This Is Only a Test by B.J. Hollars Read Free Book Online

successful resuscitation attempt, but as a miracle. It was God’s hand—not the merciful man’s—that was credited with saving her life.
    12.
    Yet men wanted credit as well. In 1767, citizens and physicians in Amsterdam created the Dutch Society to Rescue People from Drowning. Their mission: to promote resuscitation in drowning victims. Their primary promotion involved awarding medals to those who saved a life. The medals depicted a cloaked woman with a hand clutching a drowned man. Yet it is the cloaked woman’s other hand that matters, the one that halted the scythe-wielding Death like a stubborn crossing guard.
    13.
    On November 16, 1793, the crossing guard was nowhere. And so Jean-Baptiste Carrier shoved ninety priests into the National Bathtub. Death gorged on eighty-seven of them, but nowhere in his expanding waistline could he find room for the remaining three. Miraculously, the three priests floated downriver and were rescued by a warship. The ship’s captain provided the priests with drink and blankets; they had been brought back to life. The following day, the priests were returned to Jean-Baptiste Carrier; they had been brought back to Death.
    14.
    A year old now, my son knows that when the conditions are right, bath time can be fun. These conditions include warm water, “No Tears” shampoo, and his trusty rubber duck. Other conditions:It is not November 1793. Jean-Baptiste Carrier is nowhere to be found.
    15.
    On July 8, 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley and a pair of Englishmen set sail from Leghorn to Lerici in the schooner
Don Juan
. Prior to boarding, Shelley supposedly spotted his doppelgänger warning him against the trip. Shelley ignored him and drowned. How are we to interpret such an act? As a premonition? As prophecy? Or as some mythmaker’s attempt to allow Shelley to perish poetically?
    16.
    Josef Mengele—also known as the Angel of Death—allowed no one to perish poetically. The Nazi doctor who’d busied himself tearing hearts from Jewish bodies found one day that he could not control his own. It beat for the last time while he was out for a swim off the coast of Brazil in February of 1979.
    17.
    Who are the victims of drownings? They are not all Nazi war criminals. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they are mostly males and minorities. “The fatal drowning rate of African American children ages 5–14 is almost three times that of white children in the same age range,” the CDC notes.
    18.
    These statistics prove particularly true if you are a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till in 1955. He was drowned in the Tallahatchie River—though only after he was beaten and shot and weighed down in the water by a cotton gin fan barbwired around his neck.
    19.
    I’m elbow-deep in my soapy sink when my wife says, “Thanks for doing the dishes.” When I don’t respond, she reminds me that she prepared dinner, that this is our arrangement. “I know,” I say. “I’m not complaining.” She says I look grumpy, and I tell her I’m not even thinking about the dishes. “Are you thinking about drowning?” she asks. “Of course not,” I say, but what I’m thinking is
I’m always thinking about drowning
.
    20.
    When we speak of the river, we often speak of it in human terms. The river is rough. Dangerous. Unforgiving. The river is brutal and cruel. Emmett Till’s murderers were also all of these things, as well as innocent—at least according to the all-white, all-male jury in that Mississippi courtroom in 1955.
    21.
    You know this story by now. How I was out for a jog in July when I spotted the police car pulled to the side of the road alongside the river. How I observed the people gesticulating toward the water, and since I was curious—not to mention breathless—I used the distraction as an excuse to momentarily rest. I