I drive back to the only place I can call home, Karl's houseboat on the Columbia.
Still no sign of Karl. The home stands vacant, other than my few possessions. Looking at it this way, it's possible to imagine nobody has ever lived here but me. I'm meant to be this way. Everybody in my life disappears, vanished into time. Every moment flits out of tangibility with the passing of the instant. I'm not sure what exactly we call existence, if nothing solid lingers.
This can't be Karl's place without Karl's presence. I remain, so this becomes mine. If I leave, what then?
I haven't forgotten rules, laws, contracts, obligations. These things exist because everyone believes in them. I keep waiting for somebody to come along, let me know it's time to go. Each time I hear someone creaking along the dock, I wonder if it's the marina manager coming to put all this to an end. Maybe she'll ask for some fee or assessment. At least ask after Karl.
If someone does come looking, what answer can I give? My only guess is that whatever enigma Karl chased led him away, toward his own fields, his own river. Both Karl and I keep secret our own mysteries, but mine led me back here. Otherwise, despite Sadie and Lily wearing bodies of contrasting shape and color, and speaking in different voices, the two are the same.
Time passes. Nobody ever comes to ask about Karl, or anything else. Every charge must have been paid ahead, well in advance. After what seems like weeks, I start leaving the front door open, despite wind and damp, hoping some passerby will be curious enough to look inside. I'm ready for someone to appear, but people rarely come this far. My house is docked at the end of the row, the marina's outermost edge, nearest the Washington side. The few who come out this far never look inside. They continue to the dead end, maybe stop a moment, then turn around and go back. It's as if nobody ever sees me.
My eyes remain open. This world may be considered a tangible realm, but the only experiences worth keeping happen elsewhere, in another line of existence. People are never the way I imagine them to be. All the give and take of pain, it's nothing but phantom sensation. I'm left with nothing but memories of pleasure, memories of suffering, not the things themselves. Exchanges on a physical level leave no trace. Even words are transient. Intimacy seems profound in the moment, as if it might endure forever, but blink and it evaporates.
In the mirror, everything is invisible. The mirror always looks behind.
Karl vanishes, so I barely remember him. I'm left with no more of Karl than of Michelle or Lily, or my books and music, my job, anything else.
The only thing kept is memory. Transience isn't something to be wished against or overcome. It's the only possibility, an absolute limit. To live through experience, what does that mean? Life passes so quickly, it's impossible to react in time. The now can never be preserved, always vanishes before a snapshot can be stolen. Is this life, that fleeting now, or is real living actually the process of sorting through the pieces later? I focus on assembling and shaping all I've been through. Finally I have time. Sensations left behind, words spoken, a book loaded with all the designs of life. It might be the most meaningful thing I ever possessed, yet while I held it, I was never able to focus without distraction. Always looking away, thinking elsewhere.
Lily made it for me. I possessed the book even if I never possessed the woman herself. She's gone. Now that I have time, I want to make sense of this. If I can sort the ideas, every page still exists in mind. Every image is a painting in memory.
I assemble paper, pens, begin scribbling notes, sketches. I'm disappointed to find the designs are only vivid so long as they remain held in imagination. Reproduced on paper, ideas fall flat. The problem isn't my lack of skill with a pen. It's more the general problem of translation. Concepts held in mind remain fluid, malleable and complex. When an idea is forcibly conformed to hard-edged concreteness, the change in language discards most of what I remember.
My plan is no longer to render on paper. Instead, I plan to create a full concept of the book, to be held in mind. It should be possible to see every page, to refine my sense of all that appears within, before moving to the next. But I'm afraid before I reach the end I may lose some details from the beginning, forget that I've forgotten. It may not be possible for imagination and memory to correlate all aspects of everything I've seen.
Soon I may need to leave the houseboat. Increasingly things are moved or rearranged in frustrating ways. Changes occur, not effected by me. Sometimes I wonder if Karl has come home, disrupted things. I'm aware of the fact that he's gone, but sometimes I wonder if this truth is as indefinite as the rest. Once in a while, this becomes a different place. A home has moods and emotions, like a person. Time changes me, and so my surroundings are also changed.
In the bathroom, I find everything disturbed. The light switch by the door is gone, and instead of a single overhead bulb, many tiny pinpoints of light aim straight at me, through the mirror from behind. These operate by knobs and switches in a flexible cluster behind the sink. When I reach for the switches, water spurts or sprays, threatening to engage my hands in some disaster of running water and electrical high-voltage. Even when I determine the system, the correspondence between switch and light, I find most of them don't turn on after all, or they flicker off again without my interference.
Finding the bathroom changed like this, without warning, I vibrate with anger. I want to complain to someone, maybe the marina manager. But Karl owns this house. The marina's just responsible for docks, utilities and parking. Nobody can fix this but me. Karl's no longer any help. I'm angry enough now that if Karl returned, I'd tell him it's crazy what he's allowed to happen. Lights impossible to control, electric switches sprayed with water. But he's not here, and anyway I have this horrible feeling that if he did show up, suddenly everything, the bathroom, the problems with the lights, the noises I keep hearing from his room, all these details would immediately revert to the way they were before. It's predictable.
I discover a note Karl left behind, which purports to explain his absence. The letter seems fake, like something I might compose myself. Nothing about it is convincing. Phony apologies, stilted formality, no resemblance to Karl's real style. Even my memory of that I've begun to question.
After the food is gone, I take this letter out to the end of the dock and let it drift away. Floating on the surface it slowly absorbs the river's substance. The paper vanishes downstream before it sinks.
I'm learning to understand what's actually real and what only seems. I try not to consider what this fakery reveals of me, especially when my subconscious manifests material changes into the world, out of my own compulsions or perverse hypothetical visions. It's hard for a person not to wish, to pretend nothing's wrong when circumstances might be shifted to make existence more bearable. Desire is painful. Urges for companionship, sex and food are profound. Is any of this my fault? Somehow I feel ridiculous, all this illusion rising out of me, like a lie told to myself, but I can't stop it. I have no power over my desires, have never possessed the capacity to restrain myself. Why should I? Nothing like that matters. Even the greatest intimacy leaves no evidence of the connection that was. Whatever passes between two people is immaterial. Everything given and received vanishes.
All that Lily bestowed is gone, but if I close my eyes, I possess everything. I hold the book in mind, turn pages, linger over uncountable images, boundless ideas. Piece together crucial connections, previously missed.
Secret names for rivers.
The history of Cayson's house.
Locations of hidden pathways.
Art forms and languages for wilderness.
Gathering places downriver.
Charts of blood runes and sigils.
I build upon these beginnings, work toward increasing understanding, the way a crossword puzzle becomes easier with every new word filled in. Hints build upon hints, toward full comprehension. Language is a code.
Now it becomes possible to imagine myself going to this place, learning the way, discovering locales invisible and unattainable to others. Unexplored fields on the shores of foreign rivers obscured from the world's view. One day I will discover Lily, though she must be a transformed person now. Dressed differently, hair changed, a different angle to her smile. Some new texture of skin. Gathering strange specimens, bits of leaf or sunbleached bone, components for new books.
With her, a small child, the only thing she ever needed of me. A little boy, not a baby, but surprisingly older. I believe this is what she took, though the math doesn't work for the child to be mine. Not enough time has elapsed for one conceived between Lily and me, in our small window of time together, to be born and to grow to this size. But now I know enough to trust that impossibility is not proof that something does not exist.
Though I haven't seen any of it yet, all this must be true.
Different as Karl and I have always been, and though I dismissed his presumptuous advice, I find myself wishing he might return. I envision him strutting through the front door, smirking, loose in the shoulders, full of innuendo and quick to offer blithe, careless opinions. His suggestions weren't compelling for their insight, yet his easy confidence was spellbinding. Even now, Karl might give me direction I could use. Whether I do as he suggests or the opposite, I would be relieved to find him returned.
After spending so much time alone, I consider the possibility of visiting Constant. Of course he wouldn't rehire me to do the work I did before. I wonder if he might offer me some other job, hard labor or graveyard work. This is foolish, a recurrence of my old weakness. I have this tendency to drift back toward the familiar. The truth is, if I made a list of any job I might possibly do, working CAD and 3D for Constant Marine would rank near the bottom. I could do so many other things, now that everyone has left me behind. First Michelle, then Lily, Karl and Sadie.
One other person has drifted away. The old Guy. For so long I wanted to be rid of him. I remember how bad things were, when I was him. I won't forget.
Memory is important, but it's not everything. Nothing replaces the flesh for immediate sensations. Real-time experiences, face to face, that's the nearest approach to ecstasy. That passion requires body, but I don't believe the physical aspect matters as much. Physicality doesn't last. All senses mislead.
Colors, words, shapes and smells. All transform, enlighten, feed the mind. I wish I still possessed my book. Now all that remains is memory of the thing, and whatever else memory has allowed me to create. I go beyond remembering what I saw, felt and smelled. I imagine further. The fewer material objects I possess, the more memory suffices. I catch myself dreaming of escape, disappearing into trees. In mind, I travel back, grasping for the past. Each time I revisit the book, I improve it. Journey through, pages growing more distinct, images clearer, ideas sharper.
When I study the section on charms, reflect on what it tells, I begin to understand how Lily reached out, changed me from a distance, even as I was unable to change myself. She lent me strength. I gained more than I lost.
I question my idealization of Michelle, and my sexual dreams of Sadie. Maybe these were a kind of test, delusions arisen on the cusp of my meeting Lily at my lowest, most vulnerable point. The women I actually knew, and in some sense possessed, what of them? Interludes with Lily, decades with Michelle. If anything remains, it's not tangible. Nothing I can see or hold.
The thing is this: More and more, even memory is my own creation.
So I continue to study, to recollect details from a book I no longer possess. I visualize colorful drawings, intuit understanding of blocks of text previously incomprehensible. Gradually I come to understand more clearly than when I held the book in my hands. I realize what Lily intended. She meant to create life, to decide within her pages what I might become. I don't know when she began, or where, and have no way of knowing if she ever stopped. She's gone from my life, out of sight, but not mind. Maybe she continues her work, creating days as I perceive them, breathing sounds and smells out of dreams, an entire milieu gusted into existence for no purpose but to serve as backdrop for all my interactions, relationships, my entire impact upon this world. Even my death. All of it, contained in Lily's book.
What does that make her? Some deranged, fallen goddess, spinning a story into being then vanishing?
If I can only remember.
I sift through my remaining books, look between and behind the twenty-one ordinary volumes, just in case Lily's book somehow slipped between the others and was momentarily concealed. But nothing's hidden. No salvation.
I take the pile, all twenty-one, out to the dock, all the way to the end. I sit on the edge, dangle my feet into cold green water. At one time, these books seemed like the beginning of something. A new start. Desperate and sad, that's how I was, clinging to any hope.
Flipping through a shelf-worn Look Homeward, Angel, I seek any spark of interest. Why did I select these items to keep? None of these words make sense. The language is odd, distant, irrelevant to what I've become. The words are too small. They seek to make up in quantity what they lack in mass. What does any of it matter?
I stop at page seventy-one, trying to exert my will upon the words on the page. Come to life. Speak to me.
Nothing.
I tear out the page, flip it over. Seventy-two, no better. Nothing here but a waste of ink and paper.
I crumple the page, crush it into a tight ball, toss it in the water. The paper floats on the surface as if it weighs nothing. More pages, tear them all. A handful, whole chapters. Once they're loose, I separate each one, crumple every page into its own individual sphere and let it go down the river. The spine cracks, the brittle yellow glue no longer supported by the block of pages. I throw the remainder into the water. The only Thomas Wolfe book I ever owned now floats toward the Pacific Ocean.
There's only one story, a new one. I have no use for a job, a car, friends, an ex-wife.
Leaving the rest of the books on the edge of the dock, I slip inside for my paper shopping bag from Parfum de Nuit, and return to sort my candles, incense and matches outside. I burn a cone of incense in my palm, watch it become ash. I lick my thumb and forefinger, pinch the brown ash between them, place it in my mouth. Taste and smell of burned spice, exotic smoke. So insubstantial, I swallow it. Nothing left.
When I'm gone, I'll still be in the book. If I possess a body, it will continue some other place, a different existence. Not solid matter, but intangible. Safer that way. After I lost Michelle, I fell apart. I kept expecting to recover, but never could. With Lily, someone I barely knew, my breakdown was worse. I can't lose someone I never possessed, can't have fallen in love with a stranger. Maybe I was still wounded by Michelle, and managed to superimpose onto Lily all my sad desire for reconciliation. Hunger and need, so pathetically doomed. Lily might have given something, but not what I wanted. I'm the only one who can rescue myself, confront my ghost wife, shed my joyless, sleepless frailty and confusion, and float away. Measurements, durations, the way sizes fail to match, these breakdowns are unimportant. Leave them behind.
I light a match, shield the wind-sputtering flame behind a cupped palm, and hold it to the candle's wick. Inhale the flame, the smoke. Rest the cardamom-scented candle on the cover of a book of Wordsworth poems, place it flat on the surface of the water. A small raft bearing flame. I set it loose.
As the first moves downstream, I light the second candle and pair it with a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal. It follows, as if drawn after what went before.
The third candle, the last I own, smokes and sputters from an oily wick. I'm afraid it's too heavy to be supported by the thin paperback of Hemingway's In Our Time, but it stands. The river bears it away. Give us peace in our time.
Three candles disappearing.
"Keep." I speak the word. Open another book, write the word on a random page, and set the book loose.
"Hold." I write this in another book. It goes after the one before.
"Stay."
"Wait."
Keep writing, setting loose. So many words, not enough books.
Anyway, I can't stay here. Nothing is left inside. Everything trails off, slips too far away to retrieve. Here or there doesn't matter. Lily said all rivers connect. Every river is the same river.
After midnight, I drive my car. It's been so long, I can't remember the last time.
The graveyard shift crew at Constant Marine is only five men, working close to the water within a lighted, open-walled steel structure. They only return to the main office building at lunchtime, which won't be until four o'clock. Behind that building where I worked for so many years, I find what I need. Nobody below hears or sees. I wheel it to my car, load it in. The hatchback deck gets scraped up, but I don't care. I disappear, driving quiet, headlights dark.
I consider turning on my lights when I hit Marine Drive, decide not to bother.
The wheeled cart of the torch is unwieldy, difficult to get down the ramps to the dock. I take it slow. Though I've never used the torch myself, I've seen it done. It's simple, just a mix of two gases. The acetylene hisses, makes a sharp, identifiable smell until the spark from the igniter catches. The hiss changes, refines. I adjust the mix, add oxygen, turn both knobs until the blue flame sharpens enough to cut. Even in the dark, it's easy.
I lean over the edge to where the first mooring cable connects Karl's house to the dock. The edge of the stranded metal cable heats red, goes orange then yellow. The flame cuts through, molten metal spits. Drops of steel hit the water and steam, while all around, everyone sleeps. Someone might stop me if they recognized what I'm doing. I keep quiet. It's nobody else's business, pertains to no one but myself.
One cable, the next. I step lightly on the dock, careful when I roll the cart between stages. When the last is severed, all that tethers the house to the marina is utility conduit, thicker than the cables. Inside is mostly hollow pipe, water, sewer and electricity. Cutting takes time. I smell a different burn, melting plastic. Flames rise from the conduit, lick the side of the house. Smoke stings my eyes. The fire burns low, rises slowly, so I ignore it, keep cutting. Finally the electric lights inside blink out. When the last pipe gives, water sprays, drenches my face and spews into the river.
Rain falls, transforms the smell of burning. Eventually, rain should stop the fire. The smoke reminds me of Lily.
I leave the cutting rig on the dock and step inside the house. It shifts, cracks. The whole world moves. Water splashes up, as if compressed in a narrowing gap. The house shudders, comes up against the neighboring house, rebounds and scrapes away along the dock. Finally disconnected, floating free, I slip downstream. I know where I'm going, can see what I leave behind, the marina falling away. I stand in the doorway of an empty house, adrift. No connection remains. The first step out, where normally the dock would be, is now open water. Oregon to one side, Washington to the other.
I can't guess how far I might descend this river before some obstacle or dam stops me. If not this river, some other, where the measure of land exposed to sky keeps expanding. I keep promising not to return, but maybe I'll go back some Saturday in June when new grass has grown in to eradicate the black rectangle of mud. Where Lily once lived, I'll walk the perimeter, look for traces of her passage, find none. I'll make my way to the canyon where I caught my first fish. I won't climb down. From above I'll be able to see, through water clear as glass, that no steelhead remain in the pools. It may be passing of time, or changing seasons. Maybe they'll return.
Maybe Lily will be there.
I have to forget all that came before. Too many changes, too fast. Nothing remains but entropy. Broken time.
The fire spreads to all four walls and climbs the roof, casting light across the river. Smoke spins over the water's surface. The heat is almost too much to bear. Raindrops spit into the flames. Upon the night banks of the Columbia, dimly lit orange, are adornments such as I saw on the Kalama before, arrayed in familiar configurations. Though smoke burns my eyes, still I see clearly enough to recognize the hideous displays from the forest near Lily's field and the Kalama's banks.
Not only there. Here as well. So the truth is revealed. I finally understand.
All this is made in my form, designed to resemble me. These dangling structures of bone, leaf and sinew, like mobiles swaying in the wind, gestural artworks of spattered viscera imprinted on canvases of skin, constructs of dead and living parts intermingled in a unified state of decay. Charred fragments, crushed into dirt, to be washed away by rain. The frantic gestures of a doomed man. A life story penned in slashes of blood.
Tangled bits of mortality along a river, all part of me. These are the remains I will become after I burn.
THE END