After the Natatorium
The
first time they saw the natatorium they changed into their bathing
costumes, pulled their rubber caps over their heads, and rushed into the
water without a thought for the ice crystals that floated, cold and
perfect, on the surface. As they somersaulted, chicken-fought, and
cannonballed from the edges, an Indiana marching band played the young
upstart Sousa’s Liberty Bell,
conducted by a gesticulating barber from Mishawaka. The pool washed
their skin clean of Chicago grime—soot from the chimneys, brick dust
from fingernails, mortar packed and matted in their hair—and they
crawled out of the natatorium as pink and fat as they had from the
baptismal font, before they could rightly remember their own names.
At
night the natatorium’s locked doors and windows invited the jimmied
entrance of gin-breathers and wounded boys who immersed themselves in
the waters, where they bled through their bandages in a hush, leaving
the pool’s liquid a clear lapping blue and their wounds salted, closed,
and covered over with quick growths of scar tissue that shone whiter
against the white bottom of the great basin—a basin so gigantic that
none of the night gangs could have imagined it could hold them all
together at once as they bobbed and spumed and sighed in the dark, the
occasional laugh that bubbled up from their throats swallowed by the
cavernous heights above.
As
the water warmed over the course of the summer, swimmers arrived from
all corners of the city: babies with cauls that clung wet in their
mothers’ arms, dancers whose jewels spread from their hips in drifts of
color, liberated minnows that darted in bright curtains though the
depths, a dromedary with levers inside to propel its dives toward the
bottom-most deeps where it dwindled smaller than the terriers that
paddled belly down in the light-cracked shallows.
Soon
the demand for water outpaced the supply from the spring fed aqueducts
sourced in a village northwest of the city. The natatorium dried up into
a hollow field of concrete that first housed an electrical exhibit,
then a market, and then—before it finally fell into disrepair—a variety
show. Hawkers lingered by the entrance to advertise big mamas, one-eyed
dogs and penguin men, flippers downed in black and white fuzz. The
waterless pool filled with a honeycomb of curtained compartments where
hundreds of people disappeared, eyes open in wonder, in hopes that
others might chart their futures.
JR Fenn's writing has appeared in
Gulf Coast,
PANK,
Flash, and more. 'After the Natatorium' is reprinted from
Versal. She teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London.
