The River Why

by David James Duncan

  “What happens to the oldest, smallest little babies when they burn all the way out? Is that the end of them?”

  “No,” he said. “They don’t ever burn out. Sometimes they burn up. But most often they just get so bright and small that nobody can see them anymore, and they disappear out of the Garden World and enter our world, and we trade places.”

  “We what?”

  “We trade worlds with our twin: we go there and our twin comes here. See, all the time our twin is growing younger and happier, we’re growing older and more crippleder, till finally we die, and pass through our shadows, and get buried in our ground. Then we journey up and up through a long, black tunnel till we reach the Garden Angel ground, and then we sprout up through it like carrots, and there we are, Garden Angels now, not people—but the big, crooked, sad, new sort of Angels that haven’t been there long. And our twin, who has disappeared in a little bright speck too small to see, passes through his shadow and comes here and gets in a lady’s stomach and turns into a baby. So it’s really not our world or their world. We trade back and forth. Both worlds belong to both of us. We’re twins. The shadows we pass through are each other, us and our twins, swapping places.”

  This was mind-boggling information! I mulled it over, comparing it to GG’s Heaven and Hell System and H2O’s Borrowed Energy Units and Primordial Slime, and the Garden World struck me as not just more pleasant, but also more plausible. It accounted for where we came from before we were born—which GG’s formula didn’t—and it accounted for where we went when we died—which H2O’s formula didn’t—and any fisherman would like the sense it made out of releasing fish, for after a blissful sojourn in the Garden World you could come back here and catch the great-grand-fish of the ones you’d spared. But then a problem occurred to me:

  “Bill Bob, what about this? Let’s say a guy like Chunky Chuck…” (Chunky Chuck was an obese buddy of Bill Bob’s) “… gets run over by a car and killed. Now his Garden Angel couldn’t have been in the Garden World very long because Chunky’s only seven years old. So the Angel must still be tired and beat up from his last life in this crummy world, and he must be pretty darn big, too—huge even, if he’s anything like Chunky. So how is this Angel going to be able to disappear and come here and get in a lady’s stomach right off the bat?”

  Bill Bob had been nodding his head with suppressed excitement as I’d set him this problem, as though the solution to the Chunky Chuck Difficulty was a thing he’d always known and delighted in, as an old metaphysician delights in the thorniest of paradoxes. In an intense whisper, he said, “Remember, Gus, how I told ya that some Garden Angels burn up even though none burn out?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Good. Let me tell ya, then.”

  “Good. You tell me then.”

  “Sometimes in the Garden World a full-sized, new Garden Angel—wrinkled and beat-up and not very bright or happy yet compared to the little ones—will be walking in the woods, or in the hills, or out in the country somewhere way away from everybody else. And while this Angel is walking along he’ll hear a sound, and he’ll look behind him, and the Queen of the Garden World will be there on her white horse! And she’s so very very beautiful, and he’s so happy to see her, that what usually only happens to an Angel after years and years in the Garden World will happen to this Angel in an instant: watching her and seeing her smile and looking at the beautifulness and niceness and love flowing out of her reaching to every corner of the whole Garden World and even every corner of the sky, he starts to shrink like crazy and turn brighter and brighter, then Poof! He goes off like a million flashbulbs! and at the same instant his shadow—like Chunky Chuck—goes splat in this world because the car hit him! And they swap worlds just like that!”

  “Incredible!”

  “Yeah, it is,” he agreed. “And you could say that Chunky got hit by the car because his Garden Angel saw the Queen, or you could say that the Angel saw the Queen because Chunky got hit by the car. Either way it comes out the same, and they swap, because they’re really really really twins, and every single thing one of them does, both of them does.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “Can’t get any twinnier than that.”

  “Nope,” he said.

  We were silent for a while, watching the dreefee. I don’t know what Bill Bob was thinking, but I was thinking I’d like to get a look at this Queen. Somebody so beautiful she made you pop off like a million flashbulbs… wow! I was liking his cosmology more by the minute. Then I thought of something else: “Bill Bob?”

  “Gussy?”

  “What about animals, like fish for instance? And what about trees and plants and bugs and all those kinds of critters? They all got Angels?”

  He looked me in the eye and said, “Everything that gots a shadow gots a Garden Angel.”

  “What about a river, then? A river doesn’t have a shadow.”

  “Dummy,” he grumbled, shaking his head again. “A river does, but a river’s shadow is on the bottom of the river.”

  The varmint was right; I remembered the strange, vague shadows of waterfalls I had seen. Bill Bob yawned, smiled, took off his horn-rims, and said, “I’m gettin’ sleepy, Gus.”

  I sure wasn’t. Not with these Garden Worlds and Angels and twins running around practically in plain sight. “Just tell me a couple more things,” I begged.

  “OK.” He sighed.

  “Doesn’t everything there is have a shadow?”

  He shook his head again. “Dummy.”

  “Whaddya mean, ‘dummy’? Name me three things that don’t have shadows.”

  Fool that I am, I thought I had him this time. But he stared at the dreefee and in a calm, soft voice that sent three chills dashing up my spine said, “Fire. Air. Light.”

  He was seven, and he knew more than five of me put together. Trying to save face, I said, “I know another.”

  “What?”

  “The lenses of your glasses.”

  He laughed sleepily. Trying to wake him, I added, “And shadows, Bill Bob. Shadows don’t have shadows.”

  “But they think they do,” he said sadly. “That’s why we don’t know we’re twins. That’s why we get frightened.”

  I scratched my head to help it along, but it didn’t help enough. “I don’t get ya, Bill Bob.”

  He said, “There are no shadows, Gussy. Not really there aren’t.”

  And that’s all the explanation he ever gave.

  After a long silence he yawned, then said, “We’re using another shadowless thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Words.”

  Words. The kid was way too many for me. I thought about our family as I watched him watch the pine knot: if it had just been Ma and H2O and me then maybe energy units, enzymes, genes, and chromosomes would have accounted for us, for I was a plausible offspring. But this little one we called Bill Bob—such theories could never account for him. Most of the things I knew were directly traceable to Ma, H2O, and Angling, but almost none of what Bill Bob knew was traceable to anyone anywhere. He knew things nobody told or taught him. He was a most implausible son. To account for the things he did, for the way he was, for the words he spoke, you needed a Garden World, or something very like it. But he was going to sleep and I had more questions to ask… “Bill Bob?”

  “… Gussy.”

  “I got to ask you somethin’.”

  “Ask me somethin’.”

  “Does my Garden Angel like to fish?”

  “Just as much as you do,” he said.

  Fantastic, I thought… then up cropped another problem: “What happens to Garden Trout when I kill a trout in this world?”

  “The Garden Trout your twin catches sees the Queen and bursts into light,” he stated as matter-of-factly as if he’d said “Let’s play checkers” or “What’s on TV.”

  “But doesn’t my Garden Angel see her, too, then?” (I had a crush on this Queen: I wanted to get a look at her!)

  �
��No,” said Bill Bob.

  “Aw, why not?”

  “Because if he did, he would burn, too. And you’d have to die, and you and your twin would have to swap worlds. She don’t show herself to nobody ’cept who she chooses. She’s usually careful and quiet about it, but when she wants to she can pick one Garden Angel out of a thick crowd of ’em and show herself only to that one, even if the rest seem to be looking in the edzack same spot.”

  I’d kind of expected this. It was consistent with the laws of Bill Bob’s worlds, but it sure put the kibosh on my hopes to sneak a look at the lovely Queen. Beauty that kills. Now what good was a thing like that? I began to suspect the convoluted hand of God at play in the background somewhere. If she was the Queen, then who was King? And if there was a King, what chance was there for us piddling light-knights? Jealous and disappointed, I shrugged off my infatuation with the Queen and cooked up an abstrusity intended to bushwhack Bill Bob and his fairy-tale world but good:

  “Bill Bob.”

  “Hmmm…” (He was dozing.)

  “What about this: Suppose I kill a trout on the Metolius while somebody kills a deer in Montana while somebody else runs over a mouse in Minnesota while 8,000 people in 8,000 places all over the world die all at once of 8,000 sudden causes while 8 million animals and 8 trillion bugs and 8 zillion tiny organisms with shadows all do the same, all in an instant, which is about what happens all the time, you’ll have to admit.… So, how can this fancy Queen of yours and this horse of hers be in all the corresponding umpteen-quintillion places in the Garden World all at once? Huh? Answer me that!”

  Far from impressed, farther from dismayed, Bill Bob eyed me with the sleepy exasperation you might see on the face of someone whose cat wanted in or out for the tenth time that day and had roused him from a snooze with obnoxious meows. He said, “Dummy. The Queen is everywhere, always, all at once.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  He shook his head, sighed, and patiently explained: “Gus, you don’t understand how beautiful she is. There’s no way I can say it. Even sunlight covers half the world all the time, burning through thick clouds, making it light underneath. And it don’t compare to Queenlight. Sunlight shines on things. Queenlight shines through things—through everything. It’s everywhere at once, and everywhere it is the Queen is.…” He paused, leaned toward me again, and said, “The Queen is right here, right now!”

  I looked around nervously. “I don’t see her. Don’t see her light, either.…”

  Bill Bob sat up very erect and looked slowly, mournfully about the dreefee-lit room. “Me neither,” he croaked, seeming suddenly on the verge of tears. “I used to… when I was real real small… but I can barely remember.…” His voice trailed off.

  Exasperated with her elusiveness I blurted, “If she’s there, why can’t we? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not fair!”

  Bill Bob glared right through me and snapped, “Why can’t we jump off cliffs and fly? Why can’t we move chess pawns like queens? Why can’t baseball batters just run to the pitcher’s mound and back ’stead of havin’ to go clear around all the bases?”

  I felt ashamed. I said, “Sorry. Guess I’m sounding like the guys who cast lures that horrify fish into the river while they stand there moaning ‘Why can’t I catch a fish?’ as if it’s the fishes’ fault. I guess if they could catch fish that way, fish wouldn’t be worth catching. Is that sort of how the Queen is?”

  Bill Bob nodded, turned to the dreefee, and murmured, “The Queen’s the most beautiful thing there is. She’s where all pretty things come from. When we can’t even look at something as pretty as the sun without shuttin’ our eyes, how could we look at the Queen?”

  He was right, and instantly I was enthralled with her again. Bill Bob saw by my face that I was beginning to get the picture. He said, “See, Gus, the Queen has to wear lots of thick robes to cover herself up with. She makes the robes herself, ’cause nobody else can make somethin’ Queenlight don’t shine through. It’s not like she likes wearing all that heavy stuff. She does it ’cause of us. The Queen is here…” (he sought my eyes to be sure I understood how literally he meant this) “… she is right here in this room, and if it weren’t for her robes, we’d be going Poof! See the Queen before you’re ready, you die.…”

  I turned to the dreefee—which somehow continued to flicker and burn though there seemed to be nothing left of it—and was lost for a time in thoughts of all he’d told me. When I turned to Bill Bob again he was curled in a ball. I had so many more questions!

  “Bill Bob!”

  “Gsshmm.…” he mumbled, eyes closed.

  “Don’t go to sleep yet! I have to ask ya some more…”

  “Ask me.”

  “Can you really remember the Garden World, and the Queen, and all what you’ve been telling me? I mean, really remember?”

  He frowned a little, opened one eye, and said, “How could I tell ya somethin’ if I didn’t remember nothin’ about it?”

  “Then you do remember, really and truly?” I wanted to make sure of this place. I wanted to go there one day. Heaven and hell and nothingness were none of them my cup of tea.

  Bill Bob nodded very sadly: “I remember. Not as much as I used to, but I couldn’t say it good enough to tell ya somethin’ then. Now I can say it, I forget. But what I tell is all what I remember. Except what I remember is lots lots better than anything I can tell… but Gus… I’m sooo sleeeepy.…”

  “One more question?” I begged.

  “OK,” he mumbled.

  “Why don’t some things have shadows?”

  “Some things don’t need Garden Angels.”

  “But why?”

  “That’s two questions,” he grumbled, alert even in his sleep.

  “Please. No more, I promise. Why don’t some things need Garden Angels?”

  He smiled, sighed, and kept his eyes shut tight. “Dummy,” he said, turning away toward the shadows. “Some things never die.”

  And he was asleep.

  I stayed on, watching the last remnants of dreefee burn, lost in the labyrinth of shimmering images his Garden World had inspired: I saw loggers felling towering firs in our mountain forests while in Garden mountain forests Angel-loggers gaped as the trees they cut exploded, before they fell, into blinding pillars of light; I saw salmon and steelhead caught and killed in our rivers while in Garden rivers Angel-anglers watched their catch suddenly burst and blaze away to nothing in their hands.… And I saw that to die here was to begin to live there, which meant we never died, which meant there was nothing anywhere to be very much afraid of.

  Questions continued to flood my mind: what must I do to meet my twin? What about the King, Garden animals, Garden rivers, cities, birds, fish, bugs? And what must I find or learn or love in order to see the Queen as she really was, without being consumed by her beauty?… but Bill Bob was asleep. And in the morning I’d be fishing.

  The pine knot burned utterly away. I waited till the last coal faded, then asked the light-knights blackening the room, “You like my brother’s dreefee?”

  I’d no doubt they answered. And I’d have heard them, if only words had shadows.

  In my cabin on the Tamanawis the pine knot crumbled and vanished. I was alone. It was pitch dark. And at once there came a vision of Abe the Drowned Fisherman, vivid as dreefee-light before my eyes. His head was rising from a green surface, but the green was not river water: it was grass—a wild, unending lawn. His gray hair was still sodden, his eyes still astonished, but the gaping mouth was closed. Behind him rose a verdant ridge, like Tamanawis Mountain, but unlogged and a hundred times higher, and all about him the plain of meadow grass so green it glowed. He seemed to be looking toward me, and the once-filmy eyes were clear now, and alive. The soggy shirt rose into view, then the waterlogged waders that drowned him, and when at last he stood free upon that wide meadow he smiled, then chuckled, then laughed and laughed, holding his hands high above his head and turning in slow, joyful circle
s, turning, turning, turning upon the meadow as he faded from my sight.

  BOOK THREE

  CHARACTERS IN NATURE

  You will often meet with characters in nature so extravagant that a discreet poet would not venture to set them upon a stage.

  —Lord Chesterfield

  Allah hath created every animal of water.

  Of them is a kind that goeth upon its belly

  and a kind that goeth upon two legs

  and a kind that goeth upon four.

  Allah hath created what He will.

  Lo! Allah is Able to do all things.

  —Koran XXIV: 45

  1

  The River Writes

  … sounds, then a sentence, then just sound.

  It’s an odd place wherever I sit,

  this fluid speech around me,

  liquid vowels, purling,

  consonantal patter…

  a word, then sounds.

  —Kevin Oderman

  When I awoke, the first thing I saw was the morning star, bluegreen and brilliant between black silhouettes of cedars. I felt very strange, but very good; I’d no desire to do anything but watch—no schedule to keep, no fish to catch. I scarcely recognized myself: the fanatical fisherman in me had died, and what remained was a stranger. I was someone I barely knew, lying on my side, watching a star. The fisherman left a pair of binoculars on a peg at the window. He’d used them to watch for trout rising on the river; I aimed them at the star—and was amazed: brilliant greens, violets, and blues eddied through it as it glittered and shone like the Queen’s own dreefee. My naked eye had seen nothing of this whirling spectrum, and even now, through binoculars, I saw little of the beauty that must really be there. Then it struck me: trees, mists, mountains, flowers, fish, stones, and streams—all these must be the robes saving my eyes from the Queen’s searing light; yet they refracted and colored that light, and it shone dimly through, making them beautiful. Such beauty as the Queen’s must exist. My heart pounded that it be so.