The Risk Pool

surface. I quickly became a proficient snorkeler, able to stay down over a minute at a time, then rising gently, just the snorkel itself breaking the smooth surface of the pond, releasing the rubber ball to let the air in. Inevitably, some of the pond’s brackish water got into the tube, but I learned to expel it without swallowing too much. Its taste was vile all the same and the duration of my scavenging was determined as much by my ability to endure that sour taste as by false or fading light or fear of discovery.
    One evening, my net heavy with my dimpled catch, I became conscious of having stayed in the pond longer than usual. One of the things I worried about was forgetting about the time and coming up out of the pond to pitch darkness, disoriented and unable to locate my bike, which I always hid in the woods. Twice I had nearly lingered too long and had located my gear by pure chance in the darkness. The days were getting shorter now, and I was suddenly certain that I had stayed in the pond too long and that when I broke the surface it would be into an even darker darkness. When I pushed hard toward the surface, my snorkel was suddenly jammed down and wrenched out of my mouth, as if by a large hand. Almost simultaneously my head rammed something so hard and unyielding that it sent shivers of pain to the base of my neck and shoulders. The shock drove the air from my straining lungs in an explosion of frantic bubbles.
    My first conclusion was that I had somehow become confused about which direction was up, that I had propelled myself into the bank of the pond. This did not square with the direction my escaping air bubbles were taking, however, which was the same direction I had tried to go. Surely
they
knew which direction was up. How was it, then, that the ground came to be above me? There could be no doubt that it was the ground, especially aftermy second desperate lunge, this time with my arms extended before me, my hands encountering a solid wall of dense clay. At that moment it seemed that there was only one certainty in the entire world—that I was about to die. Somehow, I had become the victim of the cruelest hoax ever played on mortal man. Each direction I turned I encountered that smooth hard clay which became for me that instant “down.” There simply was no “up,” and up was the only direction that would do me any good. And though it seems odd now that it should have occurred to me at the time, I remember distinctly the terrible feeling that I had been in precisely the same situation before, that first week after going to live with my father when I’d been trapped in the basement beneath Klein’s. Then too my first reaction had been surprise, then panic, then an attempt at calm rationality. There had to be a button that would open the elevator door. To admit that maybe there wasn’t was to admit the possibility of an irrational universe.
    But in the basement of Klein’s I had been able to breathe and with each terrified breath assure myself that though I could see no way out, in time I would be rescued. Now I had neither time nor air, and so of course I would die. And it would be my fault. Because even though everything had suddenly become irrational, there was a dark shape, a message even, to its insanity. I was about to die because I had not learned my lesson. I had gotten myself into another dark place, and this time no door would open, my father would not appear, no hand would yank me into light and air for the simple reason that there
was no up
. At least not for me.
    And the truth is that if I’d had to figure it out in order to survive, I would have died there in that narrow black cave beneath the bank of the pond. I hadn’t the presence of mind to solve the riddle, to see that if I’d swum into a situation where there was no up that the only solution was to
back
out. When forward, right, left, up, and down all yielded the same result, I simply gave up, shoving in blind rage against the earth before me, furious with it even as I surrendered to it. I stopped kicking with my fins, accepted the brackish water into my lungs and felt gentle sleep coming.
    Then, miraculously, I was on the surface, my arms thrashing in the air, clawing, without any instruction from me, at the grassy bank. My last angry shove against mother earth, combined withmy surrender and the end to my frantic webb-footed kicking, had floated me back out of the cave and into the world.
    I was alive.
    Willie Heinz was