Tobias once learned how to fall down a flight of stairs for a production of Noises Off. Over two months he repeated a choreographed sequence of tumbles down a plyboard baserail, fourteen steps, second floor landing, continuing to the final baluster. Week before showtime his director gathered the cast so Tobias could fall for them.

“Forget everything,” the director said, standing behind Tobias, and Tobias threw himself down. 

Tobias was trying to convey this experience to his older brother as they paddled a canoe down Wampus River. The river was lined by beech trees, which bore paper-thin leaves in the fall, but were singed with the black film of a nematode infestation. 

The entire day, too, felt singed with the black film of a nematode infestation, and the brothers sat stiffly in their canoe. Occasionally Tobias surrendered to a coughing fit, then paused to dab his mouth with a crumpled receipt from his pocket.

Tobias wanted to paddle to a small inlet for his birthday, where the two brothers, as boys, used to drink Coors Banquets and burn ants with magnifying glasses. But he had additional plans for their trip. Adam had been stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a promissory note scheme, and Tobias worried that Adam was waltzing everyone into destruction, primarily his wife and two daughters, but also himself, by virtue of Tobias’ knowing about it and being his brother. 

Tobias broached the subject in the canoe, where Adam had nowhere else to go, and this “falling down the stairs” was what Tobias encouraged Adam to do. “The only way to do it is to ‘forget everything,’” he said, feeling privately self-conscious about quoting his director. “Forget the temporary danger, the wood, the pain, the mental guardrails—tell the truth and turn yourself in.” Adam didn’t understand the metaphor, or whatever it was.

“The wood?” Adam asked.

“It always comes out, anyhow,” Tobias said, trying not to sound threatening, despite wanting to sound threatening. Tobias believed that every single lie distorted and decayed the world, and that years of accumulated deception were expressed concretely through wars and natural disasters. He tried to communicate this only obliquely so that his brother wouldn’t freeze him out. “Adam,” he said.

 Magnificent spruces, almost pink, towered inland, and a set of deer peeked out over the rocks. They paddled effortfully. What did Tobias know anyway, Adam thought, Tobias has been single for ten years and has spent two months throwing himself down a staircase. Adam reached into a bag that his wife had packed for them, and cut a piece of duck prosciutto with a neon-blue switchblade. His life felt preserved within a lovely clear gelatin. 

“What about sacrifice?” Tobias asked, trying a different approach. Something more logical, noble, traditional. Adam, after all, was a historian, and was always lecturing about how sacrifice had been the linchpin of unity in the ancient world. A white crane took off at the river’s edge, and the scent of a baking peach pie from a riverside house wafted over them. 

“I’m making a sacrifice,” Adam said. “I’m sacrificing everything for my family, potentially my own freedom.” He dragged his hand against the river’s surface. Tobias looked simply upon the water, then back at his brother. 

Rivers downed boats and drowned men; but they were also a source of life. It was as if the two of them hovered above a thin threshold between the natural and supernatural worlds, and it was Tobias’s mission to get his brother to draw out whatever needed to be brought up to the surface. The brothers continued down the river silently. Leaves shimmered down the sky.

“You’re a stage actor,” Adam continued, “you lie all the time.”

“That’s in service of something much greater,” said Tobias.

“I’d say the same for myself,” said Adam. His throat cinched. He loved his daughters, and the life he was now able to provide for them through his promissory note scheme… Steiner school, fencing, coding classes, visits to the coast, where they bought a restored English Cottage with a farmers sink. 

It was an accident that Tobias knew anything about the scheme in the first place—a result of Adam’s drunken gallantry, mixed with a misguided desire for his brother’s approval. “You do what exactly?” Tobias had said, confused and alarmed, and Adam explained every slight detail. 

Uncomfortable in the boat, and with his brother’s moral preening, Adam asked Tobias to paddle them back to shore. Tobias apologized. Adam leaned against a propped pillow in the canoe. His muscles pushed back the edges of his t-shirt.

“Rivers downed boats and drowned men; but they were also a source of life. It was as if the two of them hovered above a thin threshold between the natural and supernatural worlds, and it was Tobias’s mission to get his brother to draw out whatever needed to be brought up to the surface.”

The way back took longer than it should have. It was beginning to get dark. Tobias occasionally looked back at Adam’s face but it appeared frozen to one expression, like a Tibetan war mask. Harder and harder to paddle, the canoe seemed to be resisting forward motion. The breeze halted, and the riverside felt glassy.

“Do you think we’ve caught on something?” Tobias asked fraily into the dusk. The resistance was now unavoidable. Perhaps they had grounded. He no longer felt confined to the canoe, but fused with the night. The lack of light made everything feel caught in black ice. 

Tobias reached his thin arm along and under the side of the canoe, until he felt a startling movement against the back of his hand. He shouted, withdrawing his arm, as Adam remained still, looking forward into the dark. 

Tobias took his phone out and turned on the flashlight. He peered into the lightbeam which brightened a patch of silty water, clouding the bottom of the river. He thought he saw a stone dancing in the water’s refractions, or a slow-moving cannon ball, until the shape floated closer and closer to the surface and he recognized the large, shifting head of an enormous fish. It was almost three times as large as the canoe. Its eye as big as a human head. Tobias backed horribly into the stern of the canoe and started cowering his arms over his head. 

Adam remained like a mannequin, even when the fish raised itself from the water, open-mouthed, and leapt out towards him. Tobias shouted warnings, the fish rose, but Adam didn’t move. Tobias sprung in front of Adam, intercepting the massive scaly body, then, forgetting everything, fell over the cusp of the canoe and out into the dark waters. Underwater was all scales, and a wide, smiling mouth that tunneled open. 

Adam remained still, like an onlooker at the planetarium. He didn’t even need to paddle as he rode the waves from the fish’s wake all the way back to shore.