At last the cold crept up my spine; at last it filled me from foot to head; at last I grew so chill and desolate that all thought and pain and awareness came to a standstill. I wasn’t miserable anymore: I wasn’t anything at all. I was a nothing—a random configuration of molecules. If my heart still beat I didn’t know it. I was aware of one thing only: next to the gaping fact called Death, all I knew was nothing, all I did meant nothing, all I felt conveyed nothing. This was no passing thought. It was a gnawing, palpable emptiness more real than the cold. I was a hollow, meaningless nothing, entranced on a rock in a fog. From that moment I was haunted by the drifting corpse no longer. I didn’t need to be haunted by it any longer: it had done its work.
6
Anamnesis
In the green world we carry with us
like a secret illness from a city
we’ve escaped,
know, too, the shadow suspended in green space…
—Henry Carlile
I don’t know how long I stayed on the rock. When I finally crept down it was dark. I fell twice as I stumbled up the bank, but made it to the cabin. Inside I built a fire and huddled near the flames, and as the fire grew, as my rigor mortis dissipated, I discovered one of the gifts of desolation: a hollow nothing endowed with senses becomes the thing its senses perceive. Thus I became the fire, and as fire my only wish was to flame, to consume, to grow. Dazed and burning I roamed the room, throwing on logs till the fireplace was a wall of flame and bright tongues flickered forward, blackening the mantelpiece; I threw on the fishing books, magazines, and manuals that abandoned me in the presence of death, threw on old fishing journals, notes, and charts, threw on the Ideal Schedule—and the fire laughed and devoured. Then, as I bent for the last few scraps in the bottom of the woodbox, I found a pitchy knot and started to throw it in—but it reminded me of something; nighttime; a room full of shadows; this knot; I’d known them all before, somewhere, and somehow they now threatened the gloom and desolation.
The overstoked fire faded quickly, but I lit no lantern: I put the pine knot in the tongs, lit it in the coals, set it on the hearth stones, and watched it burn. When the light dimmed to a faint gold cast more by the knot than by the dying coals, a word popped up—one of Bill Bob’s inventions. I said it aloud: “Dreefee.” And in a flood the night in a dim room, the ritual I’d shared with my brother, the mystery revealed, but since forgotten, came back to me.…
When Bill Bob was small he had a going-to-bed ritual Ma called Tuckin’ Time—a quiet piece of time when Ma or H2O sat on his bed listening while he conducted a rambling discourse that would fade to muttering, and finally to sleep. He was as addicted to Tuckin’ Time as was H2O to his nightcaps (the one he drank and the one he wore). But often when my parents presided at his bedside they’d been squabbling, and all around them was a squabblesome aura that got mixed up in Bill Bob’s aura and woke him right up. After a few dozen Tuckin’ Times spent listening to him ramble for fifty or sixty minutes with no sign of slowing, Ma and H2O realized they just didn’t have the tuckin’ touch. So I was made the official tucker-inner.
Given the crass lullaby repertoires and cacaphonous vocal apparati of us older Orvistons, it’s no wonder that Bill Bob found his own voice the most euphonious for a send-off into sleep. And given the unaffected spontaneity of a worn-out child at bedtime and the cosmologic calm prevailing at that hour, it’s no wonder that some of the most amazing extemporaneous stories, soliloquies, and songs ever sounded on this planet come out of such kids in their beds at night. When Bill Bob was relaxed and talkative and the calm was just right, sometimes for seconds, sometimes for long minutes his kid-accoutrements would fall away and a squeaky-edged but bardic voice would launch off on free and easy wanderings, and he would astound me with words that weren’t only beyond his years, or beyond mine, but were beyond anyone’s—beyond the kind of time that ticks away in this green and gray world.
Most kids have a special stuffed animal, ratty blanket, or dog-eared book they take to sleep with them—and a lot of kids, lacking this talisman, go berserk and scream themselves to sleep. Bill Bob had no one special talisman: Bill Bob had dreefees. None of us ever quite figured out the etymology of that word, but when I asked him years later Bill Bob thought it might be an amalgamation of “dream” and “feed”—food for dreams you might say. The dreefee itself was always some carefully selected relic of the day’s adventures, so he had a different dreefee every night. And every bit as important as the dreefee was its placement: some hung from the ceiling, some he stuffed in his mouth, some he taped to his hair and so on. But if the placement was altered before Bill Bob fell asleep it had the same effect as having refused him his dreefee altogether. He didn’t fuss, didn’t protest, didn’t seem to take notice: he simply didn’t go to sleep. If the dreefee was never put back where it had been he would lie in bed in the dark all night long—wide awake. Ma and H2O were surprisingly lenient toward this idiosyncrasy; Bill Bob had always been self-sufficient and well behaved, and they appreciated it enough to indulge a few peculiarities. But I can recall four times when Bill Bob didn’t sleep all night due to dreefee problems. One time the dreefee was a dried-out two-dimensional garter snake that had been run over by a car; Bill Bob wanted it under his pillow as he intended to ask the Tooth Fairy to blow it up like a balloon into three dimensions again, but H2O spotted it before the Fairy and it ended up in the garbage disposal. Another problem dreefee was the skeleton of a baby rabbit found while digging for treasure in the woods; Bill Bob wanted it hung among the shirts in his closet for reasons that remained obscure, but since it wasn’t entirely decomposed it went the way of the snake. The third troublemaker was a dried dog turd bleached white by the elements and shaped incredibly like a tiny sleeping polar bear; Bill Bob said that it was a tiny sleeping polar bear, that it had been eaten by a dog, that it had proven indigestible, that it had been eliminated, that it was in a coma thanks to its unmentionable experiences in the dog, and that he planned to invoke the powerful Tooth Fairy again, who would restore it to life, resulting in his acquiring a pet even more remarkable than a certain surgeon’s Doberman rat… but Ma threw the poor polar bear out the window without a question or a glance at its miraculously sculpted bearness. (So fine was the canine-colon craftsmanship that I snuck outside with a flashlight and found the thing; its head, like a ring-eyed person’s, had been jarred off, but I glued it back on, lacquered it, and placed it on my fly-tying desk where it stands to this day.) The fourth banned dreefee was a wad of Silly Putty that Bill Bob wanted on his forehead, intending for it to spread evenly over his face in the night so he’d wake with a perfect putty mask of himself which he would peel off and hang on the wall for the aesthetic gratification of friends and family; H2O confiscated this one, stating reasonably enough that, were the plan to fructify, the mask would suffocate the maskee long before dawn. But on the days that followed these dreefee disruptions Bill Bob would drag about the house with dark circles under dulled eyes, able to operate only two or three toys, games and radios simultaneously instead of the usual five or six, and Ma and H2O’s hearts would ache. So with each refusal and ensuing sleepless night Bill Bob silently, nonviolently, and successfully lobbied for greater parental liberality. They eventually allowed such startling dreefees as a bucket of thistle down stuffed in his pillowslip, a gunnysack full of scarlet vineleaf maple leaves scattered all over floor and bed, a stray dog coaxed under the covers (which left him—after Ma took it to the pound the next day—with a commemorative case of ringworm that he flaunted like a black arm band), and a live scorpion he captured under a rock on the Carper Ranch and placed on his nightstand. This little monster mysteriously escaped its plastic container (and impending execution by Ma) during the night and proceeded to make appearances in every room in the house week after week; it was last sighted scuttling across the living-room floor some six months later during a fly-angler’s conclave, which conclave broke up directly thereafter despite H2O’s assurances that it was the on
ly scorpion ranging his home, that it was shy, and that its sting was no more potent than a bee’s. It may inhabit the house still, though H2O once suggested during a squabble that the unfortunate creature had doubtless bitten Ma and died of blood poisoning, to which Ma replied that, no, it had found and fallen in love with one of Hen’s mayfly imitations and died of lover’s nuts trying to figure out how to screw the thing.
As I sat alone in my cabin before the dying embers, I remembered a night when Bill Bob’s dreefee had been a pine knot like the one I now held. He’d lit it, set it in a cast-iron pan, and we watched it burn in the dark. In those days he had a pair of lensless horn-rimmed glasses he would don for the purpose of dreefee-inspecting; he wore them as he lay on his side, intent upon the flickering knot. Our conversation at Tuckin’ Time invariably began with the same four sentences:
“Gussy?”
“Bill Bob.”
“I got to tell you somethin’.”
“Tell me somethin’.”
Then he’d lie there a while trying to think what it was he had to tell me. This night he seemed to have an extra hard time thinking of anything, maybe because it was so peaceful just being quiet and watching the little flame. Finally he said,
“You like my dreefee?”
“That’s askin’, not tellin’,” I said, thinking to pin him down.
“That’s ’cause I’m not tellin’ ya yet, dummy.”
“Oh,” I said. He always was tough to pin. “Yeah, I like it. Makes a real nice night-light.”
“What’s a night-light?”
“You don’t know what a night-light is? Come on, you’re kidding.”
“I’m only seven,” he protested. “I’m not ’sposed to have a big vocabulary at my age.”
“Oh.”
“So what’s a night-light?”
“It’s just what it says it is: it’s a light that lights the night, just like your dreefee’s doing.”
Bill Bob seemed to mull these words as if they constituted a grand conundrum. Flames framed in horn-rim burned in both his eyes. I said, “For somebody who has to tell me somethin’ you sure do a lot of asking.”
But he didn’t hear. His eyes had stopped blinking; he hardly seemed to breathe. He was lost—in thought, in recollection, in whatever it was he so often got lost in. It was the same expression he’d worn as a baby, staring at the 7-Up bottle. In an absent whisper he asked, “Know what a light-night is?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s just what it says it is: it’s a night that nights the light.”
“Oh.”
“Understand?”
“No.”
“It’s a night—like a night in shining armor—except his armor is black and makes everything darker all around him.”
“Oh, a knight,” I nodded. “The kind with swords and shields and lances.”
“Yeah. It’s a knight that nights the light.”
“How does he night light?” I asked.
“By making it darker,” he said, “like the world’s shadow does to the sky at night.”
“Oh.”
“So now do you know who your light-knight is?”
“No.”
“Dummy.”
“Whaddya mean, ‘dummy?’” I grabbed his foot and tickled it through the covers, but he pulled it away. He was serious about all this.
He said, “It’s your shadow.”
“My shadow? Then why call it a ‘light-knight’? My shadow is dark.”
He said, “It may be dark, but it’s way lighter than you are.”
“Come on,” I said; “I’m a whitey, same as you.”
“Whiteness don’t matter,” he said. “Skin weighs more than shadows.”
“Ah, that kind of light!”
“Yeah,” he said. “But the other kind too, because know what your shadow really is?”
“No,” I confessed, wondering if he’d been studying some old riddle book on the sly, “not unless it’s the thing on the ground the sun makes, or according to you, my ‘light-knight.’”
He said, “It’s both those things, but it’s something else, too. Know what?”
“No. What?”
Leaning toward me, he whispered this secret: “It’s your Garden Angel!”
“Oh,” I said, figuring he was mispronouncing it, “Guardian Angels” being an institution GG often referred to.
“Know what your Garden Angel is?”
“I don’t think so.”
He smiled. “Told ya I had to tell ya somethin’.”
“OK, OK, so tell me.”
He leaned toward me again and whispered, “Your Garden Angel is your twin.”
“My twin?” (This was not GG’s brand of angel!)
“Yeah,” said Bill Bob.
I began to suspect he didn’t know what he was talking about. I said, “How can he be my twin? I thought he was my shadow, and my light-knight, and the thing that nights the light.”
Without the least hesitation he explained, “He looks like your shadow, and he looks like the thing that nights the light. But really he’s your twin.”
“I get the picture,” I said sardonically. “I had this twin brother, born when I was born, but nobody in the hospital saw him come out so he just snuck off and…”
“He wasn’t born when you were born!” cut in Bill Bob. “He died when you were born. And he’s born when you die.”
That stopped me. This was getting complicated. I said, “Wait a minute, Bill Bob. What’s the difference between what my Garden Angel looks like and what he is, for starters.”
He shook his head at his hopelessly dull pupil. “What your Garden Angel looks like is what you see. What he is is what he is. Lots of junk don’t look like what it is.”
“Oh yeah? Name me some of this junk.”
“Dummy,” he said. “Like the world isn’t flat and the sun don’t go around it and the moon ain’t bigger than the stars and shooting stars aren’t stars at all and…”
“All right already!” I said. Hmmm. The kid was on top of it. So far, anyway. “You got a point there, Bill Bob, but I’m not letting you off the hook so easy. How can my Garden Angel be my twin when he’s one-dimensional and black and gets tall or short or deformed depending on what the light is doing to him, and dies when I’m born, and is born when I die? What kind of twin doesn’t look or act like a twin at all? What good is he? What’s he got to do with me?”
Bill Bob shook his head sadly. “That’s edzackly what your Garden Angel says about you.”
“But he’s the weird black wavery deformed one, not me!”
Calm and certain, Bill Bob replied, “Not in the place where he lives. Where he lives you look just like he looks here where you live.”
I had to stop and think about this one; I could feel battalions of brain cells mustering in my forehead, not about to be routed by a seven-year-old. I said, “But my Garden Angel lives on the ground, or wherever the light happens to throw him. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that.”
He said, “Anyone with eyes in their head can see the sun going ’round the flat world and the moon way bigger than the stars.”
I mumbled, “You got a point there.”
His mouth stayed still, but his eyes grinned a little through his glassless glasses. “I told ya twice I had to tell ya somethin’. Now I’m tellin’ ya: See, every person in the world has their Garden Angel, and every Garden Angel has their person.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And every person thinks their Angel is just their shadow, and every Angel in the Garden World thinks their person is just their shadow.”
“Hold on a minute! Garden World? What’s this about a Garden World?”
“Sure, the Garden World—where the Garden Angels live. We live in our world and they live in theirs. But if we learn the right things and they learn the right things, then finally we get to be each other’s friend and go back and forth to both worlds wide awake forever, which is funner than you can shake
a stick at.”
Wonderfully confounded, I thought I’d better confuse him before he lost me completely: “But Bill Bob, if our shadow is on the ground, then we should be able to dig a hole and get into the Garden World whether we did the right things and met our friend and all that or not. Now you and me have both dug enough holes to know there’s no world down there, right?”
“Wrong!” he said, disgusted and utterly unconfused. “Listen, ya big dummy: I told ya already, you are your Garden Angel’s shadow, and he’s yours. You think you’re standing up. He thinks you’re lying flat. He thinks he’s standing up. You think he’s lying flat. Look at your light-knight now.…”
I looked at my shadow: it was sitting on the closed bedroom door. Bill Bob said, “Go out that door you’re in the hallway, not the Garden World. You don’t get into the Garden World by walking there.”
Again I mumbled, “I guess you got a point.”
Bill Bob said, “The trouble with people and with Garden Angels is they just don’t know they’re twins.” (This obviously struck him as a regrettable state of affairs.) “We think we’re growing bigger and older. They think they’re growing younger and smaller. We think we’re…”
“Hold it!” I cried. “They think they’re getting younger and smaller?”
He nodded, very solemn now, eyes riveted on the quivering flame. He said, “You see, Gussy, Garden Angels come from the ground, like carrots, into their world. That’s one reason they’re called Garden Angels. When they first come out of the ground into the Garden World they’re very old, or hurt, or sick, or crippled or sad, but the other Angels help them out and they get better bit by bit, and they’re real happy to be there in that world because it’s all so pretty and nice, like the nicest garden in this world ’cept the whole place there is like that, and everybody’s so friendly and there’s nothing to make ya scared or hurt nowhere like in our world. It’s such a wonderful place to be that the longer those broken ol’ Angels live there the younger and smaller they grow and the friendlier and happier they get, so the ones who have lived there the longest are the kids and babies. And the very longest ones are tiny, and so bright and happy they look like flames burning up out of gladness—like that one!” He pointed at the dreefee: a bubble of pitch had ignited inside it and was sending out a minuscule but brilliant white torch that glistened and hummed as it burned… but after a time it consumed itself and vanished, so I asked,
The River Why Page 15