The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock

Author:Peter Rock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2019-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Experts said that the images of hotels were “often taken from angles and vantage points such as they could only have been taken from a helicopter.” These are blurry pictures of tilting hotels, of columns and doorways, of women walking. Many images came out dark, shadowy, then in subsequent shots the shadows would coalesce into recognizable forms, as if surfacing from deep water. Sometimes the images would be of Serios’s face, peering intently into the camera.

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By myself in Mount Pleasant, I watched the windows, waited for the eagles. Once, during a storm, I stood in the rain and watched that nest blown apart, long sticks like spears falling around me. I looked out the window and thought: If the next three cars that pass the house are blue or white, I will receive a letter today. I decided: If a bird flies higher than the barn in the next thirty seconds, there’s really someone wonderful for me out there.

My relationships had always devolved into silence and inertia and then I moved somewhere else, began a new relationship, stayed as long as there was still the faintest momentum from the beginning, that excitement of the unknown. My stories worked this way, too. Plenty of abrupt endings, doors slamming, trucks on highways. I was afraid to be still, to stay in a room with another person. I had no clue what people might say to each other, past a certain point.

In his book Audition, Michael Shurtleff writes, “I then ask, ‘Why don’t you run? What keeps you there?’ The answer to these questions is what makes the actor able to function properly in the scene.”

I could never answer those questions. I was continually searching for a scene in which I’d be able to function properly, rather than finding or recognizing or creating the reasons to stay.

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