He ascended into consciousness as if from the depths of a pool, the muddled sounds growing less oceanic, the light surging to meet him several yards below the surface and accompanying him up. His eyes had been open a few minutes, or maybe hours, before he focused on a figure hovering over him. As the world slanted from bas-relief into sharp, painful, three-dimensional color, he recognized his surroundings: Whirring, beeping machines. Tubes threaded into his arms, his nose, his throat, his penis. The nurse, on a phone, saying, “He’s coming to.”
Later, Olin learned he had been flatline on the operating table for four minutes. His doctors were the conservative type who didn’t believe in traumatizing patients with almosts, especially patients whose sedans had been resized into coupes by tractor-trailers. So his twin sister was the one who told him after a gaggle of nurses commanded him to cough and extracted the tube from his throat.
“You were dead, Olin,” Kate said, gripping his hand in both of hers, tears streaming down her face. “Dead! For four whole minutes! And they brought you back!”
Kate was four minutes younger than he was — four minutes that had meant so much when they were kids — and that time measurement was the only detail he could grasp. His throat raw, he whispered, “Does this make us the exact same age?”
Kate made a disgusted gurgle, while from somewhere far off, her husband Dennis said, “See? I told you he’d say that.”
Olin’s vision was still tunneling, and it took him a moment to swivel his head far enough to see Dennis looking out the window. They were dressed for work: Kate in standard slacks and a blouse with a needlessly elaborate keyhole at her throat; Dennis in track pants and a t-shirt that said Eating protein is my superpower, his bulging quads and biceps testing the tensile strength of his garments.
“Dennis,” Olin rasped, nodding hello.
“You already said hi, bro,” Dennis said. “Tell you what. Once you get back on your feet, and stop repeating yourself, we’ll get you into the box. Have you box-jumping in no time.” He ambled over to the bed, took Olin’s hand from Kate. “Squeeze.” Olin obliged; his hand felt like the unfolding paw of a newborn kitten. “The grip of a champ!” Dennis hooted.
Kate was dismayed. “He’s going to need physical therapy, hon. You don’t go straight from being dead to hitting the gym.”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Kate? Not the gym, the box. Besides, I bet I can take him to nationals next year.”
Olin wasn’t averse to physical activity. He’d spent his adolescence playing soccer in dirt lots an hour outside of Timbuktu — the only white boy trying to fit in with the black boys — but he had a certain immunity to his brother-in-law’s workout evangelism. Dennis had owned the gym for eighteen months, and Olin had yet to take him up on the free membership offer.
Olin gestured at his left leg, splinted and in traction. “Did I break anything else?”
Kate took his hand again. “You broke your right femur at the hip, as well as your left tibia. You need more surgery for the hip. You also have a nasty concussion.”
“We already told you this part, dude,” Dennis said. “In the meantime, we can work on your arms. You’d be surprised what you can do from bed. At this rate, you’ll do everything four times, think it’s once, and get jacked. Can he get eggs for breakfast?”
He plucked the menu from the side table. Kate leaned closer to Olin and murmured, “Tell me. Did you see the light or hear the voice?”
The question caused a ripple of involuntary tensing from his muscles. This surprised Olin, although it shouldn’t have. After all, when he and Kate were eight, their dad had seen the light and heard the voice.
They’d trekked to the pool on a sweltering blue Ohio afternoon. Olin and Kate swam off with friends, and during the pool break, when they reported back to their lounge chairs to beg for concession stand treats, they found their dad’s chair empty. They scanned the pool’s perimeter. Beside the diving boards, a crowd had gathered, so they stumbled over. Whenever Olin recalled the scene, he felt a desperate tenderness for his younger self and his sister, all skinny arms, knobbly knees, and freckled cheeks, taking their last normal-American-kid walk across the pool deck. An ambulance sat outside the fence, its flashing lights incongruous on such a sunny day. Their dad sat dazed amid the crowd, dripping wet, the crown of his head bleeding from a cut deep in his hair. A paramedic took his blood pressure while another inspected his wound.
“Who pulled me out?” he asked, in such a manner that Olin understood it wasn’t the first time. “Who said the words?”
“I didn’t see anything,” one lifeguard said.
“I just found him here, facedown,” another lifeguard said, waving her hand at a pool of blood beside the foot of a lounge chair.
The crowd murmured, but no one could produce the person who’d pulled Olin and Kate’s father from the pool after a disastrous dive. No one even remembered him somersaulting off the high springboard. This would prove a problem for the lifeguards who had been assigned to the deep end for that hour, and they would be fired. But it would prove even more of a problem for Olin and Kate.
The official story was that their father had saved himself. He must have suffered from amnesia after hitting his head on the bottom of the pool. But at the hospital, where their mom met them, their father had said, “I remember every second of it. I saw a bright light at the bottom of the pool, and I heard a voice say, ‘It’s not your time.’ And I felt arms around me.”
Within a year, Olin and Kate found themselves whisked away from their comfortable suburban elementary school, from their Nintendo and Barbies and new school clothes every September, from pizza and burgers and fries, from friends and Little League teams, from their grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, from every single thing they knew, to the heartland of Africa, where their parents secured a post as missionaries. Their father believed he’d been saved from death by direct intervention from God. He couldn’t be quietly grateful.
Seeing the light and hearing the voice ultimately led to their parents’ death five years ago, when they refused to leave their missionary post amid rumblings of civil war. Caught in the crossfire, they briefly made news worldwide: the missionaries from Ohio who didn’t want to abandon the people they’d converted, even though most of their flock had fled or taken up arms. By then Olin and Kate had escaped back to an Ohio that was foreign to them, to dismal jobs and relative poverty and night classes at community college, to agnosticism (Olin) and C-and-E Catholicism (Kate), as far away from their parents’ evangelical fervor as they could manage.
Olin shook his head. The world wobbled. “No light, no voice. Nothing.”
Kate shuddered. “Good.”
“Good,” he echoed, but he surprised himself. He wasn’t sure he meant it.
***
The hospital discharged Olin into a rehab center, which four weeks later discharged him onto the pull-out couch in Kate and Dennis’s townhouse. Olin’s apartment lease ran out while he was in rehab, and the newspaper print shop where he’d worked replaced him. He guessed, from the way Kate talked about it, that he’d been a shambles at the job, anyway. He couldn’t quite remember, a lingering effect of the brain injury.
“I wish I could think straight,” he told Kate at breakfast one morning, almost six months after the accident. “I have no follow-through. I have a thought, and I can almost see the other end, but it crisps up and curls at the edges before it combusts.”
Kate hit pause on her laptop, which was streaming Friends, Jennifer Aniston’s iconically coiffed hair dominating the screen. “It’ll come back. The doctors said it could take a year to recover.” She spooned a bite of grapefruit into her mouth. “Do you think Ross and Rachel will get back together? Wait! No spoilers.”
Olin and Kate had spent their adolescence in the same blue mud brick hut on the African savannah, and he struggled to comprehend present American pop culture, never mind everything they’d missed from ages eight to eighteen. When they came back to the States, it was shocking to see screens everywhere, including the one he eventually bought for his pocket. He still faced a certain paralysis in the face of hundreds of channels and dozens of streaming services — in the face of so much human knowledge, right at his thumb tips. He waved a dismissive hand. He had no spoilers for anything.
Just then, Dennis thundered down the stairs. It’d taken a couple of days of this before Olin stopped startling and looking frantically around, gauging whether a tractor-trailer was about to rear-end the townhouse.
“Morning, babe,” Dennis said, kissing Kate’s head as he breezed by and busied himself throwing powders, yogurt, and fistfuls of spinach into the blender. She chirped hello and didn’t look up, although she did pause the computer again when Dennis said, “Blending!” In a closely synchronized move, she unpaused as Dennis’s green shake glopped into his tumbler.
“Olin!” Dennis said. “Toast with butter? Not enough protein, my man.”
Truth be told, Olin didn’t care for salmon or almonds or hard-boiled eggs, which Dennis popped into his mouth whole, like candy. However, for the past few weeks he’d accompanied Dennis to the gym, where he stumped around, pushing a three-foot-wide mop, still dragging his right leg, despite his best efforts at physical therapy. He wiped down equipment, answered phones, and tried to organize the apocalypse of papers Dennis hoarded in his office. From the office window, he watched men whose necks were as wide as their heads jerk barbells to midthigh before dropping them with a clank and groan, like a car frame giving way to the inertia of a tractor-trailer. Olin had not yet stopped startling at this. He watched lithe women jump from the floor to the top of boxes as high as his waist. He watched bodies lift and heave and run and juke and pull and push and swing. He thought it astonishing that they arrived in this gym every morning, astonishing that none of them had ever stopped pumping and respiring and contracting and sweating and releasing.
One young woman in particular caught his attention. Almost all of her cut-neck-and-sleeve t-shirts proclaimed her a member of the Kent State volleyball team circa four years ago. Snaking up from between her breasts, an angry keloid scar terminated an inch below her collarbones. He had to be at least five years older than she was, and he was conscious of how undesirable he was: unemployed, living on his sister’s pull-out couch, still feeling like an émigré a decade after returning to the States, barely able to catch a thought. Yet as she adjusted her fingerless gloves in front of the chin-up bar, he smiled at her, and she shocked him by smiling back.
“You’re Dennis’s brother-in-law, right?” she asked.
Olin stammered an affirmative and grasped for something to say, but she continued. “It’s good to see you here. We couldn’t believe it was Dennis’s brother-in-law on the news.”
“It was on the news?” Olin was taken aback. After all, neither he nor Kate received a single phone call from a news outlet when their parents died, even though he’d spent days clicking through Google alerts about it. He’d felt both invisible and relieved.
“Oh, yeah,” the young woman said. “We got updates from Dennis. We knew you’d pull through.”
Olin was impressed he’d made an impression. Emboldened, he said, “Dennis said he’d have me working out in no time, but recovery is kicking my ass. Maybe you know more than he does about coming back from an injury.”
Her hand flew to her chest so fast that it had to be unconscious, a reflex. She itched her pointer finger over one single keloid bump. “Not an injury, no,” she said. “I had a heart transplant last year. Recovery was hell, but not nearly as hellish as slowly dying for three years while I waited for the heart.” Olin wondered if she really meant: Not nearly as hellish as slowly dying while waiting for someone else to die first and surrender their own heart.
“But you’re here,” Olin said. “Doing pull-ups. If you can, I can.”
She bowed her head, her messy topknot, so unlike the severe brushed-back ponytails of the other women in the gym, flopping forward. “You can,” she said.
He sensed he should move on, so he nodded and resumed pushing dustbunnies and used muscle tape and packets of electrolyte supplements toward the trash bin. He stomped the mop, then swept it all up with a smaller broom and dustpan. His hip ached, insistent, as if it had a message and he couldn’t understand its language.
That night, after everyone went home, Olin considered the series of boxes he’d watched everyone jumping onto earlier. The chalkboard listing the Workout of the Day proclaimed box jumps were #7 on the agenda. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Dennis in the office window, bent over his desk. Usually, he wandered out and did push-ups or squats between paying bills and writing training plans. But tonight he seemed to have mustered supra-Dennis levels of concentration. Olin took out the shortest box, aligned himself in front of it, swung his arms back, and jumped. Both feet landed squarely on top, and his quadriceps contracted and stood him up straight. He felt a distant but familiar elation. It felt like stealing the soccer ball from the fastest kid on the other team. It felt like finally walking across the stage to shake the community college dean’s hand and receive his associate’s. It felt like the afterglow of an orgasm.
He rolled his leg in his hip socket, ignoring twinges of pain. He successfully jumped onto the next-larger box, then, giddy, moved onto the next-larger. It rose to mid-thigh, and Olin knew he’d reached his limit, knew his femur couldn’t pass this test. After all, on x-rays, the break still lit up with alarming intensity, despite the screws, despite the wispy clouds of new bony growth blossoming around it. A recklessness shivered through him. He swung his arms back, compressed like an accordion, then sprang. His toes hit the edge of the top, and Olin toppled, landed flat on his back, so hard that it knocked the wind out of him. As he sucked greedily for air, he saw stars: the gym, mottled with unexpected striations, a night sky spread out for his own private viewing. Olin propped himself on his elbow, gripped his hip, and laughed.
***
The former Kent State volleyball player’s name was Brittney, which Olin learned when she arrived a few mornings later and one of her friends called, “It’s Brittney, bitch!” Instead of being offended, Brittney danced into the gym, a complicated choreography of pliés and jetés, hip-shaking and arm-circling.
Kate, who was helping Olin file paperwork, said, “That has to be a pop culture thing. Do you think it’s a pop culture thing?”
They had spent the night before watching Seinfeld episodes. Olin was happy enough to laugh at Jerry and George and Elaine and Kramer’s clueless narcissism, but Dennis, normally so energetic and positive, said, “It’s weird you two are watching this now.”
“We lived outside of Timbuktu,” Olin said. “We didn’t have a TV, and we’re going to have skin cancer by fifty because we were sunburnt most of the time. We get to watch what we want.”
“But you’ve been back for ten years,” Dennis said. “Kate, you never cared about catching up on this stuff until Olin was in the hospital.”
Olin looked out the window, at the rows of identical townhouses across the street. He hadn’t seen anything odd in his twin’s behavior; he hadn’t made the connection that her recent obsession with late-nineties and early-aughts entertainment had anything to do with him.
Within minutes of Brittney dancing into the gym, Kate abandoned the filing task and fell into an internet rabbit hole, triumphantly pointing out that Britney Spears was the point of reference, and reading out Britney Spears trivia while Olin nodded along.
His hip still ached from box-jumping several nights ago, but after Kate climbed out of her Wikipedia purgatory and they finished filing, he tried a Workout of the Day that Dennis modified for him. The entire time, he was conscious of his love handles jiggling, his underarms rippling. Six months of only the barest physical activity had transformed his body into something he didn’t recognize, something unruly, unpredictable, undependable.
After his workout, Olin took the trash to the dumpster out back. He spotted Brittney sitting in a little red Fiat parked next to it and knocked on her passenger window. She startled, which made him startle, and then she blew out a mouthful of smoke. Olin’s jaw dropped. He could hear her laugh through the closed window.
She waved her joint, motioning him into the passenger seat. He opened the door and plopped down. The car stank of dirty socks.
“Don’t lecture me,” she said, passing him the joint. “I know I shouldn’t. It’s especially bad with my heart.”
Olin inhaled and held his breath as long as he could before blowing smoke at the windshield. “I’ve got no judgment. It’s probably just as bad for me. I was dead for four minutes. And get this. My sister is — was — four minutes younger than me, so now we’re the exact same age.”
Brittney’s mouth fell open into an O. “That’s wild!”
“Is it, though?” Olin said. “Why four minutes? Why not three or five or any other number? What does it mean?”
She considered. “What if it’s not supposed to mean?”
“I think you left something out. What if it’s not supposed to mean anything?”
“I stand by what I said.”
He laughed, and she joined him, guffawing and snorting. Her laugh matched her floppy topknot, but clashed with her articulated collarbones, her keloid scar.
“I feel like it’s supposed to mean something. My body does, too. Like in my hip? In my hip it feels like it’s supposed to mean.” It was a stupid thing to say, he knew, but Brittney sobered.
“They shocked the new heart from inside my chest to start it,” she said. “For some reason, that’s what bothers me. Not my ribs being sawn apart. Not the bypass machine. Not even my chest with an empty hole after they took out my old heart. Just those flat metal spoons on either side of the heart, inside me. Zap, zap, zap.”
They passed the joint back and forth again. “Did you dream while you were under?” Olin asked. It seemed the only way to communicate what he really needed to say.
She shook her head. “Nope. Blank. How about you?”
He shook his head, too, and grasped for words, but his thoughts curled and singed and crackled. He landed on the only image that seemed to make sense and narrated it haltingly: When his family arrived in Mali, knowing only rudimentary French and no Bambara, the local language of their village, everyone wore colorful tie-dyed skirts and tunics and dashikis made of mud cloth. The hues were vibrant against everyone’s deep brown skin. But then the shipments started from support churches in the States: cast off toys and clothes. Within two years of his family’s arrival, most of the men and boys in their village roamed around in t-shirts and old jeans or mismatched basketball shorts. Sports jerseys were the most prized score out of every box. The village elder sometimes donned a Michael Jordan jersey over his tunic.
His parents hadn’t only spread the Good News, and it took years back in the States before Olin could put words to the grief he felt: How he and Kate never fit into either culture, not since they were eight and taking one last unselfconscious trip across the pool deck. How his family brought nothing good to the people of the village and had, in fact, done harm. Their Good News didn’t spread peace, didn’t stop the men of the village from joining in the civil war. Besides, the U.S. churches’ charity destroyed the local economy. By the time Olin and Kate left, the weavers and seamstresses of the village couldn’t sell their handicrafts because everyone was wearing faded t-shirts from a 2003 5k held in Cleveland.
“That’s bleak,” Brittney said. She stubbed out the end of the joint in a drink holder on her center console. “So tell me something good about living in Mali.”
Olin pondered. “From horizon to horizon, the sky was full of stars. My father used to point out that the Psalms say God named them all, and when I was a kid, that blew my mind. There were so many of them, and God took the time to name every single one. But when I came back to the U.S., I took an astronomy class and learned that we’ve named all the stars, over and over again throughout the ages. We can only see about 4,500 from the darkest, best vantage point on earth, which was probably my village. Even learning that didn’t dampen the awe I feel that all those stars exist, and every night, I saw the light they sent out years and years before.”
Brittney cocked her head, then fastened her seatbelt and said, “That makes me want to drive fast.”
“Let’s go a hundred,” Olin replied.
***
Every day Olin grew stronger. He continued Dennis’s modified workouts until he was jumping to the top of the tallest box, completing as many pull-ups as Brittney, deadlifting more weight than Kate judged appropriate for his screwed-together hip. He filed or trashed every last paper in the office, and Dennis said, “You’ve proven yourself indispensable, bro,” and hired him. At dinner, Kate called him the gym office manager, and Olin corrected her: “Box office manager.”
Kate rolled her eyes. “Not you, too.”
“If he really wants to represent the brand, he needs to eat more protein,” Dennis said. Olin sighed and popped a hard-boiled egg into his mouth.
Kate also sighed, and after dinner, Olin watched Veronica Mars with her.
After workouts, Olin and Brittney smoked in her car and marveled at their good fortune: They were alive. In the next breath, they interrogated the indifference and malaise they felt in the face of that good fortune. Brittney obsessed over whose heart she had. She’d received a brief letter from her donor’s parents, no names, no details other than the fact that their twenty-one-year-old son died in a car crash. She sometimes spent half the night searching the internet for car accidents and the victims who could have been her savior. In turn, Olin told her he’d missed learning some central truth during the four minutes he was spread out on the table, dead. He could feel it deep in his aching hip socket.
Brittney’s car was old and couldn’t do much over ninety miles per hour. One afternoon as they sped down a hilly road outside of town at seventy-eight, Olin realized the moments he’d felt most alive since his car accident were moments of danger — falling on his back in the box, speeding outrageously down the street with a driver who was stoned.
“I can almost make it mean something!” he yelled at her over the wind roaring through the open windows.
“You and making it mean!” she yelled back. “You expect too much. You expect life to make sense.”
“It could! If I could wrap my mind around it. The failing is mine, not life’s.”
“Maybe life is like a story,” Brittney said. “Maybe it only makes sense at the end.”
Olin considered this as Brittney applied the brakes, the car bucking as it slowed to the speed limit. The houses, which had been drawing closer together for the last half mile, now crowded on skinny quarter-acre lots, front porches and windows identical, the sameness of the suburbs unrelenting. With every hit of a joint, with every ache of his hip, Olin knew. Were he the recipient of seeing the light and hearing the voice, he’d choose differently from his father. He’d spin it into good.
***
Three days later, when Olin threw the trash into the dumpster and folded himself into Brittney’s passenger seat, she didn’t pass him a joint, she passed him a small pill. She stuck her tongue out at him, then placed her own pill on the back of it, swallowed, and grinned.
“What’s this?” he said. “Are we going to trip right here, next to the dumpster?”
“I heard about it on NPR. Evidently, doctors are using psychedelics to help terminal cancer patients make meaning out of their lives. Sometimes a single trip makes everything better. It made me think of you.”
Olin stared at the pill in his hand. He hadn’t even taken any of the oxycontin the doctors had prescribed. It was one thing to smoke marijuana and drive fast and try to reason through the unreasonable coincidences of life. It was another to swallow a pill and expect clarity. After all, wasn’t the real growth in the wandering?
He stalled. “What about Dennis? I’m supposed to work this afternoon.”
“Dennis won’t miss you. I told him you were taking me to a cardiology appointment.”
“That’s shady.” Olin’s resistance wilted, and he popped the pill. “But what if he comes outside and sees us in your car?”
“He’s too busy doing one-armed push-ups inside,” she said. “Don’t you think he’s trying to make up for something, or avoid something, with all the protein and working out?”
“Aren’t we all?”
They chatted for a while before he felt a wave wash over him — a brilliant blue one, fresh water, not salt, and he turned to Brittney, who had the warmest smiling brown eyes, the topknottiest topknot, the delicatest half-moon fingernails, the most best open-heart surgery scar.
“Your whole life is ahead of you,” he told her. The words tasted delicious, like powdered creamsticks and warm milk. “You need to let it flow from you, let it flow.”
“I didn’t deserve this heart.” Brittney’s lips were a bow, tying and untying itself. “But I’m trying.”
“The concept of eternity depresses me,” Olin replied. “Always has. Now is the only is there is. Tomorrow never comes, it’s only ever today. An end is a gift. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”
“A beginning is a gift. An end is depressing. I want to be eternally in the middle. Becoming and becoming and becoming.”
“That pill was a gift.” Olin took Brittney’s hand, her thumb nail like a sonnet, her pinkie a haiku, her middle finger none other than an abecedarian. His skin felt bright and colorful, like perfectly spun mud cloth.
Outside the car, the blue face of the dumpster vibrated around the edges, as if someone had struck it in the middle like a timpani. Olin watched, fascinated, as it commenced upon beating in time with his heart, contracting and rattling with the whoosh of his blood. And — strangely enough — he realized the dumpster had windows, which were flung open, and sheets blew out through them in the breeze.
Night descended, and Olin recognized the edifice in front of him dancing in a familiar way. He fumbled out of the car and found himself standing next to his family’s beating blue-washed hut in Mali. Clouds obscured even the brightest stars. The front yard was marked by the rock on one corner and the post on the other. Dust blew between twenty-six thin glass cases, each an inch wide, each standing six feet high. A beetle backed its ball of dung against one case and couldn’t budge it. Olin had seen a similar art display during one of his seven years of college: a cow, sliced vertically, suspended in what the installation notes called “vitreous fluid,” and spread apart so people could pause between its pieces, examine its putrid pink insides. Except these glass cases held slices of his father, and the members of their village milled about between his cross-sections. “Here,” said someone, not in English, but in Bambara. Olin’s eyes welled with tears. That single word felt like coming home. He turned to find his best friend from the village, Adama, wearing a Bulls jersey with 23 emblazoned on front and back, his tunic flapping below. Olin was overjoyed to see him for the first time in ten years, but Adama seemed to have more important things to do than catch up. “Here is your father’s near-death experience.” He pointed to one cross-section deep in the middle of Olin’s father’s head, indicating a section in the gray of his brain, which also beat in time, growing like a blister with each beat, until it splatted against the glass.
“It wasn’t God,” Olin said. “He rescued himself. Why didn’t he just own it? He was his own hero. He didn’t have to ruin our lives in the process.” He gestured at Adama’s Bulls jersey, as if to say, Exhibit One.
“True,” Adama said. “Your father was also wrong about souls. They don’t exist. We are mind and body, and we are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.”
Overhead, the clouds lifted like a veil, and the fevered moon illuminated the scene, beating at one hundred seven degrees Fahrenheit. Pain shot through Olin’s hip, and he realized he was lying on something hard — not the ground of his village, no, but the Fiat hood. Brittney laid next to him, her heel kicking the grill of the car on the off-beat. Above them, a few stars peeked between clouds.
“That one’s my favorite,” Brittney said, pointing, her finger wavering around the sky.
“I’ve got to go back to where it all began,” Olin said.
“Field trip!” Brittney crowed.
Olin may or may not have given her directions; he couldn’t remember whether he said them out loud or merely thought them. As the houses rushed by, he pressed his face hard against the passenger window, amazed. So similar, but he saw now: the pop of a turquoise door, a stained-glass window, the shock of a white fence, the lush green of trees and bushes everywhere, all so different! He could feel the trees secreting oxygen, sustaining his life, and even as the car swerved too close, he thought it would be lovely to smash against that life-giving tree.
He must have given Brittney pretty terrific directions, because she parked exactly where the ambulance did twenty years ago, and he found himself at the base of the community pool fence, watching her scale it efficiently, all ten feet in a few seconds. The pool on the other side disappeared into darkness, lights extinguished, the water still and the deep end glistening under the moon waxing gibbous. Brittney paddled her toes — her poetic little toes! They were free verse from her shoes! — on the wire links of the opposite side of the fence, searching for a hold, before she gave up and dropped to the strip of grass between the fence and the concrete. She swore, but not very colorfully. “Scraped my shins,” she said. “Can’t feel a thing.”
Olin proved much clumsier at the climb, and as he clotheslined himself on the top, trying to figure out how to shift his weight, the unthinkable happened: Another car, pulling into the deserted parking lot. Lights right on him. He screeched in alarm, the way he might have before the tractor-trailer hit his car, he didn’t know, he couldn’t remember a blasted thing — his life was spiraling down to this singular point, splined on a fence a decade in the air, trying to return to the last place he felt whole.
The car stopped below him, and Kate burst out of the passenger door. “Olin! Get down! What are you doing?”
A vague memory of voice texting her slid into his consciousness. She and Dennis, who popped out of the other side, were sober and taking things very seriously, despite how ridiculous Olin now realized he was. Tripping to Mali and back, next to the dumpster. Making $13 an hour as the box office manager and sleeping on his sister’s futon. Stuck up here atop this fence. The hilarity of it all carried him down the other side, and he ignored everyone’s entreaties, traipsed maybe twenty-five yards to the place where it all began. He looked back to see Dennis letting himself down on this side of the fence, Kate’s face in shadow, her nose poking through the chainlink.
“Kate! Come walk with me!” Olin called.
“Kate, stay there,” Dennis said, holding out a hand stop sign, a veritable traffic cop. “Olin, come here. We’ve got to get out before someone calls the police.”
“Kate!” Olin called again, and though she laced her fingers higher in the fence, she didn’t make to climb it.
He needed to recreate it as best he could. “Brittney! Walk with me! This could make it mean!”
She pranced toward him, light on her haiku toes, laced her arm through his like they were about to parade into prom. Maybe, he guessed, since he never went to prom. He led her across the deck, imagined the sun beating down on them, imagined the crowd, imagined his father, imagined the blood, right here. All right here. He stopped, and Brittney looked up at him, waiting. He listened to his hip, inside his body, expected it to twinge and sing: Yes! Yes! Back to the place where it all began!
But there was nothing. He did not see the light, he did not hear the voice.
“Brittney,” he said. “I have to jump.”
“Okay?” She seemed less sure about this than any other risk they’d taken in the past few hours, weeks, months. She stumbled over a lounge chair, backed up, and crossed her arms across her chest. She was obviously expecting him to cannonball in from the side. Her scar beat in time with his body, with the beautiful, virulent, pulsing earth.
“Not from here,” he said, trekking around the deep end to the high dive.
“Olin, no,” Kate said. “Please. What did you guys smoke?”
“I have to make it mean!” Olin said.
But between him and the ladder was Dennis. “I can’t let you do this, bro.”
“I thought Dennis was going to be too busy doing one-armed push-ups to catch us!” Olin shouted at Brittney.
“You were the one who texted them!” She tucked her lips and jutted her chin, and he decided her topknot was like second or third topknottiest, definitely not number one.
“You can’t do this,” Dennis said again. Olin hung his head, nodded into his chest, turned back toward Kate, and calculated. If he could jump off the high dive, once and for all, he could prove it: There was no light, no voice, no such thing as a soul. There was only the story he told himself about himself. And he could do better. He could tell it better.
“Olin, please,” Kate said. She had migrated along the fence so that she was even with him, and she reached through the chainlink, fingers straining toward him. He reached out, like he might grab them, but then he juked, spun, and ducked right past Dennis. He made it up three of the high dive’s ladder rungs before Dennis grabbed him by the ankle, then by the waist, yanking him down. They fell in slow motion to the pool’s concrete deck. He flailed and fought to free himself, but Dennis seemed to have the same strengths and weaknesses, the same intuition to roll to the side, the same instinct to strike out with a foot, to knee him in the balls. Finally, after several minutes of struggle, Dennis wrestled Olin’s arm behind him. “Give it up, bro. You need to calm down. You can jump in the pool tomorrow, sober.”
“But you know what my name means!” Olin twisted a handful of Dennis’s hair in his fist.
“Ow! What? I only know it was your dead uncle’s name.”
“Olin means to inherit. And my dad thought he heard from God, but he destroyed me and maybe Kate and the people in our village and in the end himself and my mom. He said God named all the stars, but we named all the stars. If I jump, I can set it right. I’m the story.”
Dennis loosened his grip and sat up. He scratched his chest, hair spiking rebelliously. “Kate,” he said, not taking his eyes off Olin. “You better handle this one.”
“I’m not destroyed,” Kate said. “And neither are you. You’re getting it together. You’re fluent in three languages. You’re better at running the business than Dennis and I are.”
Dennis stood up, brushed himself off, straightened his twisted track pants, and nodded. “I’m all vision. I can’t do details.”
“I forget a lot of the French and Bambara,” Olin said. “Je ne pratique pas.” I don’t practice.
Brittney hummed, obviously surprised to hear the other language singing from his lips. The frenzy had gone out of Olin for a few minutes, but it reignited, the fire suddenly blazing, the follow-through he’d been missing for so long, found. He sprang up, skipped up the ladder to the high dive, and with Kate and Dennis and Brittney all yelling his name, frantic, he leaped.
It wasn’t a dive so much as a belly flop, into the abyss of the deep end. Submerged, he wondered if this was what it felt like to be buried: The earth and the dark pressing in on all sides, until you lost track of up and down, left and right. All absence. But then, his own human condition, bursting in him, righting him, buoying him up. Because humans float.
He surfaced on his back, his trunk stinging as he blew a mouthful of water out and gasped air. He stared up at the stars, bleached on the edges by the light pollution of Ohio but as right and true as they had been in Mali. The night sky, ordered and dependable and seemingly eternal in a way that comforted him.
“Olin!” Kate yelled. “Are you all right? Brittney! Is he all right?”
Olin craned his head to see Brittney, treading water beside him. Dennis stood on the pool deck, shaking his head.
“Are you trying to save me and earn your heart?” Olin asked.
Brittney rewarded him with a swimming smile and flipped onto her back beside him, grabbing his hand, floating in tandem. They turned to the stars, which sent out that light, that unapproachable light, that unquenchable fire, burning blindly and hopefully into the future.
Valli Jo Porter earned her MFA from Old Dominion University, and in 2020 she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for her short fiction. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Every Day Fiction, Gordon Square Review, and Literary Mama. She lives in Northeast Ohio, where she is a board member of Literary Cleveland. She is querying one novel manuscript and at work revising another.
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 