We Became Worse

Jack Allison had gone swimming before. He remembers what it felt like, going to that giant public pool for the first time at age 5. He remembers wanting to copy the older kids. Those six and seven-year-olds who would float on their backs, their SPF 30-coated bellies reflecting and absorbing the sun’s deadly rays as they bobbed on top of the water. The memory is pleasant. The memory is vivid —all because it must. Because much like an airbag, when faced with catastrophe, the body has its own ways of reducing harm. And also much like an airbag, the body’s harm reduction isn’t always effective. Thus a voice breaks through, comes down and over five-year-old Jack on his back in the pool. He hears it as if from a loudspeaker screwed into the center of the sky. The Voice sounds funny, foreign, Australian: “....Alroight’...here we go….Quoite’ a big fella’…” Five-year-old Jack doesn’t know this voice but Jack-the-adult does, and thus five-year-old Jack is no more. It is Jack Allison the adult, on his back in the pool now and just as suddenly as this new body arrives, Jack remembers drowning. The horrid sensation of it attached to the serene memory of a carefree day in the pool, like an unexpected storm on a clear afternoon. The sky darkens and he remembers the water filling him and so it does: his mouth, his throat, his nose —burning. His eyes open despite the sharp pain of the chlorine —wide, yet seeing nothing. Jack thrashes, tries to bring his hands up to swim to the surface but finds them bound somehow. He tries to scream and succeeds. But what results is not what the rational part of his brain expects. No bubbles rise to the surface, no water—no matter how futilely—expels from his throat. Instead the scream passes through air as screams ought to, though this one sounds muted and distorted, no doubt a direct cause of the makeshift gag he now finds in his throat. Given that he can breathe and scream, and no longer feels the weight of water around him. Jack knows he’s not in a pool. He’s in darkness but he can tell