Parallel Rivers Read online

  We washed up on these shores more than a while ago, I can’t keep track, what, a third of my so-far life? A quarter at most of my ultimate life? A kind of second immigration. And there has been no sign yet of any ship bearing news or sufficient fortune to take me off again. I built a practice room, taxed my imagination for ways to attract clients, and still get the occasional curious soul who will lie on my table, always comment on the knotty pine ceiling — did I do it myself? — and seldom show up again. True, as often as not I witness something marvellous, in myself or in them or in nature. There’s a transmission between us humans and I blame the moon. O yes. Anxiety, yes. Boy O boy. This is what adorns me now, in the attic. Here are my favourite jewels: panic and the threat of sunrise.

  So this is the life. Cash free. Bank balance spent. Credit-card debt. A kind of ebullience.

  I bleed both pensions, mine and Dad’s, now I have power of attorney. I arranged that when I quit driving cab and became a student of the healing arts. Our money goes on books, CDs, movies, monthly subscriptions to web sites, and the occasional trip to town. I’m in touch, off and on, with angels — the real ones and the downtown variety. They’re a motley crew, shabby and immersed in their own inscrutable alchemical projects, all of them annoying and fickle so I can’t tell the aerial from the earthbound, though I miss them terribly, the whores when I can’t touch them and the winged when I can’t feel them close.

  I’m not sure I want to leave this island anyway. Not now. No longer do I expect some miracle of trade or weather, fraud, earthquake, theft, tempest, inheritance, etcetera, to change my life. Once I lived in daily anticipation of Dad’s death, or at least coma. That was toward the end of the time I nocturned in the city, doing business with mad Friday and dumb-fuck Saturday from dusk till dawn. By Sunday I’d be swimming in no water, bones and intellect banging on junk cast off by every mother’s child since the yelp of time. I was married then. Married. Dad knew his place as scapegoat and go-between, and was heavy but not fat. The attic altar was only a dusty board and a stool, a couple of magazines, a pack of cards. Who doesn’t feel it necessary to get pissed and toss out everything — the pizza just downed, pure thoughts, career prospects, parking tickets — once in a while?

  I used to prefer a simpler, cruder life. Weekend work, sharing a bed with my wife, studying massage, drinking beer with Dad. Some nights I dream of holding a girl to my breast and wake keen and replete, with the desire to write a letter to the people of the world. What would I tell them? I’d say that a revolution’s in progress down in the dark, below the soles of our feet. Shocks can be felt in the waters around. There’s submarine trauma, bedrock on the move. Better get our stories out before it’s too late.

  Amid the clutter of the room with the big windows is Dad’s empty wheelchair. Like monstrous Lazarus, he is risen. A month ago he rose and fell flat on his face but since then has remained aloft when about his business, so to speak, remarkably vertical. He says he doesn’t need it anymore. The wheelchair, that is. The sun today, Indian summer, late afternoon, taps every mote, every mote answers and I wonder where he has got to. The room is between occupants, not quite empty. Scant population. I count myself, of course. Ah, there she blows. Dad’s flat out on the lawn, covered with flies, the setter sprawled beside him, head resting on one of his gargantuan thighs. The big question is whether he can raise himself without help. The odds aren’t good. I could leave him out there till it rains, say a few months, or I could practice my technique. Fire points, gall bladder, then liver. Then the trick is to scrunch in under his shoulders and back-to-back walk him upright. Easier said than done. Soon I’ll need a crane to resurrect him. I’m like something long dead poking around the furniture, puzzled about my role here. Witness? Chauffeur? Son? I can’t decide. Something I used to or will know. Anything is possible. It’s a relief I’m still curious about myself. I pick my nose and look out at the old man. Disinterest, disgust. Members of the same family, after all. What star or atom could take our place? But nothing suggests itself beyond the perfect son of son of son, back to forever. Olé!

  Once upon a time I was walking with my father and two brothers between iron-age forts along the coast of south Wales. Visiting home together for the first time since emigration thirty years before. A gust of wind nearly swept all four of us off the cliff. Might as well have. Now it’s just Dad and me; Mum long gone to cancer, Frank and Boris to cancer and heart.

  Once, while hanging on the lip of the Commonwealth Pool to catch my breath, I looked up to see my dead grandmother leaning on her cane on the observation deck, craning her neck to look down at the swimmers below. I stuck out my tongue and grinned and she waved back.

  “Hello, Gran.”

  “Hello yourself, Malcolm.”

  “What’s it like being dead?”

  “Quite nice. Lonely.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Having a look. Aren’t you a big brawny boy now?”

  We stared at each other for quite a long time. She looked carefree.

  Two

  I’m making slow progress across the landscape collecting the eggs. My ancient father, who can only utter single words, generally nouns, though he surprises me now and then with an adjective, occasionally a verb, accompanies me through piles of slag, among which chickens dither and cluck. He is good at sniffing them out. Eggs, that is. Machinery, dormant and beginning to rust, cowers around us like a remnant forest. What stories of his I’ve heard! And for the most part forgotten. Friends lost, longed-for village girls, widows still in mourning, work accidents, the old home farm, family skeletons, faddish undergarments, New-World roadkills, instances of epilepsy. And songs! Once it was a lullaby at day’s end; over the years he sang victory songs, dirges, laments. No, I’m glad his voice quit. I’d have throttled him had he kept it up, and then I’d be all alone. Collecting the eggs. I finally relax and let autumn sunshine warm my bones and wish I still had a wife to go home to. This derelict mine recalls the long hard years of men’s doing. These wild chickens are a parody of human struggle, nothing less.

  “What d’you think, Dad? Slim pickings?”

  It’s communal work, me forging ahead, Dad clapping his hands for my attention, me returning to his side to pick up the eggs. In our family the old always control the young by interruption. A deep-rooted irksome pattern. Families develop such systems, perfecting them over generations. Anyway, you learn to wait, and it allows me to keep my eyes on the trees, the sky, noting the progress of the sun, while he keeps his eyes tuned to the ground. He hasn’t much choice about this, as it turns out, because of the weight of his head and the fact that he’s as bent as a bagel. Looking heavenward, I imagine, would involve a shoulder stand. The entire visible world held parenthetically within the compass of his plump knees. Supposing of course he could see past his belly. He is a source of endless speculation and some entertainment, I must admit. And he surely has other roles in my life even if I can’t discern them, just as I’m important to him. He’d eat himself to death if I died or ran away. Then again, he’d soon run out of grub if I weren’t around to shop and cook and set the plate in front of him day in day out amen.

  Before she died my wife sang all the time. Round the cottage and in the garden, songs she made up herself and we — Dad and I — felt held and nursed by each chorus, as if it defined the valley better than the surrounding hills, and felt betrayed by each new verse that spoke of the remote world beyond the island and things out of our knowledge and control. As if between choruses she went away. Times came when we wouldn’t hear a chorus for days on end. As if she longed to leave our lives altogether and was with us only under sufferance. And this turned out true because she sickened last winter and was dead before Christmas. I saw her in the distance every evening, pitiful, lying on the bed in the kitchen, wide eyes made bigger by the dark smudges beneath. She watched Dad and me as we sweated by the wood stove and every night sank deeper into the mattress. Outside the window snow fell onto the green thick moss un
der the old trees.

  What perfection underlies these autumn afternoons. I remember Wales, when I was a kid, a band of gypsies camped by our river one night, their horses blowing, their own style of dark easy laughter.

  “Where do gypsies go, Da?” I asked.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “When they’re not here where do they go?”

  “To the next town. Over the hills and far away.”

  It was the hour between the five o’clock whistle and the sooty night when we spoke, a time when families like ours breathed a bit before tea, when all of us were alive and my brothers were young.

  “Where do gypsies come from, then? Da?”

  “India. The Himalayas. When I was your age I’d go down to their campsite after they’d moved on and hunt for treasure, maybe dig up a gold coin or a wicked earring.”

  “Did ya find anything?”

  “No, never did. O, I tell a lie. Once I found a bunch of red roses and brought them home for Mam.”

  Yes, gypsies. The camp, the smell of horses and smoke. I remember nothing about my grandparents’ death, my mother’s death, Dad and I following Frank and Boris across the Atlantic, yet the little talk about gypsies is still fresh in my ear. The red roses he brought home to his mother.

  One night several years ago, while installing an alternator in my cab (I held the tools), my father told me my mother had been just like my wife, just like Emma.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Kind of absent is what I mean. You speak to her and she’s not home. If she answers it’s after a long silence. You’d forgotten you’d even asked her something. In bed she was weird.”

  “What d’you mean weird?”

  “Just lay there sometimes. Give me that wrench. No, that one. Let me do what I liked. Sometime tears would be rolling down her cheeks. Big tears, rolling down. I never knew —”

  “She wasn’t happy.”

  “A million miles away.” He straightened. Looked off into the dark. “That’s all I’m saying. Like Emma.”

  “And did you ask her?”

  “Ask her what?”

  “Where she was?”

  “Never thought to, no. I don’t think she’d have answered. Now it’s about forty-five years too late.” He tested the tension of the belt with a rough scarred finger. “She wanted to keep sheep.”

  “What?”

  “Aye. A flock of bloody sheep.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “O yes. Keep the grass down. Then there’s the wool. Fresh lamb.”

  “But we had a lawn the size of a bedsheet.”

  “See what I mean?”

  Three

  I’m in town for my seasonal excursion. To see the accountant and my doctor and for some extracurricular jamjams. Traveller’s Motel, thirty-nine bucks a night if you book in advance. They know me here, a mixed blessing because I like anonymity and I like the recognition. I dropped Dad off at the rest home where his last friend barely lives. They have a guest suite and Dad enjoys the fresh towels and institutional food.

  I want a woman so I go to the 7-Eleven but they tell me I can’t have one. Ha ha. Instead I buy a packet of marshmallows — those little white tits wrapped in chocolate with jam in the middle. The Marriage of Figaro is playing in the parking lot where night punks loiter and beggar dogs wag their tails. A girl says a hundred bucks but I’m in the dark as to what that really means. She holds her cigarette up like a candle to see my face. I wonder if she’s someone I loved once and might love again, though for now there’s nothing but a slim recognition. Love’s a joke but not really.

  “Free choice, right?” she says. “That’s what we got. That’s the deal.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “I’m abso-fucken-lutely clean.” She pulled back and spread her arms. “And you look horny.”

  Right.

  “So. Whadaya say? Can you actually do anything?”

  “There’s a difference between expressing desire and being desirable.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think you’re in this for financial gain.”

  “Well, duh.”

  “How much for a feel?”

  “Twenty. Cash. Yeah. You can feel me up. Go ahead, feel me up.”

  “What, here?”

  Back at the Traveller’s I watch TV and eat the marshmallows, ashamed now that I went behind the dumpster with her and settled for a phony smile and a quick fumble. And yet I’m sad it’s over, and I can’t even follow the debate on the screen.

  “How about the arms race construed as a modern grail search?” says a burly man with a beard.

  O fuck.

  A voice of God on the next channel, over a vista of galaxies. I don’t know which way the planets are moving or what physicists now believe. I felt numb when feeling her breasts. Sensations only come to me now: a memory like pissing myself: of warmth, release, soft disengagement.

  “Attack!”

  “What’s Venus like?”

  “She’s the oldest tree —”

  Another channel and here’s a well-described fountain, statue, memorial. I should know the city, a setting for envy. God, I’m tired, surprised she was so wet. A cell phone rings and hands twitch. A red setter barks. I am jealous, though. Because I want this woman who wants my money others must want her too, and we know she will not say no.

  And so the familiar city and the many ocean voyages and the island where I live are in a fog, uncertain. Desire makes me hungry for hurt, and I have the half-baked inclination to look for work. Work! Maybe tomorrow, when I get home. Home! Right now it’s time to stop switching channels, pretending I’m awake.

  The accountant rubs his hands, gestures to the red, my debt, and shrugs. “You’ll do what you want, of course. I’ve seen it before. In the end,” he says, “the deficit will be absorbed.”

  “By who?” I want to know.

  “By nature,” he answers. “It’s she who gave you life, do you remember, Malcolm?”

  Trust Northam. I expect extrication and he shows me how deep my worry goes. He’s more of an heirloom, after all these years, than a financial advisor. He was my father’s accountant before mine. He has grandchildren.

  “So,” he says, smiling.

  And I think: remorse. A storm’s anger, yes. Erotics of a dancing stream. Where’s courage in this wild future? Easy to locate catastrophe, even in the stillness before encroaching war. The flooded city on TV last night: a child in a crowd of adults searches for one in particular. I suppose an adult in a battalion of kids would be terrified.

  “I can tell you what’s coming,” says Northam, “but not what it’ll look like when it gets here. The spider does not see the web until she has finished spinning. I see what you’ve done. O yes. The whole ball of wax.” At this he turns away, goes back to his place near the bookshelf.

  “What I’ve done?”

  Northam shrugs. “The reduction of choices,” he says. I take heirloom back. He wants ancient and wise. Used to my dad’s financial stability, he’s saddened by the disastrous state of my affairs. No doubt he thinks I’m selfish, that my father will wind up on the street or dead of starvation and exposure when the food runs out and they shut off the power.

  And before I pick up Dad, I go to see the doctor.

  We’re home. How beautiful, an event like that, the sun going down five times as our old truck plunged down summit after summit after labouring up each hill, the sky finally empty, yellow at the horizon, blue above, wind coming up cold. The red dog, happy to see us, settles tired in my arms.

  Four

  The desire to make good overwhelms me. After immigration, storm overtook our first steps ashore. We were young and hopeful. Now anxiety lets it rip. I am not doing well. Out of the window I can’t see the wind, only textured air. Not rain, these are pine needles! The west’s a dream, east a nightmare, and across the room my dad’s a wrapped shape, vulnerable. Our ears are pricked for what argues with the hiss of needles on glass, what
fights with tree limb, water, and rock. We’ve been through such a lot. We’re the survivors of this childless family and the knowledge is too big to know.

  “You’ve done nothing,” Northam said softly. He plucked the last red tomato from the basket of green ones I’d brought him.

  Dog and I run in the woods till dusk, and we find eight pink lady-slippers clustered on a south slope in the shade of an old Douglas fir. Spontaneous. Atavistic. Evanescent. The sea dark between fingers of land. Wind soughing in the great branches. I tell him what the doctor said and about seeing Emma near the tree line. A raven clucks for attention then performs a mid-air flip. By the time we get home we’re soaked to the skin.

  “All set?” I ask Dad. “All prepared?”

  He gives me a black look.

  “Yes?” I say. “A little meditation before supper?”

  And after a hundred-and-sixty million years of dinosaurs, Cro-Magnons cross the Mediterranean to battle Neanderthals in the Near East for ten thousand years, Madrid’s hit with mobile-phone bombs, an earthquake off Indonesia spawns a great tsunami, the London tubes hatch their bombs, Katrina whips into New Orleans, AIDS rolls its carpet out across Africa to the tune of fifteen-hundred kids a day, blast after blast detonates in Baghdad, comes the diagnosis of colon cancer, major extinction, and some nights I can’t recall who has it, him or me, and who’s supposed to look after whom, and what will happen to the dog when we’re gone.

  “I’ll look after you, Da, don’t worry. It’ll be all right. Everything will be just fine, you’ll see. Go to sleep and go to sleep. Things’ll look better in the morning. Here’s your drink of water, here’s your big covers fallen on the floor. Let me tuck you in. Night-night, old son. God bless and see you in the morning. Rest easy. It’s only a bellyache. Sweet dreams, my dear. I love you.”

  All the hurricanes and then this one. All the earthquakes and then this one. All the wars and then this one. All the cancers and then this one.