Bob in the Deep End by Gurth Harper
There are no manta rays like on the brochure, and Divemaster Barry, tall and sitcom-handsome, is not your friend. He pretends to be your friend. He’s very familiar in a performative way. He says you can call him DMB, sings a bar of “Crash into Me,” and pats you on the back in the classroom when you correctly identify a diving regulator, but when you ask about the ocean—home, of course, to manta rays—he makes fun of your impatience and your obsession with manta rays, and looks around to make sure the other people in the class—kids, really—are laughing along at your expense.
“Whoa, Bobby! Keep your trunks on! We’ll get there, but you have to start here.” He unfolds those long, thin monster arms and gestures around, palms-up, like the space is something grander than the pool at the junior high where you feel a thousand years older than the weekend lifeguard, and the air is hot and heavy with the semen-y stink of excess youth and chlorine.
They are laughing, the kids. Everything is saturated by water and its blueness, and everything is funny.
“Okay,” you say. You’re okay. You don’t mean to be overeager; you just really want to scuba the Atlantic like Bob Ballard, because you have the same name and your son, like his, died in a single-car accident on wet asphalt, and your wife, like his, packed up her life shortly after the death and disappeared with your firmest definitions packed tightly in invisible blue suitcases, a wedding present, saying she needed space because, “You remind me of him, Bob,” and you think, firstly, “What a cliché,” and secondly, “He’s not coming back, Mel,” and thirdly, “You remind me of him, too.” But Divemaster Barry doesn’t need to know any of this, so you continue with a simple, “Just making sure.”
Then what?
Then you tread water for ten minutes to complete the swimming certification, then you towel-off in the white tile locker room with the impossibly fit boys, then you swallow bites of a tuna fish sandwich alone in the Sonata, then you return at 2pm for the suit-up and, reentering the humid stink, wonder why there’s a woman breastfeeding a baby in the steep wooden bleachers that overlook the pool.
“How was lunch, Bobby?”
“It was great.”
“Did you go to Dempsey’s?”
“No. I live out in Durdsville. I don’t really know the area.”
“Bummer. Next time you should go to Dempsey’s.”
“Okay. I’ll do that.”
He’s not your friend, but you want him to like you.
“Buddy-up,” Divemaster Barry yells, and the kids snap into twos like it was planned and, of course, you get stuck with other oldie in class, a freckled rectangle of a man named Norm. They probably planned it at Dempsey’s, while you and Norm ate in your cars and thought about death, in both the specific and the abstract.
Norm never makes eye-contact. That’s one of the first things you notice about Norm: The freckles, the rectangledness, the elusive eyes, the too-big swim trunks that billow, seafoam green, in the shallow water during edge-kick training and make him look like a humping rectangular merman, death dancing about his diverted mereyes, pupils like impact craters in their irises, sclera a bit pink, probably from the chlorine. Maybe, you think, you make too much eye-contact, and that’s why he’s avoiding it. Maybe you—
“Come on, guys,” Divemaster Barry interrupts. “You’re falling behind. Test the tank, valve-up, and strap in. Everyone’s waiting.”
He’s talking to you and Norm. How did you get so far behind?
“Okay,” you say and hustle to help Norm get his gear in place—jacket and BCD, tank, hoses, flippers, etc.—and he does the same for you, then you go over the equipment again, then you plunk into the shallow end of the pool, water up to the belly button, then you go over equipment procedures for a third time: deflating and inflating the BCD, clearing the regulator, flushing the mask, reading the pressure gauge, Boyle’s law, buddy octopuses, too much too quick in your opinion. It’s the same stuff you covered twice in the classroom, but it still feels just out of reach.
“Don’t worry. You’ll catch on.”
“Okay,” you say, and imagine the mantas again.
Not Tommy. Not Mel. No.
Just the rays.
It’s already 3:30 when Divemaster Barry lets you dunk and clear your BCD, and sink into the pool “within reach of your buddy,” of course, and crawl toward the deep end.
With small steps and too-deep breaths, you invade the deep, toeing the sloping line toward the pool’s 13-foot nadir. You feel the pressure growing in your ears like when you blew up all those balloons for—. No. No point thinking about that. The water’s in your mask now and he showed you how to clear it, but you weren’t paying complete attention. You shuffle ahead in blurry pain, and Norm struggles to keep up.
It’ll all be worth it when you see the manta rays, when they glide past you like rubber pancakes a meter wide, forty meters deep, and you have 1000 bars of oxygen left and you can just sit there in the impossible ocean with four atmospheres of pressure on your brain to push out the noise and the “whys?” and the photos of Tom-Tom’s balloon-y b-day framed above the mantel with his arms pulled in from gray heathered sweatshirt sleeves and his hands down copper-colored corduroys, looking like a ribbed torpedo with a steely smiling warhead ready to swim, celebrate, and explode, in that order.
You reach the far wall’s blue tile and slowly turn around. Everyone else stopped at the three-quarter mark, even your dive buddy. It’s just you in the blue, and you’re just below the filter output. The rush of water marbles the surface and swirls the overhead flags and, in a buttery hum, massages the sting from your ears.
You’re okay here. And it makes sense. You always liked water well enough. You had a pool growing up and, according to mom, you never wanted to get out of the bathtub. Life came from the ocean, too. That’s what they say.
Above the surface, you’ve always been disappointed; to the point where you figured being Bob and being disappointed were inseparable concepts. But underwater you don’t feel disappointed. Sure, you’d prefer to be amidst manta rays, and married nicely still, the father of a young man who never drove straight, drunk, and unbraking through a traffic circle into a killer sugar maple, leafless, but all of that is blurry wishing now. It’s like running in a dream here, or throwing a dream-punch. The more effort you exert, the slower you go.
“The trick is to give in to it,” Divemaster Barry said in the classroom. “Like with quicksand.”
“So, just give up?”
“I didn’t say ‘give up,’ Bobby. I said ‘give in.’”
“What’s the difference?”
“Don’t fight it.”
“I’m not,” you said.
“I mean, in the water.”
The kids laughed, and you said, “Okay.”
Divemaster Barry spots you at the end of the pool and tries to call you back to the group, pointing at you and pulling both palms toward his chest like an air-traffic controller guiding a jet to its gate. You plod back. You could swim, but walking on the floor of the pool is so much sweeter. He pantomimes comic exasperation and taps the dive computer on his wrist. The kids laugh in unison, sending a flurry of bubbles to the water’s surface. No bubbles from Norm, though.
You slot in beside your dive buddy facing the far wall, and he turns to meet your gaze and smiles. He seems less rectangular underwater, friendlier. You like him. You go through the signals together. You take turns clearing your regulators and flushing your masks and breathing from each other’s octo.
Divemaster Barry checks everyone’s gauges then sends you out on your own in teams, signaling to meet in the shallow end in five minutes. Thumbs-up all around, then you all flipper off to different parts of the pool in pods of two. You nod toward your wall by the filter output and Norm agrees. This time you swim over, side by side, until you’re bobbing along the wall with the smooth tile caressing your back through the light wetsuit top. Norm wants to test his BCD, so you take turns inflating and slow-purging, rising and falling like amused blowfish. On the third run-through, you pull one of the fast-purge releases, and laugh as you sink faster to the floor, where you land on your feet.
Norm smiles, then gestures toward his dive computer. He holds up five fingers and points to the shallow end of the pool. It’s time to rejoin everything you unjoined.
You shake your head from side to side. Norm nods and points harder but you don’t give up. You keep shaking your head from side to side calmly.
Norm begins to flipper away while glancing back and waving an arm as if to say, “Come on, dive buddy! It’s time to head back to shallower waters like Divemaster Barry instructed,” but you don’t move. Instead, you nod reassuringly while maintaining an appropriate level of eye contact, and flush the back of your hand toward him in a gentle shooing motion, as if to say, “I know, dive buddy. But you go ahead. It’s okay. My exploring here is not finished.”
This all repeats itself several times until it’s just the two of you in the deep end, and you can only see the bellies and legs of the kids, wavy and far. Norm is torn for a time, but pulls eventually away. He disappears, a heaving blue blob, and now you’re alone.
If you trace the converging lines in the tile as they rise out toward the shallow wall, you can see the last legs dwindle and vanish. Fourteen pairs, then thirteen, then twelve, until all the pink and brown stalks pull up, and then you’re really alone. Just you and your thoughts.
So often of late you’ve lapsed into replays of Other Bob, the doc. where he finds the Bismark with his son in tow, and—Good God!—your boys and their doughy faces! Yours playing Santana on a Stratocaster, his manning the submergible robot like a farmer from central casting knitting invisible cornsilk brows, and their ears that got rosy when they were embarrassed, still young men, never old men. You watched that doc. In the den with Mel before Tommy died. She’d had her elbows folded on a foldaway table and she drank sweet tea from a promotional McDonalds glass and it was raining that night and you had to go out to get a nine-volt battery because the smoke detector started beeping during Wheel of Fortune, and when the phone rang, you—
Now you only think about how you don’t have to think about anything. And, of course, it can’t last forever. You’ll sit in thoughtless silence for a spell, you think, then Divemaster Barry will notice you’re missing, or Norm will say something.
And then?
Maybe Divemaster Barry returns, breaking the serene plane of the pool and charging for you with those long, rubbery arms pushing and pulling the water in mean pursuit. You’ll avoid him for a while like a streaker on a football field, but you can only run for so long. The Divermaster Barrys of the world always catch up with the Bobs. They’re faster and stronger and they have the homefield advantage… But every once in a while—not often, but occasionally—maybe the Bobs sneak past. They don’t outrun or outswim anyone; they survive by being forgotten.
Maybe he makes a joke, Divemaster Barry, and everyone laughs, and the joviality and acceptance carries the crowd to the locker rooms without looking back at the pool. Norm, in a rush to return his equipment, forgets about you, or figures you’ll come out when you’re ready. The breastfeeding woman leaves. The weekend lifeguard turns off the filter, kills the lights, and locks the pool. Night descends over the junior high. Then, you imagine, in the heavy new moon blackness, in the still of the Olympic pool, in your hour of need, the manta rays will finally emerge from their nests and swim for you.
You know, of course, that “nest” isn’t the right word, but you go with it.
You give in.
Gurth Harper is a writer from Southern California and/or Upstate New York.
13 January 2023
Leave a Reply