Plunge

I’ve been told that I’m better at dealing with my feelings than I am at understanding them. When my fiancee left me—it seems like a long time ago now—I fear I understood very little about how I felt.

When the first unexpected blow had shaken me from a prolonged torpor (of which, naturally, I was unaware), and when, some months later, it became clear to me that there was hardly anything to be regained (as my fiancee quickly took up with someone else), I got restless and began to drink.

I left the country for a month. It always seems more appropriate to drink all day when one is traveling; and as I chose the most torturous means of transportation, a cheap bicycle, for my month-long holiday, I became apprised of the age-old method of self-torment as a means of absolving one’s guilt. I smoked intensely, and then not at all, as part of my penance.

Luckily I had a like-minded friend who invited me to winter with him in the Hudson Valley. This friend considers himself to be exceptionally logical—a claim I’ve always doubted—and hoped to introduce me to his own habits for dealing with difficult feelings. These habits included a rigorous gym regiment, a strict diet, and cold showers. These, he assured me, would channel my sadness into profound bliss.

The cold showers, he went on to explain, would shock my body into survival mode; and an even more effective method for reaching this state of physical emergency, he goaded me, would be to jump into the lake, which that day was frozen solid.

I had been to the lake the previous summer, with my fiancee, to swim. It had been warm and crowded with families, but that day it was desolate and covered with ice and snow. We stood at the edge, in our swimming trunks, and contemplated how we might break through to the frigid waters below.

A boy bundled up in a winter coat came wandering down the road. He seemed lonely and irritably bored, as most kids are in winter, and wanted to know what we were doing. As my friend went about finding a stone to break through the ice, I haltingly explained that we intended to jump into the lake.

“Are you stupid?” the boy wanted to know.

I said politely that in fact we were well aware of what we were doing and would proceed intelligently.

“Idiots!” the boy shouted. He said he would wait around to watch. If we fell through, he volunteered to promise that he would not lift a finger to save us.

As my friend and I tread onto the surface of the frozen lake, which seemed about as thick as marble, the boy watched eagerly from afar. Then, with a heavy stone we found among the frozen reeds, we began to hack away. The stone had a pointed end we threw into the ice; the sound traveled across the surface and came back to us in a resounding groan.

“I won’t come to save you when you freeze to death!” the boy reminded us.

Finally, with a loud crack, water began to come up from where the stone had been thrown into the ice, and with one last attempt the stone fell through and was swallowed up.

We kicked out the edges, leaving a hole just large enough to jump through, and in turn we plunged into the lake. When I reemerged I could not feel my lower legs. The surface of the lake felt incomparably warmer to the frigid depths below.

We trudged back to the car, our faces flushed. The kid could not contain his disappointment.

“I thought for sure you idiots would be screwed,” he said defeatedly.

As we drove away, the kid studied the hole we had made in the ice. “Fucking losers!” he shouted after us.