The River Remembers Sideways

London was already drunk when I arrived, which I had not expected. Not falling-down drunk — London was never that, or if he was, the falling down looked like sitting very still with his jaw set at an angle that dared the room to comment. He had a glass of something amber and a plate of bread and cold meat that he had not touched, and he was reading a paperback copy of The Road with the spine cracked so severely that pages were coming loose. He had dog-eared at least a dozen of them.

“You’re early,” I said.

“Melville is late,” London said. “There’s a difference.”

The bar was a place London had chosen — a waterfront establishment in Oakland that no longer exists, though I have looked for it since. Wooden floors, gas fixtures that someone had wired for electricity without removing the original brass fittings, a window that looked out onto the estuary where a container ship was being guided toward the port by a tugboat so small in proportion to the ship that the relationship seemed theological.

Melville arrived carrying a canvas bag full of books, which he set on the table between us with a weight that displaced London’s bread plate. He did not apologize for being late. He sat down and ordered coffee and then changed his order to whiskey and then changed it back to coffee, and the bartender, a woman with a scar on her wrist that she made no effort to conceal, brought him both.

“I have read the McCarthy,” Melville said. “All of it. Both times.”

“Both times?” I said.

“I read it once for the sentences and once for the architecture. They are not the same book. The sentences are the finest I have encountered since — well. The architecture is something else. It is a corridor. A long corridor with rooms on either side and every room contains the same thing: a man and a boy and a question about whether the fire is still lit. You walk the corridor and you open the doors and you hope, each time, that the room will be different, and it is not different, and the not-different is the point.”

London closed his paperback and laid it face-down on the table. “The not-different is not the point. The point is the boy. The boy is the only thing in the book that generates any forward motion. Without the boy, the man lies down on the road and dies. With the boy, the man gets up every morning and walks south because the boy needs to walk south. The fire is a word the man uses to describe what the boy makes him do. It is not metaphysics. It is the biological imperative of a parent who cannot stop parenting even when parenting has been reduced to finding the next can of food in the next ruined house.”

“Biological imperative,” Melville said, and the way he said it carried the same weight as a man setting down a heavy object — the relief of having found the surface of the disagreement. “You reduce everything to the biological. The dog in your snow. The man building his fire. The wolf pack and the rabbit. Always the organism against the environment, always the body’s refusal or failure to continue. You write death better than any American I have read, London, and you write it so well because you write it as a physical event. The heart stops. The fingers freeze. The dog curls up in the snow. But McCarthy is not writing a physical event. The fire the man carries — the fire he tells the boy about — is not body heat. It is not survival instinct. It is something the man cannot name and does not try to name, and the not-naming is the most radical thing in the book.”

“He doesn’t name it because there’s nothing to name,” London said. “It’s what every parent feels. You don’t need God or metaphysics to explain why a father carries his son through the apocalypse. You need biology and a gun with two bullets.”

“And a shopping cart,” I said, because someone had to.

London almost smiled. “And a shopping cart.”

Melville drank his coffee and then his whiskey and then looked at the coffee cup as if it had wronged him. “You mentioned the Strayed book,” he said to me. “The woman walking a very long trail because she is grieving. I found it — I will say this carefully — I found it brave in ways I did not expect and insufficient in ways I should have anticipated. She walks. She suffers. Her feet bleed. She carries a pack that is too heavy because she does not know how to pack for the wilderness, and this is a figure for her grief, which is also too heavy and which she also does not know how to carry. The figure is obvious and she knows it is obvious and she does not care that it is obvious because she is in pain and pain does not require subtlety.”

“You say insufficient,” London said.

“I say insufficient because the walking resolves the grief. She arrives at the Bridge of the Gods and she is, if not healed, then — reconstituted. The trail has done what the trail was supposed to do. The body’s suffering has burned away or at least rearranged the mind’s suffering, and she crosses the bridge into a new chapter of her life. I do not believe this.”

“You don’t believe grief resolves?” I asked.

“I believe grief changes shape. I spent a great deal of my life writing about men who pursued things — whales, meanings, the confidence of other men — and the pursuit never resolved into arrival. Ahab does not catch the whale. He is caught by the whale. Ishmael survives not because he has processed anything but because the coffin floats and he is near the coffin. Survival in my experience is not an achievement. It is a geometrical accident.”

London leaned back in his chair. The estuary light was moving across the table as the afternoon shifted, and the container ship had passed the window now, leaving the tugboat behind, and the tugboat sat in the water like a dog that had been dismissed.

“A geometrical accident,” London said. “I have seen men die in the Yukon who were stronger and smarter than the men who lived. The man in ‘To Build a Fire’ does not die because he is stupid. He dies because it is seventy-five below and he made one mistake. One. The dog lives because the dog does not need fire. The mathematics of survival is not about virtue or effort or will. It is about the margin between what the environment demands and what the organism can provide. When the margin closes, you die. It doesn’t matter if you’re carrying fire or a shopping cart or a backpack full of grief.”

“Then what is the story about?” I said. “If survival is mathematics and grief doesn’t resolve and the fire is just a word for continuing — what are we writing?”

The question sat on the table between us like London’s untouched bread.

“We are writing about a river,” Melville said. He said it with a certainty that surprised me, because Melville was rarely certain about anything except the inadequacy of certainty. “A river journey. Downstream. The current carries the protagonist whether she chooses to be carried or not, and the country she passes through is the country of her grief, which she does not yet know is the country of her grief because grief does not announce itself. It disguises itself as landscape. As weather. As the particular color of the water at a bend where the bottom changes from sand to clay.”

“She,” London said.

“She. A woman. Not because women grieve differently — I do not believe they do — but because a woman alone on a river in difficult country is a specific kind of vulnerability that neither of us has written well, and the specificity matters. The Strayed book earns its power from the specificity of a woman’s body on the trail. The blisters. The toenails. The pack straps cutting into specific flesh. McCarthy’s book is almost bodiless by comparison — the man and the boy are figures, silhouettes, and the landscape they move through is equally abstracted. Ash and grey and the road. I want the river to have a color. I want the woman’s hands to blister from the paddle in a way that is particular to her hands.”

London nodded, slowly, and I understood that the nod was not agreement but recognition — the recognition of a writer encountering a problem he had spent his career trying to solve from the other side. London wrote bodies. Bodies freezing, bodies starving, bodies fighting, bodies failing. What he did not write, or wrote only in glimpses, was what the body’s knowledge meant beyond the body. The dog in the snow knows it is too cold. The dog does not know what cold means. London stayed with the dog.

“The river,” I said. “Tell me about the chronology. The risk card says non-linear time — the story can’t unfold start to finish.”

“Good,” Melville said, immediately. “Good. Because grief is not linear. Grief does not begin at the death and proceed through stages to acceptance. Grief is — I will tell you what grief is. Grief is standing on the deck of a ship in the Pacific, twenty years after your first voyage, and smelling salt air and being suddenly and completely back on the deck of the Acushnet at nineteen, and the nineteen-year-old and the forty-year-old are both present, and neither one is more real than the other, and the salt air does not care which of you is smelling it.”

“The woman on the river,” London said. “She’s paddling downstream. That’s the present tense, the through-line, the current. But the river keeps opening into — what? Memories? That’s too simple.”

“Not memories,” Melville said. “States. The river bends and the bend is a different time. Not a flashback. Not a memory triggered by landscape. An actual shift. She is on the river in the present and then she is somewhere else — a kitchen, a hospital room, a parking lot — and the somewhere else is as physically real as the water under the canoe. The paddle is still in her hands but the hands are also holding something else. A phone. A wrist. A cup of ice chips. The story doesn’t signal the transitions because grief doesn’t signal its transitions. You are fine, you are standing in a grocery store reading the ingredients on a box of cereal, and then you are on the floor because the cereal is the kind he bought and the floor is very hard and very public and grief does not care that you are in public.”

London was watching Melville with an expression I had not seen on his face before — a kind of wary fascination, the look of a man who builds things with his hands watching someone build the same thing with mathematics.

“You’re talking about the structure carrying the emotion,” I said. “The broken chronology isn’t a technique. It’s the grief itself. The way time fractures when someone dies.”

“When someone dies, or when someone leaves, or when something is lost that cannot be recovered,” Melville said. “The Pacific whaling grounds are gone. Not the water — the water is still there. But the world I sailed into at nineteen — the ships, the men, the industry, the particular way the light hit the try-works at four in the morning when the whale was being rendered — that world is gone as completely as if it had been burned, and I carry it, and it surfaces without permission, and when it surfaces it is not a memory. It is a haunting. I am haunted by a place I chose to leave.”

“The woman is grieving someone specific,” London said. It was not a question.

“She must be,” I said. “The Strayed element — the physical journey as grief processing. Someone has died. Or someone has left in a way that functions like dying.”

“Her father,” London said. “A man who taught her the river. Who put a paddle in her hands when she was — what, eight? Ten? A man who knew the water the way I knew the Yukon, which is to say with his body first and his language second. He could read a riffle. He could tell you what the bottom was doing by the way the surface moved. And now he is dead, and she is on the same river, and the river is the same river and also not the same river because he is not in the canoe behind her correcting her stroke.”

The bartender brought another round without being asked, which in Oakland was either hospitality or a signal that we had been sitting too long. London drank. Melville wrapped both hands around his coffee cup and looked into it as if it might contain something navigable.

“The father is right,” Melville said. “But the river must also be itself. Not only a medium for grief. I have spent too many years watching writers turn the ocean into a symbol and forget that the ocean is also water — cold water, salt water, water that will kill you in forty minutes if you fall into it north of the Azores. The river has fish in it. The river has current and deadfall and eddies that will pin a canoe against a strainer and drown a competent paddler in four feet of water. The survival element — your element, London — must be real. She is in danger. The danger is not metaphorical.”

“McCarthy’s structure,” I said. “Each episode a test. She rounds a bend and something is wrong — a rapid she doesn’t recognize, a storm, a portage that has become impassable. And each test is also a fracture point. The present-tense danger opens into a different time, and the other time is —”

“The other time is when the river was safe,” London said. “When her father was alive and the river was a known thing. She is paddling the same water he taught her to paddle, and the water has changed — or she has changed — or both — and the skills he gave her are still in her hands but the hands are also the hands that held his wrist in the hospital and felt the pulse slow and stop. The same hands. The competence and the grief are in the same hands.”

Something happened in the room when London said that. Melville set down his coffee cup. I stopped writing. The container ship’s wake had reached the shore and was rocking a small sailboat tied to the dock outside the window, and the halyard was clanging against the mast in an irregular rhythm, and nobody spoke for what felt like a long time.

“You understand the body,” Melville said to London, quietly. “You understand it better than I do. I understand the mind that watches the body, the consciousness that stands slightly apart from the physical and tries to make sense of it and fails. My Ishmael clings to the coffin and survives, and the survival is absurd, and the absurdity is the meaning. Your man in the snow freezes to death and the death is not absurd. It is inevitable. It is the environment closing its account.”

“The environment doesn’t close accounts,” London said. “The environment doesn’t know accounts exist. That’s the difference between us. Your ocean is a mind. My winter is a temperature.”

“And McCarthy’s road?”

“McCarthy’s road is both. That’s what makes it unbearable. The road is a road — grey, ash-covered, going south. And the road is also purgatory. Both at the same time. He doesn’t choose. He holds the material and the metaphysical in the same sentence and dares you to separate them.”

“That is what we must do,” Melville said. “The river is a river. The current is measurable, the temperature will kill her if she capsizes in the wrong stretch, the rapids are graded and the grades mean something. And the river is also the shape of her grief — the way it carries her forward whether she paddles or not, the way it narrows and widens, the way the water she passed through five miles ago is not the water she is in now but is the same water, the same molecules, rearranged.”

“The non-linear time,” I said. “Here’s what I think. The present tense is the river. The woman paddling downstream, each bend a new danger, each portage a decision. But the past doesn’t arrive as flashback. It arrives as — intrusion. She is in the rapids and then she is in the kitchen and her father is showing her how to sharpen a knife, and the sharpening and the rapids have the same physical urgency, the same demand for attention, and when she comes back to the present the river has moved her downstream while she was gone. She has lost distance. She doesn’t know what she missed. The fractures cost her something real — she passes hazards she should have scouted, she misses takeouts, she ends up in water she wasn’t prepared for. The grief is not just an emotional state. It is a navigational error.”

London set his glass down hard enough that the bread plate rattled. “Grief as navigational error. Yes. The mind leaves and the body continues and when the mind returns, the body is somewhere the mind did not choose to be. I have seen this in men on the trail. The thousand-yard stare. They are walking but they are not here. Their legs are covering ground but their attention is in some other country — a warm kitchen, a woman’s bed, the saloon in Dawson where they lost their stake — and when they come back to themselves they have walked past the fork in the trail and they are going the wrong direction and the light is failing.”

“And the river does not forgive navigational errors the way a trail does,” Melville said. “A trail, you can turn around. A river — you are committed. The current has opinions. The water you are in is not the water you chose. And this is also grief. You cannot go back up the river. You cannot un-know what you know. The knowledge that he is dead is a current, and the current only moves in one direction, and you are in it.”

I looked at both of them — London with his jaw set, his glass empty, his bread still untouched; Melville with his hands around his coffee cup, his bag of books slumping against the table leg — and I understood that they had given me something I had not asked for. Not a story. Not a plan. A physics. The physics of grief on moving water, where the body knows the river and the mind keeps leaving the body and the river does not pause for the mind’s departures and the distance covered in absence is distance that cannot be recovered.

“The ending,” I said. “McCarthy’s boy survives. Strayed crosses the bridge. What does our woman do?”

“She reaches the takeout,” London said. “The place where the river trip ends. A boat ramp, a gravel bar, a place her father would have known. She pulls the canoe out of the water and she is wet and she is tired and her hands are blistered and she has lost gear she should not have lost because she was not present for the water that took it. And the takeout is just a takeout. Nobody is waiting for her. The truck is where she parked it. The river continues past the takeout, because rivers do not end where we decide to stop, and she loads the canoe and she drives away, and the river behind her keeps going.”

“That is not an ending,” Melville said. “That is a stopping point.”

“What’s the difference?”

Melville looked at the window. The tugboat had turned and was heading back up the estuary, riding low, its work done or its work paused, and the wake it left was already being erased by the current.

“The difference,” he said, “is that an ending tells you something has changed. A stopping point tells you that someone decided to stop. I think this story needs a stopping point. The woman stops paddling. She has not arrived anywhere. She has not resolved anything. The river is still there. The grief is still there. But her hands are on the gunwale and she is pulling the boat out of the water and the pulling is its own act, requiring its own muscles, and for the duration of the pulling she is not on the river and she is not in the kitchen with her father and she is not in the hospital room. She is just a woman lifting a canoe. And that is enough. That has to be enough.”

London stood up. He left money on the table — too much, as was his habit, which was either generosity or guilt or the inability to count when he’d been drinking. He put on his coat and looked at me.

“Write the river,” he said. “Don’t explain the river. The water is cold and the current is strong and the woman’s hands know what to do even when her mind is somewhere else. That’s the whole story. The hands and the water and the places the mind goes when the hands are busy. Write that and you don’t need me or Melville or McCarthy or anyone. The river will do the work.”

He left. Melville stayed. He opened his canvas bag and took out a book — not McCarthy, not Strayed, but a slim volume I did not recognize — and began reading as if I were not there. After a few minutes he looked up.

“London is wrong about one thing,” he said. “The river will not do the work. You will do the work. The river is indifferent. That is London’s great insight, which he mistakes for the whole truth. The environment is indifferent. Yes. But the person in the environment is not indifferent, and the person’s failure to be indifferent — the person’s insistence on carrying fire down a road or grief down a river or meaning into an ocean that has no use for meaning — that insistence is the story. Not the river. Not the grief. The insistence.”

He went back to his book. I sat with my notebook and the sound of the halyard and the fading light on the estuary, and I thought about a woman on a river whose mind keeps leaving her body and whose body keeps paddling, and the distance between the two — the body on the water and the mind in the kitchen, the mind in the hospital, the mind in every room where someone she loved was alive — and I did not know yet whether the story was about the leaving or the returning or the stubborn continuous motion of hands that will not stop working even when the person those hands belong to is somewhere else entirely, lost in a country that no longer exists, carrying fire she cannot name to a place she has not yet reached.