Nick Lantz

1. Josef Mengele Drowns While Swimming at a Beach in Brazil, 1979 His name then: Wolfgang Gerhard. How easy, slipping on another man’s skin. Another country, too, its sun’s heat and light as insistent as a pair of forceps. His pants, left crumpled on the beach, forged papers and a few hard candies in the pocket. Where the water was shallow, he could look down and see his shadow passing over the pale sand, a wobbly twin, matching him stroke for stroke for stroke. 2. Li Po Drowns Trying to Embrace the Reflection of the Moon in the Yangtze, 762 The moon is no drinker of wine, so I must compensate. Surely you’ve heard the crows and nightingales egging me on? The day has dispersed from the courtyards like a gang of sparrows, and nothing is left of the world that is not pecked-over, hard and dark as the dream of an apple seed. The young men laugh at an old man drinking alone, but here are my companions: my shadow, as loyal and thin as a starved dog, and the moon, his whole face wrinkling with laughter. 3. Bob, the Circus Seal, Drowns Himself in His Tank in Galveston, 1911 By then his teeth had rotted out, and he often turned to his owner with his mouth open as if about to speak, a ruined smell jetting from inside. He had already attempted it, three days before, but his owner dove in and pulled him up onto the slimy planks. His circus show days were long gone. Sure, some afternoons a kid might walk by and see the scabby painting on the side of the building: the hoop, the pedestal, the ghost of a man in a top hat, the striped ball now like a clot of pus streaked with blood, hovering over the sleek, dark head. 4. Natalie Wood Drowns under Mysterious Circumstances near Santa Catalina Island, 1981 Let me tell you: death is a long silk glove dropped to the floor. It doesn’t remember the heft of the arm, the fingers dancing. That limb is gone, and nothing will hold its shape again. You twirl your pastel skirt. You watch two cars race toward the cliff, and there is nothing you can do. So many lives you’ve entered like a room: swooned, held the prop pistol to your own face, sang for the back row. But was it your voice? What was that name you were born into? Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko? What happened to her? Was she the one taken, her family butchered, living another life among the enemy people? Was it the morning? when she stopped scanning the horizon for rescuers that she turned into you? 5. Hippasus of Metapontum Is Drowned at Sea for the Heresy of Discovering Irrational Numbers, ca. 500 BCE His fellow Pythagoreans had already built a shrine to his memory and placed it where he passed by every day, but he did not take the hint. It was on the ship that they seized him. God was an integer, firm as an unripe apricot. But weren’t there streets in the city that wound forever into the minute darkness? Weren’t there dreams where he met himself again and again, without ever seeming to wake? The sea is incommensurable. Each lungful of air kept dividing itself, even as the boat became a decimal point on the far horizon. 6. Bennie Wint, 20 Years after Faking His Drowning Death, is Discovered Alive, 2009 In the first years after I disappeared, I read every report of drowning: children, mostly boys, mostly in their bathtubs, mostly accidents. Old men whose lungs filled with fluid while they sat in their armchairs. Fishermen. Swimmers. Immigrants crowded onto rafts. Some men, their throats seize up, and they die without ever swallowing a drop, as if they never left the shore. Some nights I dreamed what never happened: I held my drowning in my palm like a giant pearl. Some days, standing behind the cash register of my new life, I felt my lungs flatten out like a pair of discarded socks. Did I ever think of the woman I left on the shore as I kicked out past the last of the breakers? I won’t say. Here it was: I might have drowned trying to pretend to. I had to swim so far out, then mark a different beach and swim back a different man, without knowing if his strength was enough to carry me to shore.

That twig of light, that branch, that fork, that form. Beyond that, a city. A horse drowning in a river, and beyond that, a city. Wildfire, and beyond that, a city. God, a slippery thing, an eel, is twined from our hands. That rainy hum is the wharf, is the light that etches a bridge between pronouns, the bottle of amber formaldehyde, the infant orangutan, the wing of a gull stitched to its scapula. Here is a river drowning in a horse’s dark eye. Devitalized, humming, rainy, the feather of this gull, this small spill of light, the written thing that glues each hill to the earth, that follows a pull with its wobbly needle. God is a drowned horse fifty hands at the shoulder. To write what convinces with the impossible whisper. After that, a city. They call this floating thing an angel and hurry you out of the tent. A bear eating its own paws, and after this, a city. A window full of smoke, and after this, a city. A meter to measure day and time Adapted for that purpose by the God of our hands.

“He is either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive.” —Donald Rumsfeld You haven’t heard from your father in six months and you can’t bring yourself to call. In Bengal, farmers wore masks on the backs of their heads to ward off tigers, who, one supposes, wouldn’t attack a man who was watching. If I don’t call, you thought, nothing is wrong. Each possibility is a cavern eaten out of limestone by water. Naming everything is a way of naming nothing. His family dropped away like cicada husks swept off tree trunks by rain. One brother, heart attack. His father’s two feet taken by diabetes, then his father by stroke. In a tornado, leave your windows ajar. A doorway for an earthquake. In a lightning storm, do not pick up the phone. Learn to see out the back of your head. His youngest brother, weeks dead before discovery: the couch where he died, face down, shadow of rotted flesh stained into fabric, ghost of a face. Imagination kills the living just as easily as it brings back the dead. In Turkey, they hang the nazar—teardrop of blue glass— on lintels, above beds, from the rearview mirror. To ward off evil, they say.

“considering that by such trade and entercourse, all things heretofore uknowne, might have come to light.” —Pliny the Elder To cure a child of rickets, split a living ash tree down its length and pass the child through (naked, headfirst, three times). Seal the two halves of the tree back up and bind them with loam and black thread. If the tree heals, so will the child. (The child must also be washed for three mornings in the dew of the chosen tree.) Two men (no, women) must pass the child through. The first must say, “The Lord receives,” and the second say, “The Lord gives.” This is how you ensure a happy marriage: This is how you keep the engine running: A jackdaw or swallow that flies down the chimney must be killed. If it is allowed to leave the house by a window or door, a member of the family will This is how, when your mother tells you she’s going in for biopsy, to make the growth benign: Burn a fire and in the morning examine the ashes for footprints, the image of a ring, the likeness of a cat, a bed, a horse, a This is how you keep from thinking of the one thought you’re thinking: Say your own name backwards three (no four) times and turn around (keep your eyes shut). The unborn child must be called pot lid or tea kettle until you hear its voice. Carry a live bat around the house three times, then nail it upside down outside the window. This will ensure If your mother calls you at 6 A.M. while she eats her breakfast (do not eat after 7), this is how you can calm your voice: This is how you say Good luck and mean An egg laid on Sunday can be placed on the roof to ward of fire and lightning. If you put a stillborn child in an open grave, the man who is buried there will have a ticket straight to heaven. Never sleep with your feet toward the door. Do not sneeze while making a bed. Step on a beetle, and it will rain. Bury it alive in the earth for good weather. Put it in your mouth and your loved ones will When you see a dead bird lying in the road you must spit on it. If a rooster crows in the night, you must go and feel his feet. When a woman is in labor, all the locks in the house must be undone, windows and doors must be left ajar. This will not prevent death but will quicken the escape of the spirit if If the ash tree remedy fails, bring the child to a third (no, seventh) generation blacksmith. The child must first be bathed in the water trough, then laid on the anvil. Each of the smith’s tool’s must be passed over the body, and each time one must inquire what the tool is used for (no one must answer). Then the blacksmith must raise his hammer and bring it down (gently) three times (four) on the child’s body. If a fee is given or even asked for, the cure will not If the phone rings, this is how you answer: This is how you say, How did it go?