The Waters & the Wild

by DeSales Harrison

  I tore open the package and a cellphone thudded onto the desk. It was her cellphone, the one I had been calling. Strapped to it with a rubber band was a note, also in her handwriting. Get a grip, Daniel, it said. Actually, it said, get help.

  I tried to turn it on, but the battery was dead. Moving as though in someone else’s dream, I walked out to buy a charger, walked home, and plugged the phone in, calling it mechanically one last time just to—just to what? To verify that it had been working? To reassure myself that she had heard the messages I had left? When I called her number that last time, however, and her own telephone leapt alive on my desk, ringing and vibrating, when the voicemail picked up and the synthesized voice repeated her number, I heard my voice saying, This is your father, Clementine. And again, This is your father. This is your father. Your father.

  * * *

  —

  Clementine’s telephone sat inert as a petrified egg on the hall table, and yet it seemed to throb with talismanic promise, as though for its sake she would bang back through the front door, exclaiming, God, I’m such a dork! Forgot my phone again—

  But weeks passed. Suddenly it was July.

  The phone had not rung.

  * * *

  —

  How queer, the tendency of our days to flatten into a sameness, as water finds its level. I watched them pool up in the old routines of work and sleep. Each day I unlocked my office and watched my patients come and go. Each day I went to the post office, to peer into box 5504. Everything different, but everything also just as it was. As though everything were not, in fact, closing on its end, as though I had not, for example, begun to seek out new placements for my patients. My explanation? An unexpected family circumstance had required me to move from the city for at least a year.

  The boy Micha, eight years old, my only child patient, was convinced I was leaving because he had thrown a tantrum and broken the Connect 4 set I keep for play therapy. When I explained to him that I was not mad at him, that there was a grown-up problem that I had to go fix, he announced that I was going to go spy on the Chinese and “steal the secret of their code writing.” I asked him what he would do while I was gone. He was going to take Chinese pills so he could speak to me when I got back.

  My patient Mrs. Thalmann embraced with passionate intensity the conviction that I had cancer—most likely pancreatic, considering my age.

  And what did pancreatic cancer bring to mind for her?

  Bring to mind? Nothing. It brings nothing to mind. Pancreatic cancer, that’s curtains.

  Curtains? I said.

  Curtains means no mind, no mind left and nothing left to bring.

  I said she was convinced I was going to die, that we would have to part for good, just as she had always been convinced that I would abandon her.

  Everyone abandons everyone.

  Yes. You are convinced of that.

  But that is true, isn’t it? One way or another that will be true, whatever I think of it, whatever I feel about it. The future’s not some sort of Rorschach blot, Daniel. With that she stalked out of the session twenty minutes early.

  It was the afternoon of Mrs. Thalmann’s departure that the next letter from my correspondent arrived in the post office box. Again I forced myself to wait until I was home and at my desk before opening the envelope. When I saw what it contained, I picked up the phone on my desk and dialed Officer Peña at the precinct house.

  “Where’s your daughter now, Mr. Upend?” Officer Peña asked when the call was put through.

  I said she was in danger.

  “How do you know?”

  I said she was still missing.

  “Is she still an adult?”

  I said I had a photograph of her, sent by God knows who.

  “Is she in danger in the photograph?”

  She was in Paris.

  “Paris, Mr. Upend? Maybe she was the one who sent it—from Paris. Maybe she wanted to put you at ease.”

  At ease?

  “Let me ask you again, Mr. Upend. Does the photograph indicate in any way that your daughter is at risk?”

  But I knew the place, the exact place captured in the photograph, the street corner, the Métro station in the background, the newspaper stand.

  “Is that a dangerous street corner in Paris? Is that a dangerous newspaper stand?” But she agreed that if I brought the picture into the station, she would put a copy on file. I hung up and ran the three blocks to the precinct house.

  Officer Peña inspected the photograph, holding it for a moment at arm’s length, then, after unhurriedly perching a pair of spectacles on her nose, drawing it closer to her round face.

  “This pretty girl?” she said, looking up at me. “She doesn’t look very endangered to me.”

  It was true: in the photograph Clementine did not appear in any way at risk. In the picture she was looking beyond the frame toward someone I could not see, her expression one of mock exasperation, as though urging someone to quit fooling around and hurry up, why don’t you?

  “You sure, Mr. Upend, she didn’t send this to you to let you know she’s okay?”

  It wasn’t her handwriting on the envelope.

  Now I was the recipient of Officer Peña’s scrutiny, as she fed her Selectric a fresh form. The typewriter flinched, chunk chunk, when Officer Peña jabbed with her finger.

  “Name?…

  “Clementine’s a nice name.

  “Phone number?…

  “Left her phone at home, did she?” Chunk jab flinch chunk. “No…known…number…

  “You say you’d quarreled with your daughter, Mr. Upend?”

  Chunk.

  “And when, approximately, was that?”

  Flinch chunk.

  “Are you sure, Mr. Upend, you aren’t just feeling a little guilty?”

  Now the typewriter merely whirred.

  “About fighting with your daughter?”

  Typing nothing, she nodded, squinting, lips pursed, as I asserted my conviction of urgency. When Officer Peña yanked on the form, the typewriter surrendered it with a squawk.

  “That, Mr. Upend, is all I need to know….

  “What is who going to do next? Your daughter and her friend?…

  “That’s right, Mr. Upend, if something turns up, you can be sure we’ll let you know.”

  * * *

  —

  Outside, I passed Esmé’s, the café where Clementine and I had spent so many after-school hours. Surely Officer Peña could have been right. Might it not be possible that I should feel relief? Hadn’t Clementine looked well, better than well, “that pretty girl,” more suntanned than when I had seen her last? I strove by sheer force of will to convince myself that my dread, however asphyxiating, was misguided, the stuff of delusion. Could it not be that what afflicted me was not an external threat but the shadow of my own past, hooding the sun but for me alone, the sun that elsewhere shone with such brilliance on Clementine, in Paris?

  In the photograph of the kiosk, posters above the stacks of newspapers trumpeted the news. I calculated that the headlines could be no older than what, four days? five? So the photograph was recent. The films advertised on the sides of the kiosk had yet to be released. Perhaps my correspondent wanted nothing but to instruct me that it was I and I alone who would never be free. This could be true, I insisted to myself. Just because he had found me, just because he had found her—that alone did not mean that he would do what I most dreaded. He had never said that he would take her life as payment for my own.

  SEVENTEEN

  I do not know how I got home. I do not know what happened between leaving the precinct house and the moment back at the apartment when my telephone rang. I frisked myself to find it—found nothing—lurched from counter to armchair to desk—nowhere—and then it stopped midring. When I finally discovere
d my telephone in my briefcase, I punched through the list of recent numbers to see who had called. No one had called. No one had called for days. Then it rang again, once, twice, before I realized that it was Clementine’s telephone ringing, there, plugged into its charger on the vestibule table. I lunged for it, in the insane conviction that if Clementine’s telephone was ringing, then surely Clementine herself must be calling.

  “Clem! Clementine, is that you? It’s me, it’s Dad—!” But there was nothing, only silence on the line.

  “Hello?” I said, this time as one might test a vacant room for an echo. Nothing…nothing…except (was it?) the sound of breathing, a fluctuation in the background hiss of the line. I held my breath, and the breathing stopped. The silence shifted. Click. Pop. “Hello,” I said a final time, meaning goodbye. “Hello?” The hiss was now more insistent, now thickening to a low hubbub, as of a wide space busy with activity, telephones ringing, footfalls, scraping chairs, when abruptly a single voice cut in. Do you hear me? the voice said, strained, insistent. Do you hear me? it repeated, urgent now. Are you listening to what I am telling you?

  A click and then the voice resumed: I am saying it was another letter, along with a photograph, a photograph of my daughter. Do you understand what I am saying to you?

  It was my own voice, recorded, played back.

  “I hear what you are saying.” This was a second voice in the exchange, a woman’s voice.

  I am telling you, my voice continued, that someone—and I don’t know who—a stranger has mailed me a photograph of my daughter.

  “That’s what you said the first time, when we took down the report. So where is your daughter now, Mr. Upend?” Just as I realized that the second speaker was Officer Peña, the line popped again with a sound something like a phonograph skipping, and her voice repeated, “So where is your daughter now, Mr. Upend?”

  Click.

  So where is your daughter now, Mr. Upend?

  Click.

  So where is your daughter now, Mr. Upend?

  Click.

  Then the gaping silence. Then a dead line.

  * * *

  —

  What prevented me then, Father—having heard my own voice on the line, my own voice and Officer Peña’s, played back through my daughter’s cellphone—from raising the alarm, from speeding back to the station to make my declaration? Someone had recorded our conversation; even when I was in the police station, someone was listening. Was it not obvious then that I and my daughter had been chosen, had been singled out, the objects of a present and calculating malignity? The recording could not have stated the reality more starkly: I know where you are. I know you are holding her telephone, the telephone she sent back to you. I know that you have no way to reach her, whereas I, I can reach her whenever I please.

  It was neither prudence nor fear that held me back. I will tell you even though you will not believe me: at the very moment, my direst apprehensions confirmed, what took possession of me was an utter stillness, an absolute coming to rest.

  Do you remember how trains between Boston and New York used to stop in New Haven to switch engines, electric to diesel or diesel to electric? Do you remember how at that moment, silence upon silence would invade the train, each one deeper than the next, as the ventilation, hydraulics, generator, and engine each cut off one by one, until finally the lights themselves went out? What a total, unbreathing stillness that was. I used to think that death must be such a moment, an accelerating cascade of failures, the encroaching silences compounded as each unnoticed whir or whisper withdraws, making itself known only in its departure. As I stared at the cellphone, that was the sense I had: an arrival at a point of complete extinguishing.

  * * *

  —

  During all the years of her childhood, how much I believed we belonged to each other, Clementine and I. Those were the years in which that bond stood immovable as the axis of our shared world. This must be true for all single fathers of only daughters, that link absolute and indefeasible. Nothing then was stronger, nothing more real than that conviction—real, yes, and yet I know now also utterly wrong.

  It was precisely because she was my daughter and I her father that we belonged not to each other but to opposing dispensations: I to the past, she to the future. Her destination, her rendezvous, was ahead of us, in the future, while my rendezvous was with the past itself. Our mutual bond was nothing more than a temporary settlement. The distance between us now was a distance that had always been there. That gulf was vast, unspannable, but my terror poured out into it and vanished. And I tell you, as I stared into it for the first time, that gulf poured into me its own inhuman and absolute calm.

  * * *

  —

  That calm held unperturbed even when, several days later, another photograph of Clementine appeared in box 5504. Like the others, this one had been printed on heavy stock, and as before, a ragged edge formed the upper border. The photograph had been taken at night, the camera even closer to her face than it had been for the picture by the kiosk. Clementine was seated with her back to the wrought-iron railing of a bridge, a bridge everyone in Paris knows, a footbridge over the Seine where the young people congregate in the evening. In the photograph, Clementine was smoking a cigarette. I had never seen her smoke, but she seemed perfectly at ease, holding the cigarette to the side as she exhaled and smiled at the same time, her mouth pursed a little as though about to speak. Her expression was unmistakably and uniquely Clementine’s, one I must have seen thousands of times and yet never noticed. But there was something different about the way she held her mouth.

  Yes, I knew. I knew what it was.

  Her lips were pursed and tightened at the corners of her mouth not merely because she was about to speak, but because she was about to speak in French. Her French had been excellent since attending the Lycée Français, but it had been a slick, synthetic, private school French, polished and expensive, made in America. In the photograph, however, her mouth formed itself effortlessly around one of the impossible syllables. I knew that shape of the mouth: I knew it from Miriam, from Miriam’s lips, smoky and muscular, whispering, brushing against my own.

  And on the back, beneath the torn upper border of the photograph, the poem had been copied anew in the familiar, blocked-out handwriting:

  Where the wandering water gushes

  From the hills above Glen-Car,

  In pools among the rushes

  That scarce could bathe a star,

  We seek for slumbering trout

  And whispering in their ears

  Give them unquiet dreams;

  Leaning softly out

  From ferns that drop their tears

  Over the young streams.

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  Away with us he’s going,

  The solemn-eyed:

  He’ll hear no more the lowing

  Of the calves on the warm hillside

  Or the kettle on the hob

  Sing peace into his breast,

  Or see the brown mice bob

  Round and round the oatmeal-chest.

  For he comes, the human child,

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

  Where there had been four stanzas at first, now the final two alone remained. The first two had been torn away. Beneath them, my correspondent had written:

  Que ce soit avec toi, que ce soit avec la fille, je serai satisfait.

  Je suis (tu comprends) miséricordieux.

  Whether with you or with the girl, I will be satisf
ied.

  I am (you understand) merciful.

  The sentence pronounced. The verdict handed down.

  EIGHTEEN

  I have this exchange with Jessica Burke recorded in my notebook.

  “But what if I am meant to be a junkie? What if that’s what I’m meant to be? Who’s to say it’s not?”

  “You want me to say it. You want me to say it’s not meant to be.”

  “I do. I want that. But you can’t say it.”

  “I can say this—you are afraid that it might be true, also that it might not be true.”

  “I was right,” she said after a long pause. “You can’t say it.”

  * * *

  —

  Do you actually hear confessions in your church, Father, actual spoken confessions? For that matter, does any priest anymore, at least as the movies depict them, the little lattice between confessor and penitent, its delicate chiaroscuro screening the priest’s profile and veiling the lips of the sinner? Surely Freud himself, when he positioned himself behind and out of sight of his recumbent patients, sought a similar partial anonymity. How we analysts must envy you, your belief in redress, in the promise of absolution and redemption. How clean the words sound compared to our own impure remedies: recollection, interpretation, speculation, suggestion. Strange, isn’t it, how we have both sealed ourselves in small, half-lit chambers, both in the service of gods who share nothing but the name of Love.