same synthesis a hundred times on the lives of strangers.
There was something of love in the challenge, as there had always been. Never the unconditional embrace, never the final security, but always something of love, nonetheless. His father had tried to love him without ever making himself vulnerable. And because his father did not trust him, he had tried to control him.
Was still trying. Read it all or not at all. Why? Because his father had feared that Christopher would stop before seeing everything of importance, would draw the wrong conclusion or be led to too harsh a judgment. The same manipulation as always, coming from an even colder, safer distance.
The temptation to answer with rebellion was strong. But such a rebellion now would be an empty, self- defeating gesture. William McCutcheon was gone, immunized by death against Christopher’s venom. And there were seventeen volumes left.
There has to be something more, he thought as he went back inside the house, something meant for him. There has to be some reason for the exercise beyond destroying the last illusions of a twenty-seven-year-old child.
These fissured cliffs, grading from brown to white to red, appear to me as a great wound carved across her face, as the wrinkled features of the crone. How could such feeble rivers cut such canyons? The wind is a ghost, water a chimera. The element that escapes our eyes is time—time in such measure that only the earth herself is witness.
Who remembers these tablelands rising from a dying sea? Only Gaea. Who recalls the march of life preserved in these canyon walls? Only those to whom the gift has been passed, whose substance preserves the fragile past in a precarious present. We have left our mark here as surely as have wind and water. My heart beats in rhythm with the land. I am its eyes, shaped from the clay and touched with the spark.
There were dozens more like it, and a yawning, eye-weary Christopher hardly knew what to make of them. Prayerful poetic reveries to the experience of nature seemed hardly to belong to his picture of William McCutcheon.
Christopher knew that his father had treasured the privacy that the forest estate assured him, that he had a speculator’s eye for land. But these essays went far beyond that. Embodied in them was a whole world of thought into which Christopher had only had rare glimpses. And, though it was not easy to accept, there was as much emotion in such passages as there had been in his father’s letter. Perhaps more.
The only way he could make sense of them was to think of them as coming from Jeremiah. But even that was an imperfect answer, because it merely confirmed the fact without explaining it. The man who had written, “These switchback mountain streams tumble through crazy folded hills growing ever wider, ever calmer, as though milked of the energy needed to sustain the conquering fecundity of the forest,” could have written any of Jeremiah’s speeches on the price of the Diaspora.
Indeed, there were any number of entries that read like sketches for such a speech, echoing the metaphor of desiccation:
In whose eyes is the butterfly more beautiful than the chrysalis, a glittering jade jewel flecked with gold? The price of the transformation is destruction, the transaction final and absolute. The beauty that was vanishes, consumed as the fuel for flight and freedom. In just this way, an unchecked hunger to expand will drain the life from the Earth, sacrificing this jade and azure jewel for that poor prize.
But was there a way to marry Dryke’s Jeremiah to Christopher’s father, and make the two merge into a single image?
He sat back in the chair, hands folded in his lap. “All right, Lila. I give up. What’s the secret?”
“Excuse me, Christopher?”
“Five down, a nine-letter word meaning ‘mercy.’ I want a peek at the answers in the back of the book.”
“I know no such word.”
“ ‘It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown—’ ” His voice trailed away as his memory failed him. “Must be the way you were raised.”
“I don’t understand, Christopher.”
“You’re helping him tell this joke. What’s the punch line?”
“I don’t believe these records constitute a joke, Christopher.”
“Never mind,” he said with a sigh. “Keep it coming.”
Fighting fatigue and frustration, Christopher stubbornly persisted in his task as the wee hours of morning slipped by. His eyes burned and blinked, his focus wandered. The words on the display blurred into an extended non sequitur.
The same world that seems crowded to some seems empty to others… What drives them? The ignorance of men empowered by the arrogance of gods... There is a bloodline of expansionism which can be traced through history, and they are its youngest, most vigorous branch… The return of sexual liberty will blunt the rush and restore the balance. Repression is the engine of ambition… Hysteresis is the enemy. We are forever responding to conditions that no longer obtain… If I can make fear a stronger force than the fantasy of freedom…
And finally he fell asleep in his father’s chair in his father’s office in his father’s house, leaving one last essay unread on the comsole display.
They pass by the windows as ghosts in a silted fog: chi-nook, silver, sockeye, steelhead. Their struggle seems to defy all reason. Once a lifetime, they fight their way upstream with a single-minded fervor we would find frightening in our own kind. They suffer the most grievous injuries, but though they may weaken, they do not falter.
Torn and bleeding, they attack the obstacle again and again, until one or the other is bested. Those which survive fight on, taking no note of those which fail—there is nothing that can be done, and still something yet to do. The next obstacle is just ahead.
And when they reach the quiet pools and spawn, the fire goes out. The fight has exhausted them. The spirit has passed from them to the eggs. Once the task is accomplished, they are content to swim in aimless circles until they die. Never, ever, do they ask, must it end this way? Such a question is beyond their capacity to conceive. This dimly apprehended call rules their being.
But I ask the question, because I have no wish to join them—or to live in the world that they will leave behind.
