Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  And then, before I can think it, I know.

  I have been granted visions.

  Suddenly it is clear what is happening to me.

  I, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, have been granted visions.

  And immediately I am unbelieving. I say to myself, This is not possible, I have entered the realm of the fabulous, of hallucinations, for there is no way that anybody stuck drowning could experience such things. But contradicting my rational mind is a knowledge that I was never previously aware of possessing. And the rational mind can only reason against that knowledge: that the spirit of the sleeping and the dying in the rainforest roam everywhere, see everything; that we know a great deal more about ourselves than we ever normally care to admit, except at the great moments of truth in our life, in love and hate, at birth and death. Beyond these moments our life seems as if it is one great voyage away from the truths we all encompass, our past and our future, what we were and what we will return to being. And in that journey away our rational mind is our guide, our mentor. But no longer. The rational mind is not persuaded by the knowledge - my knowledge - that everything I am seeing is true, that everything I see has happened. No matter. They may not be the facts of newspapers, but they are truths nevertheless. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. But what connects the two? What remains? What abideth in the earth forever?

  I have been granted visions-grand, great, wild, sweeping visions. My mind rattles with them as they are born to me.

  And I must share them, or their magic will become as a burden.

  Two

  Let me say that I am not surprised by this vision business. Not in the slightest. As far as I know, it runs in the family. Harry was forever having visions, mostly at the end of each week of hard drinking of cider and cheap riesling with Slimy Ted, his old crayfishing skipper. At his weekly barbeque, to which fewer and fewer of us came because of his increasingly erratic and drunken behaviour, Harry would address a whole range of animals who, apart from a few stray cats and mangy dogs, no one else could see, but whom Harry claimed greatly enjoyed the event and with whom, on occasion, he claimed blood relation. Cousin Dan Bevan, whom some members of the family claimed to be mad but who nevertheless was undeniably family, who could cure warts just by looking at them and who bit the tops off whiskey bottles before downing their contents in a few gulps, also saw things, although he saw them not only at the end of a bottle but also in the shape of warts. He saw all sorts of things, both bad and good, and around the Forth district in which he lived, his reading of local warts and carbuncles was treated with some seriousness. On Mama’s side, her mother had the third eye and read fortunes in the dregs of turkish coffee and by this method foretold that worms would crawl out of Mama’s stomach, which was more or less what happened. Of my fate my staramama was much vaguer: she only saw a bird wheeling in the sky.

  So let me say that I am not surprised by this vision thing. But I am not sure if any of it adds up to much. I mean, what use to me is a vision of a bloody bird? Does that help me to work out whether I am fated to live or not and, therefore, whether I ought be struggling to survive or not? No, I can tell you it doesn’t. A vision should give you some answers, shouldn’t it? But all I see are more questions. It’s not right, I tell you, it’s crook and it’s wrong. But I am not surprised by that either. Life has only ever been a constant puzzlement to me, so why should I expect death to suddenly make a whole lot of sense?

  Let me also say that I am not even surprised to be here drowning. I knew it could only end badly when Pig’s Breath first rang and offered me the job. Even the Cockroach knew it would end badly. Why did I take the job anyway? Madonna santa, as Maria Magdalena Svevo was inclined to say in moments of ill temper. Madonna santa. The hard ones upfront. How can I answer that? Things have never really gone right for me. As they say, it’s all written in the book above so why should I give a bugger why I took the job that led to this when I can blame anything? I was gone for a long time before this little number came up. Let me tell you. I mean, where do I begin? The family? The church whose walls wept blood? The school that taught people to run backwards? My father who used to hold big barbeques for ghosts and people who had never even been? The baby and all that bad bloody business? The bedspread with the tear stain that wouldn’t wash out? Couta Ho’s crazy code flags? That bastard Pig’s Breath? That idiot Gaia Head? I get a bad feeling in my guts just thinking about it all normally, but at the moment there are so many other pains crowding around my body I just don’t care. Nothing ever really seemed that important to me, not since Jemma’s death. People worry about how their hair looks, or what other people think of the colour they’ve painted their house, or, as I was once asked by a woman, what size doily to put on her washing machine. But you will understand me when I say that if you are drowning none of these things seems overly important. And I am drowning. I don’t care whether your hair is done or not done, whether your house is painted or not, or whether you even have a house or a washing machine to place a doily upon. Granted I ought to. I’ll give you that, but then I’ve always been easygoing. Lazy, some might say, but I wouldn’t agree. Or maybe I would. All that they say about me being lazy, about being a drifter, about having no future, about not knowing what I want out of life, maybe it is all true.

  Maybe I was always drowning.

  The only difference now is that I no longer have to put up with all those bastards crowding me, making me want to leave, to run, to piss off out of there as the saying goes. I could even get used to where I am now, enveloped in rushing white water, if it didn’t plain hurt so much. Where do I begin? Maybe with what I am seeing at this moment. Because it makes me feel funny, what I am seeing. Because I have never seen such things, least not in the way I am seeing them now. It’s like a movie, right? Except that I have this one vision and it stays there while all these other things happen around it. And right at this moment, this is how it presents itself.

  First. A smell. Of flood - of earth eroding, of peat washing away, of rainforest heavy with rain. More precisely - for though lazy, I have always admired precision - more precisely: the energetic stench of decay. Then. A sound. The roar, the tumult of sounds of a river breaking its normal banks, crashing through the low-lying shrubbery, forming large rapids where none existed before; of sheets of rain driving like blows of an axe into the guts of the gorge.

  Then, breaking forth from a bizarre low angle, a ray of light shining up the gorge illuminating a world otherwise cast in darkness by the black rain clouds above. The water reflects a white brilliance. From where I am watching, the mass of glistening white is momentarily blinding. It takes some time for my eyes to adjust to this whiteness and recognise the river. The Franklin River. A world pure and whole and complete unto itself. Neither rubber condoms nor rubber tyres nor tin cans nor dioxins nor bent rusting chrome reminders of the cars they once graced nor any of the other detritrus of our world seem to abide here. This is an alien world. This is the river. Rising in the Cheyne Range. Falling down Mt Gell. Writhing like a snake in the wild lands at the base of the huge massif of Frenchmans Cap. Writing its past and prophesying its future in massive gorges slicing through mountains and cliffs so undercut they call them verandahs, and in eroded boulders and beautiful gilded eggs of river stone, and in beaches of river gravel that shift year to year, flood to flood, and in that gravel that once was rounded river rock that once was eroded boulder that once was undercut cliff that once was mountain and which will be again. And then I see them. At the top of the whiteness two red rafts, each bearing people, each person craning their eyes earnestly over the rapid, down which they are now to fall.

  Aljaz

  In front of that white brilliance, there is a rock. A huge, sloping rock the size of several houses, flanked on one side by a sheer cliff and upon the other by a waterfall. And nine or so people and two red rafts pulled up on that rock. But I can’t make out the people’s faces. They are hard to clearly see in the pattern of the myrtle leaves that da
nce in the swirling water before my eyes. The people are gathered where the boulder edges the waterfall, and they are staring at an arm that rises ghostlike out of the waterfall only a few metres from where they stand.

  Like a spotlight in a theatre, the low ray of sunlight illuminates the arm, further emphasising its ethereal nature. The people on the rock observe in fascinated horror the way the fingers of the hand open out into the ray of light as if in question, stretch as far as it is possible for such extremities to stretch, and the fingers shiver and as they do so the hand pivots around the wrist, roaming its small and tightly circumscribed sunlit world, searching for some hope it might grasp. At the point where this mesmerising moving limb rises, the waterfall has not begun its absolute drop, which is a metre or two further downstream. Here the fall is a maelstrom of wild, confused falling water. And jammed between submerged rocks, stuck underneath that furious water, is a man to whom this arm belongs.

  Me. Aljaz Cosini, river guide.

  More precisely: the spotlit arm is my arm.

  My head, jammed between the rocks, can no doubt be made out from the large boulder above. No doubt. The blue of my guide’s helmet and the planes of my face visible to those looking down through these few centimetres. (How many? Seven or eight or nine? What does it avail? I’m a bee’s dick away from those people and that beautiful air they breathe and I can’t reach it or them, or them me.) But my body, snagged in the rock, wedged into the black water below, would be visible to no eyes. To those staring down, desperate and impotent, I probably look like John the Baptist when his head was brought to Herod on a plate. Funny thought, that. Funny that even funny thoughts can happen when you are dying. Maybe the humour is part of the horror.

  And then it strikes me: the site of my death, albeit in a small and humble way, will become a tourist monument. And this idea - this revelation - amuses me. Here in my agony I’m about to be enshrined as part of the joke. I suppose I have become part of the bloody joke. This idea is too much for me. I burst out laughing. And as my laughter empties into ever smaller bubbles and rushes away to join the other bubbles in the current, I involuntarily try to breathe in. Water rushes into my mouth and courses down my throat.

  I feel faint.

  I feel as if I am dissolving.

  And when that sensation washes through me, it washes me away. Not my body, no, but me, takes me elsewhere, to another time, another river. No, the same river, but so gentle, so kind, so warm, as to make it seem an entity from another world. And now I recognise it - this place where we enter the river and start our trip. The Collingwood River Bridge. It must be six, no, five, five and a half days ago; it was then, and there. There, it is me, standing at the edge of the river. When I look back at myself all that time ago I see only a stranger. But it is me. I can pick the gawky hooked nose, with its eaglebeak-like profile, and the body - yes, the body - there is a giveaway if ever there was one. My god, will you just get a goosey gander of that! It is my body, I can see that now, short, stumpy, but I don’t feel the revulsion to it now that I felt then. Then, I hated its combination of scrawniness and flab - wherever a guide should have muscle I had more loose flesh the colour of dripping. But looking at it now it seems more than perfectly adequate for the purposes of living. It can walk on both its legs with an admittedly awkward and somewhat comic lope, more like a baboon than a person, but walk nevertheless those legs do. And the arms are fine for picking things up and putting them down and all the other armlike functions they must perform. As for the face, well it breathes without effort.

  Without effort!

  To think that a man who breathes without effort would have as his major concern whether or not the customers who have paid to come on this trip will think the less of him because of a slightly chubby waistline. It is amusing. I ought laugh.

  Most interesting is that none of this nervous vanity is apparent. Nor his customary shyness. He seems relaxed and confident, his dishevelled appearance generating confidence in his customers, who marvel at his nonchalant approach. As for the piss-flambeaued face - well, I think it a not uninteresting face. It lacks, it is true, the boyishness of his fellow river guide. It is a desolate visage, all sallow angles and stubbled, strangely high cheekbones looking as though they have been cable-logged of most of the vital signs of life and further eroded by the passage of time, and, like a clearfelled mountainside, not without a perverse attraction. An eroded black-bedrock wasteland of a face, relieved in its monotony only by the large nose that sits like an abandoned mining tower over the desolation it inhabits. So splendidly large I am compelled to wonder if the face has been bred only for this feature, while the rest of its aspects have been allowed to degenerate. Why is there something fascinating in that face? Maybe it’s because in its early traces of broken purple lines, in its dirty teeth, in its lank red hair, in its darkness, there is something suggestive of experience and suffering. Perhaps even knowledge.

  Perhaps.

  And those eyes burning, a jagged blue. Like the blue heart of the guttering yellow flame of an oxyacetylene torch as the gas is being switched off. Red haired, dark skinned, blue eyed, big nosed. Strange. And unsettling. Vulnerability and doomed pride and very large nostrils.

  I watch in fascination as this Aljaz Cosini squats down, puts his hands in the creek, lays his body near parallel with the ground, then slowly lowers himself, taking the weight upon his arms as though he is beginning a pushup. His head disappears into the river. Beneath the water’s surface Aljaz opens his eyes and looks at the shiny brown and gold river pebbles beneath him. The light falls through the water as it does through the air, in shafts created by openings in the all-encompassing rainforest, falling upon the rocks beneath to give the entire river its red-gold glow. As he looks he opens his mouth and takes a draught of river water into his mouth and lets it feel its cool way down his throat. I watch him think that no water tastes as good as water drunk like this. I watch him wonder what it would feel like to be part of the river. As his thin red hair floats back and forth like kelp in the slow current of the shallows, I watch him think that perhaps it would feel like this. Then think, or perhaps it wouldn’t feel like anything at all. Then think perhaps this is what he likes best about being down the Franklin, the ditch, as the guides call it. The way the mountains and the rivers and the rainforest care nothing for him. They feel him to be neither part of them nor separate from them, neither want him to be there nor want him to go, neither love nor hate him, neither envy nor disparage his efforts, see him neither as good nor bad. They have no more opinion of him than of a fallen stick or an entire river. He feels naked, without need, without desire. He feels enclosed by the walls of the mountains and the rainforest. He feels, for the first time in such a long time, good. Perhaps this is what death is, he thinks. A peace at the heart of an emptiness.

  Shush, shush, shush. The large shiny red pontoons of the raft they will use to navigate the river begin to inflate as the doctor from Adelaide with the expensive purple polar-fleece jacket and the white legs like an emu pushes the foot pump up and down.

  Shush, shush, shush. I watch myself encouraging him in his labours and revelling in my insincerity. ‘Great job, Rickie, great job. That’s the way.’ It’s not the way, but Aljaz knows it is better that someone else does some of the work than he do it all, even if they do it badly. ‘Stick with it, Rickie.’ I watch Rickie give a purposeful smile, watch him feel wanted and needed and appreciated.

  ‘To finally be here at the Franklin River,’ shush, shush, shush, ‘you don’t know how much it means,’ says Rickie. Shush, shush, shush.

  ‘A stiff back, bad food, and weak bowels, that’s what it means,’ says Aljaz, and I see that this Aljaz is something of a comedian, that he sees his role as much one of entertaining as of guiding. I see that his customary shyness finds a cover in theatrical exaggeration.

  I watch as this Aljaz slowly looks up from the river at the bush that forms around its banks and I watch him smile. I know what he is thinking at this preci
se moment: he is happy to be back at last upon the river, back upon the lousy leech-ridden ditch. Around him, the myrtles and sassafras and native laurels and leatherwoods mass in walls of seemingly impenetrable rainforest, and in front of him flows the tea-coloured water of the river, daily bronzing and gilding the river rock a little further.

  I know he is smiling at the punters, who, despite their protestations to the contrary, despite their assertions that this is the most beautiful country, are already feeling a growing unease with this weird alien environment that seems so alike yet so dissimilar to the wilderness calendars that adorn their lounge-rooms and offices. It smells strongly of an acrid, fecund earth, and its temperate humidity weighs upon them like a straitjacket of the senses. Wherever they turn there is no escape: always more rainforest, and more of it irreducible to a camera shot. No plasterboard walls or coffee tables are to be found to act as borders, to reduce this land to its rightful role of decoration. Not that they don’t try, and almost always at the start of a trip there is at least one customer who shoots off a roll or two of film in nervous excitement. But for Aljaz, this place that they feel to be moving behind them, causing them to sometimes give an anxious look over their shoulder, for Aljaz this place is home.