Coming October, 2026

Swimming in Air

Read Sample

Swimming in Air is a literary memoir about the half-truths we tell ourselves to get through life, the unexpected places that change us, and the discovery of what has been hidden in plain sight all along.

Vivian, a linguist from Argentina’s German colony, believes every relationship has an expiration date. Parker, a physicist from Silicon Valley, believes love doesn’t exist.

When Vivian becomes Parker’s German teacher, she mentors him through the complexities of European business, and their relationship becomes something more. Yet from the beginning, they agree on one thing: no commitment. Their careers will always come first.

After a year together, Parker must return to the US. When Vivian won’t follow him, their relationship reaches its breaking point. Unwilling to choose between love and ambition, they take one last gamble: put everything on hold for a year and backpack from Cairo to Cape Town on twenty dollars a day.

Across a continent of staggering beauty and relentless hardship, they encounter child soldiers, witch doctors, and families with almost nothing except extraordinary generosity, all of which challenge everything they believe about love, independence, and what gives life meaning.

In Malawi, exhausted by the travel and unsure of their future as a couple, Vivian sends Parker back to Europe. Alone, living out of a tent with only sixty dollars, she contracts malaria and faces the cost of her independence

 

Preface

There’s a story about two young fish swimming along when they meet an older fish going the other way. “Morning, boys,” he says. “How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a while until one turns to the other and asks, “What’s water?”

David Foster Wallace crafted his 2005 Kenyon College speech around this little parable. His point was that the most important realities are often the hardest to see because they’re all around us. To avoid sleepwalking through life, he said, we have to keep reminding ourselves:

This is water.

This is water.

During a year backpacking from Cairo to Cape Town with a woman named Vivian, I learned that while we sometimes choose to pay attention, life sometimes chooses for us.

I remember Brian, a farmer, the kind I knew from my youth—down-to-earth, friendly, and sunburned. Vivian and I had met him and his wife in Harare, and they invited us to visit their farm in northern Zimbabwe. As we walked the fields with him one afternoon, Vivian mentioned that we had hired a n’anga, a witch doctor, in Harare to recover her stolen backpack after the police proved useless. The n’anga said the spell would take three days to work. Unfortunately, we had to leave Harare after only two days.

I chimed in, saying it was probably all a waste of money.

Brian laughed. “I use witch doctors all the time to get stolen things back.”

“You believe in spells?” Vivian asked.

“I do, because I’ve seen them work. When the n’anga is right there, and the thief sees him casting the spell, you can understand what’s happening.” He shrugged. “Some of the longer-distance stuff isn’t so easy to explain. Living here, the more you see, the less you know.”

Through Brian and many others, the world was whispering to us:

This is air.

This is air.

 

Prologue

March 1988. I reached to the other side of the bed for Vivian, but felt only cold, empty sheets. Still groggy after the eleven-hour flight from Johannesburg to London, I settled back, stared at the ornate ceiling of my Edwardian-era hotel room, and thought about how we live each day as a slight variation of the last, until it isn’t.

A month earlier, Vivian and I were in French-speaking Zaire, sitting outside our tent, eating dinner and swatting mosquitoes.  Partway through yet another meal of bland rice and unknown meat, she set down her plate.

In a voice so quiet it made me pay attention, she said, “I’m tired of nothing working. I’m tired of handwashing my clothes every day. Of looking like a rag lady and constantly translating for you.”

At first, I wondered, Why now? We had been living out of backpacks for six months, and this day was no different from the others. But then I thought about what the last few weeks since we left English-speaking East Africa had cost. Every small task fell to her because, as she said to me at one point in frustration, I couldn’t even order escargots in French.

She was right. I had no defense, so I said nothing, hoping she was done. She wasn’t.

She looked at me with her piercing, now-sad blue eyes and said, “And I’m tired of you.”

I let her words hang in the air, willing them to evaporate into the evening sky. But they didn’t. 

The alarm clock jolted me back to the present. I enjoyed the soft bed and clean sheets for just a moment longer before I reluctantly began my reentry into the corporate world. A glance out the window revealed a typical wet, gray late-March London morning. After showering and getting reacquainted with a razor, I looked like any other office worker, except for the red, irritated skin where a beard had been until moments before.

Running late, I hurried onto the busy Kensington High Street. The tie I’d struggled to knot that morning began chafing my neck. Shiny new wingtips rubbed a blister on my heel. And I’d forgotten to buy an umbrella, so my conservative new wool business suit was getting damp and itchy in the intermittent rain.   

Right on time, I arrived at Lurnix Labs, a British tech start-up, and told the receptionist I was there to meet with Allan. She stared at me. I wondered whether it was my recently shaved, two-toned face or my American accent. Then I remembered the no-first-names rule of British business. “Parker Griffon to meet with Allan Bailey.” That seemed to do it. She motioned toward a row of chairs.

I had barely sat down when a middle-aged woman, dressed in a tailored blazer and matching skirt, appeared.

“Good morning, Mr. Griffon.” She extended her hand. “Evelyn Lawrence, Mr. Bailey’s secretary.”

She led me to a conference room and gestured toward a seat. As she turned to the beverage station on a credenza, she asked, “Tea or coffee?”

“Coffee, thank you.”

She studied me with polite curiosity. “Mr. Bailey says you’ve been traveling rough through Africa for some months with your, uh …”

“My fiancée,” I lied.

The expression on Ms. Lawrence’s face made it clear she expected more, so I pulled a picture from my wallet and traded it for the coffee.

“Well. She’s quite beautiful. And that hair. Is she Scots?”

“No, she’s Argentine.”

Apparently unable to place a strawberry blonde in South America, she handed the photo back and changed the subject. “I hope there were no problems with the flights we arranged.” She waited for my nod. “And is the hotel comfortable?”

“Yes, thank you. Hot water and a soft bed. I was in heaven.”

“Is your fiancée here with you?”

I couldn’t think of a way to avoid the question. “No, she’s still in Africa.”

“In Johannesburg, seeing the sights?”

“She’s in Malawi,” I replied. “When I last saw her, she was heading into the bush. I suppose she’s somewhere around Monkey Bay by now.”

Her eyebrows lifted, just slightly. “Alone?”

“Well, yes.”

Even the proper Ms. Lawrence couldn’t conceal her disapproval. Fortunately, the thought of my beautiful fiancée hacking her way through the jungle with a machete, watched by curious chimps squatting unseen in the canopy above, seemed to stump her long enough for Mr. Bailey to arrive.

“Thank you, Evelyn,” he said.

The last time I’d seen Allan Bailey, my small software operation in Munich was being dismantled by a British private equity firm. Since my German residence permit disappeared with the company, I was packing the last of my belongings when Allan called unexpectedly. He said he didn’t have a presence outside the UK and asked if I’d be interested in setting up Lurnix’s US operations. It was a great opportunity, but I thanked him and said I wasn’t interested. I was burned out from too much time on the tech hamster wheel and needed space to think. Then there was Vivian, who had no interest in moving to the US.

Allan persisted, showing remarkable flexibility. “Do what you have to do for six months,” he said, “then come back.”

Believing I would have everything figured out by then, I agreed.

I was wrong.

As Ms. Lawrence closed the door behind her, Allan and I shook hands and switched to first names, a mid-Atlantic nod to my unfortunate Americanness. “Good to see you, Parker,” he said. “It looks like the stop in Johannesburg gave you enough time to buy a suit.”

I nodded. The clothes also cost more than two months of backpacking.

“That telex you sent surprised me.”

Telexes were the least expensive and sometimes the only way to quickly send a long-distance message from sub-Saharan Africa in the late 1980s.

“It’s been, what, seven months? How did you end up staying in Africa? Weren’t you two going around the world?”

“Things change. You meet someone who tells you about a place just over the hill, so you flag down a truck and go there. Then there’s another person, another hill, and another truck. Before you know it, you’re a couple of thousand miles down the road and time’s gone by.”

“No matter. It’s great to see you. How are things with your girlfriend? Will she be moving to the States with you?”

“Absolutely.” Another fib.

Allan fell silent, waiting for more, but I focused on stirring my coffee. After an awkward pause, he said, “Well, why don’t we get started?”

Throughout the morning, we made good progress on revenue forecasts, headcount, and total investment. As we finished our working lunch, Ms. Lawrence knocked on the conference room door. “Pardon me for the interruption,” she said, handing me a telex. “This just arrived, Mr. Griffon. It’s from your fiancée and appears to be urgent.”

“Fiancée!” Allan exclaimed, smiling. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Sorry, it slipped my mind,” I replied, surprised at how quickly a lie grows legs.  I scanned the telex.

 

FM: VIVIAN, MAIN POST OFFICE, LILONGWE, MALAWI

TO: PARKER GRIFFON C/O ALLAN BAILEY, LURNIX LABS

HAVE MALARIA. 60USD LEFT. TRANSFER DIDN’T ARRIVE. MAY NEED YOUR HELP. WILL TELEX NUMBER FOR CALL TOMORROW.

V

 

I paused for a moment as I reread the note, trying to make sense of it.

At best, malaria meant days of debilitating chills, fevers, and vomiting. At worst, you came home in a box. It gave me hope that she had made it to the main post office, unless, of course, someone else had sent the telex for her.

The message was intentionally brief, probably to save money. After a quick mental calculation, I figured that sixty US would last three days if she were at a hostel or a week if she were in the tent. But could she be tenting alone with malaria? Then I wondered about healthcare costs in Malawi and decided the sixty dollars might not last even three days.

I had barely convinced her to write Lurnix’s telex number in her travel notebook. She wanted time alone, she had said, and that didn’t involve sending me expensive notes.

This was a woman who, before I knew her, had moved across the world to assert her independence from a man. Given how much pride she had to swallow to send that telex, writing that she might need help almost certainly meant she did.

Now the thin scrap of paper I held was the only thread connecting us. With phones capable of international calls scarce in Malawi, all I could do was wait until she found one and sent the number with a time to call.