What We Know of Death by Drowning

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.