Pooling
Stuck on top of the world
The temperatures of the air and water were so similar that it only tickled her bare skin a little when Astrid stepped into the kidney shaped pool high above the city. She turned around and allowed herself to sink into the turquoise dreamy liquid and came to a floating position with her arms and legs spread out and her eyes gazing up at the clouds.
Water pushed against her ear drums and for a split second most of the sounds above water level turned off and instead the sounds below the surface reached her thoughts. The clicking and splashing pool sounds, familiar to her. Even her own pulse made a swooshing sound under water. Her arms paddled the water and made little creaking sounds when the skeleton and joints moved. The water began to settle and Astrid was breathing calmly while remaining as still as possible in the calming water. She smelled the sweet scent of a nearby pine tree that mixed its fragrance with hibiscus and gardenia. The warm temperature amplified the scents, and the gentle breeze created a small vortex of perfumed air pushing down on the small basin in which she was floating.
For a moment she thought that if someone saw her now, they might think she’s dead because she was perfectly still. She decided to move her right foot just in case someone was watching her. She doubted anyone was, but she just wanted to make sure. Then she became annoyed at herself for thinking of others, especially at a time like this, and tried to redirect her thought back on more important matters.
Astrid began by noticing her forehead as it was bobbing ever so slightly in the pool water. It felt cooling against the breeze even if it was a warm day. Her arms were now still and almost perfectly stretched out away from her body. Her legs had taken on a semi-buoyant position about eight inches below the surface, so her body was at a slight angle. She tried correcting it to achieve perfect buoyancy but the legs kept drooping downwards. Astrid worked on leveling her body horizontally for a good while, until her thoughts drifted back to what she really came to do.
She came here to strategize.
It was so quiet here, on top of the hill above the large city. She listened. Of course, it was impossible to hear any city noise. She listened some more. No traffic. Only birds and the wind in the trees. She was surprised she couldn’t hear neighbors either. Wait. She did hear some neighbors. They must have been quiet for a while, but now they were making a terrible amount of noise opening and closing cabinets, and slamming things on the floor, and yelling to each other to hurry, hurry! Another neighbor’s baby began to cry and a dog barked a few times on the other side of the wooden fence near the pool before it stopped without being told to do so. Eventually the baby also stopped crying and the noisy neighbors came out of their apartment dragging suitcases and vanished out in the street through the front gate.
Astrid’s neck had been strained all this time while trying to listen and see, so she relaxed her neck and let her ears submerge back into the quiet. She closed her eyes and counted to twenty, and it felt so wonderful. To be, to exist, to float, and to live. A tempting tiredness crept up from her hair roots and she protested by opening her eyes.
Focus now, she thought. Where to begin?
The refrigerator would have about four hours without electricity, if she didn’t open the door. The freezer would have a day if she was lucky. She could use the outdoor BBQ to cook food until she ran out of gas. And after that she could use wood, but it would be more cumbersome. Cumbersome, she thought. What kind of a word was that, and how on Earth had she chosen it in her thoughts? She shook off her meandering thoughts by flipping herself onto her stomach and taking a few swim strokes until she reached one end of the pool. There she grabbed hold of the warm tiled edge and wiped her face with her hand.
Would she have enough food? Probably not. Besides, what was enough food? How would anyone know what enough food was in this circumstance? How long would it take for people in the city to make their way up there, to the top of the hill, to look for things? Or the neighbors to start banging on the doors?
Astrid looked toward the small two-story apartment complex. Each apartment had an overhanging private balcony and lush greenery grew and swaddled the building in a protective verdant softness. Neighbors often greeted each other with a smirk-filled smile when they tried to relax, each on their own non-private balconies. Most balconies faced a shared courtyard, which further emphasized the feeling of intimacy in the mid-century style apartment complex. The entire complex sat perched on the edge of one of the steepest canyons on the crest of the Bel Air hills. It was a refuge from the wild city life below it. Here deer would wander on the slopes, and rabbit and raccoons were daily visitors. Astrid loved living in this hidden retreat that few even knew existed. And she loved the fact that she was the only one who used the pool.
It was almost midday now, and several tenants were at work, down there in the city. So they were stranded. It would take a few hours to walk home with cars no longer functioning. Perhaps longer. Perhaps they would find or steal bikes. A lot of people would probably hop on bikes to get to places. She recalled seeing an old bike left behind an old tenant in the storage shed by the parking lot.
To refresh her thoughts she lunged herself back into the pool and swam fast to the other side while holding her breath. When she emerged and looked toward the pool gate her neighbor, Owen, stood there. Owen was one of those L.A. creatives that seemed to have been there and done that, yet never quite made it big time. Just enough to have some great stories, and the enviable fortune to be blessed with a handsome body. Though that outside shell was getting on in the years.
“Really?” he asked. “Really? That’s your plan?”
Astrid looked toward the canyon and past the pomegranate trees that grew on the steep hillside and sighed. Then she filled her nostrils with fresh air and looked back towards Owen and said:
“Well? Do you have a better plan?”
“Jeez, get the hell out of the pool and see if there’s any shower water left! You want to walk around with a chlorine crust on you for the rest of your life?” Owen seemed genuinely worried about Astrid’s wellbeing.
“I’m thinking. I do my best thinking in this pool,” she replied in a matter-of-fact way.
Owen opened the gate and walked onto the pool deck and then sat down on the pool steps so that his legs were half-submerged. He wore shorts and a T-shirt, regular daytime wear of a man who works from home at the time being.
“So what, you’re staying? Here?” he asked. His voice had taken on a more serious tone. He fished out his cellphone from his pocket and chuckled and waved it in the air while shaking his head. He put the dead phone down on the pool deck.
“Want to band together?” he asked.
“Band together?” she echoed and immediately regretted sounding so disrespectful and remembered that she herself had just thought the word cumbersome, which was tenfold more stupid. So she quickly apologized:
“Sorry! I didn’t mean to sound, you know, mean. Yeah, I mean yes, I would like to join forces.”
They both chuckled at the exact same time and both simultaneously said out loud, as if they had read it on a screen projected to them:
“Band of brothers!”
“Ha, I thought of it too! The word band always makes me think of Band of Brothers,” Owen laughed, and then he sighed and picked up a pine needle that floated in the pool.
Astrid walked up to the steps and sat down on a lower rung.
“So, you’re serious about us… pooling together?” She wanted to be sure. Surer than sure. Double triple sure. She cringed at having used the word pooling. But he knew what she meant.
“Ha, I see what you did there! Yep, I think we can handle it better together. I mean we don’t know each other very well, but we both have an idea of how the other one operates. You know what a shitty person I am…” they both laughed “… and I know absolutely nothing about you except you like to swim, you always say hello, you usually laugh at my jokes and you have the most interesting discussions about philosophy and religion with someone named Riley and yeah, I’m a terrible eavesdropper but you talk quite loud after a couple of glasses of wine and I always want to find a way to join your conversation but I’m a wuss so I never asked if you wanted to hang out even if I know we have tons of things in common based on everything you and Riley talk about. You know how small these balconies are and how we all can hear each other. Oh, and you always smell the gardenias on your way out! I trust you. I don’t know why, but I do. And I think you can glean enough through my asshole behavior that behind that asshole is actually a decent human being, I just don’t show it too often. But I am determined to show my decent side, now.”
That made her smile. She said:
“I knew you were eavesdropping, and sometimes I felt that perhaps we were having a parallel conversation, a silent conversation, alongside my chats with Riley. I could see your cigarette gleaming when you sat in the dark on your balcony. Riley’s in Sienna working on a research project. What a stellar place to be, right now, you know? You’re not shitty. You’ve just been burned too many times. You should’ve left L.A. years ago. Me too. But it’s hard to leave L.A. Even harder than getting here. Look at us, stuck here on the top of the world! Why don’t you just walk down the hill and band together with your friends? Or walk over to the mansions a few miles from here?” she asked but didn’t look at him for a reaction.
Owen responded with a thin and quiet voice, almost worried someone would hear him:
“It’s too late. Things are already in motion. Once things are in motion, it’s best to lay low.”
Owen stood up and reached out his hand to her. She thought for a second and then grabbed his hand. He whisked her out of the water as gracefully as one of those ballet dancers who lifts the prima ballerina up high in the air before she lands in a graceful movement. Astrid’s toes touched the warm deck and it didn’t feel painful at all! She landed with just a perfect amount of velocity so that her muscles and tendons and bones had enough time to tense up and prepare for the hard surface after their gravity free session in the water.
Astrid marveled at this moment in time, at the pure physical elegance of it, and of the elegance of their new friendship and how it had formed in such an accelerated yet natural manner, which would never have been possible under normal circumstances, and she wished she could have stayed in these joyful thoughts longer, but she had to hurry to the shower and see if there was any water left.
This story is presented for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, the theme was “Connection.”
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Beautiful, such a physical, sensory piece. Great work!