The Fellow

I had been the assistant to the director for less than a year. The important qualification for the job was to have no fear of water. None. And I did not. Only one thing moved me: the appearance in my head of the river horse. The guests, the Fellows, weren’t supposed to have any fear of water, either, but often they lied. This hadn’t mattered for some time, because the creek was dry, the creek was ashen. Children, having collected pretty stones from the wetness in the past only to see them grow dull on a shelf, thought that all the stones, everywhere, had died, even the ones they’d left behind.

I had dealt with only two Fellows before Philip—which I suspect was not his real name. The previous ones had always appeared drunk, though perhaps they were only savagely thinking while I filled the water tanks and brought in fresh toilet-bowl brushes and briquettes for the grill. Both, on departure, had abandoned a remarkable amount of detritus. Plastic parts of things. Cords of many sorts. Puzzling attachments.

They had both complained of bedbugs and fire ants. “Not bedbugs,” I told them. “Conenose bugs. The conenose bugs have eaten the bedbugs.” I told them to treat the fire-ant mounds with molasses mixed with dish soap, but they did not. The proof being the empty cannisters of Baygon everywhere.

The residency came with a modest ranch house surrounded by several hundred acres. A creek bisected the only road leading to the property, though it hadn’t flooded and cut off access for many years. The stories of high and consuming waters were, however, legion. They were difficult to believe. I try to relate only to what is immediately verifiable. I don’t like to imagine things. I have to be careful about what I allow into my head, though of course sometimes I have no choice—as is the case with the river horse—and then I want to shriek with sadness and powerlessness.

Philip arrived on the first day of the new year, eager, he announced, to get to work. He was plump and pale, and reeked of mildew or worse, and he arrived with a dog about whom he had informed no one. Still, pets were not expressly forbidden.

The dog had a melancholy air.

“What’s its name?” I asked.

“What?” Philip demanded.

I helped him unpack his vehicle. There was no luggage, but there were a great many tightly sealed cardboard boxes.

“Would you like me to get additional supplies?” I asked. “Dog food?”

“What?” Philip bellowed again. “I’m anxious to get down to business.”

I said that the guests, the Fellows, always remarked on how astonishingly quickly their time here went by.

“What? That’s preposterous! Time never goes anywhere!”

The dog followed me outside and sniffed the tires of my truck. Together, we studied the sky, which appeared threatening. I rearranged some porch furniture. The dog looked at me. If I were to attempt to describe that look I would say that it was one that deeply questioned what it was looking at, my very existence, even. We walked toward the woods and I showed him various breaks in the fence line. “Don’t go out there,” I advised him, “unless you’re accompanied by someone, preferably a person.”

“You mean like Philip,” he said, though of course he couldn’t have.

We went back into the house and he settled onto a bed that had been prepared for him, a nest of faded beach towels. He chewed thoughtfully at a hole in one of them.

I told Philip about the weather-alert system, the emergency phone, the extra batteries and candles, the German vacuum cleaner, which no Fellow had ever mastered. Once again, I asked him the dog’s name but he didn’t seem to hear me. He said he was working on a major work, an exceedingly major work.

“No one will bother you,” I assured him. “The university doesn’t care about this place. I think they’d just as soon tear it down.”

“Why not,” he agreed. He seemed more cheerful now that I was leaving. Looking back through one of the windows, I saw the dog carefully removing a slim book of poems from the bookcase.

That evening, it began to rain. And it continued to rain for many days. The rain was not flamboyant, merely constant. During this period, I mostly lay quietly, staring at the walls. There was nothing on them. Once, I had had two watercolors—I’d had them since I was a little boy, and I had carried them about with me for years and hung them in whatever room I was living in—but someone in a position of authority had finally determined that they were detrimental to my progress and they were taken from me. They had been created by a capuchin. Caged animals often take refuge in art but this one was exceptionally talented. I was told at the time—when I was a little boy—that we were the same age. She favored the color blue, all the blues, of which there are many. She worked feverishly, I was told, usually at night, but then she suddenly sickened and died. But how she loved art! Perhaps she loved it too much. Perhaps she died trying to express the great thing. She presented mystery in terms of mystery. And is that not substance! Is that not meaning!

I stared at the walls and thought of the little capuchin. I saw her only once. The cowl comforting her troubled face looked weary. There she is, I was told. That is the one.

When it stopped raining, I ventured out to visit the residency, but the creek was impassable. Water rushed foaming over the ford, and the gauge posts marking flood heights either were submerged or had been ripped away. The scene before me had been utterly transformed. I returned to my room and tried to call Philip but there was no answer. I contacted the university and left a message, though they seldom responded to my messages, even in the best of times. I went back the following day, and noticed that the woods looked especially fresh and benign. All was peaceful except for the rushing water, which showed no sign of abatement.

But when I returned less than twenty-four hours later I was astonished to find the creek bed dry. It was as though someone had pulled a plug, which might well have been the case. I would not put that past someone at all. I drove quickly over the ford and up the dirt track to the house. All seemed in order, except that Philip’s car was gone.

I had gazed at the dangerous waters impassively, untroubled, but my heart was pounding as I approached the house.

“Philip!” I called, but when I entered there was only the dog on his nest of towels. There was no sign of Philip or his materials, the sealed cartons he’d arrived with. I suddenly had a terrific headache. This was always the signal for the door in my head—and I experienced it quite specifically as a door, a big red one—to open and allow the river horse to come in. He lived in a poem, but before that he had languished in a zoo. I push the poem from my mind as soon as I can, but it’s never soon enough. When it wants in, it enters. The river horse. The baby river horse.

“Oh, I know that one,” the dog said. “Craig Arnold. It ends with an infant being . . . the innocent . . . the ingenious . . .”

“Yes,” I said, my voice breaking.

“. . . whose first step came only just in time to allow him to climb, all by himself . . .”

“Yes, yes,” I said, sobbing.

“. . . the steep steps to the guillotine.”

I had to lie down. I staggered to a bedroom and closed my eyes. When I resurfaced, hours later, I saw that the dog had managed to start a fire. It wasn’t cold enough for a fire, but it was pleasant all the same.

I was amazed that he was able to build a fire.

“There are those fatwood starters,” he said. “They come in a box.”

“But even so,” I said.

“Now that it’s stopped raining we could use the fire pit outside. I investigated it earlier. It’s big, isn’t it? And those slabs of limestone around it. There are little faces in them, aren’t there?”

“Oh, I hope not,” I said sincerely.

“They seem to be screaming.”

“I mustn’t scream,” I said.

“Well, everything does at some point. I remember when I died—just the ways I died—over and over again. It was awful. No sense of plenitude or peace. Each time, I struggled. Didn’t do a lick of good. I died. Each time, I would ask, ‘But is there nothing that can be done?’ And there was only silence. I so wanted to get behind this endless end business. There’s so much there. But the resistance to its being realized is great. I was determined to break through. So I employed an amanuensis to assist in my anamnesis.”

“Philip? Your memories of other lives?”

He gazed at me.

“Words can be so weird, can’t they!” I said, my excitement somewhat displaced. “The inversion or addition of a letter or two creates a whole different meaning. It would be so easy to confuse the two if there was a test or something!”

I was a small and earnest child again, a child saving money to buy the watercolors of a capuchin.

“Amanuensis and anamnesis,” I added.

“There are tests and there are tests,” the dog said.

“Where is Philip?” I asked.

“Gone. Swept away. And all the stories of my lives with him. He believed he had them all, but he did not. Hundreds and hundreds of hours’ worth, but far from all. Still, gone again. Indecipherable. Ruined. Lost.”

I supposed that this was the end of my position as the assistant to the director.

“He left when he thought I was sleeping. But I was not sleeping. I ran after him. I saw it all. Swept away.”

“Did he record what you told him or did he write it down?”

“I’m not a fan of electronic devices,” the dog said.

“I think Philip was deaf.”

“Deaf?”

“Quite deaf, I think.”

“So he was writing down what he imagined I was saying rather than . . .”

“Possibly,” I said.

The dog began worrying the hole in the beach towel again. It hadn’t become any larger, which I thought showed considerable skill on his part. We were silent, watching the fire.

Finally, he spoke. “Sometimes I exhibit quite poor judgment.”

“The selection process here is a mystery.”

“I thought all the while that it was my work they found worthy.”

“I’m sure it was. Is.”

“The river of indifference flows through the country of forgetfulness. That’s the way it’s always been. It need not be that way forever. That is what I have addressed and must continue to address.”

The fire was burning beautifully. He certainly knew how to make a fire.

I loved him.

“We must leave,” I said sensibly. “We mustn’t stay. We would have to explain so much.”

“Yes,” he sighed. “We begin again. We are forever being taken from our home and expected to thrive in some other place. Sometimes it is possible. More often it is not.”

His coat was darker and more gleaming than I’d previously thought.

“What would you call your color anyway?” I asked. “How would you like me to describe it?”

“Devil’s-food cake,” he said.

“That’s good. That’s perfect.”

“I think so,” he said. ♦