4.
Swamped
DOC KNEW THAT if he was enthusiastic enough, the dean would let him be. It wasn’t a feint, though. Doc was thrilled.
“And the art students were fantastic,” he continued, nearly chasing the dean out the door of his office, a lab replete with mad ideas, schemes and apparatuses. “You would not believe the diversion we created.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” the dean said, her hand held high in a pledge to functional bureaucratic ignorance. She caught herself at the door and looked over at Veronica, seated in an old aluminum webbed lawn chair that Doc had found online. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, thank you for asking.”
The dean pointed at Stuart and didn’t have to say anything. Stuart knew that as an accomplice to Dr. Thomas Hock, he lived in constant academic and occupational peril. He returned to his careful study of the remarkably simple hook-and-loop action of Velcro straps multiplied by thousands.
Doc shut the door behind the dean, and swung a classroom chair between his legs, sitting opposite his test subject. He was beaming.
“You’re really having fun with this, aren’t you?” she said.
“I am! But I am because we are generating just so much material. There’s so much we can derive from it, so many psychological, social, cultural, artistic extrapolations and extensions. This is so ripe, and specifically we are generating material that we will use to repurpose and sharpen — with fangs! — our entire academic model. It’s multidisciplinary, all encompassing, life re-contextualizing substance, marrow and blood, fresh, rich air…” he paused. He didn’t know if Veronica was going to cheer or laugh at him.
“Can you swim?” he asked
“Mmhmm,” she hummed.
Stuart looked up from his work with the straps, thankfully, as the slow methodical tearing was becoming a little grating on her ears.
“Our original idea,” said Doc, “became a little too elaborate. I began with something that’s haunted me since I was a boy. It was some comic or graphic novel that depicted in lurid detail a man buried up to his neck in the sand before a rising tide.”
“Oh, Creepshow!” she exclaimed.
“I don’t want to know, it still puts the fear in me. But we did begin research on local tides. It’s funny, I never paid much attention to the name and wherefore of the Tidal Basin, never considered its remarkably unpoetic name. ‘Tidal Basin.’ Capitalized and architecturally connoted, though, it’s a romantic place on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial and studded with festival trees. But like all the waterways out of the swamp, it was a product of design, and it was designed for a very specific utility.”
“Let me guess,” she said.
Stuart smiled.
“Yes, I know, tides, but it’s a remarkable and remarkably hidden feat of geoengineering. There are gates to the Potomac and to the Washington Channel that open and close automatically to absorb the river’s tides and flush silt from the channel with fresh water. We checked timetables and started building an apparatus that would allow us to drown you in full view of the public. You’re sitting in part of it, and Stuart is playing with the other part.”
Veronica looked down at the chair. Stuart held up the straps. Doc said, “It’s a sensational way to die.”
Over the last several nights, Stuart had rerun and embellished the scenario in his imagination.
She swims into the dappled water of the Basin, coaxing from her shoulders the shear cloth of a sleeveless Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, which opens and closes around her like a jellyfish. Stuart swims alongside in parallel strokes, pulling behind him a complex of bundled antenna poles, a folding lawn chair and mesh bag of hinges and U-bolts, all kept afloat on a thin brace of Styrofoam noodles.
There is a fundraiser this afternoon at the Jefferson, a gala less for charity than an occasion for dapper and dolled-up men and women to sup on oysters and suck down cones of gin. The silver pointillism of the surface makes it difficult to see the two swimmers, so there’s no commotion when Stuart anchors the poles and erects the six foot stand, bolting the lawn chair on top of it, just below the surface of the water. Veronica treads, her smooth arms sweeping the water back and forth in time with the cycling of her legs. She nods to Stuart. He straps her arms to the rests with Velcro, blindfolds her with a sash he’s kept dry in a plastic pouch, and checks the alignment of her bracelets. He nods. She’s ready, and he paddles off into the illusory light.
Veronica is up to her chest in water. The tidal gates have been opened, and the natural course of ebb and flow, day and night, spring and fall, and life and death, begins. There’s a quartet playing on the pink marble base of the Jefferson. She can just hear the cello moan as the surface of the water rises to the nape of her tilted head. Doc and Stuart point like setters to notify the crowd of a thing happening in the Basin.
Small detachments of the partially educated trim off their discussions of Barthe and Foucault and consider a woman drowning. They calculate the levels of protection afforded them by diffused responsibility. Some know the term well, though, and force themselves out of the fog of frozen wonder and confront that, yes, there’s a thing happening in front of them now — they’d spent the day, the week, the year, maybe their whole lives retelling events and here, right that moment, is a thing happening. Some understand the possibility of emerging from the cast of a foretold history and to rewrite the present, to right the present, and begin taking off their shoes. The water is at her chin. She turns her head to open an ear to the advent of splashing. Curious. She might be able to lift her nose and still keep breathing. She knows that once the surface of the water begins lapping at her lips she will have to breathe deeply in time with the pulsing water to draw in one last breath.
By the time the first man rolls off the marble shelf and tumbles into the water, four women are rushing toward the drowning woman, submerged now, the tips of her hair curling like black fins of fighting fish. They feel the points of resistance at her side and the Velcro straps with their exploring hands, and rip the binds open. Veronica rises to the surface, and peels off the blindfold in triumphant retaliation. She squeegees the water from her wide, oxygenated eyes, looks at her liberators and laughs, “Thank you!” She kicks her powerful legs once like a scissor jack and sidestrokes, her fingers of her lead hand drawing open curtains of water, parting them with her free black hair until the surface slides like a bed sheet over the dorsal of her hip. The four women escort her in points of a diamond, their blond hair trailing in the black water like dust streams of comets.
This was the scene repeating in Stuart’s imagination, even as Doc explained the ridiculous complexity of the operation.
“The timing is just way too difficult,” Doc said. “Plus the construction and quick deployment of the apparatus, the depth, contour, and stability of the bottom of the basin — there’s just too much of this experiment to cut out.”
Stuart awakened. “Occam,” he said.
Veronica turned to him. “God bless you.”
“Occam’s razor.”
“Ah,” she smiled, “I thought you’d sneezed. Don’t talk so much!” Turning back to Doc, she added, “I’m not sure how long I can hold my breath.”
“There’s that, too,” agreed Doc. “And the whole diabolical performance-art serial-killer setup puts out a seriously creepy vibe. People would wonder how you came to be in that fix, who put you there, why, and most importantly, where the mastermind was.”
“We can’t be sure anyone would actually try to save you,” remarked Stuart, definitely not sneezing, but still awash in his carefully curated fantasy. He imagined that once Veronica was escorted to the ring of the Basin, he would have to carry her on his back to save her feet from the pebbles.
“Too much that can go wrong,” said Doc, “and the narrow margin between life and death we seek is not even approached if the tide doesn’t rise. And then you’re just some unfortunate girl left to sit chest deep in the still waters of the Tidal Basin. Unless you fear dying from embarrassment, which I doubt, it’s not going to work. Tides, topography, the constitution of silt, the timing, the proximity of the police: it’s too complicated —- so instead we’re going to throw you off the side of a ship. Stuart?”
Stuart turned to the table. For a moment he stared at the item in front of him until his little reverie left him completely. He grabbed the thing. “This,” he said, trying to find a center of gravity, “is the only piece of equipment. It is a scuba diver’s weight belt.”
Doc took it in his hands. “It’ll be hard to swim with it for very long. The belt is designed to counteract the buoyancy of flotation vests. You’ll wear it around your waist, and after a good couple of minutes of serious flailing and kicking, it’ll pull you down faster than a chimpanzee in a pool.”
“Chimps can’t swim?” asked Stuart.
“Nope,” said the doctor. “At least I read that last night. Too top-heavy.”
“The same is true for all great apes,” said Veronica, “gorillas and orangutans. A friend of mine works at the zoo, and she says that Waohab the gorilla can often be seen staring at the moat.”
“Maybe he’s contemplating an escape,” said Stuart.
“Or his own mortality,” said Doc. “Anyway, a couple of minutes of flailing and kicking is enough time for people to process a crisis and to do something about it. We’re going to have you leap from one of those dinner boats that laze about in the wide part of the Potomac south of Memorial Bridge. We have reservations for an early dinner cruise Thursday. Low 70s. Partly cloudy. Makes for a dramatic sunset.”