on into the open space. Chlorine bites my eyes. Weight machines clack. Members pound their workout. Several feet away, a surfer lies on his board in Sisyphus, the small, constant-current saltwater pool that allows a person to swim, or in this case, paddle endlessly in place. Pete “Bomb” Bullwinkle, my trainer and former big-wave surf god, is there beside the pool, staring at me with a totally serious look. No, hello.
“Bad news,” he says.
“What?”
“Come.” He waves me up the stairs to his loft office. I drop my stuff and follow him.
Bomb doesn’t ride big anymore. He’s in his midfifties, with salt-and-pepper hair cropped marine-grunt tight. His body is still trim and the picture of health, but his face has the red, telltale bloom of solar keratosis, or the pre-cancer surfers get after spending most of their free time in the water and under the hard sun.
“Have you checked your biometrics today?”
“Yeah, why? Should I be concerned?”
I’m guessing all the way up the stairs. We get to his office, which looks out across the Mission Beach boardwalk to the rolling Pacific. On his wall are two full-color posters of my main Olympics competition: Tokyo silver medalist, Brazilian Ipanema girl, Yara Silva, and gold winner, Kimberly Masters, an Aussie and my supreme rival. Yara is pictured ripping a wave on her short board, a white spray off its tail, her arms flung wide. Kim is crouched low on her board, popped three feet above the wave, getting some serious air.
I want to beat them both because (a) they’re stupid beautiful with tragically hot bodies, and (b) they’re stupid beautiful with tragically hot bodies. Bomb had some fun circling each of them with a thick black marker to create a sort of shooting-range target. The thing about Kim is that she’s a nine-time world titleholder, and mathematically this far into season she’ll be tough to defeat for the world title. But in the Olympics, qualifying is a clean slate. I’ve been thrashing Kim lately, and I can tell she feels it. Bomb says that the judges gifted her the medal, that she’s overrated, and that I have every chance to one-up her for gold, but there’s something confidence shaking as he walks over to his desk, picks up his ultrapad, and hands it to me. I take one look at the e-mail and meet his eyes.
“Are you fricking kidding me?”
“No,” he says. “I wish I were.”
5
Thursday, 4:37 a.m.
My mission-style La Jolla guesthouse rental ticks and creaks in the predawn light like an old man complaining of ailments. The shutters are closed to the spinning world, and the only light inside is from my phone, hard on my eyes as I swipe through rumors on social. I’m wigged out by yesterday’s news, wide awake, sitting up in bed, because get this: the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) wants to open an investigation on me and Bomb on behalf of the U.S. Olympic Committee. My agent-slash-lawyer says we have ten days to respond.
Did I even get an hour of sleep? The biometrics don’t lie. Digital readout:
0h 37m Deep sleep
2h 14m Light sleep
The remainder indicates waking every hour on the hour, and it shows on my mobile in a jagged orange-and-blue bar graph.
It’s been three months since I disconnected from social, joined the multitudes suffering from Facebook and YouMee fatigue, and dropped off—until now. Rumors of that big, fat doping lie started coming to me in person over the past few weeks through friends in the surf community. I thought it was a sick prank at first, but something in my gut said people were beginning to believe the allegation. I’ve never done drugs—OK, once: R71, a sex intoxicant that gave me a headache and cramps—but I’ve got a pretty good idea of who started the malicious lie and birthed it into the 24/7 spin cycle.
I spill out of bed, phone in hand, and stub my toe on the vacuum bot on my way to the bathroom. Lights on. Pee. Mirror. Is that my hair? I mean, really? It’s a hot-wired mess. Between the salt water, the hard sun, and the country’s freshwater shortage—everyone’s on mandatory, eco-fascist short showers—my hair goes psycho because I don’t have enough time to let the conditioner soak in to get it shampoo-commercial silky. What’s worse is that the stress from the doping allegation has turned my face into a pimple pizza—which is just dandy, since I have to be at a girlfriend’s rehearsal dinner at seven. Then, come tomorrow, I’ll be a bridesmaid, too.
I run my fingers through knotted clumps of hair and braid them into a ponytail. Daddy says I look like an old-world Irish lass with washy emerald eyes like the color of the South China Sea, though at the moment they’re seriously bloodshot. The truth is—and I’m comfortable saying it—that with freckles, the squarish jaw I inherited from him, none of the olive beauty of my mother, and the wide, manly shoulders that are the trademark of every pro surfer, I’d put myself at a definite five. My elbows, on the other hand? A perfect ten.
In the kitchen, I munch granola yogurt and rehang the dog-eared Mercator projection world map that fell off the wall in yesterday’s 3.2 temblor. I’ve turned it into a crafty art piece by charting all the places I’ve lived or been. Each city, sea, and landmark on the pressboard is dotted with red pushpins, linked by colored yarn, and strung with the tiny origami cranes I made. The birds give the map a migration pattern effect that crisscrosses four continents and three oceans. I’ve been to Tokyo, Guam, Bahrain, Hawaii, Newport, Pensacola, Italy . . . In an era of Google Maps, YouMee time lines, and digital everything, the tactile nature of this map makes my own unique statement of where I’ve been but never chosen to be.
I pull on aqua sharkskin leggings and an iridescent-white nanofiber rash guard—thank you, Nike—then check my phone. Surfline’s 8K surf cam shows Trestles kicking up tiny but perfect A-frames.
Bomb rolls up in his Toyota FE electric SUV at 5:45 a.m. and pings me. I’m thankful he volunteered to drive because it’s like flushing the toilet every time I step on the Charger’s gas, and the trip north would definitely suck up, like, a quarter tank. Besides, the nasty stares I get from alternative-energy vehicle owners over my carbon footprint are becoming seriously old. Even though Bomb has an electric vehicle, he doesn’t hassle me; in fact, he offered me thirty-seven thousand dollars for the Charger, which I politely declined. He says classic muscle goes unappreciated these days, and I have to agree.
I lock up and head outside, my board under my arm and my backpack slung across my shoulder, eyes scanning the backyard. Today is gray and sad under the morning marine haze, but it’ll brighten up big here in North County when the afternoon sun burns through. Overhead, a UPS delivery drone whizzes by. I step onto the stone path and pass the koi pond, centered between my rental and the main residence, catching myself and returning with a bag of Katami’s Koi Premium.
Feeding the fish is one of my duties as a tenant of the married gay doctors who own the property and are vacationing in Borneo for the next three months. The koi recognize me, and I wonder as they stare up through the shimmer if these Japanese symbols of love and friendship picture me somehow as a benevolent koi goddess who blesses them with their daily meal.
I crouch and they gather at my feet, forming a fan that’s alive with fluttering fins and bright, spattered tones. I hold the bag by its heel and gently sprinkle krill and soybean pellets into the water. Their mouths break the surface, hinging and snapping in big wide Os as they gulp the food. I love these fish: their beauty, the swatches of orange and black-and-white abstract color when they’re together feeding. But I know that in a generation or two, if they’re released back into the wild, they’ll regress into common carp and lose their vivid markings, becoming grayish-brown and plain again—a notion that’s not lost on me when I recall my father on those nights when he stepped out to the Navy Ball with Mom in the dazzling nobility of his decorated dress whites, which have now been replaced by an everyday American civilian wardrobe of T-shirts and jeans.
I meet Bomb out front at the truck’s passenger window. He’s sleepy-eyed, sipping a latte. Today’s wardrobe pick: flowered board shorts and a blue Hurley windbreaker.
“Yo, big man,” I say.