Floating

“I’m off to the sea,” Charlie said.

He was standing up, sand burning hot under his feet, with hands on his hips. It was no small feat for him to be standing like that, especially after laying on a shaded sunbed for the last hour, drifting off in lukewarm darkness. But slowly, very slowly, he managed to convince his mind to at least do something about the stomach-twisting numbness he felt, and with a jolt of will, he sprang to his feet.

Now he was standing some twenty feet away, under the shade of a parasol that was not his own. For a moment he felt he was going to faint, but then the orange fireworks blurring his vision dispersed and he could clearly see the two persons to whom he had directed his inquiry.

On the right sunbed sat Paul, his cousin, skinny and unimposing, but with a good build and what Charlie’s girlfriend called “a surfer’s tan”. His bulky nose and thick eyebrows were the only traits they had in common. He was in reflective sunglasses and speedos too small for his size. Charlie always found this kind of sunglasses rude; there was something unfair about reflecting your own mug back at you, more unfair than simply not seeing the person’s eyes.

Facing Paul and mirroring his smile, was Rebecca, Charlie’s girlfriend. Her hair was squirrel-brown, lightly touched by the sun. It disappeared below her neckline and then curled out from behind her shoulders. She never brushed the tails. Her matching set of bikini were layered with triangular zigzags: blue, pink, yellow, blue, pink… Charlie could see the pattern with his eyes closed. She was looking at his cousin, and much to Charlie’s dismay, neither of them was giving two shits about him.

Thinking he might have only thought up his statement without voicing it (he knew this wasn’t the case), he repeated:

“I’m going to the sea. You want to join?”

The first to turn was his cousin, eyebrows lifted in a fake imitation of a startled mouse. He faced forward before lifting his chin up, as if his gaze had to scale the roundness of Charlie’s belly to finally arrive at the level of his face.

“Mmmm… nah.” Paul squeezed his lips in a grimace of a jazz player hard at work; but of course, he was no jazz player. He turned to Rebecca. “Do you… want to?”

In the biggest affront he experienced this morning, Charlie’s girlfriend didn’t turn, but kept her stare at his cousin, her smile slowly deflating as if trying to get some confirmation from behind his rude sunglasses. At last she turned to Charlie.

“Maybe in a while, you know. Think I’d want to chill a bit more.”

Even though Charlie expected this, it still hurt him, and he didn’t know why. In an effort to draw attention from himself, he looked at the table beneath the parasol.

“Were you playing cards?”

“Oh, mostly chatting,” Rebecca said. “I saw you were napping so we just came here not to disturb you.”

“That’s fine.”

“Yeah…” She turned to his cousin, too busy staring at Charlie’s bellybutton. “But… maaaybe in an hour?” This got Paul’s attention. His jazz-player grimace softened while she nodded her head. “Yeeeah, I think in an hour or so we can go swimming. How about that? Do you want to wait for us?”

The answer to this, at least, came to Charlie instantly: “No. I’ll just go myself.”

“Alright.” Rebecca exhaled. The wayward locks of hair trembled at the outline of her shoulders. “Enjoy the water!”

“Thanks.”

Charlie turned and walked away. As much as he wanted to turn a blind eye, he did hear a quiet chatter of conversation resuming behind his back, and he wondered at his curiosity, and at the squeeze in his stomach, and he tried to explain why he was stressed while everything was going just fine. He was on Tenerife, his favorite among the Canaries, and the sun was shining, and the sky was clear. For god’s sake, he was here to relax.

He made a beeline to the shore, unbothered by the scorching sand. As his feet registered the cool water spilling over his toes, all his thoughts evaporated. The sea was aquamarine with patches of deeper blue. Lithe shadows glided across the seabed. Few kids were playing inside, and those who did kept to the left bank of the beach. No waves. No swimmers. The low tide drew in and retreated, and Charlie found himself just standing here, stupefied by how pleasant it felt.

He stepped forward, watching underwater sand burst sluggishly from beneath his feet. When the water was up to his waist, he dove in. The sea enveloped him, carried him forward, and stroke by stroke he carved it open, fitting his body inside. The more distance from the shore, the farther from himself he could be.

And so he swam, he swam until his muscles moaned in surprise, he swam until he hovered, he estimated, at least two and a half Charlies above the seabed. A line of orange buoys bobbed on ahead. The kids at the shore were so distant he couldn’t hear their screaming, and his belongings were tucked away under the shade of a blue-and-white parasol. Charlie preferred wild beaches, even if they came without showers, and especially if they came without the umba umba beach music, but Rebecca was set on a four-star hotel, so there was that. His cousin was staying two hotels away.

He spread his hands wide on the water. He’d normally get his nose stuffed with salt after dismissing the Atlantic like that, but today the sea’s surface was as tame as a crumpled paper. And so he drifted, sun shining through his closed eyelids, floating among the vastness so great it made his concerns seem laughably, pitifully small. He wanted to be tiny like that, thwarted by this great blue power into a speck of dust; to disappear, if only for a moment, from the world’s radar.

And the best thing was, he could drift like that for as long as he liked, without anyone and anything to disturb him. His effort to bring Rebecca into water was the last shit he was willing to give.

“It’s such a calm sea.”

Charlie tensed. The voice he’d heard was not his, nor was it any other voice he could have expected this far from the shore. The voice was masculine and dry.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” the man, presumably, asked.

“Yeah,” Charlie replied.

“Oh, alright.” A pause. “I was floating here by myself and I felt someone drifting next to me.”

“I thought no one else was swimming far from the shore today,” Charlie said. He heard a crackling sound as he moved his jaw—must be from earwax in his ear canals.

“My thought precisely! That is, until I noticed you.” Another pause, this one a little longer. “If you ask how I noticed you, I wouldn’t be able to answer. Call it intuition. I just sensed there could be someone floating here, same as me, and I thought to make sure.”

“Are you nearby?” Charlie asked.

“I think so,” the man replied. “I’m not very loud, and it seems you’re not loud either, and we hear each other well. We shouldn’t be floating far apart.” The man exhaled and Charlie heard him just fine, which supported the observation. “Though I have to say, it does scare me a little. I could tell you about it, but I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”

Charlie continued to float with his belly up. Even though he expected to feel irritated at this intruder smearing his existence over his personal tranquility, it didn’t bother him. He sensed no threat from him. His voice, while a little husky, sounded kind and honest, perhaps even delighted at their chance encounter.

“Not a problem. I could listen to someone other than the fish.”

The man gave off a low chuckle. “Alright. But tell me something first, friend, are you a swimmer?”

“I swim every two weeks or so.”

“And what do you like about it?”

Charlie considered this. He rarely asked himself questions this frank—when he felt good doing something, he just did it, and that was all.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I like the floatiness. I can just go into the water and my body disappears. It’s like I’m swimming with my head, and the rest of my being quietly drags behind.”

This was true, he realized. He didn’t feel his body at all, only the chilly kiss of the water and the undulating spell of the waves. No need to pull in his belly or do something with his awkwardly hanging hands.

“Water can give you wings, my friend used to say,” the man replied. “I too enjoy this bodiless feeling, and just the same, I hate being taken out of it. When I’m swimming in a pool and water leaks into my glasses or some guy elbows me from another lane, this spell is suddenly lost. It’s like waking up from a pleasant dream.”

“At the pool I go to—we live in Alytus which isn’t a small city, but it’s still a twenty minutes’ drive—there’s always plenty of people, and all six lanes are packed. Not a minute passes before someone shotguns water into my nose. I’m more used to it now, but it’s still irritating.”

“You’re a back-swimmer?”

“Yeah, mostly.”

“Guess that’s another thing we can relate with,” the man said. “I usually swim on my back to relieve the back pain. I have an office job and I feel like a folded chair by the end of each week—they unfold me so I can sit at my work, and then they fold me back to sleep the night away.”

Charlie imagined himself as one of the foldable sunbeds lining the shore.

“Anyhow,” the man went on, “when I’m swimming like that, I have little control of what’s happening around me. All I can see are the panels of the ceiling passing above my head.”

“I like that. You can think of whatever and then you arrive at the other end of the pool.”

“Well, I know I have to give up control, but I still keep thinking about the worst. At my pool there are many other back-swimmers. What if two swimmers like us—both unaware of each other’s existence—swam into one another and rammed their heads together? There… there’d be this crack, I’d imagine, and then they’d both wake up into their bodies, but this time they’ll be sinking down the pool.”

It took a while before Charlie replied. “I don’t think that’s very likely to happen. Even if they swam into each other for some reason, you could still feel the warning splashes of water, and the other guy’s hand would first smack you in the face.”

“I know, it’s irrational.” The man exhaled. “Still, it got stuck in my mind, and now whenever I swim on my back I can’t stop thinking of a crack, followed by pooling blood, catching onto the buoys, and spreading to other lanes. I’ve even imagined how the chlorine mixed with blood would’ve tasted like… sorry.”

“It’s… alright.” Charlie frowned. He wasn’t sure if the man was being serious, or if the sun had fried a few cords in his brain. His manner of speech seemed perfectly fine, though. “But there aren’t any swimmers today, right? Apart from you and me.”

“This is the root of my fear, you see,” he said. “We’ve grown closer together through conversation, and now I fear that the water draws us closer still. Soon, the inevitable would happen—we’d bump into each other, and then we’d wake up into our bodies, falling down…”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Charlie sneered. The man was silent. “If you’re so afraid, why don’t you just stop floating and look where I am?”

“No, that’s not something I’m willing to do. Remember how I said I noticed you floating? The same organ which issued me the command to call you… the shadow brain some people call it… is telling me now that if I did what you’ve told me, then the inevitable would happen, only quicker. I’d see your head a split second before bumping into it.” He paused. “Maybe when the waves pull us far enough from each other that your voice will become a murmur, then I’d feel it’s safe enough to turn, look at you, and swim back to shore.”

“And what if I flipped off my back?” Charlie asked.

“You could do that,” the man said. “You have your intuition to rely on, and I have mine. We can only interpret what we perceive ourselves and not a single thing more.”

“My intuition is telling me that I don’t care.”

Charlie closed his eyes and shut himself off. The conversation made him aware of his body again, something he wished to forget about. He felt like a paper boat thrown on a slow river. He hated being exposed like that, all naked and up on the surface. He imagined his cousin standing at the bank of the river, holding a giant stick and poking at his bellybutton. Most of the pokes were harmless, but then one of them sent him spinning. Rebecca was giggling somewhere nearby.

But then, he remembered that none of this was real. Seagulls cackled above his head and the kids were shouting their war cries close to the shore. The clouds passing above were few, and no matter how hard he tried to shape them into something, they resembled nothing. The sky was a sleepy, bleached blue.

“Hey,” he said out to the sea, “you still around?”

“I am,” came the reply from the edge of his perception. The same gentle if a little husky voice, of someone who coughed a lot due to a mid-summer allergy, or who was teaching at preschool. It seemed that his voice was coming from a little closer than before. “I have a feeling it will happen soon.”

“Well,” Charlie said, “I’m not getting off my back because I’m comfortable, and I don’t want this to be more paranoic than it already is. Floating on water has never killed anyone, okay?”

Silence, again. A chilly current stroked Charlie’s back and he wondered how far they had drifted. They could end up at the next shoreline, where parasols were no longer blue and white and a different umpa umpa music played to the scampering feet of beach boys playing volleyball. He still didn’t care.

The man was silent for a while. “Sorry to bother you with this. I guess I’m kind of strange.”

“That’s fine, we’re all strange. I took vacation to be alone with someone, but now I feel better off by myself. Tell me that’s not strange.”

“Sea is the best place for befriending loneliness. Ask any sailor and they’ll tell you the same.”

“I guess that’s right. Hey, do you speak any louder than before?”

“No, I speak as usual.”

Charlie tried to pinpoint the man’s exact location, but his voice seemed to be coming from all around him. He imagined playing Battleships and sinking the locations around his feet and under his armpits, but all the shots hit empty spaces. The man was a red dot blinking on and off from his radar.

“It’s been good talking to you,” the man said, so close he might be speaking from inside Charlie’s skull. “I’ve never made a friend at the open sea. We’re the only swimmers here, you and I.”

“Man you’re right by my face, I—”

A crack.

 Then darkness, a quick one, a flashy cut to black. Charlie felt as if someone threw a dumbbell onto his belly, folding him in like a chair and pulling him down. A crackling noise pinched his ears, much more intense than from the earwax in ear canals, and numbness spread through him, touching the ends of his toes and fingers. For a split second he felt all of his body, and then he lost it again.

His mask leaked water inside, but even despite the salt rubbing on his eyelids he could see that something was wrong, that the world had flipped. His lips parted and suddenly he could move his limbs again; he looked at the shimmering surface overhead and crawled his way back up. He was above water now, breathing heavily, with his eyes burning and nose bleeding and the saltiness sharp in his mouth and throat like a coating of glass.

He kept afloat in place to steady his heart. His stomach felt sickly, but at least he could breathe freely again. Even though drowning in today’s tide seemed like an unfunny joke, that was exactly what could’ve happened. He looked over the tame flatness of sea and in the distance he saw a brown lump of hair amidst the splashes of water, swimming away. Charlie could shout after the guy, but his nose was bleeding, his head felt dizzy, and all he wanted right now was to feel solid ground beneath his feet.

He swam back to the shore in no time at all and was pleasantly surprised to see the blue-white parasols on the shoreline. It seemed he was back home, but then again, he felt further from home than he’d ever been in his life. He rose up from the water and then he could finally feel all of his body again. But this body… it wasn’t really his, was it?

The bellybutton wasn’t there; he had to crane his neck further down to see it. His arms and legs were thin, scrawny even, and he might’ve been a little shorter than before. His speedos changed their color and species (they were navy boxers now) and he was wearing a seashell bracelet on his wrist. His throat hurt, but it wasn’t only from salt—there was a huskiness to it. The one you could get from coughing, or maybe from preschooling kids.

He walked back to his spot, made sure his things were intact, and made his way to the sunbed some twenty feet away. Paul and Rebecca had finished chatting for now, but the joy of previously exchanged words still hung like an afterglow on their lips. They were staring out at the sea, looking dutifully concerned—just the level of concerned that was absolutely necessary, and not the slightest bit more. Surely not enough to make them leave their sunbeds; they seemed happy here. Charlie wondered how long it had been since he’d gone swimming. 40 minutes? Two hours? He had no idea.

He thought of interrupting their merriness (even though they weren’t doing anything, it seemed like they were), but what would he say? It’s Charlie, I’ve lost some weight, some height, and look at this new bracelet, cool right? They wouldn’t believe him, and besides, why would he want to stay, anyway? When Rebecca was looking at Paul, her hair curled differently from behind her shoulders. That was enough.

Charlie turned on his feet (if his name was still Charlie—he’d deal with that later) and marched onward, away from the umba umba beach music and cousins with rude sunglasses and girlfriends with squirrel-brown hair. The sea spewed foam over the shimmering sand and seagulls cackled above. The coast stretched as far as the eye could see. How many hotels were there? How many combinations of colors on the parasols?

Charlie was all by himself, with loneliness for his friend.

Author’s Biography

Peter Wynd is a Polish-based writer and living proof that AI’s randomness will never replace human imagination. In his free time he wonders whether he’s a metaphor. He loves traveling, designing board games, and writing at unexpected places. See more of his cat at www.peterwynd.com.