Fat bodies float.
Or at least that’s what Ethan Gaines reassures himself as he dips a toe off the swim ladder into the shallow end of the YMCA pool. The clock above him reads 8:16 p.m. He pauses to watch the glare of the facility’s fluorescents dance upon the surface of the water, bouncing reflections of rippling light onto the pale blue walls. His breath catches in his throat. The scratchy nylon of his swim trunks has bunched uncomfortably between his meaty thighs, though he doesn’t dare extract it with the eyes of others upon him. Not for the first time, he wishes he were allowed to at least wear a t-shirt while swimming here. But the rules are crystal clear: swimsuits only. Dad says that back when he was Ethan’s age, they used to make them swim in the nude. Ethan doesn’t even like to change in the locker room. He wears his swimsuit beneath his pants on the way here and then slips into dry clothes in a bathroom stall for the ride home.
No one can see him naked.
There are worse things than drowning, after all.
He sucks in a deep breath and heaves his bulk down the remaining steps, shuddering and then gasping as he finally touches bottom. Releasing the ladder, he wades shivering out into the water. Standing perfectly erect, the surface of the pool just brushes against his fleshy nipples, which have popped like turkey timers from the cold. Despite his discomfort, his belly joggles pleasurably below the waterline, relieved from the burdens of gravity by new buoyancy. He stares down at himself with his arms raised, paralyzed by the cold and afraid to lift his eyes to catch anyone else’s gaze.
The sooner he fully submerges, the sooner they will stop looking at him.
He shudders, sucks in another deep breath—the air is heady with the astringency of industrial bleach—and then he bends his knees to allow the water to creep up the remainder of his exposed pink flesh. When the icy surface at last touches his chin, he lifts his lightened legs and begins to paddle, surprised when he looks up to see that no one is paying the slightest bit of attention to him. In fact, there’s hardly anyone here, what with the championship game taking place across town tonight at the university.
He practically has the pool to himself.
It was Dad’s idea to drag Ethan to the YMCA to “shed a few pounds.”
“A boy your age has no business weighing more than his old man,” Dad says. “When I was sixteen I could lap a hundred meters in just over a minute. You can, too, if you work at it.”
But Ethan has no intention of working at anything here. He does not like to swim. Everything about it screams against his nature. The cold of it. The exertion of it. The exposure of it. His elemental dread of the water.
And yet, there are compensations, too.
Once he is safely ensconced in a quiet corner at the shallow end where nobody will pay any attention to him, it’s his turn to watch the others. Though it’s not the case tonight, the pool is usually filled with them at this time of the evening: Working men who stop by on their way home from office jobs in the city doing laps to keep their bodies firm. Gangly-limbed teenagers from the high school, here to goof off with their buddies while leaping fearlessly off the diving board. Older men, too, their wrinkled skin spotted and loose, moving slow as jellyfish through the water to lower blood pressure or limber arthritic joints.
In their own unique ways, Ethan finds each of them fascinating and strangely beautiful to behold. He could watch them for hours from his place in the shallow end as they laugh and swim, horsing around or cutting confidently through the water. They radiate an ease in their mostly-naked bodies that is as alien to him as creatures from another world. And yet he feels such an acute desire for them, such an aching for the comfort with which they seem to occupy their own skin that it sometimes takes his breath away. It is a confusing sensation, this unalloyed envy shaded by the hormonal blush of a burgeoning lust he is still too innocent to comprehend. Yes, he wants to touch these bodies, to caress their skin, to feel the warmth of their unselfconscious maleness pressed against his own pliant flesh.
But even more than that, he wants to be them, to be anything other than what he is:
Inexhaustibly himself.
But, alas, there are some things no number of trips to this swimming pool will ever change.
Though Ethan’s been coming here for months now, he has only made one friend. This man’s name is Carl. He is much older than Ethan, perhaps sixty-five or seventy, though not as old as some of the others that swim here.
There is something different about Carl, something foreign, even slightly alien that Ethan has never quite put his finger on. He is not a handsome man by any means, with a dusky, laborer’s complexion; small eyes that seem to change color depending on the light; sagging man-breasts; and a pronounced belly as firm as a watermelon. His hands are thick, his fingernails coarse and ragged. The flesh of his neck and face is splotched with age, and yet his arms remain as firm and tightly muscled as a much younger man’s.
Perhaps it’s that Carl has seen the world—many times over if his stories are to be believed. He often regales Ethan with accounts of the silvery moonlight cresting over Tahitian lagoons, the briny smell of a gale rising upon the Caspian Sea, or the beauty of dawn’s golden rays cascading across Georgian Bay. Perhaps he is a retired sailor or ship’s captain. Something to do with the sea, although Ethan has never bothered to ask and has no idea why the man should have ended up befriending a fat, teenage wallflower in a YMCA pool more than one hundred miles from the nearest coastline. He only knows that Carl has a pleasing smile and an outgoing demeanor, and that he is always happy when his friend emerges from below the surface beside him to chat, as he does now.
Carl wipes the water from his eyes and says, “Hello, my young friend,” with a vaguely Eastern-European roll to the “r” in friend. His voice is low and cool, with the same tingly-neck effect on Ethan of that curly-haired landscape painter on the PBS station. He thinks he could listen to Carl speak for hours and never tire of the sound of his voice.
In reply, he squeaks an embarrassing “Hey, Carl,” and can immediately feel the blood rush to his face. He finds himself blushing a lot around Carl.
But if the older man notices this, he does not let on. Instead, he says, “How have you been? I have not seen you here in some time. Over a week, eh?”
“Yeah,” Ethan nods vigorously. “I was busy with midterms. How have you been?”
Carl grins and gestures toward the deeper end.
“Oh, you know. I am well. The water keeps me going, eh?”
Ethan nods again as if he understands, though in truth he has never figured out what exactly Carl does here. He’s never actually seen the man doing laps or undertaking exercise of any kind. He’s never noticed him socializing with the others either. In fact, he’s doesn’t think he’s ever seen Carl outside of the pool itself. Not in the locker room. Not lifting weights. Not squatted on one of the icy aluminum benches where the other old men congregate to gossip and argue politics.
Actually, Carl always seems to already be in the water whenever Ethan arrives, and he’s never seen him climb out before it’s time to leave. In Ethan’s mind, the man is as permanent a fixture of the YMCA pool as the ladders, the diving board, or the thick yellow warning stripe painted across the liner at the bottom demarcating the safe side of the pool from the precipitous slope that plunges into the deep end.
He suddenly realizes Carl has said something he missed while lost in thought.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I said, when are you finally going to let me show you how to do the breaststroke? Or perhaps the butterfly, eh?”
Carl is always trying to nudge him into the deeper end. Ethan knows he just wants to be encouraging, and although he thinks the man’s constant niggling should irritate him, mostly he’s pleased that Carl is interested enough to want to teach him something. For all of Dad’s bluster about his prowess in the swimming pool back in the day, he’s never once bothered to come here with his son to show him what he knows. There was some vague talk at the beginning about paying for swimming lessons, but that quickly fell by the wayside. Much like with everything else since Ethan was a boy—their infrequent fishing outings, the model airplanes, that idiotic stamp collection—Dad just expects Ethan to figure out on his own the many hobbies and pastimes he insists his son pursue. Ethan would much rather read horror comics in his bedroom, or draw monsters in his sketch book, or play gory RPGs online, but Dad doesn’t consider these activities healthy. So instead, he forces his son to come here to be alone, when Ethan could do that perfectly well at home.
But at least there’s Carl.
“There’s too many people around,” Ethan says, which is what he always says whenever Carl tries to get him to go into the deep end. Of course, that’s not even true tonight—besides the lifeguard texting on his phone, there are only two other men doing laps in the pool. But he hopes Carl won’t notice. “I don’t want to get in the way. Some other time maybe.”
“You will not be in the way.” Carl gives him an indulgent smile, as if he understands what Ethan really means. “You must learn eventually, no? Otherwise, what is the point of coming here day after day, week after week?”
“Good question. Tell it to my Dad.”
“No,” Carl says seriously. “I tell it to you, my friend. You must do this for yourself. Not for him or anyone else. For you. You must face your fears now, while you are still so young, because when you reach my age it will be too late.”
But Ethan isn’t the sort of boy to face his fears. Not the real ones, anyway. Sure, he loves a good scary movie. He’s sat through Alien a dozen times and can recite the screenplay of Jaws by heart. You’re gonna need a bigger boat. But horror movies are just fake blood and mechanical monsters. His real fears, the ones that give him a skin-crawling coldness deep in the pit of his belly, are things to be avoided at all costs: Disappointing his father. Being shamed in front of others. Feeling unwanted.
Drowning, of course.
This last fear is the most primal. He still has occasional nightmares about poor Joey Wales, his only other friend besides Carl, who drowned the summer before fifth grade at his grandparents’ camp on Lake Champlain. News reports described how witnesses had seen Joey venture out beyond the line of warning buoys that’d been strung across the water to demarcate where it was safe to swim.
The next thing anybody knew, he was gone, sucked down by the current.
Vanished.
The police came with divers and everything, but they never found his corpse and the lake was too vast and deep to dredge.
It’s the vanishing part that Ethan has never really gotten over. How could someone just disappear like that from the face of the earth? One minute there, splashing carelessly around beneath the hot July sun. The next minute gone, sucked into some icy, black oblivion. When people drown in movies and on TV shows, their bodies always turn up eventually, maybe tangled in the reeds along the shore line, or washed up on a lonely beach, or even caught in a fisherman’s net and hauled glistening and gray onto the rolling hull of a ship at sea.
But vanished . . . simply gone?
Actually, it occurs more frequently than Ethan can bear to imagine. A few years after Joey’s drowning, when the nightmares wouldn’t stop coming, he found himself spiraling down several different rabbit holes online in an attempt to understand how it was possible for a person to up and disappear like that. Only, it turned out that it was more than just possible—it was downright common—thanks to currents and chemistry, the interference of predators and plain old bad luck. Once he began to look, he found a nearly endless supply of stories involving unlucky people presumed to have drowned in oceans, rivers, and lakes whose bodies were never recovered.
“You don’t want to end up like your friend Joey, do you?” Dad had warned, by way of persuasion the first time he dragged Ethan here to swim.
But all Ethan could think about as he stood staring into the placid surface of the water that day was at least they could dredge this pool.
“When I was your age,” Carl begins, a faraway look in his eyes, ”I saw the ethereal glow of the Aurora for the first time reflected in an ice flow off the coast of—”
His story is interrupted by a chorus of shouts emanating from the hallway that leads to the weight room, where a TV is on playing the big game. A moment later, a shirtless weightlifter with coils of sweaty muscle that bulge from his chest and arms like anaphylactic swelling thrusts his head out of the doorway and calls to the lifeguard.
“Hey, come on, man. They’ve just tied it up . . . They’re heading into overtime.”
As he disappears back the way he came, Ethan locks eyes with the lifeguard, who throws him a pleading look that says, “Please don’t drown. I’ll be back in five,” before following the weightlifter down the hall.
“Ah, perfect,” Carl says, his story about the Aurora immediately forgotten. He glides backwards through the water like an eel to straddle the yellow line between the shallow and deep ends of the pool, extending a hand to Ethan. “Here is our chance at last. You have no more excuses.”
It’s true. The others have all gone. Including the two men who were doing laps beside them only a moment ago. Ethan didn’t notice them climb out of the pool, but he assumes they must have followed the lifeguard into the weight room.
“Don’t you want to watch the end of the game, too?” he says, gesturing after the others.
“No, my young friend,” Carl offers in his most soothing, melodic tone. “We are finally alone here. Let us make the most of this moment of privacy, eh? Do not be afraid. The time is now. I promise l will look after you.”
With these words, something stirs inside of Ethan. A longing he does not quite comprehend. He has never been “looked after” before. Not once in his whole life.
Looked at? Sure.
Stared at, even . . . Pointed at . . . Laughed at . . .
But looked after? No. That means something else entirely. Something like protection, or care, or affection.
He feels his body surge through the water toward this feeling, towards Carl, before he even consciously wills it to do so, his feet padding carefully across the slick liner beneath them until he is close enough to the yellow line to take Carl’s hand. A jolt of sensation courses through his body as Carl’s fingers entwine with his. He has never actually touched this man before, and Carl’s grip is firm, yet tender.
Warm, assuring, electric.
“There now,” Carl says. “I knew you were braver than you let on, eh?”
But Ethan isn’t brave at all.
As his friend tries to tug him gently across the yellow boundary, something within him recoils. The water feels much colder on the far side of the line. He can sense its radiant chill against his skin, as if there were an iceberg melting in the deep end of the pool. With the ball of his foot poised precariously on the yellow line itself, Ethan curls his toes over the edge. But instead of feeling the downward slope of the liner, there’s nothing but frigid water gaping beneath them. It’s as if the bottom of the pool has dropped away, as if a crack in the earth has suddenly yawned open. Directly below where Carl languidly treads, the water has turned as black as the Mariana Trench.
As black as Carl’s new eyes.
“What the—”
Ethan reels back, yanking his hand free and stumbling away from the edge. “Wha—what the hell are you?” he gasps, as the fingers on Carl’s hand—the ones that were a moment ago entwined with his own—transform into writhing tendrils of pale luminescent flesh.
“What would you have me be?” Carl says, his voice as low and sonorous as an onrushing tide. “A monster out of one of your horror films?”
“You tell me!”
Carl sighs.
“I am but a lonely traveller,” he says with unexpected earnestness. “Someone who has spent his whole life experiencing the wonders of this world by himself. I have seen what most humans dare not even dream. And so can you, my young friend. If you join me tonight.”
“I—I don’t understand,” Ethan stammers, inching carefully backwards through the water toward the ladder. He notices that Carl has not moved any closer to him. He hopes that if he can just keep him talking, he might have enough time to scramble out of the pool before—“Why—why me?”
“Your loneliness shone like a beacon across oceans of time,” Carl says, shaking his head sympathetically. “It called me to you. We are kindred in that way. ”
Just a few more feet, Ethan thinks. “But what do you want from me?”
“Why, a companion is all. Someone to share what I have seen and teach what I have learned before it is too late.”
“And if I say no? Are you—are you going to eat me?”
Carl laughs heartily at this and offers Ethan a small, weary smile made chilling by the rows of jagged, spiny teeth that have since emerged from his gums. “No, of course not. You are free to make your own choice, my young friend. I would never harm you.”
“Then I choose to leave . . . now.”
As Ethan turns to reach for the ladder, Carl calls soothingly, almost pityingly, “Stop being so afraid, Ethan Gaines. This is no way to live. Cowering each day in loneliness and despair. Ashamed to be who you are, to experience what you desire. All that’s required to change your fate is this one small step. This choice, this moment of chance. Come with me, my young friend. Choose boldly, eh?”
To his own surprise, Ethan hesitates, his hands poised on the slick aluminum bars of the swim ladder. He wonders if this was how Joey and all the other vanished were persuaded to swim beyond their own yellow lines. Suddenly, he realizes he is not afraid. At least, not of Carl. Somehow he knows that this man—this monster, whatever Carl is—means him no harm. He felt that much in his touch, can hear it in the patience of his words. Carl has vowed to look after him, and Ethan has faith that such a promise would keep him safer than any yellow line ever could. If his friend is indeed a monster, he is a monster who has chosen Ethan as kin, not prey.
“What do you say, my young friend? You will never see the world from the shallow end. All that’s worth knowing of it—and of yourself—swims in the deeps with me. Don’t be afraid of what you will find out there.”
Ethan allows himself just a moment to consider the offer. He tries to picture living fearlessly, a world traveller like Carl, a creature of the water and the wild. But the thought of it makes him feel foolish, ridiculous even. He might as well be naked. He already knows far too much of himself as it is; there’s nothing more worth discovering out there.
Besides, what would Dad say? He would laugh out loud at such a ludicrous notion.
“Thanks,” he says finally, clinging tighter to the ladder. “But I should probably go now.” He glances up at the clock on the wall, which reads 8:39 p.m. The pool closes at 9:00. “Dad will be here soon to pick me up.”
A moment of aching silence passes between them before Carl speaks again.
“I won’t return for you,” he says solemnly. “I have lingered here too long as it is.”
“I understand,” Ethan says quickly and then sighs. He knew having a friend was too good to last. He doesn’t dare turn back to register the disappointment he knows he’ll find in Carl’s inhuman black eyes. “Thanks for the offer, though. I—I appreciate it.”
Carl does not bother to say goodbye.
Instead, Ethan hears a single splash behind him, and when he turns back to look, he finds the glare of fluorescents dancing once more upon clear blue water.
For the first time ever, he is alone in the YMCA pool.
Choose boldly, Carl said.
If there’s one lesson Ethan has learned from all of his favorite movies, it’s that those who choose boldly are usually the first to die.
Ethan knows he will never choose boldly.
But he can at least choose not to disappoint himself.
After a moment’s hesitation, he finds himself pushing off the ladder and wading back across the pool to the yellow line, where he stands at the very edge with his toes curled securely against the downward slope of the liner. The surface ripples calmly before him; he can see all the way to the bottom once more. With his heart thrumming madly in his chest, he reaches a tentative hand far out across the yellow line, wiggling his fingers in water no longer any colder than on the shallow side.
Ethan waits for nothing bad to happen.
When it does, he takes a deep breath, and before he can talk himself out of it, kicks off the bottom and paddles out into the deep end, circling back in a lazy arc to the swim ladder.
Just then a rousing cheer erupts from the weight room—the big game must finally be over. Ethan hauls himself up the ladder as quickly as he can manage before the others can return and see him.
“Thank you, Carl,” he whispers, and without a backward glance at the water, he scampers into the locker room, where he will change in a stall, as always, and then wait alone in the bus shelter outside until Dad remembers to pick him up.
Originally published in Cape Cod Poetry Review, Fall 2024.
