abandoned swimming pools

by Daniel Lukes

I’d seen Matt Schwarzenbach around a few times but hadn’t gotten to speak to him: at the mall, but mainly at the skatepark, with his crew. He’d been back from the field a few weeks and only when I got to see him up close could I tell that he was any different. 

He was drinking sprite and vodka and had kind of a dazed look, I guess we were all buzzed. He was recounting some long monologue about their latest mission, which involved capturing a downed dronebot, which had gone offline and contained some sensitive surveillance information: they were either to recapture the drone or destroy it.

“We were caught in a rainstorm, and had to retreat. We marched through the forest for hours, in the end we took shelter in this smashed out greenhouse. It was like a church full of overgrown plants, like a weird cathedral.”

The music was banging and I wasn’t paying much attention to Matt’s story: it was good to see him, but dude did he look old these days. Felt like an age since I had a thing for him, but that was all in the past. It was just a different world now: everything more urgent and on the cusp of falling apart.

“The whole mission I had this strange feeling, this compulsion, to snuff Thoose. Like, how do I get into a position where I’m able to take him out, and not like, get found out? Of course it’s impossible, but, my mind was wandering. Just, you know, intrusive thoughts. I had never forgiven him the stuff with Holly, and we were cool and everything, but still, it was eating away at me.” 

There was a bunch of hooting and hollering from the back. I didn’t even really know what this party was all about; it was Hoffman’s place, but Jack Pichinin’s crew seemed to be in charge. A bunch of frat boys. I only came because Leon told me that Matt might be there, and I was not disappointed to see that he was. The light was flickering on our faces; I really needed a smoke. I wanted to get Matt alone but I didn’t think it’d be likely. His friends were there, some guys from the unit. And he looked like he was still totally spaced out from the tour. Apparently it had been a bloodbath: they had suffered heavy casualties and had not recuperated the drone, nor destroyed it.

“Turns out I didn’t need to plot anything at all.” He paused, and looked at me. “Or if you look at it a different way, maybe my plotting manifested itself and came to life. I have often believed that there are demons who accompany us through life, listen to our thoughts and desires, and they make them come true: this is why you have to be extra careful what you think about. Sometimes you might wish for something, and there’s this entity which goes and carries out your wishes.”

“Dude that’s kind of creepy.”

Laughter.

Boom boom bass. Boom boom bass.

Getting drunker.

It was hot and I really needed to get out of there. More shouting from the back and a loud THUMP followed by a crash. I tried to look over the guys dancing in the front room to see what the fucking commotion was about, but through the fug of smoke and lights you just couldn’t see shit. I really needed to pee too, and a refill, but Matt was still deep into his story. The rain, the hill, the soft grey clouds circling the valley and the feeling of dread advancing through the forest. The enemies had a mech, knew exactly where our unit was, and were coralling them into a location where it’d easy peasy to take them out.

So Matt was stuck in there with his obsessions, still nursing a grudge after all those years. I had idolized him for ever: to me he was everything a “man” should be. He was strong and smart, he didn’t have a bruised ego, and was always kind and generous to me. Most men are not like that, at all. Most men are peevish and resentful, and you can feel their fragility palpitating like a mollusc inside their shell, with eyes poking out to see if you are a threat to them. But Matt was just—I mean he was never mean to me, which kind of made him unique to me, and special. I wanted to reach out and—

Matt and Holly were the classic hot couple. I could not compete. I kept my distance because it hurt so much to see them together, even though individually I loved them both. Anyway, college was different and we all fell away from each other in different ways, and Holly cheated on Matt with Thoose, and nothing was ever the same again. It was worse than just cheating, but I don’t know, you had to be there in that freshman life, to just realize how pathetic and miserable college life was for us all. The kitchen, illuminated by that flimsy neon light: the food. Kids trying to be adults for the first time and fucking up the simple basics: not being able to keep a kitchen or bathroom clean. Smeared menstrual blood on toilet stall walls, and bloody tampons strewn around. The repulsive energy between us that let the demons foster and grow. It must have been one drunken night, or maybe Holly was mad at Matt for walling himself off and shutting her out in the cold: she gave Thoose a “blumpkin,” which he’d been begging her about for ages. A blumpkin is a blowjob while the dude takes a shit. Extra points if you defecate and ejaculate at exactly the same time. Anyway, after that, everything went to complete fucking shit.

“It’s almost like all my resentment against him over the years coagulated into this bloody, pulpy human shape that rose from the ground. One minute we were sort of chilling in this wet, green sanctuary; the next, there were bullets flying everywhere. A mech stomping through the undergrowth, methodically taking out each of us. A shower of bullets swept in the from the north, and half the squadron was dead before the copter could come roaring over the hill. I saw Thoose’s head explode like a fistful of raspberries, and took out the mech so we could board the copter. I took a slug to the gut and passed out and woke up in Camp Lejeune with a six week furlough and here I am.”

He grinned weakly at me, but I really needed to pee, so I excused myself and went in search of the bathroom through the throbbing mist of bodies and sweat. I bumped into someone coming out of a door and caught a glimpse of bare-chested dudes all gathered in a room at the back: what the fuck were they doing back there? I giggled and found the restroom and fumbled for a piss: when did I get so loaded? I’d only been sipping on a JD and coke. When I came out the commotion had already started. There was a bunch of shouting and the door to the back room was wide open. Leon was holding Matt back and whispering at him to calm down. Jack Pichinin was red faced and shouting.

“She’s fuckin’ fine with it. Why don’t you just turn your ass around and get the fuck out of here. I said she’s fuckin’ FINE.”

I tried to look through the forest of naked dude torsos, and sure enough, there was a girl on the bed. She was black and looked wet, like someone had dumped a keg of beer on her. What the fuck were they doing in there? There was a lot of pushing and shoving and screaming and they pushed Matt out, and closed the door again, and people kind of went back to their dancing.

“What the fuck was that?”

“Are they like, raping a girl in the back?”

“He said it was consensual.”

I really needed a cigarette, and wanted to make sure Matt and Leon were OK after their inglorious exit. I started to push my way through across the room when the shouting started up again.

Bodies lurched into me, like a scrum had formed in the middle of the room. A low table jammed into my shin.

“Don’t fucking DO THAT!”

Shouts, smashing sounds, and that door being opened again. Light pouring onto Jack Pichinin’s face and chest. His smile in slow motion: a vicious, eager smile with porcine eyes, the light playing off his eyebrows and stubble, a little double chin belying the chiselled effect of the rest of his face. I had always hated him, found him and his crew insufferable, they always called me “fag” or “faggot” and I stayed out of their way, and kept my head down in the mall.

A blow sucked him backwards, and I was winded: a roaring sound like shouting underwater and wood splintering. Bullets pulsating like a throbbing slow motion heartbeat.

I remember the blood sprayed at weird angles on the walls and the girl standing there in a daze. She had her panties on but her tits were just hanging out, glistening, as she put her hand up to her head. Someone gave her a Caltech t-shirt which she put on.

Red and blue lights on the ambulance that took him away, although most people had left by the time the cops came by. The cypress smells past the haciendas on the way home, and I finally got my smoke in.

***

I saw Matt again about three weeks later. It was at one of the abandoned swimming pools that people skated in during that long summer. I thought he’d be on the run or something, so I was surprised to see him, but apparently nobody had ID’d him from the party which seemed super weird to me, but whatever. He told me he ran with a crew of cleaners who removed infected bodies from homes, so they knew which empty houses had pools where you could party after dark.

I had my own shit to deal with that summer and I was working at the mall, at Dippin’ Dots. I looked forward to seeing Matt from time to time at these gatherings. It would take me out of things. We’d share a smoke and he’d tell me the crazy shit that was going on with his life.

“I spent a weekend at this mansion upstate. A friend of a friend has this Russian connection, so I went up there to collect info. After dinner these girls were brought in, and you sort of get to choose… you know, so I hooked up with one of them, she’s from Latvia. All the time I’m doing inventory, checking out the place, trying to figure out when they come, when they go. She came down to the city to hang with out me, but had to go back by a certain hour, they keep tabs on where they are, what they do, they own them, keep their passports, everything.”

He was wearing a light green Dragon Ball t-shirt and we were sharing a half-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark. Crickets and the scratchy sound of the skateboards at the bottom of the pool provided the soundtrack, and the tiki torches cast flickering flames over our faces. I felt queasy imagining him with the Latvian girl, but then guilty because of course she wanted a way out. Matt had always seen me, I felt: he knew what he meant to me, and though he couldn’t requite, he knew me for what I was and never made me feel rejected like some people do when they are terrified by intensity of feeling and they need to run away from you. Or your weirdness and otherness just makes them sick somehow, and turn away.

He was in a gang that targeted human traffickers, and liberated their victims. It was highly dangerous work and I fretted he was going to get himself killed and I pondered whether there was any way I could get him out of it, and I hated myself for not being able to offer him something that would sway him from this suicidal path, but at the same time I knew that nothing I or anyone could do or say would drag him from what was his course, or destiny, whatever you want to call it. Some people are pitched headlong into oblivion and that’s that.

I saw Jack Pichinin at the mall. His head was shaved and it looked like they’d frankensteined him back together. After three weeks in intensive care, he pulled through: two bullets had gone clean through his head and come out the back. He was wearing military fatigues and, I don’t know, seemed a lot gentler. He came into Dippin Dots and spoke to me very calmly: I was trembling and didn’t take in much of what he said.

“Your friend Matt, I’m going to fuck him up.”

“OK. I’ll tell him.”

“You’ll tell him? What the fuck.”

“Er, OK, I won’t. Whatever you’d rather.”

His brother was some big shot, and I was sure he’d be after Matt’s ass. There was no way the story finished here. Jack was very fucked-up, he could probably kiss his law school dreams goodbye. I gave him a complimentary Dippin’ Dot which he took without comment. I watched him through the glass licking it and walking away and felt nothing.

Sometimes I saw Holly at the mall too: she came in with her two kids (from two different guys, neither of which was ever around). She looked tired and used up and to think she would give me butterflies when she walked through the school corridors, her books held close to her chest.

Everyone had retreated into the past, the world itself was matte and as though through a grey mist, but Matt still burned for me brightly.

Hearing his stories gave me sick thrill of the inevitability of future grief, but there was nothing I’d rather be doing than biking to these impromptu pool parties where the crisp of dry leaves was offset by the humidity of the cypress grove nights.

“We staked out the van: this is the one with the new arrivals, coming to the villa. Security is really lax, because they know no-one cares. No-one cares about these girls, they are cyphers, they don’t exist. Leon had requisitioned a minigun but I wanted to keep everything as low-key as possible. We blow out its wheels on the interstate, and take out the driver and the passenger with a long gun, but had no idea there’d be like twenty girls inside. Katya told me they usually came in shipments of 4 or 5. Anyway, we’re out on the shoulder trying to figure out what the fuck to do, when this white limo comes out of nowhere and starts blasting the shit out of us. Marco takes one to the chest and is done, but he’s wearing a vest so he’s fine. Leon turns on the minigun and fucking riddles the limo, which takes off like the blazes. Dax and Cynthia stay with the girls who are freaking out, with the other car, and Leon and I set off in hot pursuit of the limo which is high-speeding it into town. We’re all masked because I do not want those guys plastering my face everywhere.”

I took a swig of the Maker’s Mark and it burned my throat a bit, and I passed the bottle to Matt. He took it and passed me the joint. Since my mom died I’ve always been aware that any moment you spend with someone might be the last: you never know.   

“So we’re high-legging it down the highway blasting at this car and it’s taking beltload after beltload of lead and returning fire with an Uzi and AK-47, just crazy shit. Then we get into the suburbs and we’re bumping through the side-streets and I have no idea what the game plan is. Basically I don’t want these guys to get away, though who knows what deets they’ve already spilled on the phone. Anyway, we both crash, and Leon takes out the passenger with his bowie knife while I’m in hot pursuit of the passenger, this crew cut Russian guy I recognize from the mansion. We’re stumbling through the alleyways and of course he gets it into his head to climb over a fence, so we’re running, my heart is pounding in my chest like it’s literally going to explode. I’m taking pot shots at him with the glock and he’s returning fire, and this bullet goes right through my leg, but I’m all adrenaline, running on empty, and I barely feel a thing.

We run through this house and knock over a trolley full of food and he jumps right through a glass door, then we’re in an alley again, dogs barking. Suddenly there’s this big drop and he slips and his head goes right down on a chunk of concrete and it stoves his forehead in completely, and I’m just standing there, heaving my guts out, dogs barking like crazy. Of course I can’t leave the body there so I call Leon and we stuff him in the trunk.”

I reached for the bottle again and handed back the joint, which was down to its last embers.

“And the girls?”

“In a safe house, on the network.”

“I want to come on one of these runs with you guys,” I blurted. A truly dumb thing to say.

He looked at me without saying anything, and then ruffled my hair.

“I’m not a kid,” I said pulling away. He shrugged, and threw the empty bottle into the pool with a smash.

I know how things turned out, and I know that Leonard Cohen is right when he says that everybody knows the good guys lost.

In light of everything that came later, that’s how I choose to remember them. The night when they burnt the bodies in the pool. Another run, another set of traffickers. This time it was cartel, not Russians. They dumped the corpses in the middle of the pool—a beautiful curvy pool with no flat bottom, but scooped out of the Earth like pistachio ice cream—and set them aflame like a bonfire. The whoops that went up, there were firecrackers. It was such a party. A grand moment, when you could stop for a second and believe that justice was possible in this world.

In the morning when the clean-up crew came to remove them they looked like a modern art installation.

Photo of Daniel Lukes

BIO: Daniel Lukes has a PhD in Comparative Literature, and his most recent book is Black Metal Rainbows (PM Press, 2023). His short stories have been published by Litmora, Memezine, Moonpark Review, Expat Press, Misery Tourism, and Alien Buddha Press.