Metonymy

A short story

A suit surrounded by strange tongues, overwhelmed by the brass’s need for new blood, in need of a hand or an ear and finding neither, wanders out into the black, onto streets washed red by wheels growing distant at ever-increasing speeds until the space between him and them, between him and the world, becomes an impassible barrier, and he stands alone, middle-aged but feeling older, afraid of all the wonders that youth dares embrace. Kids today.

The after-hours happy hour continues strong on the fourteenth floor, whispering its indistinct aural rain and traveling with him in word-sodden wool, causing him to shiver. His ride pulls to the curb. Questions. Answers. Silence. Peace. The world becomes a blur, every day a blur. What month? What year? He’ll be dead tomorrow. Might as well be dead tomorrow. His days are a shell, holding the shape of a life which has long since gone.

God owns the houses on a thousand hills, they say, homes full unto bursting and empty houses made emptier still.

“Not here.”

She drives him away from home and to the river, a good, wide river where bodies bloat. The car waits for him, though he says she can leave, and he stands at the railing and counts the cables on the distant bridge and traces the arc of their passing. The sounds of the city drift over him, seeking the river, and his thoughts brood over their whispers as the counting of the cables becomes the numbering of years and the fall and rise of time from riverbank to riverbank where the red blur recedes unto the grave.

“I’m more than this,” he says, and no one answers. The whispers pass him by.

What he is, is hard to say. Even in thought he can’t find the words. Maybe he’s become only that which he presents to the world and nothing more, and if anything more lies hidden, perhaps in hiding it’s lost all meaning. He could throw himself into the river right now and even that would be meaningless, his death no more than a routine chore.

If not to die, he’s not sure why he’s come to the river. If it’s to revisit some memory, time runs as swiftly as the water, and nothing that was waits for his return. When they close the dam, the river flows back on itself. When the levels rise and fall, waters gets stuck in the spillway, but moments of time aren’t trapped in the lowlands, waiting to be lived again.

Unless that’s what memories are.

Twenty years earlier on a Sunday in May, when the children still lived at home and his wife was still his wife, Geoffrey took the family to a Les Miserable matinee, and afterwards they walked to dinner, having in mind a restaurant of compromise, the one least likely to upset the evening, he and his wife with the youngest between them, her arms a garland strung between theirs. The older two walked just ahead. Everything in order in a moment prearranged when he stopped and announced, “I’ll hail a cab. Let’s eat on the river.”

He needed to celebrate a week of successes, not bustled into compromise seats but lounging over the river with a view of eternity. The shock of his swiftness must have silenced them, for he whisked them away without complaint and seated them without issue by a window over the water. They couldn’t understand. They kept the world of his business foreign and strange, complaining about the time spent, and when he lectured, they complained he treated the family like staff, as if the one part of him was all he knew and not fatherhood, too. He knew how to be a father; he was better a father than he’d ever known.

‘Do they have hamburgers?”

“This seems awfully expensive.”

“I wanna see the boats.”

“When I was a child, the Whittaker Bridge was just being built, and the old Quick River Bridge was just above the docks where your mother and I took you for a tour two summers ago. You remember that. I was younger than you when my mother took me, and the Quick River Bridge still stood, not just its pilings like the remnants of some lost Roman fortress, but the whole bridge, and it stood for a decade more, open to foot traffic after they closed it to cars. I begged my mother not to go to the river. The water, the boats, and the bridge scared me, and I couldn’t tell you why, my little mind grappling with all the horrible things I couldn’t possibly have known. They tore down in the bridge when I was in high school, after a man fell from its girders, but I couldn’t have known that then. The river scared me because the world beyond my little street scared me. I’d never known anything foreign or anything new, and now my world had expanded and through that expansion ran this terrible stretch of water. All I wanted was to go home again and believe nothing else mattered, nothing more existed.”

He hadn’t known then, couldn’t have known as a child, about teen boys and their dares, but the memory of it grew comfortable on his tongue, tumbling out as if it had nothing to do with him.

“Some things never change,” said his wife.

“Everything changes.” He’d meant to sound jovial, but the words tasted sinister in his mouth, like bile. “I’m proving those very words at the office, washing away the old guard, making way for the new. The whole world’s changing, and it won’t slow down for a few dinosaurs who cling to way things were. No, sir. Tomorrow always comes, so there’s nothing to do but be ready for it. Yesterday’s gone. There’s no bringing it back.”

“Some things are worth holding on to,” said his wife.

“That’s what they tell me, but what’s going is gone.”

She ran her hand through their daughter’s hair. “I wish I could hold onto this moment, our children young and a happy on a beautiful day. I wouldn’t mind lingering here a while.”

“What if time got stuck?” said their oldest. “But you couldn’t choose when it got stuck, just some random moment dragging out for what seems eternity, and it’s never the good stuff. It’s always the moments before, the waiting.”

“The waiting can be the best part,” said his wife. “It all depends on who you’ve got to help with the waiting, and we have you.”

“Not if you’re on the toilet,” said their oldest.

Geoffrey cast a warning glance. “Not here.”

The boy smiled in contrite victory, having only been beaten back at civilization’s edge.

“Don’t spoil a perfect day,” he said.

A perfect day.

They were walking across the Quick River Bridge, Geoff and a few boys from the neighborhood, when someone dared him to climb onto the supports. No, not just someone, it had been Jimmy Logan, and he wasn’t going to back down from a dare from Jimmy Logan.

It was the first good day after an endless rain, and the river was swollen and fast.

He swung down onto the supports, a bold and foolish move, but he’d felt sure of his grip and his landing. It never occurred to him that he might fall, and he didn’t. It never occurred to him that the homeless sometime nested in those rafters, and he landed hard and swift, landing with a sound like thunder.

He remembers the white of the man’s eyes and the black circle of his mouth before he fell.

Death came like one more chore, one more unlucky turn of events. More of the same. He wonders if the homeless man’s life had held any more meaning than his, or any less. He wonders if in that instant, in the surprise and in the fall, if life took on meaning or the promise of meaning if he could only hold on.

Geoffrey’s whole life, he’s carried that moment, that secret. Even the other boys on the bridge didn’t know what happened, not really, and that one instant became everything, defining him. Maybe that was always the problem. Maybe that’s why he could never hold onto anything else.

Below him, in the darkness, the river flows by, and he thinks maybe tomorrow, he’ll search for something he’s afraid to lose, something fleeting that’ll be gone too soon if doesn’t pay attention. It will become a part of him, and that part will seem the whole.