Still Soft With Sleep - Chapter 9
by Vincenzo Barney
We resume serializing our second quarterly Contest winner’s novel, Vincenzo Barney’s Still Soft With Sleep. Catch up with the previous chapters here:
A reminder that friend-of-the-Substack Anthony Marigold (of Magazine Non Grata) has released a Chrome extension for those who prefer to enjoy their Substacks offline.
As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, please subscribe, please share, and spread the word.
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
The water was violet and there was white in the violet where the moon lay and we swam in the white. The currents ran through the moonlight and the waves were white and my arms glowed above the water. We waded out into the white waves as far as we could before we swam. The last my foot touched the floor it was in a soft bed of eelgrass. The waves were low but I could feel the early strength of the flood against my legs. The water at the shoreline was cool against our legs but when we went up to our necks it was warm to be under it and Elvis and I talked about how it felt. The wine had given some momentum to the warmth and lifted us beyond hesitation and I felt deep into myself. We were in the white waves of the moon now, in the webbing of the Elizabeths. And there was a promise in the bond between the islands and the moon over the Vineyard and the whisper of Her voice to make the transit before daybreak. That the moon would protect us that far.
So we aimed for the harbors of the moon and sidestroked to the Lunet. The Lunet had wrecked in the 1800s in a snowstorm, just a hundred yards from the protection of Tarpaulin.
I flinched at the feel of seaweed on my legs and chest, like pieces of that webbing of Naushon making its last soft touch of me with its fingertips. We swam through ribbons of sea wrack and the kind they call dead man’s fingers. Last threads of connection looking for final knots in us. Fingertip what is leaving. The waves were small and bright but they looked bigger from down in the water and the Vineyard looked smaller and much further away too. It was black even in the moonlight and the deeper we got in the water the further away the Vineyard drew. It looked like a black hummock in the horizon that did no more than warp over low stars. The calm of the sea was delicate, as if the style in which we swam might decide its force and I felt an implication to make this swim honestly and without fear. The tide was in its early strength and I realized now just how long of a swim it would truly be and it hit me like looking up at the peak of a very tall mountain when you’re cycling and feel the knowledge flutters through all the muscles of your body of how much strength was going to be required of them. It fluttered through your spirit too because you are going to need your spirit to push on when your body wanted to quit, and you can’t waste energy on fear. It will drain you. I knew that moment would come, when there’d be no thinking and we’d be pushed into ourselves and it would be just our wills making the swim. There were random patches of cold water and in one of the patches I felt a wave of flame go up my neck and into my crown that the sea would answer to our mood, but it could have just been a surge in my warmth against the cool water that floated and took a superstition in its surge. Winter was in my mood again, and it felt like winter laid down just over the edge of summer. I tried not to think about it and the wine helped to ride me over this fear, and soon we were above the Lunet. We tried to look down at it but you could not see through the darkness and through the white strobe of the water. But I could see there was greenness in the darkness, and the darkness was deep.
“What is the Lunet?” Elvis asked.
“Some schooner that wrecked a long time ago.”
“Ah. So we’re not the only ones.”
“No, not even close.”
“So they had swim to shore?”
“No.”
“They didn’t make it.”
“Nope.”
“Great.”
He fidgeted with something below the water. “This piece is on my piece man.”
“Chris’s piece is on your piece?”
“Agh, horrible.”
“Give Chris’s piece a chance,” I said. Elvis gave a gasp of laughter into the water and we kept on with these puns as we swam over the wreck. We aimed toward West Chop going with the tide so the moon shone on our right as it continued to climb over the Vineyard.
“Make Chris’s piece, not war.”
“Keep the piece, El. Keep Chris’s piece.”
“Glide on the piece train,” Elvis sang from Cat Stevens.
“Oo-ah-ee-ah,” I sang back.
“When we get back I’m going to enter into some piece talks with Frank McConnell. I’m gonna give that cocksucker a piece of my mind.”
“What you gonna do El?”
“I’m gonna put his son’s piece in his mouth and blow his fucking brains out.”
I could see now how violent it was for Frank to have tried to own the center of Elvis and use his father like that. I couldn’t tell if Elvis was serious or not but murder to avenge the name of one’s dead father was the kind of motivation one needed to get across the waves of the moon and I encouraged Elvis and I shared in the energy of it. He was in reaction against the cancer McConnell had tried to put in his blood.
“And then what about Chris?”
“I’m gonna blow his brains out too. For Rosie. For killing that little girl.”
“Good,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll kill Chris first, in front of Frank.”
We fantasized about it and the first half hour passed without us feeling it. We went slow and methodically. We would have to ease into the wall of fatigue that would come for us and push past it. There was an odd euphoria in pushing past the early wall and the early fatigue and I thought of this for a moment. I tried to look forward to the high and the pride on the other side of it.
It was strange to swim at night and look back at Naushon growing away. The shores of the moon. We were in the Sound now and the waves came from our side and slightly behind. They were not so high that we had to turn our backs to them, so we continued crawling on our left sides. The current and its waves moved almost elliptically around the Elizabeths like the wake of orbit washing back on itself. Outside the moonlight the water was black and looked like you could fall straight through it. There were lights out on the water and when I stopped to tread and look through the waves I could see they were boats.
“Let’s keep our eyes on the boats,” I said. “We’ve got time so let’s swim slow and take breaks and keep an eye.”
I looked back. We had already drifted East quite a ways, for Tarpaulin Cove was directly behind us now and we had launched West of it. The cove still glowed, though the moon was climbing higher and losing some of that early impossible brightness.
“Maybe one of us should face West and the other East.”
“Good idea,” said Elvis.
We were spaced about fifteen feet from each other. The water was calm enough that I could see the wake of a large yacht coming silently over the water. It was moving fast and when it undulated it became very dark in the trough because it curled away from the moonlight and no light could get into the curl. Still you could see dimples in it and some of the water on its shoulder was white and flowed smoothly over it. Then it rose and it lifted the moonlight high as it could go before it was erased in the height.
“Here comes a wake,” said Elvis.
“Don’t fight it.”
We tried to lift our heads above the wake and take it gently. The first wave was the smallest and wetted the bottom of my hair and the next wave washed over our faces though we swam up into its white crest, and then it dropped us down four feet into the trough of the last big wave and this glowed and went over our heads. The water was white and glassy on the other side and it felt nice now to have my whole head wet. I had been waiting for it. The wake pushed us back several yards and we swam now to make up what we’d lost. The backs of the other side of the wake were dark and carved deep toward the Vineyard.
Two boats were coming from either side of us. Elvis saw his first and I saw mine last. We had to tread and figure which direction they were heading. They looked like they would converge on us and they were getting faster the closer they came. We had to wait patiently a long time to tell which direction they were in and I felt something bump my legs and my hackles went up. They were almost upon us when we figured we couldn’t stay where we were and we couldn’t swim backwards either. The one on my side was coming from Wood’s Hole and the one on Elvis’s was heading for Tarpaulin. It made for a narrow channel to swim and we had to swim it fast. We turned against the current and the moonlight and front crawled into the darkness forward of the boat headed to Tarpaulin and got over the other side of its path and then used the bright current to swim lateral to the boat coming from Wood’s Hole. It was about thirty yards from us and its wake was not so large as the yacht’s. We bobbed it and then rested, treading and breathing heavily.
“We’re in a lane of traffic here. We gotta get out.”
We deepened into focus and pushed forward for about ten minutes, I facing East and Elvis West.
“Let’s take a break. One of us floats on his back while the other treads and keeps an eye.”
Elvis went first. He leaned back but his legs did not float up easily. He treaded again and put the gun and water and tea which had gone around to the back of his thighs over his groin. Then he leaned back again and his legs came up a bit better and he lay there with his ears under the water and he glowed white like a glob of starlight fallen on the sea. The tide was gaining strength and we drifted in it but the waves were still calm. It was strange to feel all that dark empty space below you. Nothing to hold onto over eighty feet of depth. I felt alone when Elvis floated and he lay so long without moving I played with the thought that he was dead. I wondered what was in his ears. It occurred to me I could swim away from him while he lay there, his ears under the water listening to the darkness, and he wouldn’t find me. This thought spooked me and I wanted to make him lift his head but I thought he hadn’t rested enough and waited.
“Adam, you gotta listen to the water. So relaxing. I almost forgot we were in the middle of the ocean.”
“Ok,” I said. I put my water and tea into my groin and leaned back and I could not agree to the balance of its warped sound. My ears felt to be in a wrong field, listening to the wall of sound approach its vanishing point at the bottom of the ocean. That’s where the tide went. It drew back on its origin and I lay in a quiver of rising panic and could not rest listening under the blanket. I was listening to more than eighty feet of darkness below me. I was listening to the wound of nature. First memories and oldest dreams. The tides of the old wound of the moon. When we gambled the moon into orbit and the ocean filled the hole of our lost soul where she had been. The tide was the cycle of this memory. And I feared that at any moment something might touch me from the darkness. But Elvis was there. I remembered that Elvis was there and he was keeping an eye.
Every now and then the water lapped my ear and I could hear the silence above the blanket. I had just about let go and calmed and Her voice slipped into me. I could hear my name under the water. “Adam.” I raised my head and Elvis was swimming to me and he pushed my shoulder.
“Boat Adam, boat!”
I looked up at the white hull of a yacht barreling soundlessly toward us. There was a center of silence about it, just enough to not believe in it. It was about sixty yards away and coming fast and felt already to be towering over us. We bolted forward of it in a front crawl with our heads down. I swam thirty strokes without raising my head for a breath and raised it only when my lungs felt like they would explode and the first wave of its wake undulated me. I couldn’t think and I raised it in the direction of the waves and swallowed water. I treaded and coughed in the wake and turned around to watch the boat going past against Tarpaulin Cove.
“El!” I yelled. “Elvis!”
Its wake was steep and this time because it faced the moon it had its brightness in the curls. I turned my back to the white waves and let them push me under.
I turned around again and heard my name out on the water.
“Elvis!” I called.
“Adam!”
Elvis was ten yards away now and breast stroking to me. I hugged him in the water, but it’s hard to hug someone and tread in the water and we let go.
“Jesus man.”
“I swam from it and then went under and swam down. I stayed under as long as I could.”
“Christ. Let’s get our bearings.”
We caught our breaths, resting an arm on each other’s shoulders one at a time, and then swam. All the sprinting had lifted us past the first wall of fatigue and when we started up again my body ached in a good way. I had it in me. We put our muscles into it and we got free of that lane of traffic and it grew well past midnight and the traffic disappeared. The moon was peaking and moving West over the island. I breaststroked for a time and there was a plasmic feel in the cups of my hands and I saw we were swimming through a field of jellyfish. They were comb jellies which do not sting, and they caught in our hands and in the moonlight like weaves in the water. They tickled as they trailed my body.
We were still far from the Vineyard but we were quite a ways East which was better than West and the open ocean. The Vineyard looked short and pitch black from the water. It was no more than a lift above the horizon. Only the tops of its trees bore a faint ring of moonlight. Lambert’s Cove was straight ahead of us by many miles and the moon was over it. If we didn’t put in a good effort to get halfway across by ebb tide we risked being pushed back onto the Elizabeths further South. We would have to tear through its webbing and break its bonds. This next hour was where that voice spoke inside, “Hey man, what’s it to you? Look how far there is to go. Know how tired you’ll be? Just stop and turn around.” But there was no home or rest back on Naushon and we had gone far enough to avoid having thoughts about hiding the gun again, and flagging a boat, and drawing up some lie to Chris. In our minds Chris was already dead, and the transit across was just to confirm it. It was all in front of us and we swam through the layers of fatigue. My neck ached from keeping it above water for a couple hours and I did a kind of side stroke with my head half submerged to rest it. I switched off with my back to the waves and then facing them and the tide was coming into its strength and worked with us. Elvis and I didn’t talk much. Later the waves got too big to face them in a sidestroke so I kept my back to them until I tired and then breaststroked and the waves lifted me from my side. They were mostly gentle. I was thirsty but I wanted to save everything for the last leg when we’d really be tired and needing it.
Elvis and I tried to stay a good distance apart but every now and then we touched underwater in the darkness and spooked each other because we did not know what we touched or what touched us back. When we did drift apart we would call for each other and if one was too far ahead we would wait. When we rested we would pat each other’s shoulders as a way of hugging against the loneliness and the cold of the swim. I rubbed the top of his head once and his hair was silver and my fingers were silver in it. I swam for a time looking at him and he seemed just to coast and his lashes were very long and pretty in the water.
“How ya doin man?”
“Good.”
But his voice came from behind me and I realized his skin was black and that it was a seal floating along and stopped with my hackles up. The seal blinked her lashes at me and her eyes were bright white. She looked very human.
“Elvis. It’s a seal.”
Elvis swam to me.
“There’s another one.”
I looked over the shoulder of the one swimming with me and saw the whites of another seal’s eyes. I understood why fishermen used to think they were mermaids. They swam with us for some time, dipping in and out of the water until they dipped and never came back.
The presence of Naushon still drew on us and the Vineyard was still so far away. We must have gone over a mile in a couple hours but it drew no closer in our eyes. It almost made the heart fall to see it so far out.
“Don’t look at it,” I said.
It was cold and when the flood had peaked and we were resting I felt a quick spasm in my body. It was not a shiver so much as a shake and it started in my shoulders and the muscles of the fetal position. In that spasm my body wanted to curl inward for warmth. I didn’t say anything because I thought if I didn’t introduce the cold into our conversation I could keep some of it back, but I did rub my arms and torso underwater and slapped my cheeks and shoulders and arms. I flexed my muscles to try and circulate the blood. We waited and watched a bloom of moonjellies drift by. They were delicate bells and the stars were belled above us too and with the sound of far off buoys I thought I could hear them ringing. When I put my ears under the water I could hear them ringing. I knew now what I was weightless above, eighty feet over the origin.
Another wall of fatigue came upon me but I found the inner gate of the wall and pushed through it. The mind was crushing away and the body becoming warm again from the effort, or at least it did not know it was cold, and we stopped talking to each other for a long time. Every now and then Elvis would say, “Come on” to himself in a kind of hoarse bark. I could hear the loss of breath in his voice. The soul was being pushed in at the edges. Then the mind was gone and there was nothing to think about and the disappearance of the mind put the body into an elation. Without the mind there was nothing that was afraid in you. I was now only a body pushing across and I was addicted to moving and proud of the pain. I was sore and hurt but would not have wanted to stop now even if we’d come across an empty boat to take us back. We were at the last delicate touches of Naushon. We would not be pushed back onto them. We were halfway.
Lucas Shoal lay halfway across the Sound. A ridge that leapt from eighty feet to twelve, in some places six feet. There was no chance we’d stand on it on our tip-toes. In ebb tide a tidal rip would form and it would grow in strength until the next slack. We had to get across it before that but I had no way of telling if we were over it already. It ran for miles through the Sound. I still felt the faint pull of the Elizabeths, about to loosen forever. I also had the reckless thought that if we caught the shoal by ebb tide, the rip might shoot us West and across the Sound but that would be a dangerous swim and I didn’t know how we would fare in it. If we came across the tidal rip we would have to follow its direction no matter what and I couldn’t think now where that would leave us until we faced it. But I was warm in my efforts and brave enough to face it now. I wanted it now.
The moon was passing to the West of the Vineyard. It was low now to the horizon and I saw that it would set at the bottom of the Sound in the open ocean. There was a halo around it. A midnight rainbow. And there was a promise in it that it might be a wall for us so long as it hung in the sky, keeping us from draining away into the ocean.
We readjusted our direction East after a rest. We now swam into the darkness with the moon crossing over us from the side. The change of direction took the moon out of our eyes and we no longer swam in into the white waves of the moon. Rather we swam into a change of color and the change of mood. We were slower now in the pitch black and I had to remind myself of the moon’s promise rather than look into it. It was on the dark side of us.
A boat slowed past us about a hundred yards away and dropped its anchor. It kept its running lights on. It was haloed in the water. We treaded and watched it. It was a thirty-foot Viking.
“If we could just grab a rest on that,” I said.
“I know.”
I couldn’t tell what it was doing but it didn’t move for a very long time and then as we swam slowly towards it I could see the man at the top behind the glass with his feet up on the console.
“He’s taking a nap,” I whispered.
Elvis looked at me. “We need a rest.”
“Yeah.”
We swam to its tender and I put my arms on the back and lifted my head to look for a ladder. I dropped back into the water and reached up with my hand and swung the folded ladder slowly into the water and pulled its rungs down until it was fully extended. My hand was almost claw-like and a little dull of sensation. I lifted up and my legs felt so weak on the ladder I almost fell back into the water. My heaviness shocked me, and my head began to ache. I could feel my heavy breathing now and my heart and my chest was contracting and ballooning rapidly. Weight was coming into my body and it was giving me knowledge about how much my body hurt. I was woozy and cold in the night air and the breeze and I moved my legs slowly up the rungs until I could grab for a cleat and pull myself out. I sat down and began shivering violently and wanted to go right back into the water. I looked for a hatch or a cooler. I walked quietly checking them all and I could hear the cascade of water from Elvis’s body as he raised up. I looked up at the glassed helm and saw the captain’s feet. They didn’t move.
I found us towels and water and a cocacola. We sat down and dried ourselves and shivered uncontrollably and drank. Elvis had struggled as I had to get onto the boat. Our hands shook as we raised the bottles to our lips. We flexed and shook our bodies through the shivers trying to warm. My skin tingled now that it was dry but then it took the cold again and I wrapped myself the best I could. My body was heavier than I could remember it feeling and we sat there looking at the Vineyard until the shivering calmed. We were little more than halfway across and slowing and the tide would soon be against us. We were halfway in nautical miles alone. We had many more hours to go.
We didn’t have time to gamble on the captain’s nap and walked back to the water. I put the towels back and took another soda for Elvis and I and we put them in our pants. Taking the towel off and walking back to the water was one of the hardest things I’d ever done for how cold I was. I remembered the water as being warmer than the air when we got out but this time the water was freezing and I reached my foot back.
“Fuck,” I whispered. “It’s really cold.”
We had to lower ourselves slowly to avoid making any sound and it was a torture. I turned to face Elvis as I lowered and grimaced the whole way, pausing every now and then on a rung. “We have to, we have to, we have to,” I kept saying to myself. My body had goosebumps all the way up to my ears and cheeks and my forehead ached in anticipation of the coldness. “Don’t be a fucking pussy,” I told myself. It was the voice of the ego and every physical feat I had ever done added itself into this voice. The voice had been training my whole life. “Are you a fucking pussy?” “No,” I said. My body did not want to go back in and begged my legs to stop. It was disheartening to only be halfway across the Sound in this state, but I had answered no to the inner taunt.
The cold was the worst at my chest and shoulders but I pushed myself down and gasped and exhaled loudly in the water. I treaded there watching Elvis and my toes cramped in the shock and folded in toward my heel. I tried to breathe smoothly. My head ached badly. I grabbed onto the tender with my arm and lifted my foot to my other hand and massaged into the sole of my foot where the cramp was. I did it with the other too and then treaded as long as I could with my arms wrapped around my torso, treading only with my legs. I knew this was a waste of energy and I let go into the cold. I let go the defense of my tensed muscles and made peace with the cold and it hurt and I accepted the pain and I was pain. My musculature took the pain as its design.
Elvis took just as slowly getting in and was exhaling loudly in the water. We swam away and working the muscles pushed some warmth back into our bodies but we were sorer now from the rest we took. When we next stopped my teeth chattered and I thought that wasn’t good. A shiver had entered the balance of our bodies and I knew it would stay all the way to the Vineyard. We had passed slack tide on the boat. It was ebb now.
A half an hour later we came to a buoy in the Sound. My arms were too sore to reach for its cleats. I wanted to rest and Elvis reached too and couldn’t grasp them and fell back in frustration. We were becoming clumsy. I felt around the base of the buoy and there were sharp barnacles and nowhere to hold onto and rest. Elvis put both of his arms up on the edge of the buoy and hung there. I tried this on the other side from him and when the buoy listed toward you it was restful but when it bobbed away it lifted you too high in the water and put a strain on your arms and it was painful in the skin to dip like this in and out of the cold.
We dropped from it and treaded water looking up at it.
“If we could just boost up onto the edge we could sit there awhile and rest,” Elvis said. I could hear his teeth chatter. Mine chattered too when we rested.
“I just don’t think there’s a way.”
There was a channel marker not far and I sidestroked to it. It was smaller in the water and I wrapped my arms around it and floated for a moment. It was hard to find the right position because to truly float without taxing my body my legs would have to level out but that put a strain on my back so I just lay there hugging it, only straining when the water lifted it too high and I had to wrap it harder to hold on.
I called for Elvis and looked back at him straining to get up on the buoy. He had grabbed one of the cleats and had his legs climbing up the side of it. He climbed enough to grab with one arm for one of its central rungs and pulled his chest up so that his elbows were on top of the base. He rested there and I could see that his legs were heavy and he could not swing them up easily. I saw him use up too much of his strength in this. He could have used a place to lift and rest a knee but his body was too fatigued to position his hand hold properly to swing his leg up. Even fresh it would have been hard for a man to do. He reached for a higher rung and his knee caught about a half a foot below the lip of the buoy, and he pulled on the rungs trying to slide his knee over the edge but just a few inches from the edge the strength in his left leg braced against the platform of the buoy gave out and his chest hit against the buoy and he let go and pushed so that his chin would not clip the edge and splashed into the water.
I swam to him and his head came up exhausted, panting.
“Come here, El. This buoy is easier.”
I swam to it slowly with him. He tried to wrap his arms around it as I had.
“My arms are dead. I can’t.”
I felt for the mooring line with my hands.
“Here, grab the line.”
Elvis felt for it.
“I can’t close my hands around it.”
I felt the chain of the mooring line almost diagonal in my hands and my hands could not close around it either. They were like claws and couldn’t move properly. They were not my own hands. Only when I squeezed tight did I feel every inch in them again.
“Squeeze it tight,” I said.
He squeezed tight and then settled into a comfortable hand hold and floated there. The water was flowing past the buoy slowly. I knew it would pick up. I looked at the island and we were far West now of where we’d been. We’d been swimming slowly and resting more and so the ebb had taken away all the Eastward progress we’d made in the first half of the swim. But we were closer to the Vineyard now and I thought I could see some details of beach in it. I could almost distinguish beach from bluff and tree in the gradations of darkness.
We had to swim against the tide now and aim East almost perpendicular to the island to use the currents correctly. We left the buoys and Elvis urged us on with his bark, “Come on! Come on!” and we yelped a bit against the pain and the cold. We dug into our anger.
“You’re gonna kill Frank, El. You’re gonna fucking kill him.”
“I’m gonna blow his brains out. I’m gonna shoot him in the fucking face!”
We crawled forward and my hands were completely gone now. They were numb blocks. I was tiring into what felt like death and I was overalert on this edge but I still had strength in me. We were murderers earning our kill, I thought to myself. I knew what should really happen with the gun, but I thought also that we were earning the right to murder.
“We’re closer! We’re closer!”
“Come on!”
We yelled at each other to keep ourselves going. We whipped each other’s backs forward with our voices. We had to. It felt warm when we yelled. Another hour dragged and at the end of its sluggishness and its fatigue I felt for the first time in my life a little current inside myself. A little hatch had been opened to death and if I just gave up I knew deep in my body that I would die. It was in me to die. There was a natural gate. But it was like a whirlpool and if I swam far from the edges of its entrance I could get past it. But there was an event horizon to the feeling. I was not in it but I could glimpse the edge beyond from which there was no going back. It was not good enough to give up to die, but I felt then that you would have to make a move, a twist inside, to enter it. Then there would be only the unstoppable freefall, the perfect congruence to dying. Everytime I felt this inside I yelled at Elvis.
“Come on El! Come on!”
Our words were shrinking in the cold to one syllable, to grunts. Elvis barked in a way that sounded like, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” We had to have the kill up in us. We would kill. We had to have murderous hearts to catch good breaths.
We were drifting now toward Menemsha Bight and the beaches had a faint glow to them. My body had lost completely the outerwrapping of its warmth and the cold had only the bone to travel into. My warmth was in the glow of the beach, I thought. It was false dawn and the moon had slipped over the whole of the Vineyard and lay now low over the water at the end of the Sound. We’d been swimming for what must have been six hours. My eyes had begun to blur from the salt and it was only our wills now pushing us forward heavily. We were turned away from the moon in the way we swam but when I’d stop to look at it I knew it was our final leg. When it dropped we were on our own. We had to get across.
The ebb tide was picking up strength against us and we came across another boat resting at anchor with its lights on. It was a cabin cruiser and I couldn’t see anyone in it. We swam to its engine but when I felt for its ladder I was clumsy with it and it smacked into the water. I could hear the man aboard come out of the cabin. Elvis and I clung to the sides of the boat treading and shivering I could hear the man walk in the bow and then I heard the door close again. The engine was warm and I put my hands on it. Elvis got his leg on the rung but we were clumsy bodies and the boat was much smaller than the Viking before it and we rocked it as we held on. Elvis’s body was spasming in the cold and he made too much noise and dropped back as the hatch opened.
The man walked quickly to the side of the boat and looked over its edge. His head was above us and I feared he would hear our teeth chattering. But he looked further out at sea. He decided on something and pulled out one of his rods from the gunwale and cast it out over our heads. He cast and reeled in a couple times and I looked where he cast and could see the white braid of the rips. He reeled in for the last time and pushed the lure into the handle and went to the wheel and started the engine. We were at the back of the boat and I pushed from the boat now in fear of the propellor. Elvis did the same and the man put the boat forward gently and headed for the rips. We watched him a ways and he dropped an umbrella rig in the rip and trolled.
We were outside the Eastern edge of Lucas shoal and the ebb tide was drawing us into the rips. I panicked a little and turned my back to the rip and swam sideways from it with Elvis.
“Swim Elvis, swim. We have to get out.”
I could not feel my arms but I pushed myself as best I could without overtaxing. We were a mile now from the Vineyard but we’d have to swim more than that against the tide to reach the shore. I could see the reentrant curves of her shores, the coves of her conscience. I could see the silver of curvature just over the white caps.
In the confusion of the swim and the rips we soon found ourselves inside a calm, glassy current and the edge of the rip before us. The ridge below that formed the rips was miles long and there were many shapes and patterns to her currents and her waves. We were in a beautiful confused knot that only slack tide could untie. My heart dropped as I saw us getting sucked Southward and the waves of the rip getting taller. The waves faced us and the Vineyard was flying away. We’d have to swim South away from the island to get clear.
“Swim with it!” I yelled and angled in a diagonal position with the current. This put me facing the moon again. “Calm!” I kept my eye on the Vineyard just over the waves. The waves were loud here and babbling to each other. The moon had fallen low to the horizon like a wall that would keep us from draining out only one hour more before it set. It was small and faint now in the light and my blurred eyes.
I was too tired to front crawl and my neck no longer burned but knifed me with pain. I tried to pick smooth lanes between the waves and quarter into them in a sidestroke. If we didn’t get across, the rip would ferry us out beyond Aquinnah and the island and then we’d be done. I knew I’d wear myself out in a front stroke. I knew this would drown me. I stayed patient as I could in the panic, but these were the screams in the body of last pains. I knew I was on the edge of last feelings, tethers snapping in the will. This was the feeling before the will gave out and the soul in the water sprung its leak and was drawn into the inner waves of the Sound. My lungs burned and I wasn’t breathing well anymore but I found a stroke and was pushed sideways through the waves. They seemed never to get closer but just stay in place. But then finally you’d get to their white cap and you’d go sideways over them. They were so still it looked almost like you could grab the white caps as hand holds and drag yourself over them.
The Vineyard beyond the waves was rushing away and I was sucked under the back of the rips a few times but I would just tread and my head would get above water. I seemed to make progress out. Once I crossed a few of the waves I learned the pattern and my innertiming matched the currents and I tried to take it calmly and breathe slow. I was at the last looping edge and my face was turned in the sidestroke to look down the whole length of the rip and I saw it all the way South to the moon, like the last lane of the moon before it set, like some aspect of its reflection got into the sea itself. My eyes were blurry and so I saw mostly the dark, cracked glitter as the sky began to grow light and the faint haze of the moon sinking where the rips ended.
I made the last standing wave of the rip and it was tall and long. It had some light catching in it and I broke it. I ripped it. I tore it slowly and got across. Even here I could not stop and rest because the current would just push me right back in again and all my effort would be a waste. I switched sides now that the waves were lower and I sidestroked in my dead weight North. A little more you tell yourself, a little more. And then you go further and you lie to yourself again. A little more and then further. Further.
Aquinnah was still on my right and Menemsha before me, and I felt a glimmer of relief at that. I kept on swimming and my ears were deafened. The adrenalin now rushed over the cold in thin tendrils, throbbing against the cold of my body like the veins and last threads of the will were physical and I could feel them stretched and snapping at the faintest touch. My body glowed with the adrenalin and the glow became painful and I could feel the pain like blades against my body. My head ached and I was dazed and could not see but felt the direction of everything and kept pushing that way slowly. The tides were in me.
After quite a long time I turned to look for Elvis but he wasn’t with me.
I tried to yell for him but I was so cold and I could only get my mouth around one syllable at a time. I could not see him in the waves if he was there and my ears could not hear. My eyes were blurry and fogged almost to blindness. I was so close now to Menemsha and the moon was halfway down the horizon of the open ocean and the bluing sky. It was dawn on the other side of the island in Edgartown. With my eyes the way they were I could hardly tell it. I felt only the rush of every second plummeting out of the night and the last lift of the moon above the water. I looked over the backs of the waves at dark head-like shapes but they could have been buoy markers. I tried to rest but the Vineyard just rushed past me everytime I did and I had to keep crawling and I swam to the dark shapes but they were all buoy markers for lobster pots.
The cold was in the bone now, almost as deep as the marrow of the will, and this marrow was teetering on the impossible. I was at that last inner gate, like the innerwaves that move below the surface. You can see these inner waves sometimes from high above the water, their lighter shade of blue meandering through the water, and I was through this now, and the innerwaves of my body were flowing through this gate. I felt the tug of that whirlpool of death inside me loosen as my fogged eyes saw how close to shore I was. I saw rocks and by the shore I came across a submerged ledge a foot below the water. I held it and caught what little breath there was to catch and saw a cropping above the water ten yards ahead and swam to it. I held one and gasped across it. My hands were numb so I pinned them against the rock without feeling. I got to its side where the ebb pushed me against it and I held on for a long time. My neck ached and light was coming back to the earth and when I had rested my neck I lifted it and looked for Elvis and cried his name. But I had no strength in my lungs, not even to cry and I never saw his head. The whirlpool inched closer now to my heart the longer I waited to get to shore and I looked at the horizon and the moon was gone and I was alone and I knew now I had to push. I had to push and get to shore or I would die. The corridor of safety that had opened up to me days before was gone. It had pushed me up ahead as far as it could.
The water was dark, for sunrise was on the other side of the Vineyard. The Vineyard too looked dark, except there was sunlight bent around the tilt of its trees and its glowing ring was brimming over the top of the Vineyard now like a break of light coming round the edge of an eclipse. Stars were lost in the brightness of the ring. There was a band of brightness where the waves hit the beach too. In my blurred eyes it looked like an eclipse of the sun. It was the end of the totality of the night and I saw my soul in that inch of light. I was down to my last edge, my last silver inch of soul and I pawed forward in a kind of doggy paddle too destroyed to stretch my body into a stroke. I felt the draw now of the Vineyard. I felt it take me back in slowly. Still I could not make much distance in a doggy paddle and lay on my back looking up at the fogged sky and stroked my arms and legs as best I could. My head hit a rock and I did not feel the pain of it except dull waves radiated through my body from where I had hit it. I rolled over and the beach was before me and I looked down and I could see sand below me and I paddled in a mix of excitement and desperation and got to where I could get my hands and knees in the sand and I knew I would not die. I looked down at my hands in the sand and felt my back and my skin exploding in pain out in the air and I coughed and exhaled and spasmed so strongly I thought my lungs would give out and my back would break and maybe I would die afterall. My legs wobbled as I tried to wade and I crawled forward until I got past the tide line. I knelt on all fours for a long time dry heaving and coughing and gasping. Coughs were so deep and gnarled and painful that it kept me from my breath and I almost passed out. Then I tried to push up with my arms and stand on my knees but I fell back forward. I knew I would not be able to walk. I laid on my stomach out of the water a long time shivering until I could drag myself up behind a rock. The sunlight was on the beach now and I crawled up into it behind the rock. The warmth of a light was on a separate layer of my skin that did not work inside. My mind hurtled out of some secret place in me and as the sun broke over the top of the Vineyard I was gone into the darkness. It was the little hatch of death and I gave into it because it could not drain me out to the bottom of the ocean. I was safe on Earth.
I was shivering so hard that the pain of it woke me. I could not see well and my eyes stung and I kept them closed for a long time. Sunlight burst into my eyes now and blew its gold into the last silver inch of my soul. As I lay there coughing and shivering in the bright sand I opened my eyes every now and again to test my vision and take some light and saw a shape on the beach collapse. I squeezed my eyes to clear the fogbanks and I saw something on the ground coming to me very slowly. It took a long time. It was on its hands and knees and then its stomach. I could not see clearly through the fog and I could not move forward to get a better look. As the shape crawled toward me, I saw it was Elvis.
 | A guest post by
|