Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 2 The World's Greatest Diver

Three months into my colicky infancy, my mother—and my father, too—might have been having second thoughts about the wisdom of that adoption. After the colic passed, I had colds, and ear infections that kept on giving, and diarrheas my mother had thought she’d left behind on the subcontinent. A fast-moving virus produced a faster-moving fever, and then a seizure, the one and only, that was over before my poor mother could think about calling for help.

Cat is admitted into Woman’s Cave in Kipling’s tale because he soothes Baby, putting his crying to an end and giving Woman some peace. Not in our house. Neither cat nor dog, nor TV show, nor music, nor my father’s warm hairiness, neither bottle nor binky, would satisfy or calm me. Until my seventh month, only my mother’s breast would do. By that time, the midsummer humidity and the daytime highs were both in the low nineties and everyone in the mid-Atlantics was on edge, hoping for a break in the weather.

While my mother slept, and while the TV was tuned to the summer Olympics in Los Angeles, my father watched as I crawled around on the floor, noisy and unhappy, a condition he had almost gotten used to. I was restless, always in motion, leaning on a wall for a moment, then unsatisfied, scrambling to another place, trying to sit up without the wall, falling over, crying on impact, moving some more. Applause and national anthems occasionally held my attention, but that was fleeting. As for the events on-screen, I might look at the swimmers or the runners, and then look away. The pole-vaulters seemed to get me, my father said. He noticed me gazing at them, quieter than I had ever been, and then I was back to my usual disconsolate self, until something happened.

The something was Greg Louganis. My father noticed it when, in the tower prelims, Louganis—the greatest diver of his era—dropped from ten metres and made a hole in the water through which he slipped without a splash. I sat up by myself. No wall. I squealed with joy. I smiled, sat still, and never looked back. My mother, when she woke, hardly recognized her cheerful child.

My father made tapes of the tower and the springboard, the men’s and the women’s, the prelims, and then the semis and the head-bonking finals. For years I watched and re-watched Wendy Wyland, Sylvie Bernier, and the others with the kind of dedication that only a child can give, absorbing details of Louganis’s Buddha-like calm or Michelle Mitchell’s steely nerves that must have stood me in good stead later. The VHS cassettes were augmented by videos from dual meets and national championships, and then the next Olympics in Seoul.

My happiest early memories are of standing at the top of the stairs in a tiny bathing suit and goggles when my father walked through the front door after work. With my toes curled over the edge of a step and my head tucked between arms pointed straight overhead, he hoisted me up, flipped me halfway around, and carried me head first to the ground floor, all the time repeating variations on, “Point your toes, Lakshmileh,” or “Stretch it out, little one.” Then, another flip onto my feet, and his applause, and my mother’s if she was home. I would take a bow, and with much ceremony my father would put an old math Olympiad medal around my neck. Joy, Dear Reader. Joy, unalloyed. There was something about the leap, the power, and the grace of diving, the beautiful bodies, the wetness, the intensity of it. Divers are comfortable with themselves. I may have admired them for that from the start.

Before I could swim I was tumbling, and when I could swim I began diving with the Retrievers, a club named after the mascot of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I kept at it all the way through my freshman year in college.