In the Distance

by Hernan Diaz

  For a few moments—it was so fleeting—he did not matter, and that did not matter. There was a sky. There was a body. And a planet underneath it. And it was all lovely. And it did not matter. He had never been happy before.

  And it did not matter.

  Like a sphinx, the burro was stretched out next to him. He thought it was a dream, since he had never seen the burro lying down. They looked at each other. Dawn hummed on the horizon, but how many nights had preceded this daybreak, he could not tell. His piercing sunburn reached his bones. The lines defining the things around him—the bush, the beasts, his feet—were brittle. His body felt tingly and hollow. He walked to the pond and drank the cloudy, creamy water. After making sure his animals had all they needed, he ate some charqui and a lump of sugar. With a blanket, the saddle, and a few bags, he built a simple shelter to block out the sun. He crawled under it and took another dose of the tincture.

  This time, he did not experience the bliss of irrelevance. He was merely snuffed out. His eyes rolled back, but he was surprised to discover they were still able to see in the dark. They looked back into his cranium, at his own brain. With the part of his perception that was not involved in the process of seeing, he understood that his brain was receiving the images of itself from the eyes attached to it. It took his brain a moment to understand how extraordinary the situation was.

  “What brain has ever seen itself?” it thought.

  It also thought that its crevices, color, and texture were unique and entirely different from other human brains it had studied in the past. For a moment, the brain found the vertigo of having its own image of itself within itself dizzying and even amusing. Then it thought that it should pay attention and learn. And with that, the brain’s surface turned from gray to brown. While retaining their shape, the pearly waves became bristly knolls, and the gelatinous surface was harshened by dust and sagebrush. A gang of buffalo came out from behind the eyes and ambled through the hills.

  Now Håkan knew he was dreaming and lost interest. He sank into annihilation.

  The unstable shelter had collapsed, and the blanket had wrapped itself around his upper body. Slithering sweat stung his chest and neck. It was the afternoon. An afternoon. The pond had shrunk to a puddle of brackish water. For no particular reason, that well-known patch of land where he had been for days now sickened him. He did not want to stay but lacked the will to move on. The only way out of his apathy, he thought, was to make it deeper by extinguishing himself again with a few more drops of the tincture. The lack of water for his animals, however, made another prolonged absence impossible. With weak, unsteady hands, he packed the burro and saddled the horse and set out, itchy from the sun, his sweat, and insect bites. Scratching his face, he realized that his beard was now thick and full.

  The next morning, the earth was hard with frost. The sky was lower, and the sun indecisive. Håkan knew that the emigrants chose the warm seasons for their journey and that the trail would soon be deserted. It was time to head up north and get provisions for the remainder of his trip before winter set in. He rode leisurely, hoping to regain strength and clarity of mind along the way. The cold air cut through his head. Every evening, he had a proper dinner and made sure to stay warm and get a good night’s sleep. He would set out at sunup, always at an unhurried pace to spare his animals. When he least expected them, like noiseless detonations, images of the killings struck him with overwhelming vividness, obliterating the physical reality around him—he often found himself reenacting some of the events of that day (he would be on his horse and suddenly brandish an invisible knife, or cover his eyes with the back of his hand, or scream out, or duck). Although the hum, the constant vibration he had felt since leaving the caravan, was still there, now he was able to think and hear himself over it.

  There was no way to tell how long he had been on his own—his long vacant spells, the days spent under the influence of the potion, and his general numbness rendered all calculations vain. But since the air had cooled and the days shortened, he assumed that he had been drifting for several weeks. He picked up his pace to make sure he did not miss the last stragglers on the trail before the cold finally set in, and a few days later, he made out the broken line of a meager caravan. He approached it slowly and rode along the wagons for a while, keeping a few hundred paces from them. The train was much less populated, and unlike a few months ago, there was ample space between convoys. After some time, enough for the emigrants to see that he was alone and harmless, he turned toward the trail. By now, he was used to the impression a stranger in the plains caused. He was also accustomed to the reaction his attire and, above all, his height brought about. This time, however, something was different. Through the usual bewilderment ran a streak of recognition. They looked at him with that particular squint that tries to penetrate the past, as if they found him vaguely familiar while impossible to place. Meanwhile, some men grouped together, holding shovels and axes. A few fetched their rifles. The women gathered their children. A group of armed emigrants got on their horses and rode out to meet Håkan. As they approached, he held his hands up and rode in a circle to show them he was unarmed. They stopped at a prudent distance from each other.

  “Are you the Hawk?” one man asked.

  With these few words, reality was overturned. How could this be? How could these men out in the wilderness know his name? A current of astonishment tickled his skin from within and then dissipated, yielding to a terrible realization. Perhaps the story of his deeds had traveled from Jarvis’s party back to the trail and then passed down from wagon to wagon. The truth was awful enough, but who knew how the narrative had been distorted along the way? He did not know how to respond. Lying was hopeless—his appearance was far too conspicuous.

  “Håkan,” he responded. “I am Håkan.”

  “Right, the Hawk,” someone responded. “You killed all those people.”

  Håkan looked down. For the first time since the killings, he felt something other than pain and guilt. He felt ashamed. It would almost have been a relief to trade his torment for shame, had the humiliation not burned so much. Ashamed, embarrassed, dirty. Soiled in front of everybody.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” said one of them with a trembling voice.

  “What are you saying? The man’s a hero!” responded someone with more assurance. “Those could have been our daughters there!”

  A heated but hushed debate ensued. Håkan could not look up. Naked and soiled. Always staring down, he turned around, touched up his horse, and, with the burro in tow, left at a canter. A few moments later, he was overtaken by a small group of riders. They all stopped. Håkan’s burning face never looked up. They left a few sacks with supplies by his horse, thanked him for ridding them of those bad men, wished him good luck, and turned back to their families.

  14.

  He learned to wrestle the horse and the burro down. It started like an embrace, with his cheek to the animal’s neck. He would then force it to bend one of its fore knees with his own leg while pushing down and to the side with the full weight of his body. At first, it was a contest, but in time the beasts understood that, with an embrace and the slightest push, they had to lie down on their sides and stay until Håkan got up. He did this each time he thought he spied someone on the circular horizon. Had Håkan and his animals ever been spotted, the distant travelers would have taken the vanishing silhouettes for a mirage. But there were no such travelers—the moving shadows he saw almost every day in the distance were illusions. With the double intention of getting away from the trail and the cold, he had traveled south for days. He passed no settlements or paths, and there were no signs of trappers, prospectors, or Indians. For weeks, the only human forms in sight had been his own extremities and his own shadow. The flats around him allowed for no ambushes or surprises. Sounds seemed to travel faster in the freezing air, and if anything happened to escape his eyes, it quickly reached his ears. His solitude was total in the shoreless plains. And yet, he felt cornered. T
he slightest stir in the skyline, the feeblest rustle in the scrubs sent him down with his animals. They stayed quiet with their ears to the ground and the dirt in their nostrils. Håkan measured time with the artery throbbing underneath the living leather of his horse’s neck. After at least one hundred beats (double if he thought the threat was grave), he would look up, and the three of them would get back on their feet and resume their march.

  So great was his fear of running into anyone who might know about him and his deeds that, in addition to the illusory shadows that sent him diving with his animals, he started to detect signs of human presence at every turn. A few broken twigs (and there were many broken twigs throughout the sagebrush steppe) signaled, to him, the passage of a rider; a few stones in a somewhat regular pattern (and he saw patterns everywhere) represented the remnants of a campfire whose ashes had been scattered by the wind; a pale weedless streak on the ground (and streaks striated the plains in every direction) was taken to be a trail; a well-traced circle in the bunchgrass (and whim had drawn countless circles all over the flats) meant that cattle had been left to graze within rounded-up wagons. Several times a day, he dismounted and picked up some dry dung to make sure it was not horse manure—and if it happened to come from a horse, to establish how old it was. He inspected carrion and blanched bones, looking for evidence of human method in the way the bodies had been butchered. The air, which he had always found odorless, now seemed to carry all kinds of human smells, from cornbread to gunpowder. Multitudes had just left the circle of his reality or were just about to invade it. With the advancing cold, the ground got harder, and instead of the mossy, muffled thud Håkan was used to, the hoofbeats acquired a wooden resonance. He made eight pouches out of tarpaulin, filled them with dry grass and old rags, put the horse’s and burro’s feet inside, and tied them to their ankles. The boots rendered the hoof-falls inaudible, which gave the journey the lightness of an unfulfilled idea. For the most part, Håkan rode almost sideways, with one ear forward, listening for other travelers in the soundless expanse. The plains that first had seemed to him impenetrable in their barren sameness, and then a source of knowledge, now became a ciphered surface, saturated with coded messages that pointed to one single meaning: the presence of others—men who would see him in his rotten, infected condition. They were always just behind the horizon. And so was winter.

  Seeking to avoid further encounters with the last stragglers on the trail and looking for milder weather, Håkan headed south, always with a slight slant east. Winter was a giant wave gathering in the distance, surging over the plains, ready to break and wash away the minute rider in a whirlwind of darkness and ice. Already, the shadow cast by this massive wave had caught up with him. The days had grown shorter. The sun had lost its authority. The brown grass was crisp with frost. Firewood became immune to tinder. Water lapped under glass cobwebs. Game grew scarce. Provisions had to be rationed. He ate different plants that got him sick, until he finally found a succulent stalk that he would grind with the butt of his knife into a bittersweet, slightly salty pulp that reminded him of the licorice candy his mother had given him with great ceremony three times in his life, and that he had pretended to like. For some time, he ate crickets, but soon the supply grew scant until they all vanished completely as the cold set in.

  Since he had only a few blankets to wrap over the hodgepodge of an outfit the Indians had made him, peltries quickly became as valuable as meat. Most animals had migrated south or holed up for the winter, but some dogs, rodents, and cats still rambled around, their eyes convex with hunger and despair. He caught his first badgers and rats with a deadfall trap. Smashed to a mass of hair and flesh under the heavy rock, the smaller creatures—most of his catch—were hard to skin and impossible to eat. One afternoon, as he was discarding a particularly damaged rabbit, he remembered his father’s glue. A few times a year, his father would gather the skins and carcasses of dead animals (mostly mice and hares snared around the house, although he had once used parts of an elk he had found rotting in the forest), scrape the hides, and boil the shavings together with bones, tails, and tendons for a couple of days, adding as little water as possible, until it was all reduced to a viscous syrup, not unlike resin. He would then remove the bones and use the paste for minor repairs. Once, particularly satisfied with the results, he challenged Linus to split up two planks he had bonded together with his concoction. Linus—proud of being treated like an adult and, moreover, eager to perform a feat of strength—grabbed the planks and, without any visible effort, snapped them asunder. It was so quick, he was unable to even blow out the big breath he had taken in preparing for the effort. After the initial surprise, Linus smiled proudly, until he looked up and saw their father’s face. He told the boys to clean up the mess, then turned around and left. Even if the glue was not strong enough for wood, Håkan thought that it might be used to hunt small game. The main obstacle for making the paste was to keep a fire going for all that time—not only because of the scarce firewood and the intense wind, but mainly because it increased his chances of being seen. Having spent the next few days stocking up on fuel, he devised a screen out of blankets and tarpaulins that had the double virtue of shielding the fire from the wind and concealing its glow through the night. After boiling down the shavings and scraps of his pulped prey for almost two days, he poured the glue on a piece of oilcloth and baited it with biscuits. The first victim, a gopher, managed to escape. A second gopher also broke free from the sticky trap but was slowed down enough for Håkan to be able to deal a clean blow to its head. Most animals, although confused by the sudden thickness under their feet, succeeded in fleeing with their biscuit. Even if he was disappointed, Håkan felt closer to his father with every defeat. In time, however, between the deadfall and the glue (which, once cool, became an amber block that could be melted and reused over and over again), Håkan managed to catch a decent number of prairie dogs, ferrets, weasels, badgers, rats, hares, and even small dogs.

  He started making a coat out of the pelts. All the dissections Håkan had performed under Lorimer’s supervision had turned him into a consummate skinner. With no more than a few incisions, the furs almost slid off the frame, as if they had been lined with silk and the flesh they covered had been made of wax. In some cases, he was able to leave the empty skin almost intact, which gave the impression that the body within had simply melted and evaporated. After skinning his prey, he scraped off the flesh and fat from the hides and strapped them up to dry across his horse’s saddlebags and the burro’s croup. Remembering those Indian women he had seen tanning buffalo hides while their husbands lay unconscious from drink, Håkan rubbed the brains of the freshly caught animals into the stiff furs to soften them. Since most of the brains were so small, he mashed and mixed them with water. During a drought, he discovered that his urine produced better results.

  After some pounding, the dry sinews from the larger animals split into fibers that Håkan separated and used as thread to stitch together the disparate patches of cured leather with his surgical needles. It was a slow process (hunting, curing, threading, sewing), and the first snow had already fallen. Without a gun, there was no hope of getting one of the last few bears or larger cats he sometimes saw in the distance eating the carrion he had left behind. He once smeared himself with gore and lay down, pretending to be wounded, hoping to knife a bobcat that was on his trail. The bobcat never came. Not too many days later, however, something better made up for this failure.

  Through the light snowflakes that melted before touching the ground came the cry of a baby. As always, Håkan’s first reaction was to wrestle his horse and burro down. In the mist, the weeping continued. The small, airy drops felt like a cold halo hovering over his face, contrasting with the warm glow coming from the horse’s muscles twitching under his cheek. No voices of men or women. No jingling of harnesses or creaking of springs. No rumbling of wagons or tramping of beasts. Just the lonely wail. Håkan’s horse got restless, but he pressed on his neck and made him sta
y down. A long time went by. The weeping never stopped, always issuing from the same spot in the white mist. Other than the cries, complete silence. It stopped snowing. The fog thickened. Cramped and soaked, Håkan got up, mounted his horse, and rode into the crawling clouds. With each step, the wails grew louder. The plains barely insisted against the fog. Håkan got out his knife. As he moved along, the ground ahead of him faded into reality from the whiteness ahead. Then, in a slight depression by some shrubs, a lion took shape. It was lying in a pool of its own blood, lightened by the snowfall. Next to it, a wailing blind cub. It was getting hoarse. Håkan dismounted and immediately saw that the cougar had died trying to give birth to its second, breached offspring, still stuck halfway out. Håkan rolled the mother over and put the crying kitten to one of her teats. From its outstretched hind legs to its head, the lion was taller than Håkan. The cub nursed greedily. After a few moments, realizing that nothing came out, it started crying again. Håkan tried to milk the lion. Then, he went through his provisions and offered the kitten everything he had—charqui, sugar water, dried meat from different animals, oats, bacon, and moistened biscuits. Håkan now heard rage in the cub’s desperate cries. He made a cut into his own forearm and put the kitten’s snout to the blood, but it would not taste it. Håkan looked into the crying mouth and saw the ribbed vault of the palate, the sharp little teeth, and the white scales on the pink tongue. He smelled the clean breath coming from the empty stomach. Then he looked into the creature’s watery eyes and wrung its neck. Mother and cub were skinned.

  His animals were exhausted and ill fed, but Håkan knew their only hope was to outrun the northern cold. He gave up all aspirations, however small, of heading east. The constant gales made him feel as if he were falling rather than walking. His face was windburned; his hands scabbed; his feet frostbitten. The horse proceeded with his head tucked low, almost bent into his chest. Every so often, Håkan had to stop and turn around to rest from the relentless, deafening, insane howl that left no room for a single thought in his head. There was no way to light a fire, and he slept wrapped in his lion skin. When this was insufficient, he wrestled his horse down and huddled up next to him. One night, when the horse refused to stay down, Håkan learned that the burro was happy to have him sleep against his rib cage, and in this way they shared each other’s warmth through several storms. During those days, his only relief came from thinking how unlikely it would be to meet someone else in that obliterating scream. His loneliness was perfect, and for the first time in months, despite all the roaring and lashing, he found calm.