Free Marine Park: Stories by Mark Chiusano

The water lapped and lapped.
    He walked down the end of the wharf to the dock, which had a door over it, a chain-link door leading to nowhere, with triangular extensions on either side, like sails or ears, to prevent climbing around. Timothy did it anyway, swinging himself around the sail. He walked to the end of the dock, where all the lights died away.
    No one called for him. Courtney was on the porch. The seafood restaurant built on pilings right off the shore was closed, or else nobody was out to bother him at this hour. No waiters or valets came running. He’d always wanted to do something unaccustomed in life, like jump into an open body of water with all his clothes on, his shoes even. He thought about this sometimes on planes coming into JFK for a landing, over Rockaway Beach. But as he knew he would, he took off his clothes methodically, his jacket first and then his shirt, waiting modestly for his jeans to be last, his best pair of dress jeans. He laid these all out on the edge of the wooden dock. When he fell backward into the water, it hardly felt cold; just a continuation of the air on his skin. He remembered, without meaning to, what it had felt like, as a child, to learn how to swim—the overchlorinated high school pool, the gray lockers off the gym, the bang of their swinging back and forth. He dove deep, resurfaced, realized he couldn’t see the bottom, or anything close to the bottom, and for the first time in many times of swimming he felt scared, unsure of what was below the surface. Inadvertently he touched some driftwood, pulled his hand back in shock. It was so black, as far as he could see, and he couldn’t lift himself up farther. The oily water opened around him like a mouth, the orifice as far as he could see of some face. He scrambled up the slimy old metal rungs of the dock ladder. He sat there on the edge, gasping for breath, though he hadn’t realized he’d needed to. The hot air dried him after a while, and slowly his breathing calmed. He was shivering, leaning back, his arms hugging what they could of his body, and he felt entirely satiated.

TO LIVE IN THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MIRACLE

T his was when Hayden was living in graduate housing at Brandeis. He had a little room to himself and his own door with a lock on it, and he never put posters up. This was during the period of us-learning-to-be-better-communicators, which was something he felt strongly about.
    Hayden had become good at talking about his feelings, even though that was something we hadn’t done when we were first friends. He broke his wrist and was in a cast before high school and I helped him with that, but it doesn’t count. I didn’t talk about feelings with anyone, because Lorris was too young. Hayden lost his virginity to his girlfriend at the same time I did with mine, and we didn’t talk about it until two months after. And even then I didn’t bring it up, just said,
me too
, after he said his piece—I’ve got something to tell you, man. That was in the stands at Icahn Stadium in the spring, right after Hayden got knocked out of medaling at Cities in the 800-meter run. I’d done the mile, and broke 4:40 for the first time. He had long hair that season, and he was beginning to lose interest in track because of his girlfriend. A few months ago something incredible happened, he said.
    They called the place where Hayden lived Grad, capital
G
, as if it were more than a place but also a state of mind. It was far from the rest of the dormitories and classroom buildings: the main campus was up a winding road at the top of a hill, where there was a corny little castle that someone had built in the 1950s. The type of thing that, at nighttime, looked amazing, lit up with red ramparts and a view of the Charles and the train tracks at the bottom of the hill. But in the daytime it looked like something that someone had built in the 1950s.
    Hayden was happy to be living in Grad, as a