On the phone, a couple who believed their marriage to be a force of morality upon the world told me that she had given birth to their child. Their conversation devolved into an argument with each other over whether people like them moving from cities to small towns was good or bad. I became the jury to whom they argued their cases. He thought that the geographic dispersal of young urban professionals could only be a good thing, as cities were vulnerable overconcentrations of wealth. Moreorver, the exurbanization of the millennial WFH class would combat rural “brain drain.” As I was their witness, she argued that the effect on small towns would be like the effect of tech workers on San Francisco: Wealthy outsiders reorganize the local economy into one that serves them, and doesn’t create the conditions for the people that serve them to become them. Sometimes, the only way well-informed bourgeois liberals will tell you how they feel is in how pessimistic they are about upward mobility. I took her side of the argument to mean that the division of labor in their marriage wasn’t looking good to her, post-baby. In his ideal society (he always argued prescriptively), any “hard working” individual could acheive what they wanted. Inequality was okay if it could be swapped, in a limited and specific way. He sometimes fed their daughter formula, and when he did, the baby slept twice as much.
She dreamt that the baby was replaced by a robot imposter; the dream was discovering this by becoming suspicious of the baby’s body. She watched the baby move and had questions. The day before, I had ascribed motives to the flailings of the baby’s arms, and she had said “it’s so hard not to project.” She kept saying that the baby only smiles for her father. What was he doing that she wasn’t?
On the river, crimson rose petals were drifting. Some were floating, others had deposited in shallow crevices in the rock near the water. Further upstream, there was a pile of them on the shore, like someone had really wanted to know, and really wanted not to know, if she was loved. The river was a slippery venue for amorousness. A couple set out to swim from the narrowest sliver of shore, the only way down or up the river unless you swam, but could not. “It’s so much colder than last year!” the woman yelled to me in explanation of having not entered the water, and later on, repeated the same thing to the man who was also knee-deep in the water. “There’s no going back in,” he said, before he had yet gone in. “If I’m coming out, I’m coming out.” Earlier, when another group was leaving, and they were arriving, she said “it’s a nude beach, to be honest, I’m only wearing this thing for your benefit.” As I walked by them, she told me to beware of the wasps that she was clinging to him in fear of. Two weeks before this, I had gotten up from my chair and run around the truck to evade what seemed to me an unnaturally large wasp circumnavigating my brother and I’s camp. It had kept coming slowly up to me, a foot or two away, and buzzing. I had thought it looked like it was looking for something, something that I upon first inspection had appeared to be. I had screamed and my brother had mocked me, and now I felt how he had seemed to.
When I came back, the couple was sitting in the middle of the three-foot-wide path between the cliff and the water, their faces three inches apart, looking into each other’s eyes, their lips parted, hovering. I stopped for a second, but discovered that I was staring at them. I could’ve turned around, but in the confusion of the moment I probably resented them, and I walked the only way possible other than turning around: directly towards them. (I will keep insisting there was no other way.) When they finally registered my footsteps, I thought about saying “sorry,” but, again, that probably got thrown out due to said resentment. He glowered, and she told me that she just couldn’t with the water, it was just too cold.
The next day, the one who dreamt her baby was a robot asked me if the river was low. “I wouldn’t know,” I said, “I’ve only been here once before, and I can’t remember.” “Yeah,” she said, “but you can see the high water lines.” I hadn’t noticed those, but I had noticed how far above the river that the rock had obviously been worn down and polished by water. And I recalled seeing a photo of a bridge on the river during a flood, with what looked like the sea roiling beneath it. The petals, even if they hadn’t been left on the water’s edge, would’ve been carried away eventually.
