Читать книгу That Crazy Perfect Someday - Michael Mazza - Страница 12

5

Thursday, 4:37 a.m.

My mission-style La Jolla guesthouse rental ticks and creaks in the predawn light like an old man complaining of ailments. The shutters are closed to the spinning world, and the only light inside is from my phone, hard on my eyes as I swipe through rumors on social. I’m wigged out by yesterday’s news, wide awake, sitting up in bed, because get this: the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) wants to open an investigation on me and Bomb on behalf of the U.S. Olympic Committee. My agent-slash-lawyer says we have ten days to respond.

Did I even get an hour of sleep? The biometrics don’t lie. Digital readout:

0h 37m Deep sleep

2h 14m Light sleep

The remainder indicates waking every hour on the hour, and it shows on my mobile in a jagged orange-and-blue bar graph.

It’s been three months since I disconnected from social, joined the multitudes suffering from Facebook and YouMee fatigue, and dropped off—until now. Rumors of that big, fat doping lie started coming to me in person over the past few weeks through friends in the surf community. I thought it was a sick prank at first, but something in my gut said people were beginning to believe the allegation. I’ve never done drugs—OK, once: R71, a sex intoxicant that gave me a headache and cramps—but I’ve got a pretty good idea of who started the malicious lie and birthed it into the 24/7 spin cycle.

I spill out of bed, phone in hand, and stub my toe on the vacuum bot on my way to the bathroom. Lights on. Pee. Mirror. Is that my hair? I mean, really? It’s a hot-wired mess. Between the salt water, the hard sun, and the country’s freshwater shortage—everyone’s on mandatory, eco-fascist short showers—my hair goes psycho because I don’t have enough time to let the conditioner soak in to get it shampoo-commercial silky. What’s worse is that the stress from the doping allegation has turned my face into a pimple pizza—which is just dandy, since I have to be at a girlfriend’s rehearsal dinner at seven. Then, come tomorrow, I’ll be a bridesmaid, too.

I run my fingers through knotted clumps of hair and braid them into a ponytail. Daddy says I look like an old-world Irish lass with washy emerald eyes like the color of the South China Sea, though at the moment they’re seriously bloodshot. The truth is—and I’m comfortable saying it—that with freckles, the squarish jaw I inherited from him, none of the olive beauty of my mother, and the wide, manly shoulders that are the trademark of every pro surfer, I’d put myself at a definite five. My elbows, on the other hand? A perfect ten.

In the kitchen, I munch granola yogurt and rehang the dog-eared Mercator projection world map that fell off the wall in yesterday’s 3.2 temblor. I’ve turned it into a crafty art piece by charting all the places I’ve lived or been. Each city, sea, and landmark on the pressboard is dotted with red pushpins, linked by colored yarn, and strung with the tiny origami cranes I made. The birds give the map a migration pattern effect that crisscrosses four continents and three oceans. I’ve been to Tokyo, Guam, Bahrain, Hawaii, Newport, Pensacola, Italy . . . In an era of Google Maps, YouMee time lines, and digital everything, the tactile nature of this map makes my own unique statement of where I’ve been but never chosen to be.

I pull on aqua sharkskin leggings and an iridescent-white nanofiber rash guard—thank you, Nike—then check my phone. Surfline’s 8K surf cam shows Trestles kicking up tiny but perfect A-frames.

Bomb rolls up in his Toyota FE electric SUV at 5:45 a.m. and pings me. I’m thankful he volunteered to drive because it’s like flushing the toilet every time I step on the Charger’s gas, and the trip north would definitely suck up, like, a quarter tank. Besides, the nasty stares I get from alternative-energy vehicle owners over my carbon footprint are becoming seriously old. Even though Bomb has an electric vehicle, he doesn’t hassle me; in fact, he offered me thirty-seven thousand dollars for the Charger, which I politely declined. He says classic muscle goes unappreciated these days, and I have to agree.

I lock up and head outside, my board under my arm and my backpack slung across my shoulder, eyes scanning the backyard. Today is gray and sad under the morning marine haze, but it’ll brighten up big here in North County when the afternoon sun burns through. Overhead, a UPS delivery drone whizzes by. I step onto the stone path and pass the koi pond, centered between my rental and the main residence, catching myself and returning with a bag of Katami’s Koi Premium.

Feeding the fish is one of my duties as a tenant of the married gay doctors who own the property and are vacationing in Borneo for the next three months. The koi recognize me, and I wonder as they stare up through the shimmer if these Japanese symbols of love and friendship picture me somehow as a benevolent koi goddess who blesses them with their daily meal.

I crouch and they gather at my feet, forming a fan that’s alive with fluttering fins and bright, spattered tones. I hold the bag by its heel and gently sprinkle krill and soybean pellets into the water. Their mouths break the surface, hinging and snapping in big wide Os as they gulp the food. I love these fish: their beauty, the swatches of orange and black-and-white abstract color when they’re together feeding. But I know that in a generation or two, if they’re released back into the wild, they’ll regress into common carp and lose their vivid markings, becoming grayish-brown and plain again—a notion that’s not lost on me when I recall my father on those nights when he stepped out to the Navy Ball with Mom in the dazzling nobility of his decorated dress whites, which have now been replaced by an everyday American civilian wardrobe of T-shirts and jeans.

I meet Bomb out front at the truck’s passenger window. He’s sleepy-eyed, sipping a latte. Today’s wardrobe pick: flowered board shorts and a blue Hurley windbreaker.

“Yo, big man,” I say.

“Yo,” he grunts, and points to a triple espresso in the cup holder.

“Domo-itchy-romo.”

I load up my gear, and we’re off.

When Bomb and I get to Trestles forty-five minutes later, even at this early hour, it’s all surf trucks and tourist cars backed up along the road near the trailhead.

“Well, that sucks,” he says.

We park a mile up and walk a hundred yards, past a gaggle of groms baking a Pop-Tart on the heated hood of their parents’ SUV, and past several chirpy, rich-looking kooks who have no business on the waves, struggling into their wet suits.

Bomb points to a thicket.

“Follow me,” he says.

He spreads the brush wide, revealing a secret shortcut: a narrow path that leads to the beach from the bluff. We hike down through coastal scrub that scrapes against our boards and snags our backpacks. The pebbles under my bare feet poke and sting. A brown pelican flies directly over us with a fishtail peeking from its gullet.

“I know who put those rumors out,” I tell Bomb.

“Who?”

“That Aussie bitch, Kimberly Masters. And I’m telling you, if I see her in Sydney next week, it’s a full-on girl fight.”

Bomb walks ahead and clears a tree branch tangled with a tattered Metallica tee. Sweat beads on my skin. I smell the salty brine of the ocean mixed with a tinge of dog poo.

“Fine,” he says, “but you don’t know for sure, and you don’t want shit like that blowing up before the Games. I know it’s bullshit and you know it’s bullshit, but bigger guns think it’s real. Until then, we’re just moving forward, heads down, until they discover otherwise—which they won’t.”

“She’s been after me all season, pissed that she only came in third in the Nike XX, and she claims that I stole her wave, which is total crap.”

“Screw that,” Bomb says. “Your agent’s on it. What’s his name? Black-a-koff-ski, Blah-blah-bifski—I can never get his name right.”

“Blaszczykowski,” I say. “Jerry Blaszczykowski.”

“What is that? Polish? Anyway, you want gold, we’ve got to focus.”

When we get to the beach, we look out at the surf to the lineup. There’s, like, a gazillion surfers trying to pick off the same fifty-yard stretch of wave.

“Are total shitheads hijacking this sport, or is it just me?” Bomb says.

“They weren’t even on the surf cam twenty minutes ago. Did they all drop in out of the sky?”

“It’s not worth a paddle out,” Bomb says, so we hike back up the trail.

Back at the training center, Bomb orders two hours in Sisyphus, which is what I do, flat on my board, paddling until my shoulders and lungs catch fire. It’s designed to build upper-body strength and lung power so that when I ride a wave during a competition, I can get back out to the lineup quicker. It’s really not bad. Once you pass through the threshold of pain and exhaustion, you’re delivered into an out-of-body realm where it’s just you and your thoughts, which, at the moment, consist of wondering how to keep the doping news from my father and inventing notorious methods of disaster for Aussie Kimberly Masters.

The current dies with a hiss, and it’s back to the reality. I look up. Bomb’s finger is on Sisyphus’s control button.

“You’re right,” he says. “It’s the Aussie.”