I left the library a few minutes before eleven. The evening was cool and overcast, the ground wet from a light sprinkle. The clouds seemed to be moving much faster than the light breeze circulating between campus buildings. It was one of those nights when the weather was peaceful on the ground, but turbulent at higher altitude. The breeze picked up a little as I moved out of the protection of the buildings, but not much. I followed the bike path to the footbridge crossing the American River and started across. A solitary man was standing at the rail near the center of the bridge, staring into the darkness below. He was wearing a long wool overcoat that looked expensive, but old and a little tattered. Faded sweat pants emerged from below the coat, billowing shapelessly around the elastic at his ankles. A tattered pair of Top-Siders served for shoes, and on his head he was wearing a Lahinch, one of those small-brimmed, fabric hats popular among bird-watcher types and Asian tourists.
As I approached, he looked my way, a bit longer than a glance, long enough to do the sort of quick assessment a man might make when being approached by a stranger at night. Whatever the assessment told him, it didn’t seem to cause concern. He turned back to the river and his private thoughts. I expected him to ignore me as I passed and was surprised when he spoke.
“Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river.”
I stopped. “Borges, if I’m not mistaken.”
“A Borges fan,” he said, turning toward me, smiling.
“I am, though I like his fiction more than his poetry.”
“Yes,” he said, thoughtfully, “I suppose most people do.” He scrutinized me for a moment. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look like a lit professor.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Indeed,” he said, then raised and spread his arms, clearly amused by the state of his attire. “I, on the other hand, might very well pass for an aging academic. I’m obviously too muddleheaded to dress myself properly.”
I’ve always found something admirable in the ability to laugh at oneself. “As far as I know,” I said, “this bridge doesn’t have a dress code.”
He produced a short, laugh-like spurt that sounded like he’d hiccuped in the middle of a cough.
“Are you an aging academic?” I asked.
“Exactly half right,” he announced cheerfully. “I’m aging, even as we speak.”
I stepped up to the guardrail beside him. “I trust the aging process is running at the normal speed? I’m not going to have to watch you decompose, am I?”
He laughed heartily. “One can only hope. But I’ll tell you what, if I should stop talking and start to smell suspicious, you have my permission to drop me off the bridge.”
It was my turn to laugh.
He offered me his hand. “My name’s Steven.”
“Shake,” I said, taking his hand, my name causing the usual confusion. “My name is Shake,” I clarified.
“That’s a very cold paw you have there, Shake. Are you all right?”
“Quite all right, thanks,” I said, remembering I would be needing some fresh blood before too long. “It’s just poor circulation. It runs in the family.”
We stood silently for a minute or two, both leaning against the guardrail, gazing into the darkness below the bridge.
“It’s different at night,” he said, breaking the silence. “In the daylight the river looks so inviting, but at night it’s the opposite, forbidding.”
“You find it inviting in daylight?”
"I do. I've always been attracted to bodies of water. Not the ocean, so much. It’s too big and too spooky. But creeks, rivers, lakes, if they’re clean, of course. I always have a powerful urge to dive in."
“I prefer a drier environment,” I said.
“Well, it’s not like I’m good for much in the water. I can swim, if we’re generous in defining what that means. There’s nothing very elegant about it. It’s more like a desperately awkward refusal to drown.”
I could imagine what that awkward thrashing might look like, and the image struck me as one generally applicable to humans, in or out of water; an awkward refusal to succumb to the inevitable.
“Do you often walk at night?” he asked.
“I find the night more congenial. I seem to be nocturnal by nature.”
“I suppose the night must have its charms for me, too. I certainly spend a lot of time wandering around in the dark.”
“Literally or figuratively?” I asked.
“A bit of both,” he said, somewhat pensively.
A young man and woman were crossing the bridge on bicycles. Students, judging from their conversation. They were arguing about whether or not to buy an essay off the Internet. Steven and I stood quietly as they passed.
“Are you religious?” he asked, then sensing my aversion to the question, added, “Me neither,” and brushed the air with his hand, as if swatting at an insect.
“People who aren’t religious,” I said, “don’t generally spring that question on complete strangers.”
“No, I suppose not.” he agreed. “I’m not sure why I asked you that. I was just thinking about my mother when you happened by. She was a real Bible-pounder. A Southern Baptist. Ignorant and a bit violent, and since she couldn’t actually quote the Bible, her Bible-pounding tended to take the form of pounding with the Bible. I can remember more than once being clobbered upside the head with her large-print King James.”
I laughed again. “Like in the movies, when the suspect is getting the good cop/bad cop treatment, and the bad cop comes up behind him and clocks him with a phone book.”
“Exactly. Same methodology, except she was both cops.”
“So contact with the Bible dislodged your faith?”
“An appropriately comical way to describe it.”
“And now? What? Are you having second thoughts?”
“No, no.
