Michael Miller

The first to arrive when the sleepy-eyed coach grunts good morning and undoes the rusty lock, he starts each day facing the water alone— the shimmering skin over the cold deep end holding the calm of sunrise before his mind bellows start. He plunges in to tame the water before the water tames him back—cutting meat and treading at the Y each weekend only keeping the pounds in place. On the deck stool with his fake leg stretched before him, the coach rasps his creeds from the Navy.There’s standing tough and moving tough, he tells them.Whichever one’s tougher,that’s what you do. On the cold mornings, the slowest tries standing tough, his feet buckled in at the water’s edge and every still joint its own heady fix. When he moves, he moves to reach the finish line. The team is mired in last, not quailing from the season’s end the only victory left. All around, hungry, he eyes the greater meets: the varsity team that shreds the water twice as fast, the seniors’ cars and flaunted car keys. Is every test decided by the one before? Do the mind, the joints ever forget? He stares down the water, his body cold and primed for the tournament, finals, anything assigned.

The shirtless man by the ticket counter has already broken the gloom here, his crowd of two boys and the cashier with the Star of David gathered around and mouthing astonishment as he tells the tale behind every scar. Yes, this one on the side was from the camp — he tells them not to be shy to ask — when he tripped into the ditch on the run after stealing cigarettes, the one on the knuckle from punching the soldier in the bar, brave with whiskey, a decade after. Touch it, he snarls, jutting out his fist. That split a real Nazi’s lip. In the rooms behind him, the voices lay low but touch is the rule, the extended families passing in fours and fives as tight as at church or the carnival. Are they all survivors here, dazed and exhilarated by the fate that dropped them so far from blight? A father heads the line, shirt fat with muscles and a single proud thumb pushing the stroller; the woman and girl hug sideways, then again, tight as dancers in a row. At each display, the time lines and the whispered assurances reiterate that what is done is done. Pol Pot is dead, the children of Kampuchea reading again to go to college; Rwanda has forgiven itself and opened supermarkets; the ghettos are demolished, the Cold War won. Sudan, they skip. For now, the beasts are gone. They face the new life, the one after the mending, after the last mistakes were made.

I want to be a passenger in your car again and shut my eyes while you sit at the wheel, awake and assured in your own private world, seeing all the lines on the road ahead, down a long stretch of empty highway without any other faces in sight. I want to be a passenger in your car again and put my life back in your hands.