Sinkers & Swimmers

Seattle to Maui, a six-and-a-half-hour flight Sam spends reading the Lonely Planet front to back. He wants to show Kate that he cares because if he cares about this trip she’s planned, he’ll start caring about her, again, maybe, and if he can care about her then he can care about life, again, maybe, and combat the deficit of care he’s running now nine months into his latest bout of depression. Though, if he’s honest with himself, he knows he doesn’t want to visit Maui. Doesn’t want to burden Kate with his gloomy presence in such an idyllic place. And, more honest still, he isn’t sure if it’s worth it. Being in Maui. Being in a relationship. Being.

The Pacific froths thirty thousand feet beneath him. He returns to his book. King Kamehameha the second created the luau as a party. Kamehameha means lonely one. The one set apart. King of the Lonely Ones.

A luau employee playing the part of a native artisan hollows out a log. He carves steadily, at ease, and doesn’t look up while Sam watches him. He is making a canoe. Sam stares at him, realizes how creepy this staring is and forces a smile which is creepier still. The man ignores him. Sam doubts the canoe will ever be finished. It is cheaper to have one canoe-in-progress, one log to work on indefinitely, a prop to hollow out for the show. He isn’t sure if he finds the man’s performed persistence heartening or hopeless.

Sam follows Kate as she exits the car with bags brimming with the accoutrements of a tropical vacation. She admires the white sand crescent beach, the clear blue water and volcanic reefs like black fangs jutting out into the blue bay. Sam stares at the ocean, squinting in the sun. She invites him snorkeling but he declines. The sea frightens him. The mysterious churn. The dead fish accumulating on the seafloor. The vortices of trash. She turns her back on him, slips into her fins, adjusts her mask, throws the rented underwater camera over her shoulder, and flops into the shallows, kicking swiftly away from him and into the deep.

Maui was voted best island in the world. Thirty miles of beaches. Home to the largest dormant volcano in the world. Sam reads aloud to himself and listens to birds he doesn’t recognize, and roosters he does, click and cluck and crow in the trees behind him. The crater in Haleakalā, the shield volcano on the island, is massive. Large enough to swallow the island of Manhattan. Legend says it was once home to gods who could capture the sun and slow it down, extending the brightness of the day.

He steps out of the shadows, places the book on a towel, and picks up his fins, snorkel, mask, and stands in the hot sand until his feet burn, forcing him into the water. He clumsily, haltingly, dons his gear and swim-drifts towards Kate as she bobs by the reef. Underwater her hair lifts with the tide, the tendrils of a mermaid, a floating corpse.

They swim.

Sam feels Kate release his hand and drift closer to the reef. He flails after her, fighting the push and pull of the tide. Nothing is static or stable. The fish, the sand, the water, even the coral seems in motion. He comes upon Kate observing a turtle as it rips and tears at the algae on the reef, pops up for air, emerging like a buoyant stone, then dives again. Its calmness unnerves Sam. The relentless way it eats and chews and the haphazard way it lets itself bounce along the reef buffeted by the waves. An interplay of method and chance, intention and luck, light and shadow. Is this all there is? Is this it?

Sam shuffles over, sinks into the loveseat beside Kate, and looks at her photos. They’re all out of focus. Turtles, the reef, technicolor fishes. The odd leg or butt or torso of another snorkeler drifting by. All a blur.

Blue haze and an invisible, endless, pointless churn. The coral is dying. The fish grow fat on microplastics. The seas rise and rise. Sam removes Kate’s hand from his pants, attempts to kiss it, smells himself on her and, repulsed, drops her hand in her own lap as if it were a piece of spoiled meat consigned to the bin.

Sam stares at the screen. The black durgon looks dead. Dead and yet not dead. The living dead. A zombie fish. He wonders if you swim steadily enough, with enough zeal, can anyone stay afloat? Or is effort no guarantee?

Perhaps some people are just natural swimmers, the world divided into two predestined camps: sinkers and swimmers.

The empty condo is quiet save for the sound of the ceiling fan, the blades of it clicking as they catch the chain. Sam shifts on his wooden throne. He wonders what’s taking Kate so long but not enough to rise, cross the room, and open the bathroom door to check on her. Instead, he picks up the Lonely Planet. The island of Maui was formed by two separate volcanoes. Shield volcanoes erupted and their lava flows collided and mixed and joined to make Maui. It must have been amazing, all that heat. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine it. The molten rock merging, two discrete volcanoes creating one island. But he can’t. His imagination fails him.

Sam opens his eyes: his shadow on a frozen screen, a zombie fish, the Lonely Planet.

Kent Kosack

Kent Kosack is a writer based in Pittsburgh. His work has been published in Exacting Clam, the Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. See more at: www.kentkosack.com.

At the luau Kate waits for a refill and observes the man Sam has become over the last nine months. Almost unrecognizable. Thin, pale, with deep-set eyes fumbling with a camera as if it were a Rubik’s Cube. Though she met him when he was strong, bold, full of energy, excited about everything. Every date had been an adventure, a series of firsts: her first skydiving trip, her first night singing karaoke, her first time paddle-boarding. She thought, maybe, at twenty-eight, he was her first chance at a mature, meaningful relationship.

After three months she experienced the first dip. His shoulders slumped. Sleep crust lingered in his eyes well into the afternoon. She stuck out this dip, a mild three-week depressive episode where Sam went to work and ate and slept but otherwise was couch-bound. She rode out a second, a sixth. Some no more than a week of moping and apologies. Others lasted for months, with Sam uncertain and dull and, she had to admit it, even annoying. All the self-pity. The sheepish, apologetic shuffling. But he managed, with the right cocktail of meds and therapy and willpower, to crawl out of the dip no matter the depth. A tenacity she grew to admire. His gratitude, his stamina. He had been able to mend the broken part of himself. Until he couldn’t. Now, nine months into a seemingly endless funk that she has treated with everything she has, a combination of kindness, patience, and tough love. And finally, with a trip to Maui.

The next morning a river of sensible rental cars in neutral colors flows along at twenty miles an hour, fifteen below the limit as tourists stick cameras and phones out of their windows, snapping shots of the Maui they’ve crossed oceans to see. Blurry photos of green fields of sugar cane shimmering and swaying beside the road. At a distance, the fields look soft, smoothed down by the constant rush of the trade winds washing over them. Here and there, like muddy fingerprints smeared across the photos, mounds of old cane burn, sooty pits in the green landscape, the fires untended. Above it all, the unbroken blue of a cloudless sky.

Neither the pits nor the plumes of smoke obscure the day’s brightness. Kate has never seen a world so sunny. The island is saturated with it, overexposed. Even the shaded sections of the road where the leaning palms create a brief canopy of shadows shielding the row of cars—even the shadows feel luminous.

A Moorish idol drifts with the current, bands of black, yellow, and white. Four goatfishes graze on the bottom, their long whiskers rustling and searching through the sand. Each creature is perfectly adapted to its place, flourishing in this unique ecosystem. She surfaces, treads water, looks for Sam along the beach. Other snorkelers have arrived, their spots marked by backpacks and coolers and spread-out towels. On the far end of the beach, a couple is fucking on the shoreline. The woman grinding into the man’s lap, the water lapping around them. Romantic Maui. Sam and Kate haven’t fucked in two months. She looks away and spies Sam standing in the dark center of the palm’s shadow, standing and reading his guidebook.

Evening in the condo. Kate sits on a rattan loveseat with scratchy floral cushions, furniture seemingly stolen from the set of The Golden Girls, as she uploads the photos to her laptop, its case covered in stickers from their past adventures. Ski Whistler. Spokane Mountain Biking Club. The white outline of a skydiver falling against black space. Sam sits beside her in a stiff wooden oak chair, an incongruous throne amidst all the cushioned rattan furniture.

Sam smells good to Kate. Different. Sunblock, aloe, the coconut shampoo he found beneath the bathroom sink. She rests her right hand on his leg and with her left clicks through the photos. She massages his thigh then works her way to his crotch, over the elastic waistband, and around his flaccid cock.

Kate sets an image of a single black durgon, darker still against the background of the volcanic reef, as her screensaver. She hangs her head between her knees for a moment then abruptly stands and claps her hands, declares it time for a swim. She feels the need to get wet, to move, to be in the water and struggle with its pull.

In the bathroom, Kate puts on her damp bathing suit and cracks the door an inch to observe Sam return to his chair and turn the laptop towards him. She remembers their third date and their first night together. The adrenaline of leaping out of a plane. The adrenaline of fucking in a car at dusk in Eastern Washington. The rush of colliding with someone new and the disclosure of a new part of yourself in the collision.

She takes one last look at Sam slumped on his throne staring at the screen then gently closes the door and opens the large window facing the water. She climbs through it, dropping one foot onto the patio at a time. It surprises her, how easy it is, leaving him there. The secrecy of the escape, the relief.

Kate walks towards the water with her head back, mouth open, almost lapping up the air. When her bare feet hit the damp sand, she breaks into a run: clear skies, warm water, the world wide and welcoming.