Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  I really thought someday I might achieve what she did, that my work might stand for something. But I can’t face rejection, the blank days and roiling anxieties, the apathy and the sadness that are worse than death. I can’t face going to a madhouse.

  Virginia Woolf lifted a large stone, put it in her pocket, and on March 28th, 1941 she walked into the Ouse River in Sussex England.

  Did she think about the silver flow of cold water around her, climbing up her shoes and stockings and billowing her skirt, her dark hair? Did she think about how even if life held no prospect for change, the current would carry her? Did she think about the sound—knowing it would be for the last time—she would hear birdsong and rushing wind?

  I will think of you, and of those things as I stand along the grassy banks of the Esopus, and I will think of her, and how her work lives on and I will carry two stones.

  March 29th, 1976

  Memorandum from special psych ops agent Betsy Anselm to Director of Special Services, GPS:

  As per directive dated March 21st, 1976, you may report to Mother Taraneh that we can now show that facts such as sleep deprivation, loss of job, isolation, scare tactics, infiltration of home, surveillance, etc., created a state of heightened suspicion and a prolonged feeling of desolation and hopelessness. It can certainly be tried with variations of acts and intensity on subjects who are deemed even more important OEDs and who through word or deed undermine our policies and our organization.

  Unquestionably, “Operation Virginia” was a resounding success.

  THE GORGE OF CHILDREN

  by Daniele Bonfanti

  Spring – Aosta Valley

  The river is born from a vertical chasm in the wall of the glacier, like silver blood pouring out of a gash. Thick water out of darkness through the shimmer of the sun on the green ice and into the light of a cloudless Alpine sky. It is four meters wide here, but it will grow, fast and hungry, as it feeds on all the streams cascading down the steep walls of the valley.

  Two kayaks are already in the water, a big man with jughead ears and a woman with wavy blonde hair escaping her helmet: both warm up lazily, ferrying smoothly through the creases to the other shore, or paddling upstream in the narrow near-bank eddy, then elegantly peeling off into the current with firm, high-bracing strokes, to hop downstream five or six waves and spin back into the eddy.

  Together with a tall man in civilian clothes, camera strapped across his chest, a third paddler is lingering on the stony bank with his tomato-red creek boat—a Burn III with the airbrushed logo of his sponsor Zermatt Watches—on his shoulder, and his black, carbon fiber paddle held in his other hand like a lance. He closes his brown eyes, slowly inhaling the breeze caressing his curly hair—the sun on his face, the voice of the water rustling in his ears. When he opens them again, he looks at the photographer and smiles.

  “You should be on the water with us, mate. You would have home-field advantage, too.” Pleasant, measured cockney accent; tenor voice.

  The answer is deadpan: “And who would drive the van?”

  The kayaker chuckles. “Come on—you, me, Léa, and Iancu! We’re like the four fuckin’ knights of the Apocalypse, aren’t we?”

  “You’ll have to content yourself with the Three Musketeers today, Sean.”

  Sean squeezes his eyes. “Ha. And what about D’Artagnan?” Then raises an eyebrow, “Really, Cedric. You’re missing out on this one. It will be great.”

  “I’m sure, but I told you: I don’t do that shit anymore, not after the Congo…I’ve got family.”

  “Well, me too.”

  “As a matter of fact, you used to. Then guess what? Your knockout fashion model wife left you with Mister Safety and your baby son—who calls him dad, if I’m not mistaken—’cause she cried her onyx black eyes out all night long each time you were out on an expedition, waiting for that call.”

  “Thanks for the memo. Ever the friend.”

  “No problem, you can always count on me.”

  Sean quietly shakes his head. “Anyway…come on. One of the few places on the surface of this planet where nobody’s ever been. And it’s right there,” he vaguely hints downriver with his chin. “Doesn’t that make you hard?”

  Cedric shrugs. “A little, yes.”

  “And it’s not that dangerous; you know it.”

  “One hundred percent is a pretty high body count for a rapid, in my book.”

  “Two is a pretty low number in mine. They were both unprepared and had poor timing. Perhaps they were just unlucky, too. Anyway, they weren’t us.”

  “Still. You have no idea what you’ll find in there. Could be a siphon big enough to swallow you and your boat whole. Not even your Swiss sponsor is going to pull you out from there, you know? Could be anything. And I can’t afford a risk like that.”

  “You’re exaggerating. You saw it. It’s just the Elbow, you can’t really see that turn and…Oh, right, we had this argument already.”

  “Twice,” he smiles. He pounds a hand on Sean’s paddle shoulder, causing the action-cam–rigged helmet dangling from his hand to swing a little. “Go. I’ll be right there with this when you exit the gorge,” he lovingly pats his Leica. “Remember to say ‘cheese.’ I’ll do my best to make you presentable. Luckily, you have Léa in the party, so at least some pictures will be nice.” He squeezes his shoulder. “And be careful, man.”

  “Don’t worry, mate, child’s play. After all, it is called the Gorge of Children, isn’t it?”

  Cedric squints, deep crow’s feet carved by wind and sun. “You know why it’s actually called that, right?”

  “Come to think of it, no. Graceful name, though.”

  “Too bad it’s because they used to make human sacrifices there. Child sacrifices.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t know. It was half the reason ADAM bought my story in advance.”

  “Oh. And the other half were the magic words ‘Sean Williams,’ right?”

  “More like the words ‘first integral descent of the Dora de Pulaz, including the fucking Elbow.’”

  “You know you’re a crappy person, right? My very worst friend.” He smiles, showing large, white, slightly uneven teeth. “Anyway, children?”

  “Yep. They were— ”

  “Sean!” It is Léa, calling from the river, her voice throaty. “So? Shitting your pants?”

  Sean turns to answer her, widening his smile even more, “No, it’s just our dear Cedric here is telling me only now that we may meet the ghosts of dead children in there.”

  Her eyebrows rise over wide, green, almond-shaped eyes. “Fuck, man, you didn’t know?”

  He shrugs. Then he looks back at Cedric with inquiring eyes.

  And Cedric says, “Nobody wants to see Léa angry, so, the short version: before Augustus conquered and enslaved them, there was a tribe called the Salassi here in the Aosta Valley, one of the last to hold out against Roman domination. Tough guys. Well, this river was a god in their pantheon, and the gorge was its number one place of worship. The town of Pre de Pulaz, just beyond the gorge, is built upon the ruins of a Salassi village; you can still see some of them, I’ll take you, it’s interesting stuff. Aulo Murena, the Roman general who led the conquest, wrote that they believed the god’s core resided in the gorge, and they had to present him with a gift each spring equinox if they wanted to keep him content and prevent him from getting out and laying waste to the village. Prosaically, it was probably related to their fear of spring overflows. Yet, you know what those gifts were…”

  “Children.”

  “Yep. According to Aulo Murena, they had to give the god ‘a son’ each spring.”

  “That’s— ”

  “Sean!” Léa, again.

  “Coming, coming!” and he quietly moves in her direction, looking back once just to say, “See you there, mate.”

  Icy bucketfuls against their faces. Sharp water tries to snatch them away, to pull them below. Black, bl
urred rocks beneath a thin veil, barely surfacing between one wave and the next. One centimeter of polyethylene separating them from the maw of the roaring beast.

  They move among walls of water that crumble and resurrect, only to collapse again.

  They are very different paddlers. Iancu dominates his wild boat with utter strength, his impressive back, shoulders, and arms conveying all their might to his paddle that keeps pushing and pulling and working. Léa carves her way through the waves with grace; though solid, her strokes seem to barely touch the water, caressing it, while her hips do most of the work, giving the right chine to the right current at exactly the right time. Sean is something in between, aggressive but gentle; one with his boat, and grinning, he makes it look almost easy.

  What they have in common is that feeling: blood loaded with electricity as it fuels muscles, all senses overloaded and otherworldly keen, on. Alive.

  And not one of them is fighting the river—that would really be a one-way battle and they well know: they are trying to go along with its will. The difficult part is understanding it, while avoiding being submerged in the process.

  Sean is in the lead. His eyes dart around, looking for secret lines in the middle of that heartbreakingly beautiful, white inferno. The banks are no more than fifteen meters away, both sides, but they could as well be on another planet.

  He punches through a hole, rides a pourover; beside him, the gray rocky walls flow by, rising higher and looming. Ahead, they overhang so much that they almost touch, high up where they end, about eighty meters above, and only a narrow strip of light—blazing—remains.

  A quick stern draw, skirting a nasty sieve—bared, broken, foaming teeth of stone ready to chew on him—but then the river horizon vanishes just before him, too close; he raises his paddle and waits for the right moment to hit the lip with a high, vertical stroke, pulls back his blade as he pushes with his hips—and his boat is floating in the air with its front rocker well forward while he rotates ahead and meets the surface with a precise stroke, pushing with his feet against the bulkheads, in full control of his bow.

  An unexpected flower of water blooms underneath, though, hurling him sideways—right into a three-meter hole, and suddenly there is a front of water running dizzyingly toward him; too late to do anything but raise the paddle high and hold his breath. The impact is a harsh slap that turns the world black, generating a whirl of bubbles.

  Sean’s red boat is capsized, thrashed by the frenzied hands of the river.

  The blade of his paddle appears.

  Underwater, his lips contract in a devilish sneer; they open to trace a silent, gurgling battle cry.

  He surfaces, his body holding on to the paddle that escaped one hand. A thrust of the back completes the eskimo roll, and his fingers run to recover and seize the shaft of the paddle.

  Breathing hard, he takes in the scenario around him from this new point of view.

  They are inside the gorge now; the notorious Elbow getting nearer, fast.

  And he was right. As their scouting from upriver promised, the rapid is not that bad—still a full big-water grade V, sure—and it is actually lots of fun, with many standing waves and huge cushions along the edges.

  Gigantic arches of stone overlook them, like the nave of a cathedral, keeping all gazing eyes away.

  A great peace. Warped by the rumble of the river, growing in texture with the reverberations.

  Their three boats stand out, bright colors against white water and dark shadows, getting darker toward the gloom of the Elbow.

  They become off-key details, their yellow and their red, while sliding and hopping toward obscurity for a few more seconds.

  Then, they vanish.

  His Leica ready, Cedric is perched like a sniper on a rock, the waves that engulf it spraying him liberally.

  He aims upriver, the length of the gorge beyond the Elbow: a completely white seething of foam, with big fleeting bulges and sharp crests, a huge water dome in the middle and not one visible rock.

  Despite the biting breath of the river, a drop of sweat runs down his temple, through his thin blonde hair.

  A thrill.

  But then there are colors, materializing out of the black and into the white, and his shutter begins to click as they jolt up and down and slither over, around, and into the seams, the holes, and the waves.

  They vanish again behind the gurgling dome, reappear on its right—looking so small and fragile so close to it—and are out of the gorge in thirty seconds, passing right under Cedric who, with a celebratory, “Epic!” immortalizes their triumphant…

  Why are their faces like that?

  Grim, pale. Sean barely turns to look at him on the rock, then his gaze goes back ahead, distant, and he keeps paddling like a machine.

  Cedric frowns as Léa’s yellow Braaap passes by. She looks faraway just like Sean, and Cedric must yell, “Everything all right, guys?”

  She dignifies him with a quick look, and nods, her lips taut and unmoving.

  Five kilometers downriver. Cedric takes one shot while Léa boofs the last drop; another, just perfect, as she rides the blade-like seam of currents where the Dora de Pulaz finally ends its tormented rush, joining the shiny waters of its bigger sister, Lady Dora Baltea.

  Then he runs toward the take-out, a wide smile on his face and a bottle of Blanc de Morgex in his hand.

  The first one to reach the landing place is the Romanian behemoth.

  “Guys! You did it!” the photographer greets him.

  Iancu nods.

  And nothing more. He lays his paddle behind the cockpit, unfastens his spray skirt, and in a couple of seconds he is standing on the slippery rocks of the bank. He lifts his blood-red Director as though it were made of paper and loads it on his tattooed shoulder, covering Cedric in its shadow, already moving quiet steps toward the trail leading to the road.

  Cedric’s lashes blink fast over puzzled eyes.

  Now Léa and Sean are disembarking, too.

  Cedric gallantly pulls her boat out of the water when she is out, asking her, “Are you guys all right? How was it?”

  She shows a weary smile, rubbing her flat, too-small nose. “Couldn’t be better.”

  Sean is silent beside her, action cam notably missing from his helmet.

  “What happened?” Cedric asks, pointing at where it should be.

  “Torn off during a roll…”

  “Hell, that sucks, I was looking forward to see— ”

  Sean is walking already, following Iancu’s steps. “It was too dark anyway.”

  Léa moves, too, leaving her boat behind for Cedric to be the gentleman mule.

  Cedric protests, “But how was it? Come on, guys, tell me how it was at the Elbow! Then we’ll celebrate.” He tentatively waves his wine bottle.

  Léa turns back, without stopping. “Wonderful. It was wonderful.”

  Summer – Lake Como

  “Dying like that, someone like Iancu. It’s fucked up. I mean…”

  The dark-eyed brunette who spoke, holding Cedric’s arm, shakes her head.

  Velvets drapes and burning candles. Crysanthemums, gerberas, and lilies, mixing sweetness in the heavy air. Several people scattered in the living room, dressed in black, talking in murmurs.

  The couple stares at a big framed picture on the wall. A piercing deep blue sky and blinding white snow, separated by the curvy line of a fantastic cornice, jutting out several meters from the ridgeline. Iancu is skiing next to the edge of it, a high plume of white powder tracing a perfect semiparabola glittering like a spray of diamonds. His smiling face is almost as bright under an orange mask.

  “I know exactly what you mean, honey. You do all kinds of dangerous stuff, you flirt with death all the time in the most spectacular ways—and people keep telling you you’ll get killed, and you don’t really care. That’s why it’s fun. Then you doze off driving home from the post office ’cause you’ve worked your ass off on a roof all day, and you go down into the fucking lake
.”

  “Yeah, that’s the gist of it. What does it all mean?”

  “Meaning, ha. Come on, Marta. Still looking for meaning, at your age?”

  Marta does not answer, but asks, “Are they still looking for the body?”

  “They say it’s useless by now. Very deep, strong currents…and the bottom is basically a huge mass of quicksand.”

  “But then…”

  A sad smile. “Marta, lots of people saw the accident. He went down, didn’t come up.”

  She sighs. “I know. It’s just…to think he’s still down there…,” vaguely gesturing backward to the deep scar filled with cold water outside the window.

  He shrugs, “All bodies of water are graveyards, honey. People have two options if they want to take a swim: delude themselves or live with it.”

  She looks back, through the French window to the balcony overlooking the lake. Léa and Sean are there, deep in conversation, almost as if they’re arguing, but inaudible beyond the double glass. “Aren’t you joining your friends?”

  He turns, and sighs. “You’re not coming?”

  “I’ll say hello later. Now, I’m sure I’d be a third wheel.”

  He quickly kisses her on the cheek. “Thanks.”

  On his way, he grabs two beers from a refreshment table.

  They are so absorbed in their exchange they fail to notice him approaching, and when he opens the door, a scrap of Léa’s words is taken in together with a humid gust of Breva wind, smelling of sweet decay, of maceration: “…still having those nightmares, and— ”

  She almost jumps when she sees Cedric, and stops mid-sentence with her orchid lips parted on the next word.

  He offers a melancholic smile. “Guys. Am I glad to see you both.” He raises the bottles of Bereta, they clink together. “You know, despite all the trappings of death his family put together in there, I’m sure he’d have wanted us to remember him with beer.”