Tommy

Undertow

Chapter 7: Tommy

Dr. Okonkwo's office was on the second floor of the Asbury Park municipal building, a room with a window that looked out on Mattison Avenue and a desk that was too large for the room and a plant on the windowsill that was either a fern or a thing that had once been a fern and was now a thing that lived in the space between fern and not-fern, the horticultural limbo of a plant that received inconsistent water and insufficient light and that survived anyway, as some things did, as some things insisted on doing despite the conditions, despite the environment, despite the fact that the room in which they had been placed was not the room in which they were meant to grow.

James sat in the chair across from the desk. The chair was upholstered in a fabric that was meant to suggest comfort -- soft, neutral, the color of sand, though not the sand James knew, not the wet gray sand of the waterline but the dry beige sand of a catalog, the aspirational sand, the sand of intention rather than experience. He sat in the chair and Dr. Okonkwo sat behind the desk and between them was the annual evaluation, the departmental requirement that every first responder in the Asbury Park system meet with the department psychologist once per year for a fitness-for-duty assessment, a conversation that was officially diagnostic and unofficially something else, something closer to the thing a Catholic might call confession, not because James confessed sins but because the room had the quality of confession -- the privacy, the ritual, the expectation that the person in the chair would say the thing they did not say elsewhere, the thing that lived below the surface of the daily work the way a rip current lived below the surface of the ocean, invisible from the beach, visible from the stand, and Dr. Okonkwo's office was the stand, and Dr. Okonkwo was the person on the stand, and the water she was scanning was James.

"Tell me about the Raines boy," she said.

She said it every year. She had said it in the evaluation after it happened, in 2016, and she had said it in 2017 and 2018 and every year since, not because she had forgotten what he'd told her but because the telling was the point, the telling was the treatment, the telling was the way the thing that had happened continued to be metabolized by the body and the mind that had been present when it happened, and the metabolizing was not complete, might never be complete, because some things the body took in could not be fully processed, could not be broken down into their component elements and absorbed and eliminated the way food was broken down, the way experience was supposed to be broken down, and the unbreakable thing remained, sat in the gut, sat in the chest, sat in the space behind the sternum where the buzzing lived, and the unbreakable thing was Tommy Raines.

"July 19, 2016," James said.

He always began with the date. The date was the anchor. The date was the fixed point from which the rest of the telling radiated, the way a rip current radiated from its channel, the date that divided the career into before and after, the date that divided the number into the saves before Tommy and the saves after Tommy, and the saves after Tommy were different from the saves before Tommy, not in technique, not in speed, not in any measurable quality of the rescue, but in weight, in the specific gravity of each save that followed the loss, each save that carried within it the ghost of the save that did not happen, the negative space, the absence that shaped the presence the way a mold shapes the thing poured into it.

"Red flag day," he said. "Heavy surf. Six to eight feet. Strong rip at the south end, near the jetty. Northeast swell, which pushes the rip channel south, toward the rocks. We had the flags up. Red flags. No swimming advisory. But the advisory is advisory -- we can't close the beach, we can't arrest people for entering the water, we can advise, we can warn, we can stand at the waterline and tell people the conditions are dangerous and some people listen and some people don't and the people who don't listen are the people who end up in the water on a red flag day."

He paused. The pausing was part of the telling. The telling had a rhythm, a pace, the pace of a person walking through a room they had walked through many times and in which they knew where every piece of furniture was and where every shadow fell and where the floor creaked and where the light came through the window at this hour, which was ten in the morning, which was the hour of the evaluation, which was the hour James sat in the sand-colored chair and said the things he did not say elsewhere.

"Tommy Raines was fifteen. From East Orange. At the beach with four friends. They came on the bus -- the 67 to Long Branch, then the 836 to Asbury. They had towels and a football and a speaker and no sunscreen and no understanding of the ocean, no familiarity with it, no experience of water that was not a pool or a hydrant or a bathtub. They had never been to this beach before. They had never been to any ocean beach before."

He said this without judgment. He said it as fact. The fact was that Tommy Raines and his friends came from a city where the ocean was an abstraction, a thing seen in movies and on television and in the photographs on the wall of the travel agency on Central Avenue, and the abstraction bore no resemblance to the reality, the way a photograph of a mountain bears no resemblance to the experience of climbing a mountain, the way an image of water bears no resemblance to the experience of being in water that is moving, that is pulling, that is asserting its own will over your will and your body and your life.

"They entered the water at approximately 1:45 PM. All five of them. They walked in together. The four friends stayed in the shallows, waist-deep, close to shore. Tommy went deeper."

Why. The question Dr. Okonkwo did not ask, because she had asked it the first year and James had answered it the first year and the answer was the same every year: he did not know. He did not know why Tommy went deeper. He did not know what pulled Tommy past the shallows and into the deeper water, past the sandbar and into the channel, past the point where the feet could touch the bottom and into the point where the feet could not, and the not-touching was the beginning. Was it courage. Was it curiosity. Was it the adolescent need to prove that the body could do the thing the body was being dared to do, whether the dare came from the friends or from the ocean or from the internal voice that said: go further, go deeper, show them, show yourself. James did not know. James would never know. James knew only what he saw from the stand, which was a boy walking into the ocean past the point where the walking should have stopped.

"I saw him from Stand 4. He was two hundred yards south of me, in the zone between Stand 3 and the jetty. The Stand 3 guard was DeSilva. DeSilva was dealing with a group at the waterline -- a family that wanted to go in, that he was trying to keep out, the red flag conversation, the conversation that goes: sir, the conditions are dangerous, the flags are red, I strongly advise you not to enter the water. The conversation that takes time. The conversation that occupies the guard while the water behind the guard does the thing the water does."

James's hands were on his knees. His hands were still. His hands were always still when he told this story, because the stillness of the hands was the discipline, the containment of the thing that the telling released, the thing that wanted to move his hands, that wanted to clench them, that wanted to grip the arms of the sand-colored chair the way the drowning gripped the rescuer, the clutch of the body for the solid thing, the holding on.

"I keyed the radio. I said, 'Stand 3, you've got a swimmer going deep, south end of your zone, near the channel.' DeSilva looked. He saw Tommy. He left the family and started moving toward the waterline. I came down from Stand 4. I grabbed a can. I started running south."

The running. The running was two hundred yards of soft sand, the sand that did not cooperate with speed, that absorbed the foot's impact and gave nothing back, the sand that was the first obstacle, the first enemy before the water, the distance between the stand and the entry point that had to be covered at a sprint, and the sprint in soft sand was not a sprint but a labor, a slogging forward motion that burned the calves and the quadriceps and the lungs and that felt slow, felt impossibly slow, felt like the running in a dream where the legs move and the body does not advance and the thing you are running toward remains at the same distance no matter how hard you run.

"By the time I reached the waterline, Tommy was in the rip. He was past the sandbar. He was moving seaward. I could see his head. I could see his arms. He was swimming -- or trying to swim. He was swimming against the current, which means he was swimming in place, which means the current was taking him and his swimming was the resistance and the resistance was losing."

He stopped. He breathed. Dr. Okonkwo waited. The waiting was her skill, the way the scanning was James's skill. She waited for the words the way James waited for the disturbance in the water, with the patience that was not passive but active, the patience that was a form of attention, the patience that said: I am here, I am watching, I will see the thing when it surfaces.

"I entered the water. The shore break was heavy. The first wave hit me chest-high and I went through it and the second wave hit me and I went through it and the third wave was overhead and I dove under it and came up on the other side and started swimming. The current was strong. The rip was pulling seaward and the longshore was pulling south and I was swimming northeast, against both, which was wrong, which was the wrong approach, which was the thing I teach every guard not to do -- don't fight the current, swim across it. But the boy was northeast of me and the boy was moving further northeast with every second and the geometry of the rescue said: swim to where the boy will be, not to where the boy is, and where the boy would be was further out, deeper, past the second sandbar, in the open water where the rip channel widened and the current slowed but the distance from shore was two hundred yards and two hundred yards is a long swim in calm water and an impossible swim for a fifteen-year-old boy who had never been in the ocean before."

James looked at the window. The window showed Mattison Avenue. A delivery truck passed. A woman walked a dog. The world outside the window was the world that continued, the world that had not stopped on July 19, 2016, the world that did not stop for drownings or for the people who tried to prevent drownings or for the people who failed to prevent drownings, the world that was indifferent to the water in the way the water was indifferent to the world.

"I swam for seven minutes. That's what the report says -- seven minutes from water entry to the point where I stopped swimming. Seven minutes is a long time in the water. Seven minutes is four hundred yards at rescue pace. I swam four hundred yards, following the rip, following the current, following the path the water was taking the boy. I swam past the outer sandbar. I swam into the open water. I swam to the point where the rip channel dissipated, where the current spread out and weakened, where the seaward pull became a general drift, and I looked for him."

The looking. The looking was the thing. The looking was the unbearable center of the telling, the moment when the story arrived at its destination, the way a rip current arrived at its terminus, the point beyond the outer bar where the energy dispersed and the current released whatever it had carried and the whatever was either a swimmer who could be found or a swimmer who could not be found, and the finding or the not-finding was the thing, the thing that divided the 214 saves from the two losses, the thing that separated the notebook entries that ended with "victim survived" from the entries that did not end that way.

"He was not there."

Three words. The three words that contained the loss. He was not there. Not: he had drowned. Not: he was dead. He was not there. The absence. The specific absence of a body in a place where a body should have been, the place the current had taken the body, the place the guard had swum to, the place where the mathematics of current speed and swim speed and time and distance said the body would be, and the body was not there, because the mathematics was approximate and the ocean was exact and the exactness of the ocean did not conform to the approximation of the mathematics, and the gap between the approximation and the exactness was the boy, was Tommy Raines, was the fifteen-year-old from East Orange who had entered the ocean for the first time and had walked past the shallows and into the deep for reasons James would never know and who was now in the ocean in a place the ocean had chosen, not the place the current charts predicted, not the place the rescue protocols described, but the place the water wanted him, the place the water had taken him, the specific unmarked indifferent place in the Atlantic Ocean where Tommy Raines was and James Calloway was not.

"I dove. I dove repeatedly. The water was murky -- the swell had stirred the sand, the visibility was three feet, maybe four. I dove to the bottom and I searched the bottom with my hands and I felt sand and I felt shells and I felt the cold of the deeper water and I did not feel a body. I surfaced and I dove again and I surfaced and I dove again and the diving was the searching and the searching was the not-finding and the not-finding was the failing and I could not stop failing because the boy was there, somewhere, in that water, in that current, in that depth, and I could not find him."

His hands were still on his knees. His hands were still.

"DeSilva reached me. He had swum out from the beach. He swam the same rip I had swum. He reached me and we dove together, two guards searching the bottom of the Atlantic in eight feet of water with three feet of visibility, our hands in the sand, our lungs burning, our bodies doing the thing our bodies were trained to do in conditions our bodies were not designed for, because the human body was not designed for this, was not designed to search the bottom of the ocean by touch, was not designed to hold its breath and dive and feel the sand and surface and dive and feel the sand and surface, was not designed for the repetitive futile devotion of a search that was not finding and that would not find, because the ocean had moved him, the ocean had taken him from the place where the rip had released him to another place, the longshore current had taken him south, the subsurface current had taken him down, the water had done what the water does with things in it, which is move them, rearrange them, carry them from here to there without consultation, without consent, without regard for the guard in the water who was searching here and not there, who was looking in the place the boy had been and not in the place the boy now was."

Dr. Okonkwo's pen was still. She was not writing. She was listening with her whole body, the way James listened with his whole body to the water, the attentive physical presence of a person whose attention was the tool, whose listening was the instrument, whose silence was the space into which the telling could expand.

"The Coast Guard came. The helicopter. The boat. They searched the area for four hours. They expanded the search south, along the jetty, along the rocks. I was on the beach. They made me come out of the water. DeSilva made me. He pulled my arm and I looked at him and his face was the face of a person who knew the thing I did not yet know, which was that the boy was gone. Not dead -- gone. The distinction mattered. The gone meant we didn't know, meant the search was still active, meant the hope was still operative, and the hope was the thing I held the way the drowning held the rescue can, the thing I gripped with the grip of a person who had nothing else to hold, because the boy was not in my hands, the boy had never been in my hands, the boy had been in the water and the water had been in my hands and the water had slipped through my hands because that is what water does, it slips, it moves, it goes, and the going was the loss."

He stopped. He looked at his hands. He opened them. He closed them.

"They found him the next day. A mile south. In the rocks, at the base of the jetty at Deal. The current had taken him south along the shore and the rocks had stopped him the way rocks stop everything the water carries -- absolutely, finally, without the possibility of continuation. He was in the rocks and he was dead and he had been dead since the water took him, since the moment in the rip when his swimming stopped and his breathing stopped and the stopping was the ending and the ending was the thing I did not prevent."

The room was quiet. The fern on the windowsill did not move. The light from Mattison Avenue came through the glass and fell on the desk and on Dr. Okonkwo's hands, which were folded, which were still, which were the hands of a person who held stories the way James held swimmers, with the firm gentle grip of a professional whose profession was the holding.

"You were four hundred yards from shore," Dr. Okonkwo said. "In heavy surf. In a strong rip current. You swam for seven minutes."

"Yes."

"You searched the bottom in eight feet of water with three feet of visibility."

"Yes."

"What more could you have done?"

The question she asked every year. The question that was not a question but a mirror, a surface she held up so that James could see himself in it, could see the thing he carried and the shape of the carrying and the weight of the weight. What more could you have done. The answer was nothing. The answer was always nothing. The answer was that the ocean had taken Tommy Raines with a speed and a force and an indifference that exceeded the speed and the force and the devotion of the guard who had gone after him, and the exceeding was not a failure of the guard but a fact of the water, a physical fact, a mathematical fact, and the fact was that sometimes the equation was negative, sometimes the guard's speed minus the water's speed equaled a negative number, and the negative number was the loss, and the loss was the fact, and the fact was the weight James carried.

"Nothing," he said.

"You believe that?"

"I know that."

"Then why do you carry it?"

The question she asked every year. The question he could not answer. Not would not -- could not. The words for the carrying did not exist in the language he spoke, the language of rescue and protocol and incident report and wave height and current speed. The carrying was not in that language. The carrying was in another language, the language of the body, the language of the chest where the buzzing lived, the language of the hands that had reached for a boy and had closed on water, the language of the swim back to shore when the diving was done and the searching was done and the not-finding was done and the body had to swim back through the rip and through the shore break and up onto the sand and across the beach to the stand, the stand that was still there, the stand that was always there, the stand that did not know what had happened in the water and that stood in the sun with the patience of wood and the indifference of a thing that was not alive and that therefore could not feel the thing James felt, which was the weight of a boy he had never held, a boy whose body he had never touched, a boy who existed in his memory not as a person but as an absence, a space in the water where a person had been and was not, the negative shape, the human-shaped hole in the surface of the ocean that closed the moment the body went under and that was indistinguishable from the water around it, because the ocean did not preserve the shapes of the things it took, the ocean simply closed over them, the way the ocean closed over everything, the way the surface healed, the way the water continued as if the boy had never been in it, as if the fifteen years of Tommy Raines's life had left no mark on the medium that ended them, as if the water did not remember, because the water did not remember, because the water did not forget, because remembering and forgetting were human operations and the water was not human and the not-human was the thing, the vast indifferent not-human thing, the thing that James stood between and the living, the thing that James could not defeat but only resist, could not conquer but only contest, could not beat but only meet, wave after wave, save after save, the way you meet any force that is larger than you and that will outlast you and that does not know your name.

He climbed back on the stand that day. After the Coast Guard took over the search. After DeSilva pulled him from the water. After he stood on the beach and looked at the ocean that had taken the boy and that looked back at him with the same flat gray-green indifference it had shown that morning, before the boy, before the rip, before the seven minutes of swimming and the diving and the not-finding. He climbed the stand and he sat in the chair and he put the whistle in his mouth and he scanned.

The scanning continued. The scanning always continued. The scanning was the thing that survived the loss, the thing that the loss could not stop, the thing that resumed because the thing had to resume, because the water did not stop and the swimmers did not stop and the danger did not stop and the guard's job was not contingent on the guard's grief, was not suspended by the guard's failure, was not interrupted by the fact that a boy was dead in the ocean and the guard had not saved him. The job continued. The scanning continued. The eyes moved across the surface of the water, left to right, right to left, near to far, looking for the next disturbance, the next swimmer in trouble, the next head going under, the next person the water was taking, because the water was always taking someone, was always in the process of taking someone, was always composing the next sentence that contained the word drowning, and the guard's job was to read the sentence and intervene before the sentence ended, and the intervention was the save and the save was the number and the number was the count and the count continued, 157, 158, 159, the count that followed Tommy, the count that carried Tommy, the count that included Tommy not as a save but as a weight, a density, a gravitational center around which the subsequent saves orbited, each one shaped by the loss, each one carrying the loss within it, each one a repetition of the entry into the water and the swimming toward the body and the reaching of the body, and the reaching was the thing, the reaching was the difference, the reaching that happened 214 times and that did not happen once, that did not happen on July 19, 2016, when James Calloway swam four hundred yards into the Atlantic Ocean and dove to the bottom and searched with his hands and found sand and shells and cold water and not Tommy Raines, not the boy from East Orange who had walked into the ocean for the first time and had kept walking past the shallows into the deep where the grammar changed, where the sentences became complex, where the language of the water spoke in a dialect the boy had never heard and could not understand and that said, in the flat indifferent voice of physics and current and force: you are mine now, you are in me now, you are the water now, and the water does not give back what the water takes, except to the rocks, a mile south, the next day, in the morning, when the tide is low and the current has finished its work and the boy is in the rocks at the base of the jetty at Deal, still, finally still, the stillness that is not the stillness of rest but the stillness of ending, the stillness that James carries, the stillness that James has carried for ten years, the stillness that James will carry to Trenton and beyond Trenton and beyond the career and beyond the stand and beyond the water, because the stillness is permanent, because the stillness is Tommy, because Tommy is the weight, and the weight does not lift, and the carrying does not end.

"Same time next year," Dr. Okonkwo said.

James stood. He shook her hand. He walked out of the office, down the stairs, through the lobby, into the sunlight on Mattison Avenue. He walked to his truck. He drove to the beach. He parked in the lot on Ocean Avenue. He walked across the boardwalk, down the ramp, across the sand, to Stand 4. He climbed the four steps. He settled into the chair.

He scanned.

The water was calm. Two-foot swell, light wind, green flag conditions. Swimmers in the water, families on the sand, the ordinary beautiful dangerous day at the beach where people came to play in the thing that could kill them, to stand in the thing that had killed Tommy Raines, to float in the thing that did not remember Tommy Raines, to enjoy the thing that James Calloway could not enjoy and could not leave and could not stop watching, because the watching was the job and the job was the penance and the penance was the love and the love was the water and the water was everything, everything, the whole of it, the thing that gave and the thing that took and the thing that did not know the difference because the water was the water and the water did not know.