Free In Partial Disgrace by Joshua Cohen, Charles Newman Page B

ice cream. And there Felix removed himself with a book and ate alone before the fire, his unembarrassed appetites on full display, and all of us grew fat and happy.
    When earthbound, my father assumed three forms: at times a gentle bull who lay his full weight upon the fence of every friendship; at times a writhing, glittering serpent, mocking each blow of his adversaries; and at times a man with a lion’s head from whose laughing beard, unchecked by false shame, great torrents of water flowed. I liked them all.
    At dusk, every summer afternoon, when the slow moving Mze turned from ocher to mauve, we stripped down on its banks, leaving my school uniform and his business suit in soft columns above our shoes, and began to wade aimlessly in our black alpaca bathing suits, which we always wore instead of underwear. Swallows swooped down, dipping their wings into the darkening waters, fish rose and rejoiced in its dusky surface, while between them all manner of insects emerged like living sparks and fell into the flowers of both banks. Then he would take me up in his arms and we would cross that river which the ancients believed to be bottomless.
    He had the body of a gymnast, his frame developed by secret French exercises, low sloped rounded shoulders which concealed effortless strength, and the legs of a country gent, hard as a saddle but just as forgiving, which he toughened by rising at five each morning and walking for three hours before breakfast with a knapsack full of stones. I had my mother’s rapier-like body, designed for sleeping late, for sports not yet generally acknowledged. But when he picked me up, even for a moment, I forgot my body, forgot myself.
    The incline of the river bottom was firm and fairly gradual, and soon we were submerged, only his head above the water, his beard like a dark water lily floating above my head, which lay upon his chest. I was aware of both the current and his stubborn resistance to it. Taking a breath, I went under with his heart. I felt no fear as long as he could breathe, as long as I could hear his breathing.
    He walked almost casually, with the slight limp of the star athlete, negotiating the cylinder of water with short languid strides, suave and incorporeal, until we were both well beneath the surface. How many steps I do not know, across the bottom of that river which flowed away from history, where I first became aware of Time Out of Mind.
    We moved deliberately in that sphere, out of our element but serene, moving gravely but never grimacing through the invisible currents. Down there, all the senses were equally irrelevant, in a normal weightless gait. Then in order to reassert our gravitas, he freighted, weighted down with me.
    When his lungs close by my ear expelled, I knew we were coming up for air, that the incline was in our favor. There was nothing but blinding brightness as my own head emerged, and he permitted himself a slight stumble now that the hardest part was done. When we were in the shadows on the far side, my diminished senses returned one by one. I could hear the rivulets course about his calves, and as I was set down on the meadow embankment, looking back at the bent grass where we began, water cascaded down his beard onto my face.
    The pretext, I suppose, was exercise, a kind of fitness. For surely, any fool can learn to swim, and in your mind’s redshot eyes one can just as well walk upon the water. But to walk through it, neither floating nor drowning, now that is a test—though the choleric Cannonian is sure to ask, what good is it to be a champion sprinter in a swimming pool?
    I cannot recall exactly when this project began or ended, or how to factor in the crude determinants: my weight, his age, the velocity of the current as Time flowed back and forth. Read into it what you will. Read anything but comedy or dread. He cast me into the river which rose not over me; I was then what I was to be. As I saw the man pick the boy up, I was being picked up.