River Crossing
JACK LIVINGS
My wife, my daughter, and I live on the bluff overlooking the river. The river is wide, and it is swarming with crocodiles and hippos. Courtesy of our unique ecosystem, they have developed a taste for each other’s flesh, and some days the banks are thick with pink froth. Sometimes the crocodiles are up, sometimes the hippos. It’s your standard vicious cycle.
There are inhabitants on the other side of the river. Some people say that we are the same, those of us on this side of the river and those on the other side, but the people making those statements all reside on this side of the river and tend to be members of fringe groups dedicated to inventing unsettling concepts. My brother is one of these people, and he once spent two years building a life-size mechanical model of a hippopotamus. It was confiscated the moment he walked it out of his domicile.
Having never met anyone from the other side, I cannot say I trust any assessment that extends beyond certain observable facts. For instance, I have observed that at night the other side of the river blazes with light, therefore I feel confident saying they have electricity. I also have deduced that they like to party, and not only on the weekends. Were there a central authority in charge of both sides of the river, I’d be the first in line to file a complaint about their music and lights (especially the strobes), as my family, due to the orientation of our domicile, is subjected to thunderous distraction at all hours.
MANY, MANY YEARS AGO, a team on our side built a glider designed to carry a single pilot across the river. On its inaugural flight, the eagles who perch high in the trees around the settlement, far above our sight line, came swooping down and tore the glider to pieces. What was left, little flags of fabric and splintered wood, spiraled into the river, where the hippos and crocodiles swarmed over the wreckage. The hippos and crocodiles then fell upon one another and flesh and bone churned out of the river for days, or so I am told. As a result, airborne conveyances were temporarily abandoned as potential methods of crossing the river.
Take a boat, you might say, which would get a laugh on this side of the river, as it’s sort of a dark cliché that means, more or less, go fuck yourself. Of course we’ve tried boats. Throughout the settlement’s history, there have been attempts to cross the river in myriad forms of waterborne craft. The most recent, launched when I was a child, was a sloop that cruised at twenty knots in lake tests, fast enough, it was hoped, to outpace the hippos and crocodiles. As a child, I hung great hopes on this sloop. On the appointed day, we gathered at the shore to cheer on the crew. After a communal song, the sloop was released down the slipway and more or less directly into the waiting mouths of the hippos. Then the crocodiles got in on the action. The gracefully curved hull was smashed, and the beautiful sails were shredded before they’d even had a chance to fill with wind.
My classmate’s father perished on the sloop, taken to his watery grave in the gray jaws of a hippo. He was the helmsman. My classmate’s father had known nothing about sailing, but when he found out there was a sloop in development, he learned to sail and competed to be a member of the crew. That’s just the sort of guy he was. He beat out two thousand would-be crewmen. Two thousand people volunteered to be part of a mission that everyone in the settlement knew deep down would end in tragedy. Our history is filled with these stories.
I HAD A NORMAL UPBRINGING. My parents taught me to do my best, treat others fairly, and figure out how to cross the river. My brother, same upbringing, turned out to be something of a comedian philosopher. He likes to ask people what they think would happen if the river froze over.
BECAUSE OF OUR STRICT intellectual property laws, my classmate’s father was never able to hand down any specialized sailing knowledge to his son. Practically speaking, it wouldn’t have been useful, since these days sailing is just another hypothesis from the past, but it would have given my classmate something to remember his father by.
Naturally, I have tried to pass along to my daughter something that does not violate the intellectual property laws. I am a playwright, so, practically speaking, my specialized knowledge isn’t directly applicable to river crossing. But I have taught her that the best time to gaze across the river is dawn, when the air is clearest, when the other-siders
