Lethe River

The ripples in the water came from Dad trudging toward the middle of the Kalama River. Despite this, he was insistent it was the fish, even though they'd all died two years ago after Terragen Energy Corporation started refining sarinium. 

“See?” he pointed to the puckering water. “Feisty ones, we got today.” 

“You think it's pike?” I shouted from the river bank as I pulled on my rubber boots. 

“Pike? Frankie, it's summer. It's the salmon run.” Dad tapped his round belly through his waders. “If we get a fat chinook, you're grilling tonight.” 

“Sure, Dad,” I said and plodded into the shallows. As a force of habit, I pulled the sarinium gauge I kept in my pocket and stuck it in the water near a group of drooping cattails.

Light static crackled from the meter: the reading was low-level and not worth worrying about, at least for the moment. There hadn't been toxic rainfall near Kalama for at least a month, but the thunder clouds scudding across the sky in the distance suggested that was going to change soon. 

Mud squelched under my soles as I walked back onto the bank: old pine needles and dusty gravel scattered around the parched dirt path to the parking lot. I toed the ground with my rubber boot, knowing Mom had likely stood here, sometime before she died. Even through her cancer, she had accompanied Dad on his fishing trips in a capsule-sized Airstream. Often, she also extended an invitation to me, saying it would be nostalgic to try and re-create the fishing expeditions of my youth. But I regularly claimed the excuse of a packed schedule as a new eager-to-impress VP, working overtime to keep the sarinium plant operating.

However, since the beginning of the Great Die-Off, I had taken up Mom's old post. I watched him and slowly inhaled the sour, vegetal smell of the river. He tugged his line, and the fly rod bent in an arc-like a walking cane. Satisfied with the fishing line's weight and length, he swept his arm back in a fluid motion. The tip of the rod moved in a straight streak on the backstroke, and the fishing line formed a perfect loop mid-air. 

But, on the forward stroke, his balance rocked forward as the line unrolled into the water. He shot out his arm to steady himself. 

“Dad?” I splashed back into the shallows.

He gave a thumbs-up. “All good. I'll have to…”

His voice petered out. He looked down at the water like he didn't recognize where he was.

I said again, “Dad?”

Recovering, he replied, “I'll have to…try that again,” and pulled up his rod to begin another backstroke. The line dipped and swooped through the air until it landed in the water with a small, sharp plink! 

The sound was briefly ossifying. It reminded me of when my mother gave me coins to toss into the fountain at the park, the place we'd go on long afternoons when Dad was in the hospital getting physiotherapy after his first stroke.

Mom had been an associate professor of Greek mythology at the University of Washington. Her way of explaining the condition of Dad's brain to an eight-year-old was, “It's like he's drunk from the Lethe River. As he gets older he might forget who he is, where he is. We'll have to guide him when he forgets things and be patient, above all else.” 

Despite her warning, his body and mind persevered throughout my teens; he made it through years of continuous physical therapy, and he did crosswords and sudoku's every day. Even when his mind eventually deteriorated, Dad's fortitude was evident in how he demanded to keep fishing even without catching any fish.

Right now, it was evident in the way he pulled up and recast his line when he wasn't happy with his position on the water, which was often. I watched his fly shimmer in a pinprick of late morning light from a bit of reflective yarn that made the tackle look insectile, long and thin, like a dragonfly.

But suddenly, he stopped. “Where did Frank go?” Dad squinted at me like he was looking through fogged glass. 

“It's me. What is it Dad?”

He chuckled, “You'd find Frankie interesting. She's working for the company giving away that clean energy stuff. You know about it?”

“It's called sarinium. It's not as clean as you think—” 

And that was when I felt a raindrop on my shoulder. 

Jumping at the sudden wetness, I put down the face shield attached to the hood of my raincoat and pulled on a pair of thick plastic gloves I kept in the pockets. “We're packing up now,” I said, even though we'd just arrived. The trees began to move restlessly.

“Dad?” I shouted. “We're leaving now. Come out of the water, please!”

For a few seconds, his eyes wandered listlessly across the river until he eked out, “The weight of the line is what gets the rod to bend, Frankie. Clean backstroke, move the fly around, and get the fish excited. You want to try, honey?”

I walked over to him, the water going up to my knees, and gently plucked the rod from his hand. “Maybe another time,” I put my arm around his shoulders. “Remember Mom said your memories are like a full glass of water? Well, you've got to move around carefully so you don't lose any of them.”

Dad sighed, and whenever he did, a whistling sound shot out his nose. 

Today it was an ominous B flat. 

#

The rain started in earnest on the way home. I drove northbound on I-5. Traffic was scant, and the road was war-zoned with potholes. Dad stared out the window as the drizzle created an aqueous film on the glass. I looked out my side mirror toward the portentous vista, searching for the dark purple shimmer of sarinium; sometimes, you'd catch a momentary glimmer of it, like a rainbow film of oil on top of asphalt.

“Frank,” Dad snapped in a moment of lucidity. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

I was drifting out of the lane. “Shit,” I hissed and quickly corrected. “Thanks. But look, Dad, out on my side. Look at the trees.”

Once verdant with ferns and western hemlocks, the wetland was now varying octaves of gray. Spindly trees bent in tortured arcs; the trunks mottled umber and black. “I heard at a market in Olympia that the Interior Department's starting to cull the last trees,” I said, knowing he likely wouldn't remember the scene. Many of his memories already existed in fragments, which he'd recall now and again.

In particular, one that had gotten jumbled up over the years was my seventh birthday. Dad had rented a boat and took me spin fishing around Point Defiance for the first time. He thought it would be easier to teach me spin fishing first instead of learning the artful grace needed for fly fishing. Mom had stayed in the cabin on the boat, sitting on a small couch with a flask of vodka and Hesiod's Theogony. 

“Unlike fly fishing, the weight's all in the sinker, instead of the line,” he'd explained, and then sat down on a small crate watching the starboard side. “The waiting bit's the best part.”

At eight years old and not yet understanding that patience was a useful virtue, I had been doubtful of his assertion.

However, I listened to him and tightly held onto the rod while he pontificated. “When you're waiting for a fish, let your mind ebb and flow, like the water.” He gestured to small steel-colored waves that undulated toward the thin line of light on the horizon. “Until you're interrupted by the pivotal moment, of course.” He pointed at my vibrating rod. A fish suddenly tugged on the line like a child asking for its mother's attention. 

He had helped me reel it in. Mom had come out of the cabin, standing off to the side, and clapped as I showed off my first catch: a four-pound chub.

Dad pointed at the small, slippery thing. “Remember, ebb and flow. If you're anything but calm, you'll scare 'em away.”

“Ebb and flow. A good metaphor for your Dad’s brain,” Mom had chimed in. He had laughed, not knowing how true it would become.

“Frank?”

“What is it Dad?” 

“You think we can stop by the fly store on the way back?” he asked. “It'd be nice to catch up with Joe. You remember Joe, don't you Frankie?”

“I do remember Joe,” I said tepidly, “but the fly shop's closed.”

“Closed?” Dad frowned and checked his watch. “Frankie, it's Thursday. He's always open on Thursday unless he's going to go see his grandkids.”

“The shop went out of business, Dad.” I looked over at him in the passenger's seat. “It's been out of business for two years.”

“Let's just drive by,” he suggested, and then added, “please, Frank.”

My chest tightened, and my limbs felt boneless, even as I gripped the steering wheel and changed lanes for the exit at 56th Street. “You're going to be disappointed, Dad.” 

The exit dumped us into the heart of South Tacoma, which was a motley array of car dealerships and fast-food restaurants. I slowed down, and we inched along the block. NO TO SARINIUM PLANT was papered across storefronts and on wide slats of particleboard. Purple circles with lines slashed through had been spray-painted directly on the glass in some unoccupied windows.

Joe's Fish and Bait had been situated at the intersection of South Tacoma Way and 74th street. I stopped in front of the entrance to the parking lot. Above the windows, the sign placard was empty. 

Dad scowled. “This can't be it.”

“It is,” I said. “Joe went to go live with his younger daughter near the Great Lakes Zone when the sarinium plant leaked into Puget Sound.” I pointed out his window to the concrete and rebar rubble that loomed in the distance like a dark cenotaph. 

Dad leaned back in his seat, his arms lying in his lap, and stared out the windshield. I swallowed a lump in my throat as we trickled past Joe's old shop. At the corner of the intersection, one of the few cars on the road beeped at me as I drove around a turned over metal box, the kind that held newspapers. The glass in the box was cracked, and the few papers inside had spilled out onto the road. 

I read the headlines every time we went by. Iceland's food supply depleted; UK economy hit with end of shellfish industry.

The paper was becoming pulp mushed into the asphalt. A slow undoing, just like how I visualized my guilt for letting this all happen.

# 

I pulled up to my driveway when Dad said, “Frank…”

I looked down. The crotch of his pants was wet. 

“Shit. It's okay.” I unbuckled Dad's seatbelt. I remembered how Mom's mouth had crimped with exhaustion whenever he wet himself. I ran over to his side of the car and laced my hand through his arm, hoisting him up. We took the concrete steps up the porch together, and once inside, I guided him to the bathroom. 

I began to undo his fly when he slapped my hand away, “I can do this part, Frank!” 

His cheeks were pink, expression flat. I stood up. “Fine, I'm going to unload the car, but stay inside, okay Dad? The rain’s toxic, remember?”

“Sure, sure.” He waved me off.

I rushed back outside, pulling up the hood of my raincoat, and pressed down my face shield. A few miles away, the giant billboard screen stationed on the Puyallup River, right at the edge of the 167, was blinking with the last PSA to go up before the Great Die-Off. A wildlife advocate group had paid to have the Terragen logo Photoshopped next to the image of a dead bluefin tuna. Its scales shone with veiny purple scars.

“Frank?” Dad called from the door, his fly unzipped. “Frank, don’t just stand out there! Hurry up!”

I gathered as much gear as I could in my arms: Dad's rod, his waders, and boots. I ran to the house and dumped the load in a bin I left next to the shoe rack, along with my raincoat and face shield. I moved the container to the laundry room and emptied it into a decontamination chamber I had built from thick plastic sheets to store possible sarinium infected objects. 

I went back to the foyer and saw Dad staring at the bold, red T-shape encircled by a thick red circle. “What's that big shape? On that billboard?" he asked.

“It’s…my former company,” I replied, shutting the door and waiting for the hard seal to hiss. “Do you remember when I started working for them?”

He didn’t reply. Instead he asked, “What happened to that fish?"

“It's cell walls began to fall apart.” I guided him to the furnished staleness of my living room. Dad sat down on the couch, and I turned on the local weather broadcast. “I'll be in the kitchen.” I put the tv controller in his hand. “I'm going to start on dinner.”

Though I didn't exactly know what to make. Supplies that were guaranteed toxin free became a bit more limited every year. I stood with the fridge door open and pressed my forehead against the jamb. We had sad plastic-wrapped packages of chicken and cartons of raspberries and mushrooms. On the fridge door, the water filter hummed and a light suddenly turned on, indicating the filter would need to be replaced soon.

Somehow that was a small worry, even though water filters were in short supply. Suddenly, the horn at the fire station peeled out a wail that sounded like a teakettle at full boil. People refusing to leave Washington State had established a warning system in the beginning days of the Great Die-Off when the toxic storms had just started. It meant to get inside, stat. I shut the fridge and plugged my ears, waiting for the bleating to stop. 

And when it did, the tv roared in its place. I figured Dad had turned up the volume again to drown out the horn. Sometimes he turned it up to the point where it upset him, especially when he accidentally started streaming a violent movie. I went back to the living room. 

“Dad?” I scowled. “What are you watching?”

I inhaled sharply as my face filled the screen.

Luckily, he didn't seem to recognize it was me. I had done up my face and straightened my hair, flattening the natural curls I'd worn most of my life.

Swiftly, I reached for the controller in Dad's hand. “You hate ANBC. They’re covering an old story anyway—”

“Wait!” he leaned away. “I'm watching it.” 

I shuddered at the sound of my voice through the speakers, which had been calm and frightfully gelid as I'd testified to Congress:

The mass death of the marine population is regrettable. But, Terragen can't claim responsibility for this disaster when we were pushed by consumer demand to output clean energy at the rate it was needed—

“You don't need to watch this.” I leaned over him, tugging the controller from his hand. “Turn it off!”

“Frank!” Dad tugged back, and with a quick jerk, pulled me toward him on the couch. Artificial blue light from the tv spilled through the living room like cold milk. 

— Our first and second test trials didn't disclose that the build-up of sarinium in a living system would have the effect it has—

With his right hand, Dad struck me across the face. 

—We just don't know how extensive the damage will be at this time. We express regret—

His fingernails grazed my eyelids. He tore up streaks of skin on the bridge of my nose.

—However, we believe, given current information, that it would be a gross overstatement to compare this incident with Chernobyl, as several senators have suggested—

“Dad! Jesus!” I recoiled to the opposite end of the couch, to the refuge of an end table with a lamp and a stack of Mom's old tea coasters. I had snatched the controller, at least, even though my face stung. I turned off the tv and discreetly thumbed tears away from my eyes. “Please do not watch that!” I snapped. “I don't want you to see—do you understand? Dad?”

His eyes were the color of a dark rheumy liquor. He didn't respond, only stared into the blank screen.

I sighed. The gash across my nose throbbed. “Just sit here and don't move. Okay? I need an ice pack.”

The shock of the hit left me drained. I dragged myself to the kitchen; my legs were spongy, my vision fuzzy. I don't know how long I stood there, leaning against the countertop, staring into the sink. My mind drifted to the boardroom I'd sat in after testifying. I'd gotten countless handshakes for my cold-blooded testimony and remembered at the time I had even believed the things I'd said to the Senate’s Environmental Protection Committee.

Now, as I stared into the sink drain, all I could think about—all I could ever think about—was whether Dad would realize that the person understating the impact of the worst ecological disaster in history was me.

Cold air suddenly drifted into the kitchen, stirring me from the unwanted memory. I rubbed my shoulders and headed back to the living room. “Dad? Sound off, please.”

A shiver rolled through me. The couch was empty, save for a small indentation in the cushion.

“Dad?” I walked to the laundry room and immediately thought, shit.

The contamination chamber was open, and Dad's fishing gear was strewn across the floor. On the carpet, the sarinium meter crackled as rain spat into the laundry room. 

The side door was wide open.

# 

Hastily, I put on my raincoat, my boots and charged outside toward the Puyallup River, which was luckily only fifty feet away from the gate of my backyard. 

Rain pelted down on my hood. Hard drops splattered across my face shield. The land began to slope down to the bank as soon as I was out the gate, and I leaned on my side, sliding through a run of brittle twigs and brown mulching leaves. Scattered on the leafy floor were old branches, their bark crusty on the boughs like rusted bandages.

My boot touched down on a cross chop of rock and old, tawny mosses. “Dad?” I shouted, crouching low as I looked around for purchase on the silver-skinned stones. “Dad?”

Twenty feet from me, he stood knee-deep in the river, waders on and fishing rod in hand. But he wasn't looking at the water or his rod. He looked up toward the horizon, where the air sometimes glowed pale green like the flesh of a cucumber. 

I mustered my voice, “Dad, you need to get out of there. The water's bad.”

He turned around. “I know,” he said and ran a hand through his thinning hair.

“Oh,” I replied. He seemed lucid, alert. I descended the rest of the bumpy bank, leaning over the water's edge, and reached out to him while keeping my grip on a slippery boulder. Dad clutched my arm and I pulled him up onto the rocks.

“I know the fish—I know a lot of things are gone, Frank,” he said, nodding his head at the river. “Every once in a while I put it all together.” Then he looked over the fresh red gash on my nose as if reading how much time had passed without his knowledge. He didn't mention my testimony to Congress, though I think he knew, at least for this moment, I had played a part in destroying the thing he loved.

Because this is how I understood the nature of Dad's memory. Like water, it was rumpled, agitated, and, at times, calm. It was a muscle that held on tight to everything it swallowed, and it only felt right that in the slow destruction of this world, it should hold onto me, as it held onto him.

I at least owed him that.

“All right then. Let's get back,” Dad tried to be chipper, but his eyes were glacial, “before this old man forgets again and we find ourselves back here.”

I smiled at him. “If we have to come back, we will. Always.”

Together, Dad and I trudged back up the river bank. Behind us, the rain stopped and the water stilled. As he breathed, he whistled through his nose until he turned to me and said, “With fly fishing, the weight's all in the sinker. You want to give it a try, Frankie?”

Author’s Biography

Claire Scherzinger is a writer and artist residing in
Washington State, USA. Her fiction has been published in the webzines Mythaxis, and 365 Tomorrows. She also has a forthcoming story in Andromeda Spaceways webzine. Scherzinger’s writing and art can be found at www.clairescherzinger.com or on Instagram @paleblueglow