I fell for the diver the first time I saw him. I hadn’t really noticed him while he was inside the tank, his face obscured by the lush spew of bubbles from his mouthpiece that served as a backdrop to the drama of predation. I had been watching the afternoon feeding, absorbed by the lurch and snap of a nurse shark’s jaws as it laid waste to a small school of flounder.
After the tourists moved on, I lingered close to the curve of the tank, observing the aftermath of the feast. Cigarette-smoke swirls of pink drifted in the murky water. Fish too large or fierce to tempt the sharks, or otherwise unpalatable—swordfish, pike, flights of pirannha—circled endlessly, sometimes swimming close to the thick glass that distorted their appearance, their swollen eyes nearing mine as I peered through the algae-green glass. A pufferfish was staring me down when I felt cold water dripping on my head; I looked up and saw the diver’s flippers above me, descending the ladder on the side of the tank. I stepped aside to give him room and slipped on salt water. He reached with a shivering hand to steady me and with the other pulled off his goggles and hood. Though dark tracks circled his eyes where the goggles had fit tightly, the skin of his cold face glowed a pale and luminous blue. His teeth chattered softly. His eyes, a vaporous shade, met mine. For a few perfect moments I dared to believe I had met my match until, as I watched, the blue began to fall back, supplanted by a healthy pink.
* * *
At first the doctors thought it was the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, cutting off the blood supply, and who could blame them––three times around my throat, fat and red, tilting my head back so I had to squint up into the lights, the concerned faces. Once the nurse had cut the cord and unwound it, twirling it up and off my head like a lasso, the doctors sighed with relief and waited for my color to normalize. But it didn’t. They were mistaken about the cause. The blue of my skin was not the hue of deprivation—of cold, or lack of oxygen—but of excess, a wealth of blood so near the surface that its color swamped my flesh.
Maybe my blood panicked, wanting out, away from the big ropy red, and rushed my thin newborn skin, thinking it would step aside, when the blood might have instead chosen retreat into distant regions of my body. Maybe having risen to the top it liked the view and decided to stick around. The heightened sensation close to light and air, the murmur of voices and faint machine bleeps in the delivery room that bounced lightly off the skin’s membrane—so different from the scary thrum of the heart that pushed the blood around deep inside, bullying it along dark veins and arteries.
Though my parents had been informed that my color was incurable, I can’t say they accepted it easily. They kept trying to bring the roses to my cheeks—extra blankets, strenuous playground outings, fat-laden foods slipped into my mashed peas (were other infants snacking on knockwurst?), refusing or unable to grasp that the more they tried the bluer I became. And I wasn’t one of those sweet baby shades: sky blue, powder blue; I was the powerful blue of a deep river, an undeniable color that caused my parents to throw their arms up in front of their faces when sunlight hit me dead on, like they were afraid of falling in. Sometimes I would feel sorry for them and lie very still; at rest, my skin occasionally lightened to a kind of lavender as the blood sank down a little, tired of straining against my skin for a taste of the exterior.
As I grew up I learned to prefer chilly environments. Lucky for me we lived in the North Woods, where even the summers were cool. In high school I participated in all winter sports. I joined the swim team so I could spend as much time as possible in the element I most resembled. On weekends I went to every matinee, preferring old black and white movies that tended toward the blue tones, sitting close to the screen where the light would flicker across my face. After a while all the boys started calling for dates. They knew I was willing to linger through two shows, my hand in the popcorn, their hands in my jeans. They liked to tilt me back in their big red arms and watch me throb—I had a tendency to a general though slight pulsation, as of one large vein.
I used to wonder what my mother had been up to before I was born, anyhow, to wind the cord around my neck that way. Maybe she was whirling like a dervish, or working her hula hoop hard. Maybe she spun around three times, pinned the tail on the donkey and missed.
* * *
I was back the next day. I watched him through the glass and saw him watching me from the other side, his black wetsuit gleaming in the turbid water. It wasn’t just that the diver was blue; I could have found similar skin on any man who worked outside in cold weather, any meatcutter or supermarket stockboy. But I wasn’t looking for their kind of blue, only a light film over the wholesome color waiting below, like thin ice on the surface of a stream. What I wanted was what my diver had while in the tank—the perfect hue of suspension. All his blood cells bottlenecked as their passageways contracted in the icy water, until, for a few heartbeats, they stopped altogether. He was able to stay underwater far longer than the other divers; he claimed he didn’t feel the cold. His was a color my own called out to. My blood proceeded in steady, even streams, a scrim of blue obscuring all other systems. My surface never really stopped tingling. I longed for stillness.
I stood back when he came down the ladder so I could get a good look at him. He pulled off his headgear and pushed a wet hand through his hair, a pale kelp color, streaked like a surfer’s from salt water. He peered into the crowd; I knew he was looking for me. When I walked up to him he smiled and said hi, asked me if I had liked the show, if I was interested in sharks. He shivered a little, shifting from foot to foot, rubbing his arms. While we talked I watched the tone of the skin on his face and hands slide from cool to warm. A strand of seaweed clung to his neck; I reached out and plucked it off, touching his still gelid skin; two blotches of pink rose instantly to his skim-milk cheeks.
I made some excuse and slipped away. It wasn’t going to work, and anyway, as soon as he saw me in daylight that would be that. But I heard him behind me as I descended the steps in front of the aquarium, calling out hey, wait a minute, so I stopped and turned around, facing into the strong light of late afternoon. I looked up at him, squinting. He shaded his eyes with one hand. I watched his pupils shrink, then flare as my color registered. He flinched. His face stayed where it was and his body turned to go back. His arm came up slowly and his hand moved to my face and touched it, then sprang away. I knew he was expecting me to feel cool, but my surface temperature ran several degrees hotter than normal, what with all that motion just underneath. I left him standing there looking after me.
* * *
The quality of the lighting first drew me to the aquarium. Intended, I supposed, to make the marine life more comfortable, it crudely mimicked sunlight filtered down through stream or sea, though it lacked the mesmeric sifting of light that only happens with clouds and changing currents in the air, or the seismic shift of the ocean floor. The light provided a wan blue glow and that was enough for me; no one stared while I was there.
Though tourists enjoyed the easy thrill of performing dolphins and subjugated whales in the new addition, I preferred the pleasures of the vast saltwater tank in the old part of the aquarium. Swarms of sea creatures conformed to its strictures without complaint, the sailfish accompanying the sea worm on a comradely circuit, ceaselessly touring the thick glass cylinder. A rich variety of less directional forms of life shared the water in a festival of marine motion—seafans waved, anemones bloomed; close up, tiny jellyfish spun and swayed in a plankton stew.
Maybe the circumference of the tank was large enough, its curve subtle enough that the fish didn’t notice that they were passing the same things over and over: the fake coral reef always looming on the right as they swerved yet again around the sunken anchor. Maybe they found the repetition comforting, a substitute for the larger rhythms lost to them: the pull of the gulf stream toward summer waters, the pulse of oceans along the edges of continents. The fish adapted, the urge to spawn converted to an untiring push outward against the glass as they swam round and round, endlessly seeking a way upstream.
* * *
After a week I was back again. He started down the ladder, saw me, slowed down and stopped. I watched him rehearse his words in his head; a look of resolve came over his face. He climbed down the last few rungs and pulled me aside. He started to tell me that it didn’t matter, he didn’t care. I just stared at the blue moon his face made, ringed in dark latex, and took his cold lips between my teeth.
I started coming every day. I would wait for his show to be over, in a nearby alcove occupied only by a rarely-visited display of crabs. As soon as he came around the corner I would peel off his hood and unzip the front of his wetsuit to his waist, push my hands in along his sides, feel for those thicker parts that held the cold color longer than the bony outcroppings of clavicle and rib. I tried to admire the red that rose so quickly, to think of its rush toward me as flattering rather than of its unattractive hue. My own blood began to behave differently. When we kissed it pressed hard along my front for a closer look, like passengers all rushing to one side of a deck. I tilted toward the diver in an unintentional swoon. His blood surged up.
I pushed him to stay in the tank longer and longer. We would wait until the aquarium closed, hiding in a restroom until the guards had shut down the lights and gone home. He would put on his gear and climb back into the glowing tank in the middle of the dark hall, and cruise slowly around the perimeter, looking out at me as I walked along next to him. The edge of his mask scraped long wavy lines on the scummy glass as he circled close to me, bubbling. When he couldn’t take the cold any more I would be waiting at the bottom of the steps so we wouldn’t lose a second, my arms already open when he appeared at the top of the ladder, pulling at his mask with slow, stiff fingers, fumbling his flippers off.
The duration of his blueness grew from less than a minute to nearly two. As he heated and I cooled, our temperatures would meet for a moment in passing. It was never for long enough. By the time he was warm and hard I was no longer interested. I made amends in other ways. Once or twice, while we were getting dressed, he would get a wistful look and make some weak gesture toward normalcy, wanting to take me out to dinner, introduce me to his family. I would smile.
One night, as I watched through the glass, the diver’s wetsuit sprang a leak. When he scratched his thigh a seam gave way, letting icy water enter between rubber and flesh. His eyes widened and his mouth opened in a big O. I watched his face pale two shades, his lips cool to a bruised blue. Bubbles exploded in a thick cloud as the cold went home. I ran up the ladder, pulled off my clothes, and jumped in. When the bubbles cleared he saw me hanging there in front of him, blue from tip to toe, floating, slowly sinking. He hung there, too, staring at me, his airhose spiraling above him, then started tugging at his wetsuit. Soon we were skin to skin. He went paler; I went darker. A stream of fish parted around us and met on the other side. He passed me the mouthpiece. I took a big hit, then closed my eyes and dropped deep as my surface swelled all over. I was a jug of blood. I was flooded like the delta of the Nile in spring.
He looked down at me as I sank. Through the cold the diver’s heart thrust his blood up to those telltale junctures that so becomingly betray feeling in the normal body: the tender crossroads of capillaries beneath his arms, at the base of his throat, his inner wrists. His flesh was a map of warm islands rising from a pale sea. His rosy penis floated up and pulsed. He blushed and reached for me.
Even then, when we made love, the color of my skin was uniform, progressing click by click from cobalt to ultramarine to ink. The whites of my eyes began to turn.
I looked up at the diver. He went still. The big blue vein at his throat sank below his surface. Then he was just white.
In one soft burst my blood broke through.
* * *
I watched it once under a microscope: the streaming cells, pushing, trying to cut in line. My skin is so quiet now. My sheath of capillaries is a shriveled river bed. The blue runs only through the dark chambers of my heart.
