The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  The other day, when kicking their way through a house and salvaging what they could from it, he came upon a body in a brass bed, the mattress rotted down to springs, the corpse shrunken down to mummified skin with the hair still clinging to it. He stared for a long time and thought how nice it must be to be dead, how comfortable to lie down and let darkness take you. You would never have to worry about anything again. The others must feel the same way. Even if they don’t say it. The weight of this dead world pressing down on them. Even if they’re not, like him, fondling their revolver and considering how a bullet might taste when swallowed, there are so many others ways to surrender.

  Lewis sleeps most of the day, but when he is awake, for an hour, sometimes two, he writes in his journal or takes short, wobbling walks along the river using a long white branch as a staff to keep his balance. On occasion he sits around the campfire with a blanket thrown over his shoulders, though no one but Gawea and Clark seem comfortable speaking to him. Reed has always been wary of him but now feels repulsed. Can Lewis even be categorized as human, or is he more a mutation, like some giant white bat or hairless sand wolf, a product of this world and not the last? Other.

  Soon, when Lewis is strong enough, they will pack their things and press forward. Because Clark demands it. She demands they think of their country and not merely themselves. She demands they consider the implications of what they’re doing, their small rebellion against the Sanctuary a gateway to something much larger: national redefinition. Ever since they dragged her from the basement, ever since Lewis brought his wrist to hers, she woke with a renewed life and vigor, and when she speaks of their mission, when she speaks of this new America, she manages to somehow make it feel real, not some ridiculous abstraction.

  They listen to her. They believe in her. She brought them all this far. Not Reed. He is a totem leader, and not even that, not any longer. She gives them the hope that allows them to be led. Hope is a good and dangerous thing, Reed thinks. Hope is the moment that never comes and life is the shit you wallow through when chasing it.

  They have not slept together in weeks. More and more often he has trouble keeping his patience around her. He tries to sit by himself—he tries to lie by himself—but she always finds him. When she asks a question, sometimes he does not respond at all, and when he does, his answers are often clipped, sullen. She wants to know why he is so angry and he tells her he is tired; that’s all. He’s so tired. Which is and is not the truth.

  He has fantasized about her death. A snake will bite her. Her horse will throw her. She will eat a poisonous mushroom. When the bats stole her, he couldn’t help but feel a kind of relief. Now we can rest. Now we can stop this race to nowhere. That’s what he thought.

  Every morning, when Lewis wakes, his hand goes immediately to his pocket, searching for the tin that isn’t there. Reed has seen him suffer through his days and nights. He knows about the sweats and cramps and headaches and bad-tempered hallucinations. He understands because he feels much the same without her, Danica.

  He misses her like a drug. His nose in her hair. His tongue along her collarbone. Her nipples tightening into points when traced by his fingertip. He hates himself for his weakness but cannot deny it. His need for her. She once, when they were still naked and breathing hard and pressed together damply, said the word love into his neck. When he asked her to repeat herself, she said, “It was nothing,” and he said, “No, you said something,” but she would only dart her tongue from her mouth and trace the shape of his ear.

  Whether she actually feels love for him, he doesn’t know. But he must for her. What else would have drawn him back to her, again and again, despite the danger? What else could make him feel so bruised inside now that she is out of reach? He hears her breathing in the river. He tastes her in the salt of a pebble he clacks between his teeth. And, for so long, he has imagined her face over Clark’s. Sometimes the only thing that keeps him going is the thought of them together in a lush, green space with rain falling softly.

  Earlier today, they speared seven trout from the river, and now they crisp and brown over the fire. They offer Lewis some, but he waves it away. His skin appears as pale and brittle as an eggshell. Clark asks how he is feeling and he says his joints burn as if padded by coals and every blink feels like a snuffed candle. She asks when he might be ready to pack up and move on, and he says another day or two. Then he coughs into his fist and says that before they go any farther, this one time and one time only, he plans to send his owl to the skies and deliver a message to the Sanctuary.

  Clark asks him why in God’s name he would do that.

  He hoods the blanket over his head and tightens his grip on it, making a kind of bonnet. His face is lost to shadow except for the sharp white nose peeking out. “To give people hope, of course.” He has an acidic way of speaking that shrinks his audience into something so small and insignificant he might flick them away. He explains that the mayor has no doubt claimed they are dead, and who knows what dismissive lies he invented to excuse them away. If they are indeed journeying this far for more than themselves—if they plan to return someday and bring down the wall—then they need to give people a reason to hold out.

  York tongues a fish bone from his mouth, pulls it from his lips, and flicks it into the fire. “Going back. Damn. With all the miles we’ve traveled, with all the miles still waiting ahead of us, that is the last thing I want to think about.”

  Lewis ignores him. He will send the letter to Ella and she will find a way to spread the news to others.

  Clark says, “If anyone sees that owl, she’ll be dead.”

  “I’m sure that’s a risk she’ll be willing to take.”

  Reed says, “If you’re sending a letter, I want to as well.” He feels Clark’s eyes on him. “I have a— I have some people I’d like to let know I’m all right.”

  “You said it yourselves. A letter risks lives. The more letters, the more lives. One will speak for us all.” Lewis rises and excuses himself. He is tired. He must rest. He toddles to his bed now, twenty yards away from their campsite, a willing exile. He uses his staff to keep his balance and to stir the fire he keeps for himself. He adds two logs to it. With a rusty stiffness he lowers his body to the ground. He wobbles there a moment, fighting sleep, but instead of crushing his head into a pillow, he reaches a hand into his satchel and extracts a piece of paper followed by his quill and inkpot.

  Reed follows and watches from a short distance as Lewis begins to write—no doubt composing the very letter he mentioned, wishing to send it off before they can question him further. His pen slashes the paper with a speed unavailable to his legs. This is how he will always be swiftest, on the empty page, not the open plain, in his mind and not his body.

  But before he finishes the letter, his chin drops to his chest, his posture curls. Sleep overtakes him. A minute passes. Then he startles awake and folds the letter in half, and then in half again, and again, until it is a tiny white square.

  The owl perches on a nearby stump. He crawls over and kneels beside it. The action seems to exhaust him. He slumps against the stump, resting his forehead against it like a man praying at an altar. He wakes when he loses his balance, when his body begins to slide. He reaches for the owl and toys with a lever. Its breast swings open to reveal a small cavity into which he fits the letter. By this time all his energy is spent. He curls his body at the base of the stump and succumbs to sleep.

  Reed sneaks a sheet of paper and uses the still-wet quill to compose a message. He pauses twice when Lewis stirs or hitches his breathing. His words splotch and the paper tears in his hurry. Then he folds the letter into a small square and seals it with pitch from a split log and tucks it into the owl’s breast for Lewis to send skyward when he wakes.

  Chapter 25

  THE THIN MAN told Gawea he would personally escort her from Utah to Oregon, where Aran Burr awaited her. It was a long road and he would protect her, so long as she obeyed him. He kept her wrists bound and her mi
nd drugged with an opiate, so that she wouldn’t escape or attack him. She was so numb she didn’t feel his hands on her during the night, and during the day she saw the landscape they traversed in a hallucinogenic blur. They rode through forests that had burned down to blackened lances and others electric with the yellow-and-red music of fall. They rode across glinting fields of obsidian that looked as though the night froze and fell and shattered. They rode through striped canyons with whitewater foaming through their bottoms. They climbed cinder cones and buttes and stared out at the way they had come and the way they might go.

  Sometimes animals followed her. A jeweled cloud of bees. A parade of humpbacked foam-mouthed bears trundling in a long line. Marmots poking their heads from their warrens to whistle their greeting. Vultures and eagles and crows drafting air currents, spinning in the sky, surrounding her with rippling shadows. A cluster of antlered deer encasing her like a basket that bore her north and west.

  She was followed, too, by dreams she could not shake. In them a man visited her, the man named Aran Burr. She could never see his face—but she could see enough of him to know he was old and bent, his bald head ringed by long white hair that tumbled down his back. He spoke in a whispery, papery voice. He told her she was special. He was special too. They could be special together. If only she would come to him, if only she would listen. Come, he said. Come to me.

  She wondered if he was a ghost, like the ones Oma used to tell stories about who would drown you in a lake or lead you deep into the woods until you were lost. Burr made her startle at shadows. He made her nerves feel like twigs snapping. At first she clapped her hands to scare his voice away. Dug in her ear, shook her head as if to scrape out a mosquito. Then she began to listen. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to teach her how special she was.

  Then, in the Cascades, the thin man’s horse lost its footing. They were crossing a slope of scree at the time. The horse tumbled down the hill and took him with it. The ensuing rockslide mangled him. So did the horse, its body rolling over him, bending his body the wrong way. Gawea waited a long time. Long enough for her head to clear. Then she climbed down the hillside and retrieved the keys to her handcuffs and collected the provisions from his saddlebags and whispered good-bye to the lame horse before braining it with a rock.

  At this point, she felt she had no place in the world, so she kept moving, following the voice, the voice of Aran Burr, her only beacon.

  She could always sense people long before she encountered them. Trails and roads cut the ground. Stumps sprinkled with sawdust appeared. They made a mechanical storm of noise with their hammers and saws. They stunk the air with their paint and oil and cooking. Some lived in small clusters—giving her some sense of what life must have been like before her father was killed and her mother taken—walled villages with pigs rooting in pens and smoke rising from chimneys. Sometimes, at night, to antidote her loneliness, she would walk unseen among them. She opened and closed their drawers. She stood over their beds and smelled their stale breath and listened to them make love or murmur their way through dreams. She pretended herself, just for a moment, part of a family.

  More than anything, that was what she wanted, family. Burr seemed to offer her that. She feared him. She still fears him. But in him she found a mirror, someone who resembled her. Though his hair was a silvery white, though his bones were warped and his skin spotted, they were the same. When they first met, he took her hands in his and said, “You’re like me.”

  With these words he repaired her loneliness. He made her feel like she belonged somewhere. She remembers the first time they sat together, in leather chairs in a library full of light, and when she squinted at him, unable to see him clearly for the blazing sun, he asked if the light bothered her. “A little,” she said, and he held up his hand and the shutters slammed shut and in the darkness that followed he laughed until he coughed and then said, “Now you try.”

  People loved to use different as an insult. A spicy dish was different. A challenging book or painting was different. Someone who dressed unusually was different. She was different. Burr told her this prejudice came from fear. The fear of change. She was evidence of change. People found comfort in the boring and ordinary. And she was extraordinary. This was a new country and they were a new people. The next people. He would teach her how to use her gift. Just as he would teach Lewis. They would help each other. And they would help the world. They were healers, builders, innovators, and it was up to them to fit together the pieces of a broken country.

  She often fingered the scar on her shoulder, the place where they’d branded her, and when one day she said, “I wish I could carve it off,” Burr said that wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t do at all.

  “It’s your constant reminder,” he said, “that you serve me.” He was good to her so long as she was good to him. So long as she did what he said. Traveling all this distance, seeking out Lewis, risking her life and his—that was doing what he said—and so long as she was successful, he would reward her. She was in it for the reward, for what he promised her.

  That is why she tries to keep quiet, keep her distance, keep from growing too familiar with anyone. Farmers don’t coddle or even name the cattle they plan to slaughter; they treat them as they do the corn in the fields, as the product of a job. These people—that’s how she likes to think of them, not as York or Clark or Reed or the doctor, but as people, a generalized mass—these people mean nothing to her. They could drown in a river or puke up a bad mushroom or fall on a knife and she wouldn’t care. She wouldn’t. She won’t. You get close to someone, if they get hurt, you get hurt. They are expendable. Every one of them but Lewis. That is what Burr told her and that is what she keeps telling herself.

  But she can feel doubt tugging at her. She can feel anxiety tunneling through her like little worms. There was a time when she thought by Burr’s side was the only place she could feel some sense of belonging—until now. It’s the boy’s fault. The boy, York, desires her. Ever since he caught her beneath the gallows, ever since she took his hand and raced across the stadium with the vultures crisscrossing the sky above them, he has been following her.

  She knows this and secretly revels in it. The other day, when they sat around the fire, he seasoned a trout fillet with some dill she harvested. He ate it and spoke to her with his mouth open, talking nonsense, telling jokes, wondering what life awaited him in Oregon. He had always dreamed of opening a theater— What did she think of that? Did she think that was a good idea? And hey, what was up with the mark on her shoulder? The one she was rubbing now. The one she was always rubbing.

  “It’s nothing,” she said and dropped her hand.

  “It’s a tattoo, right? You’ve seen mine? The jester’s mask on my back? What does yours mean?”

  Rather than answer, she leaned in and stole a fillet from his plate and took a bite of it. “I’m hungry,” she said around a mouthful.

  He smiled and watched her eat.

  She doesn’t want to feel this way, her mind fizzy with attraction.

  She tries to remind herself to feel jealous. In some fashion betrayed. That’s how she felt traveling all this way to retrieve the man who would share Burr’s attention. She has tried not to get close. She has tried. She kept her mouth shut as long as she could, kept her distance even when riding alongside someone. But her loneliness—an emptiness that aches like a pulled tooth—is a lifelong disability. And when the bat nearly took York, she felt like it was taking him from her.

  They hoist their saddlebags. They sling rifles over their shoulders. Pans clank from their packs and ammunition chimes in their pockets. Gawea eyes up the campsite one last time, a place that felt briefly like home to all of them, before hiking away, following the river, feeling a barb of guilt as she once more leads them closer and closer to a destination they may regret. Lewis, she knows, will be protected by Burr. But what will become of the others?

  * * *

  Many things have changed since Lewis brought Clark back
from the brink. Including the connection between the two of them. Their eyes often meet, and when they do, he feels a rippling in the air between them, like some electrical charge. When she departs the camp to hunt, he worries for her in a way he never did before, his chest constricting. It is almost as if, with so much of him inside her, she has become an extension of him, a third arm, a second head, her heart beating in time with his, so that they seem allied on a cellular level. “What’s happening to you?” she asks him one night, and he says, “I’m trying to understand the same.”

  By the end of each day Lewis’s body feels languid but buzzy. He thinks often of his tin, aches for it, but no longer needs a dose of powder to quicken a connection, speed his tongue and hand. His mind, once walled in, is now free to chase paths never considered.

  He packed the journal—mottled calfskin cover, yellowed onionskin pages—to document. He has spent so much of his life clapped away in the museum, reading other people’s words, studying and pinning and labeling the world as if it were a still life. By agreeing to leave, he agreed to activity. He left behind stillness for movement, engagement. If this is a new world, then who better to serve as its chronicler than he, the custodian of the old?

  In the beginning, every entry seemed some variation of this: Woke before dawn, rode hard through the day, made it to X location, small argument broke out over lost provisions, no water, everything dead. At first he felt a failure and the world a failure too, everything a skeleton of what once was.