My routine has always been a simple and consistent one.

-1-

At precisely thirty minutes before dawn, shortly before the jackhammer of practical concerns starts to chip away at my brain, turning my thoughts to rubble, I leave my studio apartment near the college and, weather permitting, bike ten miles (squeak-squeak; must oil that chain!) into the valley of hardwood trees. There I follow a winding trail of crushed stone that skirts the wetlands and crooked river. Above the rim of the valley the leaden sky changes color with slow, operatic grandeur. The cicadas sing a scratchy aria sustained by the morning breeze. Hazy pink ribbons of passing jets unfurl on the horizon and look like chalk gently smeared on a blackboard, or blood seeping slowly through loosely wrapped gauze. Five hundred years ago, so the college professors tell us, the Iroquois raided this valley and slaughtered the Erie in a series of surprise attacks. Who knows why. For pleasure, for sport? People can be that way sometimes.

As I pass under the creaking limbs of the mighty pin oaks cantilevered out over the river from the side of the cliffs I envision the carnage—men and boys, standing to fight or scrambling to escape, corralled into longhouses and hacked to death with the crude stone heads of tomahawks, their limbs scattered to the buzzards and dogs; squaws roped together like livestock and prodded with wooden clubs into exile, a long life of sexual servitude and humiliation; village elders forced at knifepoint onto raging pyres, their spirits seeking refuge in the swirling acrid smoke, the flying ash, screaming to wrench free of their roasted flesh; and amidst this mayhem a lone shaman, wearing the filthy hide of a coyote and a grotesque wooden mask with pointed ears and lolling tongue, danced in an ecstatic trance around the burnt offerings.

-2-

When I reach the bridge that spans the valley I slow my pace and stand beneath the concrete arches, enormous parabolas that remind me of the flying buttresses of a medieval cathedral. If you look closely enough, everything is a religious symbol.

On most mornings I glimpse antlers protruding from the thickets near the pillars. A family of white-tailed deer will sometimes graze on the gray-headed coneflowers and white snakeroot that grow from the rocky soil. Soon the park rangers, waiting in camouflaged tree blinds, rifle barrels poking through the October foliage, will thin their numbers. Easy targets. Big bucks, jittery does, a fawn wobbling on spindly legs. What becomes of the carcasses? Mount the heads on walls, I suppose. Impressive prizes for the easily impressed. Or maybe send them to the rendering plant. Animal fat is a key ingredient in cosmetics. Men shovel the blubber into steaming kettles, turn it into an oil reduction. With a quick daub of color, a woman can transform her face into a death mask.

Today the deer are eerily absent, as if they'd sniffed out the impending danger. Do animals have a sixth sense? Are they clairvoyant? I am not a big believer in the paranormal. To my way of thinking, there is little difference between neurosis and superstition. But in the soft yellow forestlight of mid-October I feel a presence concealed in the brush. Worth checking out. A young couple making love? No, too early in the day for that sort of thing, too late in the season. Dusk, that's the proper time to glimpse a romantic tryst, under summer starlight. Swarms of gluttonous mosquitoes never seem to deter the horny from quick consummation. Unattractive people more often than not, overweight, middle-aged, their soft white flesh sinking slowly in the mudflats. Nothing you want to study too closely. In desperation they try to recapture the enchantments of youth. So sad. Anguish always awaits those who yearn to fulfill even the most humble of fantasies.

-3-

I prop my bike against a sapling and tramp through the dense ragweed. Sharp bramble scrapes my knees, draws blood. Overripe blackberries smear my cycling shorts. I push on, using a heavy stick snapped from a fallen birch to beat a narrow path. I cock my head, hear distant birdsong, rushing waters, chirping crickets. I battle my way closer to the bank, and near the river's edge I make a discovery, one that is both macabre and magical.

A hand protrudes stiffly from the wilting goldenrod. A finger points an accusatory finger toward heaven. Spinning leaves blanket the body of a young woman. Radiant hues, a spectacular shroud of many colors. That she is dead there can be no question. Senseless to check for a pulse, give her mouth-to-mouth, massage her heart. I kneel on the slick rocks, touch the taut pale skin of her neck. Lips drawn back from her teeth in a grimace of terror, pain, metaphysical angst, it's difficult to tell which. Corpse's face, ashen, already turning faintly blue, like a wax effigy. Tawny hair, tangled and matted with dark blood. Cheeks splattered with clay, eyelids misted over with morning dew. Rather plain features. Can't imagine her laughing, weeping, sighing. Death has robbed her of any beauty she may have once possessed. How old can she be? Nineteen? Twenty? College student probably. Left her bed in the middle of the night maybe. A somnambulist haunted by strange dreams. She wears cotton pajamas, fleece slippers, soft pink like the petals of a rose bower.

Ever since its construction nearly fifty years ago, the bridge has been a popular spot for manic depressives of every stripe—white-collar professionals in three-piece suits and gaudy ties, working class men in denim coveralls and steel-toed boots, heartbroken boys and girls, lonely old widows. They scale the concrete barrier, cling to the rail, then just let go. How many regret their decision as they pinwheel wildly through the canopies? Massive trees, too. Maples, elms, oaks. From the center of the bridge the drop is over one hundred feet and the results are most unpleasant.

The woman's right leg is twisted behind her back. The femur protrudes through the skin. Open fracture, the doctors call it. Branches lay scattered in the smooth bedstraw and creeping buttercups. She must have ricocheted off those sturdy limbs. Snapped her neck. Probably died before she hit the ground. Missed the river by just a few yards. Would have floated out to the lake. In time bodies either dissolve into fish food or are dredged up by drunken weekend boaters weighing anchor.

Despite the freefall, a satchel remains at her side, the strap still coiled loosely around her arm. I carefully work the bag off her delicate wrist. Inside, I find a diary bound in dark leather. The paper smells rich and heavy, like cigar smoke or crackling embers rising from a campfire on a cold autumn night. Small block letters, precise, methodical, almost masculine in their severity. One hundred single-spaced pages. I search the compartments of her satchel for food, find an apple, a bag of pretzels, a stick of chewing gum.

In the soft morning light I relax along the riverbank and for the next thirty minutes read the diary.

College: an intellectual garbage dump.
Free Spirit: a name for the enslaved and dispirited.
Enlightenment: a Buddhist euphemism for death.
Death: a consistent and universal reality.
God: only a speculation.

She has a talent for formulating bleak and bitter maxims. Wise for someone so young. The dead express themselves so well. In the lovely solitude I hear a faint whisper, a murmur. The woman's voice, sweetened by death. Her cold breath washes over my ears like sparkling water, makes my flesh tingle. If there is a god, she tells me, then he dons an infinite number of masks and disguises, and underneath them all there is no ultimate reality, no clear foundation, like the gusting wind beneath the bridge.

On the final page of the journal I find an address written in bold black letters. If you find this journal please return to... I know the neighborhood well, have pedaled down the street many times before. With great care I rip the page from the journal, fold it neatly, place it in my pocket, then return the journal to her satchel.

-4-

High above the treetops, on the deck of the bridge, traffic is picking up. Low rumbling like an earthquake. Soon the morning joggers will come along. They'll peer into the brush and wonder what I'm doing. People are so damned suspicious. I walk over to the trail and reach into the canvas bag on the back of my bike. My cell phone eventually finds a signal, and I speak to a police dispatcher. While I wait for help to arrive, I consider carrying the remains over to a picnic table in a nearby field. Then I remember from watching television, our Great Teacher, that a witness is never supposed to tamper with a crime scene. In our society suicide is treated as a serious criminal offense. Harshly sentenced, too. Write-ups in the local paper, refusal of proper Christian burial, contemptuous whispers from neighbors, a hundred ritualized indignations.

Fifteen minutes pass before sirens echo through the valley. Sounds like the cries of a sad spirit doomed to walk the earth for a certain number of days. Paramedics are the first to arrive. They ask me to step aside as they perform CPR. Just a technicality. It's too late even to preserve the body for life support. The police arrive next. Four officers in all. Shaved heads. Square jaws like blocks of limestone excavated from deep quarries. They are terse, humorless, displeased to be out in the open air. They ask a few routine questions.

"How did you find the body?" I tell them. "At what time?" I lie. "Where do you work?" Between jobs at the moment, gentlemen. There's no need to go into any of that right now, is there? I never stay in one place for more than a few months. The police take down my address "in case we have any further questions." They don't detain me for very long, and after twenty minutes they allow me to pedal away.

A patch of morning mist hangs over a meadow and makes everything look like a blank page. No one around to fill it with words. A world not yet created. The fall flowers are in full bloom. A cluster of chrysanthemums, a patch of witch-hazel, white-tipped asters. The persimmon trees bear their fruit. Rotting crab apples litter the twisting gravel path. Sweetness and corruption all at once. Feels like I'm riding through a cloud. God's garden.

-5-

I make my way to the "quaint" (as the brochures describe them) cobblestone streets of the college. It's Saturday and the campus is quiet. Undergraduates still in bed, nursing hangovers, cringing with regrets. I consult the piece of paper in my pocket and after a brief search I find the address. The house is a turn-of-the-century Victorian with a wraparound porch and intricate latticework. Like a lot of the houses in this small college town, this one has fallen into a state of near decrepitude. The shutters are lopsided and in desperate need of sanding and painting. Some are missing altogether. One window on the second floor is shattered. There are no flowerboxes or plants or decorative dogwoods to disguise the decay. The cruel winds of a hundred winters have bled the house of color, chipped away huge patches of paint on the planks of wood.

I sit on a park bench across the street and listen to the black birds caw-caw in the treetops. Their feathers shimmer and gleam in the bright October sunshine. In the distance a car backfires and they flutter away in a dark cloud of cowardice. Inside the house lights go on and off. A man wanders through the big empty rooms. Her father, I presume. In her diary the woman refers to him only as "the professor." He wears a wrinkled blazer, a hastily knotted tie. Even on the weekends he dresses for the classroom, ready at all times to present a lecture, eager to revel in esotericism, solipsism, mental masturbation. Something about the way he carries himself suggests he's more or less accustomed to receiving bad news and is waiting for more to arrive.

I watch as he shambles into his study where for the next thirty minutes he drugs himself on a stack of books. He never bothers to re-shelve them and the floor resembles a labyrinth of teetering columns. He is restless, tries to but cannot concentrate on the words, runs his fingers through his hair, what's left of it, and trudges to the front door like a man weighed down by some terrible burden. He stands on the porch, smokes a cigarette, stares at the ground like a squirrel hunting for acorns before the big winter freeze. Trying to horde nuggets of ingenious thought. Plotting out a thousand lines of inquiry.

Though he looks innocent enough, his eyes hint at things subterranean. I am convinced that he is concealing a troubled past. Even the most innocent and well-meaning of men cannot live for—fifty years is it? he looks much older—without packing away a few sins, secrets, serious missteps, things too terrible to tell, even to one's confessor. What has he done to drive his daughter to suicide? I must find out.

I decide to walk across the street and introduce myself when a police cruiser appears and pulls into his driveway. I don't want the cops to see me, not here, and I hurry away on my bike before they can follow the professor's gaze. He watches as I pedal down the street and looks at me with an inexplicable mixture of rancor and desperation.

-6-

I return to the apartment to feed the cats. How many strays have I taken in over the years? Too many to count. Banished from cat colonies and nearby farms. Their dander always makes me gag, but I feel sorry for them. They're fine hunters, and this morning they present me with a gift. Hobbled but still alive. I hold the mouse by its tail and lower it into the aquarium for Nigel who flits his forked tongue and slithers in slow delight through his bed of cypress shavings. Corn snakes usually constrict their prey first. Not Nigel. He prefers to swallow his morning meal while it squeals in alarm. The cats leap onto the counter and watch the horror show with menacing indifference, grim-faced elderly judges summoned to the gallows to witness an exquisitely slow execution. The mouse bounces lamely against the glass until Nigel slides his checkered scales against its soft gray fur. Seems to have a calming effect. The mouse cleans its paws, twitches it nose.

I take a seat on the windowsill, enjoy my orange juice, yogurt, slices of apple and pear. A healthy lifestyle is important, especially for someone who rides great distances along the river each day. I must eat with my fingers from paper plates and drink straight from the container. I've smashed the dishes, the few I owned, against the wall. The landlord still hasn't come around to patch the hole. The neighbors call him on a regular basis to complain about my erratic behavior, the music, the screams, but the landlord is a drunkard and lacks the motivation to evict me. He is a true master of non-confrontation. Each month he collects my check and murmurs, "When you gonna find yourself a lady, young man, when you gonna find yourself a lady?" A question he should ask himself sometime. He has the ashen face and sunken eyes of a man who has endured celibacy for many years. But I've come to accept the fact that, when dealing with my fellow man, hypocrisy is the one thing I can always count on.

In time I'll leave this place. Keep on journeying. I always do. There are a hundred towns along the river, untold numbers of lonely little places that the world has forgotten or shunned. Why do they remain here, these townies, why do they continue to work in the bars and greasy spoons, serving the idle college kids who cannot smile without looking smug, who cannot speak their minds without sounding fatuous? Do they stay so they can continue to fight and drink and screw and complain to their absentee landlords about the troublemaker who lives upstairs?

I turn. The mouse is squeaking in alarm. Only its head is visible now. Nigel has swallowed the rest. Incredible how the jaws expand. Can eat a full-grown pigeon, they say. A great thing to observe. Must wing one soon and bring it home. Next week maybe. Don't want to overfeed him. A dumb roaming esophagus with black lidless eyes and a sinister little smirk of satisfaction.

-7-

Two days later I return to the park and for several hours sit on the bench, watching the black birds, pretending to read a book, one of many as it turns out, that the professor has written, a dusty tome about Native American religious rituals. In the local library I found a dozen of his books, anonymous and somehow pitiful on the shelf, wedged between a hundred others, neglected like so many books are, forgotten by everyone except their authors. What drives such men to continue writing? Incalculable vanity.

In the afternoon, as the autumn wind picks up and rattles the branches above my head, the professor emerges from the house holding the woman's satchel. He pulls a scarf around his neck, goes for a walk. I follow a safe distance behind. He cuts across the college campus and pauses for a moment at a fountain near the main classroom building. He passes the student union and then ambles along a service road that leads into town. He walks on, by boarded-up storefronts and abandoned factories and white clapboard churches whose pews are always empty these days. When he reaches the square he disappears inside a liquor store. I hide behind a cardboard cutout of a beautiful model drinking a can of beer, and with mild curiosity I watch as the professor purchases a bottle of scotch, single malt imported from the Scottish highlands, good stuff, or so the connoisseurs say. I do not believe in drinking alcohol.

Resuming his journey, he turns down the country highway that leads to a patchwork of farmers' fields. The fall crop is already in. Tall husks of corn have been cut down and left to rot in the dust. The professor rests against a fencepost, removes the bottle from the woman's satchel and drinks deeply. He never winces, never gasps for air, and after a few minutes, a few hearty chugs, he moves on. I wait for him to disappear behind a copse of white oaks, but I have no fear that I'll lose him. Even before he left the house I knew where he was going.

It's a three-mile walk to the valley. I hike down the steep slope, and after following the winding trail of crushed stone, I find the professor standing beside the river's edge where he contemplates the dead leaves floating under the great arches of the bridge as if in their fragile pattern of veins and sharp edges he perceives some kind of answer to the mysteries of life.

Today the river is high. Waters rush across a small island of shale that looks like a prehistoric tortoise shell, polished smooth and glistening in the sun. The rocks crumble in my hands when I try to pick them up and skip them along the surface of the water. Its like the earth is melting away, no more real than the ripples that expand outward and then vanish forever.

The professor places the satchel on the ground, reaches inside, takes out a small object that he cradles in his arms. An urn. A simple wooden box without inscription or garish religious symbol. Despite the gravity of this moment, the professor seems oddly tranquil, his eyes barely misting over. There is about him a sense of fatigue, resignation, a reluctant acceptance of his wretched fate. What a disappointment this turns out to be. I expect him to howl and weep, to fall on his knees and grind sand into his hair. Surely some gratifying display of bereavement is called for, but the professor plunges his fingers into the urn and, without even the decent recitation of poem or prayer, scatters a handful of dust on the water.

I try to stop him.

"Rituals are meant to be communal. A man shouldn't be left alone at such times."
The professor jumps, almost slips in the mud.
I walk toward him, hands in the pockets of my jeans so I won't appear threatening. He looks like the kind of man who might scare easily.
"Oh, I'm sorry. Did I disturb you?" I chuckle. "Disturb, now that's a funny word, isn't it? To varying degrees, I suppose, we're all deeply disturbed."
"Who are you?" he asks.
"I just wanted to tell you how very sorry I am. About your daughter."
"My daughter?"

"I knew her. Intimately, you might say. Knew her secrets. She confided in me, told me everything. Her actions must seem incomprehensible to you, impossible to justify. How could she do it, jump from this bridge without any warning or explanation? But I think you should know, sir, that.oh, this is difficult.that she was obsessed with me. Stalked me night and day. Wanted to possess me. I refused to get caught up in her games. You should feel no sense of guilt. I assure you that your daughter loved you a great deal."

In stunned silence he listens to me, but his silence is deafening, drowns out the sounds of the valley at day's end, the birds screaming in the treetops, insects buzzing in the wilting stalks of goldenrod. The color drains from his face, new wrinkles appear at the corners of his eyes like deep fissures erupting on the surface of a vast desert plain. He staggers forward, leans in close. I can smell the liquor on his breath, thick and heavy and noxious. It weighs down his tongue, anchors his words to the lowest depths of his throat. It is a struggle for him to speak, but he wills the words into existence, summons them the same way a magician summons a dark spell.

"My daughter, you say? My daughter." Syllables sinister as a conjurer's curse seep from behind a row of tobacco-stained teeth, hot and pestilent as smoke that curls out of a witch's cauldron. "You insidious little worm. She wasn't my daughter. She was my wife!"

My mind struggles to make sense of his words. The weirdness of them. The sick delusion that they represent. As I puzzle over their meaning, the professor strikes me in the face, bloodies my nose, busts open my lip, and while he continues to throw his clumsy punches, I stumble down the bank and into the river. He splashes in after me, utterly deranged, arms flailing. He gasps, chokes, sputters murderous oaths. That he intends to kill me there can be no doubt at all. With incredible force he swings the wooden urn at my head, narrowly misses my skull. In the terrible melee the ashes spill into the river. The water turns cloudy with death, looks like a gray serpent skimming along the surface. Ashes surge into my mouth, lungs. Tastes bitter, oddly medicinal. An alien soul courses through my veins.

The professor comes at me again. My only chance is to swim away. I propel myself away from the bank and frantically kick downstream. In seconds the current has me in its grasp. Around the bend I go, and soon the professor's screams are indistinguishable from the thunder of water against stone. I know this river well, know where it eventually leads, and I know that to struggle, to fight the rushing water is a futile enterprise. I accept my fate. Liberated from my terror I go limp, unfold my arms, and in the white glare of October light I close my eyes and let the cold cradle of the current carry me away, beyond craggy inlets and under the bridge where the young woman sailed through the air into eternity.