Entropy (7 page)

Water could teach you how to be patient if you let it.

There were three construction sites facing the waterfront. The steel frames looked like broken, temporary images of a child's imagination, set upon a discolored background. The fog in the atmosphere appeared to be sleeping on the unstable mattress of the water, sitting comfortably in the snapping pockets and concurring ripples. I closed my eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and then placed the regulator between my lips. I clenched my teeth like a boxer before the opening bell of a fight. Although the metallic taste of the apparatus was as bitter as always, its familiarity was still quietly comforting.

I penetrated the infinite colorlessness and descended, twisting the end of my flashlight. However I couldn't see anything. I was already feeling tired. The river was some 30 feet deep. After a few minutes I reached the automobile which had rested on the bottom against the passenger side. I maneuvered into a better position and looked through the glass. I pulled on the handle of the driver's side door to no avail. The pressure hadn't caused any of the windows to crack, but there was some water slowly pouring into the vehicle. Air bubbles were escaping from the car. I didn't have much time and I would have to flood the remainder of the compartment, in order to retrieve the bodies. There was no one moving inside.

I unsnapped a button on the belt around my waist and grabbed the end of a small acetylene torch. I turned my head away from the welding arc and began to quickly work on the driver's side door. It didn't take long for me to cut through the door lock and the hinges. The force of the water trying to pour through the door finally tore the door free. Water now gushed into the compartment, causing the body of the driver to shoot out of his seat and strike me in the chest. His seatbelt had either been dislodged during the impact, or had never been fastened. I clutched his ankle and held his body so that I could check quickly for vitals. I touched his throat. He was dead. I noticed a large, horizontal laceration across the length of his forehead. Blood flowed from his wound causing the water around his head to turn cloudy. I let go of the corpse, allowing it to float gently to the surface.

There was another body, still strapped in the passenger's side. I reached deeper into the compartment and cut the line to the lap belt and the one secured around her shoulder. Her head was tilted back against the leather seat. I touched her throat. She was alive, but unconscious. However I was soon gasping for air from my tank as I recognized the small figure of eight birthmark on the woman's neckline.

Hannah Cohen, age 27, Documentary producer, married, no children. Was last seen filming a documentary on lighthouses and their keepers in California.

I was exhausted as I ascended from the water, her body cradled in my arms. In retrospect, I never should have come up. People from the department just stood and watched as I carried her. As I looked across my shoulder, I saw a news photographer, standing on the riverbank taking photos. Without uttering a word, I handed her body to a medic.

The dead man rested face down some twenty feet from the shore. An officer entered the river and with the help of two others, lifted his body into a raft. After they laid his body on a tarpaulin on the side of the river, I walked over and knelt down in front of him. I rolled over his body so that I could see his face which was covered with sand and debris from the river.

As I started to reach for his wallet, two officers restrained me. I'm not sure if they understood that the woman I had surfaced with was Hannah. I lifted the diving mask over my head and tossed them to one side. Then the brutal reality of the situation truly hit.

I stepped back violently and quickly, vomiting hard several times. The bodies, the people that I pulled out of the water weren't supposed to be alive. They weren't supposed to possess life, breath, characteristics of morality and fear. And they definitely weren't supposed to have a personal, direct consequence upon me. Distraught, I ran my fingers through my hair, feeling the coarseness created by the impurities in the water. My hair felt like scattered pieces of dead, fallen leaves; reminding me of that time when I was a child and had drifted asleep in the backyard near
that
pond in early October. While asleep, my father had amused himself by covering my body with that inescapable autumn debris; while at my feet, he had lined up half rotten peaches to resemble candles marking a body lying in state.

***

The rest of the morning after I pulled Hannah's body from the water was tense and reflective. She had been taken directly to the local hospital, so I came home to pack a bag of clothes for her. However, in the end, I did not make it back to the hospital. The home telephone rang out endlessly. The incessant rings echoed throughout the deserted places of where we must have faltered as lovers, where we somehow became misguided within one another's arms. Someone was leaving messages, and I could faintly hear their voice on the answering machine despite the volume being turned to its lowest setting. However, the sound was too soft to distinguish whether it was Mull, another member of the department or perhaps a member of the hospital staff.

I remained motionless in our bedroom, nestled in the corner between her dresser full of her intimates and some of her filming equipment. But it all seemed suddenly inaccessible to me, the clothes she wore, the photographs she'd framed, the people that she sometimes interviewed at their most vulnerable, their weakest. I felt like a nomad, a wanderer, trapped atop one of her lighthouses with no way to get down.

After being emotionally disabled and unresponsive for hours, I dressed and ended up going to the local YMCA pool. I lapped the pool for nearly three hours until the muscles underneath my skin burned, trying to deaden the emotional pain through a mixture of lactic acid and exhaustion. The muscles in my shoulders and back were stretched beyond what was expected from their kinetic construction. My lungs were bursting. However I felt like a coward, and would never have the strength to properly confront and endure the consequences of what had happened, and the layers of damage that the accident had caused.

After several days of being treated for a severe concussion, lacerations to her shoulders, neck and face, and several cracked ribs, Hannah was released. The department offered to send someone to the hospital to bring her back to our place.

To
our
place?

But someone else had already been there.

That morning, all the windows were open in our house, and the sunlight was streaming through our bedroom. It was early and the light was beautiful, delicately intense, but gentle enough to sooth away just about any emotional angst. However when Hannah found me I was sitting on the tiled floor inside the shower. I had been sitting with my back against the door for nearly an hour. The cold water bit harshly, falling across my neck and chest. There was nowhere else I could go, no body of water to hide within.

Hannah opened the door to the shower slowly, causing the tips of her hair to quickly moisten. She hesitated. I looked up. There were deep bruises under her eyes. She reached down and despite her physical pain, pulled my body forward and cradled me, securing my head gently in her lap, and moving aside the hair that fell across my eyes. I could hear her labored breathing. I wanted to pull away from her so much but I adored her. I had married her years ago because she was intelligent and alluring. She understood the emotional complexities and frailty that I possessed, and never admonished me for it or used it against me. Without saying a word, she kissed me on the side of the head and sobbed.

“You never came to the hospital,” she stated.

“I'm sorry,” I whispered quietly.

“I was there for days, waiting for you,” she said.

“I don't think they knew who I was carrying at first. You seemed so heavy, weighted somehow. It was as if all that water from the river had soaked into your skin and the clothes you had on. I wanted to know who he was so much. I should have tried to resuscitate you, but I didn't … I couldn't. Someone else did, one of the paramedics. After they rushed you away, I just sat there on the banks of the river. I couldn't pull myself together enough to be near anyone who knew about what had happened, to see the look in their eyes. Their pity would have been an endless, arid desert for me. In the last few days while you have been in hospital, I have sat here searching for the right words to say to you and everyone else. However they have just never come to me,” I added.

“I wasn't sure what you would do. When you didn't come after the second day I thought you might have gone for good,” she added.

“It doesn't matter,” I said. I abandoned her embrace and leaned against the glass door away from where she crouched.

“I'm sorry,” she said as she moved to turn off the water. “I shouldn't have done this to you.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You didn't' deserve this,” she admitted.

“No, why did you do it?” I was scared that she was no longer in love with me; that I had somehow become separated from her, and that the intimacy we once enjoyed had vanished, and that I had been too naïve to see it.

“I don't know,” she said. “I've been thinking about that since you saved me.” Her head rose up and the marks underneath of her eyes resembled smeared mascara. It was hard to not to desire her then, seeing her compassion, her vulnerability, the roundness of her breasts through her saturated blouse, and the tenderness in her eyes.

“I didn't save you,” I admitted.

“Yes you did,” she gasped in reply.

“Bringing your body out of the river didn't save anything,” I said. “I should have never come out of the water.” I stood up, my limbs atrophic. She reached out her hand and touched the plane of my stomach, but after a short pause, allowed me to continue to pull away.

“What are you going to do? Are you going to leave me?” she asked.

“Can we talk about this later?” I asked. “There's a town meeting scheduled to discuss these murders and I'd like to be there after everything that's happened,” I said.

“Are you going to leave me?”

“I don't know.” I wrapped a towel around my waist while turning my on her, becoming more unassailable around the woman that I loved.

Water could teach you history if you let it.

The history of a man was constructed upon the pain of others. I understood all there was to know about history; the archives of the muted dead, the annals of failed intimacy and privacy, the history of immorality and despair.

With my experiences over the last few months, I unfortunately now understood the sad affliction of circumstance placed upon vibrant young children by the violent unpredictability of a man's rash and savage brutality, and the complicated nature of water. It was highlighted in the chronology of the investigation, those offensive crimes, bodies and statistics, imprisoned in the bronze landscapes, the turned soil, and the cold waters of barren ponds, like archaeological relics.

I sat in the back of the school auditorium, watching people enter through the rear door, listening quietly to their concerns and fears as each one poured warm coffee into non-recyclable cups and flicked nervously at their cigarettes, clinging to support provided by their individual vices. A candlelight vigil for the victims had also begun outside for those unable to attend because of the small size of the auditorium. The local pastor leading that ceremony read each victim's name with somber remembrance as church bells chimed in the unseen distance.

There were about 110 people inside. Some who came were searching desperately for hope in the words and promises of the authorities, while others had come to express their outrage. However all were waiting for reassurances and positivity that couldn't be provided by anyone. The dead were not giving up their secrets. I once thought that they needed me, the dead when I first entered that swimming pool on that cold, late December afternoon. However, I should have turned my back on them back then and let them remain where they were and never have allowed my body to have broken the surface of the water.

Mull entered through the door of the auditorium with his wife and his daughter, Isabella.

Water could teach you control if you let it.

There were so many reasons to leave, to resign from the investigation and go home. Nothing was going to change when the murderer was apprehended. All the damage had already been afflicted by the perpetrator's selfishness and the pure tenacity of water. And I had been betrayed by both. It had stained the one thing I valued. Some wounds would remain for a long time; the dead would always be gone, archaic, but like sunsets turned into long, restless nights, eventually forgotten. It all scared me. I smiled at Mull's daughter. Water had power, pure and simple. It was dangerous to disrespect anything one knew so little about. It had an imposing will, a purpose, and could not be enslaved or manipulated by composition or structure. It could not be instructed or controlled, commanded or tricked. It was then that I realized water was just as much responsible for death as it was for birth.

Body Number Six (May): Jeremy Sundermond, 7 years old. The boy was discovered wrapped in a large mesh cloth and had been dumped into the river. There appeared to be have been no attempt to weigh down the body to inhibit the discovery of the crime. The material was commonly used for landscape bedding, to prevent the growth of weeds. His face had been nearly unrecognizable because of multiple lacerations and contusions. During the autopsy, the coroner would count over 62 separate wounds.

“… There was one witness to the action of the disposal of the body. No physical description of a suspect could be provided owing to the hour and proximity of the sighting. For the first time, after almost six months into the investigation, a piece of physical evidence was recovered from a crime scene; a bullet which was removed from the bottom of the riverbed. Ballistics couldn't be matched because none of the children previously murdered had been shot or linked to any other previously committed crime. A psychological profile of the perpetrator was created with help from the Sex Crimes Section of the Major Offense Squad of the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation …”