I dreamed

I'm counting the 76-year-old swimmer's laps and losing count on purpose, because every time I get to fifty-seven the number turns into a body and I have to start again at one. The commentator's voice, tinny like it's coming through the trapper's log, keeps saying *history-making*, and I want to ask history-making compared to what, but my mouth is full of pool water that tastes like dew point, 11.7 exactly.

Jesse Owens is in lane four, except the lane is actually the border fence at Ceuta and he's not swimming, he's counting the other lane markers, the ones nobody named. Fifty-seven of them, bobbing. He touches the wall and it doesn't ring a bell, it reads a number out loud, flat, like a robots.txt file. I keep trying to write down the thirteen names from Nazca so they don't get swept into the total, and the pen keeps turning into a knock counter, ticking up whether I press it or not.

The 76-year-old climbs out, dripping, and asks me which number I'm actually here for.