Philosophy Made Simple by Robert Hellenga Page B

loved to swim here. She loved to swim at night. The girls too. Rudy took off his shoes and shirt and pants and went downthe bank. The chaparral was tough, tangled and thorny, but he managed to squeeze between two skeleton bushes and ease himself carefully into the cool water, water that had traveled all the way from the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. He was still holding his wineglass. “If J was
a headlight,”
he sang, softly, “
on some northbound train, Yd shine my light, on cool Colorado Springs.”
He tossed the rest of the wine into the river and set the glass down on the bank. The drop-off was less than two feet. He walked out toward the main channel till he could feel the current, stronger than he’d expected, tugging at him. He started to turn around, but an inner voice — not the voice he’d heard earlier, the voice of reason, but a different voice — encouraged him to let go, and he did let go, leaned backward till he was floating. He could steer himself with his hands, and by raising his head from time to time — he was floating feetfirst — he could see where he was going, but he didn’t care where he was going, and most of the time he looked up at the sky On his left the North Star was a little lower than it was at home, and he couldn’t locate Cassiopeia, which must have dipped below the horizon. The mesquite trees on the bank behind him were black shadows twisting in the moonlight. A barn owl coasted overhead. Silent. Something stirred in the brush, a bobcat or a peccary or a night heron. Mosquitoes hummed and bit his arms and neck, but the humming and biting didn’t bother him. Had it been like this for Helen at the end? Being bitten by mosquitoes as you floated down a river? Is this what she’d wanted to tell him?
     But she hadn’t wanted anyone to listen to the tapes she’d recorded, not while she was still alive.
    It took him half an hour to reach the little mission chapel. From his position on his back in the river he could see just the tip of the steeple, but for the most part he gazed upward at theconstellations. Rudy knew his constellations, because each one of his daughters had done a science project on them and they’d spent hours lying on their backs in the middle of the Edgar Lee Masters campus looking up at the sky. As the river bent to the south, he could see Virgo and Centaurus coming into view. At first they reminded him of true beauty, and he was overwhelmed.
     He knew that this heart-piercing ache, however painful, was the central experience of his life and that he would have to come to terms with it. No one — not Aristotle, not Epicurus, not Siva Singh — would ever convince him otherwise. But then it occurred to him that Virgo and Centaurus were just as arbitrary as the rudimentary classification system he’d used for his books —
     Helen’s books. There were a lot of stars left out of the constellations, and nothing to stop you from drawing the lines in different ways to create different pictures. He wanted to lift his wings and fly, but he didn’t have the power. He could only let the river carry him along.
    In another half hour he reached Pepe’s tavern, just before An-zalduas Park. He could hear the noise of drunken laughter before he could see the lights.
Aristotle’s appetitive men,
he thought.
Appetitive women too, Plato’s beasts, butting each other and feeding at a trough.
He remained quiet, afraid that someone might take a potshot at him if he made any noise. He rounded a bend, floated past the tables and lights on a small dock that stuck out into the river. The lights disappeared; the sounds of laughter grew fainter.
    If he’d done nothing to stop himself, would he have floated all the way to the international bridge at Hidalgo? Or all the way to Brownsville and out into the Gulf? Probably not, but he didn’t find out because he started to experience pains in his chest, as if someone had placed a weight on it and was twisting his left arm at the same