Once there was a river
Once there was a river, the Skouse or the Sticks. It could have been a road or a train. He and possibly she wound their ways along it or took separate routes, but he definitely wound, noticing as he did the trees that lined the river’s edge or the tracks, whichever it was. Memory is imperfect, but each tree marked exactly his and possibly her progress toward a house.
Sometimes a house is a meeting point between two houses, an overlap. At other moments, whole stretches or expanses of them, a house is just there, marking the distance between the road, say, and the sea. Once there was a house like this. A bed in such a house is similarly a meeting point among several beds — the exact number is unknowable. A river is in play when a bed is invoked, just as the sea has inner and outer aspects.
Memory is exact on certain points, scenes that have their settings. Sounds are part of it, along with other aspects of unfolding as it happens and when, owing to the circumstance, awareness is heightened.
Once two memories blurred and two outer and two inner seas were conflated. This was because they touched the same pole.
Occasionally a medical doctor points to this and constructs a device to capture it. He’s carted off and the device ridiculed, but the pole is still there, a column of emptiness or a pipe or a tube that runs from there to here, passes through the way a train does or a river when it floods, a river with houses or the remains of houses floating on it, or the train’s horn an echo.
Later on, you look for it, although how really do you look for this thing? Yet how can you not look for it, seeing as you touched it once?
About the River Skouse: the River Sticks comes earlier or later, murky and slow moving, cars parked carefully at its headwaters, newer at the outer edge and then rusting or rotting but still neatly parked and the paths kept swept. The Skouse has aspens, and along it there are tracks and in between is a road. Once they took it, or possibly only he did, noting how it curved and how each tree was memorable. They say that aspens are all just one thing below ground, reviving in the aftermath of above-ground destruction.
The Skouse — a mighty river of transformation, some claim, but it’s just a stream, silvery and as unbounded as a bolt of lightning. The Sticks must give out to it somewhere, but the portage was hard to recall. He arrived with only Jungian archetypes to guide him. Much, much later, he realized that one who crapped out on him did so just as another was arriving to take her place, but it proved to be both better and worse, their meeting.
The Skouse is a river of such exchanges. Its aspen revive despite the havoc that occurs between two people before or leading to. Or it happens “like that,” an equivalence that lives side by side with the first thing they touch, a second pole. It makes a kind of heart-stopping sense. Where’s the warning sign? Where would it be affixed? Every 30 meters along the river’s edge.
