Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  And he knows this moment has been a long time coming.

  Ten

  And so I see them all now, standing on the rock slab above my body, below my vision, wondering what to do and what is to happen and whether or not this is the death of a man they are witnessing, and whether they would feel more attracted to the event if I died or if I lived, and feeling bad for thinking such things. The latter event is dramatic, but the former tastes of vicarious tragedy and has greater appeal for them. I can see them all, see their faces, see Otis and Marco, ever sensible, standing back from the edge of the rock slab; Rickie, ever foolish, standing too close to the edge; Gaia Head, lunar dome dripping and only a little chastened by his terrifying swim down the waterfall. And Sheena, sweet Sheena whom I thought crippled, looking at the Cockroach to make sure that what is happening is all right. Last, I see the Cockroach, and he is so scared, because only he knows the full enormity of what has happened and his powerlessness to alter any of it. He takes refuge in activity, ever more frantic activity, and refuses to acknowledge to the punters what he and I both know: that there is no way out, that I cannot be rescued with the water so high and rising all the time. I want to hold the Cockroach like a child and tell him I love him and tell him not to be frightened, because I am not.

  But although I can see them, they cannot see me. They stand on the vast rock slab that slopes down the side of the waterfall and stare into the violent, agitated torrent. And sticking up, not very far from the rock slab, is my hand. It is so close that they are able to grasp arms and legs and form a human chain out to my hand. The Cockroach is at the end of the chain, only a metre or so out from the side of the rock slab, dangling dangerously above the water’s fury, his fingertips just touching mine. My hand throbs back and forth, in resonance with the violence of the falling cataract, like a jammed tree branch. My fingers and the Cockroach’s outstretched fingers entwine. I feel his horror, and through my fingers try to reassure him.

  But he cannot see me. I am hidden and being destroyed by this beautiful water, so clean and chill it feels as if someone has taken to my throat with a grinder that has a disc made of ice. This water, this water the colour of tea, this water so famed for its reflective qualities. When I open my eyes and stare into this wild brown turbulence of bubbles and water, I never see myself reflected, only others, only the faces of others, and I am strangely pleased to have their company.

  For some time now my mind has felt oddly clear, its contents no longer a hurdy-gurdy of images and faces I cannot keep hold of, but, on the contrary, a bizarre, detached line of thoughts that seek to rationally understand where I am.

  This line of thoughts begins in an exploration of my physiological condition, which is clearly unusual and which forms a backdrop to all my other thoughts. From a first-aid course I remember that there are two types of drowning: wet drowning and dry drowning. In the former instance water pours into the lungs and floods them, rendering them useless and their possessor dead in a relatively short time. In the second, more interesting, and more common variant of drowning, a flap of the oesophagus flicks shut to prevent water entering the lungs. The body proceeds to shut down all but its most vital activities, rationing its most precious resource, oxygen, to its most precious organs. The heart can even cease to beat, but the brain remains alive, fed by tiny life-sustaining quantities of oxygen. In this instance it takes considerably longer to drown, and there are documented cases of people being pulled out of the water some hours after entering it, technically dead, yet who are brought back to life.

  I can no longer see or feel the water which envelops me, am aware neither of its force, its patterns of movement around my body, nor its intense coldness. To the extent that I feel anything, I feel my body swaying and rocking, presumably from the water sweeping over and about it. But this is only presumption. I can no longer even be entirely sure that it is my body. Perhaps through some strange extra sense I have become aware of the movement of something else. Perhaps it is not a body after all, but the bough of a fallen tree, a myrtle perhaps, washed down by the rising waters. Part of the branch is thrashing around, and part of my mind tells me that this is my rescuers tugging away at my arm. But that also can now only be presumption. I can no longer know whether my arm is being cruelly wrenched this way or that in futile attempts to save me, can no longer know whether I am in agony or whether agony has become so all-encompassing that I no longer have anything to judge it against as my normal state of being. If I no longer feel any physical sensation yet can still think, then surely, I think to myself, surely I am still alive. Aware that I have been entombed in the water for what would seem to those above an infinity, and aware that I therefore should be dead, the notion of dry drowning appears no longer as a thought but as a solace. And it leads to a paradox: if I am only dying in this fashion, I reason, then there is a good chance I might live.

  But immediately I think this, I am assailed by all sorts of doubts. The worst, the darkest question that insists upon me acknowledging it is this - who is this drowning?

  There is no easy, quick answer. I wish to cry out that is surely me, Aljaz Cosini, river guide; wish to continue seeing in the river my life as evidence of who I am. But these thoughts, these images of childhood, of love and fear, of desire and loss, are weak.

  And what is strong, what overrides all sense of progression and cohesion in my life, is the sensation of being nothing more than an outline.

  I feel as if I am one of those figures that police chalk around twisted, bloodied corpses at car-accident sites. These chalk outlines remain on the bitumen for days, sometimes weeks, until the elements and countless car tyres eliminate them. People pass by and wonder who these chalk outlines were, with their strange distended limbs and empty faces, without ears to hear or eyes to see. I feel as if I am at once one of those curious passersby and the chalk outline. Who is this? I ask of myself.

  And, as if in reply, I realise I am floating above everything that has been my life, my time, my place. And yet, as I look beneath me it all seems so strange, for what should have cohesion, what should have progression and identity, has none of these things. All I can hear is confused and crazed babble. I feel myself nothing more than an outline without substance, without identity or individuality. Below I hear only gibberish. What does it mean, I wonder, all those crazed and contradictory words? How was it possible for me to once root myself in that nonsense and derive meaning and purpose from it? Maddening thoughts assail me. In an age when everything can mean anything, perhaps it is only possible to exist as a cipher, as a thin, fragile outline of a hope etched across an infinity of madness.

  I see the figures crudely cut from steel plate by oxy-torch that lined the fence on Molle Street near where Couta lived in Hobart. The feet of the steel figures seek to escape the scorching steel flames that form the bottom of the fence, while their arms are extended toward the sky, toward the immense aqua presence of the mountain behind Hobart, lined at its summit by apricot clouds. Suspended between hell and heaven, simultaneously in agony and knowledge, unable to distinguish between either. Is that me? Is that me?

  Before I have time to arrive at an answer, I feel a long skinny tube being pushed with some violence into my left eye.

  What the Christ is going on!

  I resent this action, not so much for the pain it creates, which is negligible compared to the burden of pain the rest of my body is carrying, but because it represents an unnatural indignity. Here I am getting on with the business of drowning - indeed, almost to the point of being resigned to it - when I get a piece of tube rammed into my face. Not only that, but they - whoever my unkind rescuer is, I can only presume it is the Cockroach - begin to blow through the tube, causing a furious bubbling around my face that tickles it.

  Madonna santa!

  Let me die in peace, I would shout, were it not that I only have water to mouth words with. The tube, after being temporarily rammed up my nose, finds my mouth and penetrates with some force my lips. Air is forced into
my mouth, thereby forcing the water in my mouth and throat down into my stomach from which it rapidly returns accompanied by the burnt porridge I had for breakfast. The tube ejects from my mouth followed by a minor eruption of vomit. After a few similar, though smaller, eruptions, my rescuers finally succeed in keeping the tube in my mouth and getting air into my body.

  Am I to live? Is my life to be saved? Am I finally to be made visible? Other people who nearly die go down a tunnel and see a great light at the end. But all I have seen are people, the whole lot of them, swirling, dirty, smelly, objectionable and ultimately lovable people, and, I think, if it is to be my misfortune to return into the lamentable physical vessel that has been my body, it is them - these people in the kitchens and office blocks and suburbs and pink leisure suits - that I must learn to make my peace with.

  The clammy tube twists and turns and pulses air bubbles into my waterlogged body, bringing it literally back to its senses. This is not pleasant for me. I cease being a chalk outline seeking my world and return to being a mass of agonised, tortured flesh, whose sensations and impressions are only of the most immediately physical: the chill of the water, the fire in my chest, the jackhammer pounding in my head, the screams of my legs and torso, the pain like a red-hot poker across the shoulder of my upright arm. I am struck by the thought that death is nowhere as violent as life.

  Suddenly the tube stops ferociously aerating my innards and goes strangely slack within me, then casually writhes out of my mouth like a tired tiger snake to wash away with the furious currents down the waterfall. I cannot see what has happened. I can only presume that someone - perhaps Rickie, perhaps Marco - has accidentally dropped the tube from the rock slab above. Dropped the tube and with it my chance of living.

  Black Pearl, 1828

  My visions are growing shorter and more confused. I am unable to stay for long with those that appear, and before I am even sure what it is I am seeing, it is gone again. I see things, so many things, so many different worlds, though they come into focus but briefly and blur away again before I have time to make sense of them.

  Now that my pain has dissolved into something beyond pain, there is not even the progress of my suffering to act as a timepiece to the onset and disappearance of my visions. I no longer know whether the vision I am seeing refers to another vision I’ve had, or whether my deranged mind with virtually no oxygen is constructing a complete and total world when there is no totality to know, only this bizarre series of fragments that seem so real and seem to somehow make sense. I feel dimly aware that I am seeing less and that I must fight this sensation.

  I look through these murky waters, so turbulent on the surface yet here just pleasant swirls of bubbles, and I can see Harry standing beside his grandmother, the one everyone called Auntie Ellie. She looks like a shrivelled dark plum.

  But the more I look at her, the more the wrinkles and lines dissolve, until a young girl is looking back at me. She looks at me for quite some time, examines my nose and eyes. She beckons me to come with her, turns and heads away, down through a sandy track around which the fleshy green pigface with its crimson flowers grows. She gives me some to eat. The track winds through dense boobialla bush and we walk for a long time, so long, in fact, that night falls and a near-full moon rises before our journey comes to an end. The track winds down to a beach, at the end of which there is dancing light.

  We make our way towards the light and after a time it becomes possible to distinguish a white man and three black women sitting around a fire. The women look bedraggled and drunk. The man looks worse. All four are clad in strange combinations of seal and kangaroo skins crudely stitched together.

  And I know, though I have no way of knowing, that this man is a sealer, the women slaves he has stolen from a Tasmanian tribe and brought to this remote island in Bass Strait to slay seals and dry their skins.

  They are arguing about God. ‘Is he a big fella?’ asks one woman with a walleye.

  ‘He like hunting kangaroo?’ asks another. ‘How he walk? Like an echidna walk, like a whitefella, or he walk good and quiet like black people?’ They are goading the sealer, who until this point has been too drunk to bother responding. His immediate interest lies in his right arm, with which he has been stroking the woman wearing a red woollen stocking cap, rubbing her breast up and down.

  ‘The Lord God Almighty walks on water,’ he says to her.

  ‘He’s a bloody platypus then,’ says the woman who wears the black beanie, and all three women cackle. Emboldened, the woman in the red woollen stocking cap pushes the sealer’s arm away and asks, ‘How come white-fellas nail platypuses onto crosses?’ The women laugh even more. The sealer’s temper immediately changes from one of lecherous intent to anger at the jibe at his religion.

  ‘You blaspheming bitches!’ shouts the sealer, whose patience with this conversation is now exhausted. His sharp blue eyes flash. His sharp blue eyes.

  The sealer grabs the woman with the red woollen stocking cap. She says nothing, but stares into his face. Into those blue eyes. He cuffs her with a methodical violence that I recognise. He slaps her on one side of the face and says something, then slaps her on the other side and says something else. And his voice is fierce.

  ‘Learn this and learn it well.’

  Slap.

  ‘I was made in the image of our Lord.’

  Slap.

  ‘White.’

  Slap.

  ‘White.’

  Slap.

  ‘And God gave me dominion over all his creatures.’

  Slap.

  ‘Including you.’

  Slap.

  ‘Including you.’

  Slap.

  Then he throws her onto her belly and takes her from behind, like he does with sheep, his right arm jamming her head back in a headlock, reducing her struggles to jerks and twists of her body. She feels a white face behind her and she knows that she will never forget the fear and humiliation of this moment, knows that she will never forget, nor will her children nor the children they beget nor their children, even long after they have forgotten from where their terrible fear comes, long after they cease to understand why they are afraid. She feels his breath upon the nape of her neck, hot, like the rainforest breath of Werowa announcing a death. And she wonders, But whose death?

  Here I am, witnessing this strange and tragic event, feeling the greasy sand beneath my feet, so close that I can smell the seal blubber and cheap rum on the sealer’s breath, yet unable to find adequate material evidence to prove that what is happening is a reality I share. I would pick up the sealer’s fine sealskin jacket rimmed with wallaby fur which lies just to the left of me as material evidence, but the young girl beside me, Harry’s grandmother, Auntie Ellie, my great-grandmother, has hold of my right hand, and I can feel through her palm and her fingers that I must not move, and when I so much as make a small bodily movement, my lungs immediately fill with fire.

  And so I watch, mute, passive, horrified, as the other women start laying into the sealer, belting him in the guts and in the head, trying to wrench him away, and then backing off when he pulls a pistol out of his pocket and waves it wildly.

  The woman being raped begins to sing a strange and forlorn song. Her song sounds the emptiness of the beach and the ocean, echoes the distant cry of the sea eagle, calls for the return screech of the black cockatoo. ‘Shut up, Black Pearl,’ warns the sealer as he thrusts in and out. ‘Shut up.’

  But Black Pearl continues to sing to her brother the blue-tongue lizard, her mother the river, her father the rocks, her sister the crayfish that smells of woman.

  ‘Shut up,’ he says again, punctuating his words with blows to her head.

  Still Black Pearl sings to her family. His blows having no effect, he looks around, then laughs with enlightenment. He places the barrel of the pistol in her mouth and rests the stump of a long lost finger on the trigger.

  ‘This’ll fix you,’ he says and laughs again.

  But still Blac
k Pearl sings and sighs the cold metal in her mouth, the fear in her guts, the searing pain between her thighs - none of it can smother her song. On and on the song goes, till the man, sated, hoists up his breeches, lets her fall upon her side into the sand, and staggers away to find his rum bottle.

  On and on the song goes, and after the sealer pukes and then falls asleep in a stupor, the two other women come over and lie together with Black Pearl. They lie together on the land on which they once stood with pride. As they warm one another on the beach, they join in the low song that seems to cover all the sand. The song and the sound of the waves become as one and on and on it goes, and though the women are now asleep the black cockatoo and the sea eagle sing. The wind in the boobiallas passes the song on to the wind in the gums, who teaches it to the wind in the myrtles and celery top pines, who then sings it to the river and to the rocks.

  We are now so close I can see that Black Pearl, though asleep, has not closed her eyes. Her pupils are black. There are no tear stains. I realise I am witness to the conception of Auntie Ellie’s mother and to the genesis of all that I am. I feel afraid. The black eyes begin to fill with swirls and dancing bubbles. I realise I am entrapped, entombed in this all-encompassing water.

  On a white quartz-sand beach the aqua-green waves pounding insistently. A woman’s cry of pain, smothered partly by something in her mouth, a man’s quickening groan and then cry of triumph, then stillness. Then nothing.

  But everywhere the song.

  On and on it goes, and here in this godforsaken water I cannot rid my mind of its infernal sound.

  And now, joining the song, I feel a dull thrumming that vibrates the very rocks which grasp my body. At the same time as I feel these vibrations I am able to see the cause of them - a helicopter with the bright logo of a commercial TV station. Who knows how it came to be here? Perhaps it is a TV crew out shooting some stock footage of the south-west wilderness whom the Cockroach has managed to signal from the ground, and the crew, to their simultaneous horror and delight, have stumbled upon an actual news story in the middle of nowhere. Who cares? Least of all me, who can only watch as the helicopter hovers in mid-air, side on to the flow of the river, its side door open.