This Is Only a Test (6 page)

13.

On November 16, 1793, the crossing guard was nowhere. And so Jean-Baptiste Carrier shoved ninety priests into the National Bathtub. Death gorged on eighty-seven of them, but nowhere in his expanding waistline could he find room for the remaining three. Miraculously, the three priests floated downriver and were rescued by a warship. The ship's captain provided the priests with drink and blankets; they had been brought back to life. The following day, the priests were returned to Jean-Baptiste Carrier; they had been brought back to Death.

14.

A year old now, my son knows that when the conditions are right, bath time can be fun. These conditions include warm water, “No Tears” shampoo, and his trusty rubber duck. Other conditions:
It is not November 1793. Jean-Baptiste Carrier is nowhere to be found.

15.

On July 8, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley and a pair of Englishmen set sail from Leghorn to Lerici in the schooner
Don Juan
. Prior to boarding, Shelley supposedly spotted his doppelgänger warning him against the trip. Shelley ignored him and drowned. How are we to interpret such an act? As a premonition? As prophecy? Or as some mythmaker's attempt to allow Shelley to perish poetically?

16.

Josef Mengele—also known as the Angel of Death—allowed no one to perish poetically. The Nazi doctor who'd busied himself tearing hearts from Jewish bodies found one day that he could not control his own. It beat for the last time while he was out for a swim off the coast of Brazil in February of 1979.

17.

Who are the victims of drownings? They are not all Nazi war criminals. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they are mostly males and minorities. “The fatal drowning rate of African American children ages 5–14 is almost three times that of white children in the same age range,” the CDC notes.

18.

These statistics prove particularly true if you are a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till in 1955. He was drowned in the Tallahatchie River—though only after he was beaten and shot and weighed down in the water by a cotton gin fan barbwired around his neck.

19.

I'm elbow-deep in my soapy sink when my wife says, “Thanks for doing the dishes.” When I don't respond, she reminds me that she prepared dinner, that this is our arrangement. “I know,” I say. “I'm not complaining.” She says I look grumpy, and I tell her I'm not even thinking about the dishes. “Are you thinking about drowning?” she asks. “Of course not,” I say, but what I'm thinking is
I'm always thinking about drowning
.

20.

When we speak of the river, we often speak of it in human terms. The river is rough. Dangerous. Unforgiving. The river is brutal and cruel. Emmett Till's murderers were also all of these things, as well as innocent—at least according to the all-white, all-male jury in that Mississippi courtroom in 1955.

21.

You know this story by now. How I was out for a jog in July when I spotted the police car pulled to the side of the road alongside the river. How I observed the people gesticulating toward the water, and since I was curious—not to mention breathless—I used the distraction as an excuse to momentarily rest. I paused just long enough to overhear an officer say that the boy was believed to have drowned. That was the moment I picked up my pace. The moment I learned I knew nothing of breathlessness.

22.

Shelley's body was burned beachside in August of 1822. Overseeing his departure were his friends: Lord Byron, Edward Trelawny, and Leigh Hunt. But Shelley's boatman, Edward Williams, was the first to burn. As he did, a grief-stricken Byron turned his
attention to the sea. “Let us try the strength of these waters that drowned our friends,” Byron challenged as he charged into the water. After a few strokes he was driven back by cramps.

23.

We can only speculate what masterworks Shelley might have written had he heeded the advice of his doppelgänger. Or at least the advice offered in a 2012 article from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “Learn to swim.”

24.

In 1892, I. D. Johnson's
A Guide to Homeopathic Practice
provided information on how best to save a drowning victim. “Now, with one hand upon the back and the other upon the abdomen, press gently for about two seconds,” Johnson explained; “then turn the body well upon the face, and repeat the pressing as before; in this way strive to induce artificial respiration by the alternate pressure upon the abdomen and rotation of the body.”

25.

When I think of putting pressure on a body, I think of Josef Mengele.

26.

But let us not overlook the Romans. How in Rome, if a man was found guilty of murdering a family member, he could be sewn into a sack with any number of live animals—cock, viper, ape—and hurled into the unforgiving water.

27.

Which begs the question: How many apes were available for drowning in ancient Rome?

28.

Which begs the question: What is the Lungmotor? “The
LUNGMOTOR
,” explained the 1920 pamphlet, “is a simple and an easily understood device—always available—It is worked by hand—It can always give air, the kind you use everyday . . .”

29.

But what is it
really
? It is a pair of air pumps connected to a tube that is snaked down the victim's throat. It is a siphon of sorts, sucking the unwanted water up and out. “One of the great features of the
LUNGMOTOR
is the ease of operation,” the pamphlet explained. “Anyone can operate the device . . . All the operator does is set the pin to the approximate size of the victim, cleanse mouth, pull out tongue, apply mask, and operate the device. Simple, isn't it? Nothing to watch but the patient.”

30.

Simple, isn't it?
Mengele thought as he conjoined the twins.
Nothing to watch but the patient
.

31.

Simple, isn't it?
Schafer thought as he drowned the dogs.
Nothing to watch but the patient
.

32.

Simple, isn't it?
Carrier thought as he drowned the priests.
Nothing to watch but the patient
.

33.

It is a misconception that when water enters the lungs of a drowning victim the lungs themselves drown. In fact, when the lungs are
removed from a drowning victim and placed in water, the lungs remain buoyant. They float. What can this be but witchcraft?

34.

Water, sometimes, is a source of relief. If you are thirsty, for instance, or uncomfortably warm. It was a relief, also, for the boy at the summer camp whose body refused to bend. Brain damage kept him rigid, so I propped him against my chest in the lake—held him as close as I'd ever held anyone—and we rocked there, allowing the water to turn us weightless.

35.

The water burned from Shelley's body in the pyre. Bones cracked in the heat, brains boiled, and as Shelley's boatman burned, Lord Byron retreated once more to the sea. Took his walrus frame and just swam and to hell with the cramps. While Byron floundered, Trelawny claimed to have kept the vigil himself, later providing the primary account of the remains of Shelley's remains. “The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull,” Trelawny wrote, “but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire.”

36.

I wonder: At the conclusion of his experiments, what were Josef Mengele's findings on the human heart?

37.

Have I told you of the time my wife, dog, and I ran into a stranger on the riverbank? How we had a nice chat as we stood there alongside the shore? How our conversation had consisted mostly of small talk, though when I casually asked if there were any updates
on the drowned boy, he casually said that no, they had yet to retrieve his nephew.

38.

The Lungmotor pamphlet comes to the following conclusion: “Depending upon someone else to provide protection without your personal assistance will not result in action. Everyone's responsibility is the responsibility of no one. You realize, therefore, that the responsibility rests with each individual, and when a death that could have been prevented occurs in your locality, every individual is morally guilty . . .”

39.

Which raises the question: When Noah set sail, were the giraffes the last creatures to drown? Did he notice their bleating black tongues as they begged for mercy amid the tides?

40.

We have been told the Flood was spurred by man's wickedness, but what crime, precisely, did the giraffes commit? And why, once Noah had sailed out of sight, could a merciful God not have performed a rescue, earned himself a medal or two?

41.

God performed no rescue in the Gulf of Spezia, either. As Shelley sank, the atheist poet expected nothing more. Within days, the God-fearing faithful employed Shelley's death as a repudiation of his sinful beliefs. England's
The Courier
wrote: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned,
now
he knows whether there is God or no.”

42.

When the flame failed to consume Shelley's heart, waterlogged and broken as it was, Trelawny reached his hand into the pyre and retrieved it. Mengele would have been proud—a heart removed with no anesthetic.

43.

Though Emmett Till's body was ruined, his heart remained intact. The doctors pieced him back together the best they could. As people peered inside the casket at that broken boy whose face was no longer his face, they felt everything. Someone with a camera snapped a photo, allowing us to see our own faces refracted back. That was the point. No anesthetic for any of us.

44.

If a river travels west at X miles per hour, and a body in that river travels at the same speed, what then were Emmett Till's last words?

45.

None of the aforementioned information will assist you if you are drowning.

Once a boy drowned at a summer camp. This was June of 1968. It was early evening, a dinner of fried chicken and green beans already breaking down inside the boys' bellies, and as their counselors shouted numbers to the sky (“98 . . . 99 . . . 100!”), the campers hid, determined not to be found in the all-camp game of hide-and-seek.

More determined than most, ten-year-old Bobby Watson slipped away from his bunkmates and wandered toward the floating docks on the shores of Blackman Lake. He blocked the sun with his hand, allowing his eyes to refocus on the best hiding spot of all. There, glistening at the edge of a dock, was a Kenmore refrigerator. It was powder blue, round-topped, complete with silver handle. Bobby—smitten perhaps by the peculiarity of a refrigerator in such a strange locale—headed toward it.

Bobby knew as well as everyone else that the waterfront was off-limits to campers except during open swim. The head lifeguard—a broad-shouldered, sunburned man—had made this abundantly clear on the first night of camp (“You do, you die”). But it was a game of hide-and-seek, after all, and Bobby, a boy who wanted simply to hide, convinced himself to duck beneath the peeling fence. He jogged toward the fridge, peeking behind him to make sure he hadn't been spotted. He hadn't. No sign of him except for footprints in the sand.

He reached for the shiny handle, pulled, listened for the sound of the door yawning open:

Click
.

And then, after entering inside, the sound of the door closing:

Click
.

The inner shelves had been removed, though it was still a tight squeeze for a boy Bobby's size. Nevertheless, he found that if he tucked himself into the fetal position, it almost felt like a womb. Somewhere in the world beyond the confines of that fridge, the dock wobbled beneath the new weight. Bobby smiled to himself. The boy who wanted simply to hide was quite certain they'd never find him.

Half an hour later, as the game wound down, Bobby's prediction proved true.

Baaaahhhhh-beeeeeee
, the counselors' voices droned, followed by the sharper
Bob-be!

Amidst the shouting, a maintenance man spotted the fridge on the dock and, in an uncharacteristic act, decided not to put off till tomorrow what could easily be done today. Rope in hand, he wandered toward the water, ducking beneath the paint-peeling
fence as his work boots clomped toward the dock. He tied one end of a rope around the fridge and the other to the dock post.

The fridge was meant to serve as an anchor to ensure the docks didn't float away, and after the maintenance man double-checked his knots (“This'll hold”), he leaned his stocky frame into the powder-blue box and knocked it into the water.

Nobody knows what Bobby thought as that fridge bobbed twice in the lake. We can imagine, of course. How the water wiggled through the seams like eels. And how it began filling that fridge within seconds, drenching Bobby's shoes, Bobby's socks, Bobby's shorts. Meanwhile, on the other side of that refrigerator door, the maintenance man wiped his hands on his sleeves and headed toward the barn. There was a lawnmower in need of tuning.

Back on land, the counselors continued their search.

Baaaahhhhh-beeeeeee!
they cried.
Come out, come out, wherever you are!

A chorus of prepubescent campers soon joined them.

Hey, Bobby! Game over! Ollie ollie oxen free!

Inside the fridge, the water continued to rise. Past Bobby's orange-and-gray-striped T-shirt, past his slender neck, and finally, as the wide-eyed boy ballooned his cheeks for the last time, past his mouth and nose as well. His hands reached for a handle that was not there, his fingers clawing against the smooth surface. Then, as his cheeks deflated, he just stopped clawing. Just stopped everything. The refrigerator had become a coffin, and in the coming days, as a platoon of sheriff's deputies commandeered fishing boats and skimmed the water, nobody thought to tug on the rope pulled tight to the post of the dock. Nobody thought. Instead,
those deputies took solace in the sound of their outboard motors, while Bobby—once a boy—became an anchor.