A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [83]
In jeans and boots, Drew picks his way to where garbage and water meet. An angular slab of concrete juts out, the failed foundation of something long forgotten, and he scrambles on top of it. He unlaces his boots and removes them, then kicks off his jeans and boxers. Even through your dread, you feel a faint appreciation for the beauty and inelegance of a man undressing.
He glances back at you, and you glimpse his naked front, the dark pubic hair and strong legs. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” he says in a flat voice, and takes a long, leaping, shallow dive, slamming the East River’s surface and letting out something between a scream and a gasp. He surfaces, and you hear him trying to catch his breath. It can’t be more than forty-five degrees out.
You climb the slab of concrete and start taking off clothes, sodden with dread but moved by a wavering sense that if you can master this dread it will mean something, prove something about you. Your scars twang in the cold. Your dick has shriveled to the size of a walnut and your football bulk is starting to slide, but Drew isn’t even watching you. He’s swimming: strong clear swimmer’s strokes.
You make a clumsy leap, your body crashing onto the water, your knee hitting something hard under the surface. The cold locks in around you, knocking out your breath. You swim crazily to get away from the garbage, which you picture underneath, rusty hooks and claws reaching up to slash your genitals and feet. Your knee aches from whatever it hit.
You lift up your head and see Drew floating on his back. “We can get back out of here, right?” you yell.
“Yes, Rob,” he answers in that new, flat voice. “Same way we got in.”
You don’t say anything else. It takes all your strength to tread water and yank in breath. Eventually the cold begins to feel almost tropically warm against your skin. The shrieking in your ears subsides, and you can breathe again. You look around, startled by the mythic beauty of what surrounds you: water encircling an island. A distant tugboat jutting out its rubbery lip. The Statue of Liberty. A thunder of wheels on the Brooklyn Bridge, which looks like the inside of a harp. Church bells, meandering and off-key, like the chimes your mother hangs on the porch. You’re moving fast, and when you look for Drew you can’t find him. The shore is far away. A person is swimming near it, but at such a distance that when the swimmer pauses, waving frantic arms, you can’t see who it is. You hear a faint shout—“Rob!”—and realize you’ve been hearing that voice for a while. Panic scissors through you, bringing crystalline engagement with physical facts: you’re caught in a current—there are currents in this river—you knew that—heard it somewhere and forgot—you shout, but feel the smallness of your voice, the seismic indifference of the water around you—all this in an instant.
“Help! Drew!”
As you flail, knowing you’re not supposed to panic—panicking will drain your strength—your mind pulls away as it does so easily, so often, without your even noticing sometimes, leaving Robert Freeman Jr. to manage the current alone while you withdraw to the broader landscape, the water and buildings and streets, the avenues like endless hallways, your dorm full of sleeping students, the air thick with their communal breath. You slip through Sasha’s open window, floating over the sill lined with artifacts from her travels: a white seashell, a small gold pagoda, a pair of red dice. Her harp in one corner with its small wood stool. She’s asleep in her narrow bed, her burned red hair dark against the sheets. You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha’s sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I’ll be curled around your heart for the