Learning How to Swim

I still remember the burning New Mexico heat. It works your way inside your gut through your nostrils, heating it up. It lingers, exiting as sweat through your skin, down to the earth, back up as heat. In the summer, it was a never ending process. My family didn’t have air conditioning, so I was forced to swim frequently to cool off. We had a green lake not too far behind our property, a shabby old one story house with a partially flooded basement. I would trudge through the heat, feeling that warmth in my gut, sweat forming like pimples over my forehead. The water in the lake was always freezing, no matter how hot it got, but it was all I had, so I dove in. The water got deep quickly, so I had to learn how to stay afloat if I wanted to not be paddling in the shallowest part of the lake forever. There were always birds, birds, birds, screaming and cantillating their little mantras, God, you got sick of them after a while, but they kept going and going and going. You’d duck beneath the placid, ice-cold water just for the water to rush into your ears so that you could forget about them. The only problem with my “lake method” was that I couldn’t really teach myself to swim. I had, as previously mentioned, learned to doggy paddle, a pathetic little jittering motion of my forearms and legs in order to barely keep my head above the water, but that wasn’t enough. The center of the lake had an allure to it, a kind of femininity that was hard to describe. All I know is, it was calling to me. I had to go there eventually. My father barely ever swam, usually preferring to sit in the sand. If he did go into the water, he’d only go up to his knees, complaining about the cold. My mother was shaped like a beachball with a weight that made floatation difficult, and as such I was never taught by either parent how to swim. The only person who I knew could swim well in my neighborhood was a teenager, maybe 15 or 16, named Jathaniel.

Jathaniel was a tough kind of guy. He never talked much, had a semi-mullet, and often wore merchandise from his favorite media. One time, I saw him across the block, waiting for the bus. He was wearing a massive Family Guy-themed jacket that absolutely didn’t fit him with an obnoxiously yellow Pokemon beanie. It was a sight to behold, but I had this kind of reverential awe for him because he was an older kid (I must’ve been only 12 or 13 when this happened) and older kids were giants and therefore ‘cool’. I never really saw him with any other people, aside from a blonde girl who was arguing with him at the park. I knew that he was able to swim because his parents were vaguely friendly with my parents, and on one day, we went to the beach with them. I overheard a conversation about how he had actually won a few races a year or two ago, and that he was very passionate about swimming.

I only was able to put two and two together around a month after that day, when I was bobbing up and down in the lake, my teeth slamming into each other like they were two UFC fighters brawling. The thought flashed like lightning in my small brain and I immediately knew that I had to befriend him. Jathaniel was going to teach me how to swim.

Surprisingly, he was accepting of me, and we bonded over video games like Final Fantasy or Sonic. I was nervous to explain my idea to him because I assumed that, like all teenagers, he was going to make fun of me for it, so I hesitated to bring it up until I knew that I had him as a friend. At some point, I asked him who the blonde girl was, and he answered that it was his girlfriend. Apparently, they had some kind of argument, which, according to him, was her fault. My memory has become kind of bad these days, but I’ll try my best to replicate it.

“Yeah, we’re still, like, together and shit, but,” Jathaniel sniffed, “it’s, y’know, not the same anymore, basically. I was like, ‘hey, babe, let’s get something to eat,’ and she was like,” (he put on a high-pitched voice) “‘oh, yes, babe, Jathaniel, I’d love that so much,’ and so I was like… Shit, I can’t even remember, that’s how unimportant that fight was. It was basically something about, like, tickets, or something. But yeah, I ended up going to Gamestop just to, essentially, hang out and chill, and like, get my bearing together, however you say that, you know, right, like, and we obviously made out and she apologized to me, but, essentially, you know, like, essentially, now she’s basically less interesting to me because like, I’ve seen that side of her, you know what I mean? Like, once you see that dark aura a person has, you can’t, like, basically go back, you know what I mean?”

I was a doughy 12-13 year old who had barely even talked to girls, let alone known anything about arguments outside of my parents doing it, but I nodded enthusiastically, saying that I knew what he meant.

“Oh, really? No way, bro, I didn’t know you were built like that, damn. What’s her name?”

“Amber.”

“Yeah, crazy how women are sometimes, right?”

“For real.”

“Yeah, it’s like, you’re like, ‘I’m going to be together with her forever’, and then, like, she says something dumb, and you’re like, yeah, women, you know? I actually had a couple of girlfriends before this, uhm, she––they were all pretty hot, you know, I think I had around seven or eight, I forget, you know, because, like, you lose track after a while, you know?”

I did not know what he meant. I nodded again.

“So yeah, like, I mean, like, what can you do, you know? Tell me about Amber, what’s she like?”

Amber went to a different school. She was six feet tall, had dark hair with green eyes and a slender body. She was quirky, funny, and she loved to read. Amber didn’t exist. She never existed. As I fumbled my way through my story, I was shocked to see that Jathaniel actually believed me. At the end of my monologue, I felt more embarrassed than ever. My lying was terrible, my story was outrageous, and the thought that I would be known as the kid with the fake girlfriend made me want to jump out the window. I had gone too deep. I quickly changed the topic to swimming. Once again, Jathaniel seemed too optimistic to be for real.

“I have one, like, no, like… I have one stipulation. My stipulation is that you have to become my personal shovel master if you want me to teach you how to like, swim like a boss.”

I instantly agreed.

Sometime later, I got to meet the blonde girl––it turned out that she was Jathaniel’s sister, and that the argument had been started over him stealing her wallet to go buy something. I asked if any of his seven girlfriends had any similar issues with him, but she started to laugh, and I felt that there was something I was missing. Like a discount Columbo, I put the pieces together slowly but surely: Jathaniel had a few red flags.

The day that he was supposed to teach me how to swim, I told my parents that I had made a new friend and that he was going to come over in a couple of hours. He didn’t show until one hour after I said we should meet up. He explained that his new girlfriend (he had dumped the blonde one, who apparently was in tears over this) had forced him to spend time with her. I once again thought that this was odd, but I was more excited in him teaching me how to swim.

The actual lesson itself was half-baked. After an hour, I was sick and freezing, and he had struggled to actually do anything he said he was good at. I reasoned that since he hadn’t been swimming for a while, it was a Rocky type situation, where he would have to get back in shape, but when he would, he’d be the best again.

The next week, we had another lesson, and after it ended, he pulled a shovel out of the grass. He gave it to me. I looked at it, confused, but he said to wait for a few minutes. He walked into the shrubbery nearby and came out in a minute or two. He told me that my job was now to bury what he had created. I held the shovel, iron and weighty, in my cold, wet hands. I felt like a fetus, being offered a chance by a higher power. I felt the muscles in my back, running with power. This was my chance. If I betrayed Jathaniel now, he’d never show me his secrets. Nobly, I went to the bushes and dug a hole for his feces, burying it. In that moment, I felt no disgust, I felt no confusion, I only felt a sense of duty.

The week after that, he once again struggled to teach me to swim, but I knew that it was worth it. I buried more, becoming a master at my craft.

The next week, he told me that my name had turned invalid. He stared into my eyes and with some kind of power explained rationally and calmly that my name was now Shingus. In that moment, I felt my knees buckle under me, as if my body was deprived of its strength. I fell to the ground, my head bathed in the dust by the lake. It ran through my wet hair, turning into mud. My name was Shingus. To this day, I cannot remember what my original name was. When I rose up, it was as if what had once belonged to me had been annihilated. It was shredded and lost to the wind.

I became Jathaniel’s confidant, I became his shovel master, and I did it well. Every day, we would go to different locations that he wanted to see, and I would dig a hole and bury whatever he had created. We ceased to talk about games or girls, the two things upon which our relationship had been founded on. We talked seldom, preferring to stare off into the distance, contemplating nature.

I remember once how I stood, shovel in hand, as Jathaniel had wandered into the bushes. Before me stood an idyllic landscape: the true desert. The sun bored into my skin, making my sweat feel toxic. The sky was looming overhead, titanic and slick with iridescent clouds. They were thin and sickly, pale with dusk. Through their essences ran detached pinks and blues, which had a cold tone to them. There were rock formations around us, and I kept my eyes focused on the ones in the distance. I watched as the air grew colder until the hair on my arms automatically stood up––some primitive animal feature not yet wiped away by modern life. I felt 40 years old. Eventually, he came from behind a couple of rocks and told me, Shingus, that I had a job to do. Obediently, with the same sense of dedication and purpose I always had, I went behind the rock, selected the place in the soil where it was most vulnerable, dug a deep hole, and, carefully, using the tip of my shovel, shoved the payload into the hole, whereupon I wiped my shovel clean on the dirt and buried it. I looked back at Jathaniel, and he nodded, like a proud father.

This is the way that things were for a long time, until they weren’t. We had travelled to the border of southern Arizona, looking for a new spot. Jathaniel always liked places by the rocks––cliffs, deserts, canyons, gorges––I always believed in forested places because it was harder to get caught and easier for me to dig a hole. Not that anyone was going to stop us, though. By that point half of the country had already legally recognized us as having diplomatic immunity. Jathaniel had finished the most recent payload and I was tasked with burying it as usual. I was about to start walking towards the rock where he had done it when I was suddenly transfixed by the sky. I saw several black birds that twirled through the air gracefully; crows. They landed as a group on a barren tree, perched in the grasp of its branches as if they were stygian rings on desiccated fingers. Behind me were mountains, I turned and looked at them. The sun was peeking just over the trees, shading the farthest trees with a dark green hue. Those in the middle were lighter, and finally the trees all the way in the front had an unearthly glow. Sunlight moved through them and finally ended on a hill, on which I could see every individual blade of grass. The rest was in the shade, untouched by the light. Instantly, I was possessed by desire. The world was calling to me. A world of such beauty that resisting it felt almost against who I was and what I had become. I could feel myself regressing mentally. I was losing years in my head the longer I stared at the mountains. I turned back to Jathaniel, unsure of how to handle the situation. I gripped the shovel, sweat barreling down my wrists and down the iron handle I had grown so acquainted with. I dropped it, finally understanding the way I had been tricked. There were no eight girlfriends, there were no swimming lessons, I was the fool. I charged towards Jathaniel, knocking him to the ground. I hit him, swinging with ecstasy until I could hear the crunch in his nose and the blood slowly oozing out. I wanted to keep hitting him until his face cracked from the inside and all that held it together was muscle and skin and tissue but I couldn’t. I knew that I had to regain myself, whatever I had left of myself. I hit him again, this time in the solar plexus––I reasoned that the word solar meant that part of his body could invoke the sun. I hit my own solar plexus, smashing both of my fists into it as hard as I could, hoping the sun would come up instead of setting as usual. I keeled over, fresh drool spilling out of my mouth and onto the ground. I hit myself again, this time with a weaker impact, understanding that the solar plexus was unable to change the sun. I got up, shakily, still recovering from my own hands. I could feel myself shifting, changing, my skull opening up like a butterfly’s wings out of a fresh sheath. I saw Jathaniel’s skull opening up, too, and I understood what I had to do. Gently but insistently, I took my slender fingers and wrapped them around his jaw and around his upper teeth. I pushed his mouth open as his face opened up, revealing folds of his brain that arched outwards brilliantly. I opened his mouth wider until I could finally see the passageway that led to his stomach. With concentrated fury, I stuffed my hand down his throat into his stomach, grasping something fleshy and warm. I pulled it out as his skull opened up further into a butterfly formation and finally I beheld it to the sun, some kind of organ that I had taken from Jathaniel’s body. I remember understanding that my name was no longer Shingus but whatever I chose. Since I had taken one of Jathaniel’s organs in revenge I had taken a smaller part out of him, and, therefore, I had unsheathed Jake from Jathaniel. I proclaimed that my name was Jake. My face looked like a drawing of the sun from an esoteric text, with waves of tendon and bone branching outwards in an all-embracing ray. I remember squeezing the organ, popping it. From there, I simply walked home.

When I had returned home I thought about the little that Jathaniel had taught me, and I attempted to put it together to learn how to swim on my own. I got farther that time, and in a few days, I had learned how to do a breath stroke.