THE BOYS IN THE RIVER
There are two ways of getting home. One of them is to stay there.
The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.
— G.K. Chesterton
It’s early March 2007, about three weeks after Barry’s funeral, and you’re crossing the river for the last time.
The Camac marks a boundary for the Dublin district where you’ve lived; though you haven’t tried, you always figured it was just about exactly as far from home as you could’ve walked on your own if you needed to, although you probably couldn’t make it back. Barry probably could have, if the battery in his wheelchair was fully charged. You never took him up on his impish dare to sit in his lap while he motored down the sidewalks, but once or twice when you were especially worn out, you gave in and stood on the back, riding the last stretch of the way home like the world’s most ridiculous chariot.
But you never went as far as the river. It was one thing to do some shopping at Liffey Valley, putter around the parks, or just grab a quick greasy meal from the nearest chipper. But to cross the bridge over the Camac — either with Barry’s dad in his chair-adapted van, or on the bus — meant you were going out “for real.” In your mind it become a turning point; you didn’t really feel that you were in Dublin — the Dublin of Joyce and Yeats, of ancient cathedrals and Easter 1916, of black stout and freckled redheads — until you had crossed the bridge. You always had a little twinge in the pit of your stomach when you felt the thump-thump of the wheels beneath you on the bridge, as if something in you was only just then remembering that so much of your life had gone by with you unable to even open the front door, and it still didn’t seem so long ago that it was a great accomplishment for you to simply cross the street — and only now are you aware all over again that you live in another country on the other side of the world, a place as full of strangeness and wonder as you know you’ll ever see.
There’s been a story in the local news about two teenage boys that’ve gone missing near the bridge, apparently while partying and high on ecstasy, walking into the river attempting to cool themselves off. It’s been several days now; the gardai have been dragging the riverbed, and though the boys haven’t been found yet, friends and loved ones have been blanketing the bridge with memorials: flowers, photographs, a giant Irish flag covered in writing. This flag is the last thing you photograph in Ireland, snapped out the car window the day before while Barry’s dad was driving you back to the apartment. You pass by it one more time today, on your way to the airport to leave Dublin and fly back to Texas, your camera packed away with the rest of your things — you could look at the things on the bridge so easily through your lens, but you can barely stand to look at them with your naked eyes at all.
You checked the news one last time before you left, and the boys in the river still haven’t been found.
It’s 1979. You’re five years old, sitting on the bed of your oldest sister, Vallery. She’s sitting across from you with her guitar, singing to you:
Itsy bitsy spider climbed up the waterspout
Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain
And itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again
When she sings it to you without her guitar, she walks her fingers up your arm in time with the spider’s climb, and makes you explode with tickles as the rain washes the spider back down.
Her singing is the only thing you’ll ever be able to remember of her voice; you can’t even remember her ever saying your name. The song becomes amplified in the absence, and to think of her now is to think of a thousand spiders, washed away by a thousand rains.
You remember her standing at the door a year later on her way out the door to get breakfast at the local Jim’s. You see her leave, and you know she’s talking to you, but memory will only ever give it back to you as her lips moving against a cold hush. Two men in dark suits come to the door a day or two later, and you’ll remember what they’re saying, but you can’t understand why everyone is getting so upset about it; they’ve told us where she is now, so why can’t we just drive over there and get her? You don’t know where heaven is, but you can’t imagine that it’s much farther away than Jim’s.
. . .
It’s summer 2004. You’re floating in the ocean, a bald happy head bobbing above the sheets of shining water. Your boyfriend stands on the beach, and you wave to let each other know that you have the line of sight. Your best friend, the other man you live with, is back at the apartment; you wish he was here in the water with you, but you hope he’s at least on the balcony, allowing himself to take in something of the day.
Before you moved here to California, you never knew that a day could ever be so absurdly bright and buoyant and beautiful. Texas had brightness enough, god knows, but it was a wasteland brightness, the searing of a sun that seemed to press so much closer to the earth there; you’d spent most of your adult life indoors for many reasons, and one of them was always that in Texas, weather was a form of challenge. In California, however, the climate practically dares you not to enjoy it — this is your third year here, your second living right on the beachfront, and even the height of summer never seems more than mind-meltingly mild. It’s a rare day here that doesn’t pull you out despite yourself — despite being such a lifelong professional hibernator — or at least not manage to make you feel vaguely guilty for declining the invitation.
And here you are, as out as you’ve ever been or will ever be in your life, your pale pasty body being massaged by the Pacific under the stare of the midday star. And life is good.
You’ve made your way just far enough from shore to come near the buoy-marked line of safe distance, and you’ve started to feel the undertow tugging at your feet. Three years of California life have yet to beat you into decent shape, and the effort of making it this far is starting to make your brain swim as much as your body — you barely drink, but you imagine this is what total intoxication feels like as you dip your head under the water and let yourself sink a couple of feet. And you like it, and life is good.
The current starts pulling more strongly at your legs. You’re able to push up and resist it, but even for the frantic split-second that tells you maybe you can’t, the thought crashes hard against the back of your mind: you could.
You could. Just push out a little farther from shore, just let yourself sink another foot or two deeper. You could make it happen right now. It could be that easy.
The heart of that particular demon has never been and will never be a stranger to you, but you still have it in you to be surprised to meet him again here, right now, taking this shape and wearing these clothes. Something in you can’t help but make the argument: but it’s good now.
But still, you could.
— It’s as good as it’s ever been, something in you tells him, maybe as good as life will ever get. We — and it is we, now and always, we; you will never divorce or bury him, you will never go anywhere where you can leave him behind — live in a place so beautiful it’s ridiculous. You were just hired — you weren’t even looking for it, but they sought you out — by the nicest people on earth to do incredibly easy work for incredibly good pay. The magazine’s just getting started and it’s all possibility and promise. And our photography is only getting better and doing better.
I know. But you could.
— But we have friends here. Actual friends now that we can look in the eye and laugh with and touch. We have a home, we have a future, we have more life and more good things in it now than we’ve ever dared dream we could have before, more than most of the people on this planet could ever ask for.
All this is true — but you could.
— And he loves us. And he loves us.
It’s as you say. I give you no argument. I’m only here to tell you the only thing I’ve ever had to say: you could. You always could and you could right now. It really could be that easy.
— But life is good now.
But you could.
You start pushing your way back to shore. But not without letting your feet linger low in the water as you go, just to see how close you can get back to safety without still feeling some purchase on the current with your toes.
It’s 1985.
You’re pinned to the wall. Your mouth is hanging open as it happens, dry and numb; you keep telling yourself to close it, but somehow the signal from your brain isn’t reaching your lips, and all you can think the whole time is that you must look like a stupid fish.
But even after it’s done, you still can’t make yourself close your mouth.
. . .
It’s a time you can’t remember, and you’re dreaming.
You’re standing in a field beside a river. There’s a group of men and women ahead, all of them tall and naked and perfect and having huge black hawklike wings. Some of them are laughing to each other and looking over at you as if waiting for you to join them; a few have already started running away down the field, spreading their wings and bounding into the sky.
One of them walks over to you and puts his hand on your back. You look up to see that they’re not just tall, but twenty-foot giants. He gently guides you into the laughing company; there’s something deeply infectious and grateful about the way they laugh, as if they’ve lucked into a secret so great that they’re too happy about it to feel sorry for those that haven’t.
One by one, the others start running, bounding, flying away, until only you and your guide are left. You know you can’t fly, and you reach to feel your own back to make sure: you still don’t have wings. You never have.
And before you know it, your guide has lifted you like a doll and carried you into the sky. You soar in his arms just beneath the clouds, the endless farmlands scrolling beneath you, so varied in all their geometries that they look like circuitry to a vast alien motherboard, the river cutting through them like a careless trail of melted solder.
And you’re crying. And pissing, and drooling, and running snot; the sheer freedom of it is so intense, so absolute, that it’s as if your body had forgotten what it was ever like to be constrained. You’ll never have a feeling quite equal to this again — not with any drug, any fuck, not in anything waking life will ever give you.
You have maybe one minute of this before you realize that the man who brought you here isn’t with you. That there is no one else. And you still have no wings and you still can’t fly.
For about another minute as you’re falling, you’re half-awake — half-aware of yourself in your bed thrashing about, the more violently the closer you get to waking up — you have all the desperation of a drowning man to breathe the better air of that dream just a little longer... and then you’re back where you always were, in a bed with urine-soaked sheets and face-down in a puddle of warm drool, weeping like mad without even knowing then that you’ll never have this dream again.
. . .
It’s early 2011, and you’re staring half-conscious into a whirlpool of blood and bile.
You wanted it to look like an accident.
You keep the toilet flushing.
It’s the summer of 1990, a week or two before the beginning of the Gulf War, and the two of you are stone cold terrified. You have to admit that at least he has the better excuse for it, though, since he’s both in the closet, and in the Air Force; you’re only the fifteen-year old idiot falling in love with him.
He is exactly as handsome, not one bit more or less, as he tries to be — and you never knew him to try to be anything else. He’s a good ten years or more older than most of the boys he chases after in the clubs, but he spends a fortune on trying to look otherwise; he lives very plainly, the better to spend what spare money he has on his cologne and skin creams, his tailored silk shirts, and hair carefully calibrated to be as appealing to the barracks as to the dancefloor. He’s the first man you’ve come out to in person, and since the only explicit objects of fantasy available to you beforehand were models in perfume ads, it’s just as well that he tries so hard to look like he’s living in one.
You don’t mind that his beauty’s artificial, since it’s tangible. You don’t mind that he’s shallow, since he’s near. You don’t even mind that he lies to you, since he lies with you.
You’re sitting in his car, parked outside your house, your forehead pressed against the window staring into the sheets of rain so that you don’t have to turn and look at him. He grabs you, forces you to turn and pulls you in for a deep kiss, the last and the longest and the most passionate he’ll ever give you — and not the first act of physical passion you’ve ever received that came with cruelty and contempt. He bites your lip in the middle of it, and licks the trickle of blood off your chin.
Does it hurt? he asks you as you open the door. You nod. Good! he shouts as he slams the car door behind you and drives away, and you can’t even comprehend that he was talking about anything but the bite.
There would be other lies later — before and after both the dishonorable discharge, and the wife that you didn’t know existed. But not too many.
Over ten years later, waiting to catch a flight out of Los Angeles, something catches your eye across the crowded terminal: a man with a strangely familiar haircut. You stop in the sea of people for a good minute or two, staring in his direction until you finally catch his attention. He makes eye contact with you, stops as still as you are to stare back at you — you do not blink, you do not move, you just summon all your strength to hold him down with your eyes — then slowly falls back into the crowd.
And then he turns and walks away, and for a long moment, all the lights at LAX have contracted to a pair of headlights drifting away in the darkness, dissolving to a single distant point in the rain.
. . .
It’s January 2007, and you’re standing on the ramparts of an ancient castle in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Impossible not to feel a passing wildness, a sense of being pulled out of yourself into an older and more primal place, as you watch the storm clouds tumbling over the Irish countryside. This would have seemed so impossible, so impossibly scary, not so very long ago at all.
But you have the company of friends, and a home and husband to go back to when it’s over. The harder the rain lashes at you, the more alive it makes you feel. It’s that simple, it’s that ridiculous.
While it’s happening, it seems like it was never any other way in your life at all.
. . .
It’s October 1998, and your house is underwater.
For the first time in your life, you’re trying to sleep on a stranger’s floor. Even though you’ve never been so exhausted — after spending the longest day of your life helping your family evacuate, including carrying your disabled sister through rushing waist-deep flood waters — you can’t even begin to fall asleep. No physical ache is worse than the ache of being forced from the room in which you’ve lived most of your adult life, shutting out the outside world — and now the world has taken it back.
Of course you think about the material things, about all the things. The things were what you got through each day with, your work and your entertainment, your diversions and your deepest touchstones. Your computer and the internet, your games and movies and music, your pride-and-joy book collection that filled shelves on every wall and spilled over into countless boxes and drawers. Your work: hundreds of poems, drawings, paintings, stories; thousands of photographs and negatives. Everything you had left of Vallery, and of a man you wanted to marry.
Tomorrow you won’t miss these things themselves so much as what they were — your room is your fortress, the one and only safe space in the world you have, the only place in which you know how to exist anymore — and these things were only stones in its walls. Tomorrow you’ll see that the walls still stand, and won’t have to be torn down after all. And some things will remain; not many, but enough to begin rebuilding. Enough to help you forget the world again, the world that nearly drowned you in other ways before. And when it did, you survived it because you had your room to retreat to before, and tomorrow you’ll have it again... what’s left of it, anyway.
But tonight you only feel a different kind of drowning.
. . .
It’s February 2007, two weeks after Barry died, and you’re walking with your friend Danny along the banks of the River Boyne.
You wonder if he thinks it’s strange that you needed to be here so badly, so soon. You know some people must wonder why you’re still going out so compulsively, still taking so many damned photos of everything. Danny doesn’t ask, nor does anyone else — and even if they did, you wouldn’t have the words to tell them right now how Ireland is already starting to become a dream to you.
And you could never, ever tell them why you needed to fight that, why you needed not just to hold on so hard right now to what’s left of it while you still have it — but to keep collecting all the proof you can that you really were here, that Ireland and all that you’ve ever had of it was really beneath your feet and within your hands. The demons will do their best to make it a lie and a nightmare soon enough, but for now you need to keep gathering the evidence while you can.
You’re only half listening to Danny as he tells you a little of the history of the Boyne and his town. It’s too beautiful today, too beautiful and bright to not seem like a dream already as you’re standing here. But you’ve had hundreds of dreams where you had your camera with you — and, in some of them, the photographs you took were still there when you woke up.
And today you’re probably taking more photos in one single day than you ever have before or ever will since — and you take more of Danny, and the river, than of anything else.
Three years later, he too is gone.
. . .
It’s maybe 1981, and you’re spending the day with your older sister Catherine by the Riverwalk while she’s at work.
You’re walking up the stairs in big, sloppy Slinky-like steps, looking for her in her third-floor office; you don’t know where she went, and you don’t remember how you got separated from her. Somehow you’ve found yourself all on your own — and you’re loving it. No one to tell you where you can and can’t go. Suddenly the building seems so much larger; it’s no longer an office, it’s an adventure.
You slink-step back down the stairs and walk past an open door in the stairwell. Through the door you see a large open room with a half-open window, smelling of fresh wet paint, empty but for two men standing on either side of a large trunk. You poke your head inside (and why not?) and one of the men calls out to you: Hey, kid, c’mere.
And somehow you know that you have to run.
Something inside you, some strange and sudden instinct, is screaming at you to get away. And you run, going as quickly down the stairs — only two flights, but it seems so much longer — hearing the thud of fast footsteps behind you, until you get down to the lobby. And you just keep going, out the door, zigzagging your way through downtown; you think you end up at some store where a lady working there calls your family, but everything past the stairs smudges away in your mind. But you know — you knew it then as later, as certainly as you’ve ever known anything — that if you had gone inside that room, everything would have been different; you have an overpowering sense that you would be a radically different person today, if you’d still be here at all. Much later, you would have several dreams of going into the room, and the things that followed, as if you were looking at scenes from another version of your life. Dreams that would, like so many other things, become so many other things.
A year or so later, Catherine will fall from her third-story riverfront window and land headfirst into concrete. She will spend the next 25 years recovering, until she succumbs to cancer less than a year after Barry’s death.
. . .
It’s December 1999, and for once, it’s freezing. It usually doesn’t get so cold down here, even in the height of winter. But it rained last night, and there’s a sharp low wind blowing the chill straight into the few inches of skin that your winter wear can’t cover; you drink it down in deep breaths, let it bite into your lungs.
And you walk with it at your back. You’ve been trying to make yourself get out regularly, and you’ve made good progress in the past few months; you started in the summer walking every other week, and now nearer to every other day — and from barely crossing the street, to walking halfway down the length of it, to rounding the corner and back, and now all the way around the block. Sometimes you even walk up to the church, by the ditch where they found Vallery’s body thirty years ago. Not too often, no; but even this is becoming okay in its way, with time. Acceptance and repetition. You just keep walking.
The church is as far as you’ve ever gone in that direction, though. And in the other, the bridge across the Salado. Within these bounds there are at least still green things to see, the little field footholds and the clumps of creek trees; past them there’s only the highways, the concrete oceans and the Wal-Mart wastelands where the streets get louder, the cars faster, and the sky harder to see. You don’t think you’d have it in you yet to walk that far and make it back home on your own, anyway.
But today the cold is telling you to keep walking.
You’ve already made a full circuit of the block, and now you stop for a few minutes at the bridge to gather your strength for the final stretch back down your home street; as bracing as the cold has been, your breaths are getting shorter and feeling sharper in your throat, and your legs are feeling the strain. But the wind is still with you, a push at the back of your neck. A little farther and you could cross the highway for the first time. Find a place to eat. The day’s still early, your family knows you take your time anyway, the sun’s already starting to burn the chill away and you could —
You could just keep walking.
And just like that, suddenly it’s the only thing you want to do. The only thing that makes sense. Keep walking. You start crying just to think it could be that easy — it always could’ve been that easy. Just keep walking, and don’t you ever fucking turn around or look back. The wind is with you. It could be that easy.
Go.
You stare down at the Salado, flowing beneath your feet. Back towards home. Such a dirty creek, so choked with garbage and stale slowness that nothing can live in it anymore. Not where you are. All it can do where you are is flood over and fill the woods and streets — and your home — with its filth. But nothing lives there.
You start walking towards the highway. And it feels so good, so fucking good, for a few moments. All you had to do was to make the choice and take the first steps. That was the hardest part. Now you just keep walking.
And you stop at the corner staring at the traffic light with your eyes stinging waiting for it to stop being green and you hear someone calling your name and telling you to go home. The voice isn’t in your ear, and there’s no one else around. She never said your name before, not that you can ever remember, not that you remember her ever saying anything. Not that you can remember anything but her singing.
The light turns red.
It’s August 2006. Barry’s dad is driving you back home after a long day out, your head resting against the glass, watching darkened Dublin blur by through rain-speckled windows that turn every distant light into a shower of stars.
It’s the pools of red and green beneath the traffic light as you come to the old arched bridge near the Esker cemetery. It’s the headlights as you drive by, fanning the stone pillars along the railing back into a daylike pale yellow for a moment, then out again into darkness. It’s the jet black Liffey beneath. It’s the apartments, trees, and watermills clustered along its length, shadows within shadows, receding back to a horizon dimly glowing with low clouds.
It’s Barry’s dad gripping the wheel, the staccato stream of streetlights passing over his skin, playing with the hairs of his hands. It’s the dashboard shadows of drops trickling down, liquid smudges slinking along leather. It’s buildings blurring back and forth between your half-closed eyelids — the signposts of a bank here, a family butcher’s there, words and pictures diminished to a soft suggestion of themselves. It’s Karen and Barry in the back, talking of childhood things, laughing.
For a moment, you desperately miss your camera. Then in the next, as you turn off the bridge, you smile and close your eyes, photographing the moment with the one camera — the double-lens model built into your head — you always have with you. And for that moment, and every moment after on the rest of the way home, that’s the only camera you need, and you don’t really miss the other at all anymore.
You keep your eyes closed as you feel the thump of the wheels in the pit of your stomach when you’re crossing the Camac bridge, back once more across the boundary that lets you know you’re home.
And you crack your eyes open just enough to blur it all back together again, the rain and the lights and the river and all.
JUNE 26, 2011