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'There is no such country as Kanada,' said the lady reporter.

'Yes there is,' he told her. 'Right across the lake.'

'You know what I mean. I mean no such country as Canada spelled with a K, like you just told me. Just Canada with a C.'

'Well maybe I'm looking for the other country,' he said cryptically, turning away.

'What do you mean?' She was laughing at him now.

'Never mind.'

She scribbled something down in her notebook. Nerves, she thought. He's a bundle of nerves, they all are. God, you'd think there were easier ways of killing yourself than this. He wants to find another country; most of the others just want to win this crazy marathon. Well I guess they all have their reasons for what they're doing.

In tents set up along the shore of the Niagara River twelve other swimmers were resting, waiting for midnight and the final weather report. There was still time for a few more interviews.

'Good luck!' she called after him. 'Hope I see you on the other side!'

At eleven-thirty good weather conditions were confirmed, and the beach began to reek with the smell of sheep as the swimmers were smeared with the lanolin which would cool the friction created when their pores would no longer be able to sweat.

He stood alone on the beach, having sent everyone - including his trainer - away to the dinghy waiting offshore. Ibrahim came up to him with some last minute words of encouragement. 'You stink to high heaven,' he said. 'And although I am an atheist I will pray for you. This is a difficult thing for me to do, but I will manage. Allah listens to me. Even though there is no Allah. You see what I mean.'

'Get lost, Syrian jackal.'

As he said this he saw the water behind Ibrahim's shoulder turn dark and luminous as a black pearl, and the lake was breathing, breathing.

'No, I mean - do that then. Pray for me, atheist.'

The minutes slid towards midnight, and black grease shone all over his body. Chemical lights of a lurid, phosphorescent green were attached to the swimmers' suits to make them visible to the dinghies accompanying them, from their first thrust into the lake until the rendezvous with the pilot boats. Then the lights would neutralize themselves and die out.

Suddenly everyone was gone, including his friend. Everybody was gone, it was five minutes to midnight, and he was standing there on the beach looking like a spaceman or the creature from the black lagoon - absolutely alone. Some of the other swimmers were making nervous jokes and running around in nervous little circles, but they were somewhere else, in some other incomprehensible dimension of reality, they weren't where he was.

Everybody was gone; they had gone to another planet, and taken his passport so he couldn't go with them. They had stolen his soul, and left him beached on this foreign shore. They had run away with his soul. On some planet in a distant galaxy they were wining and dining and laughing at him. Them and his soul. His soul was laughing at him, and being wildly entertained. His soul had cuckolded him, his soul was having a ball, his soul had left him in Hell.

A gun went off behind his left ear, and through a green haze the thirteen swimmers charged down the beach and into the waiting water, screams and applause pursuing them, the water a black pearly bosom gathering them in - the heroes, the lemmings, the fools of midnight.

It took a while for him to fully realize that what he had trained for during the past few months was now a reality - he was in the lake and the marathon was on. His trainer shouted to him from the dinghy and pointed his powerlight at the buoy ahead of them which marked their position. He could scarcely remember the first strokes that had swept him down the river and into the lake, and he had only been dimly aware of linking up with the pilot boat. But now full consciousness was his, and it was the consciousness of utter and horrible darkness. He had committed himself to a limbo shared only by a very few. During the long night some of the cruisers would use no lights, because they had a strobe effect on the swimmers as they lifted their heads out of the water to breathe several times a minute hour after hour.

But after a time it seemed to him that the darkness almost became its own kind of light. The lake was a pleasant twenty degrees, and he was doing sixty strokes a minute through flat water. The operator of the pilot boat communicated by radio with the three accompanying boats which carried life-guards, medical experts and supplies, and media people.

'I heard once that the lake is a lady, and she can turn on you when the sun rises,' Ibrahim told the captain of the cruiser. 'Especially after a really quiet night like this one. One of the swimmers said before they started that they had seen the lake like this before, and they didn't like it.'

'They're all a bunch of superstitious children,' said the man at the wheel.

'How can he stand it hour after hour,' Ibrahim murmured, leaning over the rail and scanning the black water, 'not being able to see us most of the time, seeing nothing, going on, going on ... ?'

'He knows what he's doing,' said the captain. 'Otherwise, why would he be doing it?'

Ibrahim turned and smiled. 'That is a more interesting question than you might think,' he said. 'He's my friend, but I do not know him. It's all for the folly, perhaps. The folly and the glory. Forever and ever amen,' he added grimly.

The night filled up with timid stars and the static of marine radios as the cruiser captains kept in touch with the dinghies and guided them on their proper course. The swimmer propelled himself through a blue-black world of weeds and fish and lamprey eels, through the ink and slime of the night. At intervals he stopped and treaded water and took time to sip Lucosade through a straw or swallow Dextrose tablets, or wonder if anyone except himself really cared what he was doing. He floated on his back for two minutes and considered the bland stars. And because they didn't care one way or the other, he turned and pulled forward with extra force, just to spite them.

He must not sleep; he must not sleep and dream- that was the great danger. Pick up strokes, thrust forward, think of advanced calculus or nuclear fission. Not too fast or you'll go into an oxygen high. Get this thing you call yourself together. Why have you come to this, why are you in this terrible dream: Don't ask this, or you'll fly apart. Thrust forward, thrust forward ...


Ibrahim was lakesick for the hundredth time since he had been aboard the cruiser. The captain's voice came from behind him as he puked pitifully over the rail.

'Guess what? Weather report. Thunderstorms coming up. Ain't that grand?'

This is it, Ibrahim thought. Now everybody's worst dream comes true.

The Tower and many other places along the lakefront had kept their lights on all night to help guide the boats Now in the first hour of the dawn they were turned off and the lake was once more the domain of the sun. The swimmer had been in the water for six hours, and now he couldn't believe it, but he was almost halfway home. During the night someone had jumped into the water and paced him for almost an hour, but his ghostly companion finally got out and left him once again alone. Now he realized that somehow he had passed through the terrible hour of the wolf, the hour before the dawn, and his mind and body were raging against the night's ordeal. As the darkness lifted he was subjected to bouts of cramps and nausea. He vomitted several times and kept swimming off in meaningless directions; his trainer had to shout him back on course over and over again. Then he started doing circles in the water, nothing but circles.

Now someone was waving a large square of flourescent orange material at him. Out of the corner of his eye he could see it fluttering in the wind. The wind from where? All night the lake had been calm, now suddenly there were waves all around him, teasing him, flirting with him. He knew that he would have to get away from that big ugly piece of orange cloth - it meant that they wanted him to come out, to give up. He stroked purposefully away from it. His trainer read his intention and started shouting at him.

'No!' he yelled back over the rising wind. 'I'm not coming out, I'm bloody not coming out!'

The silly orange square disappeared. The anger had drawn him away from his endless circles, and now he was back on course. They were letting him stay in - for how long? He lost all track of time and the morning fell into another dimension of time altogether.

Later the sky began to darken and once again the wind rose - a sickening wet green wind that whipped the waves up to more than three metres high. They were only six kilometres from shore; a short while earlier someone had held up a sign that read: 7.5. km; this was the signal for him to commence the final sprint that would take him to shore. This was the time to summon up the body's last resources, to bend the will beyond all its limits.

But he did not know who he was; he did not know his name. His name had drowned and had sunk to the bottom of the lake.

In a few minutes and waves rose to four metres and all hell broke loose. The wind shot up to twenty-five knots. Thunder and lightning tore the sky wide open and released a deluge of enormous hailstones.

'Bring him in, bring him in!' screamed Ibrahim. 'This is madness, you are all mad!' An hour before, he had joined the others in the dinghy; now as the storm reached its peak the lake sent up sheer walls of water between them and the swimmer.

'Shut up!' the trainer yelled. 'I can't even see him to bring him in! He's veered off course a hundred metres, he's lost all sight of us!'

'We're losing him!' Ibrahim cried into the wind. 'Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,' he moaned, hanging onto the edge of the dinghy for dear life as a wave caught them broadside. It threw him clear into the water where he thrashed around blindly and roared at God. Someone managed to pull him back in.

Back in the cruiser the captain was listening to the radio. 'One boat's just been swamped,' he heard. 'Others are way off course, heading for Scarboro Bluffs. One guy's radio is knocked out. Pray we hold together, just pray.'

'He's lost,' Ibrahim sobbed. 'The word is coming to an end in this terrible lake. I should never have come to this crazy country. Oh God, oh God.'

The first time he went down he was looking for his name. Somewhere at the bottom of the lake was his lost name, his drowned self. He sank into the awful world of water, only to discover that his body bobbed up again of its own accord. The second time he went down to explore the spaces between life and death, to find what lay there in the self, in that other country.

Take me to the absolute depths, he prayed, let me give over at last. Let me offer it all up to the black water - the lost loves, the broken dreams. I'm dragging it all down with me to the bottom of the lake; the past, the future, everything.

But his lungs betrayed him, forcing him to the surface with repeated bursts of fiendish energy. Could it be so incredibly difficult to die? Could it be that death didn't want him, and the lake wasn't interested in his offerings? What then? He was buffetted by mad waves and hailstones. Hailstones, for God's sake. In the middle of summer. What else?

Suddenly he began to laugh because it was all so goddamn funny. What a colossal irony - he couldn't die now when he tried, he who had 'died' so many times in the past. Was it a luxury to even consider death in the midst of life, an unearned luxury? No, it was more than this - it was an error. It was as he had always known. You couldn't die. Now he laughed and laughed, his whole being running on pure oxygen. He was higher than the lightning, higher than the Tower which materialized in the jagged light. He knew that he was immortal; he knew it with absolute certainty. He had always been here, and always would be.

It occurred to him that since he was alive he may as well do something about it. And following upon that thought was another - that as long as one was alive, one may as well do it right, period. It was as simple as that; it always had been.

He was off course, but it was not difficult to correct himself. The Tower beckoned him, and he would not be lost as long as he could see the Tower. He knew now that he was going to make the last few kilometres. He was filled with a wild certainty that he could do anything in the world, and that the world was his. He would not be beached like a dying whale, washed up on the shores of life like all the flotsam and jetsam and dead fish and discarded junk that lined the beaches everywhere. He was painfully, magnificently alive.

'There he is!' screamed Ibrahim during a moment of calm between the waves. 'We've got him, we've got him!'

The dinghy was soon alongside of the swimmer. 'He's doing eighty strokes a minute,' said the trainer. 'He's not human.'

His only acknowledgement of them was a wave.

'I don't even think he needs us,' said Ibrahim sadly.

And it didn't really matter to him what he needed or didn't need; he lived in a moment torn away from time and in a world lit by another sun. As he approached the breakwater and the buildings that looked like Byzantine pavilions and Medieval castles along the shore, he was entering the most exciting and mysterious country in the world, with his past behind him and his alternative futures lying in wait ahead.

The sunlight appeared at intervals, bright stripes of time arrested and held within the fluid, changing present. The sky became a naked blue. He remembered something he had once read about that colour. Blue was darkness made visible.

He entered the breakwater and began the last short stretch of his journey, along the shore from Ontario Place to the Exhibition grounds. Many people were crowded along the shore, laughing and whistling and clapping; some threw red and yellow flowers into the water, some took photographs, some just stared at him in frightened silence. They knew he had come from another place.

'When you touch the ramp, turn right around and come back to the dinghy,' his trainer had warned him. 'Don't let anybody near you; don't let anybody touch you. Your body is going to be a raw nerve.'

He forgot all about that when his fingers reached out and touched the land. He didn't know where his fingers ended and the land began. He was an explorer who had discovered a new country and he claimed it in the name of all that was wondrous and real. He stood up out of the water very slowly, and a great roar arose from the crowd and cameras clicked all around him. He stood half naked and wet and shivering, water falling from him like quicksilver.

Ibrahim and the others rushed ashore to isolate him from the more persistent reporters. Ibrahim, who was weeping, put a towel over his shoulders and he almost shrieked from the touch of it on his skin. It was nine minutes past one in the afternoon; he had made the swim in just over thirteen hours, and set a new record. Two hours later the Egyptian would come in, and later an American and a Mexican would take third and fourth place. The other swimmers had been beaten by the storm.

The police shooed most of the reporters away, and a medical team arrived to determine whether or not he was still alive. He knew that if he stood on his feet much longer he would probably faint. As they started to put him on a stretcher he caught sight of the woman reporter he had spoken to on the other side of the lake.

'Congratulations!' she cried, fighting her way toward him. 'You know, I thought you wanted to die out there.'

'What country is this?' he asked her as the darkness began to fold in around him.

'This is Canada,' she smiled. 'Spelled with a C.'

'Oh. Kanada.' he said. He pronounced it his way.

'What motivated you to attempt such a difficult feat?' she asked, her pen poised in the air. 'I mean, my question is really just a simply why?'

'It was the only way I knew to come home,' he said.

A policeman took hold of her arm and began to draw her away. 'Let me finish my story on you,' she begged. 'Did you find the other country?'

'Yes I did.'

'What was it like? Where is it?'

'Right here,' he answered. 'There is another country, you know, and it's inside this one.'

They moved him away on the stretcher.

'God,' he said. 'God, the world is beautiful.'

He smiled as the darkness claimed him.

Kali was waiting on the beach with the boy. They saw him emerge from the lake, his body covered with shining, watery scales. A week later they all watched as the fireworks at the end of the Exhibition wrote bright signatures across the sky. Then the particles of fire fell back into the lake like rain.

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