I Am the River Read online

  Table of Contents

  Advance Praise for I Am The River

  Other Work by T.E. Grau

  I AM THE RIVER | T.E. Grau

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Quote

  1. Waiting Rooms

  2. Up Country

  3. Black Shuck

  4. Birddog

  5. Night Man

  6. The Weight of Paper

  7. Hard Like a Jellyfish

  8. Roman Candles

  9. The Floating City

  10. The Mirage at the End of the World

  11. Public Toasts to Private Wars

  12. Poison in the Hangar

  13. The Nightmare Factory

  14. Sleeping in the Temple of Mars

  15. Beast at Bay

  16. The Last Chance Saloon

  17. Punji Sticks

  18. Night Vision

  19. Angels with Dirty Faces

  20. The Plain of Jars

  21. Come Tell Me Your Ghosts

  22. Dead Between the Walls

  23. The Furious One

  24. Everything's Green Here

  25. Burn Then the River Down

  26. Anniversary

  27. A Love of Shared Disasters

  28. Spook Money

  29. (Four) Seeds of the Pomegranate

  30. The Ghosts Will Come For You

  31. Somewhere Along the Highway

  32. Retour du Fantôme

  33. Rest Home for Wandering Souls

  34. Orphans from a Different Tribe

  35. We the Devastating Machines

  36. Shedding Scales

  37. Butcherbird

  38. South of Heaven

  39. Moons at Your Door

  40. The FIre in our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw

  41. Everything You Need

  41. The 21st Chapter

  About the Author

  1. Advance Praise for I Am The River

  2. “A sense of being hunted, and haunted, hits you right from the start of I Am The River. That mood only grows in intensity as the scope of this novel’s nightmare takes shape. It’s supernatural and geopolitical and an unforgettable time.”

  3. – Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom

  4.

  5. “Grau’s poetic prose and stunning evocation of time and place…from the killing fields of Vietnam to the haunted alleyways of Bangkok, form a fever dream of copious bloodshed and many shades of gray.”

  6. – Publishers Weekly, starred review

  7.

  8. “I Am The River is the kind of thing that might happen if Algernon Blackwood had been brought in to do a rewrite of Apocalypse Now. A man barely holding onto his sanity in Bangkok remains haunted, stalked by a huge hound and undone by his own addiction. His only way out is through revisiting his past in the Vietnam War and the secret PSY-OPS mission he was involved in–and which he’s been running from ever since. A haunting meditation on war, death, addiction, and responsibility, with mind-blowing forays into the weird.”

  9. — Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses and The Warren

  10.

  11. “With echoes of Apocalypse Now and Peter Straub’s Koko, T.E. Grau’s blazing, immersive novel takes us on the hell-ride of the Vietnam War’s last days as its raging waters also carry us through the first of our last days. I Am The River is a hallucinatory tour de force.”

  12. — Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World

  13.

  14. “An intelligent accumulation of inner and outer darkness.”

  15. – Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual

  16.

  17. “A lush green nightmarish journey into the dark, reminiscent of the late, great Lucius Shepard.”

  18. — Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

  19.

  20. “I Am The River is a horror novel, yes, and it never skimps on its mission to unsettle us. It is also a book that finds horror not only in blood and shadows, but in the very real abysses that separate us: race, culture, and the manipulations of people by governments and by war. It moves quickly and intelligently from its first page to its last, evoking its nightmares in gorgeous, evocative, disturbing prose. A must-read!”

  21. – Christopher Coake, author of You Came Back

  22.

  23. “I Am The River moves with fluid grace, flowing between times, places, and perspectives as it carries us through its protagonist’s surreal experience of the Vietnam War and his part in a covert mission which refuses to loose its grip on him. Located at the hot, humid intersection of O’Brien’s classic Going After Cacciato and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, this novel plunges us into war at its most extreme and insane, when the methods employed for defeating the enemy leave reason behind for terror and myth.”

  24. – John Langan, author of The Fisherman

  25.

  26. ‘‘A disorienting and devasting evocation of the horrors of war and PTSD. T.E. Grau has written infused the War Novel with dark mythic imagery that sears like napalm.’’

  27. – Craig Laurence Gidney, author of Sea Swallow Me

  28.

  29. “I Am The River is a modern masterpiece. It’s a mind-bending, soul-destroying meditation on morality and despair and conflict, on the trials of the human spirit during times of war when the line between good and evil is intangible. Impeccably written, compulsively readable, I Am The River deserves every ounce of praise it’s going to get, and then some, and marks Grau as an extraordinary talent.”

  30. – Kealan Patrick Burke, author of The Turtle Boy and Kin

  31.

  32. “Grau is our boatman on this psychedelic journey of ghosts and guilt, artillery and atonement. More than a war story, I Am The River forces us to confront the bloody aftereffects in a way that is both powerful and poignant. A cautionary tale for the soul.”

  33. — Ian Rogers, author of Every House Is Haunted

  34.

  35. “I Am The River is a macabre journey through a hostile land where a soldier’s act of brutality haunts him, body and soul. With one remarkable collection under his belt, Grau now shows with his debut novel that he’s clearly at the head of the pack when it comes to compelling voices in weird horror fiction today.”

  36. — Christopher Slatsky, author of Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales

  37.

  38. “T. E. Grau’s dark tale of suffering and the quest for redemption pushes the limits of psychological horror. Deeply poetic and disturbing, it reveals that even in the darkest corners of the soul, a faint humanity can be seen glittering and it’s simply beautiful.”

  39. –Seb Doubinsky, author of The Song of Synth and White City

  40. Other Work by T.E. Grau

  41. The Nameless Dark

  42. They Don’t Come Home Anymore

  Published by LETHE PRESS

  lethepressbooks.com

  at Smashwords.com

  Copyright © 2018 T.E. Grau

  ISBN:

  978-1-59021-445-9 paperback

  978-1-59021-179-3 hardcover

  No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Author or Publisher.

  Cover design and Interior design

  by INKSPIRAL DESIGN

  This story is dedicated to Lewis Minor, Gene O’Neill, and to the surviving veterans of the war in Southeast Asia who fought and bled under their respective flags and motivations. This story is also dedicated to all those who were lost, those who lost something, and those who were left to wander. May each find their way home.r />
  43.

  44. Special thanks to Paul Minor for the dossier and the plane ticket, and to Steve Berman for providing a secure home for my work. And eternal thanks to Fish for your conversations with the stars; and to Ivy, for the Martinique, and for absolutely everything else that matters in this world.

  “A river of fire was flowing, coming out from before him. Thousands upon thousands attended him; ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him. The court was seated, and the books were opened.”

  45. —Book of Daniel: Chapter 7, Verse 10.

  46.

  47. “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

  48. —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

  1. Waiting Rooms

  I need to hide in plain sight, here at the dead center of the world, for just a little while longer. I need to go unseen by everything looking for me, and it’s a long, distinguished list. Things want me dead that you wouldn’t believe.

  So here I hide, sitting rail-straight in my chair, crooked spine upright, organs aligned and hands on knees, not moving a muscle as every fiber inside me wants to stand up and scream confessions. I tested the chair before I sat down, because I’m always careful, no matter how far gone, and found that it was a creaky chair. That was unfortunate, because I knew that when I sat down I’d have to remain still as a statue until my name was called. Don’t give away the shake of the hands, the twitch forming in the left corner of my mouth, the side that always took the punch. Any quiver will be misconstrued as something other than what it really is. I need to be invisible, as they mustn’t see inside me, and the heavy thing hiding in my right front pocket.

  Three hours and forty-two minutes I’ve been sitting this way, the picture of patience and desperate camouflage, blending in with the cracks in the wall. The doctor would see me last, because I was an estrangier and demanded the extra scrutiny. A ripening underneath a secret gaze. In the careful game being played, anything outside the norm was made to wait, in hopes that if it was found perfidious, it would eventually disappear.

  The air is bad in the waiting room and the lighting worse, with dim illumination provided by a crooked lamp in the corner and a filthy aquarium slowly suffocating a sweet corn goldfish so fat its dorsal fin never drops below the surface of the water. No table. No magazines. Not even a rumor of air conditioning during the hottest monsoon on record—one that inspired the old timers in the street to declare the end of this world and the beginning of another as soon as the earth cooled. Those who wait are made to suffer if they want relief. None of that candy-ass American dreaming for paying customers along Yaowarat Road, because what they’re offering in certain shopfronts and office façades in Bangkok’s Chinatown has enjoyed a seller’s market since man dropped down from the trees.

  I feel the eyes on me like I do everywhere I go no matter where I am, but I don’t turn my head to see who’s watching, or what. It could be the young woman with three well-behaved children sitting to my left, next to the ancient couple that have looked at each other for so long that they’ve remade themselves in each other’s image. Or the man in the pressed trousers pretending to sleep two chairs to my right. He might be hired muscle, or a government proxy. Usually the same thing. But most of all, I don’t want to see the other pair of eyes on me, that have been watching me from the inside the fog that morning at the edge of the jungle, when those two holes opened up for the first time and found me like a blind newborn worming toward its mother’s breast. It’s followed me ever since. Moving with me by day, coming to me at night. I know they’re watching me now, daring me to turn and see and then lose my shit, just like the first, the second, and the third time I was stupid enough to act against my wiring and look deeply at what no man should ever see. I’d learned since then, because my grandmother didn’t raise no fool no matter how hard I tried to prove her wrong, and on the fourth time, in that piss alley in Hue where I hid myself away from any new angles for so many days, hoping to die without making the move, I didn’t look at the eyes when they found me. I ran instead, and didn’t stop until I was two countries away.

  But they found me again anyway. Somehow I knew they would.

  Right now, if this is right now and not some other time, I focus on the yellowed poster taped crooked to the wall across from me. It’s written in Cantonese, like all of the signs down here. No Thai allowed in this lowdown imperialist takeover from the inside out. The ghost of Mao is out to eat the world, one village, one neighborhood, and one sham doctor’s office at a time. I hear the murmur of water rushing in between the walls. Faintly at first, but the sound grows. I know there aren’t any pipes in those walls, but there is water. There’s always that water. I narrow my gaze on one particular symbol on the poster, concentrating, trying to stay where I am, held fast by each curve and slash. My body throttles the movement in my muscles, outer shell motionless in this creaky chair, waiting for the walls to erupt, spilling out the water that’ll suck me backward into the River, taking me downstream to that other time that I can’t escape.

  The door to the interior office opens and a high-pitched voice calls out a name in a language I don’t recognize. Her intonation sounds fuzzy, a bad radio signal, and sets my mind humming like a hornet’s nest, drawing strength from the water in the walls. It’s going to happen again, I realize, at the worst possible time. I’m here for a very important reason, and can’t afford to fall back into the River right now. But the buzz, the static spitting from blown-out speakers, always means the same thing. Water pools around my feet, seeping into my shoes. I close my fingers over my knees, as if I can hold myself here in this place. The chair creaks as my leg muscles clench. More eyes find me, a number higher than those sitting with me in the waiting room, and not entirely divided into pairs. Most can’t see the water. None of them see my hands.

  Not yet, I call out to the River. I’m so close.

  The buzzing increases, and the water rises. At my ankles now, cold and biting my skin, sending a tongue up my leg. The River never listens, because it has no ears, but its mouth is always open.

  A figure passes in front of me, its bulk made black by the River, and my anchoring gaze on the yellow poster is broken. I blink as the lights grow more intense and blank paper bright. Back-in-the-world bright.

  The tether flaps

  and whips

  at my legs

  behind

  me.

  I’m in a different waiting room, leaning forward on my knees, hair shorter but head weighed down by the fresh mass of what recently crawled inside it. The weight in my pocket is now gone. My feet are dry, and the sound of the River recedes far behind me. I’ve been through this before, and I’ve been here before, yet every time is a surprise, as I notice something new, and live through it just a fraction differently each time.

  In this room, I keep my eyes down, away from the far wall and the posters I can read, because I don’t like what they say. My gaze is fixed to the floor. I haven’t seen tile like this since the hospital back in Baton Rouge, the first time I left the bayou and came to the city to watch my grandmother die with her mouth wide open, her tongue sticking out like a crushed bird. The tile there and the tile here is bluish gray and flecked with silver. It looks painted, but must have come raw from the ground like that, polished up and shipped to Southeast Louisiana and Southeast Asia to cover up the bloody dirt that lies beneath both places. Industrial tile. American tile. The fluorescent lights make the silver dance. Or maybe it’s just my eyes.

  But how could it be? They’re just trapped sacs of fluid wired with the proper receptors and trailing nerves like a Portuguese man-o’-war. No, it’s my vision that’s different now. Peripheral is sharper and almost front-facing without moving my head. I’m a flatfish, a flounder squatting on the ocean floor, looking up and out in every direction at once as two orbs migrate into one. Eyes develop this clarity in ancillary vision when everything on ever
y side is gunning to kill you. They can’t help but widen their perspective to take in more angles where death awaits. Survival of the barely fit demands a metamorphosis, and a deal is struck with nature without any consultation. Evolution doesn’t ask for permission first.

  There is only one chair here, made of form-fitted plastic and painted metal that doesn’t make a sound regardless of how I move, and the waiting room is more of a hallway. It’s empty and clean, with people and machines humming on either side of it, behind closed doors, muttering and humming in unison with the engines that drive the entire base. There’s no water in these walls, because the River is gone.

  Out of the corner of my new bottom-feeding eyes, I see it, crouching in the hallway corner at my five o’clock. It always waits in tight intersections of flat planes, as if angles provide it the proper geometry to spin a web to hold it fast for as long as it needs. Watching spider, if a spider is what it really is, which it isn’t. Not truly, not to me. I don’t dare glance at it. I’ve never done so, even when I’m in bed and it’s squatting on my heart and lungs. It’s changed now, this thing, adapted to its surroundings. Watching me, as it has the whole way back from the jungle, when I ran and fell and hid and killed to save whatever is inside me that makes me who I am. To keep this particular mass of atoms intact and shaped in this particular way that allows me to believe that I’m real. Mama’s boy. Grandma’s boy. Bayou boy.

  I didn’t think it would follow me here, in this time before it found me with a million tons of military machines set up to protect a native son sent to murder strangers in a foreign land. But it follows me everywhere and every time. It knows what I knew, that I was just another screw in the engine that was easy to replace when I wore out. I was unprotected, never protected in that peculiar way that would do any good, and it knew it. They’d know how to protect me down in the bayou in this new war I was fighting. At least I still like to think that, but I never went back there after that day in the hospital, looking at my grandmother’s tongue. They took me away and my own tongue changed inside my mouth. A little bit every single day I was away from my home, reshaping my atoms based on a new latitude. After a while, seven years on, I shed my skin and was reborn just in time to be shipped out, shiny and new on the outside. All that Louisiana mud went with that final layer of skin, even though I wanted to keep as much of it as I could, but you don’t get to decide what stays the same when the transformation begins.