Episode 175 · Seven O'Clock Reading

Eleven days after the river warmed, Varren reached the town before dawn.

He had come in on the night bus, three hundred kilometers of dark and a driver who listened to the same station the whole way, and he had walked from the depot down through streets where the frost lay on the cars like dust on furniture nobody used. The newspaper at the bus station had tucked the river beneath a photograph of a mayor cutting a ribbon. The short paragraph was enough. He had read it twice and bought a ticket.

The town lay at the bottom of the valley like something set down in a cupped hand. All around it the mountains went up black with fir, and lower, where the oaks still held a few brown leaves, the slopes came down almost to the last houses. The river ran through the middle and cut the town in two, and both halves had their lights on.

The road ran along the top of the bank. Below it, concrete steps went down to a narrow pontoon with a railing, and beside the pontoon a painted measuring board was bolted to a pillar, white with black marks, its foot in the water. Above the steps stood a small brick hut with an antenna on its roof and a light on in its one window. Every railing, every step, every blade of grass along the bank was furred with frost. The river ran between them black and open, and the steam came off it in slow sheets and drifted toward the sun that was not up yet.

There were ducks on it. A great many ducks, more than one river should have been asked to hold, all crowded on the one stretch of open water for fifty kilometers, talking about it.

Varren unfolded his chair at the top of the steps and sat down.

He did it the way he did most things now, carefully, testing what each joint would give him before he asked it for more. The cold went through his coat at once. He let it. He was not here to be comfortable. He was here because a place where the ground had been weakened was a place where people would start to hear things, and people who heard things needed someone who already knew what it was like.

Then he noticed the quiet.

Not the town’s. The town was quiet in the ordinary way, a dog somewhere, a bus braking two streets back. The other quiet. The voices that had stood in his garden for as long as he could remember had stepped back. Only two were left, and even two had never once let him be the only person in a room. They were still there. They were simply further away than he had ever known them to be, as if he had walked out of a room where people were talking and shut the door, and could still hear them, but only through the wood.

His thumb found the knuckles of his other hand and stopped there.

On the pontoon, a woman was humming.

He had taken her for part of the railing. She was crouched at the end of it in a dark parka with the hood down, writing in a notebook propped on her knee, and she was humming to herself while she wrote, low and not quite in tune. It was a slow tune, three notes going up and two coming down, the kind people sing to a child that will not sleep. She did not seem to know she was doing it. She looked at the measuring board, wrote, looked at a thermometer she drew up out of the water on a cord, wrote again, and the tune went on underneath, patient, as though it belonged to somebody else and she was only keeping it warm for them.

She finished, stood, and turned, and saw a man sitting on a folding chair at the top of her steps.

She stopped humming.

For a moment she simply looked at him, the notebook held against her chest with both arms, the way people hold a thing they have been told is worthless and have decided to keep anyway. She was about his age. Her hair was tied back badly, as if by someone thinking about something else, and her face was the kind that did not try to be looked at and was looked at anyway. Then her eyes went to the chair.

— Most people who come to see the river bring a camera, she said.

— I don’t take good pictures.

— So you brought furniture.

— I like to be sure there’s somewhere to sit.

She considered that, and him, and came up two steps, no further.

— Are you from the council?

— No.

— The newspaper?

— No.

— The ducks?

Varren looked at the ducks.

— Not officially.

She almost smiled. She caught it before it finished and put it away, and looked out at the water instead of at him, which seemed to be where she was more comfortable looking.

— People from town keep coming down to tell me the river’s taken up smoking, she said. I told it to quit. It doesn’t listen.

There was a pause in which the joke sat on the frosty air, plainly terrible.

Then she laughed at it herself. It came out of her short and surprised, through her nose, as though the joke had been someone else’s and had caught her off guard, and she pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth.

— Sorry. I laugh at my own jokes.

— I noticed.

— Somebody has to.

Varren had heard people be funny on purpose all his life, mostly to get something from him, sometimes to keep something from him. He knew the sound of both. This was neither. She had made the joke for nobody, and laughed at it for nobody, and the only person it was meant to cheer up was standing on the steps holding a notebook against herself like a shield.

He looked at the notebook, then.

It was an ordinary one, spiral-bound, the cover soft from handling. A sheet of printed paper had been folded into the front of it so that a corner stuck out, and on the corner, above an official stamp, he could read two words in someone else’s typing. Instrument error. The page under her thumb was dense with figures, every one of them written twice, the second time darker, as if she had gone back to check and then pressed harder on the pen to say she had.