The Swimmer

A strong swimmer plunges his face into the water as he glides forward stroke after stroke. The unsure swimmer cranes his neck above the waves as he creeps through the surf, frightened of dampening his cheeks.  Alan Grabner sunk like a garbage sack filled with lawn clippings.  His lungs were bloated with fresh water and his eyes bulged like stuffed olives.

The police deputy stumbled upon his body days later: supine, discolored, foul, and crawling with living things. “I can’t remember a floater getting this far inland,” he said as he balanced himself on the steep banks of Lake Karetan’s sandy beach.

A “floater” was police-jargon for a drowning victim.  It was like “dime bag” or “drive-by.”  It was akin to “roscoe” and “tagger.”

A “roscoe” was police-jargon for a firearm.  A “tagger” was a person who was very skilled at graffiti.  “Dime bag” was $10 of street narcotics, and a “drive-by” was when criminals didn’t even bother to stop their cars to shoot someone, they just rolled their windows down and sprayed bullets at their victim as they moved past.

Like a drive-by victim, Alan Grabner had peered into the face of his murderer.  He had memorized his wrinkles, lines, and moles.  He had made them the wallpaper on the desktop of his brain.

Where he was now, he could not see the imperfections.  He could only smell something that reminded him of a distant time in his past.  It seemed like Johnson’s Baby Powder.  It seemed like his first sensory memory, and now it enveloped him like a blanket swaddled around a newborn.  It made him feel both happy and sad.

When he was a child, Alan’s mother would glide her bicycle through their little town, zigg-zagging the alternating streets that were named for dead presidents and trees.  Little Alan, his feet swaying just outside the spokes of the wheels, his body moving rhythmically in the seat fastened to the rear of his mother’s bicycle, would peer at the white letters on the green signs: JEFFERSON, MAPLE, GARFIELD, ELM, as they made their way to the library, the post office, or other destination.

The people in the town would say things like, “There goes Ms. Grabner and that boy,” or “She sure can pedal that bike fast.”  Alan and his auburn-haired mother – the necessary duo – were a spectacle.  They were a “sight to see.”

Once a week, usually on Sunday, Alan scampered after his mother into the Laundr-O-Mat across the street from their small apartment above Big Bill’s Restaurant.  The restaurant was actually christened “Bill’s”, but everyone called it “Big Bill’s Restaurant” because the proprietor was a man with considerable proportions.  Bill also had a toothy grin that he flashed at Alan from beneath his feathery mustache.

Alan preferred Big Bill to the Laundr-O-Mat, where his mother whisked from dryer to washer and back again, shoveling clothes like coal into a furnace.  Alan sat idly nearby drawing in his notebook or chewing on a rope of gum.  The moments would pass slowly and he would often stare at the dryer and watch the colorful array of socks, drawers, bras, and undershirts tumbling in unison.  They were like flags attached to a pinwheel behind foggy glass.  They made Alan Grabner feel restless.  They made him want to misbehave.  When he did, regardless of the transgression, Alan’s mother would smack him across his face.  She would diminish him with her words.

At times, Alan would draw a picture from one of his dreams, a dream he had many times.  The picture was of a beefy woman with a perfectly round – and rotund – waist.  The woman wore a checkered dress and sported dirty white socks beneath her slippers.  She often chased Alan in his dream – a nightmare really – and as she did she exaggeratedly swung her obese arms which had dark brown patches of sandpaper-rough skin on the elbows.  She carried a broom that she used to swat Alan’s bottom.  She thought it was a game, but Alan was frightened.  He had experienced the dream so many times, and in such great detail, that he could draw her face on the brown pages of his notebook in exquisite detail.  She had blue eyes and acne-splattered pudgy cheeks.  She had a clothespin on her nose.

One day Alan was playing in the yard when a man arrived in a uniform.  It was the uniform of the United States Air Force.  It was worn by the estranged father of the children next door.  After several moments the man returned from inside and took the little girl Alan was playing with.  They walked together down the sidewalk, growing smaller as they reached the end of the block and disappearing into the man’s car.  Alan Grabner would never see Kelly again.  Neither would her mother, though she didn’t know it yet.  She had been kidnapped by her father.  Kelly had vanished as if she never existed.

There was another dream that Alan often had as a boy that would continue to visit him in his sleep as he grew to be an adult.  In the dream, Alan found himself in a field that stretched across the horizon.  He was joined by dozens of people, all of whom, including Alan, were picking flowers.  In the dream, Alan glanced over the horizon and saw the looming barrels of approaching tanks.  He nudged the girl next to him who was unaware of the impending danger.  The girl whispered, “Don’t worry, just keep picking the flowers.”

The dream always left Alan Grabner terrified.  The tanks were dark and drab.  The flowers were a dazzlingly beautiful yellow.

The death of Alan Grabner brought more attention than Alan himself would have ever imagined.  It was received with both sadness and confusion.  There were a select few who knew Alan Grabner couldn’t swim.  They knew his arms were slight and his lungs were weak.  They understood who Alan was, what made him tick.  For many of them, that understanding was a window to something they didn’t wish to explore.

Some would describe Alan Grabner as confident, even cocky.  Others would call him arrogant, perhaps brash.  A close circle of people knew him as shy and uncomfortable in large groups, even unsure.  His wife would call him abrasive, demanding, controlling, and abusive.  His parents would label him disappointing.  His children would call him funny, even silly.  These were some of the many adjectives that could describe one man – one life – often contrary and diametrically opposed. Such was the murky mixture of living.

Of course, Alan Grabner was quite aware of that murky mixture when he was still alive.  He was quite effective at personal dissection.  He was able to examine himself as if he were an archeologist dusting the sand away from the crevices of a dinosaur fossil.  When he undertook that task, he imagined himself as a walking T-Rex femur.  The more clear the bone became, the more he could imagine himself as the creature that once existed, roaming in majesty, but was now extinct, wiped out when a large rock crashed into the planet at blinding speed.  His most underappreciated novel had been titled “Terrible Lizard” which was the literal meaning of the word “dinosaur.”  The book had failed because Alan had insisted the dust cover feature a picture of a child picking flowers in a field.  The haunting of his recurring dream had forced him to make that decision.

Not all of Alan Grabner’s novels had been panned.  His biggest success, The Watchers, was a New York Times Best Seller for 18 weeks.  It was about an alien society who aimed their cameras at Earth, and had been doing so for thousands, even millions of years.  The aliens were meticulous in their observations and kept archives of every detail and every event that had ever occurred on Earth.  When earthlings learned of it, they were able to request tapes from any period in time and see what happened.  The tapes solved every mystery man had ever pondered.  They told of the building of the pyramids and Stonehenge.  They told us who shot Kennedy and where Amelia Earhardt had crashed.  They answered once for all whether Babe Ruth had really “called his shot.”  The observations enabled every human being to have a tape of every ancestor they had ever had, to watch every step they had ever taken.  The tapes were a rousing commercial success for the aliens, who were peaceful.  But Earthlings became disillusioned when many of their beliefs were shattered, when all of their riddles had been solved.  The rulers of Earth built fantastic spaceships and flew to the alien planet and destroyed their cameras and their archives.  Man would start fresh, uncertain of his past, starting from there.

When Alan’s father learned of his death, through a phone call from his mother, he was strangely calm.  He had not seen Alan in many, many years.  He did not know what Alan’s favorite color was, or what Alan had liked to eat for breakfast when he was a child.  He was unaware that Alan had a dream about a woman with a clothespin on her nose chasing him through a laundromat.  The man who fertilized the egg that grew into Alan Grabner, did not even know if his son could swim.

He assumed he could not.

Despite the success of The Watchers, Alan had never had a truly happy relationship.  He distrusted his agent, he resented his mother, and he barely tolerated his friends, who gave him luke warm attention and feigning loyalty.  Alan Grabner was all about loyalty.  Yet he had cheated on his first wife.  His second wife got him back.  She had an elicit affair with her ex-husband, fell in love, and ran off.  She used the royalties from Alan’s books to purchase a speedboat.  Alan rebuilt his life but he never again wrote another novel.  He ceased being creative and set about being agonizingly petty.

There had been days when Alan Grabner had been triumphant.  On the days his children were lifted by his hands for the first time.  On the day his first novel was published.  On the evening he first pressed his lips onto the lips of the one girl he truly loved.  On the afternoons he raced to the front of the line to enter the playground for recess.

On the day of his funeral, Alan Grabner could not wear the best suit he owned.  It no longer fit.  His body was too badly damaged by the water, debris, and microscopic organisms that populated the water he had drown in.  His face did not see the light of day.  His casket was closed.  Visitors at the funeral saw a poster-sized photo of Alan resting on a stand next to his casket.  The photo showed Alan’s face pinched between his two daughters as they planted a wet kiss on his cheeks.  The girls, much older, sat in the front row, flanking their mother, who was dressed in black.  The woman was squeezing the hands of her daughters.  She was nervously tapping her left shoe on the carpet.  She refused to look up as well-wishers touched her on the shoulder or the knee.  There was a tear rolling slowly down her cheek.  Her bottom lip was trembling.

The man who gave the eulogy – which stemmed from the latin word eulogium, meaning “a formal expression of praise or commendation” – had never graduated from high school.  He was what society called a “self-made man” who had ended up “stinking rich.”  The man began Alan Grabner’s eulogy awkwardly, even angrily.  He didn’tt want to be there, not because he was afraid of public speaking, but because he resented having to say the words he was prepared to say.

He resented his predicament.

As he read the hastily scribbled words on the pages, as the pie-round faces of the solemn gathering reflected back at him, he transported his mind to a place where he was happy.  He thought of a fishing boat and an ice cooler filled with beer.

At that exact moment, a woman in the rear of the room cleared her throat and dug her feet into the carpet.  She dropped her chin and leaned back in her chair.  She was uncomfortable in her tight, flower-print dress with yellow piping around the neck.  She couldn’t pull off the sham.  She glanced out the window and caught a glimpse of Lake Karetan beyond the half-filled parking lot.  She wondered if she could make it across the lake.  Her limbs were long, smooth, and wiry.  They were locomotives to propel her through the waves.  She hadn’t been for a swim in a long time.