About Grace

by Anthony Doerr

  For what might have been an hour, he fumbled in the shallows but found only gravel. Before dawn the storm was miles to the east and the clouds relented and unveiled a limitless matrix of stars, which appeared only as a huge and terrible ceiling, pocked with light. His duffel bag was to his right. His glasses were nowhere. His clothes were soaked.

  Trees became pillars of shadow, the sky a swirling luster, the shapes of his own hands immaterial shadows in front of his face. He crossed the river on an old wire bridge and passed through an empty campground and foundered among rocks. If I keep descending, he thought, I will stay by the river, and if I can follow the river, I will reach a road.

  But by daybreak things were hardly better: the forest was a blur, the sky a mess of roiled silver. He made for a dark, cubic structure he thought might be a house but somehow missed it and within a matter of a half hour had climbed two steep ridges and could no longer find the river.

  He reached for trees only to lurch into air. At the corners of his vision white spots tumbled like the spalls of meteorites plummeting to earth. By late afternoon he was half-starved and sun-blinded and his vision was nearly useless. He had still not come upon a road. And now he was climbing—should he turn back, and descend again?

  All the things he did not see: he walked within thirty feet of a black bear and never knew she was there; Winkler feeling his way along a game trail, the bear raised on her haunches, sniffing for a long moment before settling back down and swinging away into the trees. Two hawks, displaced by the storm, sat on a branch over the trail, preening parasites from their wings and watching him go. And horsemen, harrying sheep far below him, tan ewes like specks circling against a fence, and the faint puffs of dust they kicked up blowing south toward a road, a pickup, a horse trailer. And the next morning: a trio of summer cabins far below him, on the shores of the Deadwood Reservoir, all occupied, all happy enough to feed and water a lost stranger. He saw none of it.

  Six mornings out of Boise found him shivering, out of crackers, nearly out of soup, with very little idea where he was. He had unwittingly crossed two broken but traveled roads and now was farther north than he ever would have guessed, with the enormous tracts of the Salmon River Valley ahead of him, and beyond that Marble Creek, and the River of No Return, none of it populated. His feet had blistered in his shoes, and his right ankle had swollen grotesquely: the yellows and purples of contusion had climbed halfway up his shin.

  He stumped through the high forests, steadying himself against trunks. The air smelled of pine and sage, sweet and sickly in his nose and at the back of his mouth. Above him giant grasshoppers screamed like panthers in the branches. Occasionally one fell and writhed in his hair or down the back of his collar and he would spasm trying to reach it, his duffel falling from his shoulders, his fingers tearing at his shirt.

  This was the darkness he had been dreaming for years. This was the place where events occurred around him heard but unseen, the deep and private blindness his dreams had predicted so many years before. The deep, marine pressure on his brain. The flood of light. At the terminals of circles extremes met: darkness was no different from illumination; an inundation of either was blinding. When he slept now he dreamed of naked, frozen branches: frost growing on windows, snowflakes alighting on sleeves.

  The little nerite shells—the three or four he had left—were tiny lumps in the seam of his pocket. His trousers had lost their knees; his socks were little more than anklets, spats of cotton over the insteps of his shoes.

  In his farthest moments he sensed, again and again, presences in the shadows: Soma and Felix; Naaliyah and Nanton; Grace and Sandy. He’d be resting on a rock, or in a bed of pine needles, eyes closed, sleep closing in, when he’d hear a rustle in the brush, a pause in the wind. In his ribs, at the tips of his hairs: a slight magnetic draw, the barely perceptible gravitational pull one human body exerts on another.

  He’d open his eyes; he’d sit up. There’d be nothing, only the smeary, endless forest, spots dragging across his vision, that pressure in his skull.

  He pressed the pad of his finger to a molar and wiggled it back and forth. There was the metallic taste of blood on his tongue. You will see fire and you will die. Your journey will never be done.

  “Hello?” he called. “Hello?”

  On his ninth night since leaving the Datsun, he reached a land of rocks on a ridgeline cold and smoking in the wind where dwarf trees had grown stunted and hooked and ferns of ice meshed and feathered in clefts between rocks. A cusp of moon floated in the western sky. He tried to start a fire but the wind prevented it. He rummaged in the duffel for a can of soup—his last—and cut it open and drank the thick, salty concentrate cold.

  In the night, wrapped in his poncho, the moon seemed to move closer, filling his whole frame of vision, seeping around the edges of his eyelids, abrading him, his skin and skeleton, until he felt he would become nothing but membrane, a rippling film of soul, until he was lying on the outermost ridge toward heaven, the stars at his feet, the very core of the universe within reach.

  The next afternoon he descended maybe a thousand feet into a dense, dusty wood. The muscles in his ankles felt stripped and ragged and the sun was pale but zealous and forced him into the shade. Each time he tried to stand, his eyesight fled in slow, nauseating streaks.

  He lay on his back and watched the sky, the only cloud a single, smeary stripe, which after a while he realized was a slowly lengthening contrail at the head of which must have been a jet. An image came to him of the pilots in the cockpit, a panorama of instruments before them, a hundred round glass faces, steady needles and switches, the frozen reaches of atmosphere unrolling in front of them. How strange to be miles below, lying in thorns, while they hurtled through space, a cabin behind them packed with passengers asleep or eating or reading magazines. He raised a hand, squinted, pinched them from the sky.

  Not thirty yards from there, through a brace of ferns and across a ditch, came a rising sound, something like an extended sigh. It had crescendoed and faded into silence before Winkler realized a car had passed.

  10

  He wavered on his legs as a caravan of eighteen-wheelers roared past. On their flatbeds they carried the massive, limb-stripped trunks of trees, ten or so per truck, great streamers of bark trailing behind. The heaving air in their wake smelled thick and sweet, the smell of crushed wood. The last truck threw up its brakelights and began a long, grinding halt that took several hundred yards.

  Winkler hurried as well as he could, limping down the shoulder, the ferns at the sides of the road nodding and settling. The door swung open; a hand came across the seat and pulled him in.

  “My Lord,” the driver said.

  Winkler tried to smile but could feel his lips cracking. The truck purred on the shoulder. The driver said, “You been out there awhile?”

  Winkler lowered his face into his palms. “Well, I won’t ask,” the man said. He ratcheted the truck up through the gears. The road glided past, a blur of gray seemingly way too far beneath them. “You ain’t a child-murderer or something?”

  Winkler looked up. “No,” he heard himself say.

  “Where are we headed?”

  “Alaska.”

  The driver laughed. “I can get you to Ninety-five. How’s that?”

  The roadside blurred; the centerline whisked under the hood. Winkler sagged against the window. Soon placeless dreams were upon him and when he woke it was near dark and the trucker was braking to enter a gas station. “Exit’s just past that sign there,” he said. “You’ll get a ride in no time.”

  Winkler mumbled his thanks, dragged himself and his duffel bag into the station store, and bumbled through the harlequin light and shelves of candy and crackers and cassettes. He brought a loaf of bread, a bag of tortillas to the counter. The clerk held his twenty-dollar bill to the light.

  In the bathroom he sat on the toilet and ate half the bread, feeling his stomach distend and bubble.

  When he finished he
pulled Sandy’s obituary photo from his pocket. It was little more than lint now, a few dots of ink. He held it in front of his eyes and tried not to weep.

  The next driver’s name was Brent Royster, a hopped-up, enthusiastic trucker hauling blenders and bread machines to department stores across British Columbia. His face in Winkler’s eyes was a wide, pink spread of kindness. He had rigged a turntable on coils in the space between the driver’s and passenger’s armrests and behind the seats were crates stuffed with records, a thousand at least, all in antistatic sleeves, all jostling and settling softly as the truck rolled on.

  “How about Sam Cooke?” Brent offered. He reached behind him and without looking unsleeved a record and notched it on the turntable. The record spun, the needle fell. “Chain Gang” flooded the cabin.

  Winkler watched the highway roll past the window, looming green signs and the mile markers flashing past. He tore open a pack of gas station doughnuts and fished them, one after another, into his mouth. “Is this real?” he asked.

  “Say what, pardner?” Brent reached to adjust the volume.

  “Is this real? What’s happening to me?”

  Reflectors in the road thwapped beneath the tires, setting a regular, almost reassuring pace. Thwap, thwap, thwap. Hoob! Aah! said Sam Cooke. Brent gave Winkler a curious look.

  “Real? It’s real as rain, I guess. Real as Jesus.”

  Around dawn the next morning they stopped at a truckers’ diner and bent over steaming mugs of coffee.

  “What day is it?”

  “September the fifteenth.”

  “Thursday?”

  “Sunday.”

  Winkler shook his head. He ordered eggs and French toast and a side of fries and three glasses of orange juice. Brent leaned back in his chair. “You can ride with me all the way to Prince Rupert if you like. Then you can get yourself a ferry. You’ll be in Alaska by Wednesday.”

  Winkler blinked. “Wednesday.”

  “You got friends waiting on you? Or family?”

  He thought it over. “Friends.”

  Brent nodded. The waitress brought the plates. The juice was the best of it: Winkler could taste it in every corner of his mouth. “You’re eating like it’s the Last Supper,” Brent said.

  “I’m all right,” said Winkler. But ten minutes later he was in the bathroom.

  They were well north of Coeur d’Alene, listening to Van Morrison, when the trucker offered to call Winkler’s friends in Alaska.

  “No,” Winkler said. “Thank you.”

  “Everyone has someone to call. That’s a fact.”

  “No,” he said again, but the trucker had detached his cellular from its cradle. They spent the next ten minutes haggling. Eventually Winkler gave him Naaliyah’s name. Brent dialed Information, spelled her name perfectly. When he reached a hall where Naaliyah lived, he handed over the phone. “Here. I’ve dialed it.”

  A girl answered. “Naaliyah’s not here,” she said. “She’s up in Nowheresville. On research. What do they call it? Camp Nowhere. Something like that.”

  “Research,” Winkler said. “On insects?”

  “Uh-huh. Somewhere way up. In the Yukon.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll look it up.” He heard papers shuffle. “Eagle. Eagle City, Alaska.”

  “Eagle?” Brent said, after Winkler had handed over the phone. “Wow. Girl gets around. Eagle’s up by Dawson City. The Yukon.”

  “How can I get there?”

  “There are roads. Might be closer than Anchorage, really. From Haines you can catch a bus into the Yukon. You can probably get all the way to Eagle. Although there isn’t much there.”

  The rest of the journey passed more like dream than reality. Brent drove with his window open and cold, almost hallucinatory air swept ceaselessly through the cabin. Winkler shivered beneath his seat belt. Record after record played; Winkler thought of Naaliyah, of the Caribbean, of fishermen standing in the surf, minding the bowlines of their canoes like the reins of horses.

  At the border before Creston, two Mounties had Brent open the big trailer doors so they could see his load, but neither said anything to Winkler beyond investigating his passport, and soon enough they were back on the road. Brent was tireless, it seemed, and Winkler could not keep his eyes open and soon he was asleep, dreaming the country pulling past, the sound of the engine distant and relentless in his ears like the sound of the lagoon at Nanton’s inn, and when he woke, a few hours later, he was unsure for a long time if he were still sleeping, if the relentless sweep of trees and valley and stars past the windshield were really an extension of his dream, if from that point onward he would be living in a world of apparitions, and his body would remain asleep on the seat of a long-distance hauler. Another kind of purgatory: a waiting to wake up.

  The truck pulled him north, into a land less of Canada and more of sheer imagination, the long freezes, the northern lights, the distance from where and who he had been finally absolute.

  Three separate warehouses in Calgary. A truckers’ motel near Banff. The up-and-down wastes of western British Columbia: a low and tangled bracken, a smell in the air like mud, and frost; winter on its way. In Prince Rupert, Brent dropped Winkler at the entrance to the ferry where lines of automobiles waited to pile on.

  “Here.” Brent handed down a pair of shoes from the cab. “They’re U.S. nines. Should fit.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I won’t hear otherwise. And when you get home, you get that ankle looked at. Lots of times you think things are healed but they’ve only healed partway or they’ve healed wrong and you’ve got to rehurt ’em to get ’em right.”

  Winkler took the shoes and stood on the roadside nodding and feeling as if the whole scene was made of paper and could crumple and blow away. “Thank you,” he said. Brent Royster turned from putting on another record and gave Winkler a sweet, combustible smile, the smile of a boy, and the truck pulled out and dust pulled in behind it.

  In the ferry terminal he bought his ticket and ordered postage and two envelopes at a postal kiosk. For the broken picture frame, he wrote on a slip of paper, then crossed it out and wrote: For your trouble. And for the lady with the white pickup. He put six hundred dollars in the envelope, sealed it, and addressed it to 1122 Alturas Street in Boise, Idaho.

  On the ferry he curled up on gum-splotched carpet between two banks of seats with his ruined duffel under his head and his knees pulled to his chest. The ferry sounded its whistle. The floor heeled gently beneath him. The smell of grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches drifted through the compartment; two Inuit boys by the windows stared into the screens of their handheld video games with the ardor of believers.

  11

  He disembarked in Haines and rode motorcoaches through the Yukon Corner: a half dozen isolated towns, most named for animals: Whitehorse, Beaver, Chicken. The highway was gravel, occasionally chipped out of cliff sides, and the bus windows were soon pasted with an oily grime. Mosquitoes traveled the aisle hunting passengers.

  The driver indicated highlights as they slid past. Abandoned mining dredges; midnight-sun gardens (like gardens on steroids: inflated cabbages, colossal pumpkins). Vast islands of spruce. A road-killed caribou the size of a dairy cow.

  Thirty hours of bouncing in that seat and near the end of it Winkler could feel the minute dissociations between each vertebra. He was the last passenger. A trio of cabins marked the end of the route.

  Eagle: population 250. He disembarked on traitorous legs. It was 8:40 P.M. and there was still plenty of light in the sky, shadows reaching across the unpaved street, two boys in a Radio Flyer wagon harnessed to dogs watching the bus turn and start back toward Tok.

  He started with them: “Naaliyah Orellana? Dark skin, a scientist?” They picked at paint on the wagon walls. “Hello? Do you speak English?”

  They nodded.

  “But you don’t know her?”

  They shook their heads, then mushed the huskies and the wagon started off, creaking
up the street.

  He could barely read the phone book (thirty or so sheets of paper, clipped together) but there did not seem to be any Naaliyah listed. Out of habit he reached to adjust his glasses but pawed at air.

  No one knew her at the Texaco, or the rental cabins, or the propane dealer, or the beadwork shop. He offered the station mechanic a hundred-dollar bill but the man only shook his head: “Can’t summon her out of thin air.”

  The sky was huge and purple and the town was tiny beneath it. Nobody seemed to think his plight was all that urgent. It didn’t take long to run out of buildings: a warped box of a bar where a bartender was fast-forwarding a pornographic videotape; the old frame-building custom house; the trading company with its dusty fluorescent lights and neon bags of potato chips shining in plump rows. In his eyes everything was hazy and smeared with light. His ankle ached steadily. Have you seen Naaliyah Orellana? A young woman? Haven’t seen her. Anybody? Nobody.

  It was September 20 and he’d been in the United States less than seven weeks. The street ended at a series of sad-looking docks where a few houseboats were tied up. Beyond them the vast, khaki current of the Yukon River slid past, a quarter mile across, like some final and insuperable boundary.

  “The airstrip,” a canoe-rental man told him. “I think I saw a gal like that out there. A couple months ago, maybe? Heading to the university land up there.” He waved toward an enormous bluff.

  The airfield was less than a mile from town. He trudged the road in half darkness. Off to his right the Yukon rolled on, driving its immeasurable payload of silt northward. He could hardly believe its size: it was a sleek prairie, pocked with boils; it was an avalanche turned on its side.