In the Distance

by Hernan Diaz

  Noticing that the sun had set but that the streets had not darkened, Håkan realized that they were lit by lamps whose blue-and-yellow flames were distorted and multiplied by wavy glass panels. Together with the glow coming from stores, bars, and offices, the streetlamps created a constant twilight. Håkan found this nightlessness disturbing. He was also getting tired and could not imagine where he would be able to sleep. Men and women in rags lay in foul alleyways, but even if the reek and the proximity of other bodies had not repelled him, he could not leave his horse unattended. There was also the risk of being recognized and captured in his sleep. Turning back, however, was unthinkable, so Håkan decided to traverse the city and rest once he could pitch camp out in the wilderness. Under a streetlamp, a man with a harnessed wheel barrow (which reminded Håkan of the contraption he had designed and pulled for the Brennans) was setting up shop. He put a cloth with some words sewn onto it over the pushcart and then proceeded to line up a long series of bottles and jars.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen!” he cried. “A physic for every condition, a tonic for each malady. Every distemper has its cure, ladies and gentlemen. And I have all the remedies right here. Blisters, blemishes, blackheads? This unguent here will soothe your skin while eradicating the most inveterate corruptions. Catarrh, cough, congestion? This syrup here removes all manner of disorders from your air passages. Complaints of the stomach? Is it, perhaps, your fluids or your bowels? Dropsy, dyspepsia, diarrhea? My apologies, ladies. Forgive my language, but the flesh is a vile thing. Is it, more gallantly put, your digestion? You will never believe what marvels two or three drops of this powerful patent preparation here can work. Instant relief! Weak, weary, wan? You can’t go on. You’ve had enough. Waking up is a struggle. The smallest chore is a tiring titanic travail. Even pleasure is a burden. Here. Here is the cure. In this bottle. The rejuvenator! The one, the only, the original rejuvenator. A cordial made of herbs gathered by an Indian doctor, combined with the latest discoveries made by European chemical practitioners. Contains critical corporal nutriments and vital essences that impart to all humors their restorative principle. Life! Feel it return! The vitality, the vim, the vigor! And even if you’re healthy, try my specific for that extra zing, zip, and zest!”

  A small group of people had gathered around the wheelbarrow. Håkan was enraptured. For years, he had wondered what sort of progress the medical sciences might have made. Had anatomy and physiology discovered new relations between organs and their functions? Had Lorimer’s theories been proven correct and spread throughout the world? Could new findings have surpassed them?

  “Bone setters, ladies and gentlemen, are creatures of the past. Stiff joints? Beset by bothersome backaches? Do you feel the weather in your hips? Magnetism,” he whispered as he produced a metal rod the size of his palm. “A Frenchman has discovered how to use this invigorating magnetic cylinder here to reverse the flow of energy and turn pain into well-being, and sickness into health. And it is made of iron, the single, solitary source of all vitalizing substances.”

  This was the third man of science Håkan had met in his life. With Lorimer, truth had been an immediate, clear feeling. Reason came later and validated it, but at first, it had been an almost physical experience, like waking up from a vivid dream. His second encounter with science had been through the short-haired Indian. Here, again, the evidence of his talent left no room for doubt. His understanding of the human body and how to mend it, his reliable drugs and salves, his almost infallible method of preventing infections, and even his soft and caring touch gave him an authority matched only by the power of nature. But this man, at his pushcart, with his tonics and magnets, was a fool and a liar. This was as clear to Håkan as the genius of the other two men had been.

  “But why talk of iron when we can talk about gold? Yes, gold, ladies and gentlemen. We all want it. We all do. But when you get it (for you will, yes sir, you will), how will you know that what you got is, in fact, gold? Eh? Not all that glitters, ladies and gentlemen. Fake gold is everywhere. A plague! The cure? This detecting liquid here. Watch this matchless miraculous mixture react to the fake stuff.”

  Håkan turned away and left.

  Shops were closing down, and people now congregated in taverns and inns. The throngs were so thick that it was almost impossible to see what was going on inside each establishment. The music had become livelier. In some places, the patrons sang along. At the door of a saloon or at the entrance to a hotel, the multitude opened to swallow or expel powdered women in shimmering dresses and their long-tailed, top-hatted escorts. The scent of unfamiliar dishes sometimes managed to overpower the stench wafting up from the mud.

  As his draft horse plodded along, dragging his shaggy hooves in the mire, the lights grew dimmer and the fights louder. No carriages rolled through this part of town. Eventually, the streetlamps disappeared, replaced by sporadic fires on the side of the road. Houses and taverns no longer glowed with chandeliers but were only spotted with the tawny glimmer of oil lamps hanging here and there. In the quivering darkness, there was drinking, gambling, singing, and quarreling. The report of not-so-distant guns was disregarded. Nobody seemed to care about what happened beyond their narrow circle of light. As Håkan made his way down the street, each one of these illuminated stains revealed an isolated scene—miners with faces ravaged by dust and defeat; Chinese laborers smoking from thin, sweet pipes; broken women, sad in their seduction; black men trying to remain unseen while enjoying their modest pleasures; a little boy bent over a box, blowing on a pair of dice in his cupped hand; drunks reduced to heaps on stoops, under wagons, in the filth. The eye could reach only a few feet into the dubious gloom, but the ear got a sense of the depth of the city from the distant layers of laughter and brawls. One of these fights sounded so violent that Håkan felt compelled to ride in that direction. He heard women scream. It was a sound he had heard only once before in his life. Was someone helping them? He finally got to the thick crowd that had assembled around the scene and looked over their heads.

  Years before, when he feared that he had traveled around the world and was trapped in those vast plains framed by two equally vast deserts, he thought that he was losing his mind—that he was brainsick, adrift in his illness. The light-headed terror he experienced at that time was nothing compared to what he felt now, looking beyond all those heads. Madness would have been a benign justification. Death. That was the only explanation he could find for what he was seeing. At some point, he thought, he must have died. And now he was watching from the other side of life. For a brief moment, that was the only answer he could find.

  Over flat-crowned hats, wide brims, bonnets, and towering hair-dressings, by a bonfire, Håkan saw a gigantic man wearing a lion skin, his head invisible under the beast’s head, holding a gun and a bloody knife.

  At his feet lie two slain women in bloodstained dresses. The man is even taller than Håkan. He is panting. Everyone looks on. Nobody intervenes. The giant stands there, facing them, his body still tense with violence. His face is lost in the shade of the hood, but it must have a savage expression. From some indeterminate place, a sheriff and two deputies come in. Shots are fired. No one is hit. Somehow, the sheriff and his men prevail. The giant in the lion skin is captured and dragged out into the darkness.

  Out of nowhere, a couple of men rolled out two screens and hid the two women from sight. A man in a bright red suit followed them and, standing in front of the screen, addressed the onlookers.

  “We’ll be back in an eye blink, my friends. Don’t leave your spots. We’ll be ready in half a jiffy. How will the Hawk get out of this predicament? A warning: not for the faint of heart. Stay right where you are for the next act. We’ll be coming around for contributions.”

  Håkan shrunk in his saddle and gently touched his horse. As he rode behind the screens, he saw the women changing out of their bloodied clothes, giggling. A youth was putting up a tall wooden cactus made of angular planks painted in a green that was
actually blue. The giant sat on a crate drinking from a flask. His lion fur was a grotesque fake, made of patched-up rodent skins and wool. He was wearing stilts.

  What Håkan had seen was beyond his understanding. But it was clear that he was far better known than he had ever imagined, and that, rather than muting his story, time had amplified it. His only consolation was that, despite his unwanted notoriety, nobody had recognized him. He was safe in his aged body.

  From what he remembered, it would not take him more than three days to get to the mine. The gold, San Francisco, and the sea were not far away.

  The following morning, Håkan discovered that Clangston never really ended. Buildings grew more scattered, and there were fewer people walking down the road, but dry goods stores, bars, and other mysterious establishments could still be found here and there, and the traffic in and out of the city was constant. At night, Håkan turned off the road and bivouacked in some discreet spot, building a meager fire.

  Just like Clangston never really ended, the mine never really started. At some point, Håkan noticed that almost every flatbed wagon was packed with gangs of chalky men leaning on their pickaxes and shovels. The ground itched with the rumbling of distant explosions. Cracks and holes, many of them framed and supported by beams, interrupted the ochre monotony of the land. Out of nowhere, the heavy heads of iron tools would emerge from the ground in different points only to dive back in immediately. Every blow on the rock was followed by a short, dry echo. When the road turned, it was to follow a narrow river. Håkan could not remember that stream from the Brennan days. Soon it was revealed to be a man-made canal—it flowed in an inflexibly straight course, and some stretches were faced with slabs and boulders. Every few hundred steps, there were open sluice gates guarded by armed sentries. On the other side of the watercourse ran a pair of parallel lines of wooden bars resting on thick planks placed at regular intervals. Håkan was wondering what purpose this construction could serve when a flatbed wagon, its four grooved wheels fitting perfectly on the wooden bars, whizzed by, powered by two men pushing a beam on a pivot up and down like a seesaw or a pump. Shortly after noon, Håkan saw the end of the road, the stream, and the lines of bars.

  Vast, frantic, intricate, terraced, roaring, twisting, the quarry was an insane city for an unknown species. Through this maze ran roads on which debris-filled carts tottered behind miserable beasts. Those pump cars on wooden bars rolled in and out of tunnels with rocks, tools, and men. The sound of metal on stone, like hard raindrops, filled the air. Clouds of smoke blossomed here and there, followed by the roll of an explosion. Under the malignant sun, dusty men walked back and forth along narrow ledges, climbed up and down ladders, and crawled in and out of caves, carrying gear and boulders. Some of them gestured and screamed out their instructions, but no voice was heard beneath the tumult. Armed guards everywhere. At almost all times, there was a minor avalanche somewhere that sent handfuls of little miners running in every direction. This inhuman place, with its filthy pits, abrupt walls, and tiered plateaus descending into the broken earth like a gigantic staircase, extended beyond the reach of the eye. Wherever Brennan’s hoard was, it had been swept away like dust.

  24.

  Nothing left behind in the wilderness could ever be retrieved. Every encounter was final. Nobody came back from beyond the horizon. It was impossible to return to anything or anyone. Whatever was out of sight was forever lost.

  The initial disappointment swelled into despair but soon ebbed away, leaving behind a sense of relief. Håkan had never owned anything. Pingo, the only horse that had been rightfully his, had died shortly after being given to him. The tin box with medical instruments, the compass, and the lion coat—those were his sole belongings. What would he have done with the gold? How was gold even used? How much did one give and what could one expect for it? He had handled money only a few times in his life and conducted just a small number of modest commercial transactions ages ago, back when he was on the trail. His heart pounded with anxiety at the mere thought of being involved in the complicated exchanges his plan would have had required. Much better, he thought, to end this journey as it had started—with nothing.

  He kept traveling west, toward the sea, across the steppe, into the forest, over the mountains, down the valleys, across fields, avoiding roads, shunning travelers and herdsmen, steering clear of the many towns that had popped up everywhere, trapping when he could, eating what he found, and feeling, for the most part, secure, hunching and shrinking on his big horse.

  During the following weeks, a sense of exhaustion overcame him, as if his body were catching up with the old man it had been impersonating. He would nod off on his horse and wake up without knowing how much time had elapsed. On occasion, he would open his eyes to find that he was headed for a barn or a house and had to turn around with a sudden jerk of the reins. More often, the horse would just stop, and it was the stillness that awoke him. Once, he was startled out of his slumber to discover that the horse was standing in front of a pair of lines on wooden blocks, similar to the ones he had seen at the mine. But these bars were made of metal, and they stretched out of sight. He waited for one of those pump wagons to come by. Nothing. Before crossing the lines, Håkan thought the construction looked like a helpless, maimed bridge.

  He passed a yellow church, the first he had seen in years. It was run down—maybe even derelict—but it was easy to see from the moldings, carvings, and statues that it had once aspired to grandeur. Not too far from the church, at the foot of a hill, he ran into a strange orchard of sorts. What at first appeared to be little trees turned out to be small but stern-looking bushes whose main branches were contorted into tortured positions around sticks, to which they were tied with strings. In the shade of their own leaves, each one of these stunted bushes bore clusters of a fleshy kind of berry Håkan had never seen before. Hundreds of these shrubs were planted at regular intervals, rather close to one another, in straight lines separated by the exact same distance. There was something punitive and angry about this method. As he rode on, down where the rows of shrubs presumably ended, a large house with turrets took shape. A few smaller buildings surrounded it. It was Håkan’s idea of a castle. Not too far away, he spotted some laborers working on the bushes. He was about to turn away, as he always did at the first sight of people, when he heard a child crying. His first thought, a mere flash, was that it was, in fact, a lion cub wailing. Another kitten, he thought. Immediately, common sense rectified this impression, and he started looking for the child. He found it a few rows down, muddy with dirt and snot, bawling in a somewhat abstracted fashion while staring at the string of its own saliva driveling onto the ground. When the child saw the orange horse and the rider, its crying subsided, yielding to curiosity. Håkan did not know whether it was a boy or a girl.

  “Are you lost?”

  The child stared up at him, with those hiccups that often follow weeping. Håkan looked around. The workers had not seen him—or had ignored him.

  “Do you live in the big house?”

  Håkan thought the child nodded. Either way, the castle with its adjacent buildings was the only house around. Perhaps he could leave the girl (without knowing why, he had decided that it was a girl) with one of the workers and be on his way. He dismounted and very gently picked up the child and sat her on the saddle. To keep her distracted, he gave her a stuffed fox paw, which she found endlessly fascinating. Slowly, he walked the horse toward the house. As he got closer, the laborers dropped whatever they were doing and stared at him, the horse, and the child. Håkan, in turn, noticed that they were Indians. They wore only white clothes, which were, in every case, spotless, even if they were all working with shovels, pruning shears, and hoes, and handling those dark berries. He locked eyes with a young woman. He stopped the horse and then nodded toward the child and the house. The woman nodded yes. With a gesture, Håkan conveyed that he was going to pick up the girl and hand her over to the woman. She recoiled and looked down. Håkan turned to the
rest of the workers, who also dropped their heads and avoided all contact. The little girl played with her fox paw. He would leave her in some safe spot, close to the house, from which she would surely be seen, and turn around without having to engage with any of its occupants.