What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

where we must be

Some people dream of being chased by Bigfoot. I found it hard to believe at first, but it’s true. I was driving back from Los Angeles in August, after a summer of waiting tables and failed casting calls, when I saw a huge wooden arrow that pointed down a dirt road, “actors wanted” painted across it in white letters. I was in Northern California and still a long way from Washington, but I followed the sign down the road and parked in front of a silver airstream trailer. It was dark inside and I felt the breeze of a fan. The fat man behind the desk said he’d never hired a woman before. And then he went on to describe exactly what happens at the Bigfoot Recreation Park. People come here to have an encounter with Bigfoot. Most of their customers have been wanting this moment for years. I would have to lumber and roar with convincing masculinity. I can do that, I said, no problem. And I proved it in my audition. After putting on the costume and staggering around the trailer for a few minutes, bellowing and shaking my arms, I stopped and removed the Bigfoot mask. The fat man was smiling. He said I would always be paid in cash.

Today I’m going after a woman from Albuquerque. She’s small and sharp-shouldered, dressed in khaki shorts and a pink sweatshirt. I’d be willing to bet no one knows she’s here. For a brief time, this woman will be living in another world, where all that matters is escaping Bigfoot. People say the park is great for realigning their priorities, for reminding them that survival is an active choice. I’m watching her from behind a dense cluster of bushes. The fat man has informed me that she wants to be ambushed. This isn’t surprising. Most people crave the shock.

My breath is warm inside the costume. The rubber has a faintly sweet smell. I like to stroke my arms and listen to the swishing sound of the fake fur. The mask has eyeholes, but blocks my peripheral vision, so I can only see straight ahead. The fat man says this is an unexpected benefit of not having more advanced masks. According to him, Bigfoot is a primitive creature, not wily like extraterrestrials or the Loch Ness Monster, and only responds to what’s directly in front of him. Two other people work at the park, Jeffrey and Mack, but our shifts never overlap. The fat man thinks it’s important for us to not see our counterparts in person, to believe we are the only Bigfoot.

I wait for the woman to relax, watching for the instant when she begins to think: maybe there won’t be a monster after all. I can always tell when this thought arrives. First their posture softens. Then their expression changes from confused to relieved to disappointed. More than anything the ambush is about waiting the customer out. I struggle to stay in character during these quiet moments; it’s tempting to consider my own life and worries, but when the time comes to attack, it will only be believable if I’ve been living with Bigfoot’s loneliness and desires for at least an hour.

The woman yawns and rubs her cheek. She bends over and scratches her knee. She stops looking around the forest. Her expectations are changing. She checks her watch. I start counting backwards from ten. When I reach zero, I pound into the clearing and release the first roar: a piercing animal sound still foreign to my ears.

Jimmy and I are sprawled out in his backyard, staring through the branches of a pear tree. Earlier I found him sitting on the front porch, trying to stop a nosebleed. I told him to tilt his head back, then pressed the tissue against his nostrils and watched the white bloom into crimson. It’s not love. Or at least not what I thought love would feel like. It hurts to be near him and it hurts to be away.

“What do you dream about?” I ask.

“Of a time when the world was nothing but water.”

I spread my legs and arms and imagine floating in an enormous pool. Jimmy lives across the street from the bungalow I’ve been renting since August, a long structure with low ceilings and chipped turquoise paint. When I first moved into the neighborhood, he dropped by and offered to give me a hand. I didn’t really have anything to unpack, but invited him inside anyway. He grew up in Oregon and, after high school, drifted over to California, where he took a job as a postman. He was willowy and pale, with dark hair and green eyes and long eyelashes. He didn’t look like anyone else I knew. I pulled a bottle of Jim Beam out of my suitcase and he ended up staying the night.

He rolls toward me, leaving a silhouette of flattened grass. “What about you?”

“I don’t remember my dreams,” I say. “I can’t get them to stay with me.”

A hawk with white-tipped wings crosses the sky; I wonder where the bird is headed. It’s mid-October. The weather is cool and breezy. “I wish we could keep winter from coming,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s a real shame.”

Jimmy told me he was sick the morning after we met. We were sitting on the floor of my living room, drinking water to ease the hangover. I raised my glass and pointed at the grit pooled in the bottom. He shrugged and said the water has always looked that way. Then he told me about the cold that lasted for three months and the clicking sound of the X-ray machine and the spot on his lungs. When I asked if he had help, he said he’d lost touch with his friends in Oregon and hadn’t made any new ones in the postal service. His father was dead, and his mother married a carpet salesman and moved east a few years back. His mother tried to arrange a nurse once his outcome became definite, but he refused, saying he didn’t want a stranger in the house. He stopped delivering mail months ago and was collecting disability checks.

He told me all this and then said he’d understand if I minded and we could just go back to being neighbors. But I told him I didn’t mind at all. My older sister, Sara, used to have seizures, though I didn’t mention that to Jimmy. As a child, I saw her collapse on tennis courts and roller-skating rinks, in the school cafeteria and on the carpeted floor of our bedroom, her chest heaving like something terrible was trying to get out. My mother made her wear a red bicycle helmet whenever she left the house. My mother, who raised us on her own, worked night shifts at a hospice center. Sometimes, out of nowhere, I remember the scent of rubbing alcohol and ointment on her hands.

“How was work?” Jimmy asks.

“Not bad.” I stretch my legs and bump against a browning pear. At the end of the summer, the branches were heavy with fruit, but halfway through September, the pears began rotting and falling to the ground. “I gave a woman from Albuquerque a good scare.”

“You can practice your roar today if you want,” he says. “Since we’re already outside.”

“I can only do it when I’m in costume.” I kick the pear and listen to it roll through the grass. “It’s impossible to get into character if I’m not wearing it.”

He moves closer and presses his face into my neck. “You would’ve made a wonderful actress,” he mumbles into my skin.

Whenever Jimmy asks about my months in Los Angeles, I tell him how difficult it was to make enough money, how alien I felt carrying trays through a chic bistro that boasted a fifteen-page wine list and thirty-dollar desserts. How I used to dream of fame, of seeing my face staring back at me in magazines and hearing the echo of my voice in dark theaters and never being lonely. When he wants to know about the acting, I tell him the casting directors said I wasn’t talented enough. I don’t tell him that they often praised my poise and personality, but in the end all said the same thing: you just aren’t what we’re looking for. I don’t tell him this felt worse than having them say I wasn’t pretty or gifted because it gave me a dangerous amount of hope.

I touch the back of Jimmy’s head. His hair feels damp. In my mind, I list the things I need to help him with over the weekend: wash the sheets, mop the floors, gather all the rotten pears. Just when I think he has gone to sleep, he looks up and asks me to stay with him tonight. I tell him that I will. He lowers his head and we both close our eyes. The late afternoon sun burns against us.

I wake to the boom of a loudspeaker. A truck from the water company is inching down the street. We are running tests. Do not be alarmed if your water is rusty. The water has never looked right here. People complain and the company comes out for an inspection, but it never seems to get any better.

Jimmy is still asleep, a spindly arm draped above his head. I don’t wake him before I go, even though I know he’d like me to. I want to be alone now, although as soon as I’m on my own, I’ll only want to be back with him. I leave a glass of murky water and his pills on the bedside table. He doesn’t stir when I kiss the side of his face and whisper a goodbye.

Across the street, I find a letter from my mother in the mailbox. As I open the envelope, a picture of my sister’s pepper plants falls to the floor. My sister is married to an architect and lives in Olympia. She hasn’t had a seizure in years. She works in a library and has a garden that produces vegetables of extraordinary size: cucumbers big as logs, eggplants that resemble misshapen heads, pepper plants like the ones in the photo, bright green and the size of bananas. In her letter, my mother reminds me that I won’t be young forever, that the longer I go without a real job, the more my employability will decrease. I slip the letter and the photograph back into the envelope and tuck it into a chest drawer, which is crowded with other letters she and my sister have sent. When I write back, I end up talking about the arid heat and the blue lupine that grows on the roadside, with only a vague line or two about having found acting work and a house to rent. They know nothing about my Bigfoot costume, about Jimmy.

I undress and take a shower. The water is a cloudy red. The color makes me queasy and I get out before rinsing away all the shampoo. My hair is light without really being blond and the dry climate has made the skin on my knees and elbows rough. I have an hour before work, although I wish I could go in early. I’m starting to realize I can’t stand to be anywhere, except stomping through the forest in my Bigfoot costume. That’s the reason I always wanted to be an actress: when I’m in character, everything real about my life blacks out.

In the living room, I turn the television to General Hospital. I scrutinize the women, golden-skinned and tall, who are playing the minor parts I once auditioned for — the nurse, the secretary, the woman lost in a crowd — then start doing lunges in preparation for my current role. It’s essential my muscles stay long and supple, so I can skulk with persuasive simianness.

The phone rings and it’s Jimmy. He wants me to come over for breakfast. I tell him I’m late for work, which is about thirty minutes away from being true, and that I have to finish rehearsing.

“I thought you just do stretching exercises.” The connection is bad and his voice pops with static.

“It’s more complicated than that,” I reply. “Any actor will tell you it pays to do your homework.”

He relents and makes me promise to come over after work. When I ask what he has planned for today, he says he’s going through the jazz records in his closet.

“There’s a guy from high school I’d like to mail some of them to.”

“Don’t you want to talk to him or try to visit?” I ask. “If you’ve already gone to the trouble of getting his address.”

“No,” he says. “I really do not.”

I walk over to the window and look across the street. Jimmy is standing by his living room window, waving and holding the phone against his ear. He’s only wearing his boxers and through the glass, his figure is pale and blurred.

“I was wondering how long it was going to take you,” he says.

“Doesn’t it feel weird to see the person you’re talking to?” I ask. “The whole point of the phone is long distance communication.”

“Talking to you isn’t the same when I can’t see your face,” he says. “It’s impossible to tell what you’re thinking.”

“Do I give away that much in person?”

“More than you know.” He presses his face against the pane, so his features look even more sallow and distorted.

“Okay,” I tell him. “Now I’m really going to be late for work.”

After we hang up, we stand at our windows a little longer. His hair is disheveled and sticking up in the back like dark straw. He gives me one last wave, then disappears into the shadows of the house. I wait to see if he’ll come back, but the sun shifts and the glare blocks my view. I imagine him watching me from another part of the house, through some secret window. I return his wave to let him know I’m still here.

The fat man says my client wants to kill Bigfoot. The customer is a man from Wisconsin, who came equipped with his own paint ball gun. He tells me not to ambush, but let the man sneak up on me and then moan and collapse after he fires.

“I didn’t know killing Bigfoot was part of the deal,” I tell him.

The fat man is sitting behind his desk. He leans back in his chair and picks something out of his teeth with the corner of a matchbook. “It’s a recreation park,” he says. “They get to do whatever they want.”

When I first started at the park, my costume had to be specially sized, with lifts in the feet and extra padding sewn into the body. As the fat man took my measurement in the trailer, I asked how people found this place, and he told me about taking out ads in magazines for Bigfoot enthusiasts and about the sightings that had happened in this part of California. Just last fall, his cousin had seen Bigfoot in the woods behind his house, pawing through an abandoned garbage can.

I open the closet and take out my costume. My initials are written on the tag in black marker. “So this guy is going to shoot me with paint balls?”

“To be honest, you might feel a little sting,” he says. “But I’ve banned any other kind of weapon after an old Bigfoot got shot in the face with a pellet gun.”

“Ouch.”

“It was at close range too. He was covered in welts for days.” He runs a hand over his head. “If the weapon doesn’t look like a paint ball gun, then shout your safe word.”

I step into the costume. “I have a safe word?”

“I don’t like to tell people when they first start the job, in case they scare easily.”

“I don’t.” I seal myself inside the rubber skin. “What’s my safe word?”

“Jesus,” he says. “It’s really more for the customers, but this is a different kind of situation.”

“How’d you come up with Jesus?”

“You’d be surprised at how religious some people are,” he says. “I always thought screaming Jesus would get their attention.”

I lower the Bigfoot mask onto my head and inhale the sweet scent of the rubber. Through the eyeholes, I can only see the fat man and his desk.

“And what if this guy doesn’t believe in God?”

“Then you’ve still got the element of surprise.”

I’ve been pretending to not see the man from Wisconsin for over an hour. He’s positioned in the branches of a cedar: back pressed against the tree trunk, nose of the paint ball gun angled toward the ground. He’s wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, so I can’t see his face or eyes. He paid for two hours and most of our time has passed. He must be saving the killing for the very end.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to do the things Bigfoot might actually do. I ambled around, rubbed my back against a tree, ripped up some wildflowers. I sniffed the air and gave two magnificent roars. But the whole time I felt myself slipping out of character and soon I was only a person in the woods, waiting for something painful to happen. I wonder if this is how Jimmy feels when he wakes in the morning — alone and waiting to be hit.

One evening, when it was still summer, we made a picnic and drove to the lake down the road. We ate pears and ham sandwiches and had a long talk about the days when he was first diagnosed and receiving treatment in a hospital a few hours away from our houses and the Bigfoot park. He’s young — thirty, only four years older than me — and says he’s never even held a cigarette; it wasn’t until the hospital that he began to overcome the shock, to look ahead and weigh all that did and did not await him. He would sit around with the other patients and talk about what they would do if the chemotherapy and radiation and surgeries failed, if their hand was called, as he put it. Some wanted to travel to exotic places, while others wanted to find lost lovers or make amends with children they had neglected. Jimmy said he wanted to drive to the Grand Canyon and stay until he was no longer impressed with the view. He couldn’t say why he chose that destination, only that it was the first thing that came to him. But he didn’t go to the Grand Canyon and he couldn’t say why that happened either. It wouldn’t have been so hard, he told me, only a long car ride and a little money. After that night, I thought a lot about why he never went out to Arizona and finally decided it was fear — of having the experience fall short, of realizing too late that he should have made a different choice. For him, it was better to not know what the Grand Canyon looked like, to retain the splendor of his dreams.

I’m so caught up in my waiting and thinking and not being Bigfoot that the shots come as a terrible shock. Two red splats in the center of my brown chest. I fall on my back, my furry legs and arms rising and then hitting the ground with a thump. Air rushes from my lungs; I gasp underneath the mask. A rock digs into my back, and there’s a sharp pain in my forehead. I hear branches snapping, footsteps. The man is standing over me, still holding the gun. He’s shorter than he looked in the tree, with pasty skin and knobby elbows, a white smudge of sunscreen on the tip of his nose. He’s wearing a tee-shirt with a bull’s eye on the front and camouflage pants.

He nudges me with the toe of his boot and, forgetting I’m supposed to be dead, I squirm to the side. He frowns and raises the gun. I remember my safe word, but I don’t say it. I want to believe I stopped myself because I am playing this role to perfection, because I want the killing to be as good as this man hoped, because if he’s dying, I want him to walk away feeling satisfied with his life. But the truth is, my chest burns and I’m dizzy and I open my mouth to say Jesus and no sound comes out.

He shoots me once in the neck and again in the shoulder. I shriek and press my rubber paw against my arm. I hear quick footsteps, then nothing at all. When my breathing steadies and I’m able to stand, I take off the mask and touch the hard lump on my neck. The ground is speckled with red paint. The man is gone.

“I was always one of those people who assumed I had my whole life to do whatever I wanted,” Jimmy says without any prompting. He talks like this all the time now. I call them philosophy spells.

“Like what?” I’m sitting at his kitchen table, drinking a whiskey and coke. Jimmy has yet to comment on the welt on my neck, which has swollen to the size of a lemon. The bumps on my chest are smaller, but still bright pink. I came home late because I had to clean my costume in the trailer’s bathroom. I picked off the dead leaves that were stuck to the fur, then placed the suit in the bathtub and rinsed away the red paint with a detachable shower head.

“I don’t know,” he says. “See the Great Wall of China. Climb a mountain. Get married. Have a kid.” He opens a beer and joins me at the table. “The point is I never felt much urgency.”

“The last two aren’t exactly the kind of thing you’d want to rush into.”

“I guess,” he replies. “But maybe the only reason we tell ourselves that is because we think we have all this time.” He spreads his arms and turns his palms upwards; the skin on his wrists is as translucent as tracing paper. I remember him telling me about his last day of work, how the weight of the bag bruised his shoulder and he carried it until he couldn’t anymore, how he dumped all the mail onto the sidewalk and began tearing through the pile: phone bills, postcards, renewal notices, credit card offers, booklets of coupons. He told me that even though he’d never become close with anyone on his route, he was suddenly overcome with a desire to know what their lives contained. Because of his health, he didn’t get into much trouble, but was talked into resigning with a year of disability compensation. They only agreed to the disability because they knew the payments would outlive me, he says whenever the checks come, though he lets me take them to the bank and make his deposits all the same.

We’re quiet for a while. I finish my drink and make myself another, this time pouring straight whiskey into the glass. The ceiling light flickers. Earlier in the evening, I washed the dishes and scrubbed the floor. The room looks dull and empty. When I offer to get Jimmy a second beer, he shakes his head and squeezes the can until the metal dents. I stand behind him and rest a hand on his shoulder. He lets me do what I know best: acquiesce, accommodate, allow my desires to melt like wax around the emergency of another life.

“It’s almost a relief to not consider the future,” he says.

“To not wonder if I’ll find what I was looking for or just be disappointed. Everything falls away in the face of this.” He tips his head back and looks at me. His eyes are bloodshot. “So it doesn’t really matter if you love me or not, does it?”

“Of course it does,” I tell him because I think it’s the right thing to say. With Jimmy it seems more important to say the right thing than to be honest. Or maybe I have it backwards. But it does matter in a way, although not in the sense that it could change what’s happening to him.

“What did you do at work today?” he asks. I can tell he wants to change the subject.

“I got killed.”

“They can do that?”

“Apparently.”

“Is that why you’ve got that lump on your neck?”

“Yep.” I brush a clump of hair from his forehead. “Shot dead with a paint ball gun.”

He hunches over the table and hangs his head. I prepare myself to comfort. He surprises me with laughter.

At two in the morning, I’m woken by a barking dog. By the time I kick away the covers and sit up, the sound has already faded. My head is fogged with the remnants of a dream, but all I can see is blood on the corner of my sister’s mouth drying into a shape that resembles a Rorschach blot. Jimmy is curled underneath the sheets, his breathing nearly imperceptible. I watch until my eyes adjust to the darkness and I can make out the rising and falling of his chest. His face is pressed into the pillow, his lips parted so I can see the wet bulge of his tongue.

I get out of bed and wander into the kitchen. I can still smell the cleaning products I used on the floor. I open the refrigerator and hang my head inside the cool fluorescent glow until the light hurts my eyes. Then I hoist myself onto the kitchen counter, lift the phone to my ear, and dial my sister’s number. As the phone rings, I remember the late hour and nearly hang up, but Sara is already mumbling on the other end of the line.

“How’s the garden?” I ask. “Grown any squash the size of bowling pins yet?”

“Is everything okay over there?” I imagine her groping the bedside table for her glasses.

“Everything is kind-of-fine. Does that count as an answer?”

“Jean,” she says. “I’m going back to bed if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

What she really wants to know is what I’m still doing in California and what exactly is this acting role I mentioned in a postcard and how much longer before I come back to Washington. I try to think of a way to explain everything, but I can’t explain Bigfoot or Jimmy or why the reddish color of the water here makes me think of the fear that swallowed our childhood the way a snake swallows mice. All I know is that I’m in what I’m in and I don’t want to leave it, not yet. I hear Sara’s breath, deep and impatient, on the line — my sister the survivor, my sister the pragmatist, an overgrown vegetable garden her sole form of excess. I apologize for calling so late, then hang up the phone.

The house seems smaller in the night and I suddenly want to be outside. I go out the back door and sit on the concrete steps. The sky is black and starless. I’m wearing a pair of Jimmy’s boxers and one of his T-shirts. Both fit me perfectly. Before we went to bed tonight, he came into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth. He didn’t say anything at first, just stood in the doorway and stared. And then, as I rinsed the spearmint toothpaste from my mouth, he asked if I would like to have some of his clothes. It was the first time he’d mentioned anything about his belongings and I’d been happy to avoid the subject altogether. I spit green into the sink and watched it swirl into the drain. I mean when we’re not doing this anymore, he continued. After it’s all over. I turned from the sink and told him I’d take whatever he wanted me to have. He didn’t say anything else, just nodded and walked into the bedroom.

A rotten pear sits on the bottom step. I reach down and pick it up. This one is really far gone, dark and sticky in my hand like an exposed organ. A kidney, perhaps. Or some kind of decayed heart. I throw the pear and it smacks the trunk of a tree, exploding with a sound like a muffled gunshot. I sit in the stillness of the yard for a moment longer, then wipe my palm on the steps and go inside.

“You don’t have to stay here,” Jimmy says when I return to bed. “If you’re having trouble sleeping.”

“I’ve been sleeping fine,” I reply. “Something just woke me.”

“I thought I heard you talking to someone.”

“I made a phone call.” I roll onto my side. “Did I ever tell you about my sister?”

“The one in Olympia, with the mutant vegetable garden?”

“The one and only.” I touch the space beneath his collarbone. “Did you know that when we were young, she had these attacks?”

“Attacks?”

“Seizures. She was sick for a long time.”

“Did she get better?”

“Yes,” I say. “She’s fine now.”

“What were you doing in the backyard?”

I tell him about finding the pear and the noise it made when it splattered against the tree. I tell him how I’ve always had good aim, ever since I played in my first softball game as a kid. I flex my arm and he squeezes the small swell of muscle, pretending to be impressed.

“Maybe that’s what I’ll do tomorrow,” he says. “Smash the rest of the pears against the tree.” He flattens my hand against his chest. “Pop, pop, pop.”

I ask if he finished sorting the records in his closet, which ones he ended up sending to his friend.

“I mailed him my Django Reinhardt’s.”

“Why did you pick those?”

“Because Django has the most interesting story,” he says. “Do you know it?”

I shake my head, my hair rustling against the pillow. “Django’s first wife made paper flowers for a living and one night they caught on fire. It’s said Django knocked over a candle, but no one knows for sure. Half his body was badly burned, including his left hand, his guitar hand. His doctors thought he would never play again. But he did. And he became the greatest.”

“What does that have to do with your friend?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to share the story with someone. And he lives too far away to drop by for one of those final visits. All the way out in Hawaii, if you can believe it.”

A light rain begins to fall. We both turn quiet. I hear the barking dog again. I can’t tell which end of the street it’s coming from, the noise at once distant and immediate. Soon Jimmy’s breathing becomes hushed and I know he’s drifted off. I keep my hand on his chest. His bones shift beneath his skin.

When I get to work the next day, the fat man says we need to talk. I stand in front of his desk, my wrists crossed behind my back. The welt on my neck is still large, the color a dark purple. I wonder if he’s giving me another customer with a special request.

“Jean,” he begins and I realize it’s the first time he’s ever said my name. I know right away that this isn’t about a new assignment. It’s always a bad sign when someone who never says your name suddenly starts. “Your last customer wasn’t satisfied with his Bigfoot experience.”

I tell him how difficult it was to wait for so long, how I kept dipping in and out of character, how I was so used to being the attacker, I couldn’t keep the same momentum while pretending to be prey. I promise to work on this angle, to stand in my backyard and imagine I’m being stalked by something awful and wait for it to come.

The fat man shakes his head. “No,” he says. “That’s not the problem.”

“What did the man say?”

“He said you fell like a girl.”

I say that’s impossible, explaining how I deliberately let my torso hit the ground first, the way Bigfoot would, and refrained from shoving out an arm to lessen the impact. “I know how to fall,” I tell him.

“The man said you flailed your arms and squealed. He said the moment you fell, he knew it was a woman in costume, not Bigfoot, and the dream was broken.”

I point at the welt on my neck. “He shot me two more times while I was on the ground.”

The fat man shrugs. “Maybe he doesn’t like women.”

I open the closet and push through the other Bigfoot costumes, looking for mine, the smallest one with my initials on the tag. When I don’t find it, I slam the door and press my lips together.

“I had to give him a refund.” He rises from his chair, lifts my Bigfoot costume from underneath his desk, and hands it to me. “Sorry, Jean.”

He’s being nice enough to not fire me directly, to let me figure it out for myself, so I don’t give him a hard time. I don’t yank the other costumes from the hangers. I don’t swipe my arm across his desk. I don’t strike a match and set the whole place on fire. I take the costume, then open the door and go outside. The sky is a deep, cloudless blue. The winds are high and grey dust rises around me, as though I’m standing in the quiet center of a storm.

I’ve been walking for twenty minutes and haven’t seen a single person on the road. It’s two miles from the park to my house. The costume is light in my arms, the fur soft. The wind keeps blowing specks of dirt into my eyes, so I put on the mask. After getting fired, I’m glad to be walking; parts of my body feel so heavy, I worry if I sat down for too long, I’d never get up.

I find myself thinking of things that haven’t come into my mind for months. Like how I was married once, to a guy from Tacoma, who I met while working as a receptionist at a local theater company in Washington. We eloped to Las Vegas and were married in a tiny white chapel. It lasted less than a year. I always knew when he was seeing another woman. He had such a terrible game face, it was almost charming. After we split, my sister asked me what I’d expected, marrying someone on a whim. I’d already decided to move to Los Angeles and joked that I did it so I’d be able to channel the pain into my acting. Only it turned out that nobody wanted to see real suffering, that no director or casting agent wanted the kind of pain that would, even for an instant, make anyone want to turn away, like the pain I see when I’m with Jimmy.

It’s occurred to me that part of his appeal is the guarantee, as much as anything can be guaranteed, that he will love me and only me for the rest of his life. He will die loving me. By default, of course — he doesn’t have the time to find someone else. But if I could grant him more years, enough time to make it likely that he would abandon me for another woman, I would do it. I said this to him one night, when we were in the backyard, underneath the tree, telling the truth for once. Then you do love me after all, he replied, a smile spreading across his hollowed face. And I wondered if he might be right.

A red truck passes on the road, flecking my skin with gravel. I catch the driver staring at me in his side mirror. The wind has settled. The sky is still a clear blue, the brightness of the sun muted by some transparent sheet of cloud. It isn’t long before I see the low peak of Jimmy’s house in the distance.

“I need to get in the water,” he tells me when I turn up at his door, the costume pressed against my chest, the mask still on. His eyes are wild and determined. He doesn’t seem to notice that I’m wearing a Bigfoot mask. I worry he’s beginning to get delirious, which the doctors told him might happen toward the end.

“You’re cracked,” I say. “You get tired after picking up a few pears in the backyard.”

“I need you to drive me to the lake.” He steps onto the porch and closes the door behind him.

“But you could get a cold,” I protest, pulling off the mask. A cold for Jimmy could be deadly. “And then you’ll be back in the hospital, which is exactly where you don’t want to be.”

“I had that dream again,” he says, glossing over my practical concerns. “Where the world is made of water. I woke up knowing I had to go to the lake today.” He looks longingly across the street, at my dented gray car. “And anyway, my body is where I don’t want to be, but there’s no changing that, is there?”

“I’m low on gas.”

He steps off the porch. “There’s a station on the way.”

“Remember when you told me you never learned to swim?”

“I don’t know how to swim,” he says. “But you do.”

He crosses the street and eases himself into the passenger seat. When I hesitate, he honks the horn. I wonder if he’s just trying to make everything go more quickly and has decided to enlist my help. Today it’s swimming, tomorrow skydiving. The thought paralyses me. It’s an effort for him to sit at the kitchen table or on the porch for a few hours. After we make love, which we’re doing less and less, he rolls onto his side and plunges into a deep sleep, as though he’s been drugged. I hear the engine start, which means he’s found the keys in the cupholder. I consider telling him I’ve just been fired and don’t feel like swimming, but he wouldn’t care. And he shouldn’t. He honks the horn again. I sprint across the street and join him.

I park underneath a sequoia and toss the keys into the glove compartment. Late afternoon sunlight pours through the windshield, illuminating ridges of dust on the dashboard. We haven’t been here since summer and the woods surrounding the lake look darker, more dense. I watch Jimmy get out of the car and walk to the edge of the lake, moving with all the speed he can muster. The Bigfoot costume and mask are heaped in the backseat, hollow and limp. They look like nothing special now, just a pile of rubber and synthetic fur.

I leave the car and stand with Jimmy on the bank of the lake. He removes his shoes and T-shirt, then unbuttons his jeans. He asks me to take off my clothes. The lake is a mile from the main road, shielded by trees and overgrown bushes. I feel emboldened by the enclosure and slip out of my shorts and blouse. I fold our clothes and place them on the knotted roots of a tree, align our shoes so they’re side by side. Once he’s naked, Jimmy wades into the lake, extending his arms for balance. I wait until his knees disappear beneath the surface, then follow. The water is cold.

“This is too shallow,” he says. “Let’s go out there.” He points to the thick darkness in the center of the lake.

“That will be too deep,” I tell him. “You won’t be able to stand.”

“I don’t want to feel anything underneath me.” He tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear. His wet hand slides down my throat and rests against my collarbone. “Will you teach me to float?”

“I’ll do my best,” I say, meaning it. “But we have to start in shallow water.”

He nods. I tell him to let his body go slack. He relaxes a little, but it’s not enough. I tell him to let himself sink and when the water rises over his shoulders, I place my hands beneath his back and turn his body horizontal. We manage this in one graceful movement, like synchronized swimmers rehearsing a number.

“The trick is to let your arms and legs dangle, but keep your back firm.”

“I can do that,” he says.

I take away my hands and after he’s floated on his own for a while, I grip his upper arms and swim into the deep. I tell him to close his eyes, to not think about trying to stay above water, to pretend my hands are still pressing against his spine. The muscles in my thighs burn from treading and holding onto Jimmy. His black hair is glossy, his eyelashes long and curved. I can see the teardrop shape of his cheekbones, the green and purple veins in his face. He looks so delicate I almost drag him back to shore, but I know that’s simply not possible now. After we reach the center of the lake, I release his arms. His position in the water doesn’t change. I drift backwards and tell him to open his eyes.

“The sky is spinning,” he says.

I tilt my head back; water swallows the ends of my hair. My skin is numb. I see a huge cloud that resembles a mountain range and recall his wish to visit the Grand Canyon. Perhaps the failure to make that journey explains his persistence today. Maybe he has grown tired of seeing things only in dreams.

“How far out are we?”

“All the way in the center,” I say. “But don’t look. It’ll break your focus.” For once, he listens to me.

The sun is dropping, a brilliant orange disc with liquid borders. Jimmy is floating on his back, staring up at the sky. His lips are turning blue, but I don’t say anything. I’ve never seen anyone learn to float so quickly before, but maybe people learn faster when they don’t have much time. Time. I’ve grown to hate that word. I think of it often, how much is wasted, how freeing it would be if we weren’t always counting. I look at Jimmy, his skin excruciatingly white against the dark water, and wonder if he’s stopped paying attention to time, if he’s resigned himself to allowing the days to pass until they don’t anymore. I think of what he said back at the house, about how his body is where he doesn’t want to be, how neither of us are where we want to be, yet somehow, at this moment, we are.

“Will you roar for me?” he asks.

I shift in the water, creating small ripples that push his body farther away.

“Your Bigfoot roar,” he continues. “I want to hear an echo.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I was fired today.” I touch the bump on my neck.

He’s quiet for a minute. He doesn’t move in the water and I’m proud of him for maintaining his concentration. “That doesn’t matter,” he finally says. “You can still be Bigfoot.”

“It’s not as convincing without the costume. I’ve told you this before.”

“Then imagine it,” he says. “You’re supposed to be an actress, right?”

I shut my eyes and picture Bigfoot lumbering through the forest, more alone than any human could grasp. I imagine the weight of his solitude. I open my mouth and fill my lungs with air, then arch my back and push it all out. The noise that comes from my body is unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. It beats against the thinning branches and the fall air, shoots towards the clouds like smoke. The echoes last for a long time, the vibrations moving across my skin like electrical currents. When I open my eyes, the lake and treetops are washed in a blue darkness.

Jimmy has floated out of my reach, but I don’t swim after him. When the crescent moon turns luminous, he asks to be taken back to the car. I guide him to shore and once he’s on dry land, he crouches and begins to shiver violently. I scold myself for not bringing a blanket or towels and try to get him to at least put on his clothes. But he shakes his head and asks me to help him wait it out. It will pass, he tells me. I’m being tested, I realize, to see how long I can endure suffering in another person. I bend over and press my hand between his shoulder blades, feeling the slender ligaments and bones a healthy body conceals. The moonlight makes the lake glow like an enormous black pearl. The soft skin on my stomach hardens with goosebumps. The night is quiet, save for the sound of Jimmy’s rapid breath. I kneel next to him, the damp leaves sticking to my knees. I look down at Jimmy’s thigh, at the dirt smudged across the pale stretch of skin; I brush it away, the grit damp and cool. I bring my hand to my lips and let the dirt melt off my fingertips, tasting bitterness and metal. The moon shifts and the grass ahead catches silver, the light passing over us and away.