Unalome-style wrist tattoo

The ferry has stopped running since the spring floods took the lower pier, so I am writing this by the lamp in the customs house while the ink still runs freely in this damp. You asked me to tell you how the old surveyor in Varenne finished his map of the Salt Bend, and I can tell you now, because he died on Tuesday and left the thing to me. The last sheet is not a river at all. It is a single line drawn straight down from the top margin, with a small dot of ink set above it like a bird that has not yet decided to land.

Beneath the line he had looped and doubled the stroke until it became a knot of lazy figures, each one tighter than the last, and at the foot the line curls back on itself into a drop that hangs over nothing. I asked him what it marked. He said it was the spot where the water turns and goes back upstream for a while before it remembers where the sea is. I said that was not a survey, it was a sermon. He only laughed and tapped the drop with his pen until the ink bled into the paper.

I have pinned the sheet above my desk. Some mornings I hold my own wrist up to the window to see if the pattern of veins matches the curl of his, and it never quite does, but I am no longer embarrassed to try. Come in the spring, when the pier is mended. I will show you the sheet, and you can tell me whether the dot is the bird or the eye of the river watching us.

Yours in the wet season, Tobiah