“Remember the bathtub from earlier,” Vivian said. 

 

“I am remembering the bathtub from earlier,” I said. “It’s not helping.” 

 

“Okay, then close your eyes.”

 

“I don't think I can.”

​

Over at the far end of the pool, a group of little kids were doing backflips from the diving board, and their carefree aura was actually starting to feel aggressive.

​

We were at the Nine Islands Fitness Club, at the shallow end of the indoor pool. I’d been promising Vivian for months that I’d let her help me get over my fear of submersion, and she’d finally cornered me on an afternoon where she knew I didn’t have anything else to do.  

 

“What did I tell you in the bath?”

 

“You said to always check my gauges.”

 

“And why did I say to do that?”

​

I recited the thing she'd told me back at her bathtub, earlier that week:

 

“Because ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the reaction to a problem is more dangerous than the problem itself.” 

 

“Bingo,” Vivian said. “Panic is the deadliest goblin. So, how much oxygen do you have?”

 

I looked up at the fluorescent tubelights and took a deep breath. The pool room was constructed out of frosted windows all the way up to the ceiling, like a glass yurt over a sprawling tile floor. All of the disparate sounds folded together around me, into a clammy wash of echoes and squeaks. The air smelled like chlorine and pool supplies. 

 

“Infinite,” I said.

 

“Good. And what’s your current depth?”

 

I’d been stuck at the first stair step for twenty minutes. 

 

“Roughly four inches,” I said.

 

“And what’s your current objective?”

 

“To be waist deep.”

 

“No,” she said. Then she held her hand flat over the surface and magically pulled a small orb of water into the air, hovering it above her palm like a little planet. “That's your greater objective. Your current objective is only the very next thing.”

 

“Right,” I said. “My current goal is to take another step. The next stair step.”

 

She waded back and released the water orb from her control, allowing it to drain between her fingers. 

 

“And what’s blocking you from it?” she said.

 

“It’s… hard to put into words.”

 

“Try to,” she said. “Stare at what it is, in that way children get scolded for. Close enough to count the freckles on its face.”

 

There was a smattering of coins at the bottom of the pool, all quarters, warping oblong in the ripples.

 

“It’s like something down there knows me better than I know myself. And, um—also like when I come up, the world will be gone.”

 

Suddenly, and truly out of nowhere, an old man swam into the space between me and Vivian, chest propped up on a life preserver. He looked exactly like Sigmund Freud, save for his pink lucky-cat swimming trunks.

 

“Maladaptive avoidance behavior,” he declared, pointing at me. “Textbook case. Embarrassingly unoriginal. Almost certainly resulting from an early conditioning event. Probably nothing to even do with water, if I had to guess.” 

 

Vivian looked triggered, like a mother bear. Like she might steal the old man’s floating device just to watch him drown. 

 

“Who the fuck are you?” she said.

 

“Oh, me?” the man said, exuding smugness like onion vapor. “I am the famed Eastern European clinical psychiatrist, Dmitri Anatolia. And I’m not wrong. The hour is later than you think.”

 

“The hour?” I said, checking my watch. 

 

“Well, insomuch as hours are a thing,” he said. “Which, really, they aren’t. Not here, anyway."

 

I knew it.

 

“Are you saying I’m dreaming? That this is a dream?”

 

“Maybe,” Dmitri Anatolia grinned. “Maybe the lesson went so well today that, after nearly two decades spent in the grips of a crippling phobia, you finally found your confidence. Maybe Vivian here actually convinced you to dive in, and you’re currently underwater, flat at the bottom of the pool, like these random coins.

​

"And maybe now that you’re there, you’re discovering you were right all along, and that maybe I’m the thing in the void that knows you better than you know yourself. The hidden meaning in all the things you say to people. The only part of you that was here before you were born.

 

"And when you go back up, you know the world will be gone. No more precious little phones, or precious little buildings and roads. And no more precious little girlfriend.”

 

He winked at Vivian.

 

“Though, she’d’ve probably vanished either way.”

 

“Bullshit,” Vivian said. “I’m gonna kick your ass.”  

 

“Vivian, wait,” I said. “I think he’s on to something, here. Just a minute ago, you were lifting water into the air with the power of your mind alone. I don’t think it’s actually possible for people to do that.”

 

Vivian thought back and nodded in agreement.  

 

Then without warning, Dmitri Anatolia’s nose began to crumple. It made a creaking sound, flattening and then inverting, tunneling a hole through the center of his face. He lifted one arm straight over his head and twisted it round, two full rotations, and then three, snapping his own bones and wringing his ligaments.

​

A cyclone appeared at the middle of the pool, and the water shifted at my ankles. Within moments, the entire thing was a massive, spinning vortex. The little kids were pulled in like bugs circling a drain, and Vivian gripped the edge of the floor, bending her fingernails into the hard tile. 

 

Fear overcame me. My conscious mind constricted, cutting the previously unified world into separate, disparate objects, and then pinging between them like a pinball. Dmitri laughed.

 

“Aren’t you going to try to help the little kids?” he said. 

 

Now that I got a good look at them, I saw that all of the little kids were little kid versions of Vivian and me, all between seven and twelve years old, and each with a different hairdo. One bowl cut, one spikey, a few different lengths of mullets. All at once, they started calling me mister and begging for me to save them. I turned away, back to Dmitri Anatolia. He stood firm in the rushing torrent, as if affixed to the floor. His original limbs were still contorting, and new ones were growing out from the sides of his bare torso, braiding like those lucky bamboo arrangements they sold at the mall.

 

“You already know I can’t,” I said. “Like you said, you know me better than I know myself.” 

​

“So get out of the pool, then,” Dmitri Anatolia said, vining his arm round his neck. “Do what you always do.”

 

One after another, live mice poured out from the hole where his nose used to be, dropping down to the water, squeaking and struggling to swim with their little mouse paws. I felt the overwhelming urge to run away. To leave Nine Islands forever, to sell all of my things, and buy all new clothes, and change my name. 

 

“No!” Vivian shouted, as if she'd heard my thoughts. “This guy doesn’t know you at all. He’s just a pretentious asshole. And probably the manifestation of repressed trauma or something like that.”

 

She pushed off from the wall and started trudging upstream, toward me. 

 

“Look,” she said. “Ignore the mice, because honestly, they don't even make sense. And you don’t need to save any stupid kids, because they’re not even real in the first place. Literally nothing is different from before. I’m still me. You’re still you. And if you’re already under, then you’re already under. It’s already over with.”

 

When she reached me, she rose up out of the water, glistening in her swimsuit, drops raining like diamonds from her toes. She hovered up until we were nose to nose, kissed me with tongue, and asked a question:

 

“What’s the deadliest goblin?”

 

Our eyes were locked. Hers were brownish gold, and she had a little bump on one iris, which she'd said was caused by the sun. The image was too detailed for my mind to have conjured all on its own. Somehow, even in a world of my mental construction, she was really her.

 

“Oxygen, infinite,” I said. “Depth, four inches. Objective, the next stair step.”

 

“And?” Vivian said. 

 

“And if I’m already under, then I’m already under,” I said. “It’s not so much that there’s nothing to stop me. More that there’s nothing to even be stopped.”