F. E. Mazur's short story, "Operculum"

OPERCULUM

Basteen didn't reach his cottage until two in the morning, and the lake was crashing. In the car's headlights he saw a familiar story: he'd paid good money for less than competent work. In this case he'd hired a crew to replace the breakwall during the winter months when the governmental authority dropped the lake, and he had instructed the crew leader to install a deadman every ten feet. Perhaps they had; he wouldn't know that for a fact until he stood in the water in daylight when he could inspect their exposed ends and count the number. But what he did see that should have been unavailable to his vision was the long rectangular side of the nearest deadman. Each receding wave scoured it back to front, washing out gravel and dirt. The thick wooden tie was barely three feet in length; it should have been at least six, preferably eight. If his wife had been along, he would have remarked, as he often had at the completion of a construction job performed by a contractor: "I should have done the work myself. I could have screwed things up for a lot less money." A self-deprecating sentiment, it was not meant to be taken in earnest, as he seldom executed a task improperly.

He was not a man to seek counsel and instruction from others, Basteen--a fantasy writer who abided poor sales and rejection with stoicism because he believed evolution of any form or matter had little if anything to do with the constancy of time. He believed new phenomena could occur spontaneously if the elements of experience and exigency combined. He trusted unwaveringly that all metaphysics could change in an instant, the same as he had faith that a future book of his would be an overnight bestseller.

With the hour being what it was and the lake in an uproar, Basteen was surprised, once he turned his attention away from the deadman under assault, to see a small boat braving the waves. He bumped the car's headlights to high beam and the shrinking distance between the boat's own lights, forward and aft, suggested the craft was making an immediate though difficult turn in his direction. He silenced the engine, but left the headlights on, then worked his sinewy figure from out behind the steering wheel. As he stretched, he thought he heard a voice coming off the boat, but it was impossible to say for certain because of the water's own voice, which was loud and overrode other sounds.

The breeze this early summer night was stiff, persistent, unnaturally out of the east, and pleasantly warm. Likewise was the water this time of year increasingly warm and inviting, despite its currently obstreperous attitude. Even if his flesh hadn't felt sticky after the long, tortuous ride up from his home outside the city, Basteen would have stripped and immersed himself in the lake. He'd done it numerous times in the past.

Now standing naked at the edge where the breakwall ended and continuing to stretch his muscles, even emitting a primal scream to help unwind himself, he looked up at the night sky, hoping a bit more moonlight would push through the heavy layer of cloud so that he might better see the boat which, except for the small directional lights of white and green (momentarily red when it lost course), he could not make out at all. He judged it remained nearer the center of the lake than to himself and so, inhaling the moistened night air almost for the pure pleasure, he stepped off the shore. The next wave rolled in swiftly and crashed against his legs, hurling pebbles at the ankles and the barely encased fibulae. The rollover of water that was ushering oxygen to the lower depths had begun hours before his arrival. Proof was the pungent smell of vegetation and the corkscrew vallisneria mixed with the flying stone. He moved further out, treading gingerly to avoid slicing the underside of his feet on the razor-sharp, brittle shells of the tiny zebra mussels that covered every submerged rock like carpet nap, and each succeeding breaker knocked him back. Eventually, he advanced far enough and a swell lifted his one hundred eighty pound body from the floor, whereupon it dove and slipped silently beneath the surface.

He ran like this, parallel to the shore, for about thirty meters, the water below him, a mere two fathoms; the turmoil above, less than half that. At the end of the run he reappeared, released the CO2 from inside his lungs, breathed in new air effortlessly, and without hurry again submerged, sinking deeper to avoid the nudging of the swells. Much of a minute would pass until another gaseous exchange.

Several years earlier, a young local pilot fond of flying low and just off the lake's shoreline observed something moving through the water that he perceived to be a definite oddity. His first notion was he had seen a dolphin, and so he circled, not to confirm something he knew couldn't possibly be, but to clear his thinking and to show him what it must be: a freshwater sturgeon, a large bottom feeder often reported to exist in the deep lake, miraculously high above its comfort zone. But what he saw below the plane that afternoon was not a fish at all. A human being whose body in the water resembled a torpedo was cutting through it, arcing and carving out its own wave band, fluid as the liquid itself. From that day forward, when he took to the sky, the pilot searched for this man as though Basteen were some kind of missing link.

Not so impressed by Basteen the Swimmer as the pilot of the Cessna was were party guests at the writer's summer cottage. Some who remained long into the night often entertained morbid expectations. They warned their host of snakes and of sudden drop-offs that funneled a person to the coldest depths from which drowning victims were never recovered; a few of dangerous riptides, of which the lake was absent, the same as it was with sharks, a thing Basteen was indeed afraid of. They asked if he wasn't too drunk to play in water, reflecting their own condition more than his. They laughed when he trotted from the cottage naked, and they told him to watch out some hungry bass didn't mistake his endowment for a minnow or a popper, a useless remark as Basteen induced his penis to corrugate, a minor contribution to reduce drag. They considered him to be rather crazy than eccentric, and one night when the lake was calm and he was out a hundred meters, a visitor of this mind tried to take advantage. Ignorant of how sound traveled unencumbered across a glassy surface, the man said to Basteen's wife, "By the time we finish, it might not be infidelity."

Up he came, without splash, without a shake of the head. At the opposite shore the whitecaps sparkled. Overhead the cloudy sky opened as though splitting at a seam. The brilliant illumination spread by the moon soon captured the boat, and the swells on which the small craft rose and sank were in harmonic frequency with Basteen's own.

He recognized the boat, a wooden runabout, the only one of its size rigged with the mandated lighting for running at night, and he could see from its low profile that it had already taken on a great amount of water. But where was the boy, the boat's usual pilot? The girl alone seemed to be on board. She was on her knees at the stern, leaning as far forward from the transom as balance allowed. One hand worked the throttle arm of the motor while the other gripped the gunwale. The motor was sputtering and threatening to die.

As the seam further extended and broke above him, Basteen heard the girl shriek, then saw the boat's prow with its starboard green light point upward for a moment as though the craft were about to shoot for the moon. But the weight of the outboard motor quickly drew it down and beneath the surface.

Basteen set out at once to rescue the girl, who was now struggling in the water, screaming for help. Yet no sign of rush marked his effort, as might be anticipated of a man on such a mission. In its place were pure economy and efficiency in both his stroke and powerful kick. And the undulation of his body as it sailed through wave after wave was all of a beautiful and perfect counterpoint. He no longer visualized himself as he once had while a teenager; no longer necessary was the out-of-body experience that had allowed him to coach himself and refine each movement. All motion in the water had been tamed, was always profoundly employed. Age alone was now the unknown influence. All the same, it was something he wanted noted, this early method of learning that had been so particular to himself, a method devoid of others' pedagogy and assistance; a method by which he stared and studied. Stared hard and long, and studied. He'd already abundant notes on himself in the event his publisher expressed interest in a personal memoir, an unlikely decision.

So, this for Basteen.

It had begun with an older brother who would enlist in, not the navy or the coast guard as the younger boy would have expected, but the army. In the many years since, Basteen never once altered his belief that, had he joined either of the other branches or gone to college and made the swim team, the brother's talent in water would have been discovered and he would have developed into not just an Olympian, but a great Olympian, an athlete to be honored and remembered many years after his death. Basteen, just twelve, had watched whenever his sibling entered the community pool or the river. Then, later, prostrated in his bed or on the floor of his upstairs room, he attempted to imitate what he had observed. In time he was able to reshape his body, round the edges, shift more mass to the front, and turn his hands into a pair of broad cutting boards, just like the older boy's, only smaller.

One morning, feeling confident, he walked down to the river. It was a blustery day of cold and rain, as he wanted; no one would be present to comment on his efforts, to offer critical advice as adults were often inclined. Neither would there be anyone on hand to save him from drowning if he failed in his trial run. But this second thought was hardly a consideration. A narrow tree-dappled island no more than a quarter-mile above the dam divided the river, and Basteen had watched his brother leave the shore, fight the current, and reach the island in just twelve strokes. That day in September, with no other soul around, Basteen arrived there in twenty.

Soon after, his brother was bused to boot camp, then shipped overseas. Basteen, again under his own tutelage, began to study fish, sea mammals, and amphibians. He chose the dolphin for his model. He had already learned to round himself in front; he next added a dorsal curvature. And while his entire body would never breach like a whale, his feet in the water would begin to function like flukes.

The girl was fighting to stay afloat; and at the crest of every parabola in Basteen's rolling continuum through the four-foot waves, the eye, in the air no longer than a second, locked on her position. Another thirty meters and he would have her in his grasp and move them both to land.

But then she weakened. She vanished from view.

With scarcely a pause Basteen took in new breath and disappeared completely. The lake, strikingly clear water even before the invasion of the filtering mussels, permitted greater penetration of the moonlight as the turbidity was stretching only slowly from the shore, and Basteen could see the girl, mostly by a white kerchief knotted about her neck. She appeared lifeless. And she was beginning to tumble, a signal that both were near the end of the underwater shelf, which, according to the navigation chart on the wall of his cottage, would give way precipitously to a depth well beyond a hundred meters.

Too much time would elapse before he could get her to the shore; the realization came to him suddenly that she could not be revived. Not in the water. She was irretrievably lost to this life. Yet the recovery of her young body was an obligation he could not overlook and wanted to fulfill. Otherwise, she would drift to the very lowest depths where the water's perpetually cold temperatures denied a corpse the hideous bloating that could raise it back to the surface and release it to the loved ones left behind.

And here Basteen hesitates. He weighs that animal class which, long ago, was decreed upon him. Although he has taught himself to reduce his heart rate, thereby allowing an extended stay underwater, still, he can but estimate the time it will take to bring up the girl's body. And what if his estimation is wrong? Or what if his flesh becomes snagged on a piece of debris that sits for all eternity at the dark bottom?

Then he, too, will drown.

Faithful to his idiosyncrasy, Basteen resumes the descent and calls upon his mind, a dusty section of it holding specialized knowledge. He opens his mouth and lets the water rush in to fill the cavity. Then shutting the lips tightly, he draws inward on his cheeks so as to put the water under pressure. He can only imagine where the opercula are hidden, and he pictures them, rightly or wrongly, just behind the ears.

For now his air continues to remain good and he is swimming well, but his mammal's lungs are certain to burn if one gas cannot be traded for another. It is a million years of ossified cartilage under the skin that he is striving to crack. If he succeeds, the rest will follow--the filaments and lamellae--he feels certain, and the exchange, made. And so, aware there is no turning back, he brings greater pressure to bear on the oxygen-holding water trapped in his mouth.

The shelf has fallen away completely and the kerchief is ever graying in the diminishing moonlight. It is all that is available to Basteen's eyes. Soon enough it will surrender all color and turn to black. In the meantime, he dives deeper, expecting a tremor.

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