The Stand

Undertow

Chapter 1: The Stand

The stand was eight feet high and made of wood that had been white once, in some administration's memory, and was now the color of salt and weather and the accumulated indifference of twenty New Jersey winters. It sat on the beach at Asbury Park at the center of the main swimming area, fifty yards from the waterline at low tide, thirty at high, and from its platform James Calloway could see a quarter mile of Atlantic Ocean in each direction, which was his jurisdiction, which was his country, which was the territory he had governed for fourteen years from this exact elevation, this exact chair, this exact angle of vision that put the horizon at the level of his chest and the swimmers at the level of his knees and the whole heaving gray-green machinery of the ocean at the level of something he could hold in his hands, if hands were what you used to hold it, which they were not, because what you used to hold the ocean was your eyes, your constant sweeping attentive unblinking eyes, and James Calloway's eyes had been sweeping this water since he was eighteen years old.

Memorial Day weekend. The first day of the season. The first day of his last season, though the beach did not know it, and the ocean did not know it, and the twenty-one other guards on the Asbury Park Beach Patrol did not know it yet because James had not told them yet, because telling them was a thing that required a specific moment and this was not that moment. This moment was the opening. This moment was the climbing of the stand.

He arrived at the beach at six-fifteen in the morning. The parking meters along Ocean Avenue were still sleeping, their digital faces dark. The boardwalk was empty except for the joggers and the dog walkers and the old couple from Bradley Beach who walked the boards every morning regardless of holiday or weather or the condition of their knees, which were not good, which had not been good for years, but which carried them from the fishing pier to the convention hall and back every morning because the walking was not about the knees but about the marriage, and the marriage required the walking. James had watched them for years. He did not know their names. He knew their pace, which was steady, and their route, which did not vary, and the way the man held the woman's elbow on the uneven section near Seventh Avenue where the boards had warped and the city had not fixed them and would not fix them until someone fell.

The equipment locker was a concrete block building behind the boardwalk, painted the same municipal beige as the restrooms and the first aid station and every other structure the city maintained at the minimum level required to avoid lawsuit. James unlocked the padlock with the key he had carried on his key ring for fourteen years, the key that was brass and worn smooth and that he could find by touch in his pocket among all the other keys, the house key, the truck key, the key to his father's house in Neptune Township that he had carried since his father gave it to him when he was sixteen and that he had never used because he always knocked, because the knocking was the respect and the key was the trust and both could exist simultaneously, the way a door can be both locked and open, the way a father can be both silent and eloquent.

Inside the locker the rescue cans hung on their pegs. Six of them. Torpedo-shaped, red plastic, hard-shelled, with a strap that went over the shoulder and a towline that trailed behind the swimmer. The rescue can was the primary tool. Not the paddle board, which was for distance. Not the ATV, which was for transport. The rescue can was what you carried when you went into the water to get someone, because the rescue can floated and the person you were going to get did not float, not anymore, not in the way that would keep them alive, and the rescue can was the thing you put between the drowning and the drowned, the object that turned the dying into the living, the plastic and foam intermediary that said: hold this. Hold this and I will swim you to shore. Hold this and you will not die today.

James checked each can. He ran his hands along the shells, checking for cracks. He tested the straps, pulling them taut, checking the buckles. He inspected the towlines, running the nylon through his fingers, feeling for frays. He had done this every morning of every season for twenty years and he had found a cracked shell twice, a frayed line four times, a buckle that would not hold once, and the once was enough to make him check every morning for the rest of his career, because the once was a rescue in heavy surf where the buckle released and the can separated from the line and the can went one direction and the victim went another and James went after the victim with nothing but his body, which was enough, which had always been enough, but which should not have had to be enough, because the equipment should work, because the equipment was the margin between a save and a near-miss and a near-miss was the margin between a near-miss and a loss, and losses were the thing you could not check for, the thing no morning inspection could prevent.

He loaded four cans onto the ATV, strapped a paddle board to the roof rack, checked the radio -- Motorola, waterproof housing, channel six for patrol, channel nine for dispatch -- and drove the ATV down the boardwalk ramp to the sand. The sand was cold. Memorial Day in Asbury Park was not summer. Memorial Day was the promise of summer, the contractual obligation of summer, the date on the municipal calendar that said: the lifeguards are here, the water is open, the season has begun. But the water was fifty-eight degrees. The air was sixty-two. The sky was the color of old pewter, and the ocean under it was the color of the sky's reflection in a surface that did not want to reflect, that wanted only to move, to shift, to rearrange itself in the ceaseless patient labor of wave and current and tide that was the ocean's only work and the ocean's only language and the only language James had ever learned to speak with true fluency.

He placed the rescue cans at each stand. Stand 1, north end, near the jetty. Stand 2, two hundred yards south. Stand 3, another two hundred. Stand 4, the center, his stand. He climbed Stand 4 last. He always climbed his stand last, after the equipment was distributed, after the other stands were ready, because the captain's stand was the last to be manned, the way the captain of a ship is the last to board, or the last to leave, or both, depending on the direction of the voyage and the condition of the hull.

The wood of Stand 4 was warm where the sun had begun to reach it, cool where the shadow of the platform still fell. James climbed the four steps -- left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, the same four steps he had climbed ten thousand times, the treads worn into shallow concavities by his feet and the feet of every guard who had manned this stand before him, though he had manned it longer than anyone, fourteen years, which was not a record because records were not kept for stand tenure, but which was a fact, an accumulated fact, like the wearing of the treads, like the bleaching of the wood, like the slow patient erosion of the thing by the use of the thing. He settled into the chair. The chair was molded plastic, white, bolted to the platform. It did not recline. It did not adjust. It held the body at an angle that kept the eyes above the waterline and the feet below it and the spine in a position that would ache by three o'clock but that was correct, that was the position of vigilance, that was the posture the job demanded because the job was not comfort but attention, and attention required a body that was slightly uncomfortable, slightly alert, slightly leaning forward into the world it was watching.

James scanned.

The scanning was the job. Everything else -- the rescues, the equipment checks, the morning meetings, the training swims, the public interactions, the incident reports, the radio calls -- everything else was infrastructure built to support the scanning. The scanning was the continuous visual sweep of the water, left to right, right to left, near to far, a pattern that covered every square yard of the swimming area every thirty seconds, a pattern that looked for the thing that did not belong: the head that went under and did not come up, the arms that flailed instead of stroked, the body that moved seaward instead of shoreward, the cluster of swimmers that had been at the sandbar and was now fifty yards beyond it and did not know it, could not feel it, because the drift of a current was invisible to the person inside it the way the rotation of the earth was invisible to the person standing on it, and the guard's job was to see the drift from the outside, from the elevation, from the stand.

There were no swimmers. It was six-thirty in the morning on Memorial Day and the water was fifty-eight degrees and the beach was empty except for James on his stand and the seagulls on the waterline and the sandpipers running their frantic mechanical errands at the edge of the foam and the ocean itself, which was not empty, which was never empty, which was full of the things the ocean was full of: water and salt and sand and current and the vast biological machinery of the Atlantic seaboard, the plankton and the menhaden and the bluefish that followed the menhaden and the sharks that followed the bluefish, the whole chain of consumption that operated below the surface and that James did not think about because the surface was his jurisdiction and below the surface was God's or the ocean's or whatever you called the authority that governed the deep, and James's authority governed only the interface, the place where the air met the water and the water met the bodies and the bodies met the danger, and the danger was real, and the danger was always, and the danger did not observe holidays.

He adjusted his sunglasses. Polarized, amber-tinted, the kind that cut the glare and let you see into the water, see the color changes that indicated depth, see the surface disturbances that indicated current, see the shimmer and shadow that were the water's way of telling you what it was doing if you knew how to listen with your eyes. James knew how to listen with his eyes. He had learned it the way you learn any language, by immersion, by repetition, by the slow accretion of vocabulary that became grammar that became fluency that became instinct, the instinct that said: that patch of water is darker because it is deeper, and it is deeper because the current has scoured the sand, and the current has scoured the sand because there is a rip there, a channel where the water that the waves push shoreward finds its way back to the sea, and the rip is invisible to the swimmer who is standing in waist-deep water twenty feet from its edge but the rip is visible to the guard on the stand because the guard can see the grammar and the swimmer cannot, and the difference between seeing the grammar and not seeing the grammar is the difference between standing in the water and being taken by the water, and the guard's job is to be the eyes that see the grammar on behalf of the people who have come to the beach to swim and to play and to lie in the sun and to not think about grammar, because the beach is where people come to not think, and the thinking is the guard's work, and the guard does the thinking so the people can do the not-thinking, and the arrangement works, mostly, except when it does not, and when it does not, the guard goes into the water, and the going into the water is the rescue, and the rescue is the thing the scanning exists to make possible.

The morning passed. The beach began to fill. By ten o'clock there were perhaps two hundred people on the sand -- families with coolers and umbrellas, couples with towels and books, teenagers with speakers and attitudes and the particular invincibility of seventeen that James remembered having and that the ocean did not respect, had never respected, would never respect, because the ocean did not know what seventeen was, the ocean knew only mass and force and the physics of a body in moving water, and the physics did not care about age, about confidence, about the conviction that nothing bad could happen because nothing bad had happened yet.

A few swimmers entered the water. Tentative. The cold was a wall. James watched a woman in a blue swimsuit wade to her knees, stand there, arms crossed over her chest, and wade back out. He watched a man in board shorts charge in to his waist, let out a shout that carried across the sand, and submerge himself in a single violent motion that was either bravery or stupidity or the male compulsion to demonstrate that cold was a thing that could be conquered by will, which it could not, which was why the man came up gasping and stumbled back to shore and wrapped himself in a towel and stood there shivering and grinning and believing he had won something from the water, when what he had won was a memory he would tell at a barbecue and the water had not noticed the contest.

James scanned.

At eleven-fifteen he keyed his radio. "Stand 2, you've got a drift. Two swimmers, south of your position, moving with the current."

The radio crackled. "Copy, Stand 4. I see them."

Kyle Dermott, Stand 2. Second year. Good eyes but slow to act. He would learn the speed or he would not make a third year. James watched Kyle stand on his platform and blow his whistle -- one blast, attention -- and wave the two swimmers toward shore. The swimmers looked up, confused. They were a man and a woman, middle-aged, standing in chest-deep water, and they did not understand why the lifeguard was waving at them because they were standing, they were fine, they were in control. They did not know they had drifted sixty yards south of their entry point. They did not know the current had moved them. They did not know that the standing was an illusion, that the control was a story they were telling themselves, that the water they were standing in was moving and they were moving with it and the moving was the current and the current was the first paragraph of the drowning, the paragraph that preceded the chapter that preceded the ending that James was on this stand to prevent.

Kyle waved again. The swimmers waved back, the universal beach gesture that meant: we're fine, we don't need help, we are in control of our bodies and our situation and our lives. James keyed the radio. "Stand 2, go to the waterline. Verbal contact."

Kyle climbed down. He jogged to the waterline. He cupped his hands around his mouth. James could not hear what he said, but he saw the swimmers' faces change -- the shift from annoyance to uncertainty to the beginning of understanding that came when a person in a red suit and a whistle told you that the water was doing something you could not feel, that the ground beneath your feet was not ground but sand and the sand was not stationary but shifting and the shifting was the current and the current was the danger and the danger was now. The swimmers walked to shore. They emerged from the water sixty yards south of their towel and looked up the beach and saw the distance and understood, in the seeing of the distance, what the lifeguard had been telling them.

James made a note in his head. Not a save. A contact. An intervention. The interventions were not counted. The interventions were the vast uncounted majority of the work -- the ten thousand moments when the guard saw the beginning of the thing and stopped it before it became the thing, the whistle blows and the verbal contacts and the flag warnings and the stand-up-and-point gestures that said: you are drifting, you are too far out, you are in a current, you are in the wrong place, move. The saves were the failures of intervention -- the moments when the intervention came too late or the swimmer moved too fast or the current was too strong or the ocean did what the ocean sometimes did, which was change its mind between one wave and the next, open a channel that had not been there, close a sandbar that had been solid, rearrange the whole architecture of the near-shore environment in the time it took to blink, and the blinking was the gap, and in the gap the danger formed, and in the danger the drowning began.

The afternoon was quiet. The water was too cold for most swimmers. A few surfers worked the break at the north end, beyond the jetty, beyond James's jurisdiction but within his sight. He watched them the way he watched everything -- with the attentive neutral observation that was the stance of his profession. They were competent. They read the waves. They knew where the rocks were. They did not need him. Most people, on most days, did not need him. The not-needing was the ideal. The not-needing was the goal. The goal of the lifeguard was to make the lifeguard unnecessary, to create through vigilance and intervention and presence the conditions under which no one drowned, and the no-one-drowning was not a victory but an expectation, and the expectation was the weight, because the expectation did not allow for error, did not allow for the moment of inattention, did not allow for the day when the scanning missed the thing the scanning existed to find.

Two hundred and fourteen saves. That was James's number. He had counted them. Not officially -- officially, each save was an incident report filed with the Asbury Park Department of Public Safety, Form 7-B, triplicate, with boxes for date, time, location, conditions, victim description, method of rescue, outcome. But James counted privately, in a composition notebook he kept in his locker, a notebook with a black-and-white marbled cover that he had bought at a Staples in Neptune Township in 2005, his first year on the patrol, the year he made his first save, the year he pulled a nine-year-old girl from a rip current at Stand 2 and carried her to the sand and set her down and watched her mother run across the beach with her face doing the thing faces did when the worst thing almost happened and then did not happen and the not-happening was a kind of miracle and the miracle was a boy in a red swimsuit who had jumped from a wooden stand and entered the water and swum two hundred yards and grabbed the girl and brought her back.

That was save number one.

Save number two hundred and fourteen was last August. A man, sixty-two, from Edison. Heart condition he had not disclosed to anyone, certainly not to the lifeguard. He went into the water and the water triggered the condition and the condition triggered the drowning and the drowning triggered James, who was off the stand and in the water in eleven seconds, which was not his fastest -- his fastest was seven seconds, save number one hundred and nine, a child who went under twelve feet from the waterline -- but eleven seconds was fast enough, had to be fast enough, because the man was facedown and the facedown was the emergency and the emergency did not negotiate with seconds.

Two hundred and fourteen. And two losses. Two people he did not save. Two people the water took while James was on duty, while James was the person between the living and the dying, while James was the guard and the guarding failed.

He did not think about the losses on the first day of the season. He did not think about them and then he thought about them, because not-thinking about a thing was a way of thinking about it, the way not-looking at the sun was a way of acknowledging the sun, the way the shadow proved the light. He thought about Tommy Raines. He thought about Margaret Daly. He thought about them the way he thought about the rip currents -- as permanent features of the landscape, as conditions that did not change, as facts of the water that he carried with him onto the stand every morning and carried with him off the stand every evening and carried with him through the off-season and carried with him into his sleep, where the water was always moving and the heads were always going under and the swimming was always the swimming, the desperate forward motion toward a person who was there and then was not there and the not-there was the thing, the unspeakable thing, the thing that made the scanning sacred and the sacred thing that made the scanning possible.

At five o'clock he climbed down from Stand 4. He collected the rescue cans. He loaded the ATV. He locked the equipment locker. He drove the ATV back to the boardwalk and parked it in the space behind the first aid station where it had been parked every evening for as long as James had been on the patrol. He checked the radio batteries. He stored the paddle board. He locked the locker with the brass key and put the key in his pocket with the other keys and walked to his truck.

His truck was a 2019 Ford F-150, white, with 87,000 miles on it and sand in every crevice and the permanent smell of salt and sunscreen and neoprene that was the smell of twenty years of beach work compressed into a vehicle's upholstery. He sat in the driver's seat. He did not start the engine. He looked at the ocean through the windshield, through the gap between the convention hall and the arcade, the narrow slot of blue-gray that was all you could see of the water from the parking lot but that was enough, that was always enough, because the ocean did not need to be seen in its entirety to be known. A sliver was sufficient. A sound was sufficient. The smell was sufficient. The ocean announced itself in fragments, and the fragments were enough for the person who had spent twenty years assembling them into a whole.

This was his last season. He had accepted the position in Trenton. EMT training coordinator, Mercer County Emergency Services. A desk. A classroom. Students who would learn the protocols and the procedures and the muscle memory of emergency response in a building with fluorescent lights and climate control and no sand and no waves and no current and no rip and no tide and no ocean. James would teach them. He was qualified. He had the certifications, the experience, the two decades of fieldwork that made him the ideal candidate for a position that existed to turn fieldwork into curriculum. He would be good at it. He knew he would be good at it the way he knew the water -- not by analysis but by recognition, by the sense that the thing fit, that the shape of the thing matched the shape of the space the thing was meant to occupy.

But the fitting was not the same as the wanting, and the wanting was not the same as the needing, and the needing was the thing he was leaving, the thing he was climbing down from, the thing he was driving away from in a white truck with sand in the upholstery and the smell of salt in the air and the number 214 in a notebook in a locker in a concrete block building behind a boardwalk in a town where the ocean came to shore and the shore was where James Calloway had spent his life and the life was ending, not the biological life but the vocational life, the life of the stand, the life of the scanning, the life that was lived eight feet above the sand with eyes on the water and a whistle around the neck and a rescue can within arm's reach and the knowledge, the daily renewed unshakable terrifying knowledge, that someone might die today and the only thing between them and the dying was you.

He started the engine. He drove to Neptune Township. He ate dinner alone in the house he rented on Tenth Avenue, a small house with a small yard and a view of nothing, which was fine, because the view was at work, the view was on the stand, the view was the quarter mile of Atlantic Ocean that he would see again tomorrow morning when he climbed the four worn steps and settled into the white plastic chair and began to scan, which was the job, which was the life, which was the thing he was leaving, which was the thing that, for one more summer, was still his.

The last summer. The last season. The last time he would climb Stand 4 and own the water with his eyes.

He washed the dishes. He set his alarm for five-thirty. He went to bed. Outside, twelve miles east, the ocean did what the ocean did at night, which was the same thing it did during the day, which was the same thing it had done before James was born and would do after James was dead: it moved. It moved its water from here to there and back again, wave after wave after wave, the patient inexhaustible repetition that was not repetition but variation, each wave different from the last, each wave carrying its own freight of sand and salt and force, each wave arriving at the shore and spending itself on the sand and retreating and being replaced by the next wave, which was not the same wave but which performed the same function, which was arrival, which was departure, which was the endless rehearsal of the thing the ocean was always practicing, which was the tide, which was the pull, which was the undertow.