Read Online The News of the World by Ron Carlson - Free Book Online

is it. I could feel a warmth in my shoulders and in the backs of my legs; this was really working.
    But I’d left nothing to chance. Tomorrow, the garlic would arrive, and I’d pick up the jade. I had ordered the chickens and the birdseed and the rice. I’d become part of a process that had me in its sweep, and in a second, I was on my feet, yipping like a monkey as I rushed in four long strides right into the warm waters of Lake Mugacook.
    The medium of the water enveloped, moved me. I was flying, floating, gliding. The trees along the water’s edge drifted by as if the lake were quietly turning for me, taking me with it. I closed my eyes as I swam for minutes at a time. By the time I took my first real breath—or so it seemed—I looked up and saw the square white face of the boathouse smiling at me. Behind me, in the middle of this huge lake, the deepest lake in Connecticut, was a basketball. I turned, kicking hard, headed right for it. I imagined the other millions of sperm swimming behind me, wandering, loitering, taking the wrong turn into Cookson Swamp or Succor Brook, drowning in the acid at the top of the vagina, their tails being eaten by antibodies.
    I swam for a long time. It became real swimmimg, my arms finally heavier than the water, and I could hear myself breathing, blowing water out. It was a big lake. When I crawled to where the middle might have been, I sighted the church spire, a lighted sliver over the town. I turned to line up with Ballowells’ lights.
    There were no lights.
    I stood in a treadwater position and swiveled. No lights. Ballowells had gone to bed. Ballowells had turned out every one of their seventy thousand lights and they had gone to bed. I had no idea where I was. For a while I was under the water, which I did know, and I came up several times saying the word “Okay!” spitting like a seal. Across the lake I could still see the white line of the church spire. It was a mile and a quarter to the rowboat, then through the grove, down the pond road a half mile, across Route 43, and up the steps into the church. My knees ached like burning rubber.
    I was under, then way under, and then up for air. Each time I cracked the surface my “Okay!” had more water in it, and finally I couldn’t even hear the word. This was not a hospitable environment. I went into my drown-proofing moves, but I kept going down too far and had to kick to mouth air. Something touched my toe, something small, but it was enough. I panicked. The antibodies were eating my tail. In a frenzy of side straddle hops, side strokes, leaping waves, I called “Whoa!” and went down.
    The water played a lugubrious synthesizer tone in my ears as I fell freely through the thermoclimes past two, three zones of colder water. Small hot squiggles crawled across the inside of my closed eyes. I was swaying back and forth wonderfully. It was like the time I was playing one on one with Billy Wellner at his house. We were playing around his pickup and I perfected a shot where I would drive around the rear of the truck and then lean back into the fence and throw a set shot up off the board and through the hoop. I made the shot nine times in a row and beat Billy 22–2. All he could say was, “You’re wrecking the fence.”
    Then.
    Then I touched the basketball, and it was in one hand, then both hands, and my knees closed around it too, as we bobbed past forty-six million stars in outer space.
    THE voice behind the flashlight said, “Get up.” It was our constable, Gill Manwaring, I could tell, and he was trying to sound real tough. Story herself had hired Gill as constable.
    â€œYou better get up, fella.”
    I lay still, wrapped around the ball, in the same fetal position in which I must have washed upon this shore. He hadn’t recognized me. His boot ran up under my kidney. “Up!”
    In a voice I recognized as Raymond Burr’s, I said, “Hey,