all.

At the car out in the humid Hawaiian sunshine, Seiji and Jiro take the front seat while their parents ride in back.

“You still doing that summer job?” Seiji asks as they pull out of the parking lot and onto the highway. “Finding patterns in data or whatever it is?”

“Data pattern recognition,” Jiro corrects mildly. “Yeah. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep the job much longer. My bosses aren’t happy. They say I’m finding patterns that aren’t really there.”

“Oh, Jiro!” their mother says, sounding simultaneously sad, worried, and exasperated.

“Honey,” their father says, “leave it alone. Please.”

A mystic is a diver who can swim. A schizophrenic is a diver who can’t. If you get too far out of your depth, you’ll drown. If you don’t get out of your depth at all, you’ll never learn to swim.

“Let me see it again,” Seiji says.

“Okay.”

When Jiro slides under this time Seiji submerges too, eyes open, watching him. Air like a stream of molten silver flows up out of Jiro’s face, past his floating hair, as he sinks. A final burst of bubbles rises through the blue water, ripples the silver underside of the sky—and Jiro lies again at full length, flat as his own shadow against the bottom. He seems almost to embrace the pool’s bottom, his face learning to love that drowned pavement, to breathe no more than it does.

Experience teaches rescuers how far into the water they can safely go and how much of a load they can bear.

Seiji tries to do it too, then. He blows out air, but by the time he gets to a forty five degree angle the emptying of his chest underwater has become a tangible claustrophobia. Panicking, he inhales water and bolts to the surface, spluttering and gasping.

Parents and grown sons drive along in silence for a time, the crowds and colors of the island flowing round them like a strange blend of Polynesia, Tokyo, and Las Vegas.

“Well, maybe the rock-god shaman can help you with that,” Seiji says.

“Maybe.”

Out the window, above Kauai’s flower drum palm frond color carnival, the sky is a piercing blue. The clouds highpiled at the horizon are so white they seem backlit. The whole scene stands out with a vividness greater than the real, suffused with a persecuted grandeur like that of a mad artist’s dream.

Seiji gives drowning his best shot again and again, but it’s frustrating. He’s the older brother, he’s supposed to lead the way, to take the risks, to teach—but it’s Jiro who tries to teach him how to drown, and he doesn’t even prove to be a good student.

“Your body tells you to breathe, even when you know you’re underwater,” Jiro says. “It’s stupid. Don’t pay attention to it.”

Eventually Seiji gets to the point where he can sink fully to the bottom—just barely—but he never does manage to let go that last burst of air, to breathe it all out so his face might sink fully forward, to kiss the unyielding pavement in that perfect passionate stillness his younger brother achieves so effortlessly.

The depth to which a rescuer may go to retrieve a victim will depend upon the depth itself and how long the breath can be held after swimming to the site.

“It explains a lot,” Jiro says, electropenning thoughts as they occur to him. “The high youth suicide and car accident rates here, everything.”

“What do you mean?” Seiji asks warily.

“If society is a second womb,” Jiro explains, “then suicides and accidental deaths are spontaneous abortions, while socially sanctioned wars and executions are willful ones. That’s what all the controversy was about in the last century: whether women individually should be allowed to do inside their wombs what men for millennia had been doing collectively inside the womb of patriarchal society.”

Seiji shakes his head.

“Maybe you’re brighter or crazier than I am,” he says at last, “but I don’t see that. Sounds like the KL is talking again, bro. Either that, or you’ve been studying too much of that history—especially the Gender Wars. Whichever, I wouldn’t let Mom and Dad hear you say this stuff, if I were you.”

Jiro fully masters the art of the dead man’s sink while still in his teens. “People are mostly just water walking around, right?” he says. “If you can just get over the fear of suffocating in water, you can let it all go. It’s easy.”

By the time Seiji leaves for graduate school in California and then in Hawaii, Jiro can drown to his left side or his right, face up or face down, feet first or head first or in the fetal position.

Peaceful. A sleep and a forgetting, Jiro thinks, remembering lines from that old poem his father so loved. Till human voices wake us and we drown.

Sometimes it seems as if Jiro is going to stay down there for ever, but he always comes back, eventually. Seiji doesn’t understand it. The voice of the dolphin in air sounds harsh to him—jarring gibbering clicktalk.

“What’re you doing down there all that time?” Seiji asks.

“Communing,” Jiro says. “Most of their discourse is non-referential—philosophical poetry, songs, that sort of thing. When I’m around them and primed on Ibogara, though—‘Human awake!’—they just skip language altogether and beam me imagery directly, faster and denser than I can understand, though it’s still all up here in my head somewhere, I think. After they zap me I feel better—much better.”

“In what way?”

He pauses, thinking.

Eternal return. Avalokitesvara. Kwan Yin. Kwannon. Bodhisattvas and saviors do not leave the world but regard its lives and deeds and imperfections with the eyes and tears of compassion.

“Kind of like I’m being rescued,” Jiro says slowly. “Like I’m being lifted up into the light.”

Socrates. Jesus. Gandhi. King. Walking Bear. Ohnuki. Eternal return—

“I can’t do it, Jiro,” he heard Seiji saying tearfully, moving away. “I just can’t let go that last burst of air. I’ve got no more air to give!”

Jiro felt someone beating on his chest and heard a boat approaching at speed.

Watch!

He opened his eyes, unclear as to how he’d gotten here. All he could remember was sitting passionately still at the bottom of a deep sun-filled pool, waiting to surge toward the surface and the light once more.

“Hey,” said one of Fabro’s Samoan orderlies. “Hey! He’s breathing! He’s alive!”

“What?” Seiji turned back toward him and saw that it was true. Relief and shock warred in his face, until at last relief won. He shook Jiro’s shoulders as Jiro sat up, somewhat unsteadily.

“If you’re not dead,” Seiji said, “then I ought to kill you for putting me through this!”

Jiro looked down and saw his shadow, beside Seiji’s, cast over the edge of the boat and rippling onto the waves beyond. A shadow of a body, but for there to be shadows there must also be light and bodies. Yes, he was still alive.

Todd Fabro, the pop-music-god-turned-shaman, had arrived in the flesh—on the speeding boat Jiro heard earlier. A slender man clad in white linen suit, boater hat, and canvas shoes, Fabro stood some distance away, on his picket boat, listening to the orderly’s report, shaking the long curls of his sun-danced hair in taut agreement before jumping down onto the boat where Jiro now sat upright, gathering his wits.

“How are you feeling?” Fabro asked him, crouching down beside him.

“Saner,” Jiro said. “More ready to face the world without KL.”

Fabro nodded.

“Heard you had a near brush with the Big Guy,” he said, his jauntiness not quite overcoming the worry in his voice.