Something Else

“Why don’t they go home?” That’s me, wondering aloud. I like guarding, and I like getting paid, don’t get me wrong; but watching cold people swim in cold weather can stay fulfilling for only so long. And true to form, I have still packed exactly nothing for school.

I slowly swivel for the hundredth time this hour and almost jump. Our manager is standing beside me. For how long, I wonder. He is looking out over the dreary blue ripples. I used to worry that he did this because he didn’t trust some of us to watch our own zones, but gradually I realized he just likes to be close to the water. The table outside the office is too far away for him sometimes.

“You do a good job.” That’s him. He is usually stingy with compliments.

“You mean me, or the pool?” He is still looking at the water.

A hint of a trace of a smile, his old smile, the one that went into hiding as the week began. “Both, of course.” I wish I knew more words, because there must be one to describe the way he is gazing right now at the gentle water. It’s the same look he had when he first saw our gag gift for him last summer, the video made up of high-angle close-ups of the pool, which we called “Fifty Shades of Blue.” The joke was that this old place was the closest thing he had to a love interest; he liked the joke, even more than we expected, but maybe it wasn’t one.

A rude breeze rearranges the trees in the park outside, just for a moment, and now I can see the bulldozer crouching behind them. The city parked it there yesterday, to prepare for the day after tomorrow.

“You know why they don’t go home.” So he did hear me. I wish he hadn’t.

I nod; we both still watch the water. They know. They know the place will be rubble within two days, and they are trying to squeeze all they can out of it before then, just like the kids who wring out their soaked towels after leaving them too close to the pool edge. “Maybe they are home.” Sounds like something he would say, but it’s actually me. I told myself last weekend that it’s foolish to be sad about a pool and I wouldn’t let myself—I still won’t—but listen to me now. I wait for him to agree, but he stands silent.

One thing is for sure; he is home. He’s never lasted more than a few hours each week away from the pool, in all the years since he first hired me, but this summer it may have actually been zero. Some days he goes into rotation himself and trusts us with the office; I’ve been fielding phone calls all summer, from whatever their names are up in the Park Rec office, inviting him to this or that meeting about designing the new pool. He’s turned down every one, as far as I can tell. In fact, I think he may have done more than just turn them down. He is mild-mannered by nature, but this summer has brought out the fiercest and crankiest in him. He’s burned the bridges above him and he is not coming back next year, all because they are replacing this old pool and he says it wouldn’t be coming back at all.

I don’t say any of that aloud, but suddenly I wonder if actually I did, because he starts muttering, slowly, voice low so only I can possibly hear. “What if the doctors told you,” he begins, “‘I’m sorry, sir, your wife is in good health, but she’s close to her life expectancy now so we’re going to put her down; but don’t worry, we’re going to let you be part of the process to create a new one and you can make her as young and pretty as you’d like’?”

I am fairly extraverted, but for once I can’t think of much to say. That’s why I like guarding, though; it’s perfectly acceptable to say nothing and just keep watching the water.

I feel the first raindrop.

“Anyway,” he snaps himself back into the usual invulnerable captain, “when you’re off rotation in a few minutes, I’m giving the rookies a break and then I could use your help cleaning out the pump room.”

I give a contented nod, then spend the next three minutes trying to focus on the two ladies floating in my zone, instead of the boy outside the fence kicking over his little brother’s sand castle.

I make the customary walk-through of the girls’ locker room before returning to the office. We keep them clean, the locker rooms, and that’s about the only nice thing you can say about them. They are just old. They truly should be put out of their misery. He will barely admit even that, though.

I find him back in the pump room, stacking boxes full of … I have no idea, so I bend to rifle through one of them. Notes, cards, picture albums, chunks of concrete from the deck, doorknobs, an old flow meter; I think I know where these are going.

“Do you want the pipes or the floor?” For a second I think he is offering me a choice of keepsake, until I realize neither makes sense; no, he means each of us is cleaning one. I opt for the floor. He tosses me an old broom, and I turn on the hose. We work. In silence. Normally there would be banter, gossip, jokes, at least from me, but today it would just feel wrong; I can tell he wouldn’t engage.

I’ve been told our pump room is a relic, probably the only one in the world now with a similar filter system; and I have heard this both from him and from his Park Rec bosses, so it must be true. But from them, it was a jeer, an insult, another selling point to have their new aquatic center built; from him, it was a boast, a smile of pride, another reason to preserve this miraculous mess of plumbing built back when things were not made pretty but were made to work and to last.

“One last potluck tomorrow?” It’s him. I shrug and nod, then nod again. Yes, we should have one last potluck; it won’t be a celebration, but we should have one last potluck. I tell him I’ll make a signup list during my break. I’ll bring the watermelon.

The big filter tank gurgles and a small stream begins to drip from a pipe above, escaping the strip of duct tape stuck there long ago. I am about to alert him but he’s already nodding; I ask if I should bring the toolkit. Instead of answering, he smacks the side of the tank. “Oh, don’t do this now.” The gurgling stops. He slaps it again, but more gently. “You can’t fool me,” he scolds it. “I know you’re still good as new.” The dripping stops too. I almost feel like I shouldn’t have seen that, out of respect either for science or for privacy.

I for one will be back next summer; it’s a good job, I’ve become a natural at it, and I would miss the people here. He’ll miss them too. But his mind is made up. If they ever knock down his pool, he’s said for years, if they level her and bury her and replace her with something else right on top of her own grave, then it will be someone else’s something else. As for me? I love this place too, but we all have to remember, it is just that—a place. A building and a hole in the ground. And a few hundred thousand gallons of water, for three months of the year.

I’m about to turn off the hose. “See if you can get that corner.” It’s him, telling me I missed a spot. To be fair, he is right—I left the far corner a little dry, about a square foot of dusty floor that avoided the bath from the hose. I stop short of rolling my eyes behind my sunglasses, but I do sigh a little; we’re cleaning the floor of an ancient, rusty, dusty pump room which is going to be blown to bits in forty-eight hours, and a few inches of dry floor …

The ever-present gush of water through pipe slows just a bit, lowering, like a sad pulsing orchestra playing a death scene. I glance up; I am almost expecting her—it—to spit out some more at me in return for my sullenness, but this time no waterworks accompany the change in her—its—mechanical music. He didn’t even look up; he’s still on the other side of the tank.

Now I see what he meant by “pipes.” He has got an armful of wipes, which he is using up extravagantly, judging from the pile at his feet, and he is slowly polishing the big pipes leading in and out of the filter tank, the veins and arteries passing through his pool’s gigantic heart. These veins and arteries are eight inches across and painted blue or yellow, and caked with rust at the seams, and there he is, leaning over them, wiping them down, slowly, intently, letting one dirtied wipe after another flutter to the ground. I look closer. It’s doing something—the little section of pipe he has tended is, I think, slightly brighter than the rest of the rusty network around him. It’s hard to read his face—we guards always wear sunglasses, even indoors on dark rainy days—but as the deep plodding music of the water carries on between us, I see my manager using up his time and his cleaning supplies, with one purpose in mind: to make his pool look her best for her own funeral.

I suppose he does love her.

He is still polishing the first pipe when it’s time for me to go back out to the pool. On the way, I reach down and pick up a crumpled paper which had escaped the trash can nearby. It’s a write-up about him, from the Park Rec—a positive one, therefore from several years ago. Their first line says (a nice compliment, if a little trite) that when they think of this pool, they think of him.

“Garbage.” It’s him.

I nod, about to toss it in.

“No, I mean that first line was garbage,” he growls, still bent over the pipe he is polishing, but well aware of what is in my hands. “She’s been around long before we got to her.” He pulls out another wipe. “And if they’d only let her, she’d probably outlive us all.” I look down and read it again: When we think of the pool, we think of him. He waves a dismissive hand, as if to scatter any nascent poignancy in the air. “Never mind.”

A few more rust flakes fall free from the pipe.

And I believe I know what he is thinking. He is thinking that they got it backwards: when he thinks of himself, he thinks of the pool. And as I trudge back outside—somehow no longer hoping, despite the cold and tedium and misty rain, for the day here to end early—I look back at the sunburnt hands scrubbing some old rusty pipes a little cleaner so that this pool will be at her proudest in her last moment.

I think she is luckier than a lot of real people are.

And it occurs to me—a silly thought, but one I suspect I’ll follow through—this place has, after all, meant a good deal to me, and I was given a building key this summer, and there is a cushioned bench in the pool office, and towels can always function as blanket and pillow.

And for one last night, at least, why should I go home?