Innocence

The silicon-based lubricant, which formed a slick but seemingly dry sheath on the canvas, came with a guarantee that it was durable and would withstand much friction without wear, though surely the manufacturer had never conceived the use to which I put it. Both arms behind me, with a two-hand grip on the handle, I lurched forward in a crouch. The treated canvas slid well enough across the bricks and then over the stone, but more easily on the concrete. I drew him toward his final rest as if I were a father pulling a young son on a sled, but with the roles reversed as I would rather they were not.

I took forty-five minutes to arrive at the two buckets of metal objects. Later, my arms, shoulders, and back would ache as if I had drawn a wagonload of goods; for the moment, duty and grief together were morphine. I untied the knotted draw cords and opened the tarp just enough to fill it with the first bucket and half of the second. Father and I had calculated the poundage that might sink the package, not at once, but several yards from shore. Anchorage added to the canvas roll, I secured both ends and set out with it once more, this time traveling little more than a quarter of a mile.

The seven biggest tunnels, the terminal drains in the system, ended at different points along the river. Most of them disgorged their torrents into large catch basins, and not until the water in those storage tanks reached a certain height did it pour over the top onto a stepped spillway and into the river. This delay ensured that all trash heavier than papers and feathers would settle to the bottom of the catch basin rather than be washed into the river.

I brought Father to the open end of one of those enormous drains. The concrete catch basin before us might have been fifty to sixty feet on a side and thirty feet deep. Having been cleaned out since the most recent rain, it was dry now and empty but for snow.

To facilitate maintenance, a wide pierced-steel footbridge led from the nearer wall of the basin to the farther. A blanket of snow covered it, pierced in the same pattern as the steel, like a doily. Crossing would be treacherous, but there were safety railings. Besides, I had no choice but to cross it.

Initially I hesitated, wondering if I should wait until night. But darkfall lay long hours away. Besides, the Street and Sanitation Department workers, who dealt with the catch basins, were on strike, with little chance of anyone being in the vicinity, especially in this weather.

The sky shed itself as heavily as it had on Cathedral Hill, such blinding crystalline thickets that I couldn’t see the farther shore, as if snow meant for decades were released today because the world did not have decades left until its end. The river remained ice-free this early in winter, and every boat upon it was a working vessel, not a single pleasure craft among the lot, cruising through gauzy white curtains that half obscured them. I doubted that the crewmen would have the time or the curiosity to wonder about me, if they noticed me at all.

Dragging the shroud across the footbridge, I fell twice, once into the railing, once hard to my knees. At the farther end lay the spillway, a series of steep six-inch-wide steps, as broad as the catch basin itself, leading down to the water’s edge.

From this closer vantage point, the river traffic appeared no less obscure than it had been from the greater distance, every vessel brightened by running lights as they would be at night or in fog.

I tried to negotiate the spillway steps while controlling the shroud, for I was pained by the thought of Father’s remains making an undignified plunge. Only a third of the way down, however, the package got away from me, slid across the corrugated slope, and slipped into the river with the faintest splash.

My legs began to quiver, as if they would fail me, and I sat on the spillway. I said my good-byes and prayers in a voice that trembled not because of the cold.

Even near its engineered banks, the river offered almost a fathom, and the bed rapidly fell off to accommodate deep-drawing vessels. The tied ends of the tarp were not watertight, and I hoped that it floated out far enough to go unnoticed after it sank.

The shroud washed somewhat farther from shore than I anticipated before it disappeared beneath the waves. The added metal was meant less to sink the package than to keep it down when the body began to decompose and, producing gases, sought the surface, as Father had sought it and dreamed of possessing it all of his sequestered life.

In days to come, in the most fierce of storms, the water would swell and race, and his remains would be shifted by the stronger-than-usual currents, moved farther downstream. At some point, too, the ever-shifting silt of the bottom might deposit layer upon layer atop him, until it buried him under the river, as in life he lived under the city that enchanted him.