Distortions

The Lifeguard

“When was the last time your eyes were checked?”

“They’ve never been checked. They’ve always been blue.”

*

When David Warner was five or six years old there was an ant war one day, on the sidewalk outside his house. His mother boiled a pan of water and poured it on the ants. But it wasn’t enough water — there were so many ants. So she boiled another pan of water, and that was enough to kill them — kill them and wash them away, so you couldn’t really tell they had been killed. David stayed on the sidewalk, looking at the ripples of black washed to the edge of the sidewalk. “Why do you keep staring?” his mother scolded. “I got rid of them.” Her attention had been drawn to the ant war by David, who had squatted on the sidewalk for a long time. And then the next summer there was another ant war — he was six or seven then, or maybe he was five — and she killed them again, with two separate pots of boiling water. A cloud of steam and whoosh. That was what David told them at the induction center. It was spring, and he was thinking of the ant wars, and although he had rehearsed another story, the story about the ants just came out. “What of it?” the psychiatrist said when David finally got to see him. “I might do that. Just turn on the men and do the same thing.” “Kill them, do you mean?” “Yes, of course, kill them, that’s what I’m saying.” “What do you suggest I write in this space about the ant wars?” the psychiatrist asked. “I have to explain this, you know. Why don’t you tell me what you think it would be good to put down.” Fearing a trap, David said nothing — went into a crouch, part of the original plan. “I’m giving you a break. Why don’t you give me one?” the psychiatrist asked. David, knowing it was a trap, crouched and rocked back and forth.

*

He has been feeling lately that something good is going to happen. There is a visual distortion that accompanies the feeling; he sees, imagines he sees, sunsets when there could not possibly be sunsets. He sees them at midnight, when the moon shines over the water, then burns sun-bright, and the birds sing. Even the seagulls are quiet at midnight, so he is not just imagining that one thing is another. He is just plain inventing. Why is he doing that?

He goes to the beach every night, and about every third night he sees a sunset, hears music or singing …

He has just celebrated his thirty-first birthday by drinking a bottle of Ringnes beer and going down to the beach to bury the bottle in the sand, waiting for the sunset. It would be too much to expect that the sunset would herald something, that it would all make sense, that all the sunsets would have been foreshadowings of this great, bright dawn of his thirty-first birthday. There is no sunset. Seagulls squawk. They are looking for garbage. Naturally.

*

Andrew and Penelope and Randy. The neighborhood children pronounce it “Ranny.” An annoyance — especially because it does not annoy his son. “Kill them!” he wants to say to Randy. “Make them call you by your right name!” Killing — just what the psychiatrist would expect of him. To pick up a newspaper one day and read about a little boy who was urged to kill another little boy by his deranged father, who babbled incoherently, who cried when the police came to take him away. The psychiatrist would consult that sheet of paper — was that loony ’65 or ’64?—and aha! of course! Lookit, honey! This man made an absolute fool of himself in my office, very sick stuff …

David has always been curious. What did the psychiatrist come up with?

He is losing touch, and it is appropriate that he does most of his walking in the sand, which he sinks into. He went into town, saw the doctor and had his eyes examined, explaining the sunsets as “bright flashes.” The doctor asked when he last had his eyes checked, and David made a little witticism. The doctor said that there did not seem to be anything wrong with his eyes. “I know not seems,” David muttered. The doctor laughed, suspecting another witticism. These schoolteachers are all mad.

*

Andrew and Penelope and Randy. Andrew and Penelope are twins, eight years old. Before they were born, the doctor took an X ray and told them they would have triplets. He kept thinking that the doctor had done something with the other one, that he was selling it. He even told his wife that, and she went wild. The doctor assured them that he had interpreted the X ray wrong, and when that did not silence them he let them look at the X ray. “What’s that shadow? What’s that?” “I thought that might be a third.” “It might be! Isn’t that a leg?” “There were only two,” the doctor said, and walked out of the room. The bill was exorbitant. And when she was pregnant with Randy he refused to treat her, sent her to his partner. He does not really believe there was a third child any more. It seems silly to him that they were so upset. No doubt the sunsets will someday seem silly too.

*

She complains that in the city there is dust; at the beach there is sand. Anyone would expect that. Why does it drive her crazy? The sand creeps in, gets swept out, gets dusted away, comes again. She can feel her heart beating as she opens the door and sweeps the sand out the door, into the rest of the sand. Sand to sand. Ashes to ashes. She is thinking about dying again. Why? Why the hell is she thinking about that? She is thirty years old.

In the bed at night, she feels a grain or two of sand between her fingers. She gets up and takes a shower. There is a circle of sand around the drain. Why doesn’t the water wash it away? Everybody knows that water washes sand away.

*

Penelope gets the measles. Her eyes and her cheeks get puffy and pale. He consults a medical book and finds that nothing is said about the face bloating. He calls the doctor again. The doctor says that it is nothing; he examined Penelope the day before. She is just a little girl with the measles. David thinks that the man is indifferent — the way he speaks of her as just another itchy kid. They should see a specialist. He calls the doctor back — Penelope is in awe of all the confusion she has created — and asks for the name of a specialist. The doctor hangs up on him! He finds his wife in the kitchen, tells her about what the doctor did.

“You just can’t get along with doctors,” she says. The adjective would be wistfully. “She says wistfully.” What is she wistful for? On the table is an open book. There is a photograph: “Seated man in a bra and stockings, N.Y.C. 1967.”

“I want to leave the beach,” she says.

“But I rented this place for the whole summer.”

“I am attracted to the lifeguard.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I walk up and down the beach. I parade in front of him. I’ve bought two new bathing suits. Something is going to happen.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

No answer. The young man in bra and stockings has an enigmatic expression. Perhaps someone just said something that astounded him, then took his picture. Perhaps he was just walking around in his bra and stockings, and then he got tired and sat down, and then someone said something astounding and snapped his picture.

Where did she get that sick book? Is she serious about the lifeguard? You’d never leave me for a lifeguard, he wants to say to her, because I am a loving husband and father. Witness the fact that I’ve spent nine hundred dollars to rent this place at the beach to delight my wife and children, and that at this very moment I am trying to find a specialist for my ill child.

“You pick the perfect moment to bring this up,” he says.

“What do you care when I bring it up? It had to be said.”

She is sitting in her bathing suit, fingers lightly on the photograph, as if it might be a ouija board, as though her fingers might begin to move, as though the fingers might direct her somewhere … to the lifeguard? He decides to take a walk down to the beach and look more carefully at the lifeguard.

“How do you feel, Andrew?” he asks his son. His son is playing with a dump truck in front of the house.

“Fine,” Andrew says.

“Where’s Randy?” David asks.

“He’s at the beach with the Collinses.”

Andrew pushes the back of the dump truck down. Sand spills on top of five sticks, all neatly in a row.

“What are the sticks?” David asks.

“What do you mean?” Andrew asks.

“What kind of game are you playing?”

“I’m just using my dump truck.”

Andrew seems very defensive. He has seemed that way all summer. Eight is a bad age. Penelope, on the other hand, is quite cheerful when she is well. Now she is sick. He should call a specialist. But first he wants to go look at the lifeguard.

*

The lifeguard is wearing glasses that can’t be seen into, so his eyes show no expression. His mouth is covered with zinc oxide, smeared on so thickly that it’s hard to tell if his bottom lip has curled into a faint smile or if it’s just the guck. The lifeguard wears bright-blue swimming trunks. There is a chain around his neck with a whistle dangling from it. David would like to blow the whistle into the lifeguard’s ear, make him show some emotion. The lifeguard looks remarkably fit. He would slug him, then grind him into the sand with one of those large, perfect feet. Then he would stand on top of him, the way people stand on top of sand dunes, and wait for him to die.

“Hi,” he says to the lifeguard.

The lifeguard raises his hand. His palm is very white.

“Been in the water?” David asks.

“No,” the lifeguard says. “Not yet, sir.”

By the lifeguard’s foot (large, perfect) is a sweatshirt. Dartmouth.

“You don’t have to call me sir,” David says. “I’m not much older than you.”

The lifeguard smiles. The zinc oxide cracks.

“How old are you?” David asks.

“Twenty-two,” the lifeguard says. He takes off his sunglasses and squints at the water. He puts them back on.

“Do you know my wife?” David asks.

“No,” the lifeguard says.

“A tall, blond woman. She usually wears a red swimsuit.”

“No,” the lifeguard says.

“She also has a green swimsuit. Very tall. As tall as me.”

“Does she come to the beach very early?”

“Yes. She likes it when it’s deserted.”

“I think so,” the lifeguard says. “What about her?”

David had not prepared himself for that question. He smiles foolishly.

*

“You know, honey, you forgot my birthday,” David says.

She shrugs.

“Have I done something?”

“No,” she says.

“You just feel like giving me some shit,” he says.

“I don’t even feel like doing that. I’d just like to be alone. I think about the lifeguard all day.”

“That might be like the sunsets I’ve been imagining. I’ve been seeing the sky at night as rosy and bright and pearly … I’ve been seeing flashes of light across the sky, hearing birds, I think …”

“I don’t see the similarity,” she says.

“We’re both obsessed by something that isn’t real.”

“He’s real. He’s standing on the beach right now.”

“But you’re imagining he’s better than he is.”

“I see what you’re saying,” she says. “I think that maybe after living with you for ten years I’m going crazy too.”

“What do you mean ‘too’?”

“You’re crazy. The way you’re always arguing with doctors, the sunsets you were talking about.”

“If I can’t talk to you, who can I talk to?” David asks.

“Bea Collins said she saw you talking to the lifeguard.”

*

The lifeguard awoke several times: once because he was sleeping on his arm, another time when there was a noise, either in the house or in his dream, and again when the bright light shone into the room. The third time he woke up, the lifeguard made a mental note to change the position of the bed so that the light wouldn’t shine in his eyes every morning. Finally, he got up. He remembered awakening only once; the light, the bed …

He put on his blue swimming trunks and walked to the bathroom. It made no sense to have put them on, because he had to pull them down to urinate. He flushed the toilet — his pig roommate, a former waiter who had worked himself up to maitre d’ at the Cliff House this summer — couldn’t even be bothered to flush the toilet. The lifeguard felt himself getting angry. He went to the kitchen and took a peach out of a bag on the counter. He rolled the peach back and forth on the counter, but didn’t eat it.

In the bedroom, the lifeguard examined himself in the mirror. His lips were puffy from too much sun. As awful as it felt, he should put zinc oxide on his mouth. There was a half-full glass of water on the dresser, and the lifeguard dipped his comb in the glass and combed his hair back. He had seen pictures of men in the thirties and forties who slicked their hair back that way. It didn’t matter what the lifeguard did to his hair; the early-morning mist and the hot sun would make it fall into his eyes.

A thought came to the lifeguard on his way out of the bedroom: you might also have looked at that glass as half empty.

He put on his sandals and went out. It was a steamy morning. The cloudy sky might mean rain, or it could just be overcast all day. Half the summer was gone. It was the fifteenth of July, and at the end of August the lifeguard would return to Dartmouth to begin his senior year as a mathematics major. Before becoming a mathematics major, he had been a political-science major, and before that a psychology major. His girlfriend, who was a waitress at the Cliff House — who associated with his pig roommate every day and who thought he was a “nice guy”—was studying art and thinking about becoming an interior decorator. She was a Lutheran, and on Sunday she always went to church. The lifeguard felt himself getting angry.

He walked through the parking lot and across the wooden planks leading to the beach. There was a woman sitting on a blanket on the sand, with a child sleeping beside her. It was windy, and the woman held the edge of the blanket up so that sand wouldn’t blow in her child’s face.

Later, her name, Toby Warner, would be as familiar to him as his own, but today he didn’t know, or care, who she was. It was the fifteenth of July. The ocean was slate-gray. The seagulls flew over the shoreline as unpredictably as rolled dice. He took a little tube of zinc oxide out of the pocket of his blue shirt — a button-down, wouldn’t be seen dead in it anywhere but on the beach — and smoothed it over his lips. He took the chain with the whistle on it out of the same pocket and put it around his neck.

A seagull swooped low over the empty trash can, and the lifeguard blew his whistle at it. A shrill noise — quite a contrast to the slow, regular slush of the waves. The woman laughed. She giggled like a girl. Her little boy stirred, but continued to sleep. The lifeguard felt awkward; it was foolish to have blown it, awakened the child. He took off his blue shirt and dropped it in the sand and sat on it. He looked at his feet stretched in front of him, and thought that his toenails never grew in the summer. Toenails continued to grow after death, so why would his stop growing in the summer? The sand probably wore them down. All day the lifeguard sat or stood, but when he was off duty he always ran three miles down to the main beach, where he met his girlfriend. Her name was Laura. They must have eaten almost a hundred pizzas together, at the stand by the main beach. Laura got the pizza all over herself. The lifeguard was not in a very good mood. He was displeased with Laura because of the way she ate pizza, for God’s sake, and he loved Laura. It also bothered him, though, that she liked sausage on the pizza and he liked it plain — mozzarella only. They could have compromised, but Laura pouted, so they always ordered pizza with sausage. Tonight he would insist that they eat it the way he liked. Maybe she would even be nice about it. That made him feel better. He looked to his right and saw an old man in a golf cap walking in the surf. The woman on the blanket had her head on her knees, but he thought that she had been looking at him the second before and that she did that to cover it up. The little boy looked comfortable, and he was sleeping soundly. The lifeguard suspected, as he often suspected when he contemplated a child for a long time, that he was a father. Maybe he was in hell and the punishment fit the crime — he was a lifeguard to watch over little children, and one of them might be his. But his would be only … two years old now? It couldn’t possibly be the child on the blanket. And this child had a mother. And he had never seen the woman before. That made him feel better. He was proud of his ability to think things through.

The sun was not shining brightly yet. That meant that it would be overcast all day. The lifeguard put his shirt on so that he wouldn’t be burned. He had very tender skin for a lifeguard, and this year he wasn’t tanning well. He tanned, then peeled, then didn’t seem to tan again. His day would be spent sitting in the lifeguard’s chair until noon, when the old man who collected fifty cents from cars entering the parking lot would replace him for an hour so that the lifeguard could eat lunch. He couldn’t imagine what good the old man would be if anybody got into trouble, but who knew about the old man’s abilities, and why would anybody get into trouble? The water was too cold to swim in. The people just stood around the shore. He liked the beach, but it got boring halfway through the summer. He dreamed about the damned seagulls, got tired of seeing people’s flesh. He was bored, and when he was bored he squinted a lot; that made him take off his sunglasses to rub his eyes. He usually washed the sand off them twice a day in the water, dipping them gently into the surf and rubbing them against his bathing trunks. He was a careful person. He was careful to flush the toilet, for example. He thought about his roommate, and about eating pizza with Laura, the letter he should write home …

The lifeguard sighed. The beach was beginning to fill up. There was a middle-aged man who hung around his chair sometimes, saying, “Nothing ever happens, does it?” He called the lifeguard “kid.” The lifeguard didn’t like that, but he was undemonstrative. His previous girlfriend had left him because of that. When the lifeguard was a psychology major he had tried to figure out why he didn’t show his emotions easily. He couldn’t figure it out. It could have been for a million reasons. Everything in psychology can have a million answers. He switched majors.

The lifeguard had intended to have an introspective period during the summer — to get a case of beer and drink it and think all day to see what he came up with. His roommate was always figuring out his life, announcing that he was making a mistake about this or doing the wrong thing not to follow through with that. The roommate thought so much about himself that he forgot to feed his goldfish and it died. And of course he didn’t flush the toilet. The lifeguard was pretty depressed. Introspection while he was depressed would probably not be valuable, so he would put it off. If he put it off for six weeks he would be back at Dartmouth, and he never had time to do anything but work then.

As he walked along the beach, the lifeguard passed a little boy with red hair who was sifting sand through a fish-shaped sifter. He was probably five or six, a cute little boy that the lifeguard thought about for a second, then forgot. Later, the lifeguard would remember him vividly, know more about him than he knew about his own son … if there was a son … but the lifeguard was busy trying to think positively. The little boy didn’t enter into his thoughts.

The lifeguard climbed to the top of his chair.

*

On July the twenty-second, Toby and David Warner quarreled. He told her that she should not have allowed Penelope to go to the beach; she said that he was overly protective. Penelope’s measles had been a slight case, and she had been completely well for two days. He said that Penelope had been weepy the night before; she said that was because he always hovered around her. Before the argument began, Toby had been sitting at the kitchen table, looking at the book of photographs. She had attempted to converse with him before they got into the argument; she talked about Diane Arbus’s being influenced by the Chinese belief that people pass through boredom to fascination. It seemed to David that Toby was neither bored nor fascinated; she seemed to be in a fog. He had taken the clothes to the laundromat because it looked like Toby was going to smoke cigarettes and stare at the book all day. There had been several young men in the laundromat. They all looked like the lifeguard to him. Why was she interested in the lifeguard? Why would she be so blunt about it? What could he do about it? He had put too much detergent into one of the machines and it foamed over. The owner had given him a mop-pleasantly, considering the mess he had made. “If you was a hippie I’d feel differently,” the owner had said. David had always been “a nice young man.” Except for dodging the Army, which shocked his parents, he had never even let anyone down. Except Toby. He must have let her down. He folded the clothes crookedly, took some out of the dryer too soon.

“Would you like to go out for dinner?” David asked after the argument.

“Yes,” she said. “That would be nice.” Formal, forced pleasantness.

“Where did you get that book?” he asked.

“At the bookstore.”

“What’s your fascination with it?”

“You still want to fight, don’t you?” she asked.

“I can’t believe you let Penelope go to the beach.”

“Andrew and Randy are with her. They’d bring her back if she felt sick.”

“Randy’s always playing with the Collins’ kids. He’d never notice. What’s his fascination with those little beasts?”

“Tom’s a nice kid.”

“The older one isn’t.”

“The older one’s twelve. He has another set of friends.”

“He got put out of the drugstore today. I was standing there reading a magazine while the clothes were drying, and he and some of his friends lit a pile of napkins on the counter.”

“What happened?”

“The counter girl threw water on it and put it out. The manager put them all out of the store.”

“I don’t know. I can’t forbid Randy to play with Tom because Tom’s brother is screwed up.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that.”

“Then what were you getting at?”

“I was just telling you what happened.”

“You want to be argumentative,” she said. “I told you that before.”

David sighed — a very theatrical sigh — and walked out the kitchen door. He stumbled on the dump truck and twisted his ankle. He sat down and rubbed it, waiting for the bleeding to begin. It didn’t bleed; it just hurt.

“Let’s take a walk down to the beach,” he called to Toby.

In a minute the kitchen door opened and she came out. No lover of the sun, she was quite pale. She was smoking. She had on a red T-shirt and cut-off jeans. She looked very maternal — not for any reason he could name. He was tempted to whine to her that he had hurt himself. Maybe that was what was wrong; the children were always complaining to her. He thought about asking how she felt about the children, but there were three of them. What was he going to do about it? He stepped on something and got a splinter in his foot

“Stop and take it out,” she said.

He sat in the sand on the side of the road, the tall grass tickling his arms, a dragonfly buzzing around him. He held out his foot to her and she removed the splinter. She had long fingernails. They were painted bright red, and because he only looked at what she was doing to his foot for a second, he thought that it was blood on his foot. He thought about how brave he was, back in the road walking on his bleeding foot, until he realized that the flash of red had been Toby’s fingernail.

“We’ll see that lifeguard any second,” he said to her, squeezing her hand.

“You make beeg joke, hah? I love him …”

He suspected a literary allusion; it was either that or a line from some favorite movie of hers, and considering the kind of movies she liked, all hazy and European, he didn’t really think it was a movie. An allusion to what? She read all the time — no way he could keep up with her. And such funny things stuck in her mind. He was always saying, “What’s that from?”

The questions David and Toby would ask in the future would not have to do with how it was best to care for the children, or what book was being alluded to. All that would seem trivial, and they wouldn’t do it In fact, for a long period they would hardly communicate at all. They didn’t know that, though. They expected to walk along the beach — pick up a few shells? — eat dinner, perhaps at the Cliff House, which all the natives said was very good, get their feet wet. They held hands, going up the path to the beach. He whistled softly. “When we leave here I’d like to get a puppy,” Toby said. He was surprised — her idea just came out of the blue, like the rest of the events that day.

*

The tragedy was the fault of “the mad boy.” The natives, slow-moving, quick-thinking people, understood the situation in the correct perspective. “The mad boy,” Duncan Collins, twelve, took his brother Tom (the natives’ eyes lit up for a second — you understand that the family named their son Tom Collins?) and two other children, Penelope and her twin Andrew, out in a boat he had made — he had been forbidden to go out in the boat by his father after an incident at the drugstore, but Duncan got it out of the garage without his father noticing that Duncan had even left his room, where he was being punished — and set fire to the boat Duncan, Tom and Andrew died in the water. Penelope lived for a few minutes. The diver who was called to search the area (what for? There had been four children, and all were accounted for) brought a life jacket ashore. Duncan, who did not know how to swim, always wore a life jacket. What was he doing without it? Reasonably, the natives assumed that it was intentional. Suicide. Penelope was an excellent swimmer, but she was weak from a recent illness. Half her body was badly burned. Why didn’t she get out of the boat before she got so badly burned? It was anybody’s guess (the natives differed). Andrew was hardly burned at all, but the coroner said that he was the first to die. Tom died second. (Why did they compare the times of death? Just to have the facts? To have more to talk about?) The specifics of the incident were well-known, but nobody could really account for them. What did the other children think when Duncan Collins put a can of gasoline in the boat with them?

The lifeguard whistled for the boat to come in a little later than he should have, perhaps, but when he really started to go crazy at the police station later that night, they backed down about that. But to be honest — and the lifeguard always thought he was honest with himself — he should have whistled about two minutes before he did. He kept thinking for two minutes that the people in the boat would see that it was going out too far and come in. Two minutes, for Christ’s sake — not too long to wait, expecting they’d see their error. He blew the whistle and thought he saw the boat edge in a little. He waited. Then the boat began to go out to sea quickly. He realized that the people were deliberately taunting him. The world was full of them — people who want the lifeguard to get wet. He blew the whistle and looked through his binoculars. They were kids! He felt very uneasy when he saw that, and he blew the whistle loudly, one long blow, scrambling down from the chair. He was untying the boat, so he did not see the exact moment the boat burst into flames. He did see a child jump overboard. He was totally confused when he saw the fire. But yes — one did jump overboard. The waves were very rough, and although he was an excellent rower, he had trouble getting up speed. Some man from the beach ran into the water just behind the rowboat — everyone else just stood there — and jumped in before the lifeguard could tell him to get lost. Later he was glad he had let the man in, because with each of them working an oar, the rowboat moved quickly. It was that man who pulled Penelope out of the water and rowed her to shore — almost pushed the lifeguard out of the boat, because of course someone had to get the others, and rowed into shore with Penelope. The man’s name was Eugene Anderson. He was thirty-nine years old. He lived in Bangor, Maine. When Eugene Anderson disappeared with the boat, the lifeguard, in the icy water, swam around the fire. He saw no one inside the fire, which was by now dying out. He was extremely confused. He dived under about ten times … well, maybe fifteen … and heard a roar in the water that confused and frightened him more. Later, he realized that it was the sound of his heart. He found Andrew and Tom, and a diver who arrived, much to the lifeguard’s surprise, from the main beach, got Duncan. Eugene Anderson and the diver tried to get Duncan to breathe on the beach, but he was dead. He was naked. His chest was charred. What in the hell was happening? the lifeguard kept thinking. He was exhausted from all the diving and couldn’t do anything but support himself on one arm. He stared into the crowd. He was dizzy; it seemed like the people were standing at an odd angle. He reached toward them — he didn’t know why he was doing it — and a woman rushed forward and grabbed his hand. She’s breaking it, he thought, but couldn’t do anything about it. By the time his breath started to come back, he saw that his leg was cut. He never figured out how he cut it — a cut about four inches long, down his shin. The police were there. The diver, when it was clear that Duncan was dead, picked up heaps of sand and threw them into the crowd, into the lifeguard’s eyes, the policemen’s eyes. The diver did not even act as well as the life-guard, and the lifeguard was given Thorazine at the police station. They did something with the diver — took him somewhere. Eugene Anderson was a big help to the police. He was an accountant and a Boy Scout leader. The lifeguard kept interrupting his story, asking questions that he already knew the answers to. “That was a hell of a fire. But it went out so quickly, didn’t it?” Eugene Anderson answered calmly. His bottom lip kept jerking, though. “They set it on fire deliberately. Boats don’t just explode in the middle of the ocean,” the lifeguard said to Eugene Anderson, and Eugene Anderson answered him as if it had been a question.

They were at the police station for a long time. There were reporters. Then they took them to the hospital. What for? They were all dead. The police didn’t ask them to look at the bodies. They just drove them around. It was chaos. At ten o’clock the police called the lifeguard’s house. His roommate answered. He went to the police station to pick up the lifeguard and drive him home.

*

David believed it was happening, but he thought it would turn out all right. He was usually negative in his thinking, and after that day he was more negative than ever, but at the time he kept thinking that it was going to turn out okay. He held Randy’s hand. Toby held Randy’s arm, and when David realized that they were pulling him, he let go … let her have him. He wanted to run up, be certain that they were his children, but stupidly he kept thinking Randy is my child, and he held onto Randy and didn’t move. He fainted, and imagined, while he was passed out, that he was scrambling along the ground, a crab, an ant, moving very fast, whatever he was. He tried to figure out if he was being pursued, or if he was pursuing something, but it never came clear. When he regained consciousness he saw lines in the sand, made by his fingers, he supposed. He thought of his mother pouring the boiling water over the ants, then the long wait until the next pot boiled and she poured that. He counted: Penelope, Andrew.

Someone — it turned out to be a policeman — was slapping his face. It hurt to have sand slapped into your face. He saw the policeman as a shaky, pale figure, because he had just opened his eyes. The policeman, slapping him, had made his eyes open. Everything vibrated. He literally saw stars — or spots of some kind, bright spots, interspersed with the sunset that glowed palely in the distance.

*

Toby was staring at the naked body of Duncan Collins, and the young boy’s body was beautiful, smooth and golden. She was transfixed by him, stretched in the sand, his back gleaming wet. Then she saw the lifeguard — she blocked out the pile of bodies, the actual heap of them, looking only long enough to think that they were like a picture in Life of a Nazi concentration camp, thinking that this was some such remote tragedy, they were not her children. She did move forward, but it was to take the lifeguard’s hand. She closed her eyes and pressed his hand hard, imagined that they were holding each other, that the breeze blowing through her hair made her beautiful, that the lifeguard was pressing her hand, that the pressure she felt was the lifeguard … she opened her eyes and saw, giddily, that it was the lifeguard. She was conscious of her breathing. It was hard because she was exerting so much energy squeezing the lifeguard’s hand, but she didn’t realize it and thought she was breathing shallowly, that she wasn’t getting enough air. Air, breeze, the cool sand. The erotic fantasy she was having about the lifeguard lasted about two minutes, but she remembered them so vividly. The rest was a blur and stayed a blur, but the sedatives that she would later take, the psychiatrist, none of it shook those minutes out of her head. They were more real than anything, and they stayed that way.

*

In his senior year at Dartmouth, the lifeguard broke up with Laura and got back together with his old girlfriend, Michelle. She said that he seemed more … human. She came every weekend from Manchester, where she worked, and stayed with him in his apartment. He got drunk and introspected once or twice a week instead of once a year. She didn’t drink, or at least she didn’t get drunk, but she didn’t say anything about his drinking, and she listened to him tell the story of what happened on the twenty-second of July over and over and over. She gave him a Mickey Mouse night light, and Mickey glowed and smiled through the night. He drank tequila and orange juice. Tequila. Mexico. Maybe he should get out of New Hampshire, go to … Mexico. What for? What’s in Mexico? Sometimes he felt panicky, as though he had to get away. Michelle talked about her work at the clinic. They were sick people, physically sick. As opposed to me, he thought, they are sick. That made him feel hopeful.

It took him longer than it had in the past to do the mathematics problems, because he found himself tracing over numbers. His eights were one black circle on top of another. Michelle told him not to drink so much, and he gave it up, quit entirely. Some people couldn’t give up alcohol that way, but he gave it up and wouldn’t go back to it. He told Michelle these things earnestly, the way a convict would talk to the parole board. He thought of himself as a convict. The police station had scared him to death.

In the spring, Michelle picked flowers and put them in a vase on the dresser. They opened the window and slept with the fresh air, two blankets over them and a quilt, wanting to hurry the spring into summer. The Warners, although he was no longer in touch with them, were also anxious for the summer. When it was June and Randy was out of school, they were going to Europe. The lifeguard had no plans for the summer. He wondered what would happen between Michelle and him. Mickey Mouse glowed and smiled.

David and Toby Warner usually stayed awake for some time after they went to bed. There was no night light in their room. They preferred the uninterrupted darkness. They stared into it. Randy Warner, who had just celebrated his seventh birthday, slept easily. He took his dump truck to bed with him. Toby hated to see the thing, hated to see anything she associated with the previous summer, but she was very solicitous of Randy, and she didn’t say anything. Sometimes when David was asleep and Toby was not, she would look at his blank face and know that he was dreaming sunsets. She half hated him for it and half admired him. David usually studied Toby in the early morning, when she slept deeply. It was the lifeguard, he knew, but the lifeguard wasn’t a threat to him any more — he only felt slightly dismayed. In June, when they left for Europe, Randy did not take his dump truck along. He took, instead, a Captain Magic slate. He liked to write on it and draw pictures, then zip up the top part and watch it all disappear.