The Call

WHAT I WANT TO KNOW: How Misty Hyman keeps her head so low and her palms facing up to the sky in her recovery. I cannot keep my palms up to the sky for long because it hurts in the shoulders.

WHAT I SHOULD DO: Watch my Misty Hyman video over and over again.

WHAT VICTORIA SAYS: If your ring finger is longer than your forefinger, you’re good at competitive sports.

WHAT MY RING FINGER IS: Slightly longer than my forefinger.

WHAT VICTORIA SAYS: People who are fat are inflamed all the time. The fat presses in on them, causing the inflammation. Their bodies react to this. Their bodies are always working hard to fight the inflammation. Their bodies always feel like they’re sick.

WHAT MIA THINKS WOULD BE A GOOD NAME FOR THE MASTER’S SWIM TEAM: The Sea Slugs.

WHAT THE TEAM IS ALREADY NAMED: The Manta Rays. The logo on the swim caps, instead of looking like a manta ray, looks like a sperm traveling through its liquid medium.

WHAT THE COACH DOES: Takes care of a young man named Ted. Ted is in a wheelchair.

WHAT I DON’T KNOW: Why Ted is in a wheelchair. Ted is not right. It seems like whatever happened to him, happened long ago, before he was born, and just as his cells were beginning to divide.

WHAT TED SAYS TO ME: I do not know. I cannot understand Ted. While I am sitting in a chair on the pool deck watching the children swim, he sometimes holds a magazine or a catalog and he wheels his chair over to mine and points to the pictures and says something I do not understand. Sometimes the pictures are of cell phones or of cars. Maybe Ted is trying to tell me that he wants a cell phone, or that he wants a car.

WHAT TED DID ONE TIME: Fell into the pool in his wheelchair. He was removed quickly. Everyone jumped in to help him. He was smiling when we brought him up, and still holding onto his drenched catalog. Coach thinks that Ted may have released his brake on purpose. Ted likes the water. Ted likes to swim. Coach sometimes straps a flotation device to Ted’s waist and Ted gets into the pool and moves his arms to move through the water. Ted is always smiling when he’s swimming.

WHAT I THINK TED IS THINKING WHILE HE’S IN THE WATER: That he’s a dolphin.

WHAT MY WIFE AND I SOMETIMES WATCH ON OUR TELEVISION WHILE WE’RE DOING SIT-UPS AND PUSH-UPS: Old episodes of The Twilight Zone. Oh, he was profound, Jen says, because after every episode Rod Serling will quote Shakespeare or some famous philosopher like Khalil Gabran, who tells us what true love truly is. We watch the episodes on DVD because we don’t have television reception and you can tell when there’s a pause in the episode, that that is when a commercial was planned to air and Jen pretends it really is a commercial and she pretends we are our parents watching the show, and she says, Dahling, time for a cig and a martini. Because that’s all our parents seemed to do when we were young, was smoke and drink, and they were not, as my wife and I are doing, huffing and puffing and strengthening our muscles so that they could have a stronger fly, a faster turn, lower levels.

WHAT COACH MAKES US DO: Swim underwater two lengths of the pool without taking a breath.

WHAT I CAN’T DO: Hold my breath for even one length. I am sorry. I just like to breathe, I tell coach.

WHAT I AM ASKED TO SUBSTITUTE-TEACH: Art. I don’t know anything about art.

WHAT I TELL THE KIDS IN ART CLASS: I don’t know what art is. I just know it when I see it.

WHAT I DO DURING ART: Sit at the teacher’s desk and study German.

WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Maybe your levels are telling you to take it easy. Maybe you shouldn’t be cutting enough wood for the next ten years.

WHAT I SAY: What is your fascination with my levels? Do you miss Sam being in a coma? Do you miss constantly worrying about someone’s health in the family? And besides, maybe my levels are saying, “Cut, cut, cut away!”

WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: That’s not what your levels are saying. Your levels have more common sense than that.

WHAT IS SURPRISING: That according to Jen, not only can my levels beg, talk, appreciate food, join a swim team-they now have common sense.

WHAT THE CHILDREN SAY WHEN I GET HOME: Poppy, we are expecting ten inches of snow.

WHAT I SAY: Good, then when you stay home from school I can teach you math and German and violin and history. I can tell you about the Russian Revolution, about the czars killed in the basement and no one knew where their bodies were buried because they did not want some people to dig them up and put them in a tomb and worship their tomb and wish for the old regime to resurface. I can tell you about the Nazi war criminals, who when they were killed, were buried in unknown places for the same reason, so that no shrine would be created that worshipped the perpetrators of the Nazi killing machine. I can tell you about first position, and drawing your bow across your strings using your wrist and not sawing your elbow back and forth. I can tell you about angles, how in a parallelogram opposite angles are equal.

WHAT THE WIFE COOKS FOR DINNER: Mushroom barley soup.

WHAT THERE IS MORE OF IN THE SOUP THAN MUSHROOMS AND BARLEY: Carrots.

WHAT I SAY TO THE WIFE: My levels are saying where are the mushrooms?

WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Tell your levels they can cook dinner next time.

WHAT THE HOUSE SAYS AT NIGHT: I’m closing you in, and buttoning you tight.

WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: What’s that noise? Oh, it’s the rabbit drinking her water, she says.

WHAT I, FOR A SECOND, THINK THE RABBIT CAN DO: Cure me. The all-seeing rabbit some kind of swami, some kind of medicine man. Is it the soft touch of her whiskers on my face when I’m lying on the carpet that can lower my levels?

WHAT SARAH SAYS WE SHOULD MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT: Rabbits running the country, and doing a good job of it, considering they are peaceful and vegetarian.

WHAT THE SNOW SAID: I will fall out to sea, steer clear of your green mountains, leave you still with your old snow, now yellow with piss from your dogs. You will have no snow day with your children, you will not teach them German, violin, and the demise of the czars. Sit alone in your house, listen to your Newfoundlands snoring loudly by the fire, wait for the phone to ring.

WHAT I THINK I COULD HAVE BEEN: A professional swimmer.

WHAT TED, AT THE POOL IN THE WHEELCHAIR, BROUGHT IN TO SHOW ME: A magazine with a picture of a man with a moose head mounted on his office wall, and then on the other side of the wall, reaching into another man’s office, the moose’s body was hanging in the air, above the man’s desk. I had to laugh. Ted laughed, too. I don’t know why I think it, but I do. I sometimes think that Ted could be Jesus Christ and I don’t even believe in Jesus Christ, but maybe he is.

WHAT THE COACH TELLS US: That because so many people are losing their jobs, we may have to defend ourselves from people coming into our homes and taking what they want from us. We may have to have our guns ready, he says. We are sitting in a hot, crowded gymnasium at a technical school. We are waiting for our kids to compete in their swim heats. Coach is telling me this and above him hangs a basketball hoop that is missing its net. It looks like some kind of halo impossibly far from his head. Around us kids play video games, and read, and eat, and drink Gatorade, and run around playing tag, all waiting for their heats.

WHAT I THINK WE MUST BE: Crazy to spend an entire weekend waiting in the gym of a technical school, but I know years from now we will look back and say these were good times, maybe the best because we were with our children all the time. Sam is stronger every day. He’s almost what he once was and nothing else matters. I look at my wife across the gym, leading Mia to the concession counter to buy a drink. I see my wife turn and look out across the sea of people and I wave to her and it is amazing that she can see me, but I know she does because she waves back.

WHAT THE WIFE COOKS FOR DINNER: Nothing. We are far from home, and go to an Italian restaurant where the waitress forgets to bring us bread.