I'm Not Dead
And neither are you
I opened a conversation with my wife last week with this sentence: “So, something happened a few weeks ago, and I haven’t told anyone about it until now.” When I saw the startled look on her face I quickly added, “Don’t worry, it’s not bad.” Then I told her the following story. You, constant reader, are the second person I’m telling.
Don’t worry, it’s not bad.
I like to take baths. Not every day, but two or three times a week. Read, listen to the Mets game or a podcast, play Civ. It’s relaxing.
A few weeks ago, I was in the bathtub, with my tablet. The battery was at 5% so I plugged the tablet into the GFI outlet near the tub. The part of the plug that clicks into the tablet is pretty loose. I’m guessing you can figure out where this is going.
I was listening to a podcast and reading. I heard a small “plop” in the bathwater. I looked down. The end of the plug had fallen into the bathwater.
I had a brief moment of intense panic as I flipped the cord out of the water. I took stock as my pulse began to settle. I wasn’t dead. The other end of the plug was still plugged into the outlet. The GFI outlet’s fuse had not been tripped: the lights were on, the little red “reset” button was still depressed. The end that had fallen into the water now lay dripping on the tile of the bathroom floor.
I wasn’t dead.
I dried off the wet end of the plug and plugged it back into the tablet. The connection was live; the tablet was charging.
I wasn’t dead; my own lazy stupidity had not killed me.
I finished my bath. I got out of the tub, dried off, shaved and dressed.
My heart was still pounding hard.
I didn’t tell my wife. I didn’t tell my kids. I didn’t tell anyone. I just kept this little nugget of experience for myself, to hold in my mind and examine in various lights, and try to discern a deeper meaning.
Was my life spared? was one of the earliest questions. Is my life important enough to the lives around me so that God or some Godlike presence decided to give me a pass? While it’s among the first thoughts that occured to me, I never took it seriously, and when I thought about it at all, it was with an ironic distance that didn’t require me to drastically change my worldview. In my experience, God does not go out of his way to spare people from death or dire consequence.
Is the cord broken? Yes, I had plugged it back into the tablet, and the tablet had continued to charge. But that end of the plug WAS loose. Maybe it was broken. Broken in such a way so that as it fell into the water it lost its ability to carry electricity, and my life was spared by pure dumb luck.
Is there some safety feature of which I am unaware? The GFI plug was the obvious choice here, but the fuse had not been triggered, the lights had not gone out. Was there a safety precaution in the plug itself? None I could find on the internet.
However. That internet search led to the one that provided the most information: Can dropping the end of a plug into bathwater actually kill you? The internet beng the internet, there are hundreds of contradictory answers online. A handful of people have been killed by dropping an entire charging phone into the tub (this seems to mostly happen in England). But no one seems to have ever been killed by the end of a phone cord itself (feel free to play the home game and look these things up yourself). The voltage is simply too low.
It’s not really an answer, because I would have at least been shocked if the cord were live. I felt nothing. All I heard was a tell-tale “plop.” But a part of the answer—I wouldn’t have died anyway—gave me enough closure to move on. “Why aren’t I dead?” is a question with much more philosophical heft than “Why wasn’t I shocked?”
So, I told my wife. She has a much bigger capacity for ambiguity than I do. She hugged me, made me promise to NEVER charge my tablet while I’m in the tub (I won’t, I promise), asked me if I was bothered by the incident. I’m wasn’t. She moved on. I move on.
Still, I enjoyed the feeling of having this tiny epistemological mystery hidden in my pocket for a few weeks. Me and my mystery, no one else, not even the church or the internet, to get in the way. I rolled this private puzzle around in mouth like a gumball, looking for unexpected flavors, interesting textures. I ended up with no clear answers, and I’m not going to try and force some facile lesson out of this experience now. What I genuinely learned seems more useful and more satisfying: You’re never going to really know what happened. But it didn’t have enough power to kill you. And you didn’t die. So quit searching for an answer online, because you will never find one. Tell your wife, and then move on with your life.
Peace.
Commerce time. If you like my writing, buy a story!
June’s story: Feral
May’s story: Nine Lives
April’s story: Prince Albert in a Can
March’s story: Fuck, Marry, Kill
February’s story: Veronica Scissors
My first novel, Life Under Water
My erotic flash fiction series, Serious Moonlight (as J G Cain)
