Padraic is driving. The windows are cracked and salty air is streaming into the car, a low whistle that drowns out the radio. To his left, the ocean adds a bioluminescence to the night sky, catching the unbroken moonshine and throwing it back into the air. The craggy cliffside on the intercoastal highway’s right is stained an inky blue. In the passenger seat Ricky is trying to be a good co-captain, but he’s going droopy, his head sagging in the quiet darkness. In the backseat, Leonard is canted over, his head in Clai’s lap. He’s snoring, a light wispy noise that is covered up by the seethe of air coming in through the windows like breath sucked between teeth. Padraic looks at them in the rearview mirror and can see that Clai’s head is bobbing up and down, eyes fluttering open and shut. Padraic wonders what Clai dreams of. As the highway becomes a straight shot before them, he removes one hand from the wheel and sets it on Ricky’s kneecap.

Padraic can’t hear the whirlpools, but he knows they’re out there, hundreds, thousands of them, maybe millions, dotting the shore and the further-out water, slucking down algae and spray and sending sea life halfway around the globe. That is what the whirlpools do: rather than drown, they transport. The first woman dragged into one, carelessly floating at Myrtle Beach and ignoring the desperate screaming and whistle-blowing of a lifeguard, tumbled through the violent wet. Instead of drowning she found herself spat out on the shore of Marseilles, pulled to land by a pair of fishermen. She laughed, told them in broken French that the trek had been near orgasmic. Once she’d gathered her breath, she swam back into the Mediterranean to the same whirlpool that tossed her out onto the European shore. Another dive, another spinning bit of pleasure, and she found herself in South Carolina again, the desperate crowd that had gathered accompanied now by EMS and a fire truck. She insisted she was fine. The news interviewed her, and she ended up with a book deal.

The danger, of course, is choosing the wrong whirlpool. You might expect to wind up in Oahu or Tahiti or on a gorgeous strip of Phuket and instead could be belched out in the middle of the Indian Ocean or stuck in riptides in the Pacific, unable to dog-paddle back to your whirlpool without getting lost at sea. You might get plunked down in the strike zone of a tiger shark or maybe a herd of man-of-war jellyfish. They might end up coming to you, as happened in Miami, where the sudden flopping appearance of a great white only a football field’s distance from shore caused a riotous evacuation of the beach at Crandon Park.

Leonard, Clai, Ricky, and Padraic spent the morning traipsing through a whirlpool that dropped them on the shores of Montenegro, slipping them nine hours ahead in a finger-snap. They swirled through the water when the sky was still pre-dawn blue, bruised and blackened, and were spat out at Budva, the beach resorts teeming with people from around the world. Padraic volunteered to carry some cash—they’d exchanged their American dollars for euros before heading to the beach—and, after swimming to shore and getting his bearings, he peeled open the plastic bag he’d strapped into his swimsuit. They found a bar right on the water, where they ordered European beers and watched travelers from Norway and Argentina pop out of whirlpools along the coast. Fried Americans followed from their own belching waters, screeching with southern drawls. The quartet lazed on the sand, letting it cake their backs and chests and calves, taking asynchronous treks down into the water until the sun dipped away. Padraic watched Leonard build a teetering sand castle while Clai dug his feet into the sand and was eventually approached by a collarless dog that licked his palms. Padraic buried Ricky up to his throat, then unearthed him and, at Ricky’s beckoning, hopped onto his shoulders, his legs wrapped around Ricky’s serpentine obliques. Ricky dashed toward the ocean, grunting, and his legs gave out under Padraic’s weight when they hit waist-deep water, sending them both teetering in like galumphing children. They both laughed and Padraic kissed Ricky, tasting the char on his lips as they buoyed, covered in froth and saltwater up to their necks, the ocean lapping at their faces like a gigantic, wanting dog. Padraic would have treaded water and kissed Ricky for the rest of time.

*

Where was he when the first whirlpool came looming up out of the depths? A question people ask at meet-and-greets, in messages on dating apps, as ice-breakers on the first day of college. Like the JFK assassination or the mauling of the twin towers, it is a pinch-point, a piece of film stilled into everyone’s brain. All that water, dizzied and changed, transmogrifying the world with it, bringing the far close. Padraic was in his parents’ house, sitting on a couch, his mother and father opposite him. His mom served tea on a tray, the bone china cups steaming oolong. His father picked up a Pepperidge Farm Milano cookie and looked at it as though examining a bug under a microscope. He took a tiny nibble and then held it like he was clutching a new-born kitten. “Something’s happened,” his mother said. Padraic thought she was talking about the whirlpools, which he’d heard about on NPR. Not just one, but two, three, six, a dozen discovered in the Bay area at the same time they showed up near Cape Cod, off the coast of Sydney, in the South China Sea. The news was on his parents’ television, but his mother snapped it off. The screen hissed black. “It’s your dad,” she said, as though he wasn’t in the room. Padraic looked at his father, who wouldn’t meet his gaze. At that moment Padraic felt a sucking in his stomach, like the sofa might slurp him down, and he wished he was anywhere else in the entire world.

*

Padraic flicks the turn signal when he reaches the turn-in for their motel. Tomorrow they’ll fly back to Missouri, where the whirlpools are not. Lakes and rivers are immune, whatever tunneling system is dragging people back and forth across the globe absent in landlocked waters. They’ve needed this trip to California—and beyond—where the air is washed free of the heavy soak of midwestern humidity thanks to the saltwater breezing across west Los Angeles. Clai’s sister suffered a second-trimester miscarriage; she and her husband were awaiting their fourth child, a pleasant surprise after a seven-year hiatus. The Republican president was re-elected and promised to do all he could to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges. Leonard’s mother demanded a divorce from his father.

And Padraic’s dad died.

It was swift, a gut-punch. As his parents explained, a chronic stomach ache his father had mentioned to no one turned out to be a cavity-filling tumor grown, unchecked, to the size of a softball pressing against his intestines. It had leached its way into so much of his body that the oncologist could do nothing but prescribe palliative care. He was dead three weeks after the discovery, gone in such a quick sucking blast that it felt to Padraic like a flashbulb had gone off and his father’s life was still echoing in every corner of every room he stepped into.

The day after the funeral, where Ricky held his hand and gave Padraic’s metacarpals little pulses of pressure like Morse code, he wandered his parents’ house, staring at the photos he wished his mother would take down, smash, send through the garbage disposal. Every image of his father looked whirled and warped, his canine smile and the sink of his eyes distorted and horrible. Padraic stayed up too late that night, sitting in the living room and ignoring Ricky every time he tottered out and exhorted Padraic to come to bed. Instead Padraic stared at repeated news reports about the whirlpools, the cresting awareness of what they could do. He fell asleep to the mumble of the news coverage, the sound of the whooshing water echoing in his head.

*

Everyone stutters awake when Padraic cuts the engine. Clai makes a joke about the dot of drool Leonard has left on his shorts. Ricky stretches after he steps out of the car, tapping his hands on the tinny roof. The night air is warm, pungent with salt and the swishy noise of palm trees. Padraic thinks they should take advantage, slip across the street to a thumping outdoor bar, where voices are buzzy and the lights glow soft, but they are exhausted, sun-blistered. His entire body is coated with dots of sand and salt, his skin tight and dehydrated. Without a word they slink toward their rooms, Padraic and Ricky’s on the other side of the building from Clai and Leonard’s.

The motel is not fancy, a far cry from the boutique hotel where Ricky and Padraic spent a week in Barcelona, at the end of which Padraic proposed, when they were both bloated with paella and cerveza, his eyes squinting in the dim light of their room. Where that room smelled of camphor and fresh flowers, this one has a vague fish tank odor, like algae has sponged its way into the thinning carpet. The bedspread is scratchy, and the water pressure is miserably weak. But Padraic does not care.

They shower, sliding their sudsy hands over one another’s shoulders, Ricky’s fingers soothing and intoxicating when they poke into the tiny divots between the heads of Padraic’s deltoid muscles. There’s nothing sexy in it for them—they tried shower sex one time, with disastrous results: one twisted ankle, a bruised elbow, no orgasms—but there is something deeply satisfying in the simplicity of careful, smooth touch. When Padraic massages Ricky’s scalp, filling the bathroom with the beachy smell of off-brand Pert, he feels a paradisiacal sensation running through him. Water boings in Padraic’s ears, sliding around against his eardrum, reminding him of summers spent swimming laps in the public pool, solidifying the poor breaststroke form that his father tried to fix more than once but eventually let fall into its current hitchy, drunk-frog shape. Leonard, the day they met, raised an eyebrow but didn’t criticize how Padraic swam. That came much later, after many double-dates and bottles of wine and day trips to Lake Carmel in Terre du Lac. Ricky snorted and guffawed when Leonard, erstwhile college swimmer, explained everything that was wrong with Padraic’s form, who actually took the critique in stride and requested a few corrective lessons—for which he offered to pay in six-packs of nice beer—that they have not yet gotten around to.

The trip, in fact, sprung from Clai, who sneakily used his university account to book the room and flight, securing a discount that allowed them to travel on the cheap. He offered to send Padraic and Ricky by themselves, but they both said no, no-no, you will come, too, and so they did, the four of them stealing away for a single weekend that feels both stretched and contracted thanks to nine hours lost in either direction, their bodies shoved forward and then pulled back. Padraic feels like taffy, his body equally droopy and knotted.

Padraic brushes his teeth, and when he leaves the bathroom he finds that Ricky is already asleep. He ponders whether to wake him; Padraic knows how much Ricky likes fooling around in hotel rooms, even two-star venues like this one. Something about the glow of the television—they don’t keep one in their bedroom at home—and the unfamiliar mattress and pillows gives it a tingle of exhibitionism. But Ricky’s body is heavy, the rise and fall of his chest regular. Padraic curls himself around Ricky like the second apostrophe in a quotation mark. He inhales the residue of Budva on Ricky’s neck, feels some last drizzles of sand that have stowed away into the folds of the sheets. The beach feels a decade away even though it was only hours ago that they tumbled through time and space, bodies slip-sliding like they were zooming through a waterslide pushing them at hundreds of miles per hour for a few chaotic seconds.

Padraic sighs and closes his eyes, knows he could go anywhere, anywhere at all, and through whatever magic there is in the world, Ricky would bring him back.

*

The worst was his father’s study. He kept records of everything: taxes, health insurance, furniture purchases, receipts for tanks of gas. While his mother was busy deciding which of his father’s clothes she wanted to keep as haunting, ghastly relics and which she would send down the street to Goodwill, Padraic fed his father’s financial history into a shredder.

He asked his mother, “Do you not think you need any of this?”

“I don’t need to remember how much he made in gross income in 1992.”

“And you’re sure you won’t ever consider returning the living room sofa to the furniture store?”

She smiled sadly and waved her hands around the den as if to say, Burn it all.

He turned on a small television for a reprieve from the grinding gobble of the shredder. On a talk show, some pundit was arguing with a dilapidated hippy about the whirlpools.

“They’re Mother Nature’s way of telling us the borders we’ve constructed are meaningless. She’s fighting back.”

“You can’t possibly be asserting that our foreign policy should be dictated by the patterns of gravity, wind, and water.”

“I’m saying,” the hippy said, “that we’re not listening with the proper ears.”

Padraic changed the channel, though he smiled at the hippy’s words. As he continued rifling through his father’s papers, he ran his fingers over the loopy, messy handwriting that hopped and bowed across lined sheets and yellowing facsimiles, his father’s absurd signature looking like something made out of balloon animals. Padraic wondered what story was here, what ears he might need to put on if he ever wanted to hear his father again.

*

“It’s shitty about the whirlpools,” Ricky says between sips of beer.

“No kidding.” Padraic shakes his head. They’re with Leonard and Clai, crowded around a metal table at their favorite bier garden, where massive thirty-ounce mugs are cheap on Tuesday nights and the music, live, is soft and crooning and not disruptive to conversation. The sun is setting behind Ricky.

Five months have passed since their trip to Montenegro. Padraic’s mother has sold his childhood home. He helped her scrub the baseboards. Clai and Leonard and Ricky, despite Padraic’s objections, came over to help drag boxes out to a U-Haul that Padraic then drove to a condo, all cream walls and hardwood flooring, the back patio looking out on a frog pond that was so unnaturally blue he was sure the water had to have been dyed. Clai and Leonard stood on the balcony, taking a break from unloading, and said something about the water here being just like that on the beaches of Oahu, if not better because of its proximity. Padraic could hear the stretching attempts in their voice to offer something that he couldn’t let himself take.

Padraic spent an hour alone in his emptied childhood bedroom trying to remember something significant that had happened there, but his brain felt stoppered up, as if every bit of who he’d been as a boy, as a teenager, as a college graduate floundering in a crappy job market, had all been flushed down the drain.

Similarly, their trip has faded from his tactile memory: the cevapi charring on open-air grills, the doner kebabs, the laughing gaggle of children kicking up sand and dashing away from the lapping waves. They’ve all turned into burbles and blips. Padraic and Ricky have talked about another trek, but their schedules have not aligned with Leonard and Clai’s. And now, the whirlpools are about to become inaccessible.

Stories have assaulted the internet and news tickers: drug cartels and gun runners and illegal immigrants. Reports of terrorists sneaking across unguarded borders. The rumors and speculation came to a head when a trio of white supremacists rode a catamaran out to a whirlpool off the coast of Tybee Island, intending to spring an attack in Puducherry, India—for some inexplicable reason—but tumbled into the wrong whirlpool and found themselves in Castlerock instead. Though they didn’t pull a single trigger, caught off-guard by the temperature and the whiteness of the beach strollers, they did cause an international stir.

“The damn Russians,” Leonard says. “They didn’t help.”

A nuclear submarine popped up off the shore of San Francisco. International crisis, of course.

They drink their beers. Tomorrow, the president of the United States will make a declaration to the UN and NATO that entrance by any individual to US territory via one of the whirlpools will be viewed as an act of terrorism or espionage, take your pick. Squadrons of soldiers from the Army Reserve and National Guard have already been deployed to American beaches, where they will mix with sunbathers and vacationers, their semi-automatics and aviator sunglasses flashing against the waves and sun. Policies are moving through Congress to disallow swimming near the most suspicious of the whirlpools, those that will deliver foreigners to and from China and questionable nations in the Middle East.

“We must protect ourselves,” the president has said more than once, shaking her fist toward a camera.

They order another round, their beers delivered in one fell swoop by a tiny woman who sloshes the mugs onto their table, sudsy sprays catching their exposed ankles. They drink in silence for a while, each man remembering a little blip of memory from their trek: Padraic thinks of the weight of his hand on Ricky’s thigh as they chugged back to the hotel. He recalls a woman in a stunning white one-piece who sauntered past them and couldn’t take her eyes off Ricky, which Padraic took as a biblical sign of approval. He woke in the middle of that night from a fuzzy dream in which he was tugged through the wrong whirlpool and wound up in the icy waters of the Arctic, bumping up against narwhals and icebergs. He was torn from sleep by muffled laughter outside their motel room window. Rain had begun to drizzle down, and the neon lights of the bar across the street were blurry and aphrodisiacal. Ricky was turned toward him, one hand balled in a fist by his head, the other gripping Padraic’s wrist.

*

He accompanied his mother the day she closed on the sale of the house. Ricky went too, kissing Padraic’s mother on both cheeks as though they were all in Basel or Antwerp. The office building was tucked in a triangle of trees off the highway, hard to see, and Padraic ended up, twice, in the wrong industrial park. He and Ricky were twenty minutes late, and by the time they’d joined his mother she’d already scribbled her signature on the important pages.

“Not sure why I’d have waited,” she said. Padraic offered no complaint.

They ate lunch at her favorite chain, where burgers were the spotlight. Their hands shimmered with grease as they chewed their French fries and squirted ketchup onto wax paper that bloomed from the plastic baskets holding their food. He kept asking his mother how she felt, and she blinked at him several times before saying, “I’m not sure if I feel more free or more imprisoned.”

“Maybe you should take a trip,” Ricky said. He nodded toward one of the televisions mounted on the wall, which was switched to CNN instead of one of the million sports networks; a reporter, according to the slightly-scrambled closed-captioning, was talking about packages available online for whirlpool world tours. She turned and looked.

“Maybe I should. But where would I go? And what if I swallowed too much water?”

“Fair concerns,” Padraic said, knowing they weren’t. But he knew his mother had to say something to dodge the idea. She wouldn’t vanish across the world in a blink. Instead, she would plunk down in her condo like a stone, a sensation Padraic couldn’t help but understand.

*

The one thing that has carried into Padraic’s ears for the last five months has been the sound of the whirlpools dotting the highway. The swish of blood any time he stands too fast reminds him of the promise of travel through the earth’s mysterious waterways.

He takes a glug of his hefeweizen. The crowd has started to thin. Those still imbibing rattle with laughter and story, flirtation and desire. Christmas lights along the bier garden’s wrought fence give strangers’ bodies a modicum of illumination, like they’ve been touched by something ghostly, angelic. On the street, a car backfires, drawing attention, snap-turned heads. The sound echoes across buildings, but Padraic’s ears are elsewhere, hearing the swirl of his own blood, the remembered tumble as he caromed across the planet. He fishes under the table, his fingers seeking out Ricky’s. Their hands meet. Without the slightest sign or giveaway on his face, Ricky grips Padraic, pulling his arm just-so as he nestles their entangled knuckles on his lap. Clai is saying something about the unfairness of the world, hypothesizing that the coming restrictions on whirlpool travel are part of some corporate power move, but Padraic isn’t listening. He is looking at Ricky, feeling the hard cage of Ricky’s fingers around his own, his heart fluttering and then calming as he feels anchored, moored, kept in place.