If You Ever Find Yourself Drowning, Be Sure to Drink Enough Water

“You need to sleep.”

I stare at my son. A cold, gray, metal table sits between us. Its presence is large and undeniable. The corner of it pushes lightly against me, reminding me that it is there. That it has always been there, even when we couldn’t see it. An impermeable, unnatural solidness that has always kept us at a distance from each other. 

“It’s hard to sleep.” He stares back at me and it’s like looking at my reflection in a funhouse mirror. He looks like me, if you stretched pieces of me this way and that, in all of the wrong directions. “There’s a lot of screaming.” 

“Well, just do your best.” I say, like it is his first semester at college and he is struggling with the transition. I peer down the length of the table at him, and try to imagine some alternate version of my son sitting there. All of the could-have-beens start swirling around in my head. He could have been a student. He could have been a surgeon. He could have been a father. He could have been a friend. Instead, he became a murderer. All of the elements mixed together in all of the wrong ways. Maybe his body didn’t produce enough serotonin. Maybe I was just a terrible father.

No. My brain fights back. I provided for him. I gave him a huge home, warm meals, and an education. He had neighborhood friends, a puppy, and space to play.

But sons are not pets. Maybe I fed him three times a day and took him outside for walks, but we rarely played catch and I almost never patted him on the head to say, “Good Boy.” Maybe I had not given him the emotional tools to give and receive love properly.

No. My brain pushes back. Plenty of kids grow up without parents at all and they don’t start killing people because of it. He was just born this way. 

I lean forward and the corner of the table pokes me. I wince. 

“They keep the lights on all the time.” He says.

“Well, try to sleep.”

“Ok.” He says.

“Are you eating enough?” I ask.

Looking at him now, I can see hints of it. The darkness they talk about on the news whenever they flash his picture. It’s there, under his eyes, deep and purple. It’s in his hair, messy, long, and unkempt. It’s in the way he keeps his arms glued to his side, perpetually uncomfortable in his own skin, perhaps trying to keep the evil from leaping out. It’s in the unimpressed way he appraises the world around him. In the cold, dead, stare that looks through you. It’s in the thoughts behind his eyes that he preferred to dwell in rather than create a beautiful life to actually live in. This darkness has shoved itself deep inside his very essence, ripped apart every little piece of him that could have been salvageable, and now there is nothing left but a shell. 

“The food is bad here.” He says.

“It is?” I say.

The table is smaller in size now, and I can see him, smaller now too, refusing to eat broccoli as a little boy, unless he was promised a Hershey bar after. There are other images too. My son skipping around in the backyard with the family dog nipping at his feet. Trick or treating with the neighborhood friend. Grinning as he held his first caught fish high up in the air. Flashes of smiles, of happiness, of life. The light had been there. I know it had. Where was it now? 

“The cat’s doing fine.” I say now, to the little boy, as the table shrinks and I get closer to the version of my son I used to know. If I reached out, I might be able to touch his tiny, innocent face. “She always wants to be brushed.”

The table is almost gone now. And there he is before me, brushing the cat. Her tail raised high, tickling his nose. Her orange fur rubbing against his cheek, begging for more love. A smile from him, as he looks up at me with amusement. I think of that smile now. Had it been real? Had it reached his eyes? What hadn’t I noticed? Were any of my memories real, or did I only see what I wanted to see? 

Our hearts had been whole once. Hadn’t they? 

My son says nothing. His eyes say nothing. His body says nothing. He is still as ever, giving up no indication that he even misses the idea of the cat. Had he ever loved the cat, or did he just know that he was supposed to love the cat, that he was supposed to pet the cat, and smile at the cat? Aren’t animals supposed to sense when there is something off in a person? How had we all been so easily fooled, even the goddamned cat? 

“You know how she likes that.” I press on, trying to hold on to what little happy mental pictures I have, but its edges are burning, licking at my fingertips. Just like the son that sits before me, even the memories of him as a little child are tainted by his actions. Almost every memory is insidious in hindsight. 

“Yeah.” Is all he says.

“She’s always trying to be brushed.” I keep going, almost panicky as the table begins to grow again. My fingers are burning now. I have to stop it. I have to get rid of the table before it gets rid of me.

“Remember how you used to do it?” I say, so loud that the guard at the door shifts on his feet, startled.

My son blinks at me. Does he not remember? Was that someone else? Where did my little boy go? Who is this man sitting before me? My hands are completely on fire now. I drop the memory of my son and the cat and trade it for a new one. My mother and my son, planting roses in her garden. 

“The roses look good.” I shout at him. “The ones that you planted.” I grip the edge of the table as it pushes against me. Its coolness runs up my fingers and through my body. I begin to quiver. 

As my son was planting seeds in the garden, seeds of evil were being sowed in his head. Was he dreaming up his next moves while rowing the dirt? Was he discussing scripture with my mother while ripping his morals to shreds in the dead of night? Was he attending AA meetings just to put on a show, while he was emptying bottle after bottle alone in his apartment?

“That’s good.”

“The yellow ones and the red ones.” I try to resurrect the boy I used to know with this pleasant memory. It doesn’t work. He may have never existed. He blinks at me, bored. My chair squeaks against the floor as an invisible force pushes me further and further away from him. My son is still frozen in place. Maybe he likes the table. Maybe he put the table there. Maybe we both did. 

“I don’t know what to say.” He says finally, and the table screeches to a halt. 

“I don’t either.” I sigh in relief.

This is perhaps the only truthful thing he has ever said.

“I really screwed up this time.” 

“Yes, you did.” I grapple for more.

“I really blew it.”

“Well, you can still be treated.” I say, forever hopeful. “I didn’t really realize how sick you were.” 

Squeeaaaak.

The chair is moving again. My son stares at me, as if he doesn’t see the state of panic he has caused. 

“You need help.” I jump out of my seat. 

“I guess.” He says, unbothered.

“We just need to make sure you get some help.”

My back suddenly hits the wall with a thud. The edge of the table presses firmly against my stomach. My heart starts to race as the air is pushed out of my lungs. I am trapped now, by my son's actions. By my failures. By my refusal to accept that maybe he is as bad as the news says. That maybe he really did do those things. 

My son watches as I try to fight the table off, but he does nothing to stop it. His essence takes on a new shape, right before my eyes. His arms are resting on his legs now, his body no longer rigid. He is comfortable, now that he is in control. Everything about him is dark, dark, dark. His once light blue eyes grow deeper, like the bottom of the ocean floor, a place nobody will ever reach. And he is stuck there. He has never tried to swim to the surface. The drowning is normal to him. If you have never so much as glimpsed how beautiful life can be above the surface, how do you even know you want to swim to it? 

 He finally moves, just the tiniest bit, that it almost goes unnoticed. A tapping motion, from his pointer finger against his thigh, over and over. 

“You know, mental help.” I have completely surrendered to the forces of the table now. It pushes me up the wall so that I am hanging in the air, feet just barely touching the floor. 

Tap, tap, tap. 

“With professionals.”

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

“People who can help you.”

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

“Maybe you can get better.”

Silence, now. We stare at each other. I look down at him, suspended in the air, helpless. He looks up at me, chained to the bottom of the ocean floor, helpless.

“How’s Grandma?” He asks. He pushes his hands back to his sides, and the darkness retreats back to its hiding place inside him. The table releases me, and my feet plop to the ground. I can breathe again. 

“Fine.” I wipe my hands down my shirt, attempting to press the wrinkles out.

“Good.” 

“She sends her love.” I sit down, regathering myself. 

“Good.”

The guard shuffles his feet, walks over to my son and motions for him to get up. Our time together has ended. Heat rushes to my face, as I am ashamed to be glad it is over. The guard leads him to the door.

“Make sure to drink enough water.” I say, pretending that proper hydration could ease the pain of living a life trapped in the deepest depths of an unexplored ocean. “You need to drink more water.” I stress, thinking that maybe drinking the very water that is drowning him might take some of the pressure off. 

“Ok.” He nods, pretending too. Pretending as he always has. “See you, Dad.”

“See you, Jeff.” 

In light of the recent Netflix series, this is based off a conversation between Lionel Dahmer and his son, Jeffrey Dahmer. *Most* of the dialogue is real, pulled from Lionel's book, “A Father’s Story.” Everything else is inferred.