THERE IS NEVER, HE reflected, a moment of certainty, only the illusion. And as he worked among the rocks in the middle of the river he thought on this deeply, so deeply that had his movements not been automatic he would have fallen off the rocks and into the river and been borne away.
In the summer light, even with the coolness of the water welling up around him in the air, thinking was all he was capable of; and this distraction left him exhausted and unbalanced so that at the end of the day the physical exhaustion he felt was something he lowered himself into, as into a hot bath. He pondered gentleness often. And he tried to pry (hefting the stones, conscious of the resonance between the idea in his mind and the work of his hands) into mysteries which remained as implacable as the faces of the stones.
The work was easier in the summer; in winter he was afraid of floods. He was always damp, and he slipped more often on the rocks then. In winter, on the worst days, he lost track of himself, and his acts seemed ludicrous. In summer he would feel sunlight against his back as he bent crane-like to the glacial outwash, and he enjoyed the way the light warmed his latissimi dorsi; and when the wind blew so the light seemed to have weight, he imagined how he fit into the wind, as neatly as trout poised in a deep riffle.
His hands moved over the stones (over granite, mottled gabbro and red loaves of basalt) with a predatory finesse, flicking to rocks his eye had only that moment left, grasping, throwing in motions as smooth as his bare back under the light. He seemed as sure of himself as a cougar in ambush.
Some things he was certain of: that anadromous fish return from the ocean to spawn; that he could lift a hundred-pound rock; that it was always cooler in the evening.
At night he would sit on the porch and stare for hours at the piles of his stones, and imagine from the skeleton of the idea how he would proceed. There were technical problems, matters of physics. There were aesthetic difficulties to overcome, principally of color and texture in the materials he had to work with, but also the texture and colors, some seasonal, of the trees—maple, ash, cedar, alder, and cottonwood—on the far bank which formed a backdrop. There were anatomical details to be mindful of, a problem not only of accuracy but of verisimilitude which he felt must go to the heart of the act. He would solve each in its turn.
Out of each evening of thought he derived the energy to continue, to rise the next morning and, remembering all he had considered, to go to work, for it was (he had been told) an act of madness, and he wished above all to be sensible.
The gravel bar lay like a fish in the river, headed upstream, dark dorsal surface to the sun. Sticks of driftwood neatly enfolded on its center crest, like the collapsed spines of a fin, the dark rocks looking like scales—about it an unphraseable mood of impermanence born of its daily alteration and of eternal waiting, of migratory fish and resident stones.
He had cleared the driftwood away. He had built a bulwark of timbers on the upstream end of the bar to divert the force of high water until he was finished, the one practical concession he had made, anchored it in the river bed, into bedrock. And there were the steel rods welded into a lattice against which he worked. The stones he fitted as haphazardly as rip-rap except on the surface, where they were fitted to bind against each other, to hold a curve in two planes without mortar. From upriver and downriver (this, in itself, two years of work) he had gathered the stones and (another year) sorted them: green shales and yellow sandstones, red slates and shaded gray gneiss, blue azurite, purple quartzes and cloudy white calcites. For iridescence, for translucence, he had to rely on individual stones and pebbles, agates, jaspers, and opals, some of which he had carried from as far away as the river’s mouth.
Because his brothers had found favor with his father and he had found none, he thought. As simple as that. And a wife who had gone crazy (the fish enter the river) not out of anything he’d done or she’d done but out of the weight of her family (and move upstream), out of their perversity and sourness, generations of mistakes in which she had been a sudden clear expression, for which they had hated her. They had been afraid to have children. She was now with her sister (come upstream), reabsorbed like spent oxygen in a calm beyond his reach, forgotten but for the ingot of her that lay in him. He believed in reciprocation (come upstream) and rebalance, that others suffered as grievously as he had. He was without calculation (to spawn) or guile. And obsessed.
One evening, mired in the swamp of his thought, he leaned against the steel framework in a moment of quivering trust, as if he would weep, out of a nameless despair, and he heard coming up through the steel bars, up out of the bedrock, the murmuring of the earth—and he saw a flight of mergansers going downriver like a sigh, smelled sunshine on a thousand stones, knew by looking how cold the water would be against his belly, and that he was near the heart of it.
The room where he slept was bare as a room in a deserted hotel, but did not seem empty to him, only spare and ordered. A single shelf of books, most on the natural history of the salmonids, and a diminutive writing table, its legs barely enough to support his work (he would muse) but enough. Here some evenings, but only when he felt calm (if he was disturbed it was agony), he would write about the difficulties with his father, and of the things that had fallen apart in his life like a chrysalis flaking in the wind. He would write until he found a point of balance—and then abandon the journal as though leaping from a small airplane. On other evenings he would write in a more orderly hand and at tremendous length, sometimes until dawn: on salmon, on the dependability of their migration from the sea, on the irrefutable evidence of it. In the years until now, during the worst times, he held this idea like a walnut in his fist, cherishing its permanence, its meaning. It is how he came to conceive the stone fish.
The winter of the fourth year it began to take a finished look. He worked through these cold months and into the spring at a measured pace, which gave daily evidence of progress in spite of the enormity of the task, and also had a salutary effect on his mind. He thought less of the accidents in his life, nothing (he reflected) more than the turning of the earth, and focused instead on the sacred order to which the salmon coming upstream to spawn and die was central.
The fish was sixteen paces in length, nine feet high at the dorsal fin, Oncorhynchus nerka, a male sockeye with the irregularities of rut—the hooked jaw, the bright red mantel—with the air of a sumo wrestler, as Japanese in color, in its singular purpose, as a Samurai. Balanced on its belly and with its caudal fin swept to one side it was caught poised in an explosive movement. The natural armorial form of its scales served to conceal much of the stonework, but he had been so careful in the choice of stones that success here had been almost inevitable. The unsettling reality, the feeling of life in it, was heightened by the perfect shading of color, the smooth, rain-slick flanks, and the fish’s eyes of hand-polished lapis, the barely visible teeth of white quartz and the narrow view down a cavernous, dark throat.
In mid-September the salmon entered the mouth of the river, two hundred miles below, and by early October they were upon him, thousands of thousands of fish, so many that they forced each other out onto the banks where the river narrowed. The movement was frantic, primal. Each year he’d watched them come finally into the small feeder creeks where, with gaping wounds washed a cloudy white, they would lie on their sides to keep one gill submerged and so breathe, move on to a pool, spawn, spill their eggs in a tail-dug basin over which the males, gaunt with hunger, glassy-eyed, exploded their milt, the seminal discharge settling over the eggs like cirrus clouds. In a matter of days they died, from which detritus their children fed. It all left him stunned.
In this year it was no different. In mid-September, into water blue-green with the mineral drainage of glaciers, the salmon who had come down this same river as small fry bore off, headed up into its reaches again. They heaved through white water where a creek washed in, some turning off, each as keen of nose as it had to be. They ate nothing, hurled themselves off the river floor into the roar of falls and rapids where they were maimed and killed and some went over and continued, dreaming perhaps of the ocean fastness and of gentler currents.
In these final months he finished. What he had imagined over the years of evenings had been engineered and it stood before him as the thing he most trusted. In the days of waiting for the salmon, he achieved a level of serenity heightened beyond any he had known before. Under this calming influence he decided impulsively to study Japanese. The connection between the fish and the culture seemed to him both incongruous and appropriate. He could imagine salmon choosing to live in Japanese houses, which had about them something of the ocean, which seemed submerged. He could think of the fish writing in that apposite calligraphy, that if they left messages they would leave them in this form, and on rice tissue papers as delicate and strong as the walls of the house.
One evening in October when he had begun to worry that the fish would not come, a rain storm swept up the valley. The great stone fish glistened as though it had just at that moment burst forth. Walking out to it, he felt a fierce pride in its form, and he headed downriver with this idea. In the shallows after a few hundred yards—it was difficult to see but the rain-shattered surface of the river revealed it with a precision that startled him—were salmon, their dark glistening backs as far as he could see. For several moments it was not clear to him what they were doing, that they were slowly turning around. The rain, sweeping in wind-driven sheets, made a sound that sheltered him from panic, but his guts fell away from his heart. He turned to look upstream at the stone fish, one lapis eye glaring with its black shining obsidian pupil in the turned head, the jaw agape, and the monument struck him suddenly with the depth of his desperation—the pages of his journal, the words pounded out like this rain on his shoulders. Overwhelmed with an understanding of the assumption in his act, made the more grotesque by its perfection, he waded stupefied into the water where the fish maneuvered, milling, trying to turn around. He staggered amongst them, trying to form a statement of apology, putting his fingers to their dark backs until they were gone, until he realized that they were gone.
He brought his hands to his face and for a while, in the passing mist of the rainstorm, he imagined what they would say. That it was the presence of the stone fish that had offended them (he tried to grasp the irreverence of it, how hopelessly presumptuous it must have seemed), that it was an order born out of fear, understood even by salmon, to be discarded as quickly as nightmares so that life could go on.
When he stood beside the fish he realized for the first time how flawless it was, that the ravages of the upstream journey were nowhere revealed. He thought of dismantling it, but instead removed only the obsidian pupils from the lapis eyes, which he dropped without looking into the rushing water as he crossed to the opposite bank.
In later years he wrote poetry in a beautiful Japanese hand in which he balanced the stonework of Machu Picchu against the directionless flight of butterflies. In this manner he slowly reclaimed his own life.