The Waters & the Wild

by DeSales Harrison

  If such an illusion flitted at the corner of my sight, it lived only long enough to be crushed and swallowed by a paralyzing awareness: She was gone. There was no place to go. She was infinitely distant from everywhere. So I did not return to the train station. I did not leave Nevers that day, or that night. From the transit maps posted at the bus stops I had learned that there was a camping ground on the opposite bank of the Loire, just over the bridge. In a sporting goods store, I purchased a tent and sleeping bag. At the campground, a few RVs and camper vans with Dutch and German plates had docked themselves near the water hookups and canteen, but down in a grassy expanse along the river, none of the spaces were occupied, and I pitched my tent there. The sleeping bag, I discovered, had been made for a child, so I pulled it on top of me and drew up my legs. The sun made a cold white disk in the orange fabric of the tent. All that day and the following, a restless sleep came and went. Another day passed, and then another. A fifth day: it occurred to me that I had no intention of leaving this place.

  * * *

  —

  In the evenings, I would make my way back up into the old town, threading my way up the ramparts above the Loire: Fountain Street, Break-Neck Street. The épicerie where I bought my vodka was on a cobbled pedestrian street between a pharmacy and a horse butcher. Each day, with neither salutation nor thanks, the grocer counted my money and handed me my bottle. Each night, the darkness found me seated on the parapet of the bridge, my feet hanging over the downstream side. Beneath the bridge the river shoaled and sheeted, composing itself again downstream, where the channel deepened. When the bottle was empty, I dropped it over the edge, just as I had done with the hammer and chisel. The roar of the water canceled any splash or sound of breakage, as though the bottle were falling and falling in endless space.

  Why did I stay? Had I sentenced myself to a sort of purgatory, in the campground on the other side of the river? All I knew was that I was to wait, to stay where I was and await instruction. When it came, it would know to find me on the bridge.

  And come it did, three or four days later, not in the evening but at noon. I had not slept the night before. Perhaps, I had thought, if I walked into town and around the park, by the time I’d returned I could sleep. Crossing the bridge, toward the city, I passed a group of teenagers loitering by the downstream parapet. A couple of kids tossed pebbles over the edge. One spat. A stray remark stopped me, and I leaned against the parapet at a distance but within earshot. One of the teenagers, a girl, barefoot in spite of the cold, had climbed up on the parapet, lifting her foot and pointing her toe, as a ballerina might.

  “Was this where it happened?” someone asked.

  “It was down there,” said the girl on the parapet.

  “They pulled her out onto Tern Island.”

  “No, they didn’t, shit-for-brains, they pulled her onto the bank.”

  The girl said, “The water doesn’t look that deep.”

  “Why don’t you dive down there and tell us?” said a boy.

  “Why don’t you suck my dick?” said the girl.

  “She would have died from the fall,” someone said.

  “Especially chained to all that scrap iron.”

  “She didn’t jump,” said the girl standing on the parapet. “She walked in from the bank. She drowned herself.”

  “No way,” someone countered. “Everyone knows she jumped, or was pushed.”

  “Oh, they do? The autopsy said she drowned,” said the balancing girl. “It was in the Journal du Centre today.”

  “Oh, the Journal! Then it must be true.”

  “It’s what the autopsy said.”

  “It’s obvious,” said a boy. “Somebody threw her in.”

  “She was knocked up and she drowned herself,” said the girl on the parapet. “My cousin said so. He works at the hospital.”

  “Of course she was knocked up,” said the boy again. “All the more reason for someone to throw her into the river.”

  * * *

  —

  It was in the Journal du Centre today. That was what the girl had said.

  Noon: the kiosk at the corner of the park shut tight. Above it, the sun had stopped in the sky. The park was empty. I sat on a bench. Something in my brain had shut as well. I could not think. There was no thought. Just the silhouette of the barefoot girl, toe pointed, balanced on the parapet.

  “It’s true she was pregnant,” the silhouette was saying.

  It’s true she was pregnant. No thoughts, just the words, the silhouette. But then the kiosk had snapped open, and the air moved a little, lifting the corner of a newspaper under its paperweight.

  “Help yourself,” the woman in the kiosk had said when I placed my coin on the tray. “It is sad, monsieur, this story of the drowned girl,” she said as the coin vanished into her hand. “And pregnant too, they are saying. La pauvre. Enfin, les pauvres. It is there inside the paper. Everything.”

  Poor girl. Or rather: poor both of them.

  Following the drowning of Miriam Levaux, reported in these pages last Monday…

  Was monsieur not feeling well?

  Was he sure?

  Without doubt, monsieur, it is the fluctuations in temperature.

  The inquest, concluded yesterday, confirmed suicide as the cause of death.

  The fluctuations have been terrible.

  Levaux, who had notified the police where her body could be located, had been six months pregnant.

  One must pay attention with such fluctuations!

  The fetus had died with the mother.

  But monsieur, you have paid for it. It is yours! Take it! It is paid for! Monsieur, it is yours!

  * * *

  —

  Had I not known it all along, since the day she had called me in Paris, from la communauté, from the day she had called to ask me to come see her? Had I not known it from the beginning, even when I had persuaded myself it wasn’t so? Had I not known it ever since the day Miriam and I lay down together on the rotting boards over the stream, ever since she broke with her fingertip the thread of semen suspended between us? I had known it because it was true. It had always been true. Of all the things that could have happened, this one had happened. Miriam and I had conceived a child.

  And yet for all that, it was still impossible. Can you not see, Father, that if Miriam had been pregnant when she drowned herself, if she had been six months pregnant when she died, and if her baby, our child, had died with her, then that child—our daughter, our Clementine—must have died before she was born?

  THIRTY-NINE

  Time gave way to arrhythmic oscillations: sometimes day—close and hot, a sheet of plastic sealed over the face—sometimes night—clamped down and ground in a circle, stars studding the haze like nails in a boot heel. At some point, a fringe of restless creatures, fluttering and papery, crowded the borders of my vision. They would leave me alone, I believed, if only I could manage to sleep, but they knew what I thought. Sleep? For you? they seemed to be saying. Never again!

  Their agitation spread to my own limbs in the form of an unrelenting tremor that movement alone could subdue. So throughout those days in Nevers, I walked and walked, up and down the rue de la Blanchisserie, the overgrown towpaths, the crest of the levee above the south bank. I walked down past the sad espace de loisirs, the “leisure park” with its shuttered puppet theater, its ice-cream stand and muddy, man-made beach. Through the underbrush, I followed a dubious path out to an isolated sand spit in the river. Wherever I went, my feet would always take me back toward town, toward the épicerie and another pint of vodka.

  When walking no longer worked to suppress the tremor, I remembered the pharmacy across from the épicerie. A pharmacy would have something to make me sleep, to disperse the fringe of chattering figures. My feet were already taking me there. With a sigh, an automatic door received m
e into an interior bewilderingly bright and neat.

  I felt suddenly how long it had been since I had bathed, shaved, or changed clothes. To anyone in that spotless interior I would seem a spectacle of neglect. The pharmacist, however, did not seem to notice. His attention was absorbed by a scrawny, dreadlocked young woman standing at the counter. Waving a soiled sheet of paper, she shouted at the pharmacist in a lurching approximation of French. A scabby dog had flattened itself on the cool tile at her feet, taking cover from her harangue.

  “Un vrai, vois-vous, c’est vrai ordonnance. Signé par médecin. Vrai médecin. Tu faut le préparer, monsieur.” It was real prescription, signed by real doctor. Monsieur have to make it.

  “Once more,” said the pharmacist, slowly, as though speaking to a lip-reader. “I will fill no prescription if the prescription cannot be verified.”

  “You has to! I am much pain!”

  “No ‘real’ doctor would authorize opiates for someone in your condition.”

  But he had to fill it! A tear had loosened the grime at the corner of her eye and she smeared it away. “Alors, then. Monsieur was accepting to take responsibility?”

  The pharmacist rolled his eyes. Why, could mademoiselle doubt that he was willing? He would be more than happy to call the gendarmes for her, for her or any of her vagrant friends.

  She spun around and, jerking the dog after her, shoved past me toward the door. It was only at that moment that I noticed her belly. From behind she had seemed frail, even emaciated, but I knew now that this was the girl I had seen at the train station, the pregnant girl. The olive skin of her neck and collarbone were speckled with purulent sores, and an odor of scalp and sweat lingered after the door sighed shut at her back.

  The pharmacist muttered something about toxicomanes and tsiganes dégueulasses. “Addicts! Disgusting Gypsies,” he said. “And you? What do you want?”

  * * *

  —

  On my way back toward the river, I noticed the dog first. It was whimpering behind a bench at the far end of the place de la République, where a switchback path descends the face of the old city walls. The girl was lying on her side, without cover, on the bare ground. The dog would approach her and paw at her chest, then back away, tugging at the limit of the string. The other end of the string must have been tied around the girl’s wrist, because when the dog pulled, her hand jerked a little before flopping back, inert on her hip. Her complexion, olive in the light of the pharmacy, had turned an ashy, congealed hue, tallowed with sweat. When I lifted her other wrist to take her pulse, she attempted to pull away, but with a nerveless gesture. Her eyes drifted, irises gray, flecked with gold, sclera bloodshot and tinged with jaundice, pupils constricted to pinpoints.

  “Vous êtes très malade,” I said.

  “Enculé donne pas médicament.”

  “Vous êtes en état de manque,” I said, uncertain of the word for “withdrawal.”

  A pinpoint pupil shifted past me as she repeated, “Motherfucker doesn’t give medicine.”

  I asked her where she lived and said I could help her get home. Another limp gesture past my shoulder and then a struggle to lift herself. I managed at last to balance her on her feet, then with a jerk of surprising force she tried to twist free. She staggered and would have fallen if I hadn’t clasped her in a kind of upright tackle. Her belly pressed against my side, as hard as a knee. I tried to steer her toward the bench, but she commenced a slow walk. She allowed me to hold her arm, but she was leading me, working her way through the little streets, up to the Porte de Paris and past it, the dog wheezing alongside on his string. When we passed a bar-tabac, I made her sit down and ordered her a Coke, but she drank a single sip before heaving herself up again. “I go,” she said, and so we continued on. We had long since left behind any neighborhood I recognized, passing into a district of public housing towers, shuttered and featureless save where limp flags of laundry hung from a sill. We crossed a roadway into what appeared to be a half-built or abandoned development. Several foundation slabs stared upward into the rain, cracked where last year’s weed and thistle had pushed through the concrete. Where a temporary wall of board and netting enclosed a construction site, she stopped and braced herself against a sheet of plywood, and I welcomed a chance to catch my breath as well. The dog paced to the end of its string and back, then sat down to pound at a flea behind its ear. This site, it seemed, had been abandoned in its development later than some of the others, its pilings sunk, foundation set, and the first and second levels already poured. Above the second floor, where tendons of rebar jutted from the unfinished pillars, streaks of rust streamed downward in orange veils.

  “You go,” she said.

  “I cannot leave you here,” I said. “I will bring you home.”

  “Chez moi.”

  “Chez vous.” I said. “I will bring you there.”

  “Chez moi. Here,” she said.

  “Your home where?”

  “Bring me just down,” said the girl. “You go then.”

  And with that she grasped the edge of the board and worked it open until the gap was wide enough to pass through. The opening gave onto a broad ramp leading down into the darkness of the unbuilt building. As we descended, a bird, disturbed, burst into flight above us, the slap of its wing-beats twanging off the foundation walls. At its base the ramp leveled out, opening into a broad, flat space. We stood in some sort of underground garage or warehouse.

  “Attends,” said the girl, and moved off with the dog into the obscurity. At the cough of a match, with a sudden hiss, a kerosene lantern drove hard shadows toward the corners of the room.

  “You go,” she said again. “Chez moi.”

  Along the wall, beside the lantern, cardboard sheets had been stacked to form a pallet; a muddle of blankets lay on top. Without looking to see if I was still there, the girl lowered herself onto the pallet and unknotted the string from her wrist. “Vas-y, Obus, tu bois,” she said, and the dog, checking once to see if the length of string had agreed to follow him, drifted toward two enamel bowls laid out, in surprising tidiness, on a pink bath mat. The dog lapped water from one bowl, sniffed the other, then sighed downward between splayed legs, belly and muzzle resting on the concrete floor.

  Crouching by the pallet, I asked the girl if she knew when she was supposed to give birth. “Baby,” I repeated. “Baby soon. One month? Two weeks? When? Bébé quand?”

  “Yes,” was all she said. “Medicine.”

  “You need to be on methadone,” I said, not knowing if the word existed in French. “You need to see a doctor.”

  “Need medicine,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “A doctor, to help you.”

  “No, medicine only,” she said.

  “I am a doctor, me, un vrai médecin,” I said, tapping my sternum, and the pinprick of her pupil shifted toward me. “If you need me, you can find me. I am staying at the campground. Le camping, vous comprenez? Do you know where it is? Just by the bridge, across the river.”

  Her lips parted as though to speak, but a voice called out from above, and footsteps descended the ramp, growing louder. The voice, in a torrent of profanity, was saying something about luck or chance, but when the owner of the voice reached the bottom of the ramp and saw me, he broke off abruptly.

  A gaunt man looked rapidly between me and the girl. Who was I? And what the fuck was I doing here? The voice sounded young, but the face was drawn and creased in the lamplight, lips thin, teeth prominent. His French, though rapid, seemed to have been assembled from guttural, alien sounds.

  “Doctor—” the girl started.

  “Speak up!” he snapped, but didn’t wait for her to continue. “You,” he said to me, “you get the fuck out now.”

  She needed help, I was trying to say, she would soon be in labor.

  “And remember,” he said, pressing the tip of h
is index finger between my eyes, his voice now a whisper, “you were never here.”

  “Never where?” I asked, with the unformed notion that I could find my way back to this place if required.

  “That’s the idea,” he said. “This is nowhere and you were never here. Vas-t’en.”

  I felt his stare on my back as I mounted the ramp and passed back out into the cold, the rain falling heavier now.

  FORTY

  Did I think—and with satisfaction—that I was discharging a Samaritan’s obligation, helping a girl, sick and pregnant, make her way home? Did I harbor the notion that something in me was capable of redemption, or if not of redemption, then reprieve? Did I imagine that in time I would be delivered, that messengers would be sent, disguised as the poor, the needy, the sick, even a wheezing dog on a string, to lead me out of the wilderness I’d wandered in since Miriam’s death? Was it within such notions, Father, that my pride and self-aggrandizement concealed themselves?

  * * *

  —

  The walk with the girl out to the abandoned construction site had been an ascent, a precarious tottering, but the way back was a plummet, a headlong drop. Something had caught up to me, seized and hauled me back to my campsite, as though to say: “You cannot leave, you can never leave.” But what was it that had ensnared me? The fact both simple and impossible that Miriam had killed herself, had killed herself and her child, our child. Here. Yes, that was the implacable fact that had tracked me down and seized me, saying, On n’est nulle part, et toi, tu n’étais jamais là. This is nowhere and you were never here. You were never here, but you can never leave. Wherever I went, whatever I did, I could never leave. I had said to the girl, If you need me, you can find me, as though I had appointed myself her physician on call. But I wasn’t on call. I was in a kind of custody, held not by professional obligation but by whatever it was—the desert, the wilderness—I knew I could never escape. I had found myself in a kind of limitless detention, a version of what French law calls garde-à-vue, the state of being kept in sight, without refuge.