The Split

It began one day at the shore. It was late in the summer, right after a hurricane, when the waves were brutal but we swam anyway — throwing our slight selves again and again at the bulk and force of the water. I can't remember what the weather was like, but I imagine it was a hot, clear, fierce day. I was fifteen years old. I was with my best friend.

We drifted farther and farther out until our toes gently left the sand and the salt lifted us up and over each incoming swell. But then one wave rose larger than the rest and picked Jocelyn up (or was it me?) and brought her crashing down on top of me (or was it her?) and slammed us, a tangle of arms and legs, to the bottom, where the impact split us apart. I remember groping toward the surface, feeling the desperation tight in my lungs, and plowing my face deep into the sand — I had lost my sense of direction. There in the ocean's bed, hands clutching fistfuls of shells and weed, I had a long moment of deep clarity. Instead of being taken away, my breath was given back; my panic dissolved into a deep calm, and I hung in suspension with my body.

But this moment was torn from me as a hand, her hand, reached blindly through the dark water, touched my ankle, and, finding, pulled. She reeled me to the surface as a lifeguard reeled her. He had seen us caught in a riptide, had swum out to bring us back, had found her wrist just as she found my ankle, and pulled us both to shore. I remember coughing on the wet sand, the sun and sky piercingly bright, coughing and coughing, faintly realizing that I had lost that moment of clarity in the turbulence of recovery, in my body's mechanics. As I looked over to Jocelyn, I thought I saw a flicker of recognition. We trudged to our towels, embarrassed, and lay in silence. It wasn't until the long drive home up the Jersey Turnpike, in the safety of the car and the dark and the miles we had put behind us, that she said, "We could have died."

I never asked her what she had felt under the waves and never knew if she, too, had a moment of clarity on the threshold of death. I could not have described that moment to her, nearly impossible to put words to, and yet, at the same time, it was the truest thing I had ever — almost — known. What I caught that day was only a glimpse. It would be years before I had another chance to see.

I was in France, at a party, with friends and friends of friends. We were on the patio of someone's country house, playing a drinking game that involved reciting limericks and drawing on each other's faces with a burnt cork. When I went inside for a glass of water, and to take a break from the smoke in my eyes and the French in my head, Marc kissed me behind the pantry door and asked me to go upstairs with him. I said no. But when Enzo, at one in the morning, asked if I wanted to go for a ride on his motorcycle, I said yes.

We flew, no helmets, my hair streaming, the wind blowing any words we might have said into the night behind us. Then I saw the tree ahead of us, and when I knew we couldn't hold the curve, when the impact was inevitable, I thought, with a directness that surprised me, You should be thinking something really important right now. But there was no time to think. We slid along a barbed wire fence, crashed into the tree, and I was thrown from the bike. Then nothing.

I came to in a field of grass, its itchiness a reassurance that I was alive. There was, as yet, no need for last thoughts. Instead, I had to attend a more practical need: my arms and legs could move, my head could turn, but my face was wet and I couldn't see out of my left eye. But even while I was absorbed in this physical self, some other part of me stood by, aloof, watching and waiting, for what I didn't know.

"I will get help," Enzo said, stumbling and backing away from me. He tore the motorcycle from the wires of the fence. "I will bring help," he said again, before the engine caught and drowned my weak voice saying over and over, like the lover I wasn't but wanted to be: "Wait. Don't leave me. Wait." Then I was alone — or thought I was. It was dark and getting cold.

That other self grew more vigilant after Enzo left. It watched as I flailed weakly against circumstance. It watched as I dug a mirror out of my back pocket and saw that the wetness on my face was blood — blood had blinded my left eye — and I saw that I wasn't going to be all right after all. It watched as my shock became panic in the privacy of the night fields. But the whimpering, squealing me knew that second self, calm and clear, was there as well, attending me during those moments of separation.

Later I began to wonder if the body has a chemical, something like adrenaline, that bathes us in this calm acceptance. Something different from the endorphins that gauze over our feelings of pain, something instead that gives a mental awareness in the midst of the body's trauma. That day with Jocelyn, underwater, my breath was failing fast. Very little time was left. And that night on the motorcycle there was nothing I could do to prevent the crash, no use for fight or flight. In neither case did I feel pain, but I felt something far deeper, something the essayist Montaigne described after his own terrible accident, five centuries before my own.

Montaigne says nothing of pain but languishes over the pleasure of letting himself go, "that sweet feeling that people have who let themselves slide into sleep." He is so removed from his body —" dead," he claims, "for two full hours" — that these mysteries can be revealed. He describes the "easy and quiet" feeling he had while in the early stages of shock but only hints at the idea of a split. Reading Montaigne a few years after my accident, I began to wonder if during such moments of bodily crisis we split for spiritual reasons. More and more I believe we do.

Before I had left for France, I put on a necklace my godmother had given me when I was a child — a tiny silver cross. As a child, I had been infatuated with stories from the Bible, but as I grew older, I questioned, and by the time I was thirteen, I couldn't go through with the confirmation ceremony, couldn't stand up in front of the congregation and lie about what I wasn't sure I believed. So it was a fear of flying rather than faith that led me to hook the chain around my neck before I boarded the plane to Paris.

The plane, however,...