I Had A Dream

I had a dream that I tried to drown myself, and in doing so inhaled mouthful after mouthful of briny lake water. In my dream the water went through me like air and I could not die.

Twenty-four years ago my cousin Andrew could die, and did so in a frozen lake. He was six and I was eight. Our parents told us that he and another kid from his neighborhood had fallen through thin ice and drowned. I don't remember feeling any emotion at all over the news and instead became curious about the accident. Fascinated, really. Obsessed is maybe not too strong a word. I wondered if they had drowned to death, or had frozen to death and then sank under the water. I wondered which one had died first. What was the exact moment, and the interval between the two moments of release? Did one watch the other die? Did they say anything? Or try? Did fish see them as they sank to the bottom? And what sound did their bodies and clothes make as the touched the frozen clay? The vision of my cousin floating slowly to the floor of a murky lake invaded my consciousness and exists there still, now. His eyes are wide and lips parted. His hair floats in wisps, following him with ambivalence. I am on the lake floor and he descends toward me. The water is green and light shines on his cheeks and forehead like a painting of a saint. My fascination then took a more practical turn and I began wondering what it felt like to drown. I conducted an elaborate experiment. At the library I found how much water it takes to drown a human (1-2 tablespoons). Next I filled an eye dropper with tap water, lay with my head off the edge of my bed, and dropped water into my right nostril until a drop hit my windpipe and I suddenly found myself in burning agony and panic. I memorized the sensation. Next I filled the eye dropper with water several times and meticulously counted the total number of drops that it took to fill a tablespoon measure, acquired from the kitchen drawer. 254. 508 for the two tablespoons it would take. Finally I repeated the first part of the test, this time flinching at each drop that I squeezed. I felt the sting once more of a single drop snorted up the "wrong pipe", and before I had recovered my composure, began calculating, estimating really, imagining what that feeling multiplied by 508 would do to me. I tried. I tried really hard to feel that sensation. To drown, if only in my imagination. But I couldn't feel anything more that what I had actually felt. I began to cry. I wept because my experiment had failed, and I wept because I could not drown with my cousin. He who I had run in the woods with and eaten ice cream with and thrown sticks for his dog with and watched Fantasia in the dark basement with and been punished by our parents with and opened Christmas gifts with. This was the thing, the one final thing I could not do with him. I learned that day what death was and in that moment a part of me did die – the part that had never had reason to doubt my own power, my own strength. The part that had believed that as long as I was with someone, they were with me, and would always be. From then on I cried whenever I learned of the death of anyone or anything I had known. Because I knew it was the best I could do.