If this is your first time entering The Threshold, start with The Preface.
Year: 2008
He didn’t feel any different. He was supposed to be instantly happy. Now and forever.
“Head up to the staging area. Don’t forget your warm ups.”
He had tears in his eyes. Something wasn’t right. He was no longer certain. He started running it back.
For years, two practices a day. He said it to himself like it was math.
Before the sun, again after. Winter air that seized his hair into needles of ice as he left the natatorium. One morning it was so cold his spit froze before it hit the ground. By dinner his ear throbbed, swimmer’s ear, pressure and heat, and he still went back.
He could see himself on the floor with his legs split wide, textbooks stacked against his knees to force another inch. An exam open in front of him, words blurring. He drifted away from the page and into the air above the carpet, hands tracing a dive in slow motion, pike, open, entry. Under his breath, the same line, again and again.
“Jacob needs nines on his reverse two and a half to win the Olympics,” he murmured.
He became his own announcer. He watched himself from inside his head.
“Let’s watch, can he do it?”
He’d finish with a hush like a prayer and a verdict he couldn’t stop rehearsing.
“He’s done it, folks. Jacob is the champion. The crowd is going wild.”
At home his friends would invite him to go out, just a movie, just an hour. He stayed in the backyard, trampoline bed biting the soles of his feet. They came anyway. They played follow the leader or break the egg. They got knocked out in round two and sat in the grass until they talked themselves empty. They left when they got bored. He kept jumping after the yard went quiet. Up, down, up, down, like the body could be trained into certainty.
He drew flip books at his desk, little bodies made of pencil marks, each page a fraction of motion. A physics teacher caught him mid-sketch, snatched the paper, and scolded him in front of the class. Jacob didn’t care. He drew it again. He drew it cleaner. He drew the entry until the splash disappeared.
Then the wins started coming. Senior year. Letters from colleges. He chose Indiana. Coach Cartel red-shirted him his sophomore year, and Jacob sat cross-legged on the ten meter platform on competition mornings, beads between his fingers, counting his breath like it was the only thing that stayed.
In his junior year, three NCAA titles, one on each board. Senior year and fifth year, five more. He could list them without thinking. He did list them. He needed the proof.
When he made it to the Olympic Trials his coach was certain he would qualify and win.
Then they did. Every step just as they had planned.
“You’re a champion kid,” Coach Cartel patted him on the shoulder and pushed him toward the podium. His hand was a weight on his back.
“A champion?” he whispered as he walked forward.
“We need the medalists to line up over here please. And the champion. Be ready for photos immediately after the ceremony,” a press corps member announced to the gathering athletes.
Champion, there was that word again.
He stepped up onto the podium just as he had rehearsed it. He shook the Russian delegate’s hand. Then he turned to the silver medalist from China and shook his hand.
“Congratulations.” He barely got it out. The word stuck.
Con–
grat–
ulations.
The anthem rose and the word stayed there. A headache grew behind his right eye. His vision narrowed and he leaned a bit. His hand shot out and grabbed the silver medalist’s shoulder. The diver looked back and helped him upright.
The roar of the crowd was deafening, it muffled in Jacob’s ears like he was still underwater. He looked into the crowd. His parents, Adam, none of them were there. $10K a family.
One somersault, water.
Two somersaults, water.
Three somersaults, water, kick.
Stay tight, rip.
No splash.
The cold podium under his feet gave him a chill that connected the pulse behind his eye to this memory.
A woman with streaked eyeliner swayed off-beat, whispering into a man’s ear. Two teenagers at the back held a sign with a typo: Chinea wins gold! They laughed as they nudged each other. A toddler in the front row stared vacantly at a crushed juice box, squeezing the last drops onto his shirt. Halfway up the bleachers, a man bit into a cloud of cotton candy like it was a turkey leg, blue strands clinging to his mustache.
The sweet smell of cotton candy mingled with faint chlorine hanging over the pool. The thick, metallic tang of the medal on his neck pressed into him, heavier than it should be.
He whispered, barely audible: “Did I really do this?”
In his pocket he squeezed the small rosary grandma had left him. He skipped her funeral to compete at nationals, and he felt it now the way he felt the humidity on the pool deck. Adam never let him forget his mother waited by the phone on her birthday and he never called.
The anthem’s last note echoed. The podium seemed to move with him. Not a wobble exactly, something subtler, like the surface wasn’t quite solid. For a moment, he imagined his foot sinking straight through.
He looked at his feet and clenched his fists at his sides. He pressed his toes into the floor the same way he would balance on the board.
“Jacob!” His coach’s voice cut through the noise.
“Smile for the cameras, champ!”
Jacob forced a grin. Tears blurred his sight as the flash went off. He blinked to push the spots away.
He took the medal off his neck. He slid the ribbon through his fingertips. He held the cold metal. He slid his fingers across the edge. It was grooved and ridged. A laurel wreath, raised across the front. His fingers recoiled off the face and he held it by the ribbon only. Other than the weight, it’s exactly the same. No difference. I could bite through this easier than cardboard. He stepped down toward the Chinese silver medalist and followed him off the podium.
“You deserve this, not me.” Jacob said to him.
“Thank you.”
“No, you deserve this medal, not me.”
“Thank you. Very much. It is an honor to have you in… our… country.”
“You don’t understand me?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Jacob shook his head. Then he shook the man’s hand and walked away.