Søren AasSwimming Downstream
A False Detectives Story
The parish road ran straight as a moral absolute into nothing. On either side, the land gave up — refinery towers in the middle distance breathing orange into a sky the colour of old bone, their flames permanent and indifferent as stars. Between the road and the towers, marsh grass bent in petrochemical wind. A heron stood in a drainage ditch like it was waiting for something it knew wasn't coming.
Corrosive drove. He always drove. Twoshoes had stopped arguing about it sometime in the second year.
"You ever think about how a river doesn't know it's a river," Corrosive said. Not a question.
Twoshoes looked out the window. A dead nutria on the shoulder. A billboard for a personal injury lawyer, sun-bleached to near illegibility. "I think about lunch," Twoshoes said. "I think about my daughters. Normal things."
"Everything you think you understand —" Corrosive touched the wheel lightly, two fingers, like he was taking its pulse "— you understood it a moment ago. The actual thing is already past you. Already moved on. You're always living slightly downstream of your own life."
"That's a great comfort, Corrosive. Thank you."
The refinery complex slid by. Chain link and sodium light and pipes running everywhere with the logic of something that had grown rather than been built. A man in a hard hat stood outside a fence doing nothing, watching them pass with no particular expression.
"That man there," Corrosive said.
"What about him."
"He goes home tonight. Maybe there's a woman. Maybe she says something, does something — just a small thing, the way she sets something down on a table, the way she doesn't quite look at him — and something shifts. Something he can't name."
"Or maybe he watches television and goes to sleep," Twoshoes said.
"Maybe. But the shift happened anyway. Those small things — they're not small. They're the whole thing. People die by increments so slow they call it living."
Twoshoes turned from the window. "We're going to look at a dead girl, Corrosive. Can we just — can we hold off on the philosophy until after."
Corrosive said nothing for a while. The road offered nothing back — no curve, no elevation, no relief. Just the flat industrial forever of a landscape that had been used for something and left.
"The ones who do this," he said finally, quieter now, "they think they're taking something. A life, a light, whatever they tell themselves. But they're not taking anything. They're just — interrupting. The current keeps moving. The river doesn't notice."
"You think that's supposed to make it better or worse."
"I think it just is."
Twoshoes rubbed his face with both hands. Fourteen months with this man and he still couldn't tell if Corrosive believed any of it or if believing was simply something he'd moved past, the way you move past a landmark on a road you've driven too many times.
"There," Corrosive said.
Twoshoes looked up. Three patrol cars in the marsh grass, lights turning silently. Yellow tape. The particular stillness of a place that has just had its nature changed permanently.
Corrosive pulled over and sat for a moment before getting out, looking at the scene through the glass with something that wasn't detachment exactly. More like recognition.
"You know what the worst part is," he said.
"Don't."
"No coincidences. Not one. Everything that led here led here on purpose. The whole chain of it — every small death that came alive to make this one."
He got out. The petrochemical wind moved through the marsh grass in long slow waves, the way water moves, the way everything moves — downstream, downstream, always downstream, whether you're watching or not.
Twoshoes got out too. He put on his hat against the flat white sky.
He'd stopped trying to argue with Corrosive about the nature of things. Some currents you just swim in.