The Waters & the Wild Read online

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  Yes, I know it, I had said to Jessica Burke. I know it well.

  It was the same poem, unaltered, as though nothing had changed at all, and yet at the same time the poem now was wholly different: the place names not just foreign but strange—Sleuth Wood, Rosses, Glen-Car—the antiquation of the phrasing not just fastidious but alien. What made it so? The strangely familiar paper of the envelope, its slick finish something I remembered from Paris, yet had never thought of again. I realized I was hearing the poem now not in Jessica Burke’s voice as she might have read it to me, but in another voice entirely, a voice struggling with the poem’s oddities of diction, the syllables so difficult to pronounce for someone whose first language was not English but French: heron, drowsy, furthest, faery. I heard the poem, its refractory words—eron, droassy, furdest, feery—in that other, beloved voice. What filled me then, for the briefest instant, was an inexplicable sweetness. It was as though someone had found in a closet or attic a piece of my own memory and had sent it to me, thinking I should like to have it.

  Even as this tenderness flowed through me, I perceived that the sheet on which the poem was written was not, as I had thought, some unfamiliar variety of European paper, heavier and smoother, like Bristol stock, but photographic paper, thick and curled at the edges, stiffened from the fixing bath. I turned it over, and it was there, she was there, her face facing me: the image of Jessica Burke dead in her bathtub.

  The image was horrid and familiar at once. In every detail the scene in the photograph was just as the officer had described it three years earlier, just as Jessica Burke had been when the building superintendent had found her. There it was: the spent needle. There were the spoon, the lighter, the pool of wax where a candle had burned down, all just as the officer had said. Her works were right by the tub, he’d said. No sign of foul play. Pretty cut-and-dried. Just due diligence. Just dotting the i’s. He had said that the girl’s mother, unable to reach her daughter, had called the super. The super had called the police.

  I say the scene was in every detail just the same as I had imagined it, just as the officer had described it, and it was the same, that is, in every detail except one—the plastic sack over Jessica Burke’s head. I have read the statements, all of them, the responding patrolmen’s, the super’s, the medical examiner’s, the young investigator’s; none mentions a plastic sack over her head. But there it was in the photograph, bag drawn down over her face and gathered under her chin, where a collar of what looked like masking tape secured it against her throat. Beneath the collar, the edges of the bag formed a kind of ruffle. The sack’s clear plastic did little to veil her face, her expression one of absorbed preoccupation, as though sleep had surprised her. Her head had lolled to the side, and her arm rested on the edge of the tub, hand expectantly open. A patch of sunlight had draped itself over her breasts and shoulder as though trying to cover her nakedness.

  What must be obvious to you now, Father, came to me only slowly, slowly and terribly: someone besides Jessica Burke had been there. The bag meant that Jessica had died of suffocation, but there was no bag present when her body was found. Someone had to have removed it. Someone else had been there, standing a little to the side so that the sun would not lay his shadow across her body. That is what the photograph itself meant: someone had been there, someone who had taken the photograph, someone careful to hide his shadow, someone who had removed the plastic sack and vanished.

  At first I could not accept this. After all, could not Jessica have put the bag on her head before injecting the drug? Would not that have made sense, for someone whose intent was not to get high but to kill herself? I had been certain, ever since I received the first letter, that she had taken her own life. I must admit that for a moment I even assumed idiotically that she’d taken the bag off between overdosing and being discovered. It took minutes for the obvious fact to become for me even a possibility. Someone had to have been there. Someone had stood in the bathroom and taken the photo, not the night before when it was thought she had died, but in the morning, after the candle had burned down, after the light of the risen sun had reached in through the window to spread its patch of light on her nakedness. Someone had broken the tape seal around her throat and had slid the sack off, allowing her head to loll back to where it had been.

  What struck me first was the absolute irrevocability of that nakedness, a nakedness all the starker for the sealed veil over the face. And it was from that sense of her nakedness that everything followed. Shame filled me to have happened upon her like this, to have happened upon her even now, three years later, peering through the pane of the photograph, her body laid out in cold water and morning sunlight. Someone had been there, and what they had known since that morning I knew now too. They had wanted me to know it. The time had come. I had been admitted into the inviolate privacy of it, and a latch had clicked shut behind me. Only then did I notice the two words written along the bottom margin of the photograph in the now familiar block capitals. Only then could I read them. Or rather hear them, as though a cold breath from a cold throat had whispered them in my ear: REMEMBER ME.

  SPURLOCK

  11:57 P.M.

  Daniel Abend, said Spurlock aloud. No answer. Only darkness and the shuffle of restless sleepers. Spurlock thought of the stack of papers on his desk in the dark of his office, each sheet a weightless onionskin, though the stack itself was heavy, like a stone.

  Was this awful alertness the pressure of God’s mysterious hand? To hell with that. As for the mystery of God, Spurlock had always maintained that God’s part was no mystery at all. The command was clear: to love. But love whom? the heart objected. Everyone, God foremost. Love how? With everything you have. A task, in short, doomed to failure, but that was part of the plan, because fulfilling the commandment was meant to be costly. In fact, it was meant to cost everything. Sooner or later, everything would be taken away—success, reputation, possessions, health, memory, mind, body—the soul at last stripped naked before God. Love was nothing but this discipline of surrender, the practice of relinquishment taken up each day anew. The soul would seek to avert its gaze, to flee from the charge, but the instruction itself left no room for doubt. The mystery was no mystery, the secret no secret at all.

  How resourceful the soul was in pretending otherwise. He thought of his wife Bethany’s tireless, lucrative toil for her firm. The firm was a creature of appetite, not for justice or even riches (the money was secondary, a means of keeping score), but for the exercise of power, perfectly adapted to the intricate wilderness of the law. This region was where Bethany lived and thrived, swooping among the mountainous contracts and filings like a hawk among everlasting alps. Faced with complexity himself, Spurlock had always trusted his impulse to stop, to sit, or to kneel, confident that in time he would hear the still, small voice of the command. What should I do? Love. Whom? Everyone. When? Always. If at times this imperative seemed infantile and unbelievable, well, that was how God came into the world, as an infant, cradled in the straw of an incredible story.

  Now, however, as Spurlock lay on his back in the dark church, for the first time in his life he felt the weight of a new thing, and beneath the weight he felt his old confidence buckle. What was it, this new thing? He did not know, but he registered its presence as an act of justice, a chastisement for his lifelong presumption that clarity and simplicity were his due. If obedience to God’s command was to cost everything, he wondered for the first time, why should it not cost his belief as well?

  Father, my name is Daniel Abend. You will not remember me.

  Of course he didn’t. They had never met. Abend had said so himself. Nor had Spurlock ever met Jessica Burke. The only time he had seen her was in the photograph set u
p beside the coffin at her funeral.

  Once, not long after he’d been ordained deacon, Father Spurlock had accompanied an anxious parishioner to a cardiologist’s appointment for an angiography. He had watched on a video screen as the doctor steered a catheter from an incision in the parishioner’s groin up into her laboring heart. Once in position, the catheter was made to release a dye, in pulses, and with each pulse, for an instant, the branching path of blood was visible, as if the body were nothing more than a mist and the mist had been blown aside. Now, thought Spurlock on his cot, he was the one who had been infiltrated. The probing voice of Daniel Abend had threaded its way into him and released its radioactive stain. Spurlock closed his eyes, but the mist kept blowing away, revealing with each gust of dye the negative image of a heart on a screen.

  FOUR

  Do you, Father, have children? Listening to you at Jessica Burke’s funeral, I thought you must have. You said that to lose a child was to lose everything, not just a person, but hope, purpose, meaning, faith itself. There was no place to hide—not even, you said, in religion. That is why, you said, in the Passion narratives the mother has to be there at the Crucifixion. The Passion is the Passion because the mother is present. All of us can and will lose our friends and our illusions, as Mary Magdalene and the disciples do. All of us can and will lose our lives, as Jesus does. Losing a child, however—that is a different matter. For other people it has happened, does happen, will happen. For one’s own child, however, it cannot. The event is not only unthinkable but, in some elemental way, impossible. One can continue to live after the death of a child, but no one, properly speaking, survives. After the death of a child, all life is afterlife.

  I am certain you can imagine what gratitude poured into me later that day, the day I received the photograph of Jessica Burke suffocated in the bathtub, when, staring in a stupefied panic out the window of our apartment, I saw Clementine round the corner with her friend Liza. My beautiful daughter, living and breathing! Clementine was encumbered with a grocery bag and clasped the bag to her chest when Itzal came out to meet them on the sidewalk, stretching out his long arms to relieve her of her burden. You will imagine what relief I felt when she appeared with her friend in the vestibule of our apartment, kicking off her boots, dropping keys and cellphone onto the vestibule table, crinkling her nose, and asking, “What’s that smell?”

  I had just burned the photograph at the stove. It had arched and stiffened over the burner, the image darkened, inverting itself into a ghostly negative before igniting all at once. My regret for burning it was immediate and permanent. Those words at the lower margin, were they a command? Remember me! Never forget! Or did they pose a question: Remember me? How could it matter now, I think, then think next: Before long I shall find out.

  Clementine informed me that I had met Liza already. If I had, it was in an earlier version of this young woman, without fuchsia-dyed hair and a ring piercing her nose. “Dude,” said Liza to Clementine, “show me a picture of your mom.”

  “Dan doesn’t keep any,” she said. She’d taken to calling me Dan, I thought, because no one else did, because doing so was both more insolent and more intimate than calling me Daniel, as others do.

  “Why not just Dad?” I had asked, saddened by the development.

  “Because you’re not just Dad, you’re Dan,” she had said.

  “Dude, juices,” said Clementine to Liza. Their plan was to “do some juicing,” a new enthusiasm of Clementine’s, before heading out again for the evening.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Just friends, just out,” said Clementine as she snapped together the components of a juicing machine she’d persuaded me to buy. “Dan doesn’t drink juice,” Clementine said to Liza. “He’s the only shrink in New York who doesn’t believe in health.”

  Taking turns feeding hanks of kale and beet greens to the machine, they closed around themselves a patter of hermetic jokes and imitations, all conducted in the ironic hybrid of French and English common to students at the Lycée Français.

  “Encore de leg-yooms,” said Liza, calling for more vegetables.

  “Dude,” said Clementine, “cool ton jets.”

  “Aren’t you girls going to eat something before you go out?” I asked in what struck me, even as I spoke, as an impersonation of parenthood.

  “Aren’t you going to read something,” said Clementine, “before falling asleep at nine?” The girls finished off their juices and left. Where had she learned to solicit and cultivate friendship? Not from her father, I thought.

  After the girls had gone out for the evening I discovered the empty vermouth bottle hidden under some carrot greens in the garbage. The pulp-clogged parts of the juicing machine, abandoned in the sink, stank of vermouth and yard waste. I put the empty bottle back in the garbage, covered it again with the carrot greens, and retreated to my room.

  I was not asleep at nine, or at two thirty when Clementine’s key finally turned in the door, my wakefulness unblinking, like the shutter of a camera open forever over the body of Jessica Burke. I was not asleep hours later when first light, wet and livid, dissolved the black mirror of my windowpane, replacing it with the veiled, oblique, first face of the world, an image like that of a motionless girl in her bath, fixing itself on a submerged sheet of photographic paper.

  FIVE

  That dawn arrived like a bailiff’s summons. I had been given notice that the end awaited me. Whatever else the photograph of Jessica Burke meant—that someone had been with her when she had died and had removed the bag before the body was discovered—for me it meant that the end was here. It said: See, it is over; the end is here. It has found you at last.

  The face was Jessica Burke’s, of course, and yet not hers. It was also Clementine’s, as though its look alone said: Whose child is safe? Whose child cannot be stalked and taken? What shield is your care, your worry, when I can enter through a keyhole, the prick of a needle? That which in her infancy you could only wonder at—what she would come to look like, who she would become—I already knew, I who can see through everything, through everyone. What you would ignore, what you would deny, I know already. Whom you would keep from me, I have already marked as my own.

  And it is also another face, the one I had tried so often to describe to Clementine when she, standing in front of a mirror, would ask me about her mother: Was her nose like mine? Are my eyes like her eyes?

  I had thought I could describe Miriam’s face to her, just as I had thought I could explain Miriam herself. I would invent, discard, rehearse the sentences I would say to Clementine. I would even write them down. Should I say, Sometimes when babies come into the world their mommies have to leave and become angels? Or: When you were a tiny, tiny baby your mommy got very sick and she didn’t wake up? Holy God. Could I think of nothing better?

  When Clementine was a little girl, I read books, consulted colleagues, prepared myself for her inevitable curiosity, for her inevitable confusion, disbelief, grief, rage. Her questions, however, proved both simpler and more stymieing than I’d imagined.

  “When you used to be Mommy did I use to be a boy?” was one of the first. Somewhat later she asked, “Was Mommy dead when you first met her?”

  In the end, it was not so much her inquiries as her physical being that pushed the question of her mother out into the open. Late to develop, even her body seemed to resist this arrival, but when puberty finally overtook her, imposing upon her an arresting, unignorable beauty, the question took up residence in our apartment. It was as though an uninvited relative had come to stay. Who was this new person troubling the mirror? Where did she come from, and what does she want? It frightened me how rapidly her body took on adulthood, not only the young adult she was to become, but also, uncannily, the young adults her parents once had been and were no longer, one of them alone somewhere on the tableland of middle age, the other among the ageless dead.r />
  Of course, I had no right to be frightened like that. She was after all a girl, a girl in a huge city, with the usual cares and the usual needs. Still, that unfamiliar face emerged from the depths of the mirror, as though to say, “Do you remember me? You must remember me.”

  Several years ago—before Jessica Burke died, so Clementine would have been thirteen or just fourteen—we had finished breakfast and I was washing up when she asked, “So did she look like me? Like me minus you?”

  “What do you mean, ‘me minus you’?” I asked.

  “Like Clementine minus Dad?”

  I knew what Clementine was asking: whether she could draw aside those features she attributed to my genetic contribution and look at last on her mother’s face. I do not remember my reply. Did I answer pretending that I could truly remember, as though that face that was always with me were not also always hooded in shadow? Or did I try to dodge the question, saying something like “She was French, of course, so she was darker than I am, her skin more olive, her eyes brown”? Did I say, “As for your height and eyes, you got them from me”? I confess there have been times when I have caught a glimpse of Clementine doing her homework at the table or reading on the sofa and the impossible notion has pierced me: Miriam is here.

  * * *

  —

  I met Miriam on the landing outside a friend’s apartment in Paris. I was thirty-one years old. My friend and I had eaten dinner, and I had taken my leave, was on my way to the stairs, and there had been no reason to pause, to acknowledge a stranger. The stairs were the spiral sort one sees in Paris, the kind that wind around the caged shaft of an elevator. I could have kept going when the elevator door clacked open on its dimly lit interior, its single passenger, her downturned face. Her eye unmet, I could have departed by another way. I could have descended the stairs to the unlit foyer and stepped into a different future, any of a thousand different futures. Each time the memory resumes, each time it flickers into motion with the whir and rattle of the elevator ascending, I turn to descend the stairs, to follow their curve around the shaft so that the elevator and its passenger pass unnoticed….