It has been two years since Collin walked into that lake never to be seen again. We'd heard voices from it for months at that point. Muffled. Luring. Filling the night with a siren's song that does not leave room for true quiet. The cliché thing to say would be that it drove us insane, but it really didn't. At least not often. Some people in the neighbourhood may have lost their minds, but any honest accounting would point to the fact that some people always inevitably lose their minds, unexplainable Lovecraftian bullshit or no. Then there was the lockdown, so all in all I doubt the rate of lunacy in our village was significantly above baseline for the time. No. The consequences of that whisper were far more mundane. It drove you obsessive or it drove you to ignore reality. The second camp could be split in twain again: Into those who were good at it, and those who were not. The former could stay home and pretend like everything was normal, look us dead in the eyes and claim that they didn't hear anything, face twitching only very slightly as they did so. The latter just didn't have it in them. Couldn't commit to the bit. Not for long. They'd get jumpy, lose sleep, lose weight, lose the plot and then, one day, they'd either move away or go on indefinite vacations. The people who did acknowledge what their senses were feeding them were a different story. It didn't trouble us. Never, at no point, did it trouble us. We'd say it did because intellectually we knew how eldritch this shit was and how clearly not normal the world had gone, but again: Lockdown. The world had already gone abnormal and this abnormality was at least exciting. If you wanted folks to let you go about your business, you'd pretend to be intrigued in a justifiably apprehensive way. Troubled, you know, when in reality you were nothing but feral fascination anymore. A limbic system buzzing like a fucking arc light. Short circuit through the reward-centre. Some days it felt like the only thing that meant anything at all. The only thing with any pull. Try getting school kids to wake up two hours early and trudge through the Canadian mud towards a body of water that looks completely unremarkable for weeks on end any other way. I dare you. Maybe we too could be separated into two groups after all: the ones who stopped diving when summer turned to fall and those who didn't. Both me and Collin were in the latter camp. Eventually we saved up enough money to buy some neoprene, but by then it was almost winter. Hypothermia didn't really worry us. Nothing did. Funnily enough, the voices didn't get louder as you neared the lake, nor when you dove in for that matter. They didn't even get clearer. We just sort of felt that this was where they were coming from, and in that same way our bones knew that somewhere down there would be answers. Our breathing techniques got better. The time we could spend down there longer. Eventually it was more like sitting on the lakebed, meditating and waiting for epiphany to strike. Pretty early on we got this blinking ball —a dog toy, I think—, which was both waterproof and buoyant, so you could go down holding it, and if you lost consciousness or such you'd automatically let go. It would float to the surface, and someone would drag you up. This happened a lot, but no one ever died... "... except for you." I finish my rant with a and-whatever-the-hell-your-deal-is-supposed-to-be gesture. Collin responds with an exaggerated pout. "Do I look dead to you?" "Nope. That's the scary part." He looks more than alive in fact, like someone has dialled up the saturation around him. Not so high as to be clearly discernible, but to the point where your brain scrambles for the social-media-honed alarm bells, which chime that "unedited photos don't look that good". Even his movements are too smooth for comfort. Like water flowing from one pose into the next. "So what is it?" I scoff with a bit more confidence than I really have, which has always been a theme. "'Drowned kid is actually just an apnoea-savant coming up for air one year later?' Should I fetch the tabloid hacks?" The thing that looks like Collin seems offended by my implication that he had to come up for air at all. That he couldn't have stayed even longer. "Oh please, you know me. When have I ever done anything without an anterior motive?" "Anything" in this context seems to include breathing, and his incessant attempts at easy charm only make him creepier. A smart person would run here and now, but then again, a smart person never would have opened the door for him. I kick open the fridge with my heel and throw him a bottle of lager, not even looking whether he catches it. After a year you start to think that maybe it really was just mass delusion. You forget what it's like for your brain to be all wire buzz. Forget that it can be that way. Time smooths out the edges, flattens it, leaves only the words, even when you once knew that words weren't shit. Words aren't shit again, and I'm troubled that I'm not more troubled. The lake ate Collin, I try to remind myself. A faint klktzsshhhh as he opens the beer behind me. "So, you a zombie? Some freshwater Dracula? Or just an unusually solid ghost." He grins and exhales against the window, leaving a slowly shrinking patch of condensation "None of the above, officer, though Freshwater Dracula is a pretty baller band name." He seems disappointed that I don't immediately drop my guard. "Look, I could do the whole thing where I cut my palm to show you how red the shit in my veins is, to demonstrate beyond the shallows of a doubt that I bleed like a real boy, but let's be honest with ourselves, that would only make me look more spooky, and I'm really not that keen on cutting my hand." I don't say that it would actually be nice if he did something really spooky. If his eyes went white or he started oozing black sludge from somewhere or said some ominous shit to tip his hand. If he just offed me here and now, I'd at least know where I stand. Uncertainty's much more annoying. Trope-savvy plausible deniability for horror movie bullshit... "..." "Relax, if I wanted to harm you I could have easily done that already." He picks up a butter knife, tries to thumb-around it, but drops the dull blade instead. "...Because you're some creature." "No, because you've got the reflexes of a sedated sloth. Always have." I grudgingly let the tension in my shoulders dissipate and crack open my own bottle. "What happened in November?" There's still bite to it, but less of it. The anxiety's giving way to simple unease. If I die then I die, big whoop, mea culpa and all that, but he's still unsettling. "The thing that was gonna happen eventually", he shrugs. "It didn't feel like we were getting anywhere. The time didn't matter, it was more about trust. Letting go." "It's called being oxygen deprived." "And this is called jealousy", he smirks. I choke on my drink and start coughing uncontrollably. "I am so not jealous of dying in a spooky lake." "Coulda fooled me with the teen drinking and the depression-cave. How many of our old friends are still vaguely functional?" The middle finger flipped his way might as well be an admission. What do you do when you lose the wire buzz frying your brain into unmitigated obsession? Our parents thought it was simple grief, or trauma, and some of it was, but not where it mattered. The grief was a dark cloud obscuring the fact that there was nothing underneath anymore. Just a hole. You try to find new mysteries. Binge Wikipedia. Make bad decisions on purpose. But nothing sticks. There's a vast gulf between trivia and discovery. "Anyway, I'm not dead, the lake isn't spooky, and the bit where you accuse me of being some third rate horror flick critter is getting old real fast. Plus... It's hurtful? Believe it or not, I missed the hell out of you, dude. There isn't much which could have propelled me to come back up here" Collin sneers those last few words as though they were poison mixed with rat piss. "But back to answering your question, — do you see how cooperative I am? — so, in the spirit of this letting-go, I wedged our little rescue light under a rock and put some more pebbles into my pockets..." he trails off like a douchebag. "...and?" Some thoroughly useless gestures. "There's a place where words give out, and it's under that lake. I mean— it's in lots of places. Words kinda give out near the starting line, but if you refuse to look closely at anything you can pretend that they don't and people will usually humour that." "You're gonna have to do more than vague-post truisms at me." Collin slumps. "It's... it's good? It's heaven, if the feeling of that word meant to you what it means to a believer. It's like not having to breathe anymore, figuratively. It's like flow, but if flow was about everything at once, but none of that means anything, and also... do I have to do more? Isn't the burden of proof for 'better than this' insanely fucking low? I get that you're wondering why I didn't come back up to fetch you earlier if it's so great down there, and a part of it —a big part of it— is that I didn't want to go back. Kept hoping you'd just arrive by yourself... This," he gestures around him, then at himself "is excruciating. It's so small, so lonely, so incomplete. I feel like I've got phantom limbs all over the place, like my mind's operating out of a tiny little box with spikes on the inside. And then there's this place." Eyes slightly teary and full of disgust. "Oh come on, it's not that bad." "Isn't it? Is all the suffering fine actually? Does it serve a purpose? We didn't buy that shit back then, do you buy it now? Has poverty been eliminated? Are the kids alright? Has anyone with the power to swing shit managed to be both good and sane for a hot sec? It is that bad. It has always been that bad. People only say that it isn't in hopes of believing their own lie long enough to fall asleep at night." Sure, walked right into that one. But the world being bad is still a bit of a useless platitude. All of the manifestos agree on that bit. Things suck, nod nod, very insightful. Just doesn't get you anywhere. You need to present a viable alternative. "And the lakebed is just spiffy" "It is, but it's also remarkably easy to appreciate literally anything when you aren't forced to make your assessment from within this soul shredder." Again there's this pain in his eyes. The wrong pain. It would all be fine and dandy if I could recognize in those tensions around his mouth and eyes some apprehension, some vestigial human regret about the thing he's going to do to me. The priest crying an expiating tear before he slits the lamb's throat. But it isn't there. There's just strain. Few things you learn to spot as easily as emotional labour in a village like this, and it's all that. With a face my mind has conjured up so often since the incident, I couldn't delude myself about what the expressions mean if I wanted to. And still there's that implicit knife at my throat. A knife in the form of that old pull reawakening slowly in my nervous system. "Hey, buddy, love ya. I really do. It's great seeing you again and I'm glad you're enjoying the peaches on those mighty fine trees... but I'm not gonna drown myself... That is where this is going, right?" "Well that's awfully dismissive" "That's obvious, isn't it?" "Not really." Throwing an apple, catching it. Lucifer's favourite weapon in backspin. "It's an action you've never taken before, so you run some basic risk-reward eval based on what you know about it. 'Die in a cold lake or stay in here', gee, that doesn't sound great. On the other hand: 'Take the thing every fibre of your being has been hungering for since you came to live in this terrible place, or stay within it.' That is the real choice. You can keep pretending as much as you want, but there's still life beneath your skin and there's still light behind your eyes, so I know that you're not actually satisfied with this." There are more snappy comebacks to be had, but every single one so far has just been turned around to subtract from the tenuous ground I am standing on. "Sounds like a thing someone who'd drown themself over a teen obsession would say" Well sure, but he is, and it was, end he'll wholly eat that bullet, look at me like a strangled puppy and ask me to please believe him. Like I'm gorging myself on poison and he's begging me to take the antidote. I sigh deeply and fashion my upturned emotional state into the best olive branch I can muster. "I'm not. But I'm scared and you haven't given me anything but emotional manipulation and vague promises so far." Rushing forwards, Collin cradles my face in his hands, beaming like a supernova and I ask myself only moments too late why I didn't back away. "Yes. Yes! Because every fucking thing- Every fucking rock you turn up here has maggots beneath it. Retaining your curiosity means learning to bear pain because every single time the thing you were looking for is terrible. You learn to brace and then you learn to brace harder, and eventually, when you are utterly and completely broken, when finding out one too many times snaps your spine for good, you learn to stop looking. You haven't. You're still functional. And this isn't an intrinsic quality of the world, it's just this part of it. When the whole of your soul screams that you need to look and learn and that there are wonders you cannot fathom, riches at the end of a rainbow, that's true. That's real. Your whole body knows that it's true and that's why it takes so much effort to beat it out. But I also don't have more than myself to show for proof before you take that leap. Ask me anything. Anything you want, anything only I would know because I am me. You haven't really been trying to get me to slip, so I don't think you doubt that, and if you think that I'm faking it perfectly —that I'm some creature who ate Collin Steward wholly—, then why are you still talking to me? It doesn't make sense. Propose anything, I'll oblige. Any evidence you want, I'll get it to you, but your threshold of doubt can't be infinitely high. Is there an argument that would convince you, an action that would sway you? Are you a rock or are you still a person? I cannot bear the thought of letting you die up here, so please. Please. Anything." I look inside, see if there is. The general shape of the argument is fine. If you require infinite proof you never get anywhere, you never figure out which things are edible, humanity never makes it out of the evolutionary crucible... "Do you remember that school play we did?" "Oh god, eat my entire dick. Actually, I regret coming back for you. Why would you remind me of that?" "That might be the only time I've ever seen you fail at something, you know? ...Unintentionally that is." It was almost a week after some philosophy class discussion on consciousness had gotten out of hand. The old toy question of whether one can be sure of still being oneself after waking up. Whether one dies every time consciousness is interrupted in some sense. It was motivated by the similarly old hat of teleportation, though we didn't know then that these were thoroughly explored discussions. Stale and wrung for all the conceptual nutrients they're worth. Neither of us came away with the conclusions our teacher wanted us to have. Me troubling the shit out of her by trying to tie it back into an earlier discussion about euthanasia and arguing that "sure, you might die every night, but you can't actually prevent it, so the right thing to do would be to go out with dignity intact, instead of unnecessarily suffering through sleeplessness until one dies anyway". Collin on the other hand didn't want to bite that bullet. He wanted to not do anything reckless until he had figured it out, and sleeping was reckless now. It wasn't even really that he thought or was afraid that it might kill him, he just wanted to know ahead of time. He wouldn't rest until he solved it, so when the play came around he made an ass of himself by falling asleep in the middle of it. Five days of self-induced insomnia for nothing. Maybe dying. Who knows. "Turns out sleep doesn't kill you by the way." He adds after a brief pause. "I mean I didn't actually get there, so in terms of me blowing it the point is moot, but it's good to know that holistically beefing an experiment didn't literally kill me in retrospect." "And neither does death I gather." "Oh no. I'm pretty sure death kills you. Not fully, but —you know— worth avoiding when you can. The claim I'm making isn't that death is safe, It's that the lake doesn't kill you." I start laughing, something in my mind breaking for good. "But you have somehow achieved clarity about the sleep thing? About consciousness interruption?" "It's pretty obvious when you see it. Short answer's that there isn't actually an interruption and that our model was screwy, but you know. More freshwater Dracula woo you have no reason to believe in." "Okay." "Okay?" "Not gonna pretend to be remotely confident here. I don't have much faith to be leaping with, but you're right. That pull is still in my bones. Only thing left in there. So I'm gonna go down to the water eventually. Might as well do it with a friend. With the prepense of being swayed by arguments rather than as an act of pathetic desperation a few years down the line. Show me your mysteries, waterboy."