On the other side of the pool, Oliver was still swimming and would have kept his head in the water for many more laps, but he must have noticed all the new adult swimmers crowding; he didn’t make his turn. He hung on to the wall instead, still wearing his dark goggles, his gaze settling immediately on Vik and his wife. He just watched them talk, or Vik talk. There was nothing else for him to do. Finally Betty begged him to please stop doing this now and Vik, seeing there was nowhere to go, relented. He walked to Fan on the near side of the pool.
How are you? he said, his pleasing face all broken into parts.
I’m fine, Fan said, her own chest heavy. I hope you will be, too.
Thank you, he answered. Then he slowly walked to the far end with a dignified deliberateness. When he reached the last two lanes, he donned his goggles and then dove into the pool in the next-to-last lane. He smoothly swam the length, freestyle, heading toward where Oliver was now treading at the wall, and when he got there, he didn’t stop or slow but made a flip turn and reversed, kicking hard away. Oliver followed him in his own lane, by the half point catching up to Vik. They kept pace with each other for the rest of the length, their speed more steady than anything else, as if they wanted to be going side by side, as if the eyeing each other were building up their strength.
Then, near the wall, Oliver swam beneath the lane divider and into Vik’s lane, and when they both flipped and turned, they were still neck and neck, but now flying. The commotion and sight of two swimmers racing in the same lane was now drawing the pool’s attention, such that people were collecting along the four sides to watch them go, crowding and leaning over one another, including Fan and Pinah the helper, so they could see these two, the long man and the short man, the gliding strides and the pistons, their arms sometimes tangling or even striking the other on the shoulder, the cap, the torsos jostling and pushing each other against the divider, riding up over it. There was a race to win but neither knew how long the race was, they just kept eating up lengths until Vik, longer and more fit for having been swimming all these years, began to pull away, one length becoming two, becoming three, until it was no longer a race anymore, Vik flipping and turning against a straggling Oliver and then turning again, clearly keen on reaching and lapping him.
By this time Betty was shouting for Oliver to stop, to get out of the pool. When Oliver saw Vik closing, he made a furious kick, perhaps for propulsion, but it caught Vik in the nose and instantly bloodied him. There was a guffaw from the spectators, both swimmers now treading in the pinking water. Vik held his face and saw the blood and then fell upon Oliver, the people around now yelling, Betty screaming, with some of the spectators so riled they either stepped in or jumped in themselves or were pushed in from behind, so that others might see the swimmers fighting, though lifeguards and some swim team members had already jumped in and separated Vik and Oliver.
Fan couldn’t see any more for the bigger people blocking her view, but she did notice Pinah through the scrum, or rather she saw the pinned dark hair of Pinah’s head, suspended a foot below the surface of the water. Her arms flanked wide. Fan jumped in and crouched at the bottom and then shot them both up with a fierce boost of her legs, the plumpish woman much heavier than Fan would have ever thought. Some people on the deck pulled Pinah out and a lifeguard started working on her, Fan watching from the water as she caught her breath at the pool ladder. Luckily the guard got Pinah to cough and hack and start to breathe again quickly, as she’d been under for only a few seconds.
Fan climbed out quickly, panicking for a second, but saw the twins still secured in their bouncers, if now crying. But she didn’t want to pick them up for how soaked she was, her loose sweatpants and T-shirt now clinging to her. Then she saw a toweled, totally spent Oliver being hugged by Betty at the other end of the pool. Betty was fiercely whispering to him, perhaps beseeching him. Whether he was, in fact, listening to her, Fan could not tell. All she knew was that he was staring at her with the deadest eyes, the hollow of the feeling making her instinctively pull the wet fabric from her belly.
26
Look at the fish.
Our best B-Mor primes. Look at the eyes, luminous and clear. Even on ice, the scales are tiled tight to one another, the points of the fins unbroken, unclipped. Peel forward the gills and see the darkest cherry red, as if there’s blood hotly pushing through its robust, meaty body. The mouth is closed but not clamped in any grimace, saying instead this with a tranquil set of jaw:
We are in good order.
Take us up.
We are ready to be chosen.
And choose them they do. For the rumors are done. Any remnants of the months-long scare about the wholesomeness of our fish are now very few, to be found in only the most phobic quarters, such as those flats and villas where they parse every morsel and sip and likely never enjoyed them anyway. The rest, however, are back at the fish shops all across the Association, queuing as before and with their unyielding Charter scrutiny selecting the ones they deem the brightest, finest, the most pure. They have absolute confidence in their ability to discern and analyze and perhaps well they should, given where they are. They fully believe in themselves, and it doesn’t matter if our fish are of unsurpassed quality, virtually identical in size and composition, and raised in such a way as to make it almost impossible, if not ridiculous, to try to choose among them. And yet they do, studying the displays like they were buying gemstones, and while there are no jostling scrums like at a special clearance or sale in B-Mor, when someone else picks the very one they’ve identified as theirs, the one they’d determined was destined to best nourish and block any rogue unknittings in their cells, they can’t help but get there just a bit earlier the next time.
The result has been a heady rise in the price per kilo of #1 primes, enough, in fact, to get us near the record levels reached during the last big boom, when it seemed no Charter could go for more than a couple of days without a fillet on his plate. All the facility tanks are full again with every stage of them, from specks of fry to the stoutest matureds, the concrete floor of the grow houses tickling the feet with the constant vibrato of the filter pumps running around the clock, the air heavier, moister (though it truly can’t be, given how engineered everything is) with the enriched quality of the reprocessed effluent dripping onto the plant beds. These are growing as dense as ever, so that you can hardly see a coworker weeding directly on the other side, merely hearing the threshing of his gloved hands against the stalks.
And from all this flush being there’s a scent that is at once off-putting and sweetly alluring, too, whiffs of faint rot and newest life columned together and vented through the roof so that the surrounding households of B-Mor must be dreaming of every earthly hunger, of filling themselves with whatever goodness may be at hand. Or are their lights burning later, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning, to feed newly roused desires?
The rest of us have no such wafts carrying across our paths, and yet here we are in the mall-going throng, like everyone else pursuing our day’s own trivial ends but feeling drawn in, too, by the wider pitch and tow. There’s no specialness or majesty in this, there’s nothing different from what has gone on here since the originals set themselves up, we descendants doing what we should be doing, workday or free-day, in the households or in the parks, contracting ourselves for best use and the welfare of the run of times to come. Nobody knows the future. So when we chat on the stoops, say, before the evening chill finally drives us in, of the lady on the next block who attempted to circumvent the usual regulations and produce her own designer line of fashion slippers in her attic using a platoon of counties peddlers as cheap labor, or of the man who was caught sitting at night — totally unclothed — high up in one of the largest trees in the park because he simply wanted, he said, a better view of the stars, we rib one another and chuckle and maybe even argue about the state of our settlement, though with no more of those uneasy skips or pauses, no more throaty, dire tones. We speak and abide one another and then we go in.