Treading Water

The pool is only about six feet deep, so you have to keep treading. It's alright. The edge is only eight or nine feet away in every direction. A good work-out, treading water is. You get the sense that that's why you went into the pool, to work out those arms and legs. There's a comfortable feeling being only a foot from the bottom, knowing that you can take a quick break under the water if you want to. And so every few minutes you sink like a stone, occasionally daring to open your eyes underwater. The water isn't chlorinated and yet it feels somehow clean. You open your eyes underwater and it doesn't sting or even itch. Music overhead is playing, You recognize the aria, "Erbarme Dich," from St. Matthew's Passion. What a nice song. You remember finding it.

You only wonder how you got here. Seems like you just woke up in this little pool. So maybe you're dreaming. But then, why this pleasant fatigue upon the muscles? After ten or fifteen minutes you've reached a nice feeling all over. Treading is a continuous challenge, but it's not too aerobically demanding, nor is it too demanding on the muscles. Just a solid return. Return. That's the word your mind produces, and it feels somehow right.

Anyway, after a while you start to get a little tired. So you keep treading water and, like many ending a stationary workout, you keep your treading going in rhythm, planning to tread all the way to the edge of the pool for the last few seconds.

And then, before you reach the edge, you're swept back into the middle again by a current of water.


At first you're surprised. And then, of course, you recall: it's one of those endless pools, designed to give you a continuous workout even when you don't want to practice treading water. Even when you want to, like, move: Even then, in a manner of speaking, you can swim forever. Front-stroke. Back-stroke. Etc. As long as you go in a certain direction, the water will jet against your movement. The jets will compensate for your momentum and keep you in a relatively stationary position. It's safe, it's neat, and there's an odd feeling of enjoyment comparable to over-wet dough through one's fingers - like how for one it's subjective substance and for the other it's subjective distance, and in each case there are real mechanisms for producing each sensation. Plus it's real distance as far as your muscles are concerned. You flex pleasantly.

And you figure you'd just happened to go in the exact direction for which the pool would compensate with a current. So you go to the opposite edge, obviously. And, lo and behold, you cannot. The endless pool must be bidirectional, because the other end of the pool also sweeps you back from that edge (which you call "South" to get your bearings). The clear blue water under the clear blue sky has rejected your exit South as well as your exit North.

And so you try East and are rebuffed and so you try West and are contradicted and so you try North by North East and are unsuccessful and so you try every permutation of a direction that a compass knows and more and as yet do not reach the edge. And, breathing more heavily and feeling the rush of neurochemicals that signify known desperation, so you try path integrals and misdirections and tricky sequences of dizzying moves that leave you tired and frustrated, and water gets in your nose a couple times and you just have to stop and bear it. You realize you're trapped. The pool is endless in time and space as far as you're concerned and from its infinity of time portends your end. You have to find a way out.

And yet it feels so calm from start to close. Whatever desperate maneuver you'd attempt, you'd be brought back to center and there would be a truce between mortal and mechanism. And the bottom was always there, and the bottom of the pool was below you, and the bottom of the pool was only below you by a foot as you tread the water. You need to keep treading water to survive, but it's not a violent effort that's required, for now. You just need a good supply of energy, and you do have that.

It's calm and you've calmed down. The clawing desperation is gone. But of course, intellectually you know you will die if you do not escape. Erbarme Dich is still playing. You hear the word stasis and don't know why. You almost meditate in this empty place, looking down upon your body and the bottom of the pool, and you know that your treading may fail and your life would end at the bottom of the pool.

Eventually (after what feels like a half-hour), you figure out the back-float position that you've seen before but never managed, and that isn't terribly comfortable but preserves your energy. You look around the rim of the pool - two feet high, meaning you're going to need more than a simple unmolested second in which to climb out if you get there. The rim of the pool shines smoothly and seems to be made of a safe material that you'd be able to get purchase on to climb if you got close enough and the current ever stopped. But two feet up is two feet up.

After so many efforts and having seen the the mechanical power of the endless pool, you've realized you can't beat the machine with force - you'll have to transcend its mechanics. You'll have to win the game beyond the game - beat the mechanical system. You cry out for a few minutes - in retrospect, the first and most obvious solution of all. But screaming for help is drowned out somewhat by the music and something tells you, deep down, that no one is coming to help you. You've started to figure that with a two-foot rim and a perfectly calibrated height that would keep you treading, you've started to figure that nothing about your placement in this pool had been a mistake, that you are meant to be here. Maybe you'd been the one to place yourself here in a prior condition of life (you truthfully doesn't know), but this is not a place you'd been sent to get a quick work-out. You'd been sent here to live or die. Occasional mild cramps in the calf and gut testify that this is not anyone's dream, so scrap that.

Distances are hard to come by without reference points. You'd read somewhere that this 8-15 foot radius of the pool - from center to circumference, that is - is precisely the range at which human bicameral vision has an odd breakdown in judging distance. That they would actually exploit this distance, filmmakers would, to create the illusion of UFOs. You remember from childhood seeing the alarm clock's numbers jumping out and flashing at you when you were at a specific yaw and pitch and distance in the dark. How the effect had made you turn on the room's main light and verify no ghosts or monsters. How the static the alarm clock's radio had given you as you turned it on to calm yourself down had only made it worse, made it seem like the government had been taken over or something. How understanding this perceptual illusion about the 8-15 range had finally cleared up the fear a bit, but how the fear still remains to this day in you as residue somehow. From the bluish-green tint of the sky, you could see that the sun would be going down and decide to get as much visual information as you possibly could... before.

And in an endless back-float, hearing placid anechoic wind of noise in your mostly submerged ear, you start to think about the mechanics of the endless pool. The pool is surely a mechanical thing - you could feel secondary jets just like those of hot tubs you'd been in. There was no magic - it's a system to be manipulated. Unfortunately, you have little control over the machine as far as you could tell. The jets seem to begin work perfectly to counteract your motion whenever you're anywhere about four feet from the center and to shut off precisely when that goal is achieved. Even three feet away from the center, you start to feel a little push. Your back-float drifts marginally from the center and you start to feel it, and you're about six feet tall, so you do some trig and figure that the radius of the circle you're allowed to stay in freely is about 3.5 feet wide. So you just have to bridge that final five foot gap or so to the edge.

What actually triggers the jets? you wonder, having come to terms with its mechanical nature. It can't just start whenever it feels you're starting to escape, can it? You explore the pool's floor, crawling around between longer breaths. You see black tiles. The way they've been treated, they're pretty stable. You can't hope to destroy the tiles. Your eyes widen as you notice the slight black ring seven feet in diameter and feel its different texture, and just as you feel the ring a slight puff from the jet confirms your feeling - the ring triggers the jets.

You think quickly and run through as many tests as you can between breaths. You play the ring like a keyboard, tapping keys experimentally as the jets stream out in sequence from the given distances. So with this makeshift calliope you realize you have a fine degree of control, though, obviously, good luck using that. As you're looking harder, you notice concentric rings of sensors every six inches beyond the first, presumably going all the way back. Each ring must demand a stronger pull. Or, just as likely, each ring might be closer to the jet. Or there might be multiple jets, each triggered by separate sensors.

Finally, after what feels like hours (the sun has set), you've got a pretty good idea of exactly how it works. Conserving energy in a back-float, you run through how you understand the mechanics of the endless pool: There's a rudimentary program that controlled intensity as a function of two variables: 1) which sensors have been tripped (going from emergency level near the outside to "gentle discouragement at 3.5 feet) and 2) duration. You can see three groups of jets you can see - one right at the surface, another three feet down, and a final group five feet down (just a bit above the pool floor). This ring of jets is incredibly powerful and could seemingly be operated independently, no matter how many you asked. And anytime a jet went off, so would its brothers in the same vertical line - 0 feet, 3 feet, and 5 feet. Jets in a vertical line obey the same logic, had the same circuit, and were simultaneous.

You realize that the pool would be too immaculately programmed and tested to "game". You're not going to trick the jets into getting you through. There's no way to hide from that many sensors. The jets are too quick to react and the jets in vertical lines are all perfectly synchronized. There isn't like a path you can swim through where a broken jet is. There isn't any drainage to allow for a missing jet. There's not much you can do, honestly. You get a funny idea - what if I just hold my arms on the weakest jets and let the jets fill the pool up over time. It might be unsustainable, but you figure, hey, eventually the water level will rise to the point where I might be able to escape above the jets. Eventually. After 20 minutes of this strategy you come to a sober realization - well a) you're probably going to die but you'd figured that out, like, obviously, and b) the water level isn't changing. Some lights have turned on from somewhere - causing you to shudder from fear of the known and unknown and attempt Strategy Yell for a few minutes to no avail. And you can see that the surface, just as before, is right at the level of the jets. So in despair you realize that your salvation is not going to come easily through some cheap trick of drainage or water level. You can't wait for 10 inches of rain (though you suppose you can pray). You can't do anything but control those jets, and those jets are never going to buoy you to safety. And the jets aren't stopping anytime soon - and you can't hope to solve the problem by turning on too many jets - all that would mean is that you're pushed forever into the center, and even your placidity of death would be gone.

But, hey, wait, you think... The water level isn't changing. So it's the same water, recirculating over and over again. You first of all congratulate yourself for not drinking the water yet, because God knows how long that water has been recirculating. You're not that desperate, or more precisely, you're not that desperately thirsty. Yet. But if it's the same water and the level isn't changing? Then the jets are just moving it around and around and around. And somehow - no matter how much or how fast the water comes at you - more water comes from within the endless pool to replace it.

And so you get a notion and act upon it. It's the first time you'll genuinely risk injury, but you feel you have no choice. So... you take a deep breath and spread your body as wide as you can along the smallest ring of sensors. You've got a bet with some engineers.

You're betting that this is such an evil system - perhaps, you think in passing, a sort of puzzle - that the algorithm of this system that detects whether to blow the jets or not is going to err on the side of blow. See, because if it isn't designed that way, then error in the algorithm can be blamed for an unwitting escape.

You're betting that all the sensors, pressed down for long enough, will eventually cause the jets to reach their maximum setting, even if it's a harmless trigger to the ring of sensors nearly 5 feet from the edge. But this fail-safe might be the endless pool's downfall.

See, you're low enough to the ground that as the intensity builds, you can still claw onto the sensors and tiles and hang out below the jets as long as you can hold your breath. After about 30 seconds the jets reach their maximum, as expected, and you dart towards the edge with a pushing-off motion that puts your head in front, keeping your belly low to the ground. With one hand you protect your head, with the other you propel your body towards the edge, along the floor. And you need the protecting hand, because Whap! you're thrown violently against the edge by the slipstream of water, the underwater current from the center of the pool in the fragile foot just below the lowest series of jets.

You are starting to run out of breath. You use the little notches below the jets as purchase and hold your body congruently to the corner between floor and circular wall. The jets stop for a merciful instant. Apparently there aren't any sensors on the final foot around the edge. The word halo comes to mind. You come up for air on the edge but you realize that the rim is more than two feet above the surface. It's closer to three feet up, which strikes you as quite a long way. At least you can reach the rim with some bobbing action. It's not slippery, but the human kinematics aren't favorable: You try and you try but you can't quite get your muscles to pull you that first foot up that you'd need to pull yourself to safety. You can't get your toes on the notches of the metal jets - they're too small and sharp when weight is applied and you actually slip and scrape your toes badly and the jets start up and you are forced back to the center. There's a lot of pain, the panicked neurochemicals are back, and you whimper for awhile, a slight but certain tinting of red that you can see from the surface. Osmosis. Watercolor painting. After some pain you calm down and dive back to the bottom and then the edge and then to the surface and you hit on the slipstream plan in a different context. You lay yourself congruent to the inside of the halo and wait for the jets to reach their maximum velocity again. It takes about five seconds. Another slip-stream begins and the lowest circle of jets stop just as you push off towards them and the water is still disturbed, so you're actually able to get some powerful momentum. You make sure to jump off with your hands. Unfortunately, you realize this amounts to jumping about 9 feet from a lying position. You start to imagine a person throwing you from the ground, 9 feet into the air, and the immense amount of force it would take.

So you get some air and try again. This time you sort of sit along the emergency jets, sit facing the center with your legs out in a wide V-shape, keeping your head as low as it can go between your legs (noticing a bit more fat on your belly than you like that prevents you from going lower). You estimate that you're 18 inches off the ground in this position because you feel the top of your head assailed by the jets, and you drive yourself a few inches further down, harming your abs and neck. But you get an equilibrium that you can hold with only minor discomfort, and your hands and feet are poised.

The air is running out and all you're waiting for is serenity and wisdom and courage and all of that. And you jump with one motion of your feet and butt and calves and arms and shoulders and back and abs and hands and your head is scanning as best it can all that it can learn in case this doesn't work.

And you reach the rim and push off and up with your triceps, focusing only on the escape. You dive forward, scraping your toe on a jet for a tiny bit of purchase again. This little extra foot was all you'd needed before, and you are able to throw an arm forward to an eminently grabbable surface. You do a final pull and roll over onto the surface. For a minute you simply thank. No one in particular. Not God, not the human mind, not love or mercy or fate or choice. Not yourself, not the things that had to go right, not the night sky, not that burst of energy or adrenaline or your self-preservation.

No, you thank. Intransitive. Your existence is gratitude incarnate, waiting for an object to thank. But anything on heaven or earth, no matter how vast or worthy, could not deserve and would not receive your gratitude. You can't think of who or what to thank. You simply thank and that's all you are for awhile.

And then you look around. You're on a big hill - big as in some vast countryside is visible to you for miles in every direction. You see an unfamiliar house. And, walking up to a certain angle, you could see that the world is not itself. It's only an hour after twilight had fallen and a city with towers and industry is unlit. Windows have been broken on the towers and you sense that no one is there to lament them.

The house has lights, at least, and its windows are intact. So escape from who or what inhabits the house - in the long game - is out of reach. There appears to be little else on earth to speak of save for this house that survived, and - if you want to survive - you realize you must join them. And you want to know who and where you are. From the backyard patio, you make one last glance into the endless pool and you recognize a sudden tearful feeling of instant nostalgia for that perfect circle, when the struggle to survive was so much simpler.

And then you knock on the back door.