by Lydia Millet
He walked to the back to look down. He had seen Delonn raise the propeller once or twice, why he had not known, but he knew it could be done. He leaned past Delonn at his feet, reached down and heaved it up. Two of the blades were sheared off and a third was broken. It must have hit a rock, he thought. Nothing could be seen through the turbid brown.
The current would still carry them downstream, but he had no way to steer. And the prow of the boat was pointed toward a bank already, moving steadily toward an eddy in the shallows. He glanced around in a panic and saw a white oar on a pair of hooks along the side. This he grabbed and grappled with and held out as they drifted; he stuck it over the side without judging distance, stuck it out and pushed away fiercely: and the boat slanted lightly away from the bank again.
For a while he used the oar on both sides of the boat, keeping afloat straight down the middle of the channel. It was tiring and his arms ached. As he rounded the meander with the still pool, where Delonn had offered him a swim, a large bird flapped over his head without warning; his hand slipped. The oar slid swiftly through the oarlock and into the water.
He watched it float away, hit a ridge of rocks and catch there as the boat moved downstream and left it behind. The boat stayed straight until it knocked into a low branch and slid up into a tangle of brush. A stick, he thought, and balanced tenuously on one of the side benches to reach up. After a struggle he was able to break a long branch off a tree and use it to push the boat off the bank, but the slant of the boat was hard to manage, the stick was awkward for steering, and at the next meander, where a short clay-red cliff rose on one bank, the boat lodged itself in the mud wall of the cliff.
He sat there for some time, listening to birdcalls and looking up at the clear blue sky.
•
When the current failed to dislodge the boat he decided to get into the water and push; he had to swim around and force
it off the bank. He peeled his shirt off and then his grimy jeans, perched on the gunnel and slid into the warm water gently. Feet in the mud, he pushed against the side of the boat until it seemed to loosen; as he pulled himself up a hard thing in the water slid down his calf. The cut was not deep but bled right away, freely. He left bloody footprints on the deck, which gratified him—as though someone else had finally acknowledged his injury. The blood collected into a thin ribbon.
River sand had gathered in the crotch of his boxer shorts and the crotch hung heavy like a sling, so he slipped out of the shorts and hung them from one of the shelter poles. For a while the boat moved nicely downstream; but then the river curved and despite his exertions it drifted into the bank again. He dropped into the water and pushed; again it drifted. Finally he was sick of the boat and furious.
He tied it to a tree and threw a full pack of food onto the bank, the water filter, his tent and sleeping pad and flashlight. He went to Delonn and touched the tent fabric at the shoulder. He laid a tarp over the body, covering the face, and tucked it carefully beneath.
He was sorry for Delonn but partly envied him too.
He clung close to the bank, wary of losing his bearings if he strayed too far into the jungle. At times there was no trail and the vegetation was thick where the trees were set back. He had to beat his way through. At times he had to stray from the bank, careful to keep the water in sight. Soon he had cuts on his arms and knees; he allowed himself small sips of bottled water but was eager to conserve it, and his head ached from dehydration. In the late afternoon he found himself at the edge of a large marsh that extended north from the river’s edge.
He stood uselessly, despairing. The marsh reached far away from the river, too far to see—miles, clearly. He tried stepping
in and sank up to his knees; he almost lost a boot trying to pull his foot out. Better to swim the river, he thought. The river was not swift, but was the other bank a marsh too?
The further from the river he walked the further the swamp seemed to stretch. He got anxious. The sun was behind the trees. Finally he chose a hummock to set up his tent and struggled manfully with the tent poles until they held up the nylon. Inside he took off his bungee-cord belt and army pants, heavy with moisture, and sat down on his sleeping pad with his bare legs stretched out. He dabbed at the cuts with alcohol pads from Delonn’s first-aid kit; then he found he was shivering and wrapped himself in his sheet. He had been wrong to leave the boat, clearly; for sooner or later, after the snags and the holdups, the spins and the drifts, it would have reached the coast.
It would have been safer than this.
He ate dry oatmeal from a plastic bag. The texture made him thirsty, parched his throat, but he took a single gulp from his small bottle of clean water and decided he had to save the dregs; he could not bring himself to glug from the flask of yellow-brown liquid he had filtered from the swamp. He studied it briefly with the flashlight, whose bulb was dimming rapidly. He believed he could see protozoans swimming, the whirring of their cilia.
Delonn was still on the boat, in his yellow wrap. The boat might be loose by now, loose but still tethered. He thought of it rocking lightly on the surface, Delonn bundled inside, and felt a pang of regret, almost fondness. Without Delonn’s death he would never have known this fondness, the odd gratification of having, for a short while, guarded what was left of Delonn, the protector of his honor.
Of course he would also not have known the resentment, the disgust or the repulsion. Those were part of knowing.
Taking care of the deceased he had established a certain intimacy: they were not opponents after all but only companions.
He listened to the night; he curled in. Take stock, he thought, take stock. He would be fortunate if he got home at all. There were hazards beyond being lost, being hungry. Delonn had told him about a certain local tree species that grew near the stream bank and exuded a toxic sap. You could brush against the trunk or the branches unknowing and if the sap touched your skin it caused third-degree burns, raising welts up to six inches long. Delonn had been able to identify the trees; of course he himself had no idea what they looked like. For all he knew he was surrounded.
He had had a strong faith once that the world was, at its best, its warmest and most glowing, a network of cities. He recalled a map of the continent at night—a map or a time-lapse satellite photograph—anyway the North American continent seen from the sky, with lights winking on all over, the clusters of population like beacons in the blackness of space. This had seemed to him once to be the epitome of the real, of the hopeful and the farseeing. A night starred with fires, with the fires of habitation. The world had been buildings, he had always believed, and the invisible structures that imbued these buildings with roles, keeping some persons outside them and others within. The whole world had been the systems of men, and he recalled faintly what a comfort it had been to admire it.
And it was not—as he considered now, huddled and wretched and further from cities than he had ever been— that these systems and the rules that bound people to them were not close to the core of life: but the life they described was a narrow life, a fast life. It was a small life, the life of certainty and straight paths, that life of crowds and buildings.
And look. Look! It had passed.
9
More than anything he wished he could just glance up at the sky and see an airplane or a helicopter, the sun reflecting off its silver skin, solid and ready to descend.
But all he got looking up was eyeshock.
By the time he had ringed the marsh and returned to the riverside he had tired his throat with tuneless singing; he had kept himself steady by impersonating a soldier, tramping forward step after step, slogging. There was another marsh, then another. There were nights and mornings. How many miles was it now? He wished he knew; he wished he had an accounting of them, a tally. Then at least he could be sure of an accomplishment. He was weary of the sweaty air, the low gray skies, the crowding of brown and green: he moved as quickly as he could and let the wet air fall to the sides. He had rubbe
d insect repellent through his hair, stared at the label and then poured it down the back of his neck, N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide 100%.
These were the only written words he had seen in a while, he reflected—although how long had it been? Only a few days: but already it was a lost country. Aside from the tags in his clothing they were the last proof he had of English … certainly he was nearing the mouth of the river now. Certainly he would be there in a matter of minutes, see a sedate tourist boat motor up the channel, old ladies seated pleasantly on the shaded benches. He imagined their pastel-colored visors and wraparound sunglasses, how they would smile blindingly and point in amazement when they caught sight of him. He would strike them as a woodsman or a hermit; they would be able to tell he was a person undergoing a hardship far from their experience, undergoing a trial by fire and a transformation. Once recovered from their initial exuberance—a man who came out of nowhere! A Tarzan, a Doctor Livingstone!—they might well be frightened.
This at least was something to find pride in, obscurely, a secret sense of himself as a man made rugged by adversity, a rough primitive.
He found a trail, finally, following the river, and at first he was encouraged, thinking he must be nearing the town. But the trail was narrow and often seemed to fade and then reappear: it was not, he realized presently, maintained by humans. It was an animal trail. There were piles of scat here and there; there were gnawed tree trunks and broken twigs; there were the husks of fruit thrown down from the trees and once, in the scat, a pile of bones.
He retreated into the trees around lunchtime, seeking a place with fewer insects. Sitting on a log where a stream of sun filtered down he ate more of the dry oatmeal and drank the warm river water: it left silt in his throat but he did not think it would make him sick. When he came to the delta, he knew, he would meet a crisis of questions: they would
clamor at him. People there might have been close to Delonn, there might be children and grandchildren, a sister or a wife.
He peed in a bush and was tying his bungee-cord belt when he heard a scratch and looked up: there was an animal perched on a branch. It was small and brown with large eyes and round ears, a thick coat of fur and a long thick tail; it sprang away chattering. He watched it jump and climb until it was too far from him to see.
He had no idea what it was. This pleased him: maybe there was hope yet. How was it that his own ignorance was a comfort? But it was.
Expecting to reach the coast, expecting to reach the town, he became indignant as he failed and kept on failing. Anger rose fiercely in his chest and subsided again. At least to see someone, someone who could help him, but no one came. No one appeared. He had always been on the bank of this sluggish river; he had always been walking here, always been this person. The rest had been a mirage.
He started walking at six in the morning and by four in the afternoon his feet hurt too much to persevere. Blisters bubbled and ripped on his heels and his toes; they bled through his socks, forced him to whistle sharply to forget the pain.
He began talking to himself. He wandered, he was bored, but he had no other diversion and after a while he was forced to invent a companion.
“So are we going to die?” he asked him.
“Unlikely,” said the friend, and paused. “Possible,” he admitted.
“This is ridiculous,” he told him. “Could it be we went off along a tributary? Or another fork of the river as it braids at
the delta, a fork that takes longer to reach the coast? But we’re still headed east. I know that from the sun. So sooner or later we have to come to the ocean.”
“Too bad you got kicked out of the Scouts before Orienteering.”
“East is all we have to know,” he insisted stubbornly.
Together they recalled moments from youth—kids he knew, things that happened. Who was in the closet with Kate Bonney, in sixth grade? French-kissing? The story circulated for weeks … Eric K., that was it. It was the first-ever kiss for both of them and Eric K. was determined to make it a French one; he had read up on technique. But he was overeager and had put his tongue so far down Kate Bonney’s throat that it touched her stomach. That was the story and they had circulated it without mercy. He himself had had a tendency to bribe the girls at that age, bribe them for the favor of a feel or a kiss: Blow-Pops in watermelon, cherry, or grape. The pink flavors were the favorites … small tokens, nothing extravagant: they were gifts, not payment. He had a soft touch even then. He stopped walking as he recalled this, could almost taste the sharp tang of the globes of sugar.
He recalled all these people as an elegy, since he was removed from them. Not only now, he thought, but forever. He might still seek people out, talk to them—of course he would, they were part of him—but his eyes would be fixed on a point beyond them. His craftiness in boyhood, his single-minded enterprise—all was for the sake of gain, for gain was his religion, simple and stunning. No grown man could love accumulation as fully as a boy did. Indeed he never recaptured the joy of that love, and it passed out of his grasp.
And the infrastructure: he had drawn cities, first, and plastered his walls with them; he had built cities of Legos and lined the shelves of his room with their red platforms,
their blue and yellow rectangular monoliths. There were Lego helipads, gas stations. Then he made his parents buy him miniature trees, tiny street signs, other items that architects used to build their dioramas, and built his own replicas from kits—the Capitol building, the Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore. He had hastily disassembled the babyish Lego structures in favor of these, had enlisted his father’s help in lighting them so that the buildings of state cast long shadows, and as he slept they towered over him.
With the sun setting at his back he dropped his pack on a rippled hump of sand that rose out of the river. The river must be low: at times the sand bar was underwater, he could see from the dark contours. Now it was dry. It had not rained since Delonn was alive, since he became alone. Even the rain had forsaken him. Maybe he could tempt it; he would use only the mosquito net for shelter instead of his tent. Let the rain come, he would welcome it. He draped it over a jutting tree limb and propped it up from beneath with four long sticks. Fit for a dignitary, he thought. He could sit underneath and watch the flow of the river as the sun went down.
Before he retired into the shelter he took a bath and stood in shallow water in sunlight until he dripped dry. His cut legs stung but he was pleased to be washed. Dusk fell over the river with him sitting on his sleeping pad behind the translucent white screen, his pack and the rest of his meager belongings arrayed around him. He had not wanted to put his clean self back into the filthy army pants; instead he had washed them and hung them on the tree limb beside his netting. He sat wrapped in the sheet. It was a balmy night. He flipped the switch on the flashlight and saw the bulb dim away to nothing.
Scrounging in the pack he found a packet of soup powder, which he tipped into his mouth; stale crackers, which he
gobbled. And then: the plastic flask of whiskey! He shook it: still an ounce or two left. He had forgotten it completely. Thanksgiving.
He drank and watched the light of the sky change. If he were not so hungry, he thought, he could almost be happy here. He had left the settlements now, all the old geographies. For so many years they had been the only thing; you did what you did and whatever it was consumed you, as though your actions were the heart of experience. As though without a series of actions there would be no story of your life.
Those who loved stories also loved the human, to live in cities where there was nothing but men and their actions as far as the eye could see. Once it had been believed that the sun revolved around the earth; now this was ridiculed as myopic, yet almost the same belief persisted. The sun might be the center of the planets and then the sun might be only one star among galaxies of them: but when it came to meaning, when it came to being, in fact, all the constellations still revolved around men.
He had been drawn to cities, had
considered no alternatives—cities and buildings, buildings and institutions. The lights across the continent. But what if, from his childhood on, he had imagined not the lights but the spaces between them? He would do so now, to make up for all the years behind him.
Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan—it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution—tiger, tiger,
burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic.
Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will … they could never be known in every detail and they never should be.
When time moved, mountains rose from the plains and the miracles multiplied, infinitely lovely. The miracles were the beasts.
•
Lying on his back, gazing up past the tip of the bough at the spectrum from blue to black in the sky, he heard a clinking and scraping off to his right.
He sat up abruptly. White in the dimness, white bearing down on him. It was the boat. It floated downriver.
His bad knots.
He dropped the flask and tussled with the mosquito net: the boat was approaching rapidly. It was almost already there, almost at the sand bar. Was it not his duty to scramble aboard? Was it not what he was supposed to do?
He pulled the netting up and ducked through, the sheet falling around him; naked and tottering he stood on the edge of the sand bar, his feet sinking. The prow loomed past him: he splashed out into the water and grabbed the side, tried to heave himself up: he was clinging, legs thrashing, looking down into the boat, halfway over the side. His feet trailed in the water. He could not get in: the boat was still moving fast: over the side he could see.