The Swimmers

by Julie Otsuka

a few facts about your condition. It is not temporary. It is progressive, intractable and irreversible. Ultimately, like life itself, it is terminal. The medication will not stop it. Green tea infused with gotu kola and ginkgo biloba will not stop it. Prayer will not stop it. Qigong, “working the steps” and “living more purposefully” (too late for that) will not stop it. Having an unrealistically positive attitude will not stop it and may, in fact, even hasten your decline. There are no exceptions to these rules. Although you are a special person, yours is not a special case. There are eighty-seven other people at Belavista and more than fifty million worldwide who are similarly afflicted. — who gets it? you may be wondering (as well as, Is this a joke? Am I under arrest? And, Did somebody just take my car keys?). Wealthy Mexican drug lords get it. Wildcat Chinese miners in Brazil get it. Unusually good-looking Ivy League professors in the movies get it. Seven-time nominees for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in Leipzig, Germany, get it (Nobel Prize winners, however, do not, due to the salutary effects of the “winner’s boost” on their immune systems). Geriatric prisoners at San Quentin serving out their last years under the three-strikes-and-you’re-out drug laws get it. In a remote inbred fishing village on the northeast coast of Iceland, two out of three people above the age of fifty get it. In an even more remote village in the northern Andes consisting of several large ext...