The Session

Undertow

Chapter 17: The Session

The fern had grown. This was the first thing James noticed when he entered Dr. Okonkwo's office for the second session of the year, the mid-season check-in that was not required by departmental policy but that Dr. Okonkwo had added to James's schedule three years ago, after she determined that the annual evaluation was insufficient, that the once-a-year was too infrequent for a person who carried what James carried, that the weight needed more than one examination per year, the way a bridge under heavy load needed more than one inspection, the structural assessment that said: this is holding, this is still holding, the load has not exceeded the capacity, the carrying continues.

The fern was taller, greener, with new fronds uncurling from the center, the fiddleheads that were the fern's version of growth, the tightly coiled potential unfurling into the actual, the becoming that was the plant's work, the quiet vegetable labor of converting light and water into structure, into leaf, into the green thing on the windowsill that was, against all probability, thriving in an office on the second floor of a municipal building on Mattison Avenue.

"You watered it," James said.

Dr. Okonkwo looked at the fern. "My daughter gave me a schedule. She taped it to the pot. Every three days."

James sat in the sand-colored chair. Dr. Okonkwo sat behind the desk. The desk was between them, the same desk, the same distance, the same arrangement that the sessions always had, the architecture of the therapeutic encounter that was designed to be consistent, to be the same room and the same chairs and the same distance every time, the sameness that was the container, the reliable space into which the unreliable contents could be poured.

"How is the season," she said.

"Fifteen saves since Memorial Day. Three on the Fourth. Flash rip rescue last week -- mother and child."

"The child was how old."

"Three or four."

"How did that feel."

James looked at her. The question was the standard question, the therapist's question, the question that asked for the feeling because the feeling was the thing the therapist worked with, the way the guard worked with water, the medium in which the professional operated, the substance that the professional was trained to read. But James did not work with feelings. James worked with water. James worked with bodies in water. The feeling was secondary, was downstream, was the thing that happened after the thing that happened, the response to the event rather than the event itself, and James lived in the event, in the moment of the rescue, in the nine seconds and the forty seconds, in the body moving through the water toward the other body, and the moving was the thing, the thing he knew, the thing he could describe with precision and accuracy, and the feeling was the other thing, the thing he could not describe, the thing that lived in the chest where the buzzing lived, the thing that did not have words because words were the wrong tool for the thing the way a rescue can was the wrong tool for a feeling.

"It felt like a rescue," he said.

Dr. Okonkwo waited. The waiting was her rescue can. The waiting was the tool she deployed when the words were not forthcoming, the silence that was not empty but generative, the space she created by not speaking into which the patient might speak, might find the word that was hiding behind the other words, the way a rip channel hid behind the surface of a calm day.

"The mother was holding the child above the water," James said. "The way they do. The way the parents do when they're going under. They lift the child. They sacrifice their position for the child's position. The physics of it -- the mother pushes the child up, which pushes the mother down, and the pushing-down is the drowning, and the mother knows it's the drowning, and the mother does it anyway, because the child is the thing that cannot go under, the child is the thing that must stay in the air."

He paused.

"I've seen it before. Save eighty-seven. July Fourth, 2012. Father and daughter. Same thing. The father holding the daughter above the surface. The arms above the water. The lifting."

"What does the lifting mean to you."

"It means I have about thirty seconds before the parent goes under. It means the parent has made a decision -- conscious or not, instinctive or deliberate -- to use their body as a platform. It means the parent is sinking. It means I need to reach them before the platform sinks below the surface and the child goes with it."

"That's the tactical meaning. I'm asking about the other meaning."

James looked at the window. The window showed Mattison Avenue. The same delivery truck, or a different delivery truck, or the idea of a delivery truck that existed on Mattison Avenue as a permanent feature, the way the rip existed at the jetty as a permanent feature, the recurring element in the daily text of the street.

"The lifting is the thing parents do," he said. "The thing they do when the water is taking them. They give themselves to the water so the water doesn't take the child. They make a deal. They don't make it in words. They make it with their arms. The arms that go up are the terms of the deal: take me, not her. Take me, not him. The deal is with the water, but the water doesn't make deals, the water doesn't negotiate, the water takes everything at the same rate regardless of the arms and the lifting and the deal. So the deal is not with the water. The deal is with me. The lifting is a signal. The lifting says: I'm here, I'm going under, the child is above me, come now."

"And you come."

"And I come."

"And if you don't come."

"I come."

"But hypothetically."

"There is no hypothetically. I come. That's the job. The lifting is the signal and the signal triggers the response and the response is the coming. I don't think about whether I come. I come the way I breathe. The coming is involuntary."

Dr. Okonkwo wrote something in her notebook. The notebook was different from James's notebook -- smaller, leather-bound, with ruled pages that were cream-colored instead of white, the notebook of a professional who wrote not incident reports but observations, not the facts of the rescue but the facts of the rescuer, the interior facts that the exterior facts concealed.

"Tell me about Trenton," she said.

The shift was deliberate. The shift from the water to the land, from the rescue to the leaving, from the thing James did to the thing James was about to stop doing. The shift was Dr. Okonkwo's technique -- the lateral movement from one subject to another that was not lateral at all but that connected, that drew a line between the two subjects that the patient might not see until the line was drawn, the line that said: these things are related, the rescue and the leaving are related, the lifting and the letting-go are related.

"I went to the facility," James said. "In August. Orientation. Met the director. Saw the classroom."

"What was the classroom like."

"Fluorescent lights. Desks in rows. A CPR mannequin on a table."

"How did it feel."

The question again. The feeling question. James sat in the chair and looked at the desk between them, the desk that was the distance, the professional distance that Dr. Okonkwo maintained between herself and her patients, the distance that was the boundary, the line that said: I am here to help you but I am not you, I am the person on the stand and you are the person in the water and the distance between us is the space in which the work happens.

"It felt like a room," he said. "It felt like a room that was not the beach."

"What does the beach feel like."

"The beach feels like the beach."

"James."

He looked at her. She looked at him. The looking was the mutual scanning, the two professionals reading each other the way they read their respective mediums -- she reading his face for the disturbance that indicated the thing beneath the surface, he reading her face for the intention behind the question, the direction she was leading him, the current she was creating with her words, the therapeutic current that would carry him, if he let it, to the place he did not want to go, the place where the thing he could not say was waiting.

"The beach feels like home," he said. "Not home as in the house. Home as in the place where the body fits. The place where the body does the thing the body was built to do. The stand. The chair. The height. The angle. The view of the water. The water itself. The whole thing. The beach feels like the place where I am the thing I am."

"And the classroom."

"The classroom feels like a place where I will be a thing I am not yet."

"What thing."

"A teacher. A person who talks about the thing instead of doing the thing."

"Is that a lesser thing."

"No. It's a different thing."

"But."

The but. The word she left for him to fill, the gap she created, the rip channel in the conversation that would pull him toward the thing he was avoiding, the seaward drift that he could resist or submit to, that he could swim against or swim across, and the swimming-across was the therapy, the lateral movement that took him out of the avoidance and into the place where the avoidance dissolved and the thing was there, the thing he was avoiding, the thing that was the truth.

"I'm not leaving the water," he said. "I'm leaving the stand."

The sentence arrived in the room the way a wave arrived at the shore -- with force, with finality, with the sense of a thing that had been building offshore and that had traveled a distance to reach this place and that broke, here, now, on the surface of the conversation.

Dr. Okonkwo set her pen down. She looked at him with the look that was not the diagnostic look but the human look, the look of a person hearing another person say a thing that mattered, the look that said: I heard that. Tell me what it means.

"The water is the medium," he said. "The water is the thing I know. The water is the thing I read. I will still swim. I will still go to the beach. I will still look at the ocean and read the surface and know what the currents are doing and where the rips are and what the wave period is and what the tide stage is and what the wind is doing to the surface. I will still know the water. The water does not leave me when I leave the stand."

"Then what does leave."

"The stand leaves. The position. The elevation. The authority. The -- "

He stopped. The stopping was the edge, the place where the words ran out, the place where the thing he was trying to say exceeded the language he had for saying it, the way the ocean exceeded the word ocean, the way the grief exceeded the word grief, the way the identity exceeded the word identity.

"The responsibility," he said. "The being-between. The being the person between the living and the dying. The standing on the stand with the whistle and the can and the eyes on the water and the knowledge that someone might die today and I am the person who will prevent it or fail to prevent it. The responsibility is the stand. The stand is the responsibility. When I leave the stand, I leave the responsibility, and the responsibility is -- "

He stopped again.

"The responsibility is what," Dr. Okonkwo said.

"The responsibility is who I am."

The sentence sat in the room. The sentence was the thing. The sentence was the core that all the other sentences had been orbiting, the gravitational center, the density from which the rest of the weight radiated. The responsibility is who I am. Not what I do. Who I am. The identity. The self that was not a self apart from the job but a self constructed by the job, built by the job, shaped by the job the way the water shaped the sand, by twenty years of constant contact, twenty years of the daily pressure of responsibility applied to the material of a person, the material yielding to the pressure, conforming to the pressure, becoming the shape the pressure required.

"And in Trenton," Dr. Okonkwo said. "Who will you be."

"I don't know."

"Does that frighten you."

"Frighten is the wrong word."

"What is the right word."

He thought about it. He thought about the classroom with the fluorescent lights and the desks and the CPR mannequin. He thought about standing in front of twenty-five students and teaching them the protocols. He thought about the words he would use -- airway management, cardiac arrest, spinal immobilization, the lexicon of emergency medicine that he knew, that he had practiced, that he had applied in the field. He thought about the translation from field to classroom, from the body doing the thing to the mouth describing the thing, the translation that was the new job, the new work, the new version of himself that he would become or attempt to become or fail to become.

"Dislocated," he said. "Like a joint. The bone is still the bone. The socket is still the socket. But the bone is not in the socket. The thing is not in the place where the thing belongs."

Dr. Okonkwo nodded. The nod was not the agreement of a person who shared the feeling but the acknowledgment of a person who recognized the feeling, who had seen it before in other patients, other first responders, other people whose identities were forged in the specific heat of a specific job and who, upon leaving the job, found that the identity did not come with them, did not pack into a box, did not fit in the car, did not transfer to the new address.

"The identity," she said. "The who-I-am. Where does it live."

"On the stand."

"Does it live in the rescues."

"No. The rescues are events. The identity is not the events. The identity is the readiness for the events. The identity is the scanning. The identity is the sitting on the stand and watching the water and being ready. Being ready is the identity. The readiness that is the state, the condition, the way of being in the world that says: I am here, I am watching, I am the person who will go into the water if the water takes someone. The readiness is the thing. The readiness is me."

"And in Trenton, you will not be ready."

"In Trenton, there is nothing to be ready for. There is no water. There is no stand. There is no scanning. There is a classroom and a curriculum and students and a whiteboard and the work is teaching, and teaching is important, teaching is valuable, teaching is the transmission of the knowledge that saves lives. But the teaching is not the readiness. The teaching is the description of the readiness. And the description is not the thing."

He looked at the fern. The fern was green, was growing, was the living thing on the windowsill that had found its conditions and was thriving in them, the conditions that were not ideal -- the office light, the inconsistent watering, the indoor air -- but that were sufficient, that the fern had adapted to, that the fern had accepted as the conditions of its life and had grown in anyway, because the fern was a thing that grew, that was the fern's nature, to grow in the conditions it was given, to unfurl its fronds in whatever light was available, to send its roots into whatever soil was provided, to be a fern in an office on Mattison Avenue the way it would have been a fern on a forest floor, differently but completely, a different shape but the same species, a different life but the same impulse.

"Can the readiness adapt," Dr. Okonkwo said. "Can the readiness find a new form."

"I don't know."

"You've been ready for twenty years. The readiness is a skill. Skills transfer."

"The skill transfers. The identity doesn't."

"Why not."

"Because the identity is not the skill. The identity is the skill in the context. The skill is the swimming and the scanning and the reading of the water. The context is the stand and the ocean and the people in the ocean and the being-between. Remove the context and the skill is still there but the identity is -- "

"Dislocated."

"Yes."

Dr. Okonkwo wrote in her notebook. James watched her write. He did not try to read the writing upside down, the way he read Elena's clipboard. He did not want to read the writing. He did not want to see the clinical notation for the thing he was feeling, the diagnostic shorthand that would reduce the dislocation to a category, a taxonomy, a line in the DSM or the professional literature that described the thing first responders experienced when they left the field, the thing that had a name he did not want to know because the naming would make it clinical and the clinical would make it manageable and the manageable was not what it was, the manageable was the reduction, and the thing was not reducible, the thing was the whole of it, the whole twenty years, the whole 215 saves, the whole two losses, the whole life on the stand that was ending and that he was choosing to end and that he could not explain the ending of because the ending was not rational, was not the product of analysis, was the product of the fullness, the completion, the saturation that he had felt and that he could not unfeel, the glass of water that was full and that could not be unfilled, that could not be returned to its previous capacity, that was simply full and that the fullness had changed from a container into a thing, from a vessel that held the water into a thing that was the water, the solid block of ice that was once liquid and that was now solid and that could not, in its solid state, accept more water because it was water, all the way through, completely, totally, the twenty years made solid, made permanent, made the thing that he was, James Calloway, the lifeguard, the captain, the man on the stand, the identity that did not transfer.

"What will you miss most," Dr. Okonkwo said.

He did not hesitate.

"The first scan of the morning."

She waited.

"The first scan. When the stand opens. When I climb up and settle into the chair and look at the water for the first time that day. The water is new every morning. The water I scanned yesterday is gone -- it moved, it was replaced, it was carried by the current to some other shore or some other depth or some other place the water goes when it leaves this beach. The water I scan this morning is new water. And the newness is -- "

He stopped. He looked at the fern.

"The newness is the thing I love."

The room was quiet. The word had been said. The word love. The word that James did not use for the water, had never used for the water, had kept in the place where the unsaid things were kept, the place behind the sternum, the place where the buzzing was, the place where the identity lived. He had said it. The word was in the room now, on the desk, on the fern, in the air between them.

"I love the water," he said. "I love the scanning. I love the readiness. I love the standing between. I love the first scan of the morning when the water is new and the day is new and the danger is new and I am the person who will face the danger if the danger arrives. I love being that person. I love the person I am on the stand. And I am leaving the stand. And the leaving is -- "

"The dislocation."

"Yes."

"And the love."

"The love goes with me. The identity does not."

"Are you sure."

He looked at her. She looked at him. The looking was the question repeated, the question amplified, the question that was not clinical but human, the question of a person who had listened to another person describe the thing he loved and the leaving of the thing he loved and who was asking, simply, humanly, the question that the answer to would determine the quality of the life that followed the leaving: are you sure. Are you sure the identity stays on the stand. Are you sure the who-you-are does not come with you. Are you sure.

"No," he said. "I'm not sure."

"Good," she said. "The not-sure is the beginning."

The session ended. James shook her hand. He walked down the stairs, through the lobby, into the light on Mattison Avenue. He walked to his truck. He sat in the driver's seat. He did not start the engine.

He looked at his hands. The hands that had pulled 215 people from the water. The hands that had held rescue cans and children and the heads of spinal injury patients immobilized in the surf. The hands that had written 215 entries in a composition notebook. The hands that would, in Trenton, hold a whiteboard marker and a curriculum binder and the CPR mannequin's plastic chest. The same hands. The same bones. The same muscles. The same skin, salt-darkened, sun-darkened, the skin of a body that had been in the water for twenty years and that carried the water in its cells, in its pores, in the permanent salt residue that no amount of showering could fully remove, the salt that was the body's testimony to the medium it had worked in, the way a carpenter's calluses testified to the wood and a farmer's tan testified to the field.

The hands would go to Trenton. The hands would teach. The hands would demonstrate the procedures on the mannequin, the compressions and the breaths and the immobilization, the mechanical steps of the protocols that the hands knew by muscle memory and that the hands would transmit to the students' hands, the passing of the knowledge from the experienced hands to the learning hands, the transfer that was the teaching, that was the new work, that was the new life.

The hands would miss the water.

He started the engine. He drove to the beach. He climbed Stand 4. He settled into the chair.

He scanned.

The first scan found nothing. The water was calm, green-flag, the ordinary beautiful day. The swimmers were in the water. The children were in the shallows. The families were on the sand. The guards were on the stands. The system was working. The standing-between was holding. The identity was intact.

For now. For this summer. For the days remaining between this August afternoon and the September morning when the stands came down and the guards went home and the whistle passed from his neck to Elena's neck and the identity, the who-I-am, the readiness, the love -- the identity would either come with him or stay on the stand.

He did not know which.

The not-knowing was the beginning.