The Survivors

by Alex Schulman

  He walked down to the water. The old fishing boats that had been renovated into housing for eccentrics. He kept going along the waterfront, passing the white passenger ferries docked along the quay. The restaurants advertising “catch of the day” and hoping to lure in the tourists who had no idea that nothing grew in this water, no fish lived here, because the sea was dead. The people around him were dressed for summer, but the weather had an April chill, flimsy collars turned up, goose bumps on bare arms. He had walked here a lot recently. Through the park to the pier and back up. He was taking walks more frequently; sometimes they were hours long. In the winter he might be so cold by the time he got back that he was numb; he would try to unlock the door but couldn’t do it, and he stood there, fascinated, staring at his hand, how it couldn’t hold the key, turn it in the lock. He often walked through the city without a destination in mind, through cemeteries and down into subway stations, riding to the next station and walking on. He had decided to put the accident behind him, but it didn’t work out as he’d expected. His thoughts kept moving in that direction anyway. Each time he heard a loud noise, saw a bright light, any sort of disruption he wasn’t prepared for, he was there again, in the transformer room. It still happened several times a day. Unexpected sudden sights cast him right back there. Or heat, when he opened the oven and bent down to see if the food was ready and the wave of hot air hit him. He would suddenly start sobbing. Sudden noises. Not just clear reports, like when teenagers were playing with firecrackers in the subway. The scrape of a chair when someone stood up in an empty restaurant. The sound of knives and forks being roughly sorted into a silverware drawer. He couldn’t be in a bathroom when someone was drawing a bath. The noise of downtown was worst of all, especially when it was raining, because somehow the drumming rain enhanced the noise, even cars that were crawling along seemed to roar by and that sound lived on inside him, like a never-ending, thunderous circle. The only thing that was worse than sudden noises was sudden silence, because then the familiar realization returned, that if sound disappears then so does the world, and the quieter it got, the greater the feeling that he had lost contact with reality. He had long dreamed of finding the perfect silence, one with distant sounds. Lying in the bedroom and hearing a radio coming from the kitchen. Sitting in an empty restaurant with roadworks outside, watching the men work, the sound muffled by the large glass panes. He’d spent a lot of time thinking about that in the past, but now he had stopped doing that as well. He had slowly stopped caring about his own discomfort. He recalls the first time that feeling trickled through him. He was in the kitchen and suddenly smelled fire, and began to search the apartment. He went through the living room, following the odor of burnt electricity, caught sight of the electrical panel in the hall and noticed white smoke creeping through the cracks. He opened the box and found that it was burning inside. A very small fire, a cautious flame in the surface behind the fuses. He ran to the kitchen and filled a bucket with water, dashed back, and just as he was about to toss the water onto the fire he recalled something he’d learned in school, that water conducts electricity. And he recalled stories of people who dropped hair dryers in the bathtub and were fried. Maybe it would be a disaster to use water? He tried to blow out the fire, but that only made it burn stronger, he stood with the water in hand, helpless—until he exhaled, three seconds of complete calm, and poured out the water, full of certainty: it doesn’t matter.

  Nothing happened: the fire went out, the safeties flipped one by one, like popcorn. The next day, an electrician came to fix the box, all the dangerous electricity disappeared, but from that day on the feeling remained inside him: it didn’t matter.

  It wasn’t that he had made a decision. He hadn’t even formulated the thought in his mind; that was never it. Maybe it was like every other difficult thought: he pushed it away, preferring to make his brain empty to filling it with things he didn’t know how to handle. He had been here at the pier many times before, to look out at the bay for a while before turning homeward again. He doesn’t know what made this time any different from the others. He went to the edge and stood there for a moment. Gazed down at the water, saw the seaweed resting like a membrane over the enormous anchor cables. Eight inches of visibility, then it was black. He took off his clothes and placed them in a pile, the eyes of passersby lingering on him and moving on. And then he jumped in. There was no plan, no fine detail. He just decided to swim straight out for as long as he could, until he was sapped of energy. And he left the pier with its small-scale boat traffic, swam out into the open water. There was no breeze and the water was smooth as a mirror, but waves came in from the sea, full-bodied, the sea moved up and down around him, and he went with it, he was small and insignificant in the pitching waters, as if the sea hadn’t yet decided what to do with him. The water grew colder as he went, and his strokes grew shorter. But he was a strong swimmer. His parents had sent him off to swim camp one summer. Everyone had known each other; he knew no one. The other kids were older than him. They had to swim in a line, he was slower than everyone else, when someone came up behind him a whistle sounded from the edge of the pool. “Give way!” And, panting, he grabbed the yellow lane marker, let someone pass. Later, in the showers, the smell of chlorine and his fingers wrinkled and the small puddles of water on the floor, gleaming in the fluorescent light, and the older boys running around and whipping each other with their towels and shouting, their voices echoing off the tile walls. They slept in a gym. The others had sleeping bags and sleeping mats, but Mom and Dad had forgotten to pack his. The swimming instructor let him borrow a blanket, and they unfolded the high-jump mat for him. The other kids started calling him “the king” because he lay there so majestically, up above everyone else. He cried silently for his parents when he was supposed to be sleeping. Gazed up at the ceiling, tracing the balance beams and the rings and the wall bars with his eyes. The last day was for theory. The swimming instructor gathered the wet children, lined them up at the edge of the pool, blew his whistle the second the kids got rowdy. He talked about what to do if you fell into cold water. And he stood at a blackboard, roaring so loud it sounded like a dog barking: “Orient yourself ! Where are you going? Orient yourself ! Where are you going? Orient yourself ! Where are you going?”

  Benjamin knew where he was going. He was going to the open sea, and it didn’t matter what happened after that. He left the small islets behind, the sounds of the city were gone now, all he could hear was his own breathing and his hands scooping into the surface of the water.

  A roar passed over the world, and when it ended there came a few seconds of silence. And then it happened again, a heartstopping rumble, a thunderclap and a siren all at once, and the sound drilled right through him, he could feel it in the water, as if it came from the sea. And he turned around and saw the gigantic passenger ferry passing him, just fifteen yards away. The horn sounded a third time, and Benjamin’s entire body was paralyzed for a second, the sound passed through flesh and bone, and he was back at the substation, hearing the explosion again and again, he felt Molly spasm in his arm, and he kept a firm hold on her, and the room turned blue and he felt the pressure at his back, and he thought that now he knew, now he knew how it feels to be blown to pieces. And then everything went black. And when he woke up, he did so with fire in his back.

  Orient yourself ! Where are you going?

  Where are my brothers?

  And he crawled over to Molly.

  When the ferry horn sounded a fourth time, Benjamin screamed aloud, he heard his own gasps, he kept swimming. He swam straight out, the sea suddenly harsher, a breeze on his cold head. Then he saw them, two tiny heads in the water in front of him. He knew them immediately, he would recognize his brothers from half a mile away. He swam up beside them, saw Pierre concentrating, his head not far above the surface, looking at the little buoy farther off, bobbing in the water. “There’s the buoy!” he called to Nils. “We’re almost hal
fway!”

  Pierre’s eyes darted up to Benjamin’s. “I’m scared,” he said.

  “Me too,” Benjamin replied.

  Nils was a ways ahead, Benjamin could see his head tilted back to keep water out of his mouth.

  “Nils,” said Benjamin. He didn’t react, just kept swimming with his eyes on the sky. Benjamin caught up to his older brother, they breathed hard in each other’s faces. They stopped in the water, the three boys. The sea was quiet, waiting.

  “Your lips are blue,” Benjamin said to Pierre.

  “Yours too,” said Pierre.

  They grinned. He looked at Nils, his gentle smile. The boys put their arms around each other, holding each other up in the water, and they pressed closer, warming each other’s faces with their breath. They gazed into each other’s eyes and he wasn’t afraid anymore.

  “I have to go now,” said Benjamin. Nils nodded.

  Pierre didn’t want to let go. Benjamin placed a hand on his brother’s cheek, he smiled at him, and then he pulled loose from his brothers and turned around again, facing the open sea, the cold on his legs biting and moving up to his thighs, his fatigue, he wasn’t out of breath, just exhausted, he felt pinpricks in his shoulders and arms, and the water got closer and the waves, which had been big but friendly before, changed character, the sea leaned into him so powerfully that he gasped, and with that inhalation the sea poured inside of him, filled his stomach and airways and lungs, and in the seconds before he lost consciousness he stopped being anxious too, because he knew that at last, he could let go of the reality he’d been clinging to for so many years. He tumbled below the surface, limp and free, and when his heart stopped it was neither light nor dark, there was no glow at the end of any tunnel.

  There was a gravel road.

  | 22 |

  2:00 A.M.

  He tells his brothers that he’s just going to use the bathroom, that he’ll see them tomorrow. Pierre and Nils are bent double for a moment in Mom’s hall, tying their shoelaces, and then they pile their mementos of Mom in their arms and stagger out into the dark stairwell. Benjamin watches them move toward the elevator, then closes the door. He really does use the bathroom, not because he needs to, but to mitigate his lie. He sees Mom’s toiletries in the wide-open bathroom cabinet. Hand cream. A stuck piece of soap that has become one with the porcelain. A toothbrush, well used, almost brutalized. Traces of vomit in the sink. On the edge of the bathtub is the bottle of Chanel perfume, the one she bought herself years ago and worshipped so much that she never used it. Three lightbulbs over the sink, only one works. He stares at his reflection. He never looks in the mirror any more than is necessary, never makes eye contact with himself, always gazes past himself, at his chin or his nose, but now he lets his gaze linger. He sees his prominent mouth, his wide forehead. He remembers the time his dad jokingly said, “It’s easy to imagine what you’d look like as a skull.” When he was little, he was fascinated with his appearance. Stood at mirrors, entranced somehow. Once when he was home alone as a kid, he stood in front of the hall mirror and stared at himself for so long that eventually he was convinced he was looking at someone else. He wasn’t frightened, he went back and tried again a number of times, but the moment never returned. Once, at the cottage, he sat on the kitchen floor with his legs outstretched on the rug, and he gazed at his lower body and suddenly felt like it wasn’t his own. Those were someone else’s legs, everything below his waist was just dead flesh that didn’t belong to him. It was so real that he couldn’t move. He reached for a piece of wood from the basket next to the kitchen stove and smacked himself on the thighs and feet, to feel something, take back the body parts that belonged to him.

  He looks at himself in the mirror.

  Tries to imagine what he would look like as a skull.

  He goes to the living room and looks around the apartment, which is a mess after the three brothers’ search for mementos to take with them. Photo albums open on the floor, cabinet doors agape in the kitchen, pictures taken down from the wall. It looks like a bunch of burglars have been here. He goes to the bedroom and sees the unmade bed, sheets still twisted from Mom’s final bout with insomnia. He undresses, pauses for a moment, and then lies down in the bed. He doesn’t want to go home. He wants to sleep here, in his mother’s bed. An ashtray on the nightstand, cigarette butts at the bottom, and through them a line of stubbed, half-smoked cigarettes. The ashtray looks like a mohawk, a memory of Mom’s last weeks, when she didn’t even have the strength to smoke anymore.

  He unfolds Mom’s letter. In the faint glow of the bedside lamp, he reads it again. He hears his mother’s voice, the one he knew so well, the one in which he could sense the tiniest detail, catch nuances even she wasn’t aware of. He reads and pauses as he knows Mom would have done. He absorbs the text carefully, slowly, as if he won’t ever see the letter again and has to memorize it. Then he places the letter on his chest. He turns out the light. He’s four years old, in a bedroom he doesn’t remember, on a bed he doesn’t recognize. Mom pulls up his pajama top and tickles his belly, she says she’s an ant and her middle and index fingers wander across his stomach, and Benjamin chokes with laughter, and Mom says here comes another ant, and now both hands are trailing across his stomach, and Benjamin twists and turns and kicks his legs wildly, accidentally hitting Mom in the head. She takes a few steps back, her hand to her forehead, muttering something to herself. Benjamin sits up on the edge of the bed. He says, Sorry, sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean to. She says it’s no big deal, still holding her hand to her head. She comes toward him, sees that he’s crying, and hugs him, holding him: “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m fine.”

  Benjamin turns over in the bed. It’s finally dark out, finally nighttime in the summer. He takes out his phone and calls Pierre. It rings for a long time before Pierre picks up. He can tell right away that Pierre’s not himself, his voice is thick, congealed.

  “Things are spinning,” his brother says.

  Pierre has just gotten into bed, he took some of the sleeping pills. He couldn’t fall asleep and spotted the pack and thought he might as well.

  “How many did you take?” Benjamin asks.

  “One,” he rushes to say, and then he adds, sounding uncertain and a little sly: “Maybe, maybe I did take two after all.”

  Pierre puts down the phone, the line crackles, Benjamin hears his slow footsteps across the floor, he picks something up and comes back.

  “Two!” he cries. “I’ve got the pack here. I took two, and then I decided to have a competition with myself, to see how long I can stay awake.”

  He starts to giggle.

  “It was going pretty well, but now…” He sighs, suddenly downtrodden. “Now I’m spinning.”

  Benjamin listens to a confused babbling through the phone, and then it stops, and all he can hear is Pierre breathing.

  “Hello,” says Benjamin. “Are you still there?”

  “What the hell kind of lamp is this?” Pierre says. He’s quiet for a few seconds. “How the hell do you turn it off ?”

  They end the call, and the phone screen emits its pale light into the room for a moment; then it goes out and the room is black. He tries to follow his therapist’s advice for when he can’t sleep. Take in a thought, observe it, and then get rid of it. Take in the next thought, observe it, and get rid of that one too. But it’s that last step he can’t manage, the first thought bumps into the second, and he drills down deeper into his associations, forgets the task at hand, and has to start over. He picks up his phone again, dials Nils’s number. Nils answers as he always does, formally, by stating his last name.

  “Did I wake you up?” Benjamin asks.

  “No,” Nils replies. “I’m in bed. Just about to turn out the lights.” Benjamin can hear classical music playing faintly in the background.

  “I read Mom’s letter again,” Benjamin says.

 
“Yeah,” Nils says quietly. “It’s so messed up…”

  “What is?”

  “That she couldn’t say all of that while she was alive.”

  “I know.”

  Nils sounds so calm. So thoroughly grounded in what has just happened. Benjamin has always had the sense that Nils came through childhood okay because he never let it in. On occasion he has even wondered whether Nils may actually be happy. It seems like he is, now and then, on those rare occasions when they meet. But in unguarded moments, when his brother is refilling his coffee at the counter or standing by a window and gazing out, Benjamin can see sorrow glowing in Nils’s eyes like a tiny phosphorescent flame.

  “Can I ask you something?” Benjamin says.

  “What?”

  “The day you graduated high school, remember that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The morning after, you left for Central America. You were supposed to leave early in the morning. Do you remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was lying there in bed, listening to the sounds outside my door, I heard you leave. Why didn’t you come in and say good-bye?”

  “I wasn’t allowed.”

  “Wasn’t allowed?”

  “Mom and Dad said you were sick. That we shouldn’t bother you.”

  Neither of them speaks. The brothers’ breathing, the quiet music in the background.

  “See you tomorrow, Benjamin.”

  “It’s already tomorrow.”

  “It’s going to be okay.”

  “Yeah.”