Drown
BY JUAN CARLOS REYES
My first mistake that night was to drive into the Holland Tunnel the wrong way.
10:34pm should have made me think twice about that right turn. Not the time, per se, just the general lateness, how over-eager I was, how the steady traffic of trucks along the waterfront crossing the river to hit the interstate for a day’s drive before sunrise made for the kind of barrier even a planet couldn’t flip off.
Not a hundred feet from us, maybe not even fifty, an oncoming truck blared its horn when it saw me. Its headlights gawking at us, its cab might as well have been a sun aiming right for us, and I hit the brakes. Hard. Full stop. And then I shifted into reverse faster than someone’s guts after a shot too much of whiskey.
It’s true what they say. You notice everything the moment you near dying. We’d just crossed the threshold into the tunnel. The tone after the first few wall lights went from warm to cold. The double white lines looked like a fresh coat of paint. And the plumbing pipes running along opposing corners the length of the tunnel into Tribeca just seemed off. Not just that the copper pipes weren’t even straight anymore or the U-bolts that pinned them to the ceiling seemed like they’d started to sag, but also like someone had pinned them differently to their situations. One interconnected series of pipes looked like it hung inches further from its wall than the interconnected series of pipes along the opposite wall. I know it might be stupid to think about all that, to think you remember all that, to think it matters to consider it now, but attention to that much detail makes you pause. Detail overdrive in one place and like you run out of headspace to consider the details in some other place.
Reversing, I pulled the steering wheel hard right, so much so that my left hand slipped, so much so that I had to swing hard back left to keep from crashing into or grazing the stone wall. I was lucky, we were lucky, there was a shoulder outside the mouth of the tunnel to just sit on and keep my foot off the pedal.
That truck, though. Its honking like a bomb. The blast almost stopped my heart. Weird, though, too, that I felt like a hero right after feeling like a fool, saving us after almost killing us. Both feelings, I’d say, are as lies as lies get.
But let’s rewind a minute. Because it’s not like I wasn’t paying any attention.
Selena and I had been on a date. Her skin and collar and hips and chest, you notice all these things at seventeen. We’d touched each other all over our bodies in the movie theatre. We’d held hands walking out. We’d kissed, too, after dinner at the cheap Mediterranean place in the mall, and she’d taken her shoes off to touch toes under the table. I wore sandals because it was almost summer and my feet get so sweaty in shoes starting in, like, May, and I didn’t want to go sloshing around everywhere while she looked good looking that good.
And what else are we going do after all that but drive, and maybe too long, too, cruising past red lights and stop signs, under streetlamps so bright that we might as well have been interrogated by police with the wheels rolling. We even coasted along downtown’s emptied buildings, through the strip of upscale hotels between downtown and the interstate, and I know what you’re thinking, but we were kids. She was smart and horny, and I was smart and horny, and seventeen is, in the end, just seventeen, and so we started playing with each other just driving around. My free hand where she let it go, her busy hand where I needed it to go, and that’s all we were doing, pieces of us heating up and flaring big and just plain old wet in the most beautiful of ways.
And, sure, I was distracted, and maybe I wasn’t paying any real attention, but, yeah, I wasn’t giving the road all my attention, and at that right turn, I didn’t notice the No Right Turn sign, and right then, she pulled my hand somehow further into her and then squeezed my thigh, and she even rotated my fingertips in the thick of it, and I pressed in and up and high, and, yes, I turned to read the expression on her face. In her eyes. To see what we’d managed to do together in the dark.
And then just as soon as all that, nothing in front of us but bright and brightening lights shook me all kinds of loose. Something like an eternal horn blast. The oncoming truck and its churning engine wailing to keep from derailing everything. Us. It. The tunnel’s exit mouth.
But let’s rewind a minute, because it’s not like that night hadn’t been building up in my head for a while.
Selena and I had known each other a long time, since first day first year of high school, the teacher taking attendance and us two one after the other on the roll, and when I didn’t initially answer to my name—I hadn’t even heard it—she intuitively elbowed me from her desk across the aisle to ask if it’d been me, and I answered in a daze, What, and then she said, I said is the teacher calling your name, What do you mean, Is your name stupid or is your name Hector, It’s Hector, Then stop being stupid and raise your hand Hector. She straight up air-quoted “stupid” like she’d intended a capital S, some actual name against all will and reason.
As far as I could tell, we’d hooked up with enough people over the four years that followed, and she had one serious relationship in that time, which I was never been able to tell when it started, and I had one serious relationship in that time, too, a relationship that ended in ways I can’t even pinpoint. It just happened. I started calling that old girlfriend less, she started calling me less, and then I saw her kiss somebody else on the lips in the cafeteria as we all left lunch, and later on that same day, some senior pulled me into the girls’ locker room to tell me that she’d heard all about our breakup, something even I hadn’t heard about yet, and then she told me that our bodies could do the rest of the talking on a bench there.
So, yeah, I finally asked Selena out our last year in school. Last month of the last semester. June can be a great time to ask somebody out. If it doesn’t work out, hey, no worries, I’ve got college or work and they’ve got college or work, and everybody’s busy. If it doesn’t not work out, then you spend the days counting the minutes in which you fear the other person might let you down or you might let the other person down, and every day it gets warmer. Every day the temperature messes with your head. Not to mention, I was the oldest child in a family living in an apartment where somehow everybody was always so busy. Mom with work. Dad with work. Younger sister working to save money for her camping trip. Little brother working to save money to travel with his soccer club. If there’s one thing immigrants don’t mind it’s putting their noses down and fearlessly driving into too much work, and, eventually, you realize you’ve been no role model at all—like at all, or at least not like them. Nobody ever looked to me for advice, and nobody ever looked to me for help, and I might as well have accidentally made a wrong turn the wrong way into the Holland tunnel because surviving meant, at least, I’d have a story to tell, something like, If I have any advice for you it’s that you shouldn’t be getting hot heavy with a date in the car while you’re driving around town, or something like, At least wait until you’re parked somewhere.
When I asked Selena out, at first she hesitated. I didn’t take it personally because it made sense. Because why would anyone say Yes right away when your on-and-off lab partner of a few years in high school asks you out. Really, all we’d done together is dissect a frog, observed amoeba under a microscope, made printing errors with our analysis reports, paid too much money for a tri-fold cardboard, and repeat the cycle, and we weren’t even in the same room writing the reports we submitted. Digital life. It’s valuable for precisely what it should be valued for. Attraction at a distance.
Anyway, hesitating was likely the only thing she could have done. Eventually, though, right there after a moment of silence, she said some kind of yes. She said, Let me think about it, and after school, in the parking lot, we passed each other outside on the sidewalk, and she said some other version of yes. She said, Sure, and then she said, I trust you as far as I could shove you but okay.
I nodded. I said, Okay, like I wasn’t sure if the sun had risen on something or if the day had just set on something worse.
Just don’t make it boring, she said.
Outside the Holland Tunnel, I tore my hands off the steering wheel. I don’t know that I could have told anyone then what happens to your brain when it’s toggling between fainting and screaming and can’t decide on either, but I can point, now, to the kind of situation where it’s likely to happen.
I pressed my hands into my chest and brought them to my neck. My fingertips like they wanted a pulse. Like they wanted to scrape bone or just hold blood. When Selena finally grabbed my right hand, she almost crushed it. She probably just wanted to measure her racing heart against mine to test whether the adage had always been true. That people sharing a near-death experience share more than just the memory of it. Their bodies, too, overlap in this symbolic space between panic and desire.
She grazed the stubble under my chin. Her touch loosening something inside me. I wanted to say something like Sorry, but I shut my mouth because I found myself inching closer to a space between I can explain this and It wasn’t my fault. Even in that moment, I couldn’t stand myself for the impulse to not just apologize, so I just nodded like I wasn’t absolutely clueless about what came next. Moving meant certainty and starting the engine again could skip over the beats I didn’t know how to keep, so I turned the key in the ignition.
Selena asked me what I thought I was doing when I grabbed the back of her headrest, and I said, Getting into a k-turn and getting the hell out of here, and she said, Wait, and I said, For what, and she said, Just take a breath, and I said, I’m good I just want to go, and just then a police officer flashed his lights as he pulled up behind us.
I caught her eyes turning from the back window back to me.
I wanted to argue in that moment. I wanted to slap the steering wheel. I wanted to lean my face into the dashboard lights to make sure nothing was wrong with the car, but all I said was, Dude sure likes riding another car’s ass, which did nothing to help me calm down.
The cop had stopped ten feet closer than I wished he would have. The cop got out of the car a lot faster and smoother than I wished he would have.
I reached for Selena’s hand, but instead of clasping my hand back, she just patted it. This, like, polite tap-tap I didn’t know what to make of. It was the kind of tap-tap my mother gives my father when he does something capital-S stupid, so I pretended like Selena had done anything but that. I pretended in my head that she’d instead hooked her arm into mine and then that she’d started massaging my shoulder and then that she’d accepted to mutually curl her fingers into mine, and all this to pretend to drown, even if for only a second, in the comfort of a touch that could help me forget about the possibility of a ticket, of a DUI, of an arrest, of a beating.
The tunnel regurgitated one car at a time at such a clip it was anybody’s guess if the world ever slept. As the officer approached my window, I switched from high beams to low, without a clue as to how they got from low to high in the first place and without a clue as to why I didn’t just shut the lights off entirely. It was like my wrists were too fragile to make that last turn on the tab even happen. Like my hands went stuck in this impossibly catastrophic freeze.
Selena lowered her window and then reached over to lower mine, this freeze in the absence of knowing how to center myself in the right now. She even reached for my wallet in my pocket and for the insurance card in the glove compartment, and I said, Okay, like I’d given her permission to dress my body before it went in a coffin.
In the end, too, who else would I have given that permission to. This girl who enjoyed 12th grade pre-calc enough to tutor me and eventually let me copy the homework. This girl who could synthesize stuff from AP History and AP Bio and contemplate thoughts about trouble, about the world, about the trouble the world was in, not to mention intersectional things that make for less trouble and even better solutions. And then there was me—too hung up sometimes on the difference between “solve for x” and “explain your answer,” between the state of the world and the state of a world’s lies, and I was still too afraid to make anything personal and, worse, to steady my field of vision long enough to understand some of the things right in front of me.
In any case, I took a deep breath. Before the officer arrived to my window, I said, I drove the wrong way into interstate traffic and almost killed us and it was almost an accident and I just wasn’t paying attention God I wasn’t any paying attention, and saying it felt like I’d wanted somebody else to say it all for me when the time came. I said it all like I didn’t know if I’d meant it as a question or an affirmation. Like I didn’t know how to trust what I knew and didn’t.
Yes, she said, Say all of that.
Except the part about you not paying any attention, she added, Omit that part.
The police officer tapped his flashlight on the side view mirror. He shone his flashlight on my lap. He leaned down and asked for my documentation, and at first I froze because who the hell carries a passport when they aren’t flying, and then he poked the light beam onto Selena’s lap and then he smirked as he told us to wait while he checked our details back in his car.
Goddamn fields of vision. I hadn’t even noticed Selena give him all the papers. All I could notice was how he eyed her like a bear spotting an RV full of food.
I looked at Selena and she pursed her lips so tight that her nostrils almost flared into balloons. She didn’t take any breaths that weren’t worth wasting, and she seemed to be inhaling at such a steady clip, she sat there defining necessary cool in ways most of us couldn’t have even imitated. I reached for and pulled the hem of her skirt back to her knees, but she immediately slapped my hand away, and then she told me to glue my fingers to the steering wheel before Mr. Peeping Tom came back, And certainly before I lose my taste for anything but the sight of my own house tonight.
When he returned, the officer asked us where we thought we were going with such shit poor directions. His pregnant pause after the question like a dare. Like even if I’d tried answering, not a word could have satisfied him. He asked us why nobody likes to face the right way anymore. You people, he said, like he’d had too much practice generalizing the idea of youth and the idea of strangers. He even went on to ask why people were always looking to go places they didn’t understand, and he kept on like that, waxing some kind of pigsty poetics that, whether it made sense to anyone or not, certainly re-molded that moment to suit his own image. And then he stood tall again, peered both ways down the road like he didn’t care for an answer or even if I’d given one at all, like even if I’d tried, it would have been an extended wasted time in more ways than one. And then he smacked his lips and leaned back into the open window, I’m letting you off with a warning, he said. So park somewhere else off the road to do whatever it is you people do, he added, cocking a nod at Selena again, where he let his eyes linger for longer than I thought men were supposed to let that happen.
What a feeling that was. The anxiety that you couldn’t do shit in the breath of a bigger man with a gun and disenchanted cologne. The kind of feeling that made you feel horrible for being someone who wanted something, who wanted the same thing as that other kind of man who could turn wanting into an active crime scene—and even worse for being someone who somebody else wanted badly enough to risk putting the whole world on notice for it, wanted something with a bad kind of wanting that cut their heart open ready to tear something out of you just to get it. Even after the officer walked away, I couldn’t shake my hands loose of the feeling enough to move the car. The man’s utility belt with all its angles and jutting handles swaying. The leather and the clips. The holster and his handcuffs. All of it shaking like he wanted to be seen.
The tunnel regurgitated one car at a time at such a clip it was anybody’s guess if the world ever hesitated long enough to catch its breath. Tires rolling. Cars whirring. The officer deciding to shout into all of that to tell us to follow him out. I barely heard him, and then his roof lights went on. The red and blue spun. His siren wailed twice. It halted the next car out of the tunnel, and my shoulders tightened like an insecure machine. Selena, again, took her wherewithal to grab the stick and shift us into movement. Are we okay, she said, Are you, I said, Stop pretending like we’re going to be in this long enough for you to know the half of it, she said, firmly, without hesitation, into that threshold between disaster and tomorrow. She went on, too, after I’d started driving, talking low but clearly, securely, about aggression, about manners, about the things in people’s eyes that people, And by people I mean men, she said, think that they’re always so good at but are always so terrible at hiding.
We drove around a lot after that. Through the edge of Jersey City. The awkward traffic triangles and the acute turns. Through Hoboken. The abrupt pavement changes and the acute turns. Sticking to speed limits. Slow around double-parked cars. Coming up to road signs and lights at an easy pace to keep from making the tires squeal, and maybe I thought we both wanted to be alone, together-alone, in that part of the night where things feel still but aren’t, well after 11pm, where staying alert means thinking to yourself to keep your eyes open.
We eventually found a spot by a shuttered seafood restaurant and a burnt-down bank, both on a gravel jetty along the Hudson overlooking the city and with a lot between the buildings that was just dirt and grass.
I thought for a minute that maybe Selena stayed quiet because she wanted to ask me to take her home, to just drop her off somewhere. Instead, she lowered her window all the way, and I lowered mine all the way, and along the river, water splashed against the rocks and the moss. Even in supposed silence, there was a comforting lack of it, and maybe it was me who’d wanted to take us home. Her back to her parents and me back to mine. She asked me if I was feeling okay. I said I was. I asked her the same question. She fired back the same answer.
I remembered the time when we were in lab alone once, and she’d wanted me to teach her how to dance. She didn’t like to, but did it when she had to, and it was going to be her cousin’s birthday that weekend, and she hated to move in those kinds of ways, as much as she hated to not know how to do it, so every family party seemed like a compromise between smiling through condescension and faking it to avoid being patronized, and so she’d said to me, Just brush me up on the stuff because I’m not here to pretend I enjoy the intimacy of the stuff.
So I tried, more than happy to do it, really. We pushed our stools aside in the empty classroom. I held my hand out and she grabbed it, and when we started moving together, she imitated my basics steps. That’s all we ever got to that day. The easy stuff. I warned her about the steps I didn’t know. I held her waist and elevated her arm. I told her I could teach her about different positions. I could teach her strength. I told her that learning didn’t so much mean attention as it meant pattern. But I was nobody to be teaching either, really, least of all teaching somebody who could have taught me everything I needed to know about patience and tension, lies and the questions that didn’t need asking.
Her body moved that day with a certain toughness, a sturdiness, that radiated from her rib cage like an electrical pulse. A centeredness that always seemed to lead even when she didn’t mean to. Her knees, too, bent with a strictness that gave her ankles and calves definition. She moved, essentially, like she did at every track and field warmup. As if every stretch mattered, every stride an actual attempt to win, every flex meaningless if not for winning. She carried discipline at seventeen like a soldier, and when I nudged her close, she held firm to a form that kept her distance, her elbows steady, bending only so much.
In the gravel lot, too, she kept her hands clasped on her lap, her head leaning on the doorframe and her ankles crossed. I kept the battery running and turned the radio on low. I didn’t lean my chair back, so I simply hugged myself, the soft breeze not cool enough to make me uncomfortable, just cool enough to remind me, especially vital in the context of the night, that I’d had a body that shook in the face of anxiety and attraction, conversation and silence, I want to go home but not yet, she said, Absolutely, I said, That shit wasn’t anybody’s fault, It was my fault, Don’t do that, What am I doing, Pretending like I need you to be some kind of hero.
Commercials on a radio station compel the worst kinds of silences, too, amping you into a kind of energy that expects something, that expects to build into something, even if that something is the kind of feeling that refuses something outright with a kind of aggressive no, Just don’t apologize please, Yeah, Let’s just sit here and with some better music please.
She reached over and changed the station, putting us through a stream of jumbled sounds, of hard beats and then no beats and then pop songs and then jazz and then DJ chatter and then commercials and more commercials. When she stopped at the folk music station, nylon string guitars and the cajóns and the harmonies, the gravity of the humming engine pulled me into a different kind of attention, and she said, I don’t want to talk about the cop okay, and I said, Yeah yeah of course, but not like I’d meant it, only like I’d wanted to mean it. Like I’d wanted to hide precisely how much I’d expected to be in that headspace with her, readying myself for it since we parked, steadying myself to hear her scream, maybe, to hear her cry, maybe.
But she didn’t. She just gazed out onto the water, sighed occasionally through the open window, pointed out some lights across the river, The flickering like its own kind of statement, she said, Like nothing here or anywhere ever knows how to stop thinking and moving and feeling and so it all just keeps moving because it’s better than stopping.
I didn’t want to pretend then, like I don’t want to pretend now, that I knew how to pass the time. Before she told me to take her home, she changed the music station a few more times, and she changed the position of her hands even more, and she said things like, I’ve never seen anyone drive with barely their fingers on the wheel like that, and, I don’t think I realized before tonight how almost nothing changes between one town and the next out here, and, Who knows who we’re going to be a year from now, and my responses didn’t vary much, from, Yeah, and, I know, and, I can’t imagine, the empty stuff, the stuff that can come out of your mouth and help you float on a silence to keep you from drowning in it.
