Chris Offutt: The Same River Twice: A Memoir

“Because I’m alive.”

“So am I, Jahi.”

“Without me, you weren’t. You were young, dumb, and full of come. Now you’re just young.”

“I’m glad you don’t think I’m dumb anymore.”

“Oh you are, Chris. I made you smart enough to know you are, that’s all. Write that in your little notebook.”

The journal was my combat arena, the final refuge of privacy in a city of eight million. Each day I saw perhaps two thousand different faces, an enjoyable fact until I realized that my face was one of the two thousand each of them saw too. My math collapsed from the exponential strain. Jahi wasn’t in my journal. Those pages were filled with me. Some of the pages held my full name and place of birth on every line to remind me that I lived.

“Write down everything I say,” she said. “Make me live forever.”

“Come on, Jahi. I don’t even write good letters.”

“You don’t know it but you will. You’ll reach a point where you have no choice.”

“Yeah, and I can be president too.”

“You can do anything you want. You’re a white American man.”

“Right.”

“And I’m a nigger bitch who sleeps with Whitey.”

“Goddamn it, Jahi!”

“See,” she muttered through a smile. “I knew I could get to you.”

I stomped the floor. “I don’t care what you pull on the street. Go naked! Start trouble! You’re the only friend I’ve got, remember. There’s maybe fifty people who know me at home. Everybody in Brooklyn knows you, and half of Manhattan. I’m the nobody, not you!”

“Not forever.” Her voice dulled to a monotone, “I traveled your dreams.”

She stiffened to catatonia, eyes glazed, her fingers twined in her lap. She tensed her jaw to stop the chattering of her teeth.

“You will make gold from, lead, flowers from ash. Cut the scabs and stab them. Cut the scabs—”

“Stop it, Jahi.”

I considered slapping her, but had never hit a female and wasn’t sure if it was different from hitting a man. Her droning halted before I found out. Jahi slid from the couch to the floor, limbs pliant as rope. The pulse in her neck throbbed very fast. She opened her eyes and rubbed her face with the back of her fists, looking around as if lost.

“Has that happened before?” I said.

“Many times,” she said. “You never asked about my family.”

“So what. You didn’t ask about mine.”

She moved across the floor to my feet, gently stroking my leg. Her eyes were very old. I noticed gray in her hair.

“I didn’t know my father,” she said. “My mother was an Obeah woman from the mountains. She died before I learned to control what she taught. I went to Kingston and hustled money. I came to Brooklyn when I was sixteen, too old for work down there. I can’t help what I am.”

“What?”

“They said I was a witch bastard whore in Jamaica. Here they just say I’m crazy.”

She sighed and tipped her face to mine.

“I feel the new gray hair,” she said. “Pluck it.”

I obeyed. She flicked it with her fingers and the hair whipped, taut as wire.

“Strong,” she muttered. “I see strong tonight.”

She leaned against my legs and closed her eyes. Through the window and over the tenement roofs, the full moon gleamed like the top of a skull. No doubt she was a tad nutty, but I hadn’t met anyone in the city who wasn’t. New York appeared to be a voluntary asylum where all the cranks and sociopaths escaped from their small towns; nobody I knew had been born and raised there. Half the population was crazy and the rest were therapists.

The moon disappeared into the neon glare. Jahi faded into sleep. I moved to the couch and opened my journal. It had begun as proof of my identity, but under Jahi’s onslaught, it began a transformation as I tentatively set my goal to be an actual writer. The standard rule was to write what you know, but I did not believe I knew anything worthwhile. The only thing I could write with any confidence was a considered record of daily events.

Jahi found me on the couch, fully clothed. She was giddy with a plan to ride horses the following Saturday. When the unicorn came for her, she wanted to be ready. I bragged outrageously at my ability to ride. After two months of tagging behind her in the city, I was eager for a familiar undertaking.

We rode the train to Prospect Park. Jahi wore a pair of brand-new jodhpurs given to her by her sugar daddy, a phrase I didn’t understand. We found a bunch of kids on ancient mares with cracked saddles. The guy in charge was a weight lifter named Tony, dressed in boots, Stetson, and fringed shirt. When I asked where he was from, he said, “Roun’ de co’nuh.”

Tony led his motley posse along a dirt path through the park. The horses walked a lazy single file. Half an hour later they still strolled with heads down, performing their function like machines. I was embarrassed for the animals, domesticated to disgrace.

Tony left the path for a wide paved road that curved around a pond. The horses began a brief trot. Following instinct, I snapped the reins across the horse’s neck and hunkered down. A gallop was much easier to ride. The old mare lifted her head and, for the first time since retiring to Brooklyn, heaved into a run. Her hooves sounded odd pounding the tar. I guided her to the outside and around the others. Jahi whooped behind me.

Tony shouted for me to stop, his face red and snarling, finally looking as if he was from the neighborhood instead of Montana. I floated above the pavement, well seated and moving with the mare’s rhythm, I looked for Jahi and saw a horse following at full speed. Someone screamed. I reined in and a horse shot past me, its rider slowly tilting sideways like a centaur splitting at the seam. The horse swerved toward the edge of the road. The rider slid from the saddle. His head slammed against a streetlight, spinning his body in a pinwheel, slinging blood that spattered the street.

A few hundred people formed a tight circle around the kid. Teenage boys dared each other to step in the blood. An ambulance arrived. Tony was mad and wanted to fight but Jahi pulled me away, screaming that she’d sue. She held very tightly to my arm, pushing her groin against my leg. Her palms were hot.

We took a cab to her apartment. She hurried upstairs and when I walked in, she was waiting, bent over the back of the couch with the jodhpurs at her ankles.

“Please, Chris,” begged her disembodied voice.

Mechanically I unbuckled my pants. As I lowered them, I heard again the sound of the boy’s head hitting the steel pole, like a boot dropped into a fifty-gallon drum. Swallowing bile, I turned and ran down the steps. The public sacrifice had been too great, too unexpected. I was unable to merge with the priestess for recovery of life.

I wandered Flatbush in a muddled stupor. The day’s event unfurled in my head at varying speeds. I watched the scene from above in slow motion, seeing myself on a tiny horse. I became the kid sliding for miles from the saddle, waiting for impact. I became Tony, drop-jawed and aghast, primed for a fight. I was the horse; I was Jahi; I was the bored medic. I was anyone but myself.

I missed work for a week, staying in bed like a hog wrapped in the warm, wet mud of misery. When I finally went to the warehouse, Jahi called, petulant and forgiving. I hung up on her laughter and never saw her again.

A week later, on my twentieth birthday, I joined some guys playing football in Riverside Park. Quick and lean with good hands, I made a spectacular catch on a thirty-yard pass. The ball was spiraling high, thrown too hard and over my head. I leaped, twisting in the air to snag it from the sky, seeing at my zenith the New Jersey smokestacks reflected in the river’s glare. My left foot landed one way while my momentum carried me the other. A tackier smashed me a third direction altogether.