The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  “Thank you,” Lewis says, and Burr says, “You don’t need to say thank you.”

  The cups steam with black coffee roasted from chicory nuts.

  “Why not?”

  Burr gives a croaking laugh. “Because she’s a slave.”

  The woman bows and leaves them. Lewis sips from his cup and cringes at the bitterness.

  Burr holds his with two trembling hands. “Not to your liking?”

  “No. It isn’t.” Lewis sets his cup on its tray, giving up on it. “Gawea had those same markings on her.”

  “She did.” His enormous head shivers more than nods. “She does. I can tell that this bothers you, but if you look back, way back, on the long hoof-marked trail of human history, slaves are the standard of empire. Rome. Egypt. The Macedonians and Ottomans. The Chinese dynasties. These United States. That’s how you build something big. You have to abuse some to benefit many. In this case, it’s not just about power; it’s about survival. We’re on the brink. This could be the end. The world will keep spinning without us if we don’t stake our claim. I’m the person who is making this happen. You’re capable of helping me. Help me.” His voice grows kind and weary. “Look at me, Lewis. I won’t be around much longer. I need you.”

  The old Lewis might have believed him. The old Lewis, who held others in disdain, who clapped himself away in his office, who studied the world with a cold remove. But that man is gone, shed like a dark chrysalis, and the new Lewis has traveled to the horizon’s rainbow edge, where he has discovered—no better word for it—a magic in himself and others.

  His mind turns to Colter then, his demand that Lewis not dis­appoint him. As a delaying tactic, to get his head in the right place, he nods at the bookshelves and asks, “May I?”

  Lewis is a scholar, after all. He is a man who reads in order to figure out how to behave. He rises and walks the length of the shelves and pulls down a book at random and cracks it open and breathes deeply. Parchment, leather, mold. He has missed this, the company of books. And they give him a confidence he lacks when fumbling around on his own. He remembers his own journal. He remembers that he is writing his own book, that he is authoring his own story, not this man and not anyone else.

  “They’re so comforting,” Burr says.

  “They are.”

  “Because they feel so fateful. In them people do things for a reason. They are following a predetermined pattern, often one established long ago by another writer, or another hundred writers, or another thousand writers, so that every story might seem unique and particular but is actually recurring, in conversation with others. That’s how history works too. That’s how life works. We’re all characters caught in a cycle of ruin and renewal.”

  “That’s a way of looking at it.”

  “There’s no way of looking at it. It’s true. We’re at the beginning of a time of renewal. And you—you are one of my fateful characters.”

  “Hmm.” Lewis closes the book and fits it back on the shelf.

  “Have you read many novels?” Burr says. “I’ve always liked novels best. The hero comes from humble or disadvantaged circumstances. He suffers a loss or injury that presses him into a fight or quest.” His coffee steams. “He gets help. From a friend. They push their way through a dark time. They triumph. Everything makes sense. Everything turns out for the best.” He slurps loudly. “I can be that friend.”

  Lewis stares at him a long moment and says, “I tend to prefer nonfiction.”

  “Of course you do.” Except for his head, Burr is so much smaller than expected. Bird boned. As if a hug could crush his ribs. Just looking at him, Lewis doesn’t understand his power, his seeming command of this place. “You can read whatever you wish. The library is yours. Consider this home.”

  Lewis feels the words pulled from his mouth. “I would like that.” He brings a hand to his mouth, too late to stop himself.

  “You would. Yes, you would. To study under me. To call me your teacher.”

  Lewis feels something like fingers inside his mouth, his throat, making him gag, making him say, “Yes.” He snaps his jaw twice, biting away the word, the sensation. “No. No, I would not. I consider myself a man of science, but what you’re doing here seems to go against God.”

  “What God?” Burr croaks out a laugh. “If there was a God, he made cats that play with birds before eating them. Just the same as he made stillborn babies and rapist fathers and brain tumors and viruses that make you cough your lungs inside out. There’s no right and no wrong in any of that. Only the survival that comes with strength and a little bit of luck. We’re God, Lewis. You and I. We’re the gods of this time.”

  Again the fingers in his mouth, pinching his tongue, clawing his throat, drawing something submissive from him. But he fights back with a word, “No.”

  The lights blaze. Burr seems suddenly to grow larger. Lewis swears he stands, even as he plainly remains seated. “I hoped you wouldn’t say that, but I expected you might need some convincing.”

  Footsteps clomp down the hallway. Two figures appear in the doorway. One of them is the man who escorted him here—the one with the arms too big for his body—and the other is a woman with her hands secured and a burlap sack over her head. She struggles against the man’s grip and tries to stomp on one of his feet. He brings a fist to her stomach to quiet her. With a moan she bends in half and he rips off the sack to reveal a fiery tangle of hair. Her face is bruised, but Lewis recognizes her all the same.

  “Clark!” He tries to move toward her but something invisible grips him, anchors him in place.

  “She arrived two days ago by train. I’ve been very happy to make her acquaintance.”

  Lewis’s face twists in several directions. He can’t decide how he feels. First an ebullient giddiness. Then a lingering fury. This mellows when he realizes why she is here, how Burr hopes to use her against him. Lewis feels more and more like a marionette tugged by strings, dragged thousands of miles and now asked to dance, shaken when not compliant.

  “You see, don’t you?” Burr says gleefully. “You understand? You’ll maybe listen a little better now?”

  Lewis thinks about lying, about saying she means nothing to him, but he feels as if an eye is rolling through the corridors of his mind and he must dim the lights and close the doors on it. He removes from his mind any thoughts of Clark. In defense, he focuses all his attention instead on the grain of the wood in the floor, how much it looks like the whorl of a fingerprint. For the moment that is all he knows.

  “I understand,” Lewis says and he feels the eye retreat, releasing him. He realizes only then that he is crumpled on the floor, like a boneless pile of clothes.

  He reaches into his pocket—his habit from long ago, when he would seek comfort in his snuffbox—and finds not a silver tin but a wooden case. The coffin-shaped one containing the vial. He transferred it there when they left their bags in the cove. He didn’t want to leave it behind, thinking it too valuable and dangerous. How easy it would be to snap its top, shake its contents into the coffee cup beside him. He wonders how much time would pass before Burr began coughing, before his fever spiked. He wonders how long it would take for the infection to work its way through all of Astoria. A viral infection that would wipe away the human infection.

  It is then that a thunderclap sounds, though only a few clouds spatter the sky. They all hunker down. A crack runs through the window. A book falls from the shelf. Outside, down the hill, a bloom of fire, a plume of smoke. The aftermath of a bomb. A concrete building crumbles in half, opening its dark, gaping center. The noise of the explosion lengthens as it orbits the town.

  Burr has risen from his chair and stands by the window. Lewis can sense his anger, but it is momentarily directed elsewhere. “It’s those goddamned women again,” he says.

  Now. Now would be the time. To crack the container, to twist open the vial, to dose his coffee.

  Then he hears a crying. The boy stands in the doorway. The boy with the cleft palate a
nd the marbles. His cheeks are wet with tears. He runs to Burr and clings to his leg and the old man pats him and says, “There, there. Nothing to be afraid of. Just some bugs that need to be squashed.”

  Boys. Girls. Men and women. The innocent and the terrible alike. If he shook out the specimen and infected Burr, this is what Lewis would be destroying. Then he would indeed be playing God. He will have to find another way.

  Outside, with every passing second, the smoke blackens and thickens. Then comes a second explosion, farther away than the first, that jangles the cups on their saucers.

  The wrinkles in Burr’s face seem to multiply when he turns from the window. “I’m needed elsewhere. Which will give you some time to think about this,” he says, with a voice with a lot of teeth in it. “Adapt. Or face extinction.”

  Chapter 57

  IT WAS NEVER going to be easy. Gawea knew that. But she thought the trouble would come from hunger and thirst, storms that spit snow, sunlight that scorched, insects that stung and animals that clawed. She thought her flesh would be vulnerable, not her heart.

  When they paddled the Columbia, when they followed the final artery of water that would lead them to Astoria, she hoped that she would return in more ways than one—to her home and to her original frame of mind, indifferent to her cargo. She didn’t want to care about Lewis anymore. It was too hard.

  The current pulled them and their paddles pulled them and Burr pulled them, and at one point she almost yelled at them to stop, turn back, but by then it was too late. The lights of Astoria glowed in the distance. She could call a snake up from its burrow or a bird down from a branch, but she could not control the guilt and the doubt twisting inside her, and on the beach she decided she could not face Lewis any longer. Before she stole off into the night, she told herself that he would be fine. If he gave in and did as he was told, if he became the old man’s instrument, he would be rewarded. She would not consider the alternative.

  Burr made her a promise. If she delivered Lewis to Astoria, he would give her what she has pined for all these years. Family. Her mother. This, she thought, was what she wanted. This would give her the sense of wholeness that has escaped her all her life.

  When dawn comes, when she presents herself to Burr, he pets her hair and thanks her and feeds her and questions her and makes good on his promise and directs her up the bald-sculpted hill where clouds pattern the grass with fast-moving shadows. Here the Astoria column rises, with pioneers and trappers painted in a swirling mural along its length, memorializing all those who braved the way west in the hope of a better life.

  Its long shadow points to a gazebo. In it she finds her mother waiting on a bench. She forgets all about Lewis then. Her feet whisper in the grass when she approaches and stands a little off to the side until her mother turns to look at her. The last time Gawea saw her, seven years ago, she clutched a baby to her breast and contorted her face in fear when a storm of wasps came pouring in the window. She looks calm now—sad but calm—acknowledging Gawea and then returning her gaze to the ocean. The salt wind blows and knocks her hair—streaked gray—around her head like tentacles. “I never thought I’d see the ocean,” she says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Gawea takes a step closer. “Do you remember me?”

  Her mother blinks hard, as if something bothers her eye. “I remember.”

  Gawea takes another step closer and another still. “They told you why you’re here? They’ve treated you well? You look well.”

  She does. She is deeply tanned and furrowed with wrinkles—and her hands are so callused they appear hooved—but she is freshly bathed, wearing a pine-green dress that matches her eyes. Which makes it all the more unsettling when she takes a deep breath and asks Gawea in a calm, cool voice, “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  It takes her a minute to find any words, and when she does, they’re the obvious ones. “Because I want to be with you. I want us to be a family.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have another family now.”

  “You were a slave. Now you’re free. I made that happen.”

  “They stole me away once. Now they’ve stolen me away again. If I’m free, then let me go back. I have children. I have a home.”

  “I’m your child too.”

  “Maybe.” Her mother’s eyes, her green eyes, regard her, so different from Gawea’s. She is different. They are different. “But that was a long time ago. And I was another woman. I just want to forget all that. Don’t you understand that it’s easier to forget? It’s harder to remember.” She reaches out a hand for Gawea to take. Its fingernails short, its calluses rough. “You must have people who care for you. Go to them.”

  Her mother was different, but Lewis was like her. Gawea was like him. All this time she kept yearning for her mother, when he was more family to her, a brother beyond blood, fused by their abilities. She needed him, and right now—maybe more than ever—he needed her.

  * * *

  The knob and then the deadbolt lock behind Lewis and Clark, but the footsteps do not retreat. The man waits outside, guarding them, his feet shadowing the light under the door.

  This is the tower of the Flavel house, an octagonal sitting room with cushioned benches. At its center, a narrow metal staircase spirals upward into another windowed peak, four stories high. Lewis goes to one of the benches and looks out across the bay, all that open space rolling off to the horizon. No fences, no walls. No fear.

  Because these people are the ones to fear. He understands that now.

  “I’m sorry,” Clark says behind him.

  “Are you?”

  He has come here looking for an answer. But it is not the answer he is looking for. The present is constructed from the past. The future is predicted by the past. Virgins are hurled into volcanoes. Children are stabbed on altars. Women are burned at the stake. Natives are gifted with blankets smeared with smallpox. Africans are hunted down and chained and stuffed into the bellies of ships. Jews are marched into gas chambers, their bodies wheelbarrowed to furnaces that pump black clouds from tall chimneys. A bomb whistles from the sky and flattens a city. Planes become weapons and rip down buildings. Serbs are killed. Tutsis are killed. Hmong are killed. Homosexuals are killed. Muslims are killed. Christians are killed. The wheel of time turns. People kill people. People enslave people.

  Burr is wrong. The world is not evolving. The world stays the same. The circumstances change but not the matter. The world has not destroyed itself. The world has always been destroying itself, a perpetual apocalypse. What hope is there?

  He feels suddenly overcome. He has traveled all this way for this. He tests the window, toying with the idea of throwing himself out it, but finds it nailed shut.

  Clark says, “Back at the Sanctuary, when we were ranging the Dead Lands, we sometimes came across animals. Sand wolves. Bears. Javelinas. Spiders. We were trained to never run. Never run. If you run, you give up your power. You face whatever it is that’s dangerous. You face it, and if you need to, you fight it.” Her voice chokes and she goes quiet a minute. “I forgot that. I ran away from what scared me. But I’m ready to face it now. I’m ready to fight by you again.”

  She appears beside him. He does not look at her directly, but sidelong, and still he sees her battered face. If she is anything, she is a fighter. She’s not going to give up, not on living and not on muscling him over to her side again. “I said I’m sorry and I mean it, Lewis. I’m sorry for everything.”

  “What happened to the others?”

  She tells him. About the hundreds of men who charged out of the fog, who swarmed the mall and overcame their defenses, who beat them and interrogated them and crushed them onto a train. The doctor—here she clears her throat and says, “Minda”—Minda did not make it, a blow to the temple cracking her skull and making her brain swell so that she cried out visions the rest of them could not see before falling into a deep sleep she never woke from.

  “I think she might have loved you, you know
,” Lewis says.

  “I know.”

  Clark reaches for Lewis and at first he flinches from her. Her hand pauses in the air between them and then continues and she runs her fingers across his scalp, his hair now as white and stiff as a horsehair brush. “What happened to you?” she says.

  “You. You happened.”

  She smiles with her whole face, everything bending into an expression of warmth. “Did you ever think you’d see me again?”

  “I hoped I would.”

  “What’s going on in that head of yours?”

  When he thinks about the Clark he grew up with and the Clark who stands beside him now, he might as well be staring at a mirror with a crack running through it. He sees a similar division in himself. While the Sanctuary brutalized them, the journey has humanized them. He is not the same man; she is not the same woman. To blame her for what she did would be to blame a hard-faced stranger. He would have never been capable of such a gesture before, but he takes her hand now and their fingers knit together.

  Lewis blows out a sigh, and, like an echo, another explosion concusses the air.

  More and more people appear in the streets. They appear frenzied, lost. They run one way, pause, and then run the next, like ants rushing out of a kicked hill. The sky is dirty with smoke. Maybe they are afraid. Maybe they should be afraid. Maybe they need a wall of their own.

  “Somebody is fighting back,” he says.

  Clark sees him, knows the potential inside him more clearly than Burr ever could. “So are we going to join them or fucking what?”

  He feels a small flash of hope once more. “I thought I came here to join something. Now I understand it’s to stop something.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  He leans against the window, pressing his cheek against the cold glass, fogging it with his breath, trying to see where the latest explosion has come from.

  That is when the first gull swings by, a flash of white that startles Lewis back a step. It is followed by another, this one tapping at the glass, chipping it with its beak.