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67 Marco Polo The swimmers who halloo his name honor the Khan’s Venetian friend, I assume, as I belt my son into his Safe T. Seal life vest. It’s good that these kids haven’t heard the great Marco was a great fraud who never made it east of Baghdad . . . “Marco!” shouts a red-goateed boy as I tow my son across the pool. “Polo!” the boy’s friends roar, and dodge his gropes and lunges while, yards away, the ocean’s glittering blue heaves and humps toward Xanadu. Diving at dawn with parrot fish and yellow tangs, I felt part of the sea’s great fellowship. Now—oldest in the pool— I’m more apart than It, who foghorns, “Marco,” homing in on a pink micro-suit, a khan’s ransom of flesh he’s privileged to clutch wherever his hands run aground. How can he know his course leads straight to me? “Daddy!” my son shrills, “Shark attack!” Great white adult, I chomp my snorkel, slide my mask into place, and as I make my shark-descent, allow myself one glimpse of teenaged skin from my own past that grows more 68 distant as I sink, and some lost kid calls— above the water or below?— “Marco! Marco . . .” ...

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