Flat Water Tuesday by Ron Irwin Page B

with some of the locals. I had also gone into the cage with a digital camera in plastic waterproof housing and stayed there as long as I could each day. The Durban water was warmer than the water near Gans Baai, where everyone went to film the Great Whites—there was so much Great White footage among the filmers in South Africa that we all traded it like baseball cards. But the Zambezi sharks look nearly as fearsome—and the tens of thousands of sardines in the water made the sea look frenzied—especially as they ripped into the tiny silver fish that swarmed around them. Each night back at the hotel I’d go over the day’s footage with the divers. They’d be pumped up, fast forwarding to the sharks. They had named some of the bigger ones that looked suitably menacing on camera: Bugsy, Mugsy and Bart. Carolyn told me that it seemed incredible that a little over a week before I had been underwater in that carnage. It may have looked exciting but I had felt at peace in the cage, panning the area for Bugsy’s next appearance or Mugsy barreling out of the dark like a jet fighter and banking around me. For every one minute of shark footage I recovered, there must have been an hour of less interesting sardine footage. And eighty percent of the shark footage was unsellable because of the light or a camera jump or the ambient sound of the edge of the camera lens hitting the side of the metal cage. Carolyn’s major job was finding the minutes of wheat in the hours of chaff.
    The two of us ate in front of the computer, separating segments of the video into smaller chunks we could mix and match with the interviews and the scenery shots. By the time we were finished consuming the goodies from the SoHo House of Thai and Asian Cuisine I was bushed again. I managed to stay up until nine and then I took a shower and went to bed, fell into the dreamless slumber of a deep-sea animal.
    I woke up with a jolt about three hours later and for a heartbeat had the terrible feeling I was in a hotel. I lay on my side and looked at the heavy sliding door to the bathroom in the dark, letting my eyes adjust, hoping as I did I was really back home and not in the Heathrow Hilton or a windowless hotel room in Schiphol Airport or in a Holiday Inn in Botswana. When I made out the familiar outlines of the room and the dim line of light from under the shades, I swung to my feet. Carolyn wasn’t in bed. I heard somebody shout something ugly and drunken far down below on the street. I felt my heart writhing in my chest and walked out, barefoot, into the living area, then to the suite. Carolyn’s chair was empty; the plastic pods of food were abandoned. I called her name a few times. The shot where she had downed tools was a cutaway I had snagged on the last day of filming of a mother and baby at the beach, the mother holding the baby closely and protectively, the kid squinting into the sun, pointing out at the water, a blue beach hat flopping over her chubby face. It was a close-up shot.
    I felt my heart plunge inside me.
    I threw on my sweatshirt and jeans, found my leather jacket in the closet and pulled on my sneakers. I went out the kitchen door into the narrow service hall and took the concrete factory steps up to the heavy door leading out to the roof. I pushed the door hard and it groaned open. The night air was cool on my face. The old police station was lit up, displaying all the yuppie apartments with incongruous dormer windows and skylights poking through the chateaulike exterior. I walked around the roof, and finally found her sitting on one of the air-conditioning units, smoking a cigarette. She had a big scotch in an insulated plastic #1 Yankees Fan tumbler next to her, straight up, with ice, and was already halfway through it.
    “What are you doing up?” she asked. The minute she said it I figured she was working on drink number two or three. There’d be a bottle up here somewhere.
    “I’ve been looking for you.”
    “I’m taking a