Drowning for Life

His ears are bursting and he doesn’t know why. 

How it’s happening is known, why is another question. 

After again running his fingers over its muddy floor, he bends his knees to send himself to the water’s surface. Although impossible, his brow is covered in cold sweat. A Brown Trout hovers nearby, nonplussed by the ascent.   

Gasping, he kicks his way to air and nestles into a bed of pebbles. 

Nothing. 

Again, nothing.

Rolling himself over them, he shuts his eyes and lets the sun lift the cold tarp left by the lake. His limbs, spasming, go limp as the little stones knead his back.    

As children were wont to do not long ago, he once wandered down the wrong supermarket aisle. Panicked, he ran to the back of the store, frantically looking side-to-side. 

No one was there, no one was coming. He was lost, never to be found. This was wrong, of course. Children are naturally ghastly: they can catastrophize completely; in that instant the absurdity of being stuck for hours, much less an eternity, would have never occurred to him.

His relief faded; the ride home was overrun by thoughts of being lost. These reminders would rehash themselves for months. Now he is the only one who remembers. If he drowned, it would die with him.  

His fingers slither through the pebbles, poking and prodding as they’d done all day, but now without the same purpose or breathless urgency. It’s hard to stand, but not because his arms are shaking or that he’s melting into his stony bed. 

There was a pinch, a stinger is sinking into his shoulder. Dazed, he turns his head to find the culprit. Tensing his neck, he lobs an oddly shaped amber stone at a spindly yellow birch, missing it by several feet. It is thin, but his aim was abysmal. 

What began as a tremor in his calves settles in his chest as he staggers to his tent. 

Again, he crawls into his sleeping bag empty-handed. Swaddling himself and closing his eyes, he remembers a spiky-haired guy at summer camp squeezing a vaseline-coated watermelon into the lake. 

Spiky hair, which was fine to have back then if you were cool, mocked him. It was all too loud, embarrassing, and futile. He was reeling from the previous night’s campfire question: 

“Who is your crush?” 

All the expected celebrities were named. Henry fumbled, as claiming a starlet would make him seem presumptuous. It would invite teasing.

But before his brooding made him dead weight, the counselors grabbed him by his ankles and set him in the middle of the spectators. 

Still in his underwear, no one was laughing or pointing. 

“Come on, Henry. Stop being such a sad sack. Get in there!” 

He fell forward like a corpse and started groping for the sweet fruit–even yanking one camper away from what he thought was the prize. Perturbed by his lapse in passivity, he paddled back. 

The spectators turned away. Not knowing what to do, he went under the pier to stare at the horizon. They were lost and didn’t know it; they were inmates like him. 

They were trapped too—only they didn’t know it. He caught the edge of a crystalline eddy and wiped his face, grinning like he’d won a sports car. 

They can’t keep you if you know what they’re doing!  

“Henry! What are you doing down there?” 

“I’m getting to second base with Dr. Tapioca Puddlesworth!” He retorted, cackling like an old hag. 

Thank God that camp burned to the ground when he was in high school; knowing it was gone made him marginally less likely to relive all the nonsense he’d thrown at the counselors that summer. 

It all happened just after fifth grade graduation, a ceremony his uncle called a party for mediocrity.

It was hard even for a ten-year-old to disagree. 

In an auditorium lit by a single projector, he looked to his left and right: their faces were so happy, so expectant. Something was ending and no one cared. After being given a ribbon for good (though imperfect) attendance, he walked home to circle the block. 

Around the corner was a man who’d worked with his grandfather and who, as a confirmed bachelor, had a nicer garden and more disposable income than many men of his generation. 

His earthy prairie style home was the epitome of Midwestern respectability; a monument to plodding steadfastness, with a touch of eccentricity. 

“Hey Henry, congratulations on everything. I want you to have this,” the old man placed a silver coin in his hand. It was slightly tarnished, but this suggested provenance–an antiquity that could not be replicated. He said it was silver from a shipwreck.

“Do you know any pirates?

“Blackbeard!”  

“He was quite a guy. He’d put matches in his beard and light them. It would scare the bejeezus out of me!” 

For a while they talked about him and his crew. Maybe there was life beyond grade school, maybe there was, even if it was just vicarious, still adventures to be found. After being confined to his room for wandering off, he would examine it often to stoke his imagination. 

At the lake that fall the Scout Master told them, “keep your head straight and your eyes in front of you.” 

Shortly after departing, his head tilted downwards and, with it, a partially liquefied tuna melt. Retiring to the corner of the boat, he pulled out the coin. 

Trading cards and action figures no longer held as much sway (or, if they did, they were more reluctant to admit it), but they weren’t quite ready to compare golf scores or compare stamp collections. 

Visibly spastic, he showed off the coin he claimed was worth millions. Of course, his shaking hand dropped it. It was nearly six months before he admitted it to anyone. 

“I lost it, Mr. Roberts.” 

Nothing more was said. It was never broached again. Like so many other relics, it was just assumed to be somewhere until it couldn’t be found. 

He died last month. In the casket his cheeks were still, maybe thanks to a makeup brush, so ruddy and spirited.  

“You've been here every day now. How are you doing?” The man asked with a friendly Michigander dialect. 

“I’m slowly killing myself for a rusty piece of crap that’s been rotting in the sphincter of this cesspool for twenty years.” 

He’d been rehearsing underwater; it spilled out like a geyser.

“Okey-dokey, let me know if I can help you out!” 

Nothing. 

He grabs a solid branch, hoists it over his head, and releases it without a sign of exertion—the hive is crushed by gravity. A crowded buzzing envelopes his shins, but he does not kick or scream. He doesn’t grin or frown as he raises it to strike another blow. 

They keep coming, screaming at the attacker and now needling his neck with an intent to kill–if hornets have intentions They tear into the delicate parts of his ears, and he dashes to the lake to revel in the clash between its icy depths and his flaming welts. 

It must be somewhere, but it wasn’t. Again, it was nowhere to be found. 

His arm slammed against the rough bark of a wizened beech tree; he scraped away his skin furiously, wishing the tree would fall, but knowing it would not. No one could tip it over, especially him. Remembering this, he did the same to the other arm. 

Kneeling, he holds up his palms, wet and reddening, and pushes them towards the void dusk had left behind.