The Notebook

Undertow

Chapter 22: The Notebook

He took the notebook home on a Thursday evening, seven days before Labor Day, carrying it from the locker to the truck in his hand, the composition book with the black-and-white marbled cover that he had bought in 2005 at the Staples on Route 35, the notebook that had lived in the bottom shelf of his locker for twenty-one years, behind the board shorts and the zinc oxide and the unfinished copy of Kon-Tiki that he would never finish now, that he would leave in the locker for Elena or for whoever cleaned out the locker after the season, the book about the raft that crossed the Pacific that James had started reading three years ago and that had stalled on page 147 when the raft entered a storm and the crew held on and the holding-on was so familiar, so precisely the thing James did, that he had closed the book and not opened it again, because the reading of the holding-on was too close to the doing of the holding-on, and the closeness was the thing he could not sustain in the off-hours, the thing that needed the distance of the evening and the house and the not-being-at-the-beach to dissipate, the thing that could not dissipate if he was reading about it.

The notebook was heavier than it should have been. Not physically -- physically it weighed the same as any composition book, a few ounces, the weight of paper and cardboard and the adhesive that held the binding. But the weight James felt when he carried it to the truck was not the weight of the materials but the weight of the contents, the two hundred and seventeen entries that the pages contained, each entry a day, each day a person, each person a moment in the water when the living and the dying were separated by the width of the guard's arms and the length of the guard's swim and the speed of the guard's response, and the entries held those moments the way a photograph held a face, frozen, fixed, the moving thing made still, the dynamic event compressed into the static record.

He sat at the kitchen table in the house on Tenth Avenue. The table was wood, round, scratched, the table he had bought at a yard sale in Neptune when he moved into the house in 2015. He set the notebook on the table. He set a glass of water beside the notebook. He opened the notebook to the first page.

6/28/05. Rip rescue, Stand 2. Female, approx. 9 yrs.

The first save. The girl in the rip. He read the entry and the entry opened the day the way a key opened a lock, the words turning the mechanism of memory, the memory releasing the day from the place where the days were stored, the archive of twenty years that lived in his body, in his muscles, in the specific neural pathways that the water had carved through repeated use, the pathways that were the memory's channels, the memory's rip currents, the flows that ran from the present back to the past with the speed of recognition, the speed of a word triggering a world.

He remembered the water. June 28, 2005. He remembered the temperature -- sixty-six degrees. He remembered the swell -- two feet, from the southeast. He remembered the rip at Stand 2 -- south end, near the sandbar, running seaward. He remembered these things the way a musician remembered a performance -- not the notes individually but the whole of it, the feel, the texture, the quality of the experience that the individual elements composed.

He remembered the girl. Twelve years old. Dark hair. The arms reaching for him. The face that was crying, that was terrified, that was the face of a child who had been in the ocean and the ocean had taken her and the taking was the worst thing that had ever happened to her and the worst thing was happening now, in this water, in this current, and the worst thing was the face, and the face was the thing James reached, the thing his arms closed around, the thing he held and swam to shore.

He turned the page.

8/2/05. Shore break, Stand 4. Male, approx. 45 yrs.

Save two. A man knocked down by a wave in the shore break. Not a dramatic rescue -- the man was in waist-deep water, the wave hit him, he went down, the shore break tumbled him, James was at the waterline in eight seconds and pulled him up. The man stood on the beach, disoriented, sand in his ears, water running from his nose, the particular indignity of a middle-aged man who had been upended by a wave in three feet of water and who looked at the lifeguard who had pulled him up and did not know whether to say thank you or to be embarrassed, and the not-knowing was the common response, the response James saw in many of the saves, the face that could not decide between gratitude and shame, because the saving implied the needing-to-be-saved and the needing-to-be-saved implied the helplessness and the helplessness was the thing the saved person did not want to feel, even though the helplessness was the truth, the truth that the water had enforced, the truth that said: you are not in control, you were never in control, the control was an illusion and the illusion ended when the wave hit.

He read through the entries. He read them slowly, deliberately, the way he read the water -- with attention, with the quality of observation that the reading required, the observation that was not casual but professional, not skimming but scanning, the careful systematic coverage of each entry, each day, each save.

The entries changed over the years. The early entries were clinical, institutional, the language of the incident report transposed to the notebook. Date, conditions, victim description, method, outcome. The entries from 2005 through 2008 were data. They were facts. They were the records of a young guard who understood the importance of recording but who had not yet found the voice, the personal voice, the way of writing that went beyond the data and into the thing the data contained but did not express.

The voice arrived in 2009. Save forty-one. The man who stepped into the hole.

7/23/09. Stand 4. Flat calm. A man walked into the water the way people walk into water on calm days -- casually, with the assumption that the bottom is the bottom and the bottom will hold. The bottom did not hold. The bottom had a hole, a scour, a place where the sand had been removed by a current too small to see and too strong to ignore. He stepped into it. He went from waist to over-his-head in one step. The one step was the lesson: the ocean does not promise its bottom.

The entry was longer than the previous entries. The entry was not clinical. The entry was the thing itself -- the observation made personal, the data made human, the record transformed from a filing into a testimony. James read the entry and recognized the moment when the writing had changed, when the notebook had stopped being a record and started being a document, a document of a life, a life in the water, the life that the clinical entries could describe but could not contain.

He read forward through the years. He read the saves of 2010, 2011, 2012. He read the saves of his early captaincy, the entries that reflected the captain's perspective -- not just the single rescue but the multiple, the coordinated response, the deployment of guards, the radio calls, the decisions.

7/4/12. Stand 2, 80 yds offshore. Father and daughter. The father was holding the daughter above the water. The arms were the terms of a deal: take me, not her. The deal was with the water. The water does not make deals. The deal was with me. I accepted the terms. I took the daughter. I gave the father the can. We all came back.

Save eighty-seven. The entry he had described to Dr. Okonkwo. The entry that contained the lifting, the arms, the deal that the father's body made with the water and with the guard, the transaction that was the save, the exchange of weight from the father's arms to the guard's arms, the transfer that was the trust, the trust that was the thing, the thing that made the save possible.

He read the gap. The gap was between saves one hundred and forty-seven and one hundred and forty-eight. The gap was Tommy.

The entry for Tommy was not numbered. The entry was not a save. The entry was on a page by itself, the page that followed save one hundred and forty-seven and preceded save one hundred and forty-eight, the page that was the space between, the page that was the loss.

7/19/16. Red flag. 6-8 ft. Strong rip, south end. Tommy Raines, 15, East Orange. I went in. I swam 400 yds. I dove. He was not there.

Nine words for the drowning. He was not there. Four words. The four words that contained the loss, the way four walls contained a room, the way four chambers contained a heart. He was not there. The sentence that was not a sentence but a fact, a geological fact, a fact as permanent and as immovable as the rocks at the base of the jetty at Deal where the Coast Guard found Tommy the next day, the rocks that were the period at the end of the sentence, the full stop, the ending.

James read the entry. He had not read it in years. He had not needed to read it because the entry was not on the page, the entry was in his body, the four words written not in ink but in the tissue, in the muscle, in the bone, the cellular inscription that no amount of time could fade, the permanent record that the body kept independent of the notebook, the record that would survive the notebook's destruction, the record that would survive the body's destruction, because the record was the weight and the weight was the carrying and the carrying was the thing that transcended the carrier.

He turned the page. Save one hundred and forty-eight. August 2, 2016. Two weeks after Tommy. A woman in a rip at Stand 1. James's first save after the loss. The entry was brief.

8/2/16. Rip, Stand 1 zone. F, approx. 35. Rescue can. Lateral swim. Ambulatory.

Brief. Clinical. The return to the data, the retreat to the facts, the language stripped of voice, stripped of the personal, stripped of the thing the voice had become in the entries before Tommy. The voice was gone. The voice had been taken by the loss the way the current took the swimmer, pulled under, pulled away, displaced. The voice did not return for months. The entries from the remainder of 2016 and from 2017 were data, were facts, were the clinical records of a guard who was doing the work but who was not writing the work, who was recording but not testifying.

The voice came back in 2018. Save one hundred and seventy-two.

6/15/18. Flash rip, Stand 3 zone. Calm day. The calm days are the liars. A couple, mid-twenties, standing in waist-deep water, not swimming, just standing, the standing that people do in the ocean when the ocean is behaving, the standing that says: I am here, the water is here, we are together, the togetherness is the thing. The rip opened under them. They did not know the rip was there because the rip was not there and then the rip was there and the being-there was instantaneous, was the sandbar shifting, was the gap appearing, was the current establishing itself in the time it takes to blink. I went in. I reached them. They held the can. We came back. Save 172. The calm days are the liars. The calm days are the ones.

The voice. The voice was back. The voice that was James's voice, the voice that saw the water and the people in the water and the relationship between the water and the people and that wrote the relationship down, that testified to the relationship, that said: this is what happened, this is what I saw, this is what the water did and what I did and what the person did and the doing is the thing, the doing is the save, the doing is the entry.

He read through 2018, 2019, 2020. The pandemic year -- the beach closed, then reopened, then closed again, then reopened with restrictions that the ocean did not observe, the social distancing that the water did not practice, the mask mandates that the swimmers did not follow because masks did not work in water, because the virus was a land threat and the water was a water threat and the two threats did not collaborate, did not coordinate, the virus killing on the shore and the ocean killing in the water and the guard standing between both, scanning for both, watching for the drowning and the distancing, the dual vigilance of a season that required the guard to be both lifeguard and public health officer, the impossible bifurcation of attention that the pandemic demanded.

He read 2021, 2022. The entries became denser. The voice deepened. The entries that had been a paragraph in 2018 were two paragraphs in 2022, the writing expanding the way the career expanded, the way the knowledge expanded, the way the twenty years of water expanded the mind that held them, the mind that was a container growing to accommodate its contents, the contents that were the saves and the losses and the scans and the mornings and the light and the water and the whole accumulated weight of a life spent on a stand.

The gap after save two hundred and twelve. Margaret Daly.

9/4/22. Before hours. Blue towel near Stand 3. Sandals, size 7. Tote bag with wallet. Margaret Daly, 67, Morristown. Entered the water at approximately 6:15 AM. Found by Coast Guard at 8 AM, south rocks. I was not there.

Five words. I was not there. The echo of Tommy's entry. He was not there. I was not there. The two absences, the two not-theres, the paired losses, the call and the response, the boy who was not where the guard looked and the guard who was not where the woman drowned. The two entries faced each other across the pages of the notebook the way the two absences faced each other across the years, the two weights balanced on the same scale, the scale that James carried, the scale that did not tip because the weights were equal, because both losses weighed the same, because the weight of a person lost was the weight of a person lost regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the fault, regardless of the duty hours, the weight being the weight, the loss being the loss, the carrying being the carrying.

He closed the notebook. He sat at the kitchen table and looked at the closed cover, the marbled cardboard that had been white and black in 2005 and that was now gray, the colors faded by twenty-one years in a locker, the cover that was the face of the notebook, the face that did not express what the pages contained, the face that was neutral, was blank, was the unmarked exterior of a thing whose interior was the record of two hundred and seventeen saves and two losses and twenty years of water and a life.

Two hundred and seventeen. That was the number. The summer had added three -- saves two hundred and fifteen through two hundred and seventeen. The flash rip rescue of the mother and child. The two others that had come in the ordinary course of the ordinary days, the saves that were not dramatic but that were saves, that were entries, that were days and persons and moments in the water that the notebook held and that James held and that the holding was the point.

He opened the notebook to the last entry. Save two hundred and seventeen. August 19.

8/19. Rip, Stand 1 zone, near jetty. M, approx. 50. Strong swimmer, caught in jetty rip on outgoing tide. Rip velocity approximately 3 ft/sec. Victim swimming against rip, making no progress, tiring. I responded from Stand 4 via ATV. Beach entry at jetty. Swam to victim at approx. 60 yds offshore. Victim conscious, exhausted. Secured on rescue can. Lateral swim SW, out of rip. Towed to shore. Victim ambulatory. No transport.

The last entry so far. Maybe the last entry of the career. Maybe not. Seven days remained. Seven days of water, seven days of scanning, seven days of the possibility that the 218th save was forming somewhere in the ocean's machinery, the shifting sandbars and the building currents and the approaching swimmer composing the next sentence that would contain the next name, the next number, the next entry.

Or maybe two hundred and seventeen was the number. Maybe the remaining seven days would be calm, would be uneventful, would be the quiet ending that the season sometimes provided, the days when the ocean behaved and the swimmers cooperated and the scanning found nothing and the nothing was the goal, the nothing was the ideal, the nothing was the best possible outcome.

James did not know. He could not know. The not-knowing was the condition, the permanent condition of the work, the uncertainty that every morning brought, the uncertainty that said: today might be a save or today might be a loss or today might be nothing, and you will not know which until you climb the stand and scan and the day reveals itself, the way the water reveals itself, gradually, condition by condition, wave by wave, the unfolding that is the day's narrative, the story that is written in real time by the ocean's pen, the pen that is the current, the pen that is the wind, the pen that is the tide, the pen that is the force, the force that does not know it is writing but that writes anyway, the writing that is the water.

He closed the notebook. He carried it to the bedroom. He placed it on the nightstand, beside the alarm clock that was set for five-thirty, beside the glass of water he drank from during the night, beside the things he kept near him while he slept, the things that were the last things he saw before closing his eyes and the first things he saw upon opening them, the things that anchored the waking to the sleeping the way the sandbars anchored the waves to the shore, the fixed points in the shifting field.

The notebook would go with him. The notebook would go to Trenton. The notebook would sit on a different nightstand in a different room in a different life, the life that was coming, the life that was seven days away, the life that would not produce new entries because the new life did not have water, did not have saves, did not have the moments in the ocean that the entries recorded. The notebook would become what it was becoming now -- a document, a record, a testimony to a life that had been lived and that was ending, the final version of the thing that the twenty years had written, the two hundred and seventeen entries and the two losses and the thousand mornings and the ten thousand scans, the whole of it contained in a composition book with a marbled cover, the whole of it weighing a few ounces, the whole of it heavy as the ocean, heavy as the water, heavy as the twenty years of standing between the living and the dying and choosing, every time, to enter the water and bring someone back.

He turned off the light. He lay in the dark. The notebook was beside him. The ocean was twelve miles east. The morning was six hours away. The stand was waiting. The water was moving. The saves were in the notebook and the notebook was on the nightstand and the nightstand was in the room and the room was in the house and the house was in Neptune Township and Neptune Township was three miles from the ocean and the ocean was the thing, was always the thing, was the thing the notebook recorded and the thing the notebook could not contain, because the ocean was larger than the notebook, was larger than the entries, was larger than the twenty years, was the thing that exceeded all containers, all records, all testimonies, the thing that simply was, that continued, that moved its water from here to there and back again, wave after wave, in the dark, in the light, in the August light that was changing, that was fading, that was the last light of the last summer, the light that the notebook held in its pages and that the pages held in their words and that the words held in their ink and that the ink held on the paper that was the record of the life that was the water that was the thing.

The thing that was everything.

The thing that was ending.

The thing that would go on.