The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [142]
He treaded water for a long long while, feeling an endless spontaneous power unspooling from his limbs. It seemed he could do it forever. Finally he turned toward the shore and let his limbs swim him in, aided by the waves that lapped at his back. When he reached the shore he knelt on all fours and slurped at the funky algal water like an animal. He couldn’t see the lighthouse, and he wasn’t sure whether it lay to the north or the south. His body gave out all at once. His teeth were chattering, really clacking away. His shoulders convulsed, his lungs heaved. He had his whole life ahead of him; it wasn’t a comforting thought. He peeled off his wet clothes, nestled into the sand as deeply as he could, and fell asleep.
55
He awoke with the birds before the sun could breast the water. The low clouds made the dawn all the more beautiful, catching and spreading the soft colors across the sky. He watched it dumbly, his body shaking. Sometime in elementary school his class had read Anne Frank’s diary, and Henry, terribly alarmed, asked why Anne hadn’t simply pretended not to be Jewish. The way Peter escaped from the Romans by pretending not to be Christian. Peter got in trouble for that in the Bible, but if you put it in the context of poor Anne, who was not only real but also a kid, didn’t it make sense? What difference did it make what religion you were if you were dead? So said a very alarmed Henry, in what remained the most passionate and probably the longest speech of his academic career.
His teacher said that St. Peter was a real person, first of all, and in any case being Jewish wasn’t something you could put on and take off like a sweater. This ended the discussion, but it didn’t satisfy Henry. He didn’t see how a religion, which was a freely chosen thing, could mark people so irreparably.
It wasn’t clear why he’d woken up thinking about that—the remnant of some bad dream, no doubt. If it meant anything, it seemed to mean that he was who he was and there was nowhere to go but back to Phumber Hall. The bus would be leaving for Coshwale soon. He could go to his room, take the phone off the hook, and sleep. Coach Cox would suspend him from the team, but that didn’t matter because Schwartzy was going to kill him, and that didn’t matter either because Henry was tired and he deserved it.
Now that it was nearly light he could see that during his swim he’d drifted a hundred yards south of the lighthouse. He bent down, scooped up a handful of greenish water, tasted it, spat it out. Then he trudged back to the lighthouse, collected his bag, and departed. The two miles to campus seemed like twenty. He was barefoot, having lost his plastic sandals in the lake. Every rock or root that forced him to lift his heels felt like a hardship. He hadn’t eaten since Thursday, not that he wanted to eat.
When he got home, he unplugged the blinking answering machine, poured himself a glass of water, and went to sleep.
He was awakened in full daylight by a frantic drumming on the door. He pulled the covers over his head—This too shall pass—but the drumming didn’t stop, and a female voice yelled his name as an angry question. He stumbled to the door in his boxer shorts, fumbled with the knob. There stood Pella Affenlight. “Henry,” she said. “You look terrible.”
You don’t look so good yourself, Henry thought, and she did look bleary, like she’d been up all night, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you said to people.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. Mike’s furious, you know. He’s been calling me every ten minutes, not to talk to me, of course, but hey… let’s see. What am I supposed to tell you? His keys are in his car and his car’s at the