Author Games: Red Room

Task Four: St. Judas

Swaggy Pete

When I was in the fifth grade, my parents watched me drown.

They don't remember it the way that they used to. None of us do. We've chosen to forget those years through our own terrible means, but I think that Mom and Dad's means are the worst, because they do it by virtue of not caring. I do it by virtue of near-constant drunkenness, which is messier and more clownish than simply not caring, but I can afford to forget these kinds of things in the ways that I want because they actually happened to me. It's my right as the victim, I think. But Mom and Dad keep forgetting my awful childhood with every day that rolls by without them seeing me, and they keep caring about it a little less, and I end up being a victim twice: once because of the drowning, once because my parents don't give a shit about residual trauma. Maybe that's why I'm so messy about my own coping mechanisms. Maybe I'm trying to get people's attention.

But anyway, I drowned in the fifth grade, and it was a lot like the way I'm feeling right now.

I'll start with the actual drowning, which went something like this: we were at the lake, and I slipped out of my life jacket and leaped off the dock into the murky water below. The sun had been beating down on my face and shoulders, and back then I hadn't cared about tanning, so I'd been miserable out there on the edge of the water while my parents and my uncle cruised around the lake on their pontoon boat. I'd hated the life jacket, too, with its stupid orange flaps and its uncomfortable plastic buckles jutting into my skin. So I solved all my problems at once, and I ripped off the life jacket and jumped into the water.

I'd never been taught how to swim, but for some reason I thought that I could do it. Just before impact, I thought about the Olympic swimmers I'd seen on TV, the people in skin-tight suits who glided effortlessly through fifty-meter pools, and I figured I'd wave my arms and kick my legs just like they did. Then I actually entered the water, and suddenly I couldn't think about anything but how numb my arms and legs were because the lake was fucking freezing. The instant my head slipped beneath the surface, my body entered some kind of primal emergency state, and my lungs seized up, meaning that I couldn't move or breathe or do anything but think about how cold it was and how absolutely terrifying the lake seemed from the other side of the waves. Jesus, I couldn't even scream. I just bobbed there, wanting desperately to fight back but lacking the strength to do it, and after half a minute had passed, all the gumption and the fear just drained out of me. At that point, my lungs were feeling tight and thin, so I opened my mouth in some stupid attempt to breathe, but the grimy lake water poured down my throat and into my lungs and then I really started to drown.

And here's the fucked-up part: in that terrible instant, with a chest weighed down by water and a mind too oxygen-starved to think clearly, I closed my eyes and I accepted my fate completely. I'm about to die, I thought, and I was absolutely, horrifyingly okay with it.

My sister Janie pulled me out of the water with both hands. I don't remember the details that she describes, the screaming and the tugging on my wrists and and the sitting on my stomach to get the water out. But I remember the moment that I regained consciousness, and that was one of the worst moments I've ever experienced, because I looked into the faces of Janie and my mom and my dad and I saw my dad scowling, my mom biting her lip the way she did when a client was wasting her time, and I immediately shut my eyes again. The real world shone behind my closed eyelids, colorful and hideous and frowning, and later it would demand that I get in a silver Honda with two adults who didn't give a shit about me and eat Taco Bell like I did every night and cower in Janie's and my bedroom while Mom and Dad watched The Price Is Right, hoping that the vents wouldn't make noise and Mom and Dad wouldn't blame it on me and make me sleep on the floor again. All of this flashed before my eyes in the instant that I woke up, and I realized that the only time when I hadn't been afraid, when the world had been pleasantly quiet, had been those precious moments beneath the surface of Lake Ashmere.