Swimmers
The weekend was full of sunlight caught in the bare outlines of indistinct corners and plain honey-colored walls. It was mid-November and the dreaded prospect of the winter rainy season’s looming approach draped itself over the city like an unsequenced pathogen biding its time from an anonymous gastrointestinal tract deep in the rural hinterland. Waste releases from faraway industrial feedlots had spawned huge toxic algal blooms in the harbor, and although initially we had decided over text to go on a walk along the waterfront we opted to stay inside and do something chill, like watch a movie and have sex or have sex and watch a movie. Each sequence of activities had a special rhythm of its own, of the ritual opening and closing of laptops and the muffled crescendo of the plum tree thumping against the blurred glass of the upstairs window, whose flowers were pink like the suit Jackie Kennedy wore on a similarly beautiful November day in Dallas when strong southerly winds had melted a damp and overcast morning into an impossibly perfect afternoon.
Getting to his house took three discrete steps that dissolved into each other like images of dead people captured on fading celluloid. I started by walking my bike to the bus stop from where I was living, an old dingbat apartment whose chipping layers of paint resembled thin filaments of mica. The fact that the bus never arrived on schedule allowed my thoughts to be smudged as I looked blankly into the waves of traffic over which the bus route number and destination would eventually hover like a weakly incandescent Fata Morgana. Once inside, the stop-and-go motion of the bus lulled me into a semi-fugue state that similarly emulsified my thoughts into a comfortable blankness, this time in the landscapes passing at a steady velocity. The bus followed the path of a long-forgotten streetcar line, during which I caught views of long barricades in front of the shiny new recruiting center, front porches obscured by aluminum fencing, Chinese elms under freeway passes, tentacles of fog lingering over the curve of the posh hills across the bay, and the falling sun igniting the sea and fracturing the sky into stunning parcels of color, whose fleeting textural idiosyncrasies would inevitably burn off into the moonlight.
Only after disembarking at the central bus terminal did a slew of trenchant questions begin to surface and bleed into each other like the intricate, interconnected burrow systems of Gobi Desert gerbil colonies. Was I being purposefully opaque with my intentions? Was he? Who was he even? I knew only that his first name was Ryan, which he had slipped into his departing words the first time we met in the shadows of a late October evening. He was in the area to visit his grandmother who lived in a mid-century Craftsman bungalow much farther uphill amidst the overgrown ruins of exhausted quicksilver mines. She was a practitioner of an esoteric form of Buddhism that made her view all people as clay figurines, condemned to amount to nothing but dust. He had discovered my online profile while she lectured him on the importance of abandoning all worldly desires. She was the chief financial officer of a private equity firm that specialized in human plasma investment.
I thought of the way I had taken off my glasses to appear more attractive to him as he drove me around in his grey Prius, the streetlights and electric Halloween decorations becoming increasingly distorted through the windshield until we got to a viewpoint overlooking the patchwork metropolis we called home, where I slipped my glasses back on in the darkness and laid witness to the glimmering debris of civilization. As my vision went in and out of focus I was struck by how the view resembled the stippled flanks of the radioactive salamanders that stage intense mating frenzies in the Belarusian swamplands every spring.
I biked down the main artery through downtown, which at the outbreak of the war had been frequently clogged by combative demonstrations that grew progressively smaller until only tired acronyms remained on the streets on wrinkled banners and wheatpasted flyers. The federal complex and most major firms had moved their personnel out of downtown as a preemptive security measure; I raced past hunched bodies arranging stolen goods on the curb and mobile surveillance trailers whose flashing blue lights were slightly off sync with the blinking screens that asked no one in particular to support the defenders of democracy in Asia. I biked over tight folds and other abnormalities in the street grid that denoted hills that were no longer there, ghostly altitudes that would fizzle out as the underlying geology transitioned to reclaimed landfill in the urban fringe. Old linen napkins, unidentified bone fragments, imported chinoiserie, telegraph poles, bits of police academy plexiglass, outdated desk globes, election paraphernalia from long-forgotten political campaigns—the miscellaneous residue of the city lay underfoot in what amounted to a series of temporary victories against the ever-fluctuating sea.
Ryan lived in a brown-shingle house with a view of the decommissioned naval shipyard that dominated the city’s southeast quadrant. When I arrived at his porch the shipyard’s massive bridge crane was faintly illuminated by the afterglow of the day’s last light. Live oak and sumac trees lined the block, and every building seemed to be sinking into overgrown vegetation as if reflecting the precarious existence of land created where previously there was only water. The tangled fence vines and weed-ridden lots looked like they could disappear at any moment, like the lush xeromorphic forests of northeastern Brazil that turn into dry scrub just as quickly as they come to life. Green merged with black in the twilight like in the jungles across the Pacific where American drones hovered over depopulated villages to detect any signs of body heat.
“I’ve never been with someone like you,” he said, touching the small of my back. I squirmed a little on his couch under the solemn light under his lampshade. He smiled. I reciprocated. Designer cows were being lassoed by robots in Texas and there were microplastics in my dandruff.
“What makes you say that?” I trapped my earnestness with my hands, loosely covering the grin that flashed through the gaps between my fingers like quartz shining through granite rocks.
“I saw a mermaid when I was in Paris,” Ryan said, gesturing to a framed sunset view of the Notre Dame from Pont Saint-Michel, from which hundreds of Algerian demonstrators were thrown into the Seine by the French National Police half a century before. “You look just like her.”
“I don’t believe it.” I pouted at him sardonically. “Show me a photo.”
He took out his phone and showed me a blurry mass clinging to the algae-ridden side of a picturesque canal. “I got the stitches I had in my shoulder taken out that morning, so I couldn’t take a better one before it disappeared. But I know what I saw.”
I kissed his forehead, pinching the moles on his cheek that reminded me of the way cities with large populations were denoted on maps. “Any chance that I might be able to see one myself?”
“There’s a spot on the coast up north. Once you paddle out beyond the reef and throw a few potato chips into the water they’ll come out from where they live in the seagrass beds.”
“Can we go?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you.” I pretended to curtsy and ate the rest of the ground turkey pasta we had on the table, after which I scrolled on my phone on the toilet and watched the rim of a clock face slowly reveal itself from behind his bushy head of hair as he fell asleep in my arms.
There were rubbish fires outside whose periodic bursts of cracking noises assimilated themselves into my dream as the fuzzy intermissions dividing one scene from the next. I was a catfish and Ryan was feeding me treats. I was in a tank, the pH balance was off, and all the other fish were dying around me. I was waiting for Ryan, standing around with my gills tucked between my legs. We were swimmers and hours turned into minutes, minutes into seconds.
❧
Martial law began in Ottawa early Sunday morning. The pretext of the declaration was the purported mass sabotage of Québec’s hydropower utility facilities and the sinking of an American warship off Halifax. News of a limited nuclear exchange over Seoul prompted widespread looting in all major cities. All political activities and work stoppages were banned. Most of the Pacific Rim was already under some form of emergency powers declaration. NORAD was on high alert. By the time we woke up, Canada was in flames.
It was cool weather when we stepped out. There were more flags than usual outside. I saw a photo on social media of tanks rolling down Howard Street, but someone said that it had been taken last year. Fog rolled in over the western neighborhoods, hugging the land like the low cottonwood bosques lining the Rio Grande where the river bends in Albuquerque. We walked past rows of wrought iron bars covering store windows and pigeons hopping across the abandoned courtyards of dilapidated mixed-use developments.
“I think we should get out of here,” Ryan said, the distance between us fluctuating based on trees and other miscellaneous obstacles in our path. “My grandma has a beach house up north. It’s actually more of a cliff house, but it has kelp and shellfish and everything.”
I thought of my job, the coworkers who I smoked with during breaks, of how everything in my life would have to fall back into place on Monday by eight in the morning. Squadrons of Canada geese flew south overhead. I wondered if any of their stubborn counterparts in the lightly timbered escarpments of Manitoba had stayed up north, believing that by now the planet had warmed up enough for them to stay. I wondered if they, having ventured into a desolate Winnipeg under curfew to scavenge for food, were eviscerated by the intercontinental ballistic missiles that landed on the city’s strategic air force base, their haggard bodies thrown into the sky and illuminated by a white blinding light.
I nodded.
I knew that was something you weren’t supposed to do, going to a strange man’s house in the country on a whim, especially when a full set of organs could sell for a premium. But I couldn’t care less. It felt good to live with my lips, to be buoyant and blithe.
We drove past arthritic tent cities wilting under the weight of their accumulated detritus, acrid wastewater effluent pools next to hastily erected wartime assembly plants, convoys of middle-class families heading to flashy rural bunkers that only existed on Internet ads, the rounded blisters of decrepit piers crumbling into long banks of sand, and a long line of misty peaks from which isolated radar systems whirred incessantly into the night like little fleas on the mangled pelt of the Earth. We got gas station coffee and bought a black market Geiger counter from an Asian woman selling shoplifted merchandise out of her truck. I asked Ryan if he remembered 9/11. He said yes and that he was in elementary school when it happened. He lived three time zones west of New York and saw everything on TV before the school bus came to pick him up in the morning. None of his peers knew what had happened—it was the type of school whose students were encouraged to become sensitive fully actualized individuals from an early age, which required taking piano lessons and practicing meditation instead of watching television—and he felt like he was harboring a great secret as he walked around the halls, trying to make out the muffled expressions of horror and revenge in the hollow eyes of his teachers.
“Do you think it was an inside job?” I asked, feeling cheeky.
“Of course,” he said with startling clarity after having mumbled his way through our previous conversations. “My uncle worked for the Project for the New American Century.”
He touched my leg and I touched his. We pulled off in a gravel parking lot offering a scenic view of a drought-stricken reservoir and made our own explosions.
❧
We arrived at a set of modernist timber-frame cottages framed against the gently sloping topography of an ancient marine terrace by dinnertime. Tiny creatures moved through the tide pools under the nearby bluff, under which ran the last transpacific submarine fiber optic cables to remain unsevered. Farther up the hill lay a tight complex of two-story buildings concealed by a stand of eucalyptus trees and a two-meter barbed wire fence. There they processed signals from Guam, Hawai’i, Okinawa and the rocky outcroppings of what was left of Taiwan and sent them to a clandestine central monitoring hub before being distributed into the national telecommunications network. There were a few pieces of trippy textile art and majestic free-range hens trotting around the grounds, laying speckled brown eggs that felt heavy in my palm. We walked between hedgerows that twisted in unexpected directions. At one point he began running, and I struggled to keep up, partly because I was carrying my backpack and a tote bag of everything we would need for the next few days: canned tuna, dried mangoes, flashlights, water from Fiji, flashlights, a radio that may have been broken, portable batteries, and a freeze-dried herbal remedy that a prominent wellness influencer promoted as a cure-all for radiation sickness. I also had my laptop in my backpack, although Ryan had told me there was no internet. Something about the chromatic smear of its soft artificial glow was calming for me.
We ate walnuts in the candlelight. Little lights flared up in the other houses where shadowy figures drank wine and made exaggerated motions with their hands. Ryan offered me a glass of Chardonnay, but I declined. My old roommate used to drink wine every evening while inputting AI prompts for every piece of writing he had to produce: text messages to his mom, a paper on Islamic architecture, sporadic updates to his social media profiles. He was either doing that or complaining about the fact that he wasn’t living in Brooklyn, where he would eventually move to attend graduate school at a prestigious university where student protestors against the war were first doxxed, then disappeared. While usually chatty, he said nothing about this when I last saw him. He was working at a design firm that specialized in building police memorials for the staged encounter killings of Appalachian subversives.
We smoked weed around a stone fire pit under a grove of crooked cypress trees a few yards back from the cottage. It was cold, but we liked it. Zapotec migrants harvested cannabis in huge plantations on the other side of the mountains, but the weed we smoked was synthetic, having been undressed from its genome by a company that matched couples through an app based on autosomal DNA testing. The residual effects of the caffeine from earlier amplified the feeling of disequilibrium that soon set into my body. I had the urge to bobble and make erratic motions with my arms, as if the discomfort of sitting still in the car all day had just dawned on my body. I opted for a charming grin, stretching the sides of my mouth so that Ryan could see all the little chunks of enamel that had chipped off my teeth, making little slits that ran perpendicular to my smile like the gaps in atmospheric pressure that produce wind.
“Who else lives here?” We were back inside and lingered in a room where he had made little marks on the walls many years before.
“Mostly people from the city. There are a few families who travel up from Los Angeles, one or two who split most of their time between London and New York. The neighbors are a couple who work in risk investment and securities law. Some of the old hippies who got to this place first have stayed around.” Ryan kept vigil over a table that had a photo of him at Stonehenge. He looked about nine. I sat on a couch that was almost perfectly white. “They’re mostly good people, kind of.”
I laughed without thinking about it out of being conditioned to automatically react with laughter in any social situation. Ryan looked at me perplexed, and I tried to avoid eye contact, sensing that I was rapidly proceeding toward the perigee of drug-induced dissociation. I asked him what he did for a living, and he said that he was making a film that served as a perfect allegory for the war. It was about a pair of young advertising media consultants in Northern Virginia who commit gruesome spree killings of refugee nail technicians. His style was mostly static shots and fragmented meta-narratives without any characters or much dialogue. The film was composed almost entirely of passing interchangeable landscapes, pizzerias and piano stores and shopping cart corrals set to ambient electronic music.
“It’s about snorkeling in the ennui of suburbia,” he said, the moon like a constable through the window in the corner. “Most of it is recycled footage from when I worked for this immersive virtual reality startup.”
“How is it about the war?”
“I wrote that it’s about immigrant women overcoming adversity in my grant application. But I like to think of it as interpreting landscapes as a reflection of the American psyche.” Ryan looked at me, his speech fading to a low murmur. “And maybe there’s something dark hidden under the surface of this society.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little problematic?”
“What do you mean? Like racist?”
“Not racist.”
“Is it because I’m not giving the victims a voice? Not letting them tell their story?”
“No, it’s just I think that art should be clear about its intentions. It should divide an audience, expose contradictions. Especially when the world is at the precipice of complete annihilation.”
“And when did you become an artist?”
I didn’t respond, turning away with the slow grace of an elephant. He cuddled me from behind, stroking my hair in a way that felt almost baroque, like a royal horsekeeper combing the mane of a prized mare.
“I love you,” Ryan said.
“Do you mean it?”
“Why would I bring you to this place if I didn’t?”
I thought about all the times he must have said I love you to other people: sitting in the dim light of his high school band room, walking his bike past street cleaners at Oxford, smiling bashfully over porcelain cutlery, in the back of vans heading to music festivals and wrestling with weighted blankets in the dark. I imagined all the richness and color of his life, which for all it was worth had the same depth and complexity as the millions of other lives that were being extinguished at that very moment.
Outside the other window, which looked out into the verandas of four other equally-spaced cottages, dark figures scampered around like rats in the distance. They were the faceless housekeepers who lived in an underground bunker half a mile down the road that was built to test machine guns on aircraft in World War II.
❧
The attack began on Monday morning before dawn. The hills looked like the massive medieval pyres of Seville which burned through acres of human flesh during festive auto-da-fé. Fire swept down the canyons in psychedelic gusts and ash fell like snow on our eyebrows. Ryan and I drove to the bunker. There was already a small crowd there; the housekeepers had locked themselves in with some of their family members from across the mountain. We left once some of the neighbors started shooting. It smelled like garlic from the white phosphorus. Surveillance drones buzzed overhead, capturing artful clips of the carnage.
Ryan told me he knew the locations of a few rowboats where we could wait out the firestorm and find a cove or a sea cave where we could be better shielded from the effects of radioactive dust particles. We passed by some old hippies who had resigned themselves to taking shroom chocolates and reclining on sun chairs, watching the sky burst open over and over again. A family of coyotes jumped out of clumps of manzanita and ran with us for about half a minute. They too were heading to the ocean. From far away the cottages looked like what happened to the boxes that homeless guys slept in before they put in the huge plastic Christmas tree in Union Square every year: little crumpled things that went from brown to red to sooty black as the fire swept ever closer to the coastal fringe.
“These must be what the mermaids wear to school,” Ryan said, lifting a green backpack from the water. Intercontinental ballistic missiles had done to Vancouver what the Cascadia subduction zone had failed to do, and fleece jackets, old portraits of Queen Elizabeth, empty dimebags, Haida totem poles, the blasted windows of glass condos, and the concrete silos of grain elevators had floated down North Pacific Current along with assorted debris from across the ocean—lunch boxes from Busan, polymer banknotes from Hong Kong, navigational buoys from the Strait of Malacca.
Giving Ryan a mild grin, I reached my hand into the water and grasped a journal whose pages were full of hearts, little smiley faces and a language I couldn’t identify. “The mermaids here must be old-fashioned. They still write letters to express how much they love each other.”
We eventually ran aground on a sandbar. We weren’t sure if there was land nearby, as dense fog obscured everything beyond our fingertips. The rowboat was leaking water, and we were shivering. As we waded in the water, testing its depth and trying to make out the shore, the light of our headlamps cut into the thick air and crashing surf, crossing each other and overlapping momentarily before drifting off into separate directions.
Andy Choi is a junior at UC Berkeley studying Urban Studies, Geography, Conservation and Resources, and Spanish and Portuguese. He is the author of Slow Hot (London: Schism Press, 2021). His writing has been featured by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Korea Policy Institute, South Dakota Review, and the Harlem International Film Festival, among others. He enjoys breaking traffic laws on his bike and looking at maps.
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