The Current

Undertow

Chapter 11: The Current

The longshore current was invisible from inside it. This was the fact James returned to, the fact he taught every rookie, the fact he held in his mind like a coin he turned over and over, examining both sides, the side that was physics and the side that was metaphor, because the longshore current was both -- a physical force and a figure for the way life moved you laterally, sideways, without your consent, without your awareness, while you stood in it and believed you were standing still.

The physics was simple. Waves approached the shore at an angle. The angle was determined by the swell direction, which was determined by the storm that had generated the swell, which might be a thousand miles away, which might have happened three days ago, the energy traveling across the open ocean at the speed of wind and arriving at the shore of New Jersey as a swell from the south-southeast or the east-northeast or whatever direction the distant storm had chosen, the storm that did not choose but that blew, that blew where the pressure gradients said to blow, that blew because the atmosphere was a fluid and fluids moved and the moving was the wind and the wind was the swell and the swell was the angle and the angle was the current.

The waves hit the shore at an angle. The water pushed up the beach at that angle. The water returned to the ocean in a straight line, perpendicular to the shore. The difference between the angled push and the straight return was the longshore current -- a net lateral movement of water along the coastline, parallel to the beach, a river within the ocean, a current that ran north to south or south to north at a speed of one to three feet per second, a speed that was too slow to feel but too fast to resist, a speed that moved a swimmer ten yards per minute without the swimmer knowing, a hundred yards in ten minutes, a quarter mile in twenty, the slow patient displacement that put a person in a place they did not intend to be.

James thought about this as he drove to Trenton for the orientation meeting. The meeting was in August, three weeks before his start date, a meeting to introduce him to the facility, the staff, the curriculum, the classroom where he would stand in front of EMT trainees and teach them the protocols he had learned in twenty years of fieldwork, the protocols he had written in the binder, the protocols that described, in numbered steps, the thing that could not be reduced to numbered steps but that had to be, because the teaching required the reduction, the translation of instinct into instruction, of fluency into curriculum, of the thing the body knew into the thing the manual said.

The drive to Trenton was fifty-three miles. Route 33 west to the Turnpike, the Turnpike south to Route 1, Route 1 south to Trenton. He had made this drive twice before -- once for the interview, once for the second interview. Each time the drive had felt like a departure, like a leaving, like the westward movement away from the coast was a physical metaphor for the vocational movement away from the water, the lateral drift of a career that had been stationary for twenty years and that was now moving, not because the career had decided to move but because the current had changed, the current being the thing that happened when a body stayed in the same water for twenty years and the water shifted under the body and the body, without intending to, without choosing to, began to drift.

He had not chosen to leave. He had not woken up one morning and decided: I am done with the water. The leaving had happened the way the longshore current happened -- gradually, laterally, without a specific moment of initiation. There was no morning when he climbed the stand and thought: this is the last time. There was instead a series of mornings, a sequence of days, a cumulative weight of days that pressed on him not like a burden but like a tide, a rising level that did not crash but crept, the slow elevation of something he could not name that made each morning on the stand slightly different from the morning before, not worse, not less meaningful, but different, the way a word repeated enough times becomes a sound, the way a sound repeated enough times becomes a rhythm, the way a rhythm repeated enough times becomes a silence.

The silence was the thing. The silence was not the absence of sound -- the ocean was never silent, the beach was never silent, the radio was never silent. The silence was the absence of something else, something internal, something that had been present for years and that had begun to fade the way a signal fades with distance, the way a radio transmission weakens as the receiver moves away from the tower, not abruptly, not with a snap, but gradually, the voice becoming static, the static becoming silence, the silence becoming the thing you noticed only after it was complete.

He did not know what the thing was. He had tried to name it in his sessions with Dr. Okonkwo. He had said: it's not burnout. It's not fatigue. It's not the losses. She had waited. He had said: it's something else. Something that feels like -- and he had stopped, because the thing he was about to say was the thing he did not want to say, the thing that felt disloyal, that felt like a betrayal of the twenty years and the 214 saves and the two losses and the scanning and the swimming and the whole life he had built on the stand, the life that was the only life he knew, the life that was his identity in the way that a river's identity is its course, the way a current's identity is its direction, the way a guard's identity is his stand.

The thing he had almost said was: completion.

Not in the sense of finishing. Not in the sense of accomplishment, of having achieved the thing that was to be achieved. Completion in the sense of fullness, of saturation, of the body and the mind having absorbed all the water they could absorb, having reached capacity, having arrived at the state where the next wave did not add to the volume but spilled over the edge, the excess running off, the container full. He was full. Twenty years of water had filled him. The 214 saves and the two losses and the ten thousand days of scanning and the ten thousand nights of not-scanning had filled him, and the fullness was not a problem but a fact, a physical fact, the way a glass of water that was full was not a problem but a glass of water that was full, and the fullness said: there is no more room, there is no more capacity, the thing that has been poured into this container has reached the top and the top is the limit and the limit is not a failure but a boundary, a natural boundary, the boundary of a career that had been long and full and that was now, simply, full.

He arrived in Trenton at ten in the morning. The EMT training facility was a two-story building on Perry Street, brick, with a parking lot and a flagpole and the specific institutional architecture of a government building that had been designed to be functional and not beautiful and that had achieved both goals -- it was functional and it was not beautiful, it was the opposite of the ocean, which was not functional and was beautiful, which existed without purpose and with grandeur, which did not train anyone or teach anyone or certify anyone but which taught everyone who paid attention, which was the paradox of the ocean's pedagogy: it taught without intending to, the way the sun warmed without intending to, the way gravity pulled without intending to, the way the natural forces operated as instruction by being what they were, and what they were was the curriculum, and the curriculum was the world.

He met the director, a woman named Constance Wheeler, who was fifty-five and who had been an EMT for twenty years before she moved to administration and who understood, in the way that only a person who had done the fieldwork understood, what James was bringing to the classroom, which was not textbook knowledge but body knowledge, the knowledge that lived in the muscles and the nerves and the instincts that had been trained by years of application, by years of entering the emergency and the emergency entering you, the reciprocal inhabitation of the crisis by the responder and the responder by the crisis.

"The classroom seats thirty," Constance said, leading him through the building. "You'll have cohorts of twenty-five, six weeks per cohort, four cohorts per year. The curriculum is standardized -- NREMT protocols, state certification requirements, practical skills stations. But we bring people in from the field to teach because the field is where the protocols live, not in the manual."

James nodded. The classroom was a rectangle with fluorescent lights and a whiteboard and thirty desks arranged in rows and a CPR mannequin on a table at the front and a defibrillator trainer on another table and the specific institutional smell of floor wax and whiteboard marker and climate-controlled air, the air that was not salt air, that was not ocean air, that was the air of a building in a city fifty-three miles from the coast where the nearest body of water was the Delaware River, which was a river, which was fresh water, which was not the ocean, which was not the thing James knew, which was not the thing James's body was calibrated to, the way a radio was calibrated to a frequency and the frequency was the ocean and the ocean's frequency was the frequency of his life.

He stood in the classroom. He looked at the desks. He imagined the students -- twenty-five people, adults, aspiring EMTs, people who had chosen emergency medicine the way James had chosen lifeguarding, for the pay or the vocation or the desire to be the person between the living and the dying, the person who arrived at the emergency and did the thing the emergency required. He would teach them. He would stand where the CPR mannequin stood and he would speak the protocols and the protocols would be correct and the speaking would be competent and the competence would be the job, the new job, the job that began in September when the stands came down and the guards went home and the beach returned to the ocean and the ocean returned to itself and James was here, in this room, in this building, in this city, teaching.

The word sat in his mind like a stone in a shoe. Teaching. He was going to teach. He was going to stand in a room and talk about the thing instead of doing the thing. He was going to describe the emergency instead of entering the emergency. He was going to lecture on airway management instead of managing airways. He was going to demonstrate CPR on a mannequin instead of performing CPR on a person whose heart had stopped in the water and whose life depended on the compression and the breath and the rhythm that was the rhythm of the living imposed on the body of the dying.

The displacement was the thing. The lateral movement from field to classroom, from water to building, from doing to teaching. The longshore current of a career that had been standing in one place for twenty years and that was now moving, drifting, being carried by a force it could not feel but that was real, that was as real as the current that moved the swimmers south along the beach without their knowledge, the current that put them in front of the wrong towel, the current that rearranged their position while they believed they were stationary.

He had believed he was stationary. He had stood on Stand 4 for fourteen years and he had believed he was standing still, but the current had been moving him, the current of time, the current of age, the current of the body that was thirty-eight and that was not the body that had been eighteen, that could still swim the rip and make the save but that swam it differently now, more slowly now, with more effort now, with the awareness now that the effort was increasing and the capacity was not increasing and the gap between the effort and the capacity was the gap that would eventually become the failure, the rescue that took twelve seconds instead of nine, the swim that took fifty seconds instead of forty, the arrival that was in time but barely in time, and the barely was the warning, the signal that the current was moving him, that the standing-still was an illusion, that the career was drifting toward its end the way all things drifted, laterally, invisibly, under the surface.

He drove back to the coast. The drive east was different from the drive west. The drive east was the return, was the coming-back, was the body moving toward the thing it knew, the way a current reversed when the wind changed, the longshore current that ran south in the morning running north in the afternoon because the wind had shifted and the waves had shifted and the angle had shifted and the shift was the reversal and the reversal was the return. He could feel the coast before he could see it -- the change in the light, the change in the humidity, the salt in the air that arrived before the water arrived, the advance guard of the ocean's presence, the atmospheric announcement that said: you are close now, the water is near, the water is waiting, the water is the water.

He parked on Ocean Avenue. He walked to the boardwalk. He stood at the railing and looked at the ocean. It was five in the afternoon. The beach was still populated -- the mid-summer crowds that came in the morning and stayed until dinner, the families and the couples and the solitary swimmers and the teenagers and the whole human catalog of beach users who had come to the coast to be near the water, to be in the water, to submit themselves to the thing that James was leaving, the thing that had been his life, the thing that he was drifting away from.

The longshore current was running south. He could see it in the foam patterns, in the seaweed drift, in the subtle lateral movement of the water along the shore. South. The current was carrying everything south -- the foam, the seaweed, the sand, the swimmers, the summer, the career, the whole of it moving laterally toward a destination that was not a destination but an ending, the way the longshore current did not have a destination but simply moved, simply carried, simply displaced the things in it from here to there without intention, without purpose, without the awareness that the things it was carrying were lives, were careers, were twenty years of standing on a wooden platform eight feet above the sand looking at the water that was looking back with the same surface it showed to every departure, the indifference that was not cruelty but physics, not rejection but the simple absence of the capacity to care, the lack that was the ocean's nature, the nature that made the guard's caring necessary, the caring that James had carried for twenty years and that was full now, that had reached its capacity, that had been poured and poured and poured into until the pouring spilled over the edge and the spilling was the sign that the container was full and the fullness was the completion and the completion was the leaving.

He would miss this. He knew he would miss this. He would miss the railing and the view and the sound and the smell and the salt and the sand and the light and the water and the scanning and the swimming and the rescue and the can and the whistle and the stand and the chair and the four steps and the morning meeting and the coffee from the Dunkin' Donuts on Cookman Avenue and Elena to his right and the guards in the semicircle and the faces, the veteran faces and the rookie faces and the faces of the swimmers he pulled from the water, the faces that did the thing faces did when the worst thing almost happened and then did not happen.

He would miss the standing between. That was the thing he would miss most. Not the rescues -- the rescues were events, discrete, countable, the things that happened when the standing-between failed and the guard had to enter the water. He would miss the standing-between itself, the position, the stance, the being-on-the-stand that was the being-between-the-living-and-the-dying, the state of being that was not action but readiness, not doing but being prepared to do, the coiled potential energy of a body on a stand that might at any moment become the kinetic energy of a body in the water, and the might was the thing, the might was the tension, the might was the wire that hummed between the possible and the actual, the wire that James had balanced on for twenty years and that he was stepping off of, was letting go of, was releasing in the way that a muscle releases its tension and the releasing is both relief and loss, both the ending of the strain and the ending of the purpose, because the strain was the purpose, and the purpose was the strain, and the stepping-off was the end of both.

The longshore current continued. South. The foam slid along the surface. The seaweed drifted. The sand migrated. The summer moved toward September. The career moved toward Trenton. The life moved toward the next life, the classroom life, the indoor life, the life without water, without salt, without the sound of the ocean in the morning and the smell of the ocean in the afternoon and the sight of the ocean at all hours, the constant visual presence of the thing that had been his world and that would become his memory, the thing that would drift in his mind the way the seaweed drifted in the current -- slowly, steadily, laterally, toward a place he did not choose but that the current chose for him, the place where the drift ended, the place where the memory settled, the place where twenty years of water came to rest on the bottom of a mind that was no longer in the water but that carried the water within it, the internal ocean, the private Atlantic, the sea of experience and knowledge and loss and love that he would carry to Trenton and that Trenton would not see and that the students in the classroom would not see and that the fluorescent lights would not illuminate because the sea was inside, was his, was the thing the current had deposited in him during the twenty years it had been moving him, grain by grain, wave by wave, save by save, toward the shore he was now approaching, the shore that was the ending, the shore that was the beginning, the shore that was both, the way all shores were both, the place where the water met the land and the meeting was the thing, the meeting was always the thing, the interface, the boundary, the line between the deep and the dry, the line James had stood on for twenty years, the line he was leaving, the line that would remain after he left, the line that the ocean would continue to define and redefine with every tide, every wave, every current, the longshore current that ran parallel to the shore and that carried everything with it and that did not stop, did not pause, did not wait for the guard who was leaving, because the current did not know the guard was leaving, because the current did not know the guard, because the current was the current, and the current was indifferent, and the indifference was the truth, and the truth was the water, and the water was everything.