The Water Woke Me

Entry one. Might as well start where I woke up.

The water woke me.

That's the first thing, and I've always put down the first thing before it gets complicated. A habit off the workbench. You note the symptom before you start guessing at the cause, or you'll spend all day fixing the wrong part. So. The water woke me. The sound of it, falling, and for a few soft seconds I was only a man who'd nodded off somewhere he shouldn't have. A dock, maybe. Somewhere with water in it.

Then I opened my eyes, and I was in the tub.

Not a tub. The tub. The big jetted one upstairs, off the master, Colleen's tub, the one she'd loved and I never once climbed into in all the years we owned the place. I'm a shower man. Four minutes, main floor, in and gone. I couldn't tell you the last time I'd set foot in that room, and yet there I was, flat on my back in it, dressed, the sprayer running down over my face, and the whole picture wrong in a way I couldn't name.

I knew the room, though, the way you know a room you never use. The two brass jets down by my feet, dry and dull, that hadn't run since Colleen's day, and over my head the pair of shower heads that were no plumber's work but my own, put up in a temper I'll get to when I can stand to, though this was Sarah's house now and Colleen the wife before her, long gone. The little pleated blind Sarah kept half down so the morning wouldn't come in too hard. And the wrongness of it went past the room. It was in me. There was no cold coming off that porcelain, and porcelain is always cold; I've laid my forearm across a thousand of them reaching for a shutoff. No ache in my back from the hard of it. No weight to me at all. I was lying in that tub the way a shadow lies across a floor, taking up the shape of it and none of the load.

So I reached up to shut the water off.

And my hand went through it.

Not into it. Through. Like reaching into the beam of a projector. No cold, no wet, no push-back. The stream poured straight down through the middle of my hand and kept right on going, breaking around nothing, closing back up on the far side like my hand had never been there at all, and I lay there and watched it, calm as Sunday, because some quiet part of me had already run the numbers and was only waiting on the rest of me to catch up. I turned the hand over. Looked at the back of it, the two knuckles I'd broke on a compressor housing in '88, the wedding band, whichever wedding that band had ended up standing for. It looked like my hand. It just wasn't good for anything anymore.

I'm dead. That's the sum of it. I wrote it out plain in my head the way I'd have written it on the pad: subject deceased. Found in a tub he never used. Water still running. No idea how he got there.

And then, right on cue, no warning, no reason, the way it always came, the panic hit.

You'll get the whole story of it later; it's the biggest wire in the box, and it runs back to a basement and a broke-down dryer and a young paramedic with a bored, kind face. But you need it now, on the first page, because it's the first thing my death and I ever did together. Thirty years I'd had these. The heart bolting like it meant to climb up out my collar, the iron band cinching down over the chest, the cold flat certainty that this one, at last, is the one, this is the end of me. It came on me there in the tub exactly the way it had come a thousand times before, in basements, in pews, in the cereal aisle at the Smith's, the whole familiar terror, I'm dying, I'm dying, this is it, this is the one.

Except I already had.

And I can't rightly put it to words, and I doubt a living soul could follow me if I tried: to feel your whole body scream that it's dying, and reach down for the runaway heart, and find no heart. No chest. No body at all. Just the old scream, going and going, with nothing left to run it through. An alarm bell ringing its fool head off in a house that already burned to the ground. I'd spent my whole life terrified of this exact minute, braced for it, running from it, one bad winter even rigging a fool contraption to hurry it along, and it had already come and gone, quiet, in the dark, while I wasn't even looking, and here was the terror showing up late to a funeral it had plain missed.

It passed. They always passed. That was the cruelest joke in them, they always passed and left you shaky and mortified and alive. This one left me shaky and mortified and dead, which is a new one even for me. And I'll tell you what I was, if you want the honest inventory: a man made mostly out of fears. Afraid of water. Never did learn to swim, never trusted a thing I couldn't stand up in. Afraid of spiders, and of open desert, for a reason I'll get to that involves Colleen and one very strange afternoon. And afraid, always, down underneath all of it, of the quiet.

But when the panic cleared, what was left in its place was the old itch. The one I got when a machine came into the shop stone dead and the fella who owned it swore up and down it just quit for no reason.

Nothing quits for no reason. There's always a why. You just have to open it up and follow the wires back to the one that failed.

And I've got the time now, don't I. All of it. Nowhere to be, for the first time in sixty-one years. Would you listen to that. Nowhere to be. If you knew me you'd know what a sentence that is.

So I'm going to open it up.

Here's the file on the man in the tub. Five wives. Four of them I left, or they left me, or we left each other. The paperwork's always vague on the choreography. The fifth was Sarah, still mine on the morning the water was running, though what the two of us had by the end you couldn't honestly call a marriage. And somewhere back in all of that, some room, some woman, some grudge I planted and forgot I'd planted, is the reason I'm standing here as a draft in my own bathroom with the sprayer going and nobody come to shut it off.

I always did carry a notebook. Never trusted my own memory with the important things; you'd be amazed how a mind will quietly misplace the one number that mattered. So I'll do what I always did. I'll write it down. Start at the beginning, work it forward, and somewhere in the pages I'll turn up the loose wire. The part that failed, the why.

It's a peculiar job, I'll grant you, writing your way back to your own death. If that's even what this was. I don't know yet. That's rather the whole point of the exercise.

But I know where a man starts. You start at the first one. The first of anything is where the trouble quietly pours its foundation, years before the wall ever cracks.

The first one was Emily.

Let me tell you about the boat.