The Image of the Engine That Stops
By Josh Hanson
As tho all travels
Ended untold, all embarkations
Foundered.
-George Oppen
The child was dead: cold and heavy in the mother’s arms with that strange weight that the dead take on, like the body had shifted suddenly into liquid. A small container of birdlike bones and fluids that had once been animated by some electric spark, but now that spark was gone, and the fluids were all searching for the lowest point.
The lowest point.
This could be it, he supposed. The mother was done weeping. She just stared out over the side of the little boat, into the dark water, glassy eyed, mist-shrouded, closed off. He thought briefly of how the two figures formed a surreal pietà: mother and child seated at the boat’s prow, fog above the water, the sun lost in cloud behind them, the water stretching out interminably beyond.
But there was no one to paint that picture. No sculptor to capture this particular misery. It would never be captured as an object of any kind. Art presumed a viewer. Even words presumed a listener. A reader. Some other. Who would his interlocutor be? The mother? What pleasure might she be expected to find in his objectification of her sorrow?
He sat at the stern, his hand on the rudder, which did nothing. The motor had stopped the day before. Sputtered and coughed and simply stopped. A whining roar punctuated by a heavy silence. That was almost music, wasn’t it? A cold dynamic.
There was sound, of course, the creak of the boat and the slow sloshing of the waves against the hull.
He remembered a time when he was a younger man, and he would walk the same trail every morning, and there was a stretch of trail—maybe two hundred yards—that lay between two footbridges. Mostly unremarkable, with a thin creek trickling on one side that gave off a faint sulfurous smell, and cow fields on the other side, stretching away into the distance toward the far mountains. He’d thought there was something magical in that stretch of ground. The space between two bridges. A caesura. A place in which he was suddenly thrown back on himself, in which he felt genuinely connected to the ground, part and parcel of a world too large to comprehend. He’d always wanted to find the word for that feeling, but he didn’t know if it was to be found in philosophy or art or music. Those nameless feelings were always worth noticing.
Almost everything was nameless now, with just the two of them, and the mother’s dead child, and the sound of the waves. Nothing to say, really. What good were words this far from shore? He found himself wishing for the whine of the engine, just to give the silence some sense of scale, some contrasting color, something to make it seem meaningful.
He chuckled into his hand. Amused at his sudden concern with meaning and also ashamed at his laughter, however dark. The mother didn’t notice. Somehow he’d thought the end of things actually bestowed meaning, highlighted it, offered essential understandings about the world. He should be overcome by the sheer weight of meanings, here at the very end.
Instead there was the dead child, limp and oddly heavy, clutched in its mother’s arms. No meaning to be wrestled from that. Meaning didn’t reside at any destination, certainly not this one. It was the story you told to keep you moving forward. Meaning was just the space between two bridges. A feeling without a name. A shadow in the fog you continually mistook for another boat.
The mother shifted at the front of the boat, and he could almost hear her joints crack as she unlimbered herself. She lifted the child’s inert weight out over the side of the boat, and it slid from her hands silently, not even making ripples in the water. It just sank away. Vanished. Like the sound of the engine. So painfully present and then gone.
He wanted to say something. A prayer. Some words. Perhaps a song. But what could he say? Prayer necessitated a belief in some listener, if not divine, at least present. Or it was perhaps a way of making one’s thoughts concrete, one’s wishes, one’s sins.
But there was nothing much to think now. Certainly nothing to wish for, with the child dead. That tiny emblem of some barely imaginable future. Gone. And now, finally, there were no sins anymore.
Perhaps if he sang out, knowing the futility, knowing the absolute meaninglessness of the act, that would be a kind of heroic gesture?
No. If there was to be some emblem for the moment, let it be this: the image of the stopped engine, the lack of its sound, the aimless drift of the boat through the fog, the woman, no longer even a mother, her child gone, and no one even to see. No observer. Just a man thinking about the lack of a sound, lost on a wide space between two bridges. Adrift.
Josh Hanson lives in northern Wyoming with his family, where he teaches English, writes, and makes up little songs. He is a graduate of the University of Montana MFA program.