Quiet Yourself

"Find the water first. Everything else about a place is only consequences of where the water goes."

She had me by the arm and she was walking me out past the tents at a rate I had not agreed to, and I was letting her, and then I heard it.

Water.

I stopped so hard she came off the end of my arm.

There was a creek down the eastern boundary at Owens Hollow that ran eleven months in twelve, and I could not have told you the last time I'd actually heard it. It had gone into the background of my life about a year after we bought the place and stayed there. But I had spent that entire morning walking inside a silence with nothing in it but our own boots going into sand, and now there was moving water somewhere off behind the canvas — a wide low continuous noise with a grain running through it, the noise a good body of water makes when it has room to work — and it got into me in a way that nothing else had managed all day. My eyes went before I had any say in it. Standing in the dust behind a stranger's tent, over the sound of a river I had not yet laid eyes on.

Karen said something. I went round the back of the tent.

The ground fell away in a long easy grade for thirty or forty metres, and then there it was.

Wide. Wider than the Derwent up past New Norfolk, wide enough that I had to turn my head to take in one bank and then the other, running left to right with a good pace on it — not fast, but purposeful, the way a river runs when it has been running a long while and knows where it is going. The surface worked in long smooth belts out over the deep water and broke up into fine texture across the shallows near the edge, and there was a shine coming off the whole of it. After a morning of orange and brown and that flat unforgiving red, the colour of that water went into me like cold on a tooth.

I went down the bank, and I did not go carefully, and I did not go with any dignity about it. The bank was rock under a skin of the dust — proper rock, slabby, sitting in courses the way sandstone sits, with the dust lying over the top of it in drifts a hand deep wherever the breeze had put it — and I came down that slope half sliding, with my jacket still over my arm and my boots throwing up a cloud behind me the entire way, and I got to the edge of the water and went straight down onto my knees in it.

"Chris—"

The water was clear.

Not clear the way we use the word at home. I had stood in the Florentine in February with the light coming down through it in bars and called that clear, and it would not have got a mention alongside this. I could see the bed four metres out and count the stones on it and pick the colour of every one, and see the point where the channel dropped away past them and the light finally stopped reaching down. There was no colour in the water itself. No tea-stain off leaf litter. Nothing green through it. Nothing brown.

I put my hand in, and it was cool — not cold, a good deal warmer than any Tasmanian river in July, but cool against the heat that had been sitting on me for an hour — and it came up my wrist and into my forearm and I made a noise I would not have made in company if I had been thinking about company.

I cupped some and smelled it and there was nothing there. I touched some to my lips and waited, which was what I had been taught to do and what I had taught other people to do, and then I stopped waiting, because my mouth had been gone for the better part of an hour, and I put my whole face down into it and drank.

It was the best water I have ever had in my life. Sweet, and clean, and cold enough at the back of the throat to make the jaw ache, and it went down and kept going and I could feel it arriving in me. I drank until my teeth hurt with it and then I sat back on my heels with it running off my chin and down inside my collar, and for about four seconds I was entirely happy.

Then I started working.

Because a river was an argument, and the argument ran backwards. A watercourse that wide with that much pace on it had a catchment sitting behind it, and a catchment of the size that implied had to be collecting from somewhere, and somewhere there was rain coming down or snow lying and letting go, and between that place and this one there was a fall, and every metre of the fall was doing work. I looked upstream and there was the blue line of those mountains sitting precisely where they had sat all morning, and I thought: there is water up there. And if there was water up there then there was weather, and if there was weather then there was a system, and a system was a thing I could get my hands into.

"Karen, what are you doing?"

She had hold of my shoulder and had turned me off the water, and it came out of me a good deal sharper than I intended, because I was in the middle of something and she had put her hand on it.

"Listen to me." Her face had gone the way it went before a hearing. "I remember Luke telling me about a very specific dream. It was about the role that you and I would play in the new world."

I had a stone in my hand by then. I'd taken it out of the shallows while she was talking, without having decided to, the way I'd have taken one out of the creek at the bottom of our own paddock.

"Come on, Karen." I was turning it over between my fingers. "That was all just fantasy. All those times you and I talked about it, none of it was real."

And then I looked at what I was holding.

It was clean.

Every stone I had ever lifted out of running water had something on it. A film — biofilm, periphyton, algal slime, whatever name you cared to put on it — a slick brown-green skin that came away on the thumb and made every rock in every creek bed treacherous to stand on, and it was the bottom rung of the entire business, the first thing anywhere in a river that took light and turned it into something an animal could eat. The Derwent. The Florentine. Our own creek. A stock trough. A gutter after a wet week. There had never once been a bare one.

This one was bare stone. Wet, and cool, and as clean as something come out of a kiln. I ran my thumb across the face of it and it squeaked.

I put it back and took another from further out and that one was the same, so I turned it over, because the underside was where everything would be. Mayfly nymphs flattened down against the rock. Caddis in their little glued-together cases of sand and grit. Flatworms. The whole unlovely crawling foundation that the rest of a river gets built on top of. Karen had had me turning stones over since about the second year we knew each other and had never once needed to ask me twice.

There was nothing on the underside of it. Not a nymph. Not a case. Not an empty case. Not a shell, not a husk, not one dried-out fragment of anything that had ever been alive out there and then stopped being alive.

I stood up and went along the edge twenty or thirty metres with Karen behind me saying my name, and what I was looking for was the wrack line.

There had never been a bank anywhere I had walked in my life without a wrack line on it. Water came up and went down again and left a mark along the edge of everything it had been carrying — stick, bark, leaf, feather, the ribcage of a bird, somebody's fencing wire, a bottle, a bit of somebody's shed. I could read three separate floods off the bank of our own creek in an afternoon and tell you roughly which winter each of them had been.

The high-water mark was there. Plain as anything — a change in the way the dust sat and a darker banding across the rock underneath it, running along the bank as far as I could follow it in either direction. And there was not one thing lying along it. Not a twig. Because there was nothing upstream of me anywhere in that world with a twig on it to lose.

And then the last of it, which took me longest, because it was the thing I kept expecting to find and kept not finding.

That river was running through a sand desert and it was carrying nothing at all.

It should have been brown. Water moving at that pace across country made out of dust ought to have been taking a load of it — carried in suspension through the column, rolling along the bed, cutting into the outside of every bend it came to and dumping the spoil on the inside of the next one. It should have been the colour of milky tea and it should have been laying down bars I could have walked out onto. I got right down with my eye almost level with the surface, which was the only way to catch turbidity properly, and there was nothing in suspension whatever. I stirred the bottom with my fingers and the plume came up off it and was gone within a second, and behind it the water was as clean as it had been before I put my hand in.

Thirty years I had spent on water and ground and the argument between the two of them, and I sat down on the rock with my elbows on my knees and could not have told you the first thing about what I was looking at.

"Chris," Karen said. She had come down beside me. "Quiet yourself."

And I did, because I always did.

She had brought it home from somewhere about a dozen years back — a course, or a colleague, or one of the three books she always had going at once — and she had used it on me the first time in a hospital car park in the winter of a bad year, and it had worked, and after that it belonged to the two of us. Four in through the nose. Hold, while she counted it out. Eight out through the mouth, slow, until there was nothing left in me at all and my shoulders had come down off my ears. Her hand flat between my shoulder blades the whole time, so I could feel where the breath was meant to be going and could tell when it got there. We had done it in kitchens at three in the morning. In the car outside appointments. On the back step more times than either of us could have accounted for.

There were things that had got harder for the two of us over the years, for reasons that were nobody's doing and that neither of us had gone looking for, and somewhere in among all that we had lost a few of the ways two people have of getting hold of one another. This was one we had kept, and we had kept it on purpose. When Karen put her hand flat on my back and told me to quiet myself, I went. I had never once not gone.

So I shut my eyes and I breathed, and the noise of that impossible river came up and filled everything there was, and her hand was between my shoulder blades and warm through the shirt.

This is real, Chris. I am real.

It came in the way the others had come. Not through the ears. Sitting in with my own thinking, in the place where my own voice sits, and using my name.

I did not open my eyes, and I could not have said why. Everything in me ought to have got up off that rock and run, and instead I stayed where I was and kept breathing, four and hold and eight, with my wife's hand flat on my back.

"What does your mind show you?"

And then it started up behind my eyes, and it came from the bottom.

The ground first. It was always the ground first with me and had been since I was a boy. A face of it, cut clean the way I would have cut it for a pit, and it had a profile — dark crumbing topsoil forty or fifty deep, going down through a lighter horizon and down again to the parent material underneath, and every part of it structured, breaking along its own lines into peds when I put my hand against it, worm channels running away through the body of it and root hair inside the channels and a fine white bloom of fungus through the tilth. Wet the whole way through and holding onto it. Ground that had been getting made for a very long time by things that knew what they were doing.

Then up out of it. Grass, thick and standing and going over in a wind. Scrub coming through the grass. And then the trees — a canopy, a proper one, with the light coming down through it in pieces and moving about on the floor, and a wind going through the top of it, and the noise a wind makes in a canopy, which was a sound I had not heard since I walked out my own back door that morning and had not expected to hear again as long as I lived.

Birds. Birds all through it, half a dozen at once, calling over the top of one another.

Then it opened out and went wider, into country I could read at a single glance. Contour banks running along a slope with the fall taken out of them properly. A dam sitting where a dam ought to sit. Windbreaks planted across the prevailing and grown up enough to be doing their job. Fences, paddocks, a road with a camber on it and a table drain down either side. Terraces cut into the steep ground. Orchards with the rows on the contour. Somebody's beans up a frame. And people out on all of it, a great many of them, working.

"Forest, wildlife, a great farming community, living off the land," I said, and my voice did not manage any of it properly.

It was every argument I had ever lost. It was the thing I stood up in a room in 1994 and got told the evidence was thin on. It was the whole of my working life sitting there in front of me finished and standing and thirty years old, and I had not put one hour of labour into any of it.

My face was wet. I had not noticed it start.

You see the mountain?

Behind the lot of it, holding the sky up along the back of the whole picture. I had not looked at it until I was asked to and then there was nothing else in the world to look at.

Yes. It has six distinct peaks, like pillars thrust into the sky to keep it from falling.

Find it.

Why?

For Luke.

I don't understand.

He will. But he needs your help. His mind is too busy. Keep your mission secret. Secrecy will protect you. Luke will know what to do when you find it.

An engine turned over somewhere back beyond the tents — an actual engine, catching on the second go and revving once — and the whole of it went out of me at the same instant, the ground and the canopy and the birds and the six peaks, all of it, and I could not get one corner of it back.

I opened my eyes, and there was the river going past with nothing living in it, and the rock under me, and my wife's hand coming away off my back.

"I think you're right, Karen," I said.

She looked at me for a moment longer than she needed to.

"Shall we?"

I got up. My knees had gone to nothing from the kneeling and the walking, and there was river water still coming off me — out of two days of stubble along my jaw, off my scalp where I kept it near enough shaved, down the back of my neck and into a collar that was already wet through from the other side.

I had a wife who had spent years telling me about a man and his dreams, and had been right about them, and had just sat beside me on a rock and watched me shut my eyes for two minutes and come back up with my face wet. She had earned every word of it. All of it, and the rest besides. In nineteen years I had never once kept a thing from her that mattered, and I stood there on that bank knowing exactly what I was about to do, and did it.

She took my hand on the way up. The left one, with the sleeve buttoned down over the wrist, and I let her have it, and I told her nothing at all.