Chapter 4
Akira paced back and forth in his dad's kitchen, scratching his head. "I don't know, Paulie. I mean it seems kind of risky."
Paulie sat cross legged on a wooden chair. He was holding a stopwatch and a pair of boxer shorts. No one else was home. "It's not risky. It's an experiment. If you see me struggling, pull me out. That's the rule. If you don't see me struggling, keep track of the time and pull me out after nine minutes and forty one seconds."
"What if you drown?"
"I won't."
"How can you be sure of that?"
"You were there. You saw what happened."
"What if that was your 'get out jail free card'? What if God gave you one extra chance and all you are doing now is wasting it by seeing if you have another?"
Paulie handed the stopwatch to Akira. "Your dad taught you not to believe in God," he said.
"My dad taught me not to believe in things that cannot be proven," Akira said. "That includes you staying underwater for ten minutes without holding your breath."
"I'm not asking—"
"You're asking me to have faith."
"Only in what you saw for yourself, with your own eyes."
"People saw burning bushes, didn't they?"
"They thought they did."
"And visions of spirits, and the Virgin Mary."
"Hallucinations."
"What if we all hallucinated?"
"I think your dad would say that's highly unlikely. Besides, you saw Pinder's watch. Machines don't hallucinate."
Akira fiddled with the stopwatch. "You know, even if you approach this scientifically, there are still hundreds of factors that have changed. The water is different, the temperature is different. The time is different. The day is different. Even if you could breathe underwater—"
"I wasn't breathing underwater. I was existing."
"Even if you could survive underwater without breathing, that does not mean you can do it now."
"So if I can't, if I start struggling, you pull me out." Paulie bit his lower lip. "I simply need to know what happened."
Akira nodded.
Paulie changed into his boxers in Akira's room. When he entered the bathroom, the bathtub was already full of still, transparent water. What Paulie was about to do was both hard and easy. It was easy to drown. Everyone could do it. It was hard to drown intentionally, without flailing about in panic. He slid into the tub without a word.
"You are sure?" Akira asked.
"Yes," Paulie said.
Akira dragged the tripod into position, placed the camcorder on top, tightened the clasps, and opened the viewfinder to point the lens in the proper direction.
"Make sure you get the outside of the tub, and don't move the camera once it starts rolling."
"People will still say you have tubes running in from underneath," Akira said. "They will say you had packets of oxygen in your cheeks, or that the video was edited."
Paulie moved his arms lazily through the water. He let some of it flow into his mouth, and swallowed it. "I don't care what people think. This video's not for them. It's for me. I need to feel what I feel and then I need to see it, to know it inside and out."
"As soon as you flap an arm or leg I will pull you out," Akira said.
"That's the rule."
Paulie let his head fall back against the wall tiles. The energy-efficient light bulbs emitted clinically clean white light. The bathroom shone. Although Paulie had been here before, it had never registered with him just how clean the place was. It was like a lab or a hospital.
Akira put his finger on the camera's red record button. "I will start rolling and, on three, I will start the timer."
"Start the timer," Paulie said.
Akira pushed the button. The camera beeped.
"One, two..."
Paulie heard barely heard "three". The water rushed into his ears, dampening all sounds. He let his body fall deeper until his back was against the tub's bottom. His eyes were open but his mouth was still closed. He opened it. The water rushed in. He swallowed and swallowed until he was as full of it as the tub. He choked—but concentrated on staying calm. There could be no rash movements, no jerking limbs. Even his head had to stay motionless, or else Akira would reach in, pull him out and the experiment would be over.
He felt the same things as before:
The white light was bigger than just a hole in a sheet of ice, but he was still a bundled up baby in a stroller being pushed through a cold winter day.
He was kissing Diana.
He heard the horn go after Patrice Bergeron's overtime winner.
And he didn't want to die. He wanted to live. The desire to live was strong—stronger than anything—a feeling all its own, comparable to nothing but itself—as obvious as an erection.
He coughed.
His knees bent and relaxed, bent and relaxed.
His hands scratched at his thighs.
His head fanned, side to side, while his mouth opened and he screamed into the surrounding liquid, which tasted like melted butter poured into his nostrils, behind his eyeballs and into every one of his pores.
It was over.
It had to be over.
He'd failed. He couldn't keep calm. Any second now Akira would clasp his shoulders and pull him out of the tub and dry him off and say, "I told you, Paulie. I told you it was no use. I bet you are glad you didn't try this stupid stunt yourself."
Except it was his mum's voice he heard, not Akira's.
And Akira didn't reach down.
And when he finally did and Paulie gasped, taking air into his lungs again, Akira didn't say a single word. He merely showed Paulie the watch. Paulie rubbed his eyes. The watch's display read:
9:57
Akira put the watch in front of the camera.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
Paulie stared at Akira, then at the camera, then at Akira again. "Fine," he said, spitting out water. "I feel fine."
Akira pressed a button and stopped the camera recording.
Paulie stood in the tub—the water he had spent the last ten minutes drowning in didn't even reach his knees—and stepped onto the floor. Water dripped off of him. He took the towel Akira was holding out to him and wiped himself dry. "Why didn't you pull me out?" he asked.
"You were not struggling. You were not moving at all. The rule was—"
"Show me the video."
Akira loosened the clamps securing the camcorder to the tripod, picked up the camcorder, and rewound the recording. When it was ready, he opened the viewfinder and pressed play. Paulie huddled beside him, and together they watched ten consecutive minutes of Paulie's body lying peacefully underwater on the tub floor. For the full duration, the picture barely changed. Paulie didn't move. Even where Paulie distinctly remembered moving—his knees, his hands, his head—the Paulie in the viewfinder remained motionless. The second Paulie barely flinched.
When the recording reached the point of extraction, Paulie's subjective experience merged with what was in the camcorder's memory. Watching himself gasp for air, he remembered gasping for that air.
The video ended.
"I don't believe it," Akira said. His eyes were open wide. His skin was paler than usual. "You should be drowned."
"I did drown. But you don't have to believe. You've seen it three times now, twice in real life and once more through the eyes of a camera. A camera doesn't lie."
"There are not any videos of burning bushes," Akira said.
"There aren't any burning bushes."
"You are for real?" Akira asked. "You are not playing a trick on me?"
"I'm not. I mean I don't understand it any better than you do," Paulie said, which wasn't exactly true because only Paulie knew that his own experience was different than what the camera and everyone else had seen, but the point was still valid. "But I don't think either us can say it didn't happen."
"It happened," Akira said.
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"I'm some sort of freak," Paulie said.
"You are an unexplained phenomenon," Akira said. "That is not the same." He folded up the tripod, keeping the camcorder cradled under his arm. "If it is OK with you, I would like to show the video to my father. He may have insights to help you understand."
"I'm not sure I want to understand," Paulie said. For the first time, he was entertaining the idea of letting the matter drop. Despite how different he still felt, everyone else was back to treating him like they always did. That might be good enough.
"Or you could make a post online. There are forums for unexplained phenomena. Another user might be able to help."
Paulie grinned. "I'm not a UFO or the Sasquatch." The grin wilted into a grimace, and he sucked in air. His tooth had made itself known again. "Don't tell your dad, either. At least not yet. However, there is something you can do for me. Do you have any Aspirin?"