Swim
Following her brother's death, an alcoholic comes to terms with her addiction by pursuing the answer to the same secret that killed him. From "Women in Strange Places: Stories" (2009).
When I got the call that Elliot was on his deathbed, I was on the floor with my back heavy against the splintered wood. Three empty bottles of rum framed my head.
I caught a flight from Austin to Pittsburgh, and then sped south in a rented car to Langford, the industrial town Elliot called home. I thought it was too dark for him. It was surrounded by long-impotent mines, and the people there looked tired and ragged about something they could never talk about. For a man who wrote about living out of his car and disowning his social security number, I always wished he’d end up somewhere softer, maybe wilder, further into the woods.
Dr. Darya explained that he declined in the days prior, and they found him wandering the hall the night before. Apparently, he’d tried to call me from an empty room, then started walking around and collapsed.
I knew he was looking for me, thinking I was down the hall from his room like when we were kids.
Blindsided by the greedy chaos of my life for the last two years, I was now out of time with my only brother. Dr. Darya and I were in the hall when it happened. I turned around to ask her if I could sit with him for a few hours even though he was sleeping. She said that would be fine. I was in the room for maybe five seconds and then the machines around him began to scream.
I rushed to the bed and stared at all the tubes and screens that crowded him, appearing to have sucked the life out of him. Several nurses and his doctor ran in and told me I needed to wait in the hall. From there, I watched as they tried to revive him.
An exotic blue fish paced in a bowl on the bedside table.
I felt cheated when he died. Where had he gone? His death had been completely invisible. I found myself wishing I could have seen it, so that he wouldn’t have died alone. I wondered if he had woken up before he died, just briefly and I didn’t see it; if he felt every limb slowly vanish from the sight of his nerves, the way limbs seem to when they fall asleep. I wondered if he ever dreamed about me.
I should have responded to his letters and told him what my life had been like. I had all the pictures he sent me of his hikes in the woods and painting near lakes.
I could have even just sent him a note on email that said, Elliot, your big sister’s a big fuck up. Like everyone else in my life, he had no idea how weak I had become. I loved bottles, and bottles loved me. They loved me enough to make me delay phone calls and payments and mailing Christmas presents. They made a wall two years wide between me and my brother.
I was drunk at the wake, of course. Chewing wads of strong mint gum and crying most of the time didn’t tip anyone off to the fact that I couldn’t really sit up straight. But then on remembering I was disrespecting Elliot, I went to the bathroom a number of times to throw up and force myself sober.
When I came back to join our family, I saw a stranger walk toward Elliot’s coffin. He was approaching it as if it were a bomb.
He had olive skin and his hair was deep black, short and spiky. It looked like he’d just gotten out of the shower.
I watched him kneel and mouth a prayer. When he was done, he stood up and looked at Elliot for a long time.
Our eyes met as he walked back toward the seats.
“I am so, so very sorry,” he said in a hushed voice.
Mom nodded her thanks to him as I stared.
“You must be Lynn.”
“Yes. And you?”
“I’m George.”
We shook hands. He held onto mine.
“George. Yes. He’d mentioned you in letters.”
“Elliot would talk about you all the time. I’ve seen many pictures of you. It’s like meeting a long lost friend.”
“Thank you, that’s very kind.”
“I heard you were at the hospital, when Elliot…”
“Yes.”
“It’s good to know he didn’t pass alone. I was just on my way to see him, that day.”
We looked over at Elliot. I saw his chest rise and fall with a deep breath. I saw his eyes twitch with dream. I rubbed my eyes and focused on George.
“I have a lot of questions for you, George. There was a letter he sent where he mentioned something about a house?”
“Yes. Yes, of course, the house and everything. He left some things for you.”
“Did he?”
“I can talk whenever you like; where will you be this evening?”
I went to the hotel and drank until my stomach felt like gobs of wet cotton. I had the fish from the hospital in my room and watched it swim in circles until I passed out.
George met me at the bar next door to my hotel the next day. It was an after-work bar where people came to wish they’d never been employed. I took a booth in the back and watched it rain.
I had just finished chugging a glass of heady ale when George walked in through the neon and sticker door.
“Good to see you again,” George said. He kissed me on the cheek and sat down. His car keys sounded like broken wind chimes when they hit the table.
“Hi, George.”
“How are you?”
I hated when people asked me that. I shrugged it off and looked around me. What’s it look like?
“Are you having anything?”
“No, I don’t drink.”
It was so hard for me to make conversation with a stranger. I used to be so good at it. But once that last beer kicked in, I knew where to start.
“Who are you, and how do you know my brother?”
He smiled. “George Taylor. I’m thirty-three. I’m from upstate New York. My parents were missionaries. That a good start?”
“Sure.”
“Swimming is my life. I love it. I met Elliot when I was out one day at the lake. He was the only person there, he was sketching. It was at the end of winter, just barely spring, and the water had a nice bite to it.”
I listened as his voice painted a wonderful picture for me: my darling Elliot sketching the rusted metal trees of winter, calm as could be.
“Well, I wasn’t familiar with the lake and just jumped into any old spot. There were a ton of rocks there and I banged my head, knocked myself right out. Elliot saved me and we were friends ever since.” He sighed. “After a while, he went on some trip to an Indian reservation in New York, not far from where I grew up. When he came back, he said he had to buy that house.”
“He would never, in a million years, want a house,” I said.
“Well, he wanted that one. I came to live with him after me and my wife divorced. He offered me the bottom floor. That’s the way it was for about a year and a half, until he got sick.”
A year and a half. Why hadn’t Elliot told me? I tried to imagine him dealing with housework and decorating. He must have done a wonderful job.
“And he got sick last summer, right?” I asked. How could I have forgotten?
“Yeah, that’s right.” George rubbed his sleepy face. “He hated doctors.”
“I know.”
“He kept complaining about his chest hurting. I asked my sister-in-law to check him out. From there, he just got worse and worse.”
I resented the emptiness of the glass on the table. There was nothing in it to protect me but foam.
George leaned in and asked, “Are you alright?”
He asked me in such a way that I felt in the loving company of a priest. I hadn’t felt that way since the last time I had a heart to heart with Elliot.
“Fine,” I said.
“Lynn, I know we’ve just met, but the way Elliot spoke about you all the time—I feel like I’m already close to you. Does that make sense?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No, listen.” He leaned in closer this time and took my right hand. “I’ve traveled a lot in my life. I’ve seen and done many things for my age, met many people. There are few things that don’t change, and to me, it’s when someone’s hiding something.”
I took my hand back from him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You drink pretty fast, don’t you?”
He didn’t ask in a judgmental tone. I felt as if I’d shown up to work naked in a dream. Everyone’s had that dream at least once.
“It’s none of your business, George. I’m fine.”
“I know I can’t force you to talk to me. That’s fine.” His dark eyes lowered for a moment and then came back to mine. “I’m sorry. I just want us to be friends. If you need someone to listen—”
Red grief bubbled up in me. “Thanks, George, but you know what?”
Don’t shove him away, don’t do it, I pleaded to myself.
“My brother just died. And at every corner I turn there’s all this stuff I learn about him. I’m upset. I’m going to drink.”
He leaned back against the seat. Silent minutes moved past us. I was fidgety, George was still. He stared at me off and on.
“Do you want to come see the house?” He asked finally. “It’s nice. Nothing fancy, but it’s nice. Really quiet. Maybe it would be good for you to spend a week or two there, with me. Maybe it would be good for both of us.”
“And the boxes?” I asked sharply. This caught him off guard, though I realized in my rising stupor that he hadn’t mentioned them.
“Well…they’ll be there for you, too.”
“What’s in them?”
He shook his head. “Nothing I’m going to try and explain to you if you’re not sober. Really, if you’re going to drink the whole time you’re in town it might be best to just mail them to you—”
“Wait a minute, who the hell do you think you are? Elliot was my brother and he left those things for me. I think I have the right to see them when I damn please!”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, Lynn. I don’t want to sound so mysterious, but, it’s just a matter of fact. Please, for the sake of his memory, you need to be here for this. He left you some very special things. Very important things.”
George rose and gave me a tender smile. His eyes were a little angry at me.
“I have to go. Just tell me when you want to come by. Okay?”
I wasn’t sure what awaited me. But as near to the bottom as I was, I had to get something right. It was my duty as his sister to go be at the house, and George was right—I had to be present.
“I’m staying next door,” I said.
“I know.”
“Come get me tomorrow afternoon?”
“I’ll call you when I’m on the way over. And, just out of curiosity: do you happen to know what happened to a fish Elliot had in his room?”
“Yeah. I have it in my room. Why?”
He looked relieved when he said, “Oh good. I was worried the hospital had tossed the poor thing. I gave it to Elliot.”
I nodded without concern. It was just a fish.
“I’ll see you,” George said, and walked away.
Soon after he was gone I was alone at the bar. I felt like an old party streamer tangled in a tree limb.
If I could get anything right in my imagination about Elliot owning a house, it would be situated in the middle of nowhere. This meant I couldn’t go to the store, or for too long a walk, and I definitely couldn’t run out for something to eat.
I carried a picture of him in my purse, and I told it that my trip to the store down the street would be the last time.
I wandered the aisles for a half hour as I stared at the mad array of liquors, beers, wines, vodkas. In the long hall of fridges that housed the beer, I stared at the shiny twelve and twenty-four packs, the frosted, rotund aluminum jumbo cans, and the variations of brown, green and red bottles. It felt like these mosaics of poison were pressed against the glass, like fans of me, all wanting to get inside and ingest me.
I ended up back at the hotel room drowned in wine. At one point during my silent debauchery I thought I saw Elliot cross from the bathroom door to the closet, just around the corner. I could even smell his old cologne.
“It wasn’t your fault, get off that bottle,” I heard him say.
No, it wasn’t mine, that’s what Elliot always said. I started drinking a few years after our sister Shirley drowned in a river. I was thirteen and she was eleven. I couldn’t swim fast enough to save her. She was right at my grasp, but it was as if every time her frantic hand was within an inch of mine, the current would yank her away from me hard.
I had to fight to catch up to her and not let myself get ripped away, but it was useless. I was exhausted. I could only watch as the river rolled her around in its torrents that sounded like a million windows breaking at once, and then her thrashing frame was gone.
I was depressed for several years until I discovered drinking. I drank to drown out Shirley’s screams. Then I drank to get through classes and break-ups, movies, and drives home. I drank to get to and out of work.
Now I drank because I couldn’t protect Elliot, my remaining sibling. I drank because everything was my fault.
I didn’t want George to know this. The humiliation was so deep whenever someone found me out in some parking lot or hanging off a stool at a bar. I was afraid that George wanted to be my friend. I knew that if he met the real me, he’d want to forget I was Elliot’s sister. Elliot, who had done nothing wrong to anyone, and had lived his twenty-eight years in peace.
On the way to the house, Langford’s drab streets gave way to the land surrounding it. The nothing of trees warped the horizon as the main road wandered through them. I had a dry mouth and a head a mile wide. George had bags under his eyes.
After some time, I made the decision to talk, even if it was just to hear the sound of my voice.
I shoved mint gum into my mouth before I spoke. I even gave a little smile.
“Where are we going?”
“The house is in a bit of a limbo. It’s not quite part of Langford, not quite part of Alter Grove. That’s the next town to the west. I usually just tell people I live in the woods.”
I nodded. “How are you today?”
“Tired. I didn’t get to swim this morning. I haven’t slept.”
“How come?”
He looked over at me periodically, saying, “Too many things on my mind. Elliot, and then comes the problem of what to do with the house. I’m not going to stay there…not for much longer. I don’t know what to do with myself anymore, you know that feeling? Sometimes, I worry I’ve done it all. There’s so much in my head. I get so agitated when I don’t swim. I can’t focus.”
“Really?”
“Mhm. It’s a necessity for me. I swim four times a day.”
He leaned forward onto the steering wheel, trying to stretch his lower back.
“Where do you swim?”
“In the lake outside the house.”
“The house is on a lake?” I looked out the window, trying to imagine it. A house on a lake reminded me of summer and lush trees, barbecues and insect bites. Not ice.
“Oh, yes.”
“Where’d he get the money?”
“I fronted it to him. He had his savings, too.”
George made a left turn onto a dirt and gravel road. The house became visible immediately, along with the shore of the lake. It was an enormous stretch of glassy water. The house was modestly sized and colored, buttoned into the hilly land.
I stared at the lake, thick with cold, as it was jostled by the breeze.
“You swim in this?” I asked.
“I love it.”
“You must have a death wish.” I rushed to the front door and heard George laugh behind me.
The house was white and gray on the outside. Inside, it was wooden and bright, with minimal furniture and metal grate stairs that went up to the second floor. There were barren windows and full closets. The front porch had a pair of wind chimes that dripped from the awning. That was the only thing that was really charming about it.
But I did feel comfortable. I was in Elliot’s house—a place I never thought would come to exist.
George lived on the first floor and kept all his things very well organized. He made his home in the living room, complete with a pull-out couch and a small television. He kept the kitchen fully stocked. There was a fireplace that gave his simple arrangement a warm glow.
“Why are these metal?” I asked. I set my things down at the foot of the stairs.
“Elliot had them put in. He loved the sound of walking on grates for some reason.”
I looked up at the dark second floor landing. I imagined Elliot moving around up there, asking where his paint brush was, or saying he wished he could go to India. My brother lived at the top of those stairs. I could barely move a muscle.
George stood beside me and put his hand on my shoulder. “I know,” he sighed. “I do that, too.”
“What? Freeze on the spot?”
“Stand right there and look up. Like he’s going to come down, you know?”
There was a tone in his voice that made me feel like a fool. I moved away from him and sat on the second step with my elbows on my knees. If I didn’t need a drink then, I started to think I would really need one in a few minutes.
When George said he stood there, looking up as if Elliot was going to come down, his voice had the distinct lilt to it that only resided in the voices of people in love.
“George, who are you?”
He crossed his arms and said, “What do you mean? You sound like I just appeared in front of you—”
“Who were you to Elliot? Really?”
He turned around and started to walk into the living room. “Come, sit with me.”
I followed him in with my coat draped over my shoulders. We sat across from each other on the floor.
“Look, I’m sorry I wasn’t more upfront about this before, but it’s something I was hoping Elliot had told you by now.”
“Okay.”
“As he and I got to know each other, things just, clicked for us. I left my wife for him. The only person I ever trusted as I trusted him. The only person I knew, as I knew him.”
“You’re serious.”
“You had no idea?”
I shook my head. I had no idea. I had no idea who my brother was at all. I felt awful for George, but more so for myself. I was starting to feel like I was mourning a stranger.
“The only person I thought would know or understand him better than me was you.” George lay on the floor with his head near my feet, and he began to tell me the strangest story I’d ever heard.
“I’m sorry you had to find out about him this way.”
I was having a hard time understanding the feeling inside me. I felt betrayed by Elliot because he hadn’t told me such an important fact about him, especially when he’d met someone special too. I wanted to know everything George knew, both about my brother and about himself as a person.
“The day Elliot pulled me out of the water I was dead for a few minutes. There was no bright tunnel or angels. At least, there wasn’t for me. The place I went to was completely black and made of water. I was floating there and I felt the water less and less, like my body was dissolving. I didn’t breathe.”
I could hear the bells of Shirley’s screams like she was right behind me.
“It felt like I was lying there for years. I felt that I knew things no one else knew while I floated. Like I’d been told secrets and given answers. I think that’s where the peace comes from, when people say near-death is peaceful. You just—know things finally. Mysteries don’t hurt anymore. I felt completely disconnected from my body, and then I felt like I was going to sleep. That was total death coming.
“Elliot was giving me CPR and doing everything he could to wake me and cough. Eventually I did. When I was pulled out of that state it was like—you know that feeling when your hands are really cold and you run warm water over them—it was just like that. Burning and freezing. My entire body felt that way.
“When I came to, the first thing I saw was Elliot’s face, upside down over mine.
“He stayed with me in the hospital and he was constantly asking me questions about what happened, and who I was. He got worked up about my drowning and what I described and so he went to a shaman for some kind of a ritual out at the reservation.”
“Looking for a simulation. He would do something like that.”
“I thought about him, I worried about him. Day and night. When he came back to town his only mission was to have a house near a body of water. We bonded over that lake. I was here every day, swimming and drifting, didn’t matter the hour. Water holds so many little secrets. And, it’s a doorway. To whatever you need.”
George sat up and looked into the fire.
“Why’d you marry that woman if you’re gay?”
“I’ve loved men and women in my life. I married my wife because at the time that’s what made the most sense to me. We were happy. We were in love. I divorced her because that’s what made the most sense to me. We were no longer happy. And I was in love with Elliot. No one I knew as a friend or a lover in my travels was like him. I’ve been around so much because my family wandered a lot. I inherited that quality when I inherited my parents’ money. I’ve lived in fifteen countries, visited about thirty total. Jumped around from place to place, did work here and there.” He looked at me. “Sound familiar?”
“He must have had a marvel of a time talking to you. He did that, too, but just never left the country. It’s all he ever wanted to do.”
“Yeah. He loved to hear me describe ruins and towns. Sunsets, sunrises. I have a lot of stuff around the house that I’ve picked up over the years from different places. He liked to sketch them.”
My body was giving way. The memories of failing to rescue Shirley smashed up against envisioning Elliot as he pulled George out of his discoveries. All the guilt and the anger swelled with my hangover.
I burst into sobs. George and I cried together. It was the first time I’d ever let anyone see me cry for those reasons that made me drink. I suddenly needed to say everything that haunted and hurt me. If I didn’t take advantage of this new gap in my walls, I would have kept trudging through my life.
With a patient face, George said, “I learned so much from your brother. I learned so much from what he and I experienced together. He wanted you to experience these things too. Elliot has united us, you know. You’re looking for the answers I was looking for before I drowned. I can feel it. There’s a lot I can tell you about. Please, trust me.”
I felt like I was being pulled into him as I finally told him my story. I told him about my life with Elliot and our family, Shirley’s death, my fiancée who left me because I wouldn’t stop drinking, and other things. I constantly felt like living would only be about bearing a formless weight.
George smiled knowingly. “You’re subconsciously seeking water,” he said. “You keep putting it into you. You want to be cleaned out. Made new, right?”
“I don’t understand.”
“In my experience with water I’ve learned that it can clean, it can liberate and it can poison. I know what you need. You need to swim more.”
“What?”
“You need to swim more,” he repeated.
“Swimming isn’t going to do anything for me, George. This is a mental problem, this isn’t a spiritual thing.”
He nodded patiently and stood up. He quickly dried his tears with his shirt and let out a composing breath. Then he reached down to me.
“Come, I’ll make you something to help you rest. Come with me.”
I followed him into the kitchen.
George was right. I needed to rest. I fell asleep on his bed well into the evening and woke around ten. He was asleep on the floor near the shrunken fire.
What was strange about the first days without Elliot was that I’d wake up and not immediately remember that he was dead, but for a few seconds I only felt like something was missing or wrong. Then when it all came back to me, the feeling became a persistent, spiky sensation just above my stomach. I still feel that way sometimes.
I went into the kitchen and found a lone beer standing among juices and milk in the fridge. The amber glass was in my hand before I negotiated with myself. I rushed back down the hall and passed the living room, hoping George hadn’t woken up and would find me drinking. I moved slowly up the stairs while I chugged the beer.
At the top of the stairs there were two closets full of building materials and the door to Elliot’s room.
The beer was doing nothing to steel me against this surprise I had coming to me. I turned the knob and pushed the door open. My hand searched for a switch around the corner, and when it came on the room was just as I had imagined it would be.
There was no bed, only dozens of easels, broken boxes of used paintbrushes and dirty hunks of graphite scattered over the large space. The walls were covered in his art. I walked into the make-shift gallery and stared at what had to have been two hundred sketches that were like photos printed with ink and pencil. There were trees, roads, eyes, buildings, houses, a beautiful drawing of George reading a book, and the mouths of mine shafts.
The days and dreams of my brother all lay out in front of me. I turned around several times as I was encircled by his talent.
I shut the door to find more things pinned against it and its neighboring wall. This time they were sketches of rivers, lakes, an imagined tidal wave barreling into New York City, and a self-portrait that made me drop my bottle.
Elliot had sketched himself sitting underwater, with his hair moving like smoke rising from a cigarette. His eyes were wide open, legs crossed, and a tiny bubble of air escaped from his lips. He sat on a mound of sand. At the top of the long sheet was the bubbling edge of the water. He might as well have been sitting right in front of me in a tank. It was perfect.
I stood there with him in that suspended meditative state, and touched the paper as if to coax him out of it.
In the corner of my eye I saw a pair of medium sized cardboard boxes that weren’t stained with paint. They didn’t have brushes or erasers jutting out of them. Their flaps were tucked into each other. With all the 3D images in that room I probably didn’t even register them the first time I walked in.
As I went to them I recalled George’s face during our conversation, when he realized that I should have just looked through these things to begin to find what I needed. It could have been letters for all I knew, drawings, or some kind of mementos that Elliot thought I should keep and turn into heirlooms. I racked my brain until I knelt in front of the boxes and pulled the flaps of the one on the right.
Elliot sat behind me in his graphite and paper tank, staring on.
I opened the box to find a stack of sketches so thick they were laid on their sides so that they looked like the spine of a book. There were two composition notebooks and a balled up piece of newspaper. I felt kind of silly for having my hands shake as badly as they did. Elliot had simply left me his sketches. I pulled open the flaps of the neighboring box and found old pictures of us and us with Shirley. There was also a wrapped birthday present for me that Elliot never got around to mailing. I knew it had to have been because he was sick. My birthday was in August. I sat with the second box for a long time as I looked at my brother’s healthy face. I missed his voice and his deep-chested laugh. I wanted him back so badly.
I went back to the first box. I figured that the notebooks were more sketches or his poetry. I kept a picture of him, Shirley and me from middle school tight in my left hand as I pulled out one of the composition books. On the front it read January – July 2006. I didn’t know what to think when I opened it. He had left me his diaries. I spent half the night consuming the first one, which all started with “Dear Lynn…” He documented his dreams and desires in short evening bursts, and always wondered what I was doing, or why I barely answered my phone anymore.
In February, he came out to a friend of his named Charles, who later stopped being his friend. Elliot had apparently gone through years where he thought he was crazy, and later thought he was bisexual. Then finally he understood he was gay after an experience with a friend of a friend during a trip to New York City. I felt terrible for him. It sounded like it had been such a lonely and painful process.
In March and April, his entries got very distracted, as if his days were lush dreams. He started to watch a man swim at a lake every day, who later turned out to be George. He said he went there to pretend to sketch the trees but would instead sketch George. In writing about saving him, and his subsequent immersion into George’s life, Elliot couldn’t stop wondering what it felt like for George to “die without dying.”
He went on for pages about the body being a thin membrane between the soul and the world, and that there were secrets there that he had to know.
My eyes ingested his code-like handwriting in the second notebook, marked august – december, when the entries took an obsessive turn. He thought about Shirley, and how she must have felt when she died. He explained how he would interrogate George about his near-death experience and then sketch out what he thought it might feel like. But his obsession with finding a repeatable death grew.
He visited a reservation where he had a six-hour transcendental ceremony. He said he felt partly deaf from the shouts and he smelled incense in his nostrils for a week, but no experience with death.
A few days after he returned in late August, and not long after George got his divorce, Elliot went back to the lake where George had drowned. He said the police had put up a “no swimming” sign at the shore after the accident. But as luck would have it, when Elliot sat to start sketching again, a young man showed up and stripped down to swimming trunks and began to stretch.
He then committed the same mistake George had, and dove into the rocky water.
Elliot raced down and swam to the man, who was partly conscious and panicking under the water. The sight of him made Elliot freeze. From the looks of the man he had broken something during the dive and couldn’t get back up to the surface on his own. He struggled there, suspended, gasping water into himself. Elliot watched, even as the man’s arms reached out for rescue.
But all Elliot wanted was to see his face at the moment where the membrane became no more, and the young man was part of the water.
“Would he feel it?” he wrote. “Would he be pristine and new, would he take back his old body and reanimate himself? Could he be able to possess mine?”
Elliot swam back to shore and ran to where he’d left his things. He became convinced that a portal to the final mysteries before total death was in that lake. “There’s a house not fifty yards from the shore of this place. It’s empty. I need it,” he wrote.
I was sick to my stomach as I read on. He followed a few articles in the paper about the man going missing. Elliot called the police to say the man in the picture looked like someone he saw at the lake near Alter Grove. The police found his clothes at the lakeshore. Elliot and George were conveniently away visiting George’s family the weekend that the body was pulled.
And when they came back, Elliot bought the lake and the land and the house. He and George went on months of experiments with nearly drowning one another.
One held the other down in the water until the body’s natural fight for air subsided. They’d resuscitate each other. Elliot said the panic was the same every time, and it was something primitive that did not ease no matter how much he invited the water into his lungs. Inside the water felt like millions of little needles for a few seconds and then he was out. Far away into the other world. He said their near-drowning experiences would never result in death because neither he nor George actually wanted to die.
Elliot’s favorite way to be drowned was to go out to the part of the lake where the water became waist-deep. George would hold Elliot’s legs against his chest and his arms tight around his lower back, keeping him there, thrashing upside down until he stopped. Elliot mentioned something about a shift in the blood that he could feel. He felt lightheaded, like he was flying in the water.
George called it a birth in reverse.
He said they saw spirits. Bits of their futures. Hints of their long-faded past existences. Yet what they came back for every time was that big void of peace.
The mass of sketches made me shake. Every single one portrayed eyes and water, or a sea of eyes, or a figure made of eyes, plunged into murky water. At night the drowned stranger came to Elliot in his dreams to interrogate him. And in one instance during the drowning sessions Elliot swore he saw the ghost of that man like a shadow in the water, darkening the sediment and rocks around him. He felt terrible for having pushed that man into a premature death.
In his scribbles, Elliot begged me not to think of him as an evil person. He felt that he could only trust me with this secret, and no one else, because I never judged him.
He felt that George would leave him for sure if he found out that Elliot had killed someone for the sake of his own fascination.
I shoved everything back into their boxes and sat there, numb. I started to see how parallel and disconnected mine and Elliot’s lives had become. He was unafraid, unlike me. He sought his answers regardless of boundaries. I let those boundaries beat me. He invited death to his side, asked it questions as if it were a friend. I hid. I should have been there to talk to him.
I never thought I would be so frightened of Elliot. When I turned around and saw him steeped in water again, staring, I was forced out of the room by my fear. I went back to standing in the doorway. I had been mourning a brother that stopped existing a long time ago. I had to accept that. I had to accept that.
What was I going to do now? Elliot left me those things thinking he was imparting a secret to me. He wanted me to try and understand, he wanted me to know him. I wished I could see for a minute through his eyes.
I ran down the stairs and straight out the front door. I only knew I was moving because I could hear my shoes slamming onto the steps and then onto the wooden porch. The black of the outside absorbed me. The porch light wasn’t on. I knew that huge lake was there, of course, but in not being able to see it my body could kind of sense it. There was an open space there, a dark reflected by dark. I hadn’t gone swimming since Shirley’s death. Maybe now, if at least for a few moments, I could know what both my siblings already knew.
Moving toward the lake in that absolute night was like sticking my head into a god’s mouth. This was the path my brother walked everyday, with the love of his life, and learned how to leave his body.
A small white light came on behind me and I heard the door whack against the inside wall.
“Lynn! What the hell are you doing?” George shouted.
I turned around but didn’t stop moving toward the water. “You killed him.”
George ran toward me. At first I could see him clearly and then he became a silhouette and then for a moment he was lost in the space between the house and where I was. I felt his hands grab my shoulders. He tried to wrap himself around me and I kicked and shoved at him until he let me go. I couldn’t move any further. Not with him there.
“Spiritually, he and I were even. He saw what I saw. I never thought I’d meet anyone who could ever do that.”
“Who knew about all this? Someone had to know what you were doing to each other.”
“My sister-in-law. You met her, Dr. Darya.”
The cold was taking me over quickly. In the tiny amount of light from the porch I could make out the ghosts of our breaths in the air.
“I know what he left for you. When you got into town Elliot and I hadn’t spoken for about three days because the day I brought him the fish, he told me to read the diaries and then mail everything to you. He didn’t want to die without either of us knowing about that man. When I found out you were here—well—I thought it best for you to come see for yourself. He loved you so much.”
“You did this every other day? You tried to kill my brother all the time?”
“Dammit Lynn, no, we didn’t. We did it when we needed to. And I wasn’t trying to kill him. Same as he wasn’t trying to kill me. Come back inside, please come back inside. I don’t want to talk like this without being able to see you.”
I looked over my shoulder at the nothing behind me, and said, “I was thinking of going for a swim.”
I never made it to the lake. When I got to the edge I stood there, my mind empty of fear but frozen in place. My body physically resisted going into that water. George eventually coaxed me back into the house.
We paced around the living room and kitchen like fish in a tank until morning. The living room was hazy with sunlight and dust. We argued the entire time. I was so angry at George for indulging Elliot I could only see them both as monsters.
George barely made any sense to me until he sat on his bed.
“Do you know how betrayed I felt, to find out about that man through paper?” he said. “So long after the fact? He couldn’t trust me with that! I wouldn’t have left Elliot for anything, not even for that. I understand why he did it. I don’t think he understood.”
I was sitting with my back to the fireplace, listening to him closely, and feeling like I had finally hit bottom somewhere inside.
George looked at me. “You and Elliot have the same smile, you know.”
“Please, George.” I said blankly.
“It hasn’t crossed your mind once?” He glanced out the window in the direction of the lake then back at me. “What it’s like to be out there? What it’s really like, I mean.”
“I wondered what it felt like for him in the hospital. I wondered what it felt like for Shirley. I couldn’t save either of them.”
“You couldn’t save your siblings. You were not ready to, you were not equipped to. Wish all you want, Lynn, but if you’re not ready for something … it will evade you. Your siblings haven’t gone to doom…they know peace. You can reconnect to them. You can know what they know without going before your time.
“Stop hiding at the bottom of bottles, and know, clear-headedly that in this life we’re only running toward peace. That’s all there is at the end. You don’t have to live your life in the converse of that. Not at all. Elliot knew that but he didn’t learn it. He was too busy feeling guilty.”
I shook my head.
“Let me bring you back to your brother. I’ll show you what he knew. What we shared. Trust me the way he didn’t know how to.”
Peace. No more formless weights inside me. If it was everything George and Elliot said it was then Shirley’s death had not been as painful as I had tortured myself with imagining for so long.
As Elliot lay dying he knew what waited for him, and it wasn’t the ghost of that drowned man, or some angry vision of Shirley, or me in purgatory, flushed there by my addiction. He knew there was nothing but that familiar zone of peace until the next thing came, whatever and wherever that was.
I stood up and walked to the window with my arms crossed tight against me. I looked out onto the lake. “This is…I can’t imagine what I’m imagining,” I said at length.
“You don’t want to understand. You won’t. That’s fine.” He marched out of the room and I heard him throw open a closet door in the hall.
I turned away from the window. “George? What are you doing?
“I’m going to swim,” he said.
Of course, he was. He was going to the only source of focus and concentration he had left. I heard his belt buckle hit the floor and his shoes clunk off to the side somewhere.
Peace. It was finally possible. It was present in Elliot’s life every day, such as it was. George, who had moved through and taken in everything put before him in his life, knew the same thing. I knew he was doing his best to preserve his memory, and his own balance, now that his love had gone.
I went to the front door, looking out its window again to the lake as it churned and glistened within its bounds.
I turned and looked at a half-naked George as he pulled on an insulating swim suit. He stared at me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
I folded my hands tight in front of me. “I’m going with you.”
From Women in Strange Places: Stories (2009). Now part-adapted into the feature film Natatorium.