12 - The Letter, pt. 3

This was the state James was in when I next saw him. I was in one of the search parties who were scouring the coastline, looking for the boys, looking for the boat. Looking for anything. After three days, most of the local volunteers had given up. After the first twenty-four hours are up, there's very little hope. The coast guard and the surf life guard continued the search. As morbid as it was, it was good training for them, and they rarely had a great deal to do. Little boats zipped back and forth about half a kilometre offshore, while parties on foot trudged up the coastline, looking for caves, cliffs, inlets- anywhere the boys could have pulled into. Maybe they had swum to the shore and gotten lost. It was a slim thread to hold on to, but when you're falling, you'll grab onto anything not to go down.

The surf life guard had found James first, seen him floating in the dip between swells. They had pulled his body aboard and radioed back to the guardhouse, asking for another boat to find the team I was on and bring me back in. We were walking along the jagged foot of a cliff at the time, navigating our way through the strange, sharp, twisted rocks that you sometimes find on the sea shore, big hulking pieces of bizarre masonry, carved by the ocean in eons past. Every piece of trash I saw in the distance sent my heart soaring- it always turned out to be a plastic bag snagged in the rocks, but I never tired of breaking into a run when I saw something, anything, that could be my boys. The other members of my team had long since stopped trying to dissuade me, just accepted my random fits and starts as part of the searching process.

My heart leapt when I saw the boat coming towards us through the surf, thinking, as they pulled into a gap in the rocky shoreline and one of them leapt onshoreto secure the boat, that they had come with glad tidings. They didn't say what had happened, they simply told me that I needed to get back to the guardhouse right away. They were little more than kids themselves. Maybe they were afraid to break it to me. Maybe they assumed that I would figure out what they needed to say from the expressions on their faces. I didn't. Against all logic, I took their arrival to be the harbinger of good news. Maybe there was a tiny voice of terror inside me that was screaming the truth at me, but I blocked it out. They took me back to the guardhouse in silence. I remember the trip seeming to take no time at all, bouncing along sheets of water, huge crests of spray launching upwards and outwards over us in a shower of cold tears. The ocean was a flat plain. It was early morning, and the sun was low in the sky, spreading its light across the smooth surface of water, making it shine with a dazzling silver light. I kept my eyes affixed on the horizon.

We must have arrived back at the beach shortly after the first boat, because they had only just unloaded their macabre cargo onto the beach. Someone had lain a blue tarpaulin down on the sand and some thing lay on top of it. A thin white strip, like a tear in the material. I saw it, but some strange mechanism in my brain refused to let me recognize what it was, did not let the reality sink in. Our boat rode a wave into the shore, and two of the lifeguards leapt from the boat and dragged it onto the sand. My legs were unsteady after the pounding up and down motion of the trip, and I stumbled uneasily over the side of the boat and into the knee-high surf that came up around where it had been grounded. I took two steps toward the tarp before one of the coast guard officers interceded and spoke to me.

He said: "I'm sorry."

I ignored him, and stepped around him. It wasn't until I noticed that there were people, you know, regular beach-going people, being held at bay a few hundred metres away by other lifeguards. They wanted to see what was going on. They wanted to slow down and see the car wreck. That was what it took to make it real for me. And suddenly the tear in the tarp coalesced into my James, my little boy, dead, alone on the ground. He was bloated, disfigured, distorted. His eyes were open, but there was nothing behind them. What I saw looked nothing like him, yet at the same time there was no mistaking him. I ran to him, skidding to my knees in the sand, sending a wave of gold over him, over me. I cradled his head in my lap. Nothing. He was gone. I looked about me at the gathered coast guards. Most were looking away from me. Some were crying. I didn't cry, I didn't scream. I felt nothing. I felt like I was at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by darkness. Far away, somewhere far above the waves I was under, at the top of the cliff I had fallen from, I heard screaming. A raw, hoarse noise that tore at Alison's throat as she shoved her way through the line of life guards and volunteers holding the citizenry back, then shoved me aside into the sand and threw herself on top of James' body, as though to protect him from all of us. From me. She screamed and screamed until there her vocal chords were scraped dry, and even then she kept screaming an eerie silent scream, like wind passing through a cave. She screamed until she passed out.

I just sat there, watching her. Someone asked me which of my children this was. I told him. They went back to searching for the others. I didn't. Somehow, I knew the others had met the same fate. My hope had died inside me. I'd died. I'd just forgotten to turn off the lights on my way out. The other two bodies were found on the shore in short succession. I identified them in turn, this time in the Lennox morgue.

They said we'd been lucky to find them at all. Many drowning victims just disappear forever, leaving their families and loved ones forever wondering, forever not knowing, what had happened, if they might be out there, somewhere. It was hard to give up hope. Lucky was the word they used. I didn't ask, but I remember being told that it was probably a rogue wave. They're not rare, apparently, but it's rare that humans encounter them. No-one really knows what causes them, the strange oscillations of waves across the ocean just sometimes combine and send a wall of water ten feet tall running up out of the ocean. It comes from nowhere, and shortly after it is created, it sinks back into the ocean. Just 'one of those things' we don't really understand. The boat was probably overturned, capsized, the boys tossed out, scattered. Without lifejackets, they had little chance.

Perhaps they tried to swim for the shore, and panicked, robbing themselves of vital energy. Perhaps they tried to float, laid on their backs and moved as little as possible, like I had taught them to when I first taught them to swim, and simply run out of energy over a couple of hours. That's how I imagine it happening. One after the other. Carl must have gone first, Evan trying desperately to hold onto him as he kept slipping under, finally not having the energy to hold both himself and his little brother afloat. The horrible moment of realization that he was not going to be able to make it. Then he must have watched James go under, then, not long after, defeated, having watched both his younger siblings drown before him, succumbed to the waves himself. Or perhaps Evan went first. Or perhaps he was knocked out by the initial wave, leaving his younger brothers alive and confused. Or maybe James was the one who was knocked out. Or maybe they all were. I have imagined every permutation, every possible outcome- they just all have the same conclusion.

We, Alison and I, tried to keep the marriage together past the funeral. But she couldn't look at me without seeing them, without bursting into tears. I couldn't blame her. I can't look myself in the mirror, either. I understand, intellectually, that it wasn't my fault. They must have taken the boat into the ocean. They knew I wouldn't have allowed it, had I been there. But I wasn't. I had bought the instrument of my family's destruction to them. I had failed to provide the thing that would have saved them. I had failed to be there in their last hours. Alison needed to blame someone, and I was guilty in all directions at once. Perhaps we could have made it, perhaps she could have forgiven me, if I had cried, screamed, shown even the slightest emotional reaction to the tragedy.

But I didn't. I haven't shed a single tear, to this day, since finding the body. I just shut down. My heart can't feel. Anything. Happiness, sadness. There's nothing there anymore. My mind works fine. As you've experienced, I am quite capable of having an ordinary conversation. I can talk very easily, very analytically about all of this- I just can't feel it. Everything, sunlight, beauty, horror, tears, comes right to my skin, then stops. Nothing gets through. I suppose if it did, my heart would tear itself out of my chest in pain. Maybe this is my body protecting itself. I couldn't maintain my relationship with Alison. She needed someone to share her grief with. I was running from the grief as fast as I could get away from it. We gave it the old college try, but it got to the point where she was trying to tear my eyes out, screaming at me, just to make me feel something. She left the country. Cleared out our joint account, took everything. I didn't resist. Said she never wanted to see me again, said she never wanted me to contact her, wanted nothing more to do with me. I nodded, told her it was a good idea. I don't even miss her. I remember loving her with all my heart, then: nothing.

I don't want to live like this. I don't want to live in a world where I can't love, or feel love. I've had the counseling, I've had the tough love, I've had the guilt trips, I?ve had the drugs. Nothing gets through. I don't feel anything, and I don't want to be alive. My body is an empty shell, and I don't want it anymore. If death is feeling nothing, then I've already died- I just need to finish the job that day started. This is not some whim. I have given this months of thought. I think of little else. I've tried to find solace, but I don't think I'd know it if I found it. If my emotions ever do return, they will be nothing but undiluted pain. I think I have been given this time to end it, without pain. If I wait too long, I run the risk of exposing myself to that pain, of hitting the bottom of the abyss, of having to take a breath at the bottom of the ocean. I don't want to know what that is like. I want it to end. There's nothing good in this world for me. I am going to end it, of this much I can assure you. I cannot be dissuaded.

However, I am still lucid. I still think clearly, even if I cannot feel. I recognize that I have a responsibility to leave this world in a better state than the way I found it. I thought I could do that by raising three great kids. I failed. That doesn't mean my responsibility has ended. If I can benefit even one person as a result of my passing, then my life has not been a total waste. I want you to be that person. Sure, I could donate my body to science, start a foundation, give some money to cancer research. That isn't good enough for me, it's too ephemeral, I won't know if it will change the world or just fade away. I want to be your patron. If I can give you a boost, set you on your way, who knows what you can accomplish? Who knows what you will write, what you will uncover, what children you will have, what you will be able to provide them with what I have sown. I want to know, in my final moments, that my life has meant something, has, in some small way, made the world a better place, even if just for one person. I won't be able to feel it, but I'll know it, and that will make my death, and life, less pathetic than it has been predestined to be.

And who knows- maybe, knowing what it has taken to bring me to this place, knowing the four lives that were laid at the alter to give you your special advantage, will inspire you to live a better life, to not squander this gift, to live fully, and gratfeully. To leave the world in a better state than how you found it, and perhaps encourage those who you leave behind to do the same.

For all that I've lost, you may be the best thing to happen in my sorry excuse for an existence. Please reconsider your decision, and accept my offer.

Your servant,

Anthony Raymond.