In the Distance

by Hernan Diaz

  At dawn (he wanted to make sure he would have all the light he needed), Håkan gave Pingo several drops of Lorimer’s sedative tincture with a sackful of tender leaves. Soon the horse’s eyes turned narrower and blacker. He seemed to be squinting inward. Then he started showing his teeth to the desert. Even though his hind legs became wobbly, Pingo managed to walk away. He could not be stopped—he did not feel the pull of the rope, and he even dragged Håkan, who was hanging off his neck, digging his heels into the ground. Pingo cackled joylessly like an old hen or a tired witch. Kea, kea, kea, kea. Håkan panted. The burro looked at them, calmly surprised at their lack of decorum. Pingo sat down, staring nearsightedly into the void. Håkan tried to get him back on his feet with gentle words. Suddenly, as if lashed by an invisible whip, the horse got up and resumed his erratic march. Kea, kea, kea, kea. Once again, Håkan clung to the pony’s neck. The horse’s strength seemed to increase with his disorientation. The burro had become a speck near the horizon. Had they gone that far or was the burro walking the opposite way? Håkan managed to give Pingo a few more drops of the draft. The gelatinous legs finally melted, and the horse collapsed on his side. Just in case, Håkan tied up the pony’s feet and then ran back toward the burro. It had not moved.

  Once back by his horse with his donkey and his equipment, Håkan laid out a waxed canvas tarp, boiled his instruments in the murky water (humming, like the short-haired man), washed his hands as best he could, and took all his clothes off. After making a large cut into the pony’s abdomen, he had no trouble finding the large colon. In fact, it was much bigger than he had ever imagined—thicker than a human thigh. He stuck his arm shoulder-deep into the horse’s belly, trying to go around the intestine and lift it out, but it was too heavy and slippery. Additionally, it was apparent that the tissue was extremely delicate and that it would tear if handled brusquely. His body was soon covered in sweat, blood, and viscous fluids. After gently wrestling with that colossal snake, he managed to withdraw the most movable part of the large colon from the horse’s abdomen. The heavy bowel hung over the animal’s frame and poured over onto the tarp. He made an incision the length of his hand and flushed the contents. Pingo had swallowed an enormous amount of sand. Håkan rinsed the intestine clean, almost depleting their water reserve. Then he sutured the colon and reset it in the horse. It was remarkably lighter now that the sand had been cleaned out, and he had little trouble putting the organ back in place.

  As a precaution, Håkan left the horse tied down on the ground for the first two days and kept giving him a low dose of sedative. When the time came for Pingo to get up, he proved to be stronger than expected. Still, Håkan knew it would be several weeks until the horse could walk the long distances they had previously covered every day. And they were almost out of water. According to Lorimer, they were supposed to come to a river, which—given the distance already traveled—could not be too far away. Håkan left Pingo food and water in a cask buried to the rim so it would not spill, tied him to the trunk of a sturdy bush with a long cord, and, in case this should fail, fettered his forelegs with a loose rope so as to hamper his movement. Although the animal was tethered and hobbled, Håkan was reluctant to leave his horse and kept turning around to look at his immobile silhouette until it was warped and wiped out by the distant waves of heated air.

  The river, a brown line of slow, muddy waters, was a mere two days away. Although the vegetation on the riverbank showed the sternness the desert demanded of all living beings, Håkan found it refreshingly green—and the burro even discovered some bunchgrass to bring back to Pingo. Hidden in the low, entangled treetops, the only haven for miles around, several bird nests brimmed with eggs, most of them a pale orange marbled with ochre streaks. Håkan ate a few and wrapped about two dozen more of different sizes and colors in a piece of cloth. He went back to the riverbank and tried to fish with suture and a curved needle but, after a long wait, only caught a small, pungent bottom-feeder. Walking up and down the shore, he made a loud crunch with every step. He scratched the sand with the tip of his shoe and found the strand to be lined with mussels that had made their shallow homes just a few inches under the surface. He pried one open and inspected the slime within. It looked more like a single organ than a body made of many parts. He dislodged the mollusk from its shell and slid it down his throat, avoiding chewing or tasting it. With little effort, he dug out a great number of mussels and then threw them into the vats, already replenished with turbid water. The sacks were packed with grass and eggs, and soon Håkan and the burro were heading back the way they had come.

  Faithful, uncomplaining Pingo stood waiting by the bush, exactly where he had been left. He was thirsty but in somewhat better shape. His stitches were healing, and although he seemed more vivacious, he found walking extremely painful.

  Their bivouac gradually became a permanent camping site. Håkan cleared the center of a large thicket and spread a tarpaulin over the opening, creating a low, shady shelter where he lay most of the time, stupefied by the heat. Every three days or so, he walked back to the river with the burro and brought back water, mussels, eggs, and grass, so despite the long delay, their provisions remained, for the most part, untouched. Meanwhile, Pingo’s condition seemed to be deteriorating. He got intense itching fits around his stitches. Part of his rib cage was raw after so many attempts at scratching the scar with his teeth, and he often had to be muzzled. The fits increased as he developed a swollen redness around his stitches, a hard yet somehow fragile force pushing from within. Pingo’s eyes had grown larger. When he was not dressing his wound, Håkan was coaxing him to drink water or trying to shield him from the sun. He spent most of the day with his cheek to the horse’s neck, feeling the flesh twitch under his coat. Eventually, Pingo’s legs gave in, and he lay down. His breathing was a broken rustle, as if withered leaves were rolling inside his rusty windpipe. His eyes seemed to be about to pop out. The wound acquired a life of its own—warm and mauve, taut and throbbing.

  A maggot emerged from under one of the stitches the same day Pingo started hallucinating. Håkan pulled it out and saw a confusion of worms boiling within the wound. Later that day, Pingo’s ears started quivering as if they were swarming with insects. Then he began shaking his head and whipping his back with his tail, swatting invisible flies. Then he tried and failed to get up. Then he screamed. It was a sound unlike anything Håkan had ever heard. Two monstrous knife edges running against each other. Pingo sustained the scream until his lungs crumpled. Then, he screamed again. And over and over again. Håkan embraced the neck of his horse, whose delirious eyes were being sucked out of their sockets by the horizon. Pingo kept screaming, veins and tendons bulging around his throat. Håkan held him tighter and wept. The screams only stopped after a strong dose of sedative. Once Pingo was unconscious, Håkan cut through his cava and carotid, rolled up his tarp, and left.

  10.

  He had not seen his own face since he had left Clangston. Only splintered reflections on blades, partial glimpses on lids, quivering images on water, or curved caricatures on glass—never a complete, truthful picture of his features. And now, there it was, lying on the desert. His face.

  Walking alongside the burro, he had crossed the shallow river and kept traveling north for several days without incident. Håkan was used to the illusions the desert conjured up from the dust. He had seen many pools spring up in the distance and then dispel as he advanced toward them, many hopeful or menacing shapes gather on the horizon that were nothing but the hazy ghosts of heat. But the blinding light coming from the ground was unlike anything else, and this strangeness confirmed its reality. More than a glare, it looked like a frozen blast, a detonation suspended in its flashing climax. The sharp whiteness cut through his eyes. As he approached that silent constant explosion in the sand, Håkan realized that it was somewhat elevated, although it was hard to look at it straight on. A few moments later, he reached the blaze. It was the mirror on the open door of a massive wardrobe. The large trunk was beache
d on its back, disemboweled, and the open door hung from its hinges at an angle. He was impressed by the dresser’s craftsmanship—sensuous spirals and scrolls, lifelike paws and claws, plump cherubim and flowers. It was the softest surface he had touched during his long trip through the porous, pumice-like desert. Although there was something profoundly intimate about it—something conjugal—the dresser also called forth a crowded world and a sense of urban refinement Håkan could only vaguely imagine. In fact, the dresser was the most concrete embodiment of those civilized comforts he had ever been free to touch and inspect. While running his fingers over the turned black wood, Håkan’s approach to the mirror changed. The sun was no longer on the glass, and he was finally able to look into it. It took him a moment to accept the face he saw as his own. Some of his old features were gone, new ones had set in, and he had to find himself in the image at his feet. The orange shadow of a mustache hovered over his lip, and the hesitant promise of a beard spotted his chin and hollow cheeks. At the sight of his emaciation and his protruding bones, he was reminded of his teeth. With great anxiety, he parted his chapped white lips to inspect his gums. The inside of his mouth, moist and red, was the only part of his body that remained unaffected by the arid wasteland. Relieved to find his teeth as healthy as ever, he returned to that strange face that looked up at him in bewilderment. He had withered and wrinkled—the sun had burned deep crevices into his face. His eyes were permanently screwed up, but not as the result of a deliberate frown. This was just his face now, creased by the constant squint of someone facing an overwhelming light or an unsolvable problem. And his gaze, almost invisible in the narrow trench under his knit and ribbed brow, was no longer fearful or curious, but dispassionately hungry. For what, he could not tell.

  Before moving on, he was tempted to smash the mirror to take a shard with him, but the majesty of the dresser deterred him. As an afterthought, he also considered that its owners would surely come back for it at some point. He took one last look and walked away.

  With every day, as he kept moving north, bunchgrass became more abundant, and eventually the land turned yellow. Water was less infrequent, but Håkan still drank it with reverence. Gadflies and mosquitoes spurred him and the burro on—the assaults when they stood still and unprotected by a smoky fire were so vicious that they once sent the burro bucking uncontrollably across the plains. Trees and thick bushes, however, grew scarce, and soon Håkan ran out of fuel. Charqui and raw wild mushrooms were his fare. Dogs, rodents, and birds became a habitual sight in that grassy extension that challenged the sky, and Håkan felt the joy of being once again a living thing among living things.

  A few days later, once the desert had yielded to the prairie, Håkan stumbled upon a rocking chair swaying back and forth in the open wilderness, nudged by the breeze. For a long time, as he approached it, he could not understand the meaning of chair, as if the object itself were a word on a page made up by those signs that would forever remain a cipher for him. He kept looking at the chair. What does chair mean? He reached it and touched it. He sat on it. The vast plains receded. He felt out of place, and there was something thrilling and comical about this. But at the same time, he also felt lonelier than ever—smaller, frailer.

  Although Håkan did not keep close track of time, he believed that, according to Lorimer’s directions, he should meet the trail fairly soon. And sure enough, three or four days after finding the rocking chair, Håkan finally ran into a path. He was confused. If emigrant trains were like traveling cities, this track seemed nothing more than a footpath and just about one palm deep. It could never have been the result of oxen and wagons, and yet it was so regular in its construction and course, it could only be man-made. He followed the path north for a few leagues until suddenly, behind a thicket atop a small hill, he saw, for the first time, buffalo. They followed each other down their trail one by one, in single file, with a slow step and great deliberation. Beyond this stately procession, as far as the eye could see, the heath was darkened with buffalo, grazing or wallowing in muddy basins. It seemed to Håkan that these beasts were made out of two different bodies ineptly put together. Their hind legs and quarters were positively equine—slender and toned—but with the last rib began a transformation, and, as if nature had changed its mind halfway through it, the animal swelled in a stupendous, monstrous fashion, suddenly becoming thicker and taller. Its back rose steeply and abruptly, leading to a head so massive (could that dense, anvil-solid block of bone that seemed impenetrable even to sound contain a brain or any flesh at all?) that, compared to the animal’s smaller back end, it seemed to have been dreamed onto the rest of the body. Below a pair of sharp horns, a pair of black eyes had been bored into either side of the skull. If any of the beasts that Håkan had seen in America had ever resembled his brother’s fabulous inventions, that creature was the buffalo.

  He pressed on. As the days went by, the sight of buffalo skulls, some of them bleached by the elements and scaly with lichen, became frequent. Håkan supposed that the pioneers must have hunted those beasts in great numbers, and the jettisoned goods he found over the following days—a trunk with china, bedsteads, a spinning wheel, cupboards, several cast-iron stoves, a large carpet he unrolled on the grass—seemed to confirm the proximity of the trail. Sometimes it rained, and it was always a miracle.

  It was one evening, after one of those showers, that Håkan heard the church music. It came to him with the wind, in rags and tatters, like a torn flag. Although the sounds had the texture and flavor of church music, the melody was unlike anything he had ever heard—sad and incomprehensible.

  Following the intermittent organ music, Håkan found three Indian lodges. He stopped a few hundred feet away and remained still, making sure he would be seen, and once he knew his approach could not be taken for an ambush, he proceeded toward the tents. Smoke puffed out of the top flaps of the lodge in the middle. They were cooking meat. As he got closer, he saw four or five men lying on the ground. Sitting next to them, a man played a harmonium. He was tall, lithe, and scrupulously neat. His hair was coiled in a bun on the back of his head, and from his neck descended a loose chest plate made out of coins of different sizes. His chest was naked under this ornament, but he had a whitened buffalo robe over his shoulders. With his left hand, he pumped the instrument while his right fingers slowly ran across the keyboard, playing an erratic melody. Now and then, he would pause to drink from a jug, which he sometimes rolled over the keyboard, creating discordant clusters of sound that made the air oscillate. He was drunk, and it was clear he would soon join his unconscious companions on the dirt. He briefly noticed and then ignored Håkan’s presence. Around the tents—tattered buffalo hides over frames of poles—meat hung to dry on hair rope and leather cords. Going around the lodges, Håkan found a few women on their knees, shaving the hair off newly skinned hides with sharp flint, scrubbing out the brown flesh from the inner side, and rubbing the brains of the buffalo into the skins, probably to soften the leather. When they noticed him, they were unsurprised. He was invited into one of the tents and given roasted meat from some ribs hanging off a rope over the fire. The women sat and watched him eat. When the fire started to sink low, someone flung a piece of buffalo fat on the coals. A wild blaze flashed up, revealing every last object in the tent—a stone mallet, silverware, a portrait of a corseted lady, piles of hides and robes, a decanter with a faceted glass stopper, arrows, a stranded chandelier, bows, a stuffed owl in a glass dome, a mortar, a swaddled baby, a sewing machine, shields decorated with birds and buffalo, empty bottles and jugs. The organ music stopped. Håkan finished his repast, and the women walked him out. The drunken men were blots on the dark ground. Håkan gave the women some flour as thanks and walked into the night.