First let’s talk about rivers. They dragged a man’s body from one yesterday. The East River. And it’s always struck me as appropriate, really, for men to die in rivers. It’s the metaphorical quality of the thing. Life is a river, etcetera. I know people say time’s a river too. But they’re wrong. For the record: more like an ocean. When they pull a man’s body from a river, they remove him from a certain spot, just like he’s been removed from life at a certain spot. See the parallel? Sure you do. When a man takes his own life in a river, it’s even more appropriate. Strikes me that men like this possess an understanding. The other options have no narrative weight. Hanging from the end of a rope. Slumped over in a the seat of a running car. Brains blown out. Crossed out by a handful of pills. No yarn to spin.

The man they pulled out of the river yesterday had been there a while. He’d taken precautions. Stones in the pocket. Something of that sort. His overcoat was gray, which is the only proper attire for a river suicide. I applaud this man’s attention to detail. He’d been missing two months, which is the same as sixty days. Fourteen hundred and forty hours. Imagine one of those hours. If you’re the man, you are engaged in a struggle between buoyancy and gravity. The water, heavier than you are, wants to let you rise. In a sense, it wants to expel you from its midst, vomit you up. You are an intruder, a foreign body. Gravity, though, doing what it does to you and your gray overcoat and the stones in your pocket. It’s determined to keep you down. Moored to the riverbed. You are as if sleeping there.

If you are the man’s family; his wife or daughter, an hour is a different matter. Where is he? On the street, at work, on the bus, at home. You see the back of a man’s head and rush to see the front. You hear a voice ordering coffee. And, yes, he drank coffee too. Spinning and palpitating through the minutes of that hour. You and I rub against each other like tectonic plates at a fault line. There’s nothing river-like about your life. By throwing himself into the life-like river, your husband or dad has frozen your river-like life. Temporarily. I am capable, after all, of healing all wounds.

You couldn’t be blamed for supposing that, of all my qualities, this would be the one I’m proudest of. This healing. But no. Healing’s an unintended consequence, a by-product. My greatest pride is reserved for my diluvian character. Again, more oceanic than river-like. It’s life that’s like a river (or a beanstalk). This confusion is widespread. I met a Danish philosopher once who told me: do not all agree – both ecclesiastical and secular speakers, both poets and prose writers, both skippers and undertakers, both heroes and cowards – do they not all agree that life is a stream? Like water, I am patient; have all the time in the world. I can wear down stone, sluice between the tightly-closed fingers of a hand, wash away the blemishes of moments. (Moments being merely parasites.) I stop everything from happening all at once. My overlapping eddies, curl around to disavow what’s left behind. There will come a time – if you are the wife or the daughter of the man from the river – when you will forget the fact that he was returned wearing only one shoe. The pain of that song will subside. He was chewing gum at the time. You’ll never know that.

He sat on a bench a while. He read the paper. The Times, coincidentally. He looked at the river a while, over the top of the paper, still held aloft in his hands. There was a story about African famine. But he didn’t see it. He hadn’t seen stories about African famine for years. From the Manhattan side of the East River, one sees Brooklyn and Roosevelt Island and a bit of Queens. One can look up into the sky, limitless in theory. The river is bordered on both sides and moves between them. Even in January one can’t help but wonder what it feels like. What it tastes like. Though one must first take notice. The man they pulled from the river was a noticer. That, above all else, was what defined him. Others, less observant than he, noticed that he noticed. He was, in this sense, their representative in the world of noticing. Like an elected official. A brown shoelace in a black shoe. And so on. At home, he could be forgiven for not noticing. Marigolds in the vase today. He’d no idea she was fond of marigolds. And so on.

When I say sat on the bench a while; looked at the river a while. I’m taking a leap of faith. "A while" is ambiguous; immune to sense. How long was he there? How many stuttering jerks of the arms of a clock? The reason I’m telling you about this man – as opposed to another – is that I sensed that he understood "a while", which, after all, is the same as understanding eternity. That’s not to say he accepted eternity. No. But he had a hunch. More than a hunch, really. An intuition. He liked the joke about eternity being very long, especially at the end. Would it be helpful if I told you that his mother also took her own life? He was a younger man at the time, his immunities not yet complete. Porous. From then on, he moves through each day like stepping through a gauzy doorway; not hard and squared at its edges, but fleshy and aqueous, like seaweed in a current-lipped shoal. This kind of movement puts a man in touch with eternity; with "a while", with absence. In this regard we were, so to speak, simpatico. I, too, am in touch with eternity, "a while", with absence. Everywhere and always. Nowhere and never.

So I took an interest in this man. He sat there on the bench, looking at the river. I knew, of course, I knew what would happen next. Any student of narrative, any keen observer of human nature, would have known. This man’s while had merged with his eternity. Like I said, simpatico. Once before, in the late 80s, I remember, I had taken notice of him. He was doing interesting work. He was in the theater. Kind of. I remember speaking of him to the girl at the front desk, Stacy Godlesky. I was recounting a performance I’d seen. I knew his name then and said it, referring to him. I said his name a number of times, recounting the performance, offering opinions. I kept saying his name. Then I left. I exited. I turned north on West Broadway. And there he was. As if I’d conjured him. His name, something of a charm. (I won’t use it here.) I passed right over him. He moved right through me. Oblivious. I’ve always been amazed by people moving through me. Suggestible creatures. Susceptible to oblivion. Immune.

He sat on the bench. He read the paper. He was still in pain. His hip. His head. A car accident in Ireland. He’d gone to "the land of Beckett" to celebrate the passage of time. Oblivion stripped bare. Sixty years, the mark. A celebration of sixty years passed? Didn’t sound like his idea of fun. A rite of passage. Truly inappropriate for a man who wished to freeze such passage, who wanted nothing more than to suspend himself like a jot of flotsam in ice. This gift, of course, is permanently out of stock. So, instead, they went to Ireland. The old country, he mused. Two years later, on a bench, with a newspaper. Passed like the slake of drying paint. He complained about the metal in his hip. Titanium. He wondered about Irish depression. Like fish in water, he said. He, himself, was amphibious. In and out of it. When out, worried about going back in. When in, worried about never coming out. Not a fair fight. A fix. The New York State Boxing Commission ought to investigate.

What this man didn’t realize – and truth be told, I’d grown rather fond of him – is that this sixty which caused him such distress, this death of his which he considered external, yet inevitable, was, in fact, internal. The very fact that he could call it his death was foretold by the thing he called his life. Or, just as accurately, the life was foretold by the death. Things without death (pebbles, soap, light) are things without life. Moments are meaningful in relation to previous moments and moments-yet-to-come. You couldn’t even call them moments if you hadn’t other moments to compare them. These other moments, too, are only moments in distinction. That’s why I call them parasites. They ride my back, suck my oceanic blood. As if my blood were their blood. In the end it is. This man, in this moment: on the bench, reading the paper, is distressed. These other moments distress him. Simpatico. Moments past and moments yet-to-come. I tried to tell him. I tried to whisper in his ear. To ignore the moments, to sink into my tides. Even to reverse this osmosis, to absorb me. Drink me in. Absorb me in his pores. The tug boat sounded its horn and all was lost. The noticer was busy noticing and all my well-intentioned nuzzling couldn’t find a purchase. He gathered his gray coat around him. He re-tied his shoes. Both of them. And he got up from the bench. And he walked north along the river past the heliport.

New York had always been his home and he knew, that when they called it New Amsterdam, the winter was a different city. The city was a port then, first and foremost. Shipping ruled the day. Ice, taking the rivers by storm, turned the flow of life solid. On the Hudson, ice traveled from the north, down past West Point, below the Tappan Zee, skimming the palisades to where the river split. There, at the southern tip of the Bronx, the Hudson births the East River and severs Manhattan Island from the mainland. The violence is marked by a swirling, a sucking, a devastating force. This whirlpool, known to the Dutch as the Spuyten Duyvil. The man was miles from it. And besides, it had been dredged a century before. There was no cause for alarm. Still, he couldn’t help but think of it. The ice came no farther south than that. The skaters made the trip from Riverdale to Jersey. Not from Morningside Heights. Not from Washington Heights. The Dutch boys played a form of hockey. Intrepid traders deployed their wares on sleighs from bank to bank. Most, however, resigned themselves to furlough. The river, such as it is, came to a stop. Life, river-like, followed suit. Winter though, driven by deeper forces, more intractable desires, eventually turned to Spring. Some liked to forget me. But I was never out of earshot. Spitting distance.

His wasn’t the only ear I’ve ever whispered in. Many have taken my words as gospel. Many more, though, haven’t given me the time of day. In one ear and out the other. Newspapers tucked under arms. Hot sandwiches steaming the insides of brown paper bags. Where the hell are those keys? In every head there’s a synapse with my name on it. I try to make my mark. The world’s a hard, hard place. He was different though. I’d grown fond of him. Already said that. Maybe it was the incident on West Broadway. Here was a man who’d come to me, instead of me having to root him out, hide’n’seek-style. I said his name a few times and there he was, like a fish on a line.

There on that bench. I tried. I whispered, I extolled. I am not without my charms. When a man’s mind is made up, though. He had things on his mind. The next project. Inspiration. Enthusiasm. Not exactly on his mind. Not exactly. If they had been on his mind, perhaps he’d have heard me shushing my slight refrain. Their not being on his mind was what was on his mind. The something that preoccupied him was nothing, an empty hat, echoes in the canyon. Drowning out my voice on the wind.

It is the only truth that matters. The truth is that I’m always whispering. I whisper all the words to see which ones work. At some point I whisper the word "now". You flinch, never sure you’ve heard it. By then it’s too late. I return with dogged perseverance, a kind of alacrity. Somehow, always unexpected. In the end, the truth peels the future from the past like the skin of an orange. This is the answer to the question. What is it like to die? When you need to know, you’ll know.