Only the Dead

by Vidar Sundstøl

  In a sense it felt like this was the bottom of the lake. He looked around. This ice world. But if that was true, where would he end up now if he fell into the water and sank? Would he emerge from the lake into a radiant, hot summer day on the other side? Boats plowing stripes of white wake water, American flags fluttering in the breeze, cars driving along Highway 61? The normal world in which he could get into his Jeep and drive down to Two Harbors to visit his brother. And afterward go home to Mary and Jimmy. Sit on the sofa with them and watch TV. Lie in bed next to Mary. Sleep. Dream. Wake up like a normal man.

  The cold from the rifle was stinging his hands. He slung it over his shoulder again. The rain was still pouring down, and every drop froze to ice the moment it struck something solid. There was no sign of life, only a shadowy figure who didn’t belong in the same world with him.

  Lance stuck his cold hands in his jacket pockets. His right hand touched something. He took it out. It was a Dove chocolate. For a moment he felt a great resistance to unwrapping the paper to see what the message was inside. He felt an urge to hurl the little heart into the trees. Yet his curiosity was equally strong, and finally it won out.

  He used his fingernails to carefully peel off the foil wrapper. With a shaking hand he held it up to his face and tried to read what it said. The rain made things difficult, but at last he managed to decipher the words:

  Only the dead do not dream.

  6

  I don’t even know how long he’s been gone. Or whether time is passing quickly or slowly. I’m sitting on the floor holding his rifle on my lap. Wearing only my shirt, which has started to thaw out a bit, but it still feels like I have a shell of ice around me. Below I’m completely naked. I need to put on the rest of my clothes and get away before he comes back, but my rib hurts so bad when I bend down that I can’t pull on my pants. If I don’t get out of here, I’m going to end up in hell. And there I will burn for all eternity. With no boat or house, only sinners and flames. But I’ll be all right if I can only reach Knut and Nanette. If I do that, I will spend the rest of my days living as a true Christian should. “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. All men will no doubt be resurrected and live on after death, but only those who, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, keep their faith in Jesus Christ, can hope for joyous resurrection and blessed everlasting life.” All else is eternal torment.

  I’m holding the rifle so tight that I’ve almost lost all feeling in my hands. Or is the cold to blame? If I’m going to put on the rest of my clothes, I need to set down the gun. I don’t know whether I dare risk doing that. Because then I’ll be defenseless. No, I can’t set it down. What if he comes back and I have no gun? Then I’ll never get out of here. He won’t let me go. That was why he put my clothes in the darkest corner, far away from the fire, so I wouldn’t be able to get dressed again. I don’t know why he’s keeping me here, but I can’t die in this hut. Then I’ll go straight to hell. So I can’t put down the rifle. I just have to sit here, holding it on my lap, until he comes back. But what am I going to do then? Maybe I can manage to put my pants on first. He might be gone for a while yet. But then I’ll have to set down the gun. And then I’ll be defenseless. I came to America to get a boat and a house. I can’t die here. And now . . . there . . . now I heard . . . wasn’t that the sound of someone coughing?

  As I lay in the dark and listened to the clear singing of angels in Paradise, I saw the whole hut turn golden in a flash of light, and the rifle was hovering in midair, as if it were alive. I saw it over and over, many times. Again and again. I saw no Indian, just the golden hut and the rifle floating in the air. And the whole time the angels were singing. It was a song I’d never heard before. I almost believed I’d gone to Heaven. Did I die? I wondered about this as I lay over there in the corner. My head felt empty, as if someone had blown everything out through my ears. Am I dead now? I wondered. Are those angels singing in Paradise? But gradually the song changed into this pinging sound that never stops. There is a pinging in my ears. A pinging from one ear to the other, as if a string is stretched between them. A string that is trembling and pinging inside my head.

  I open my eyes and see that I’m still here in the Indian’s hut. I notice a bad, sharp smell. The rifle is lying on the floor. Sticking out from under the big piece of birch bark covering the doorway I see an arm and a hand. When I blink my eyes I still see the gun hovering in the air, but now it is a bluish shadow in a white room. Why is it floating in the air, as if it were alive? I get onto all fours and crawl over to the gun. Hold it in my hands. The barrel is warm. I look toward the doorway. There is no longer an arm sticking out from under the bark. I must have shot the Indian, but he’s not dead. Oh Jesus, save me! Now he’s waiting for me outside the hut. I’ve seen that he wears a knife on his belt. If I poke my head out, I’ll be slaughtered like a lamb. Did I do it on purpose? No, I just squeezed the trigger. I heard something and so I squeezed the trigger. But I had to do it, because he wasn’t going to let me go. And now he means to get me. Not a sound from outside, but soon he’ll come back with his knife. It’s now or never, Thormod.

  LANCE WASN’T POSITIVE that it was here Georg Lofthus had been killed—the whole dense birch forest looked much the same—but it felt like this was the place. Here he’d caught sight of the naked body between the trunks of the birches. This is where it all started, he thought. That was why he felt this sudden chill, as if he’d fallen into a deep hole. A raw, iron cold. His rifle was slung over his shoulder, transformed into an ice sculpture. Inside the sculpture he could still glimpse the dark shape of the gun.

  He closed his eyes and let the world contract to the clinking sound of the rain falling onto the ice-coated forest. As he stood there like that, a great calm descended over him, as if this was where he belonged. He remembered how he’d stood in the parking lot afterward with the local police officers, feeling that the horror back there inside the woods belonged to him and no one else. Every time someone went in there, they seemed to take something away from him. At first the sight of that shattered head had been his alone, but soon everyone had taken a look at it, snapping photographs and jotting down comments in black notebooks. Now this place was his again, just as it had been in the beginning.

  When Lance opened his eyes, everything looked just the same as before he’d closed them, but he knew that in the meantime the ice had gotten thicker. With every added layer it grew, he became more and more cut off from the rest of the world. For every drop of rain that fell, the forest became a bit more insulated from outside sounds. Little by little it got harder to push the branches aside, and the path back home got longer. He almost couldn’t believe his house even existed anymore. Or his possessions. The family photographs. The drawings Jimmy had given him. He thought about the phone call; the boy must have been trying to get ahold of him. But he didn’t regret the fact that he hadn’t answered. Where he was going, he couldn’t be reached.

  Lance raised his hand and cautiously touched a few of the icicles, making them move with a delicate ringing sound. He did it again, harder this time, and touching more icicles, as if he were playing many tiny, untuned chimes. He kept on doing that, at the same slow tempo of a funeral march. Then he began to worry and stopped. Somebody might hear.

  Suddenly he pictured his father’s face. Oscar was sitting at the kitchen table at home in Duluth. Behind him was the window facing Fifth Avenue. It was spring, and the snow was melting on the sidewalks. Sunlight had formed a halo around his father’s head. “He’s lying to us, you know,” Oscar Hansen said. “He’s . . . a liar.”

  “You have no right to talk that way about your own son,” replied his mother quietly. As usual, she was somewhere else in the room, not sitting at the table. Only Lance and his father were sitting there. Lance couldn’t see himself; he saw only what he would have seen on that spring day long ago: his father’s face and Fifth Avenue ou
tside the window behind him. The melting snow on the sidewalks.

  Suddenly his father slammed his fist down on the table, making all the plates and silverware jump. “I refuse to let him hang out with those kids!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

  As he stood there in the icy forest many years later, Lance could still feel the impact of that long-ago shout. Yet this was something he’d completely forgotten. He must have been about eighteen when it happened. Andy was sixteen. His father had called Andy a liar. He didn’t remember what that was about. Someone he wasn’t supposed to associate with. Andy used to hang out in Lester Park with his pals. They would take along a boom box and listen to music. But Lance couldn’t recall that his brother had ever been in trouble, except for the time when he beat up Clayton Miller.

  His father’s face disappeared, along with the kitchen on Fifth Avenue. His voice was gone too, and yet Lance had heard it so clearly. He felt shaken. The memory had surfaced without warning, and he had no control over it. It actually seemed a bit like a dream, even though that couldn’t be right, since he was wide awake. Yet it seemed to have come from a part of his brain where dreams were born. And that was what had shaken him the most—more than the unpleasant memory, more than his father’s voice. What was so shocking was that for a moment something inside Lance had been in touch with the land of dreams.

  He started walking again. All around him the icicles clinked and clattered. It was nearly impossible to move without setting some of them in motion. He was still heading toward the Cross River and Baraga’s Cross, since that was what they had agreed. But he knew full well that it no longer mattered. They weren’t hunting anymore. He couldn’t even fire his rifle. He just kept walking, or rather, pushing his way through the forest of icicles while the rain continued coming down, undiminished.

  The woods ended, and he found himself near the highway. A slight slope would take him up to the guardrail. It wouldn’t be hard to climb up since the ice hadn’t yet settled on the tall grass covering the incline. He made his way up, grabbed hold of the guardrail, which was coated with a thick layer of ice, and peered over the edge.

  Highway 61 gleamed as if it were a shimmery new type of road, cast from some sort of artificial material. The only sound Lance heard was the rain pouring down on the shiny, slick surface. He thought the world seemed deserted, as if all human beings had simultaneously departed. Everyone but him. On both sides of the road stood a forest of ice, as if even the trees had vanished, to be replaced by ice trees.

  He maneuvered one leg over the guardrail and cautiously hauled the rest of his body over. It took great effort to stay upright. The slightest shift in weight might send him tumbling. But then he began moving away from the guardrail, taking tiny steps forward, without actually lifting his feet off the ice. When he reached the midpoint of the highway, he stopped. Even though he drove this road every single day, he wasn’t exactly sure where he was. The ice made the woods unrecognizable. Many of the birches had started to lean over the road; a few were already bowed down under the weight of the ice. Over the next few hours quite a few trees were going to snap in half.

  If Lance had stood here, motionless, under normal circumstances, he would have soon been hit by a vehicle coming around the curve. Maybe one of the semis that shuttled between Duluth and Thunder Bay in Canada. This was not a road where anyone should be standing in the middle of a downpour and expect to escape alive. But here he stood, unable to move at any great speed, and yet there was no danger. The only thing that was going to happen was that the rain would continue to fall. The ice would continue to thicken. Even more birch trees would start to lean over the road. The first trunk would snap with a dry, ripping sound. What was guaranteed not to happen was that some vehicle would show up. Or any people. All activity had ceased. This is what it would look like if everybody were dead, he thought. Everybody except for Lance Hansen. If that were the case, he would see the same thing he saw now. An empty road that would remain forever empty.

  Or was this, instead, what it was like to be dead? When everyone else went on living, but he couldn’t see them because he was on the other side of death’s invisible wall? Only the dead do not dream. Maybe that was why he couldn’t see anyone except for an Indian dressed in ragged old clothes. Because both he and the Indian were dead, and the dead could see only each other.

  He squatted down, holding the completely ice-coated rifle in one hand as he ran the fingers of his other hand over the ice on the road. A couple of inches below his fingertips he could see the asphalt that he’d driven over only a short time ago. There it was, as if under glass, in full view but unreachable.

  Just as unreachable as he was. Jimmy had tried to phone a dead man. That was why the boy had received no answer. There is no area code for the realm of the dead.

  Lance sat down heavily on the ground. The slick Gore-Tex of his clothing created almost no friction on the icy road surface. And so he slowly started to slide. Up ahead the road sloped gently down toward a curve about a hundred yards away. After several yards his heavy body began to pick up momentum, and his speed noticeably increased. He grabbed the rifle and held it out in front of him, as if it were attached to invisible reins that, in turn, were attached to an invisible horse that was pulling him along the road. Inside the long block of ice he was holding, he could see the gun, like a dark shadow. He tried to stop the slide and get to his feet, but it was pointless; the road was much too slippery. All he could do was hold on to his ice rifle with hands that were aching with cold. The gun had cost him too much money to simply let it go. The invisible horse was going faster and faster through the rain. For a moment he thought with dread about what would happen if a car showed up, but then he remembered that wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t happen. No one was capable of driving on this road right now. Lance was utterly alone on Highway 61.

  He skidded and slowly began rotating to the left. His head, underneath the hood, was being steadily pelted by big raindrops, falling hard and fast. The backs of his hands too. His hands were crimson and almost completely numb. The icy forest, the gleaming road, the guardrail, the trees leaning so far forward that the icicles practically touched his head—everything rushed past in a blur, like the view seen from a carousel, going faster and faster, while he still held on to the shapeless rifle, as if the whole world might disappear if he lost his grip on the gun.

  Turning counterclockwise, he slammed right into the ice-coated guardrail, careening like a runaway spinning top. Then he slid down the rest of the slope on his back, head first, with the rifle lying on his chest. He was afraid of running into something hard with his head, but a few moments later he came to a halt. He was lying in the middle of the road. Rain was pouring down onto his face. His left upper arm hurt from hitting the rail. It hurt so bad that at first he thought he might have broken his arm, but when he tried to move it, he was able to do so, even though he gasped in pain.

  The birch trees, heavy with ice, leaned forward on either side of the road. They looked like big crystal chandeliers. He must be somewhere between the Temperance and the Cross Rivers, a stretch of road that he drove almost every day of the year, but right now he didn’t recognize it at all. The ice had changed everything.

  He sat up, dizzy after so much spinning around. With an effort he got to his feet and made his way over to the shoulder of the road. There was no guardrail here. He took another step and found himself on solid ground. A few more steps and he was once again standing among the birches. The icicles seemed dangerously heavy now that he was in among them. If any of them fell and struck his head, he would definitely be injured.

  The best way to find out where he was in relation to the Cross River was probably to go down to the lake and look for Baraga’s Cross, which was visible from quite a distance. Carefully he started forward under the bowed birch trees. As he moved, the icicles kept tapping against each other. Each icicle produced a different tone, depending on its size. Together they sounded as if someone were playing on a hu
ge, untuned ice instrument.

  He stopped to listen for anything that might indicate someone else was moving through this ice world along with him. He heard nothing but the rain striking the ice. As soon as he reached the parking lot, he’d find out whether his brother was still there or whether he’d driven off before the ice storm started. But first Lance wanted to go down to the lake to figure out how far it was to the parking area. He should be there soon. He just had to be careful not to tread on the slippery rocks.

  Stooping a bit, Lance kept moving forward beneath the overhanging ice, afraid that a big icicle might break off and hit his head. The vast, open space of the lake suddenly seemed extremely enticing, but he hadn’t yet emerged from the woods. The forest went on and on. The feeling grew stronger that he was never going to reach the shore of the lake. He must have headed in the wrong direction, but how was that possible? Here? Between Highway 61 and Lake Superior? The strip of land between the water and the road was no more than a couple of hundred yards at the widest spot. How could he have missed the world’s largest lake? And yet he seemed to have done exactly that, because the forest didn’t end. Nor did it look any different.

  The icicles formed a swaying latticework in every direction as they tapped against each other and against his ice-covered rifle. The cold, raw air gave him the feeling of being underwater, as if he were not moving among ice-laden birch trees but instead found himself deep inside an ocean that was in the process of freezing solid. An ocean or a lake. When he looked up he could no longer see the rainy gray sky. The trees were so coated with ice and so bowed down that they formed an impenetrable ceiling right above his head. It was getting a little harder to breathe, as if the weight of the ice were pressing on his lungs. What little light there was down here was being tossed back and forth between the swinging icicles. Fractured reflections of himself shimmered all around him.