I wanted to go home, but I can’t walk backwards. I remembered how we were on the way out by Pigsfoot Spit. Emilie with knock-knees, and I with the birthmark on my right foot, which now found itself over a shower grate at Vesterbro Indoor Pool, distant in time and space, and it surprised me that my 123birthmark was still there, and still looked like the island of Anholt seen from the air.

When the Indian woman put on her suit, I put on mine. When she walked out of the showers, I walked behind her. The door she opened, onto a set of stairs, I opened too. It was white and wet in the staircase, and it smelled of algae and chlorine. I walked a few steps behind the Indian woman, whose heels were cracked. She opened the door to the pool and I followed. She went calmly over to the lip of the shrieking water-hell, giving her bathing cap an extra downward tug. Then she stepped over to the ladder and started to climb down. When her body was ninety-five percent submerged in chlorine, she let herself be swallowed up. First she was a shadow in the water; then she popped up in lane three.

I don’t like having my head underwater, so I walked over to lane four in the shallow end, eased myself gingerly into the pool, and swam out. I looked for feces in the water but didn’t see any. I glanced over at the pool toys and the noisy children. I caught sight of a hairy man who was standing in the shallow end of lane one. He had a snorkel on and dived underwater every time a woman swam past. I wanted to do ten laps, then I wanted to go home. I thought about rivers with distant sources. I thought of the carp at Kastellet, the light down there in the deeps. I thought of the water lilies, the geese, and the heavy organic chill. I wanted to block out the channel and tried to swim with my eyes closed, but when I did, I drifted over into the Indian woman’s lane.

On the seventh lap my hands hurt. Through the deep end of the pool, a beef-colored figure suddenly glided along the bottom. I missed a stroke, got water in my mouth. Tried to 124find my footing, but of course there was nothing beneath me. My head went under several times before I grabbed hold of one of the flexible lane markers. I used it to get myself over to the end of the lane, beneath a diving block. There my feet found a narrow ledge to stand upon. The figure was gliding along the bottom of the pool in the direction of the diving board. I stared until the surface of the water broke. First the top of a wet head. Then two small hard eyes with a wet mouth at the bottom.