by Tom Lin
9
They could afford to carry water enough for them to drink but not enough for the horses too. For days they moved through a landscape that seemed to condense out of the haze before them as easily as it evaporated once more behind them, as though called into being only to accommodate their passage. The prophet rode atop his withering mount and with his hands he dowsed the earth over which they rode and from time to time he spoke of vast aquifers locked in rock hundreds of yards below them. Ming swallowed hard against a dry throat, uncorked his canteen, drank a little. At first he offered the prophet his canteen. But each time the old man refused, and before long Ming’s thirst superseded what vestiges of filial piety had first compelled him to share. The two men traveled in a silence broken only by the prophet’s sporadic proclamations of water uselessly far underfoot.
By now the horses were little more than articulated frames wrapped in hide but dutifully they lumbered on, their strides growing shorter, their heads hanging lower to the ground with each hour. A gentle swell in the earth came up around them and in the oblique afternoon sunlight the slight contours of the terrain seemed carved from light and shadow. Ming was certain that their horses would die before day’s end and yet still the prophet proclaimed they would not.
The evening overtook them, the moon not yet risen. They continued on. Shortly after moonrise their horses stopped and would go no farther. The men dismounted and the animals lowered their bodies to the ground and lay on their sides, barely breathing, looking for all the world like they were dead. Ming and the prophet made camp where the horses had stopped, built a low fire.
Ming laid out his bedroll but found no sleep. At last he sat up and regarded the prostrate form of the prophet and gently he shook the old man awake. “Prophet,” he said.
The old man stirred, opened his eyes. “Yes, my child.”
“Can’t sleep none.”
The prophet sat up slowly and turned to face Ming. “No matter,” he said. “Only the horses must.”
“They’ll die soon, won’t they.”
“Yes.”
Above them the moon crested its zenith.
“Can I ask something else of you, prophet?”
The old man fixed Ming with his blank eyes and nodded.
“How’d you come to have your strange sight?”
“Ah,” the prophet murmured. He thought for a while. “I reckon I’ve always had it. But perhaps I simply cannot remember ever being truly blind.”
“You can’t remember nothing.” The words came out more accusing than Ming had intended.
“No,” the prophet said, “nothing.”
“Don’t that trouble you?”
The prophet smiled wryly. “Not at all.” Suddenly the old man rose to his feet. “Wait here awhile,” he said, and began to walk toward where the moon had risen. He took small and steady steps, his hands outstretched before him, palms parallel to the earth. The world was silent but for the crackling of the fire and the muted footsteps of the prophet.
“You dowsing again?” Ming called out.
“No,” came the old man’s reply.
Against the star-shimmering sky, the silhouette of the prophet stooped to pry something from the dirt. When he returned to the fire he was holding a small black disc, ridged in tightening spirals. A fossil.
“Take this,” the prophet said, “and heft it in your hands.”
Ming obliged. He ran his rough fingertips over the crenellations of stone, brushing the loose dust free. The prophet sat down beside him.
“It’s a shell,” Ming said.
“Not quite,” the prophet said, taking the fossil back. “But it once was.” He turned his face to the fire and his milkwhite eyes gazed down through the earth, as if past immensities of groundwater, clear to the southern sky. “This is not a shell,” the prophet proclaimed. He turned the fossil over in his hands and firelight slid across its slick faces. “It is stone that has taken the place of a shell, the form of a shell, meaningless shape. A remnant. The creature what made this shell was extinguished eons ago. But the earth retains its memory. Life out of bounds, unthinking stone remembering life.”
Now the prophet turned to the stars.
“Here was once a shallow sea.” His sightless eyes seemed to sparkle with a light filtered through antediluvian fathoms. He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. “You ask whether it troubles me that I cannot remember.” The fossil was turning, turning, tumbling in his gnarled fingers. “How can it trouble me, my child? In time all things are forgotten, all things are scoured away. If memory were all creation I might be troubled. But memory is something what lies beyond man’s compass. The earth bears witness to all things, testifies to time beyond time, the works of men and beasts alike.” He tossed the fossil high into the air and caught it again. “Memory only troubles those for whom it burns the brightest, my child. But it does not trouble me.” In a fluid motion belying his ancient body he snapped his wrist and sent the fossil skittering into the night. “Time now to rest, even if you are unable.”
Ming lay back on his bedroll and for a long while he stared up at the stars, the moon sinking toward the oblivion of morning. And then he was sleeping, and dreaming, treading water in a vast ocean, the sandy bottom visible through the clear waters. He dreamed of diving down and reaching out to touch the bottom, he dreamed of the light above him bending and dancing, and then he dreamed of drowning.
He woke in a colorless dawn and drew breath after ragged breath. The prophet was still asleep. He scattered the ashes from the dead fire and went searching in the cool morning for the fossil but could find no trace. It was as though it had melted where it landed and been taken up for water by the parched earth.
10
Ten miles from Elko their horses stopped and would go no farther. When Ming and the prophet dismounted, the prophet’s horse bent its ruined knees and dropped to the dry earth, its breathing a slow and labored death rattle. Ming’s horse remained standing, its head hung low, ribs visible through wax-paper skin. They had been moving for days now without rest. In the cold predawn light the two men stood beside their horses and watched the beasts breathing. Soon the sky began to shout with garish streaks of pinks and reds. How similar dawn and dusk appear to the eye unmoored from time, from east and from west. The one approximates the other, and time waits to be set in motion everywhere at once.
“Their time approaches,” the prophet said of the horses, and it was so. His horse lay stretched out so skeletal and still that it looked to have already been dead for a hundred years. The old man knelt to its glassed and sightless eyes and regarded the animal with his own full blindness.
“We’ll reach water soon,” Ming said. “The Humboldt runs just south of here.” His voice was low, almost soothing, as though he were comforting the horses.
“We will, yes,” the prophet said, “but they will not.”
Ming looked at the old man. “River’s only a few miles away,” he said. “Ain’t they got a few miles in em?”
The prophet shook his head and placed a hand over his horse’s head, closing its eyes to the world. “They will die today,” he said. “I have told you this before.”
“How long?” Ming asked. “Until they die.”
“How long until anyone dies?” replied the prophet.
Ming reached out and stroked his horse’s nose, felt the heat coming off its wide nostrils. Its eyes were huge and dark and empty all the way through. His hand resting on the animal he turned and regarded the wretched form of the prophet’s horse lying motionless on the earth. “How long until anyone dies,” he murmured to himself. He withdrew his hand from his own horse’s nose. The animal’s eyes were upon him, an empty gaze. Ming stared back. For a long time neither moved. “All right,” Ming said at last. He hated shooting horses. “Get back,” he warned the prophet.
The old man rose from where he knelt by his own horse and retreated.
Ming unholstered his gun and cocked it and in his mind he traced two intersect
ing lines across his horse’s forehead, drawn from each eye to the opposite ear. Aim at where the lines crossed, and aim downward, in line with the animal’s neck. Any lower and it would not be a mercy.
Death was always a mercy, Silas had told him, pressing the revolver into his small hands so many years ago after his pony had lost its footing and broken its leg. He must have been only seven or eight then. It was his first real kill. He had shot at groundhogs in the fields with the old air rifle, even hit some of them, but they were nameless and many and strangers to him. His pony had been livelier than these wasted horses, baying as it tried to stand again on its twisted and fractured leg. Ming had cried and cried, thrown Silas’s gun down, and refused out of childish cowardice. One of Silas’s men had even come by, revolver in hand, ready to put down Ming’s pony for him. But Silas had waved him off. The boy must learn. And when it was finished Silas had taken the gun so heavy from his young and shaking hands, tussled his hair and smiled at him. Death is always a mercy.
He had put down other horses after that, probably a dozen or so by his own count, but it had been many years since the last time, and now he was about to shoot two. He checked his aim and fired. The horse’s knees buckled and it crashed to the ground. The prophet’s horse threw its head back, its eyes wild, searching desperately for the source of the sound. Its legs kicked feebly in the dust. Ming recocked his gun and stooped low to where the prophet’s horse lay struggling and another shot rang out.
For a little while there was only the dull rustle of the wind passing over the earth.
Ming sat down between the bodies of the horses and wordlessly he reloaded his gun, firing cap, powder, ball. When he was finished he stood and dusted loose grains of powder and sand from his trousers. “Let’s get going,” Ming said finally. “We’ll get water at the Humboldt.”
“Wait.” The prophet approached the dead horses. “Thank ye,” he said. He held out his hands broad and flat over their bodies and closed his eyes. “Return,” he breathed. Then he opened his blind eyes and turned to follow Ming.
“I will tell you what will become of them,” the old man said. They continued on foot, closing the distance to Elko, and the prophet told Ming that oceans gave way to dry land gave way to oceans again. A continuous cycle of deluge and drought. In time beyond time these alkali barrens would be once more subsumed by a shallow sea, and these clutches of sagebrush and sere grass would be drowned under waters teeming with unfamiliar life, these hollow bones replaced atom for atom by stones and crystals, reduced to their barest form, the insinuation of a spine, the intimation of a skull.
The prophet asked Ming if he knew what it was to be reduced to form and Ming answered that he did not. They stopped under the linear light of the midday sun to rest and passing his hands over the earth in strange convolutions the prophet formed shadows upon the dust. The silhouette of a diving hawk. The profile of a dog. Of a man. Form begets form, the prophet said. To be reduced to form is to be reduced to nothing at all. For the first time in days Ming felt exhaustion.
At the banks of the Humboldt, Ming washed his face and filled his canteen. The water was cold and tasted of silt and spring snowmelt. The lines of the railroad now drew nearer by the hour as they walked, a slow convergence. Intermittently a train rushed past eastward, laden with wood and iron, or westward, blank faces filling its carriage windows. Their steps fell into rhythm and moving almost imperceptibly across the landscape the two men carried on, the man out of bounds forging ahead, the blind man following as though he could see. The day spun into a night peopled numberlessly from horizon to horizon with stars.
When they at last arrived in Elko they rented a small room in a boardinghouse a little ways from the river. Ming eyed the innkeeper warily, waiting for some sign that they had been recognized. None came. They were but two Chinamen seeking shelter. In their room the prophet took up a seated position on the floor, staring past the walls, as though turned to stone. Ming was not tired, could not sleep, and before the moon had risen he was gone wandering the darkened streets with vice and liquor on his mind.
11
In the gambling tent he played craps and robbed his table blind. He downed tumblers of whiskey and rotgut and played faro, winning fistfuls of coins and bills that he stuffed down into his pockets. The world rocked uneasily on a subtle axis and he stumbled out into the cold clean night. He went trawling drunk through the deserted streets in search of a fight but found none. He had lost his way.
The woman came so silently and easily out of the night that when she first whispered into his ear he did not startle but only looked at her wan face a moment. It was as though she had always already been by his side, the heat of her breath forever on his cheek.
“Care to see some miracles?” she asked. They were stopped in the dirt road and in the darkness she took his hands in hers and led him a short ways from the barren road into a tent shining with lamplight. “A magic show,” she said. “Miracles to see and admire. The real thing. Only five bits.”
There was money yet in his pocket and with a clumsy hand he fished out a coin. The woman took the money from him and when Ming gazed upon her face again he nearly stopped breathing. “Do I know you?” he asked, the syllables tripping over his liquored tongue. “Have we met?”
“In another life, perhaps,” the woman replied. “In another life everyone has met everyone.”
He asked her name.
“I travel with the magic show,” she said, as though she hadn’t heard, and he wondered if he’d spoken his question aloud at all. “We deal in miracles.”
Ming frowned in concentration, struggling to order his thoughts. “Ain’t that you, Ada baby? Ain’t you remember me?” he asked at last, his voice made small and childlike in his drunkenness. He turned to see her reaction but she was already gone.
Toward the far end of the tent was a semicircular area of hardpack earth, swept of pebbles and ringed with lanterns. Faded gray curtains strung from tentpole to tentpole marked off a backstage and wings, transforming the dirt semicircle and the canvas above it into stage and proscenium. Ringing the stage were a number of dusty pews that looked as though they’d been taken from the burned church in that distant ghost town.
He found a seat on a nearby pew and waited drunkenly for the magic show to begin, resting his elbows on his knees and letting his head drag his body toward the ground. There were a few dozen other men in the audience, all of them blind drunk. Some had stretched out entirely on their pews and fallen sound asleep. At length the ringmaster came out and rapped his cane on the stage, rousing the men. Ming’s gaze swung lazily left to right before coming to rest upon the ringmaster’s face, pale and pockmarked from adolescence or perhaps from war. The man was dressed in a thin and ragged suit patched in so many places that it seemed more patch than suit. Ming scrubbed his face with his hands and breathed deeply, hoping the liquor would ease.
The ringmaster strode to the center of the stage and spoke grandly, as though to an amphitheater of thousands. “Gentlemen!”
The audience lolled in their pews.
“Tonight you will see miracles. You will see them with your own two eyes and you will know that they are miracles. I want to assure you—to give you my word—that nothing tonight deceives you. While demonstrations of this type abound, and while you have no doubt seen parlor magic in some saloon or other, I swear to it that these miracles we have for you tonight are another thing altogether. For our miracles are flesh and blood, who live and breathe as you or I, and yet possess strange and fantastic powers. Such are their abilities that when our show is concluded I trust that you will be their apostles as readily as I, or any man.”
“Blasphemy!” called the man sitting beside Ming.
Ming turned his head to look at him. The man wore a priest’s frock and collar but his eyes were bloodshot and his vestments were ragged around the edges. Even from where Ming sat he could smell the whiskey on the man’s breath.
The ringmaster raised an eyebrow and apprai
sed the heckler with amusement. “You, good sir,” he said. “Are you a priest?”
“I was,” the man slurred. He grinned and raised an amber bottle of whiskey high into the air. “Till I found God in the bottle!” he added loudly.
A few halfhearted whoops of approval ensued.
The ringmaster was unperturbed. “Then you have no quarrel with our secular miracles.”
The ex-priest shrugged. “Spose not.”
“Perhaps our first miracle will properly convince you,” the ringmaster said.
Two stagehands emerged from the wings dragging a heavy wrought-iron cage. A naked man squatted in a dim corner of the cage, his hair matted and his eyes blank. The stagehands brought the cage next to the ringmaster and retreated into the darkened wings. A lantern swung gently from the roof of the cage. The ringmaster knocked the iron grate with his cane and the man inside twisted his head round.
“Up, man,” the ringmaster commanded in a low voice.
The caged man stood and stepped forward under the lantern so that his full aspect was visible. A low murmur scattered through the assembled crowd. The caged man was completely covered in tattoos, inscribed from crown to sole with a litany of strange glyphs. He peered out at the crowd with an expression somewhere between curiosity and indifference.
“This here is Proteus, as we call him,” said the ringmaster, his eyes scanning the tattooed man up and down. The man seemed not to care. The ringmaster turned back to the audience. “He represents the first miracle you will see with your own two eyes tonight.”
The audience stirred.
“Now, gentlemen, I want to tell you about Proteus. He is a pagan from a remote Pacific island antipode, found by a Nantucket whaling ship, the solitary inhabitant of his own tropical isle. He speaks not a word of any civilized tongue that we know of. His curious abilities were not discovered until it was nearly too late. The whaling ship that found him was itself found when she drifted ashore off the coast of Chile, bereft of man or beast. On board only our pagan Proteus remained.” A smile crept across the ringmaster’s face. “For this miracle, I’ll need a volunteer from the audience.” He pointed his cane at a drunk sitting in the first row. “You, sir. Step right up.”