Read Online A home at the end of the world by Michael Cunningham - Free Book Online Page A

freeze, with a sky clear as melted snow. The first hardy, thick-stemmed flowers had poked out of the ground. The quarry, which lay three miles out of town, reflected sky on a surface dark and unmoving as obsidian. Except for a lone caramel-colored cow that had wandered down from a pasture to drink in the shallows, Bobby and I were the only living things there. We might have hiked to a glaciated lake high in the Himalayas.
    “Beautiful,” he said. We were passing a joint. A blue jay rose, with a single questioning shrill, from an ash tree still in bud.
    “We have to swim,” I said. “We have to.”
    “Still too cold,” he said. “That water’d be freezing, man.”
    “We have to, anyway. Come on. It’s the first official swim of summer. If we don’t swim today, it’ll start snowing again tomorrow.”
    “Who told you that?”
    “Everybody knows it. Come on .”
    “Maybe,” he said. “Awful cold, though.”
    By then we had reached the gravel bed that passed for a beach, where the cow, who stood primly at the water’s edge, stared at us with coal-black eyes. This quarry had a rough horseshoe shape, with limestone cliffs that rose in a jagged half circle and then fell back again to the beach.
    “It’s not the least bit cold,” I said to Bobby. “It’s like Bermuda by this time of year. Watch me.”
    Spurred by my fear that we would do no more that day than smoke a joint, fully clothed, beside a circle of dark water, I started up the shale-strewn slope that led to the clifftop. The nearer cliffs were less than twenty feet high, and in summer the more courageous swimmers dove from there into the deep water. I had never even thought of diving off the cliff before. I was nothing like brave. But that day I scrambled in my cowboy boots, which still pinched, up the slope to the cracked limestone platform that sprouted, here and there, a lurid yellow crocus.
    “It’s summer up here,” I shouted back to Bobby, who stood alone on the beach, cupping the joint. “Come on,” I shouted. “Don’t test the water with your fingers, just come up here and we’ll dive in. We’ve got to.”
    “Naw, Jon,” he called. “Come back.”
    With that, I began taking off my clothes in a state of humming, high-blown exhilaration. This was a more confident, daring Jonathan standing high on a sun-warmed rock, stripping naked before the puzzled gaze of a drinking cow.
    “Jon,” Bobby called, more urgently.
    As I pulled off my shirt and then my boots and socks, I knew a raw abandon I had never felt before. The sensation grew as each new patch of skin touched the light and the cool, brilliant air. I could feel myself growing lighter, taking on possibility, with every stitch I removed. I got ungracefully out of my jeans and boxer shorts, and stood for a moment, scrawny, naked, and wild, touched by the cold sun.
    “This is it,” I hollered.
    Bobby, far below, said, “Hey, man, no—”
    And for the sake of Bobby, for the sake of my new life, I dove.
    A thin sheet of ice still floated on the water, no more than a membrane, invisible until I broke through it. I heard the small crackling, felt the ice splinter around me, and then I was plunged into unthinkable cold, a cold that stopped my breath and seemed, for a long moment, to have stopped my heart as well. My flesh itself shrank, clung in animal panic to the bone, and I thought with perfect clarity, I’m dead. This is what it’s like.
    Then I was on the surface, breaking through the ice a second time. My consciousness actually slipped out of my body, floated up, and in retrospect I have a distinct impression of watching myself swim to shore, gasping, lungs clenched like fists, the ice splintering with every stroke, sending diamond slivers up into the air.
    Bobby waded in to his thighs to help pull me out. I remember the sight of his wet jeans, clinging darkly to his legs. I remember thinking his boots would be ruined.
    It took another moment for my head to clear sufficiently to