But not as I love mine. I am nothing like his father in temperament and neither is he. I am in my son and my son is in me. I bleed by any blade stropped in a room where he dwells. Cold wind near him blows my skin like the membrane enclosing peeled onion or egg: the cloudy layer silken under the carapace.

If he perishes I will with joy abandon my own so-called life: I’ll clench and break beyond this wooden agony into freedom. So summon my son to death, if is your plan for him, but know that in doing so you condemn his mother to the same bliss.

My mother was wrong about the bliss of dying. A lot of people are. People think death is an end, a comforting oblivion, and I wish with all my being that it were.

—

ALONG THE RIVER COMES A WOMAN practicing a single line from a Chinese opera over and over. Her ruffle-eared spaniel snuffs up to me, its paper-thin tongue quivery and sunlit. I bend to pat it and its joyful drool soaks my pant leg. As they walk off I spy a different woman approach with a yellow retriever.

The yellow dog fixes her brown eyes on me, and I recognize her. She is not wearing her service dog vest but instead has on a blue collar with pink owls on it.

“Excuse me,” I say. “But is that not Harold’s dog? Is this not Veronica?”

The woman stops to let me and the dog reacquaint ourselves. Veronica is now a civilian, whereas I have put on my soldier’s coat.

“I told Harold he’d have to find someone else to walk her after next week,” says the woman. “If she was shorthaired I wouldn’t mind. If she was a Weimaraner or a coonhound…I sweep up enough goddamn hair at my salon—yours is nice though, if you’d brush it—ever think of selling it?” She hands me her business card: Sylvie Lauzier, stylist. “I’d give you forty or forty-five for it.”

“Why can’t Harold walk Veronica?”

“Psh—Harold!”

“Is Harold…has there…”

“Haven’t you seen him on the news?”

“Where is he?”

“Bavette de boeuf’s on sale at IGA,” she says. “I gotta run.” And as she hurries off, she flings a few indecipherable words about Harold, words that sail past me and fall into the ever-listening river.

—

I SIT BY THE WATER on a cushion of flattened reeds. The river chants its choppy flopping sounds as a tanker drifts past and sends ripples.

This part of the Saint Lawrence is a plashing-spot for gulls and the odd goose or heron making its way to Parc des Rapides. When I ask it things I once asked its selfsame body farther down, between Point-Levis and Quebec’s fortress, I find today’s river is a mute sibling of that talkative one of old.

Why, river, are you silent?