Craig Enters The Water To Stay With His Catfish Family

This is my final surface dispatch.

I am writing it from the low dock near the bend, with my shoes under the bench and my bag closed beside them. The family is already here. They have been circling below the ladder for twenty minutes, not impatiently, but with the settled attention relatives give when they know a person is almost finished with the public part of a decision.

At 6:41 p.m., my aunt came up first. She did not break the surface all the way. She placed one whisker through it, held still long enough for me to see the direction of the current, and went back under.

That was the invitation.

The Decision

I am not describing this as death. That is a surface word for a surface absence.

The more accurate description is that I have reached the end of visiting my catfish family as an outside party. For several months I have entered their water, stayed as long as I could, surfaced, dried off, and turned the visit into language. That arrangement was useful at first. It let the newsroom understand what was happening without asking the family to explain itself.

It has also become the least true part of the work.

The family does not live in a story about me entering the water. They live in the water. My repeated returns to shore have started to feel less like caution and more like an apology I keep making to the wrong people.

My cousin Darryl is below the ladder now. He has not surfaced since March. He passed close enough a moment ago that the water moved against the first board. This is the most direct statement he has made all summer.

I understood it.

Going Under

I have told the desk not to expect a correction unless one floats in on its own.

There is nothing to retrieve from the bag except a towel, a phone, a small bottle of water, and a sealed envelope with the passwords written in ordinary ink. I placed the envelope beneath the stapler before I left the hotel. The phone will remain here because it cannot follow the part of the story that matters.

The violin is not coming either.

I considered bringing it because it has been a reliable way to announce myself in rooms where I do not know what my hands should be doing. Underwater, the family has no use for that introduction. They already know the pressure of me. They know the bad timing. They know when I am trying to make a moment into something that can be held by other people.

For once I am going without an instrument, notebook, camera, or explanation.

The first minute below the dock is always the loudest. Boards creak above. The city stays where it is. Everything that was recently air continues moving through the body as a list of demands.

Then the water takes over the count.

My aunt came alongside my left arm. Darryl stayed deeper, facing upstream. Two younger cousins moved around my knees, not touching, making sure I was not entering as a guest who expected the room to be rearranged for him.

I did not ask them to come higher.

That was the change.

Family Status

If the paper needs a status line, the line is this: I am with family.

The family is not rescuing me. I am not rescuing them. No one is being promoted into a symbol. We are not resolving the difference between shore and water by pretending the difference was decorative.

The difference remains.

I am choosing the lower side of it.

There will be practical consequences. My apartment will need to be handled. Someone should cancel the gym membership because the billing department will otherwise continue to believe in my eventual return. The blue jacket by the door can be donated. The red shirt should not be donated because there is a stain on the front that has resisted every normal method and does not need to become someone else's problem.

Please tell the movie people I am unavailable for additional photography.

Please tell the family, if they ask above water, that I went below in an orderly way.

Last Surface Paragraph

The water is up to the second rung now. My aunt has returned to the ladder. She is holding in place without asking me to hurry.

That is one of the family traits I have come to trust most. They do not make urgency theatrical. They simply stay close enough that delay becomes visible.

I am leaving this paragraph unfinished in the old sense and complete in the correct one.

The shore has been informed.