The passageway turned and ended in a closed hatchway. Good enough, beyond that would be an unbreached compartment. But he had to get it open and get through. Warmish salt water foamed up around his waist as he worked the dogs of the hatch one-handed, left arm thrust under a railing to hold him. So many locks on these bulkhead doors! He was in danger of getting knocked over, drowned while inside the ship. Had to go under foam to get to the bottom dogs, and they were stiff as hell. Okay, last one. Flash of triumph as he put his weight on the handle and pushed out. The door was snatched from his good hand and the water behind him shoved him over the coping and right out the door—onto the open deck of the ship. Wrong hatch! He dug with his feet, trying to get a purchase and get back inside. Then water surged up around him and he was off and away, swept away helplessly. His leg hit something and he grasped for it. Caught it, had his grip torn away. Then he was tumbling underwater, thrashed in a soup as if body surfing. Instinctively he clawed upward, broke the surface with lungs bursting, took in a big gasp of air and foam, choked and was rolled under again.
Free of the ship, he thought. Probably so. Fear took all the air out of his lungs. Desperately he swam, up and up and up. He got to the surface and trod the boiling surface furiously. Yes, free of the ship. Couldn’t see it anywhere. Overboard in a hurricane, “No!” he cried out, the word wrenched from him. Then under again and reeling, lungs burning as he held on. Drowned for sure, just a matter of time. He clawed madly to the surface, too frightened to let go. Another breath, another. He looked around for the ship, saw nothing. Too tired to move, and at the bottom of a trough with a wave forty feet high over his head. Hell.
Under again and somersaulting. Punched in the stomach. No way to tell up from down. This had happened to him body surfing as a kid, he had almost drowned three or four times. Swim to shore. He forced his eyes open. Green white black. He had to breathe, he couldn’t breathe, he had to breathe and it was water he breathed; feeling it he choked in panic and thrashed upward and held his breath again, and then breathed in and out and in and out and in and out; and all of it water. Helpless to stop himself. He felt the water heavy inside him, lungs and stomach both, and marveled that he was still conscious, still thinking. You really do get a last moment, he thought. What do you know.
And indeed he felt an enormous liquid clarity growing in him, like a flash of something or other. It was quiet and blue black white, a riot of bubbles flying in every direction around him, glowing. Blue capture plate, white quarks. Done for. Relax. Concentrate. He cast his mind deliberately back to his wife, her face, his baby held easily in his hands, and then the images tumbled, a forested cliff over ocean, a window filled with blue sky and clouds, swirling like bubbles of nothing in the rich blue field of the life he had lived, every day of it his and Pamela’s, and the crying out of his cells for oxygen felt like the pain of all that love given and lost, nothing of it saved, nothing but the implosion of drowning, the euphoria of release—and all the blue world and its blue beauty tumbled around him, flashed white and he snapped alert, wanting to speak, pregnant with a thought that would never be born.
11
Out.
How I hugged that lawyer. He just looked tired. Lucky, he said. Procedural irregularity.
He drove me to a restaurant. Looking out the car window, stunned. Everything looked different. Fragile. Even America is fragile. I didn’t know that before.
At the restaurant we drank coffee.
What will you do? the lawyer said.
I didn’t have the faintest idea. I don’t know, I said. Go to New York and meet my wife’s ship when it comes in. Get cross country to my kid, find some kind of work. Survive.
There was a newspaper on the next table but I couldn’t look at it. Crisis to crisis, we’re too close to the edge, you can feel the slippage in the heat of the air.
And suddenly I was telling him about it, the heat, the barbed wire, the nights in the dorm, the presence of the hospital, the fear, the courage of all those inside. It’s not fair, I said, my voice straining. They shouldn’t be able to do that to them! I seized the newsaper, shook it. They shouldn’t be able to do any of this!
I know, the lawyer said, sipping his coffee and looking at me. But people are afraid. They’re afraid of what’s happening, and they’re afraid of the changes we would have to make to stop it from happening.
But we’ve got to change! I cried.
The lawyer nodded. Do you want to help?
What do you mean?
Do you want to help change things?
Of course I do! Of course, but how? I mean I tried, when I lived in California I tried as hard as I could….
Look, Mr. Barnard, he said. Tom. It takes more than an individual effort. And more than the old institutions. We’ve started an organization here in Washington, DC, so far it’s sort of a multi-issue lobbying group, but essentially we’re trying to start a new political party, something like the Green parties in Europe.
He described what they were doing, what their program was. Change the law of the land, the economic laws, the environmental laws, the relationship between local and global, the laws of property.
Now there’re laws forbidding that kind of change, I said. That’s what they were trying to get me on.
We know. There are people afraid of us, you see. It’s a sign we’re succeeding. But there’s a long way to go. It’s going to be a battle. And we can use all the help we can get. We know what you were doing in California. You could help us. You shouldn’t just go out there and survive, that would be a waste. You should stay here and help.
I stared at him.
Think about it, he said.
So I thought about it. And later I met with some of his colleagues, and talked about this new party, and met more people, and talked some more. And I saw that there is work here that I can do.
I’m going to stay. There’s a job and I’ll take it. Work for Pam, too. Talked to her on the ship-to-shore, and she sounded pleased. A job, after all, and her kind of work. My kind of work.
It didn’t take all that much to convince me, really. Because I have to do something. Not just write a utopia, but fight for it in the real world—I have to, I’m compelled to, and talking with one of the people here late one night I suddenly understood why: because I grew up in utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child’s paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed, I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure, and when I came home my mother and father created a home as solid as rock, the world seemed solid! And it comes to this, do you understand me—I grew up in utopia.