Haw
Originally published in filling Station (Issue 77)
Colten Dom
Every couple of years, I meet someone in my sleep. All dreams are childish, but please, suffer me this, because the internet is adamant: these strangers are not imaginary. They exist, stolen from the conscious world. And I remember their bodies, their faces, their hands — the images linger for days. I’ve sauntered past them on some grimy street corner, seen their mugshots on the late-night news, or met their eyes through the window of a speeding car.
With fourteen came the first dream: an afroed woman in a white hoop skirt. We meet inside a red room with a stainless-steel cooking oven, an overhead fan, and pale cabinetry. The floor upon which she and I lay and, I later realized, had sex, was that of densely tiled slate.
At fifteen, it was a bindi-wearing girl about my age, her hair trussed up in a dirty-blonde top-knot dye-job. She dressed in the counsellor’s attire of my old summer camp, the historic site of my first and second kisses.
And then, when I turned sixteen, I dreamt of Jake.
*
The hotel lined the pool as far as it could reach, stucco walls enfolding a vast, chlorinated sea beneath palisades of faded pink balconies, stained undershirts and musty bathing suits rotting around peeling railings. The bejewelled purse-dog witches of Maui — wild, leathery old swingers — rambled the poolside as the Hawaiian sunshine blurred the soft white of my eyepatch. Itching the fabric, I savoured a warm beer on the deck of my parent’s suite.
“Sorry Roan,” Jake’s nicotine-fingered mother mumbled at me through the sliding door. Sitting on the couch opposite my folks, she punched nervous glances towards my cyclopean profile. “He’ll be back any minute.”
She’d changed, skin cancer and plastic surgery conspiring to create a new nose. She’d been the first to recommend that I study biology. Double-blinded by the sun I squinted through the glass, searching her alien features, finding only sympathy.
I crossed paths with Jake in the lobby. Standing at the portico and staring out towards the pool, he had taken the form of a man. I planted myself on the railing beside him. Brown-red freckles hung along his cheek, skin still the velvet of creamed coffee. The puckered scar serrating his beetled eyebrow had refused to fade. As we stood together, I wondered if the palm trees would recognize the moment, if they would lean down and snatch us up into the sky together and make us a hammock of their leaves.
“Long time,” Jake grunted, drumming the railing. He turned to face the patch. “Sorry to hear about that.” A warm, deep voice, deeper than mine.
“Yeah,” I said. “I was almost finished, one term to go.”
He squinted at my good eye. “You can’t write exams with this one?”
I shook my head. “I’m not supposed to concentrate. Island life, no stress, y’know?”
He nodded, a drop of sweat sent licking down his sideburn. “How’s everything else? Haven’t seen you in, how long? Four years?”
“Four years.”
“That long,” he stated.
Twisting my palm on the banister, the breeze tickled my fingers.
“I didn’t know we’d be here the same time,” Jake told the view. “I would’ve texted or something.”
“It’s fine — you wouldn’t have my number.”
*
“A dermoid cyst pressing over the right occipital lobe,” the half-asleep doctor said through a yawn, “explains the blurry vision.” A fuzzy Christmas tree sticker shivered on her breast, the star dipping and zagging.
“And not a tumour?”
“A benign cyst from when you were born. It’s swelled, I’m betting from bad study habits.” Wooden blinds twitched over the window, the glass buckling under wet Vancouver wind. I pushed my thoughts into the corner of the room. “I’m not accusing you, Roan,” the doctor poked. “The eye is fine, it’s just your brains that’re getting smushed.”
She tapped the MRI stills, the intimate serial-killer peek into my skull. “Again, it’s not entirely serious.” She dropped an icy palm over my hand, the other smoothing her shirt, pressing the sticker flat against her chest. “And it won’t be permanent if you just try to relax.”
*
I vegetated on the quiet deck of, as the hotel routinely boasted, the ninth-largest swimming pool in the world. Glances peppered me, long stares and short squints directed at the eyepatch scissoring my scalp. Looped over the invisible cyst, the band contained all of my head in a perfect, bizarre axis.
Out on the open pool deck, my flabbiness was impossible to avoid. A wave of curls flowered in the sweat of my chest, crashing beneath my clavicle and flowing out toward pink-grey nipples. My pre-diagnostic hardness had vanished, all serious exercise banned in fear of the ruminating cyst. Of what little brawn and toughness I had stuffed into my body, only the baked-in definition of biceps and abdominals remained. The beer foamed over my fingers, the water reflecting through the stein, the amber and the bubbles.
Slipping the eyepatch off, I thrust it between the lounge chair’s plastic ribs before slouching into the pool. Floating away from the other swimmers, one-pieced septuagenarians with blue-silver hair and their hoarse, pink-eyed grandchildren, I tried to relax. Tried to let the time pass, drifting, the blank balconies overhead empty and without judgment.
A splash like a broken champagne bottle — Jake laughed in my ear. Wiping down our eyes, we faced each other. “I saw you from the room,” he said.
“You were watching me?”
“I happened to notice.” Jake mimed distress, gasping for breath. He dipped beneath the water, thrust up, the droplets pulling his bangs into arrow shafts across his forehead. It was unnerving to be standing with him again, enclosed in liquid, sharing a stale womb. The smell of chlorine. The heat.
“Wanna race to the end?” he asked.
The water went on and on into a thin grey line, nine-tenths sun, one-tenth tile. There was a conflicted, kneading pain as my brain deciphered the blur. “Doctor’s orders, no unnecessary strain.” I covered my sight with a dripping, stinging hand. “I swear. I wouldn’t make it.”
The broken eyebrow arched, laughing at the joke I hadn’t made.
*
We weren’t big teens. Jake wasn’t, at least. But when the hammer came down, and it was decided I would lose some weight, he was also co-opted into a blended community centre lifeguard-fitness program, both of us beguiled by the promise from our families that we would swim it together.
We stripped on opposite sides of the changing room. The pool steamed like a kettle, the water itself the inconsistent heat of microwaved hot chocolate. I didn’t know how to dive, so I jumped. As I surfaced, blinking back the chlorine, Jake slid overhead: a snarling face, dark armpits, a coil of black fur over the swim trunk brim. Then, a fountaining glimmer.
The first class took an eternity with me out of shape, outpaced by him on every lap. Released, I heaved out of the pool on shaky arms as Jake slid to the ladder. Slopping back to the changing room, he poked jokingly at my flab.
Under the shower, I heard a grunt. I turned as the top of his trunks slid under his thigh, the deluge beating the sodden polyester like rain on a tarp. I kicked my own trunks down to my ankles, emptying my brain of function. After a couple minutes, I shut the faucet off, and Jake’s stopped too. We dripped, blank-faced, staring.
*
The tiki lights had dimmed in the empty poolside bar. We spoke short, deliberate sentences, pausing to clink glasses or to remark on the moon trapped metres away, cut up by the lapping chlorine. I leaned on the unmanned counter, pressing my cheek to the fake bamboo, eyepatch flattening.
Jake throttled his glass. “Gin’s too dry.” He drained it.
My hand draped over the bar, into the forbidden realm of the tender. Brushed something wetly fibrous, rough-skinned, maybe a lime. “Your occipital lobe, right?” Jake’s voice oozed. I remembered tequila suicides in dark campus pubs — snort the salt, gobble the booze and squirt the lime straight into your pupil. Fingers probed the back of my head, and I shivered.
We finished our drinks and moved out to the pool deck, laid in the reclining lounge chairs without towels. The night was hot, beads of condensation running awkward lanes on my forearm.
Jake blew air over his lips. “You wearing trunks?”
“Sure.” I shifted, the netting pulling at my thighs. He motioned to the water, stretching into the distance. The tile was mesmerizing, a glaring, solvent blue. The eyepatch strangled my skull.
We stripped. Shirts and patch torn away, we slid into the cool bright. “To the end?” he breathed, punching off the wall.
Slipping into my old freestyle, the pool edge, palm trees, even the hotel whirled around me as Jake’s strokes slapped the water ahead. The puck lights along the pool wall rose and fell, shooting pain into my bad eye — between gasps, I wished for a haw, a nictitating eyelid like a shark or a duck.
The balconies disappeared from the weary turns of my head, replaced by the shrubbery and haloed streetlights of the resort’s parking lot. The far wall remained far, fatigue tearing at my arms. I stiffened into a breaststroke, my favourite position. Jake’s faraway spray broke the endless line of the pool.
With a bubbled sigh, my body drifted to the bottom, knees brushing the tile, ears electric with pressure. I cracked my eyelids, left and right both equally blurred, the senseless fog of vision pulsing in spurts until there was no air left. Me, myself, and I at the bottom of the pool, with both eyes stung to blindness.
An arm hooked around my stomach. I blinked, colours and vision colliding as I was propelled from the water and onto the deck. Nausea constricted my gut, a hollow ringing singing through my lungs, and I peered into the night sky through a swirl of chlorine and empty sound — and overtop of me, a punctured eyebrow.
I breathed. The pressing hesitated, then pulled back. He moved away.
Crawling to my feet as he trotted away down the pool deck, I coughed. “You thought I was drowning.”
He turned, nodded. “I thought you were drowning.”
When I crept back to the suite, my parents lay snoring, drily entwined on the bed. The patch came off again as I snuck to the balcony, one hand pressed over the swirling vortices of my eye, the other jumping and shaking at my hip. I looked into the night sky, my vision relaxing in the absence of light, watching the dull stars that blurred and trailed like faraway headlights.
In the pool below, a man swam feverishly, his warm skin made boyish, even childish when laid against the enormous water. Trapped, caught in the glow like a fish hooked on some translucent line, he traced a path toward the distant, chasing end, and I knew I would enjoy a dreamless sleep.