Swimming
by Michael Luo
For Made Up Words
After every meet, he’d have a great bowl of stir-fry with a side of Oreos. He ate everything with a fork, finding it easier to stab his food than to pick things up. The crunch of milk’s favorite cookie garnished with the tug of undercooked celery and soggy steamed rice made for what a champion’s post-meal should be, had he won the race.
Swimming had become his sport after he had turned out to be too short-legged for basketball, too flat-footed for football, and too self-righteous for chess. During tryouts, he was placed in the piranha group, a title intended to instill fear in the dolphin group, which was actually much faster and much better looking than any piranha could aspire to be. To improve his chances at having a shot at qualifying for nationals, his mother had signed him up for extra private lessons after practice, so he could be trained by Syrian Olympian freestyler turned Detroit local bartender, Fadi.
On the team, he looked much more the part than he acted. With one dip into the water, his hair became stiff like pines jutting out in fractals. There was something to his skin too, how it tingled then formed gentle pink bumps after prolonged exposure to chlorine. Sometimes he’d forget his goggles on the granite kitchen counter that he almost always ran into because he was late for practice, and this gave his eyes a bloodshot look worthy of a piranha.
Fadi told him he needed to work on his dry-land. Running, push-ups, crunches, sweating, tears, disappointment, then succeed. Fadi repeated this verbatim every practice with each syllable stuck within a thick desert accent. He couldn’t get over how Fadi was so fast and how someone so hairy became a bartender. Didn’t neck beards make you less aerodynamic?
His motivation was to simply reach the end of the lane. Then he’d flip, turn in a barely legal manner so water wouldn’t run up his nose, and do it over again. There were no clever tricks to score, no moments worthy of replay, nothing but to launch himself from the diving platform too small for his size thirteen feet into the water too cold for his sensitive skin for repeated instances of back and forth. Every moment before and after the race, he adored. The adrenaline rush felt like falling in love or getting laid, neither of which he had experienced.
Once in the water, he kept his head down, letting the manmade currents meander through his hair and back as he propelled forward with unconscious confidence. His limbs had rotated in this motion countless times, reminding him of past injuries: pulled triceps still recovering from week one of recruitment, a black eye the result of that night visiting his older brother at Michigan State, and tendinitis in two fingers overclocked on his six-string. At two hours a day and an hour and a half at night, swimming had become his life and not his sport. These thoughts never occurred to him during the race, since so much of his mind was focused on how he hated being submerged in water.
All his eyes could peek at among the bubbles clouding his vision was how the straight lines of the ceramic pool bottom appeared to curve and wave as he glided past. He noted how the glimmer from the artificial stadium lights above danced underwater, mimicking a rhythm that egged him to push on until he too could burst out with arms held high and photoelectric flashes refracting on his body. With each entrance and exit of his arm into and out of the water at alternating rates, he sensed how the liquid wrapped itself around his naked exterior as he pushed himself forward with the heart of a champion. Sometimes, he heard muffled sounds of someone yelling from the outside world. Maybe it was his name, but most likely it was just the water intruding into his ears to clog up the noise.
The race was the part he hated. There was no way to see who was ahead and who was behind, especially given that the goggles he had borrowed from his brother were a size big enough for water to invade. He raced with his eyes sealed shut from the chlorine, awaiting the moment when his fingers poked at the wall one last time to trigger someone he’d never meet to click a stopwatch in hopeful unison announcing his efforts to blip on the scoreboard.
2:24 on the dot. Not bad at all. A personal record, actually. But just so happened, on that day, there were three other personal records before his. He stretched his head out of the water with an optimism instantly vanished into memory. Mathematically, 2:24 was bigger than 2:20, 2:22, and 2:23:58, and in this division III pool at this ESPN televised meet on this weekday that his parents had asked for off from the stevedores union, he had made a personal best worth nothing in comparison.
An alarm sounded, so he crawled out of the water. As he placed his soaked palms on the cement edges to lift himself up, the soreness struck him in an immediate but unexpected way, the same way Layla’s laugh had confused him at first when he asked her out for froyo. His body stunned his mind with pain. Muscles ached in places he wasn’t aware had nerves. Pulling himself onto land, he glanced out of his periphery the tears for 2:20, the cheers for 2:22, and the silent shock for 2:23:58, who looked more surprised than he did.
He kept his head low while a salty mixture of sweat and bleach dripped down from his chin. Now standing upright, his neck bent, his feet soaked in meaningless fatigue, he walked over to grab a towel. There were none left. Confused, he looked around and saw that the towels were being used to dry up the diving platforms for the next heat. Another race had begun. He wasn’t a participant in this one. What would be remembered about him from this race and the one before would be the same.
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Copyright 2016 | Editor Tom Farr
