The Body

Undertow

Chapter 5: The Body

The body was the tool. Not the rescue can, which was plastic and replaceable. Not the paddle board, which was fiberglass and could be repaired. Not the radio, with its waterproof housing and fourteen-hour battery. The body was the primary tool, the irreplaceable instrument, the thing that swam and ran and climbed and scanned and carried and did the work no other tool could do.

James's body was thirty-eight years old. He knew its inventory the way a mechanic knew an engine -- not by reading but by listening, by the daily diagnostic of getting up and moving and assessing the morning's report from the joints and the muscles and the tendons that had been doing this work for two decades and that communicated their condition not in words but in sensations, the specific vocabulary of a body that had been used hard and used well and used in salt water and sun and sand for twenty years and that was beginning to say the things bodies said when twenty years of use accumulated into a condition, a state, a reckoning.

The shoulders were the first conversation. They spoke every morning, in the shower, when the hot water hit the deltoids and rotator cuffs and trapezius muscles that powered the crawl. They had reached forward and pulled backward ten thousand times per season, two hundred thousand times per career. The medical profession called the result tendinopathy. James called it the mornings, because the mornings were when the shoulders spoke loudest: I am still here, I can still do the thing, but the doing has a cost.

The right shoulder was worse than the left. It had carried the rescue can for twenty years, the strap crossing the chest from right shoulder to left hip, the can's weight pulling on the right deltoid. The load was asymmetric because the job was asymmetric. The can was always on the right, and the wearing was recorded there: in the fibers, in the tendons, in the specific degradation of a joint that had done one thing too many times, not wrong, not improperly, but simply too many times.

He stretched the shoulders every morning. In the kitchen of the house on Tenth Avenue, standing at the counter, waiting for the coffee to brew, he performed the rotation sequence that a physical therapist in Neptune had taught him in 2019, the year the right shoulder first produced a sound, a clicking, the mechanical announcement of a structural change, the internal rearrangement of cartilage or tendon that produced, during the overhead reach, a click that was not painful but was informative, was the body's way of saying: something has shifted, something has moved, something that was smooth is now catching, and the catching is the message, and the message is: attend to this. The rotations were forward circles, backward circles, cross-body reaches, wall slides with the back flat against the kitchen wall, the exercises that took eight minutes and that were the maintenance, the daily maintenance of the tool, the way James checked the rescue cans every morning, running his hands along the shells, checking for cracks, the same principle applied to the body, the inspection that said: this is functional, this is holding, this will hold for one more day, and the one-more-day was the horizon, the planning window, the only future the body could guarantee.

The knees were the second conversation. They spoke on the stand's four steps and on the inclines and declines of the sand, the soft sand that was the enemy of the knees because it was unstable and the instability was absorbed by the joint, by the ligaments, by the meniscus, by the whole intricate architecture built for firmer ground. Twenty years of beach running had produced the same message the swimming had produced in the shoulders: I can still do this, but the cost is increasing.

The left knee had been scoped in 2018. A torn meniscus, the medial meniscus, the inner cushion, the cartilage that had torn not in a single dramatic event but in the accumulation of ten thousand beach runs, the slow progressive degradation that produced, one morning in August, a locking, the knee refusing to straighten, the joint seized at thirty degrees of flexion, the body's veto, the body saying: no, I will not straighten, I will not cooperate, I have absorbed the last grain of sand my tolerance will permit and the permit is revoked. The arthroscopic surgery was outpatient, forty-five minutes, the surgeon in Neptune going in through two small incisions and trimming the torn flap and smoothing the remaining cartilage and declaring the knee functional, which it was, which it remained, but functional was not the same as original, functional was the reduced state, the state of a thing that had been repaired rather than restored, the knee that worked but that worked with the awareness of its own repair, the awareness that was the slight catch on deep flexion, the slight tenderness on cold mornings, the slight hesitation on the first step of the day that was the knee remembering its surgery, remembering the tear, remembering the limit.

The hands were the third conversation, though the hands did not speak in pain but in knowledge, in the accumulated tactile intelligence of twenty years of touching the ocean's equipment and the ocean's water and the ocean's victims. The hands knew the rescue can the way a violinist's hands knew the instrument -- by feel, by memory, by the immediate recognition of the thing that had been held ten thousand times. The hands could find a crack in the can's shell that the eyes could not see, the fingertips detecting the hairline fracture by texture, by the slight discontinuity in the plastic's surface that was invisible but palpable, the way a reader detected a typo by the feeling of wrongness rather than by the seeing of the error.

The hands knew the towline. The hands could assess the line's condition by running the nylon through the fingers, the way a tailor assessed fabric, the tactile reading that detected frays and weak points and the UV degradation that New Jersey sun produced in nylon rope over the course of a season, the degradation that weakened the line from within, the molecular breakdown that was invisible on the surface but that the hands could feel as a slight roughening, a change in the line's texture from smooth to granular, the feeling that said: this line has another month, or this line has another week, or this line should be replaced today.

The hands knew the water. The hands, trailing in the water from the stand when James leaned forward during a scan, could read the temperature to within two degrees. The hands, held in the current during a training swim, could estimate the velocity by the pressure on the palm, the way a person held their hand out a car window and felt the speed by the wind's force, except the medium was not air but water and the force was not wind but current and the current was eight hundred times denser than the air and the density was the danger and the danger was the thing the hands were measuring when they measured the current.

The skin was the history. The skin was the document that recorded every season in the coloration and the texture and the specific weathering that twenty years of salt and sun and wind had produced on the surface of a body that had been outdoors, exposed, unshielded for eight hours a day, six days a week, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, for twenty consecutive summers. The tan was permanent. Not the seasonal tan that civilians acquired in July and lost by October, the vacation tan, the recreational coloring that faded to the baseline in the absence of the sun. James's tan was structural, was embedded, was the result of twenty years of melanin production that had settled into the skin as a permanent condition, the skin's adaptation to the chronic exposure, the body's long-term response to the environment in which the body lived, the way a tree's bark thickened in response to the conditions the tree endured.

His mother's skin had been fair, the skin of Belmar, the skin of the Irish-German ancestry that had populated the Jersey Shore towns in the middle of the twentieth century, the complexion that burned in June and browned in July and peeled in August and returned to its baseline in September. His father's skin was dark, the skin of Newark, the skin of the Great Migration, the skin that did not burn but that absorbed the sun with the quiet efficiency of a surface designed for solar exposure, the melanin that was the ancestral adaptation to a sun that was not the New Jersey sun but the equatorial sun, the African sun, the sun that Keith's great-grandparents had lived under and that Keith's grandparents had carried in their skin to the industrial north and that Keith had carried to Neptune Township and that James had inherited, mixed with his mother's inheritance, the blend that produced in James a complexion that tanned deeply and evenly and that the lifeguarding had made permanent, the skin that was the visible record of the biracial body in its outdoor profession, the body that belonged to both ancestries and that the sun had resolved into its own specific shade, the shade that was not his mother's and not his father's but his, the lifeguard's, the twenty-year shade that was the body's autobiography written on the surface.

The scars were the annotations. A two-inch scar on the right shin, white against the tan, marked a barnacle-covered rock at the jetty's base during save number forty-seven, a rip rescue in 2009 when the current pulled him and the victim against stone. A thin line crossed the left palm from a broken shell in the sand during save number eighty-two, when the hand opened and the blood was visible but the running did not stop because the person in the water could not wait for the palm to stop bleeding.

A scar on the right knee, the twin arthroscopic scars, the two small marks that were the portals through which the surgeon had entered the joint and repaired the meniscus, the marks that were not from the ocean but from the repair of the ocean's damage, the evidence of the fix, the documentation that the body had broken and been mended, had torn and been trimmed, had reached a limit and been pushed back from the limit by the surgeon's instruments and the body's own healing and the physical therapy that followed, the weeks of exercises in the clinic in Neptune where James bent and straightened and bent and straightened the knee under the supervision of a therapist who told him the knee would be functional and the functional was the goal and the goal was the returning to the stand, the returning to the sand, the returning to the running and the swimming and the scanning that were the job and the job was the thing the knee existed to serve.

The eyes were the instrument the body could not repair. They were more primary than the shoulders or the knees or the hands, because the eyes were the scanning: the eight-hour seeing that began when the guard climbed the stand and ended when he climbed down, not looking but reading, not observing but analyzing.

At thirty-eight, James's eyes were beginning to tell him what the shoulders and the knees had already told him. The telling was subtle. The telling was the slight increase in the time required to focus on a distant swimmer, the fractional delay between the looking and the seeing that had not been there at twenty-five, the accommodation that the lens performed when shifting from near to far, the muscular adjustment of the ciliary body that flexed the lens and that was flexing, at thirty-eight, a fraction slower than it had flexed at twenty-eight, the fraction that was not measurable in the daily work but that was present, that was the beginning, the beginning of the presbyopia that would eventually make the distance reading harder and that would eventually contribute to the decision, the decision that was not a single moment but an accumulation, the way the meniscus tear was not a single moment but an accumulation, the career arriving at its limit not in a dramatic failure but in the gradual diminution of the tool, the body telling the guard what the guard did not want to hear, which was: the body is finite, the body is temporal, the body has a season, and the season is ending.

The sunglasses helped. The polarized amber-tinted lenses that James wore were the body's augmentation, the optical prosthetic that compensated for the glare and that allowed the eyes to see into the water, to read the color changes and the surface disturbances that were the water's language, the language the eyes had learned to read and that the sunglasses helped the eyes continue to read, the way reading glasses helped the aging eye continue to read the page, the external correction that maintained the function, that extended the season of the organ's utility beyond the organ's natural season.

He did not talk about the body. He did not catalog his injuries or his pains or his diminishments in conversation, not with Elena, not with the patrol, not with Dr. Okonkwo, not with Keith. The body's conversations were private, were between the body and the person who inhabited the body, the internal dialogue that the external world did not hear and did not need to hear, because the external world needed only the function, the performance, the visible output of the body doing its work, and the work was the swimming and the running and the scanning and the carrying and the climbing and the standing and the being-present on the stand for eight hours in the sun and the wind and the salt, and the being-present was the thing, and the body was the vehicle of the being-present, and the vehicle was aging, and the aging was the fact.

He ran every morning. Not the patrol's six-thirty training run, which was the group run, the collective morning exercise that served the dual purpose of conditioning and cohesion. He ran before the group run, at five-thirty, alone, on the beach, in the pre-dawn dark, the private run that was the body's maintenance and the mind's meditation and the daily negotiation between the man and the sand that the man had been running on since he was eighteen.

The morning run was three miles. North to the jetty, south to the boundary marker at the Third Avenue groin, north again to the starting point. The sand was hard at the waterline, packed by the tide, the surface that was closest to pavement, that returned the foot's energy with something approaching efficiency. He ran at the waterline because the waterline was the running surface and because the waterline was the interface, the boundary, the place where the land met the water, and the running at the interface was the daily traversal of the thing he guarded, the body moving along the edge of its jurisdiction the way a sentry walked a perimeter, the movement that was both exercise and inspection, the body conditioning itself while the eyes read the morning water, assessed the conditions, began the day's interpretation of the ocean's text before the stands opened and the public arrived and the text became complicated by the presence of the people in the water.

The swimming was twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, the open-water training swims that the patrol conducted at six in the morning, before the stands opened. Half a mile, out and back, the course marked by orange buoys that the patrol anchored in the spring and retrieved in the fall. The swimming was the core of the conditioning, the irreducible minimum, the exercise that most closely replicated the physical demand of the rescue, because the rescue was swimming and the swimming was the thing the body had to be able to do, had to be able to do fast, had to be able to do in surf and current and wind, had to be able to do while towing a person who was not helping, who was panicking, who was adding drag and resistance and the dead weight of a body that had stopped cooperating with the water and that was being carried by the rescuer through the water to the shore.

James's time for the half-mile swim had slowed. At twenty-five, his time was eight minutes, forty seconds. At thirty, nine minutes, ten seconds. At thirty-five, nine minutes, fifty seconds. At thirty-eight, his last timed swim, ten minutes, twelve seconds. The progression was the graph, the visual representation of the body's decline, the downward curve that every athlete knew and that every athlete watched with the specific attention of a person reading a sentence that was being written about them, a sentence they could not edit, could not revise, could not rewrite, a sentence the body was composing in its own language and that the clock translated into numbers and the numbers were the truth and the truth was: ten minutes, twelve seconds, and the twelve seconds were the difference between thirty-eight and twenty-five, the thirteen years measured not in candles on a cake but in seconds in the water, in the specific temporal cost of aging as recorded by the body's performance in its medium.

He was still fast enough. Ten minutes, twelve seconds was still fast enough. The speed required to reach a drowning swimmer was a function of the distance and the conditions and the swimmer's remaining time, and the remaining time was the variable, the unknown, the thing that could not be calculated in advance because the remaining time depended on the swimmer's fitness and the water's temperature and the swimmer's panic and the current's strength and the ten thousand other factors that determined how long a person could sustain the contest between their body and the water before the contest was decided in the water's favor. Ten minutes, twelve seconds was fast enough for most rescues, for the rescues that began with a swimmer two hundred yards from shore in a moderate rip, the standard rescue, the modal rescue, the rescue that the half-mile time approximated.

But fast enough was not the question. The question was whether the body could do the thing tomorrow and the day after and the season after, whether the graph would descend past the threshold, past the point at which ten minutes became eleven became twelve became not fast enough. Not fast enough was the thing he could not be, because not fast enough was the guard who entered the water and did not reach the swimmer in time. That was Tommy Raines. That was why the seconds mattered, why the daily diagnostic was not vanity but vigilance: the guard checking the equipment, and the equipment was the body. The body was still functional, still capable, still the instrument that swam and ran and scanned and carried and saved. But the instrument was finite. The instrument had a season. This season was the last.