Chapter 5
Paulie drowned again in the evening when his parents were sleeping. And again in the morning after they'd left the house. He drowned for ten minutes the first time and twenty minutes the second. Within a week he had stayed under for more than three hours total, and once for over thirty minutes. It got easier with practice, too. The more he did it the more easily he believed in not dying, and the less of a distraction was his will to live.
Soon, drowning became his favourite activity.
He stopped looking at porn and he stopped playing video games. His social networking accounts lay dormant. When George came to his house, wanting to hang out at the rink, he was busy. When Pinder messaged him about coming over for dinner, he felt sick. He didn't even notice when his mum gave back his ethernet cable because stopped using the internet altogether, just like she'd wanted.
It was hard for him to say what it was he did when he drowned. Once he got the hang of it, it was like what he imagined meditation to be: the art of doing nothing, of emptying his mind. He fancied himself a Buddhist monk or maybe a Taoist, letting the water run freely over him, body and mind. Or were the Taoists supposed to be the running water itself? He wasn't sure and couldn't be bothered to check. It was a waste of time.
As Paulie became increasingly obsessed, he also became more brazen. He began drowning when his parents were still awake, or cutting school and going home to drown instead of going to French class. To drown: noyer. I am drowning: Je noie. What else did he need to know?
It was during one of these stolen drownings that Paulie finally discovered the way in which drowning was unlike meditation. That it was this way wasn't hard to guess. It made perfect sense, given the physical reality of drowning. For emptying yourself is merely one aspect of drowning. Being filled with something else, with water, is the other. When a Buddhist monk empties his mind, it stays empty. The nothingness is the goal. When one drowns, nothingness is the creation of a vessel, and vessels exist to be filled. The first visions Paulie had while being drowned was of a desert castle drenched in milky fog being bombarded by strong gusts of wind that carried metal buckets, and with each gust the buckets scooped up a small part of the castle and deposited it on a nearby hill. Paulie watched for what felt like several minutes as in this way the wind decomposed the castle into a pile of rubble.
Later he was in space, watching an invisible hand (if it was invisible, how did he know it was a hand?) tip over a ceramic pitcher decorated with colourful flowers he couldn't identify, pouring forth the Milky Way: Earth, Mars and Saturn as intergalactic cereal.
Not all of the visions, if that's what they were, were so dramatic. Sometimes he saw regular brick buildings, fields, mountains and suburbs. Sometimes he saw nothing but sounds. He didn't hear them. He saw them, the chirping of birds, the rumble of a waterfall, the crunching of pebbles beneath boots expressed as lines, colours and shapes. Although he didn't know where these or any of the images came from, what they meant or how they fit together, from the beginning it was clear to him that the images were not his own. They were not of his mind. He was letting them inside from an unidentified external source, and just as easily letting them out, like a projector being fed a roll of film.
But when a film ends, you feel returned to the drabness of an unflinchingly vivid reality. You are back in your living room or sitting again in the fifth row of a smelly movie theatre. When Paulie awoke from his drownings, his bathroom felt increasingly blurred, almost pixelated. And it wasn't just the bathroom. It was the hallway and his room, the school, everything. He wanted to awake again, to a reality of sand castles and astro-pitchers.
"Are you feeling OK?" his mum asked him one evening. She had a parent's look of concern on her face. "You're not grounded any more, you know that right? You seem so distant."
"Tell him he should get a girlfriend, a real Galadriel type," his dad said from the living room.
"I'm fine," Paulie said.
"And your tooth? You used to complain about that."
"Fine," he said.
"If you need anything, you let us know," his mum said. "I know you think we're fuddy duddies who don't have a clue about what you're going through, but we went through it ourselves. Everyone does. We're not so different from you."
Paulie doubted that very much.
That night, instead of watching TV with his dad or the Leads game with his friends, Paulie pretended to go to sleep early, opened his window, and escaped down the side of his house toward the lake. It was frozen, but he pounded through the ice with a stick, and when the hole was big enough he jumped in and drowned until morning.