One Summer Evening, I Drowned (1995)

My best friend Karen and I liked to be invited to spend the night with Bird. Bird was two years older than we were and two years ahead of us in high school. Although Bird was technically a hippie because her boyfriends all had long hair and because she actually purchased marijuana, not just smoked joints as they were passed around, she was president of the senior class and editor of the year book. The snotty blond cheerleaders liked her as much as we little barefoot flower children did. Her mother was a nurse and her father repaired appliances for a living. Bird's popularity was not bought with fashionable clothes, membership in the country club and a lipstick-pink Mustang of her very own, like some of the other girls we knew at school. For some reason, Bird loved Karen and me and liked to spend time with us.

One afternoon during summer vacation Bird telephoned and asked us to spend the night with her at her family's lake house. It was a stone cottage with its own private pier located on a lake a few miles outside of town: Fort Phantom. The lake had been the site of a Civil War fort, and local legend had it that a phantom, wailing woman, her head shrouded in a veil, walked the banks of the lake at night searching for the body of her dead soldier lover.

Somehow I convinced my mother to give me her permission to go, and had assured her no strange boys would be there. Bird picked Karen and me up in her car late that afternoon. Bird's parents trusted her and stayed in town, so we three girls had the place all to ourselves that night. When we arrived at the lake, a police radio in the front room of the cabin quietly reported local disasters as we brought our things in.

Bird's father had constructed rafts from the Styrofoam packing crates appliances were shipped in by nailing planks around their edges. When the heat of the day had finally begun to wane, during the early evening, Karen and Bird and I each took a raft from the boat house on the pier and paddled out to the middle of Lake Phantom. We flopped on top of the rafts, sprawled out, drifting fragments of conversation back and forth when one of us had something to say. Karen was a dog paddler who didn't really know how to swim so she was fascinated when Bird and I dove off our rafts and swam underwater for long distances in the deep, muddy lake, holding our breath. Karen suggested as a game of friendly rivalry that Bird and I have a contest to see which of us could hold her breath longer.

When Karen gave the signal to start the contest, I jumped off my raft feet-first and loitered around deep underwater with my eyes closed to give myself something to do to take my mind off holding my breath. When I started to need to breathe urgently, I counted. When I could count no longer and was certain I'd beaten Bird, I exhaled, rapidly rising to the surface in a torrent of tickly bubbles. But when I reached what I had thought was the surface of the brown, murky lake, I discovered with horror that I was trapped beneath the heavy raft. At the nape of my neck my waist-length hair had somehow entangled itself in the nails of the raft's wooden frame. My head was bent sideways at a crazy, broken angle, as if I was hanged from a noose. No matter how hard I thrashed I could not tear my hair free from my scalp. I thought the boiling caused by my frantic kicking would attract Karen and Bird's attention, but it was twilight by then. The moon was rising. I had not a second to waste. I never regretted anything in my life so much as I regretted exhaling my last precious chestful of air. I willed myself to fight against the raft, to get free of it. I tore at my own hair until I imagined my fingertips were bleeding. My lungs ached as if they would burst. Everything inside my brain commanded me to breathe the cold dark water, but I willed myself to resist. The animal part of me, my skeleton and muscles and nerves, raged against the water, but my brain, the cold-blooded, traitorous spy, said calmly, You are drowning. There is nothing you can do. This is the end of the world for you. You are dying now. Goodbye to your poor mother and baby sister. Goodbye to all the sweethearts you'll never have. Goodbye to Paris. Goodbye to your children. Goodbye to your soul-mate.

Then I felt myself falling down, down, into a black chasm: triangular, deep, icy, like falling into an hourglass, like falling off a cliff in a nightmare. Suddenly, abruptly, my downward plunge changed into an upward ascent. It was as if I had fallen completely through the center of the earth and was now falling up, toward China. I fell upwards from the apex of the second triangle, which was white, and which grew broader as I fell. I saw that the white light contained all the colors of a crystal prism, like the colors one sees reflected in the icy glare of snow, in the spray of a water hose. Then I became aware of the sounds of millions of human voices, all separate, like the static electrical interference of overlapping radio transmissions. Then the separate voices converged into a single tone, as if the note were sung in several different registers, like the harmony of singers in a choir. With a shock, I realized I already knew this note. I had heard it in my own ears before for a lifetime. It was the note my own blood hums, the tone of the wind blowing high up in trees, the tone the grass sings, the tone upon the which the whole universe vibrates. The tone began a joyous crescendo and then I realized it was sung by a celestial choir made up of angels and the souls of all those who have ever lived on earth. The white light was so full of clarity, like an exquisite lens, that it made my eyes smart. My body went limp and then the muscles of my neck and my poor bony spine stopped burning. My brain formulated no more instructions to me and I surrendered, finally and forever, to the light, to the singing, to the drowsy, bed-like warmth which I knew then was Love.