by Steve Himmer
But I followed my orders, and why wouldn’t I? Why not spend the day floating in a perfect blue river, when I’d been given the chance?
I drifted first on my back, sliding along at the base of the hill in the shadow of piled-earth banks, bouncing from one to the other then paddling back to where I’d begun against a current that looked, somehow, so much swifter than it actually was. If I tossed a stick or a leaf or a raft of bark in the water it sped off right away, but when I settled myself onto the surface it took a long time to start moving and ages to float to the end of the river where it crawled underground and ran away to wherever it ran (who knows where brand-new rivers flow?). And it was as easy to swim against the current as it was to swim with, like the flow was with me even when I could see that it wasn’t. It didn’t behave like I thought rivers did, but I’d never swum in a river that I’d watched made in a place where no river had been, and they must have ways of being a river that are all their own.
Floating became my routine. I woke in the morning, had porridge and tea, and sat on my cave top until the sun rose and the mist burned away. I watched birds for a while, beaks dipping in and out of their plumage to pick nits and unruffle ruffles, then it was down to the river for me. There’s a smooth, sandy spot where the bank slopes into the water, and in the days when I still wore my tunic, that’s where I left it behind. It was great to be nude, to be out of that fabric so scratchy and warm, and the water was always just frigid enough to give me a shock but not so cold I couldn’t settle into it as I stroked away from the bank and out into the current.
A large tree had fallen from the far bank almost as soon as the river was carved through the estate and began flowing; I say it fell, but to be honest I don’t remember it standing, so I’m not sure quite where it fell from. But wherever it came from that tree stretched—and still stretches—out into the stream, making a safe, steady harbor on the days I didn’t feel much like drifting or swimming or paying attention to where my body was. I’d paddle across, perhaps pause in the middle to tumble ass-up and dive for the deep, sandy bottom before swimming on toward the tree and resting the soles of my feet against its smooth trunk, like I was standing up into the current, water sliding along both sides of my body while I was held fast with sunlight warming my skin. Some parts of my body had never spent time in the sun, and in those first days on the river they blistered and burned, but even those parts were happy enough to be floating and swimming and sunlit and out of that torturous tunic.
I’d been asked to spend my time thinking but not told about what, so I tried to decide what Mr. Crane might like me to think about on the river but that didn’t go anywhere. I wondered sometimes about him, what he did for a living, where all this money for digging rivers and building caves had come from: something to do with construction in China, travels to the Far East and to Europe and who knows where else. It wasn’t my business what Mr. Crane did—I worked for him, not the other way round—yet because he’d been the one to tell me to think about something, the man himself seemed as good a topic as anything else, at least to get myself started. But I didn’t know enough about Mr. Crane to consider him for more than a moment, and I found that thinking of money, of Mr. Crane’s money and how it was made, distracted me from the contemplations he was paying me for. So I didn’t think about him very often.
It takes more effort than people realize to let your thoughts drift, really drift. It’s not as simple as starting to think, to daydream, because there need to be both space and time for a daydream to become what it’s going to be. With no interruptions, no external pressures, I let my mind lead me wherever it would and the river was a perfect inducement.
I thought about all the birds overhead, whether flying or sitting on branches, and I watched which species were jerks to the others. Blue jays, which I could recognize, seemed among the worst, driving smaller birds off of branches and away from pinecones and bunches of berries. I thought about the itches still itching my tenderest bits and the scabs and sores I’d put there by scratching, though the cold but not too cold water was soothing and sweet on those spots.
Sometimes I hung in the current, suspended, dragging my toes on the sand at the bottom like ten tiny anchors, holding my body upright at an angle with my chin on the lip of the river and my eyes closed and mind calm while hours slipped by without any motion or effort or thoughts passing through. There were sounds and I heard them, and my nose noticed smells and my skin felt cold and warmth and wind passing, of course, all of that, but it was nothing to do with me, any of it. I was just there, in the water, floating, submerged, and the world could do as it liked because I was right where I needed to be. There was nothing I had to accomplish except what I’d already done by being there, nothing expected of me beyond being placid, being Mr. Crane’s garden hermit, and nothing I was meant to change from one day to the next or the next unless he asked me to change it. I might spend the year, two years, seven years, floating on the same river in the same pose every day. My body might change, my beard and my hair would grow longer—and already they rippled around me, fanned on the river like a tangled logjam—but those changes would happen with or without any mind paid to them. I was becoming as gentle on the river, on the world, as the dragonfly who stood on the riverine island of my exposed nose with delicate dragonfly feet, unfurling its wisp of a tongue for sips of water so small that their absence would never be noticed.
I made sense in the river and the river made its own sense in me. How else can I say it but that?
15
Once the river became part of my practice and part of my day, Mr. Crane had other ideas. The river remained, and I kept swimming, but he made additions to the garden one after another. There were peacocks who didn’t last long, screeching and squawking in harsh voices at odds with their beauty, and I was glad to see them go a few days after they came (though I can’t say whether they wandered off on their own or were rounded up and removed by unseen wranglers).
A tree house was built, a square platform, really, and I was asked to move my sunrise meditations from the roof of my cave to the tree. I made the shift though I didn’t enjoy it: the angle from the tree to the horizon was wrong, and the branches were too thick with green leaves and blocked the best part of the view. Then another note asked me to do tai chi moves in the tree instead of just sit. I’d tried tai chi soon after settling into the garden, with no idea how it was done, and I’d been glad when I was asked to end the charade. Now I was back to faking tai chi but this time a good twenty feet in the air, on a platform without any railings or sides, and surrounded by branches that swayed in the wind and were thick enough to sweep me right over the edge.
So my treetop tai chi, such as it was, wouldn’t have been too impressive if anyone had been able to see it behind all those leaves so high in the air. I was satisfied with not falling off, never mind faking the moves in a convincing way, and was relieved when the platform was removed overnight and I went back to watching the sunrise from my cave as I had been doing before.
Every so often a new animal wandered into my cave, sometimes at night, leaving only strange tracks, and sometimes in daylight so I saw who it was. I met porcupines, ferrets, and foxes in several colors, and deer and rabbits too many to count. I didn’t know if they’d come to the garden by nature, wandering in from the surrounding mountains or up from the city below, or if they’d been introduced like the peacocks. It didn’t much matter to me; they were there, so was I, and I liked watching them go about their foxish or owlish or rabbitish work. In reality, I discovered, animals didn’t do as much as they did on TV—I had to wait days, sometimes, to see as much activity as I’d seen in five minutes of a good nature show—but they were still pretty exciting. They smelled worse in real life, but I was in no position to hold that against somebody else.
I met several skunks including the one who’d wandered into the cave my first night in the garden, the first I’d ever encountered who wasn’t a cartoon. They were good neighbors, for the most part
, and the one time I got sprayed it was my own fault: I tripped over a fat, waddling skunk in the dark, not looking where I was going. If somebody stepped on my back, I might even spray them myself. The smell was horrible, of course, but worse was the burning in my ears and throat, and after a long, painful night of wheezing and retching a large kettle of tomato juice appeared in my cave with a note that said what it was for (I wouldn’t have known otherwise). I scrubbed and I scoured myself and it made me smell better but didn’t do much for my tunic, its tangled, tough threads holding onto the scent for as long as I wore it thereafter. Not all the time, not every second, but when a wind blew the right way or a day became hot, sharp tangs of skunk wafted up from my clothes and made my eyes water all over again and burned the back of my throat. Another reason I’m glad to be rid of that garment.
But I couldn’t blame the skunks for being themselves. And watching them waddle, watching them snort and root in the ground, more than made up for the stink they had only once laid upon me. And, to be fair, I never saw one of those skunks spray again. They struck the pose sometimes, when I got too close; they raised tail and shook bum and went through the motions of spraying, but they never cast anything out. They always looked as surprised as I was that they weren’t spraying, but I guess we grew used to each other. Once I knew they weren’t going to spray, I could walk right up to pet them, and could scratch behind their twitching ears. Sometimes they were too vigorous returning the favor and tore into my wrists with their claws, but I think skunks mostly get a bad rap.
And the skunks and foxes were small potatoes—or small animals who later learned to eat my potatoes—compared to who arrived next. I woke one morning like I would any other, turned to my nook where breakfast sat steaming, and unrolled the note curled beside it. “A lion has been released into the garden,” it read. “It has been trained to befriend you.”
A lion! In the garden. My garden, with me and my beat-skipping heart.
And it had been trained to befriend me. What did that mean? How did a lion make friends and, more importantly, I thought, why would it want to with me? The only training I could imagine was rewards of meat when a lion was friendly, one fleshy treat after another as it learned to behave, and that method seemed plausible enough in my head except for one flaw: I happened to be made of meat, tender meat, without very much clothing to get in the way. A lion could almost be excused if it mistook me for a snack, for an oddly shaped training morsel.
Had I known of some other method, had I known something about how lions are trained, I might not have been so afraid that I crawled back under my blankets, pulled them up to my nose—missing sunrise for the first time since I’d come to the garden—and waited for the lion to walk in and eat me.
But the lion didn’t show up, and later that day, itching to swim, itching from too long spent under my blankets, I decided to emerge and face my fears like a man, or at least like a mouse (which I remembered lions were supposed to be scared of, so letting my inner mouse out might for once serve me well).
On hesitant toes I crept to the mouth of the cave, to scan the garden for lions before I committed to going outside. But I stuck my face into the sunlight and there he was, sitting beside my fire ring like he’d been waiting all morning for me to wake up. The lion turned his massive head toward me, and with his broad brown face and rippling corona of mane, he looked an awful lot like the sun. A big, brown, furry sun right outside the mouth of my cave.
I jumped back inside but didn’t land well, turning my ankle and collapsing onto the cold ground. The lion rose from his haunches, shook his head so a cloud of fur erupted around him like a blown dandelion, then took three steps forward straight into my home. My heart raced, and I kicked backward across the ground until my shoulders were against the pallet and I had nowhere else to go.
And the lion took three more steps before hanging his muzzle right in front of mine, so close I could feel his hot breath drying out my nostrils and eyes, and he yawned. Right in my face, a long, creaking yawn, then he laid down on the floor at my side and he went to sleep. At least, I think he was sleeping. His eyes were closed and he wasn’t eating me, that much I can say for certain.
I was glad to survive, but as lions go I was pretty let down. I thought he would be ferocious, I thought he’d be loud, roaring and rumbling and chasing me with his teeth bared for fun before tearing me down and chewing me up. I thought he would act like the lions I’d seen on TV, but he didn’t, not really. I hadn’t looked forward to being eaten, but I had been excited for seeing a lion. But this one acted more like one of my former neighbors’ cat—I never knew which neighbor, not that it mattered—who used to sleep on the Welcome mat in front of my door and make me step over to get home after work.
I had a better chance of eating this lion than he had of eating me. Still, it was exciting to sit so close to an animal I’d never expected to meet, to see how much longer his body was than I’d imagined, stretched out across the floor of my cave, and to see his long tongue loll out the side of his mouth and drip a pool onto the stone. I’d learned that lions aren’t vicious and wild, but models of patience and peace. He could teach me something about meditation, this lion, I thought, so I left him sleeping on the floor by my bed, on top of the woolly blankets I’d flung to the floor getting up, and I went down to the river to float and to think of how I might be as quiet and calm as a lion.
He was gone from the cave when I walked back for lunch, though it still smelled of his hot body and breath—not an unpleasant smell, either; it made the cave cozy and warm and made me wonder if anyone sold scented candles with the aroma of lion (not that I needed candles, because I had the real thing in my garden).
And I decided that evening, while sitting over tea by my fire, that I would call the lion “Jerome.” It seemed like a nice, gentle name for a nice, gentle lion. I didn’t expect to speak it aloud, but it gave me something to call him in my meditation, and it was easier to aspire to emulate something if I knew its name.
And in this case its name—his name—was Jerome.
I didn’t see him again for a couple of days, and that time I was down by the water washing some rust-and blood-colored stones I had found. I thought they’d look nice along the edge of a niche in my cave. Crouched over the river, dunking my stones, I didn’t notice Jerome approaching until his reflection fell over mine on the water. I stood, and started to turn so I could scratch his head or give him a pat, but before I could reach out he leapt toward me, claws extended, teeth bared, and a rumble tumbling out of his mouth like an earthquake rising up through the ground.
I don’t know how I survived and wasn’t eaten, but somehow I did. Somehow I fell backward into the water at just the right second or fraction of one for his claws to swipe the air where I’d been but no longer was. And somehow the current—that mysterious current—pushed me away before Jerome landed with a wet thump on the spot where I’d crouched in the sand. I swam, I paddled, I panicked as hard as I could to the log at midriver where I liked to float and I climbed up onto it before turning toward shore. I didn’t know if lions could swim, or if Jerome would, but he seemed to have lost interest in me and was viciously attacking his own reflection, slashing and biting the water, pouncing and rolling with only himself in his grip, and casting a cloud of sand, dust, and spray up into the air.
And then, quick as quick, his whole body froze, his ears perked up straight, and his head cocked toward a sound he’d heard but I hadn’t. Then he not so much roared as growled deep inside, without his mouth even moving, and ran away into the trees.
Heart pounding, whole body shaking, I stayed on the log with my knees pulled up to my chest. I sat until I was too hungry to sit any longer, by which time the sun was already low, then I quietly, carefully swam back to shore and crept as softly as I could, with as much mousiness as I could muster, up to my cave for some food and in hopes Jerome wouldn’t be waiting for me in my bed.
I knew wolves did that sort of thing, but I wasn’t sure about li
ons.
He wasn’t there, though. He wasn’t anywhere. Instead I found a note on the floor of my cave where it must have fallen unnoticed from my breakfast tray. It told me—not in time!—that Jerome’s “pacification” had been adjusted after problems the previous day, and that I might notice differences in his behavior.
And I supposed that I had, as the note promised. There was another note the next day, telling me—as if I didn’t know—that there had been some problems with the adjustment, and that they would be sorted out. But I didn’t see Jerome that day to test his new dosage (I assumed his pacification was drugs) or for a while after that. Perhaps he’d been taken into the house for his treatment, until he could act more like a lion should act, however that might turn out to be. Or perhaps his correctly dosed medication had made him curl up in some quiet part of the garden for a long nap. Either way, I felt like I’d helped him a little, like the extra dosage had been a thorn in his paw and I’d been the one to pull it out, and I hoped he’d remember that favor the next time we met.
16
This part of the world isn’t known for its seasons, but one afternoon not long after Jerome’s arrival, as I walked back to my cave from the river, there was as much a suggestion of autumn as I’d ever seen. It was nothing as grand or as grounding as leaves going orange or falling from trees into piles, or frosted pumpkins marching through yellow-grassed fields, none of what catalogs sell as the autumnal mystique of New England. But the air changed that day. It was a little bit sharper drawn into my lungs, a coarse touch in the back of my throat. Maybe those hills were so high even the climate was different, with those down below accepting a world without seasons, one endless summer in which some days were slightly cooler than others and never knowing that up in the hills seasons came and went in ways unimagined. Maybe, like sunsets, the seasons were buried under pollution. The only leaves I’d ever seen change in the valley had been those on rare tree-lined stretches of highway, where exhaust fumes painted brown stripes every fall.
