RIVERS OF THE DEAD
Within the mirror, within the scalar term, within the daylit and obvious and taken-for-granted has always lain, as if in wait, the dark itinerary, the corrupted pilgrim’s guide, the nameless Station before the first, in the lightless uncreated, where salvation does not yet exist.
THOMAS PYNCHON, Against the Day
The Rivers of the Dead is not what you think but a book lain unopened for seventy years. The printers and binders of the Rivers of the Dead faintly remembered through records of transactions who brought it to them. He was thin and cold.
“We were made to print the pages on paper like vellum, a rough finish, but deep to the touch of the hand. And he acted as though these words were important. The title was finished in gold.”
The frontispiece indicated seven copies were made, none sold but given away. The author was listed as Webb.
The language of the book was odd and peculiar, but its ideas were clear, if unfamiliar, when the book was read slowly with care. And, on occasion, the words were rhapsodic and luxurious. It seemed to be an elevation of thought, quite unlike anything written before. There seldom were commas, and no quotations. And the readers of the book were profounded and shaken and they altered their walk and stared away. And all of them mentioned the last chapter was the puzzle. The book was clear till that chapter. It seemed to be the writer stumbling, or a passage written with extreme eloquence. Now they were trying to decipher the meaning of that last section called the Rivers of the Dead.
STEVE MARTIN
November 1913 - London, England
Grey and petulant years, they were. Plague years. Fever and weakness, pale skin shivering under feeble winter sunlight. Phlegm in the gutters. The bakery out of butter. Sundays when no traffic came through.
I heard somebody mistook a black cat for an ash heap and shovelled the poor mewling beast into the oven. Newspaper vendors argued over half-pence in fog-choked alcoves. Ladies and gentlemen held their noses as they walked hurriedly through the swine-smelling streets. Switchblades were opened, teeth were bared, wild dogs prowled cobblestones; their nighttime barking would waft all the way over from St. Katharine’s & Wapping.
My dreams seemed authored by demons that autumn, all missed chance and sudden emergency. Just one bullet to kill some monstrous blighter. The Great War loomed invisibly ahead, not unlike a certain iceberg that had sunk a certain unsinkable ship just the year before, flinging 1500 souls into the North Atlantic.
Sometimes my dreams were prescient, full of men who looked like insects, men with gas masks swinging to and fro, trembling as they raised their rifles. Men mowed down in senseless spectacles of industrialized murder. And two vivid images shot through with such inwrought horror that I’d wake struggling to breathe: a pair of eye-glasses sitting neatly atop the mud in no man’s land. A drowning hand waving from inside a limestorm, from inside the poisonous gas. The former image I would see years later in the London Times, a photograph with the headline VERDUN: A WAR OF ATTRITION. The second image was made by me, or rather, by my subconscious as I read the book. I’ll tell you which one in a moment.
I also dreamed of men and women floundering in the North Atlantic, blinking upwards through leagues of water, held down by the billions of pounds laying atop them…
As one of four partners who ran Whitechapel Editions out on Greenfield Road I was due to take the Titanic to our editors in America but something held me back. Nothing supernatural, mind you. Just some flimsy obligation. That I can’t remember the specifics does not mean evil was afoot already, that some sinister force wished to ensure the four of us received the book (though I have quite often wished I’d gotten aboard the bloody ship…at least then I could have taken my chances when the thing started sinking). Instead I stayed in London and received the manuscript. And if I had any doubts as a young man I’ve none now. Hell is real. And I’m damned, you see. We all four are. And not a thing to do about it.
We are still trying to get it back: the book called Rivers of The Dead.
We all remember the man who brought it; he was cold and thin, and he brought a draft in behind him, but afterwards we could not bring to mind his countenance, the way victims of trauma are said to be unable to summon the face of their violator.
For that was what the book did to you, got it hooks into you, articulated in great detail long-held private thoughts one was unable to confer language upon, aimed a light into the cobwebbed corners of one’s subconscious, understood one the way one wished to be understood. And so we loved it, Rivers of The Dead. It was only weeks later, after finishing (or so we believed) and closing the book behind us, that the dreams began.
And such strange dreams they were! Nothing like my dreams of the prior month, for even those dreadful visions had been familiar, however frightening they might have been, the dream was usually in a recognizable London or English countryside. Not so after I read the book. Or, perhaps, after the book read me.
These were dreams of things unseen. Of half-formed shadows and hazy, distant loomings: mountaintops or perhaps skewed and crazy prospects merging into themselves until there were just two essential roads running through a dead city, a city vast and ruinous. These twin highways through hell cast cold fear upon my beating heart, for I could hear something coming from the city as I approached, not a screaming in unison but a cacophony of anguish, as if all the souls who’d ever lived were now confined to torment in the flickering offices of crooked buildings far above the eerily vacant streets. I could not see what was happening to them (I could not see anything…it was difficult to discern basic shapes). I could not help. And I knew that my turn was swiftly approaching. That I, too, would be tortured soon.
I give here a quote that captures the sensation of terror those dreams produced:
Such to the dead might appear the world of the living - charged with information, with meaning, yet somehow always just, terribly, beyond that fateful limen where any lamp of comprehension might beam forth.
Indeed. They were dreams that troubled and engulfed one. Dreams that brought low four modest men of modest means, partners in a now forgotten London publishing house. We were all having them. And we all knew the book was somehow responsible. We took to reading it in turns. I’d have it for a day, then Rudyard, then John, then Miles. But instead of consulting each morning about what we’d learned the night before, we each of us grew evasive and suspicious of the others. We wouldn’t share our thoughts. It was almost as if we were hoarding whatever the book was giving to us. Doing to us.
And though I’d hoped it was over when I heard news of the fire, in my secret heart I knew it was not. For the dreams came more urgently after that. Terror-filled dreams of uncertain origin, thoughts that seemed to think themselves, like messages from distant epochs, an ancient handprint on a cave wall, a desperate missive from the past announcing similarity (if not solidarity) through form.
I saw the above photo in LIFE Magazine in February 1914. Staring at it produced an odd sensation, one of being at sea. It’s the same hand, I know it. The man who wrote the book is the possessor of that 20 000-year-old hand. He was cold and thin. He was a stranger in the night. But there was something ancient about him.
Tell me, how did he somehow know the way, despite our house being in one of the hardest-to-find corners in all London, especially London on a foggy day, which that day unequivocally was, when streets unseen reveal themselves only through touch, like the razor teeth of a great nocturnal beast of prey as it sinks its teeth into your flesh? His introduction letter stated he wasn’t from here, yet he found us just the same. He knew he would. He always knew. But did he know his book would haunt us? Did he know of the coming fire? Is this particular hell we’re in a form of “tis better to know one book intimately than 100 books superficially?”
I’ve gone on long enough, I suppose. Now about the book.
It seemed familiar when read slowly and with great care. And, on occasion, the words were rhapsodic and luxurious. It seemed to be an elevation of thought. But towards the conclusion it either went off the rails or went somewhere we couldn’t follow. I was prepared to dismiss it outright as the work of a hack. Rudyard concurred. John said he would “reserve judgment” until he could read that last section again, for the first two sections were “decidedly not the work of a hack, but rather the work of a very fine artist.” Miles took John’s side, as ever.
So we read it again. We were trying to decipher the strange language in that final section when the office caught fire, destroying the manuscript. It was Rudyard’s turn to take home but he’d been in his cups the night before and had forgotten. Ashen-faced and in wrinkled trousers he stood in the soot of dawn, looking like he’d murdered somebody. The adjacent counting house was gutted too, as if a great monster had…not so much punched a hole in our actuality as sloppily opened a hole to another. I ceased my appraisal of our neighbor’s ruined enterprise once a peculiar feeling began to steal over me. Just staring into that hole too long could drive one mad. I remember glancing at it sidelong a few times, as one looks at the sun and thinking for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?
Another curious thing, much remarked upon by onlookers: Our house, though burned, seemed ripped from its foundations as if by great force.
We four partners were murmuring to each other, assessing the damage and discussing various insurance stratagems, when Rudyard suddenly fell knee deep into the black ashes, blubbering loudly. He was still weeping when the clock struck noon, three hours later. He would not be consoled. They carted him off to the madhouse. John, Miles and I signed his committal procedure papers.
“Do you suppose the book got him?” Miles whispered furtively when the police had gone.
“I rather suspect he stared too long into the void,” I offered.
“I fail to see the difference, gentlemen,” John said bitterly. “That man who brought us the book is the devil. And he hasn’t finished with us.”
November 1926 - London, England
Rudyard remains at Bedlam, having not spoken in 13 years. At first he communicated using alphabet blocks but now he can write short notes in halting cursive. The alienists and physicians tell us he is trying to remember that final section of Rivers of The Dead, word for word. “If he can remember it all,” intoned the doctor, “he promises to speak again. He wishes to recite it for you three. Fill you in on the missing pieces, as it were.”
One of us must go see him each Thursday. (No one ever volunteers. We draw straws.) Whichever one of us goes inevitably returns with no news, for Rudyard is catatonic. He sits in a chair all day with a woebegone expression, as if someone stole his teddy bear but he can’t be bothered to get it back. They say he wakes up screaming every single solitary night.
Gathered in our new office - a moot enterprise, for though we haven’t officially closed up shop, we haven’t released a new book in years - we mutter and warm ourselves by the stove and tell each other we are close to giving up. To leaving it alone. But we all know, both respectively and collectively, that we won’t give up. We shall follow this mystery to its end or to our own. Were we to solve our baffling little mystery, we know that in so doing we would surely stroll obliviously into some other, grander adjoining mystery. Perhaps even the mystery at the heart of life.
I don’t need to unlock grand secrets. I have no wish to open Pandora’s box. Those who wish to know the mystery of life only really wish to violate that mystery. I believe this with all my heart. Of those types I am not. I would be perfectly happy to leave larger mysteries unsolved if we could just have our small riddle explained to us in a language not dead to this word.
Tonight Rudyard’s reading report is thumbed through for the millionth time, as if one of us will somehow find a sentence not there previously:
Rivers of the Dead is not a novel, nor a travelog, still less a memoir. Yet it is all of these things, and more. A compendium of the strange, a 700-page report on the nocturnal half of reality, it features sentences from books burned long ago, various fragments salvaged from burning libraries, secret texts banned by the catholic church, and so on.
If this sounds like the book is a mere compendium of fine writing from various books, I’ve not done it justice. The long passage containing other writers words is among the most effective in the book. Somehow, across centuries, across cultures, the author shows intersecting threads of thought, phrasings that resemble each other exactly written by authors who could not have known each other. It is sublime. And then, of course, there is that puzzling final section. The only words that can do it justice are the very words that comprise it, for it is a singular document. I will restrict this report, then, to passages i could comprehend. Here is a sample of that marvellous middle section:
47: “the hovering statistical cherub who’s never quite been to hell but speaks as if he’s one of the most fallen…”
53: “they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass . . . Certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naptha winters, of sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage…”
55: “ruminous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard…”
56: “…joined the tumbling mirth…”
59: “…thousands of these hushed rooms without light…”
63: “houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, i breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, the distillation would intoxicate me also, but i shall not let it…”
65: “living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings…”
67: “…as under a green sea, i saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, he plunges at me, guttering, choking...”
69: “hearkening in an air stirred and shaken/by the lonely traveller’s call. And he felt in his heart their strangeness…”
“And he felt in his heart their strangeness,” we murmur in unison, reading aloud before the dying fire of evening. Then we shrug into our coats and leave. John stays behind to snuff the fire. We find him hanging from the roof beam the following morning.
November 1930 - London, England
Decades have changed but it remains a cold, damp century. Dogs still prowl cobblestone streets. Another great war looms ahead. (I don’t know this but I feel it.) These are still the plague years. O Father, keep us in the house of the Lord. Do not cast us into oceans alone.
And now the remaining pair of us, no longer an unholy trinity, decades away from a plump and happy quartet publishing the frivolous novels produced by London’s smart set, gay offspring of the fin de siècle, spend our days by the dying fire, wetting our lips in worried thought, stroking our greying beards, rocking with eyes misted over, trying to recall to mind that lost great work not of our century but of all centuries, carved out in a lost sylvan language that dooms us to puzzle over Rivers of The Dead until we too join such rivers, Miles before me, or perhaps me before Miles. It doesn’t make a difference.
Sometimes in dreams I see the four of us attempting to cross a swiftly moving river, clutching corrupted maps in gnarled hands, to see what waits on the other side. What appear to be rafts are in fact bloated corpulent corpses. These then, are the titular rivers. There is no doubt of that. Tittering madly, we manage to cross one. And cross another. Then another. And one more, until we are in firmer regions, beyond the rivers of the dead, beyond the false binary of light or dark, of something or nothing. In single file we step cautiously onto some far shore and pad softly forward into a land where even death has died.