Paul looked round in a daze. The small outdoor stadium felt even emptier now that night had fallen. He couldn’t hear any signs of life in the theme park beyond. It was late enough that even the Marineland workers would be gone, his father would be gone. He went down the steps to the giant unlit pool, pressed his face against the plexiglass cupping his hands around his eyes to see. He couldn’t make anything out except the slight movement of dark water in the breeze. A boy alone by water at night. Did it soothe him or scare him?
He looked up again, wondering if it might start to rain. Then back at the black water in the killer whale’s performance pool.
He went to the step ladder by the side of the pool. Took off his shoes, socks, everything but his boxers, climbed up the three steps. He didn’t even have to jump to hoist himself up and sit straddle over the plexiglass wall. The bare foot on the inner side of the wall a good few feet from the gently moving water below, what looked like a vat of black.
Carefully he steadied himself to release one hand and slowly, awkwardly, pull his outer leg round to the inner side of the pool wall so as to face the water. He inched forward to the very edge, hands still holding tight, his legs reaching down, his feet still a good distance from the water. As he edged off he counted down numbers, counted down again and made the drop. He slid through and down, barely making a splash, his eyes closed, his whole body straight-arrow under, head and all. Underneath, it was deadly quiet except a faint hum, likely the pool’s heater. Paul wanted to go right down and feel the bottom. It was unpleasant when he didn’t. He tried for a few desperate seconds to go deeper, stretching his legs, pointing his toes to graze the bottom of the pool. Not coming close, he quickly rose to the surface. He rubbed stinging water from his eyes and tasted the salt on his lips. Surrounded by high plexiglass walls the only thing Paul could hear was his own breathing.
* * *
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but can we please get some fucking snow?”
“Sorry?” Paul was gazing out across Eastdale’s bleak backfield, in early February the grass a depressed camouflage mix, more beige and yellow than green. The track off to the right that no one was running on now.
The agitated sound came from Tosh’s throat. “Dude. Where do you go every time?”
Paul turned to his friend. “I’m sorry, man.” He said this with real sincerity too, he hated to trouble others. Tosh had already finished his smoke, Paul noticed, so he got out his pack of du Mauriers to offer one over, in consolation.
“It’s frickin’ freezing.” Tosh said. “We should go in.” He pulled a cigarette from the proffered pack. He popped it in his mouth but didn’t light it, focused himself now on the dead grass. “What were you thinking about?”
“What? Nothing.” Paul stretched over to give Tosh a light.
“Liar.” Tosh exhaled out the one side of his mouth. “Why don’t you trust me? Just tell me. Who is she?”
The worst part was it wasn’t a she. It wasn’t an anybody. It was hardly anything at all. A daydream recurring since long before high school. Visions Paul had of himself sitting on a beach alone at night. The dark movements of the sea ahead. From Welland, Ontario the nearest salt water not in a pool was at least a thousand flat kilometres, in any direction. Yet the daydream remained. Probably as influenced by the movies as the lone memory Paul had of the only real ocean he’d ever encountered. A trip to Costa Rica with his parents when he was eleven, when his mother was still alive. The recurring image included neither of his parents though. The boy was alone on the beach at night. Alone in the dark, the sound of the waves, the smell of the Pacific and all that was unknowable and held within the vast darkness beyond. Paul didn’t know if he was more entranced by what scared him about the vision or what calmed him about it.
It was a dream hardly worth sharing as nothing happened, Paul just sitting by the salty sea. The end.
**
Paul and Tosh had some things in common, like losing parents. Tosh’s father died when they were in grade ten, Paul lost his mom the next year. Nonetheless, if they hadn’t wound up in the same class their last semester of high school, Paul would never have become friends with Tosh. Or rather the other way round because Tosh was popular and Paul was not. Not that this bothered Paul much. One thing he did like about himself was that he knew who he was. Bulky and tall in a way that was more awkward than athletic, he didn’t deceive himself. He wasn’t the bright star at a party like Tosh, nor for that matter the beautiful half-Japanese guy all the girls wanted. Paul was a pretty decent listener though, when he wanted to be, and if he had one or two good friends in his life, he was happy enough.
It was a grade ten elective, Intro to Photography. Paul and Tosh were the oldest in the class and both took the work more seriously than Mr. Benavente, the visual arts teacher who wore an ever-changing selection of 80s rock band t-shirts under the same navy blazer, could have hoped. This plus their being nearly eighteen meant being often left unsupervised in the dark room, which meant going out to hack butts whenever they pleased. The very first time, standing by Exit Seven at the back of the school where smokers went, Tosh had asked how Paul was doing with it. Paul gave his usual short answers that he knew wouldn’t satisfy, but Tosh didn’t push. “You talk when you want. I won’t force it, brother. I get it. Believe me.”
Paul felt a surge of love, from that alone.
He felt more comfortable asking Tosh, who wasn’t shy talking about his father, they’d been very close, they actually liked doing things together. Tosh dove in detailing their shared passions, music especially. “Who goes to their first concert with their old man? This guy.”
Paul smiled in sympathy. It was obviously still hard for Tosh. “Who did you see?”
It was an involved answer. Paul learned about the “primo” Toronto venue, the encores, the drummer who had since left the band (“Father John Misty? No?”). Once started Tosh couldn’t stop. Paul didn’t mind. It was obviously a cherished memory.
Headed back into the school, Tosh said, “But losing a mom. Man! That’s worse, no?”
Paul nodded. “People say that, but I don’t know. The truth is my dad did a lot of the parental stuff. My mom was the one with the regular job. My dad was always around. Maybe too much.” He laughed. “I don’t mean to be a dick. He loves me and all, he’s just got no idea what I need.”
“What do you need?”
Paul paused. “Good question.”
Just before he met Tosh, Paul had lost the only real friend he had over Christmas break, though in hindsight he realized she may never have been that in the first place. Alice stopped calling Paul after confessing her feelings to him late one night at the Donut Express (their spot), telling him not to say anything because she knew he didn’t feel that way about her. When he didn’t say anything because she was right it got awkward. That was the last time he’d seen her. Paul could have called but didn’t. Since his mother died Alice would overly meaningfully ask him, “How are you?” every time they went for coffee. It was the look on her face. She was so earnest, so kid-glove delicate with him, it made Paul bristle mostly because of how much like his father it was, how his dad had treated him ever since.
**
The friendship that started in the dark room and out back of the school for smokes, soon spilled over into lunches together in Tosh’s pickup in the school parking lot, cigarettes held out the opened windows, Radiohead’s In Rainbows playing soundtrack because it was all Tosh listened to that winter and spring. Within a few weeks they were going to The Film House on Saturday nights. Tosh turned out to be as big a movie nerd as Paul.
“Since my dad died, going to The House has become a bit of a thing for me.”
At the time Paul thought this meant Tosh was continuing a ritual he’d shared with his father. He didn’t yet know the movie theatre itself was the refuge Tosh went to grieve.
The (Film) House was in St. Catharines. It played arthouse and cult movies, everything but the blockbusters they showed at the Seaway, the multiplex in town. Also, at The House tickets for high school students were only $5.00. So they drove, past Niagara Falls and all the dumb theme parks, the Grey Wolf Lodge, Marineland, nearly twenty-five kilometres in Tosh’s truck they drove to catch an early show. After the lights went down and the drama began, soon enough, inevitably, Tosh would cry. Sharing a joint in his truck beforehand the first time, Tosh had warned Paul. “If there’s a dad in the movie or like a terminal illness I’m fucked.”
Tosh of the tan skin who got with girls seemingly whenever he wanted, and yet what Paul envied most was his friend’s ability to cry. Paul hadn’t cried once since his mother died. The gentle giant, his mother had called him, who’d sprouted too soon, a kid who’d never feigned at anything remotely macho and yet he could not cry.
There was always a joint beforehand and it always had to be the seven pm show. These things were set from the beginning. Paul soon discovered why Tosh insisted on the latter. He double-booked his Saturday nights, making other, more exciting plans for after. A house party somewhere or just a gathering of people. Paul worried it was because he was too intense or probably not fun enough, though Tosh had occasionally invited him. The one time Paul went to a party, Tosh all but abandoned him. Off charming other people. Some, like Paul, need but a single person, a best friend, for their social needs. Tosh, meantime, was the type to have a whole cluster of others to be best friendly with.
Those first Saturday nights before Tosh invited him might have been worse, Paul dropped at home barely after nine. It was embarrassing. The second time, walking into his sad, little house in a state so hurt he couldn’t hide it from his dad, there, in the cramped living room with its 1970s furniture, that scratchy yellow and brown couch, the pathetically small tv. His dad would be half-watching the last period of the Leafs game with the sound off, something jazz or classical on the record player. On this particular Saturday the smell of boiled hot dog from the kitchen. Miles Davis’ mournful muted trumpet, surprise, surprise.
“Oh Pauly. That’s really unkind of him.” His father, Don, said, on learning of this new friend of his son’s driving off in search of better plans. Don keenly felt what his son felt, felt it too strong for Paul was the problem. “Makes me think of a change I remember going through.”
Paul’s dad went on about the time he’d learned to choose friends not because they were cool or even interesting but simply because they were reliable. Paul didn’t mind this. It actually made sense. He might not even have left the room had his dad not tried to hug him. He felt badly but he was in a sour mood. Paul would never let Tosh drive him again. Better still, he thought, he was done going to the movies with Tosh, wondering if this was really a friendship worth keeping.
Then the next Saturday came round and Tosh called and Paul had nothing better to do and nobody else was calling him now, certainly not Alice, and he could use the laughs and the joint for that matter. More than that he needed a reason to get out of his depressing house. The pattern in this way continued through the spring. Paul did drive himself from then on, and after the movie wouldn’t head straight home but go for long drives down dark country roads. He liked to drive this one road off Highway 50, there were almost never any cars on it, just stretches of farmland and eventually, rather randomly, an old gas station, the only light in the night like some perfect Edward Hopper painting.
He didn’t mention Tosh to his dad after that. Even months later, after the boys had graduated and they were well into summer, Paul didn’t tell his dad that it was Tosh he was bringing to Marineland.
**
Paul’s father had often tuned pianos as a side gig, but he was handy, he could fix all kinds of things, though he had never worked at a theme park before. He’d taken on the summer contract to work maintenance at Marineland because the two orchestras he played cello for (The Niagara and the Buffalo Philharmonic across the border) didn’t perform in the summer and there was never enough piano tuning work in the area. These last years Don had taken summers off, but this summer, with Paul going to Brock in the fall, his father was earning extra to help cover Paul’s tuition. When Paul tried thanking him, his dad just made jokes. “Come on! I just wanted free tickets for me and my guy to go watch the dolphins together!” Or Paul hoped his dad was joking. Don had a tendency to forget his son was eighteen and not eight. If he hadn’t mentioned it in passing to Tosh, Paul never would have gone to the theme park at all.
“Dude, we’ll get flambasted.” Tosh had said over the phone one humid night in late July. “It’ll be awesome!”
They met at “Fishland,” as Tosh called it, mid-afternoon, arriving in separate cars. The pot gummi bears didn’t kick in until after they had ridden the one roller coaster the park had to offer and had already walked too far under the hellish sun across the unreasonably long shade-less distances between the smaller rides and the animal enclosures where they kept the beluga whales and the pool for the two killer whales, but also land animals including one for elk.
“Elk?” Tosh said. “The Fuck? Isn’t it called Marine-land?”
By six the heat of the day had hardly begun to subside. The boys got oversized Cokes and a large fries to share and took them in to catch the last whale show of the day. They sat up near the top of the stands to avoid the families. The whales weren’t yet in the big pool. The high-energy of the bass-heavy dance music was already cranked, parents and their kids clapping with much enthusiasm and zero irony. Tosh’s clapping, on the other hand …
“You’re such a dick,” Paul said, laughing.
But even Tosh went quiet when the two orcas entered the main pool: marine mammals this enormous, gliding through the clear waters like they didn’t weigh how many thousands of pounds. Soon enough the killer whales were diving up and out of the water to the crowd’s delight, crashing down in splashing waves, coming back to the trainers, standing poolside with fishy treats at the ready.
“When do they do that thing,” Paul asked, “When they come up with the whales, diving off their noses?”
Tosh gave his friend a look. “They don’t.”
“What do you mean? Sure they do.”
“No, dude. The trainers haven’t gone in the water for years. Haven’t you seen that documentary? The killer whale that went crazy and killed a trainer. Scalped this woman. Ate her arm whole.”
“Jesus Christ. Was that in Canada?”
“No! Dude, it doesn’t matter. It’s actually really tragic. You realize, this whale, like the biggest in captive history had been badly treated and forced to sleep in like a twenty-foot sleeping cell his whole life. Nowhere to move, no natural light.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, it’s actually amazing cause what starts out like a horror show, ends up being about how we are the horror show for keeping these super-intelligent creatures in captivity.”
“Yet here we are.”
“More popcorn?” Tosh said, offering the fry container to his friend.
The whales came up out of the water in unison to the oohs and ahhhs of the crowd. They really were amazing creatures.
“I gotta admit I dream of going to the ocean,” Paul found himself saying, clearly caught up in it. “I’ve had this recurring vision since I was little.”
“What?” Tosh looked over at him.
“It’s the weirdest thing because it’s scared me almost my whole life, but it kind of soothes me all at the same time.” He told of the boy alone on the beach at night.
“I don’t get it.” Tosh said. “He’s just sitting there? Does the boy eventually go in the water at least?”
“Not really, no,” Paul said with a nervous laugh.
Tosh’s laughter, meantime, wasn’t nervous at all.
“Anyway, it’s just this dumb thing,” Paul said, ready to move on.
Tosh wasn’t. It was much too funny. “Dude, this is the recurring dream since you were a kid? That’s about the most boring dream I’ve ever heard. No offence.”
“No, I know,” Paul said, forcing a laugh.
**
They walked the park grounds again after the whale show, stopping by “Friendship Cove” to see the whales once more. They weren’t alone. Seemed like half the people in the stands had had the same idea. A last activity before heading home. The boys could barely get near the orcas, or orca; there was only one in the pool now. Paul went over to the Beluga whales but they weren’t nearly as impressive in comparison.
“Swim?” Tosh asked as he joined his friend, who didn’t pretend to laugh.
“You okay, man?”
“Yeah yeah.” Paul said, “I think I’m ready to go. You?”
At the exit gates, however, Paul stopped. “I assume you got plans tonight?”
“I’m meeting some people, but not till later.”
“I actually think I’m going to stick around for a bit. You go ahead.”
“Here? Really? Isn’t it about to close?”
**
Alone Paul walked through the park without purpose and found himself back at the killer whale stadium. There were no creatures in the big pool now. No trainers nearby. A worker’s step ladder off to one side by the edge of the pool, but not a worker in sight. Nobody in sight. No one in the stands. Paul sat on a dry spot of bench a few rows up from “The Splash Zone”. He watched the sway of the water behind the Plexiglas wall until he got sleepy and lay back.
The sun would come out and then get covered again. Big white clouds mushrooming out explosively while moving deceptively quickly across the sky if you took the time to notice.
Paul woke with a jolt. It was getting dark and he was in Marineland still. He knew that. The giant pool beside him. But the dream. It had seemed so real. An echo of a voice, his father’s, down an unknown hall as nondescript and white as any school or hospital. His father calling after Paul. ‘Your mother’s still here. She’s here.’ Paul blank in response, not saying a word. He turned to look into one of the rooms. She was there, in bed. In her bed, the large wooden head rest he remembered. She was younger. Younger than Paul could remember. His mother’s pretty pale skin like something from a soap commercial. Her auburn hair long, like a girl’s. She was sat up in bed, busy doing something, knitting maybe, but then looked up when Paul looked in.
Paul tried to speak but couldn’t. It was too late. He was somewhere else. Another hall. There were no rooms. His mother gone. His father’s voice again. ‘Paul, can you hear me? She’s here. Your mother is waiting for you.’ And all Paul could think to say— and he remembered this clearly when he woke, because he woke as he said it: ‘So?’
The sun had already set, the once blue sky now completely clouded over and dark. Paul sat up and pulled out his phone. A missed call from his father. It was 8:50.
So?
He looked round in a daze. The stadium felt even emptier in the night. He went down the steps to the unlit pool, couldn’t make anything out except the slight movement of dark water in the breeze. A boy alone by water at night. Did it soothe him or scare him? “I don’t get it,” Tosh’s voice on replay in Paul’s mind. “Does he go in?” Fuck you, Tosh. Paul thought.
He looked up again, wondering if it might start to rain. Then back at the black water.
In just his boxers, he sat straddle over the plexiglass wall. Paul carefully steadied himself to bring his leg round and face the water. As he edged off he counted down numbers twice and then made the drop. Underneath, it was deadly quiet except a faint hum, likely the pool’s heater. Paul wanted to go right down and feel the bottom. It was unpleasant when he didn’t.
The water was cool not cold but still he was shivering. He began his swim. The wind had picked up, swirling inside the pool such that it felt like swimming against the tide in open water. Swimming across would take longer than anticipated. It didn’t help that Paul was a lousy swimmer. Still, he swam full-out, only getting faster with each new sea creature imagined in the opaque depths beneath. Too soon though he’d tired himself. He was barely halfway when he paused to catch his breath. He’d not been treading water a few seconds when he felt something brush by his leg. It was impossible. There was nothing in the pool now. He tried to convince himself. Then again, a not so slight bump against a different spot on his leg. The question: whether to move or not. Would that even matter?
The water was no longer gently moving up against the plexi-glass but rather in choppy slices was hitting hard and high against it. The first drops of rain. Paul began a sort of half-swim, a pathetic doggie-style. All motions intentionally muted, nothing allowed full extension. In this way he thought he might not attract the whale’s attention, if there really was one. Inches at a time and the sea storming. Something hard and rubbery slapped hard against his foot. He couldn’t look, as if looking would make it more real. A killer whale in the pool. He kept his head high to avoid getting mouthfuls of the mad splashing water. Thought: fuck it, closed his eyes, took a deep breath and thrust his head beneath. There were base sounds under the water. A pulse other than his own. A moving creature of instinct. A sudden bump, rough like a body check, knocked Paul’s side, shifting his whole body over. He snapped his neck back out of the water. It was properly raining now. Paul wasn’t ten strokes from the pool’s exit. He inched. The water sloshed. Three strokes in the rain. He extended and properly, quickly, swam the last strokes, reached up and took hold of the ledge. The rain was now coming down so hard Paul couldn’t ignore it. He didn’t care. I made it, he thought. Just lift yourself up and you’re out. But he had to see it now, to confirm what he knew. Facing the pool wall, he dipped his head underwater, opened his eyes and looked down. He wanted the whale to be directly below him. That’s what he was expecting. What he needed to see. Below was only black.
The water gently bubbled around him as he flung his body round. He faced the great pool, looking left, then right. There: the whale, the white of the whale. He followed it as it swum along the bottom of the tank, gliding towards him in a sleepy drift like that of a black and white submarine.
Paul told himself he wasn’t scared. He started rationalizing, convincing himself there was no threat. What Tosh told him, the documentary. That wasn’t normal, was it? The whale nested directly below the boy, swimming back and forth, around and around. Paul was no longer sure he could pull himself out without attracting unwanted attention. Something told him not to move. He was not lifting his head out of the water for anything, not even to breath. He had to watch. Back and forth, the motions of the whale and the scissor-kick motions of the human legs, the water had no choice. He surfaced to take a mighty inhale and quick as he could pulled himself up, halfway, he was nearly out the pool. But the whale was headed his way. He knew this, felt it as strongly as if he could see it. The whale didn’t touch him, not a hint of a bump but he felt the great surge of water and the rush of a warm-blooded mass of a creature rush past to lift the water around him into a rounded surge as he pulled his legs quickly out the pool and scurried from the edge. Paul was standing now where trainers fed the orcas fish. In the constant winds the pool had become a storm of jagged waves, the rain gushing down harder than ever. Paul stood mesmerized, almost forgetting the marine mammal beneath. The rain poured down his wet face, like endless tears down his cheeks and past the closed lips of his mouth. It felt good. Like a scene in some somber movie. But it wasn’t a movie. “It’s not a movie,” he found himself saying out loud. “She’s dead.”
So?
He did not hesitate, took a running start and dove back into the water, dove straight down, determined to reach the pool’s bottom, as if that were a goal that held meaning. He only barely missed the whale as he careened down to the smooth white base of the pool. Paul worked to fish-like glide against the bottom, to stick close like he’d done in pools as a child. The whale above him now, swimming circles above. Paul could not gauge if this was a threat but worried his passage back up for air would be blocked. He attempted to swim up around the one side but the whale was swimming back and forth too quickly and Paul couldn’t get by fast enough. How would he get up? He hadn’t been down long but already felt desperate for air.
A single click sound. Paul could hear it, and when he did round lights, like car headlights, came on all the way round the bottom of the pool’s circular wall, shining bright, if dusty cloudy through the water, allowing the black length of the whale to be seen in all its enormity. With the lights, came the call of human voices. They seemed to spur the whale on ever faster, swimming round the pool as if in automated response: the show had begun. Paul could make out two men up against the glass, yelling Paul’s name, gesturing for him to get out. One was his father, the look of on Don’s face.
Paul turned away, continuing to keep himself close to pool bottom. The whale had come back round and was now far lower in the water, near enough Paul had only to swim a few strokes to touch the thing, and with outstretched fingers he did. He palmed it’s firm rubber belly which set it moving toward the yelling men and round, whipping quickly round the pool. At first this made Paul jump-start his swim into a sprint, as if he could chase the whale. It was seconds later that the whale was passing the boy, lapping him once and then twice. A game they were almost playing until Paul tired out and looked back at his dad. The horror on the man’s face up against the plexiglass, banging on it, yelling for his son. How many airless seconds longer could he survive? The whale was on the other side of the pool. It was now or never.
The terror of it struck when Paul looked up toward the surface and realized he lacked the strength to swim up fast enough. His father yelling, Paul had to try. He began kicking his feet, waving upward with his arms. The movements were weak, he barely rose. Tired, he stopped, closed his eyes, wondering if this was what it felt like, when all hope was gone. He opened his eyes, determined, but no stronger than before, his arms and legs like jelly, which is why the sudden rush of water felt almost impossible. The water rushing by as Paul shot upward. He was nearly breaking through the surface before he understood. The whale beneath him, nose-pushing him, his feet, to get Paul up and out the water.
With a surge like a plane taking off from a runaway Paul burst from the water, until he had no choice but to dive-jump forward off the whale’s nose. He smacked sideways against the water, nothing elegant about it, but he was alive, and swimming fast for the pool’s edge.
When he got out he was shivering and his father had a towel for him. That alone made Paul want to cry. More than anything what he wanted was for his father to wrap him in that towel and rub his arms warm but his father didn’t do that because Paul was eighteen not eight. And also Paul had been asking him not to for nearly as many years.
***
Jonathan Mendelsohn has previously published short fiction in Prism International and Oyster River Pages. His non-fiction has appeared in a variety of Canadian and international publications including The Globe and Mail, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Toronto Review of Books and The Toronto Star. His piece ‘Tokyo Tomato’ was a finalist for the Mary C. Mohr Non-fiction Award and has subsequently been published with Blank Spaces Magazine. Finally, when not writing he teaches applied linguistics and writing at York University.
