The Dead Are More Visible (8 page)

Late afternoon, your third day in the desert, the Fisher catches up with you. You’re not sure why he’s called the Fisher and you’ve never had the balls to ask him. According to one story, he got the alias a few years ago, back home, after the period when a number of cats and small dogs turned up dead and mutilated, and for a while people in the Heights guessed they were the victims of some psycho. It turned out they were killed by a fisher—a kind of large, nocturnal weasel—that had come down out of the woods along the Cataraqui.

Maybe too the nickname stuck because it sounds a bit like “pusher.”

When the Fisher comes walking toward you up the dry streambed, tracing the path your own boots have left in the dirt, you are not surprised. In fact you
have the feeling you’ve
summoned
him here, though even now—after three days alone in the wilds above Osoyoos in a heat wave, parched and hungry—you’re sufficiently self-aware to wonder if it’s really him. Really anyone at all.

It was not supposed to be this hot, even here, in mid-July, but the Program doesn’t cancel its “client” OutTrips. Rain or shine. (You’ve never seen rain here.) Your first OutTrip was three days, in June. Afternoons on the desert floor were smelter hot and after midnight you shivered in your thermal blanket. Still, there was never a moment when you feared you wouldn’t make it out alive. This five-day trip—the climax of the Program, after which you’ll debrief and fly east to face a few months’ probation and then, supposedly, get on with your life—is different. Though you’re way, way fitter and tougher now than when you arrived sick and skinny at the camp, you’ve been struggling. By the end of day 2 you were struggling. The “staple quotient” of water was challenge enough on OutTrip 1. This time you guess it’s dangerous. If it gets too hot, travel at night and sleep through the day—that was the instruction, and starting tonight you mean to follow it.

It’s around five p.m., you guess, and with hours to go until dusk you’re resting in the louvered shade of a stand of stunted firs. You can see down the streambed to the valley, a full day’s walk away, where irrigated vineyards roll greenly to a cool blue lake: a small, V-shaped vision of the promised land. Not even a
breath of breeze. Sweat pearls on your face and trickles from your armpits to the waistband of your boxer shorts; as if you can afford to lose fluid. In the silence you think you hear the needles of the firs drying up and falling onto the dead ones with the sub-audible ticking that ice crystals make as they form from your breath and fall on the coldest winter nights, back east.

You keep dreaming of such cold.

You plan to walk by the light of the moon—not much of a moon these nights, but it’ll have to do—using your map and compass. The next cache of water and food is fifteen kilometres from here. All you want is the water. In this ragged terrain it’ll take you until five or six in the morning, just after sunrise.

What are you doing here? you ask, your voice hoarse and corroded.

Serious efforts were required to locate you, the Fisher says as he slows and stops, spotlit by the sun behind you and this puny, pathetic brake of firs. He looks unfazed by the incinerating heat. He has on black sport loafers, designer jeans manufactured to look worn and ripped, and a form-fitting, large-collared yellow shirt he wears open to the third button and tucked stringently into his jeans. He’s older, maybe forty, but that doesn’t fully explain the tight tuck; a lot of guys his age dress loosely, like teenagers. He seems to model his look on porn stars of the ’80s—a compact, gelled helmet of ginger hair, ample sideburns, aviator shades with red lenses that allow just the slightest glimpse of
the eyes behind. He wears a black belt, thick, an ostentatious silver buckle. The gold Rolex is likely real.

He looks down at you speculatively. Slowly he bares those even teeth with the large, jeering gap between the front incisors. It’s a smile that always enjoys itself a little too much. A coarse smile, a cannibal’s wide rictus; every time he smiles, he belies his pretensions to refinement.

You ran, Ben, even though I told you Upper Mongolia wouldn’t be far enough. (A classic Fisherism. He sees himself as a superior being, a polymath, and in fact he knows a great deal about many things, but his information is all a few degrees off, as if his brain makes slight data-entry errors with the info he probably gleans from dicey blogs and websites. It’s the same with his extensive but wonky diction.)

I’m not running, you say, holding your voice in place as it tries to slip up the register, thin out and vanish.

You don’t look like you can even walk now, Ben.

Are you going to sit? I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything. I have to hike from meal to meal here. Drink to drink.

Sure, I grasp completely how the Program operates.

Of course you do! you insist, as if to convince yourself: the Fisher cannot be here in front of you, even if all the details are right, including the voice that he always slows down and gruffens, like Donald Rumsfeld. You’re just me! This isn’t for real—I’m dreaming you.

He takes another step toward you and nimbly folds downward, without the aid of his arms, assuming a
loose lotus position. He always moves with this easy aplomb—a Zen abbot’s serene poise crossed with a pimp’s air of dignity. A self-pampered, theatrical dignity. But he does feel the heat: perspiration glazes his tanned, lined face, sequins of sweat dot his auburn chest curls. There are stains around his armpits and you smell deodorant—his usual perfumy brand, incongruously feminine. Over his shoulder the far valley of vineyards wavers in convected heat as the sun sears these arid slopes like the surface of Mercury. The rocks are about to crack, like clay in a kiln.

Your father, a Baptist minister, left your mother and you in Kingston ten years ago and started a second family out west while founding his own church, or cult, as the Saskatchewan RCMP now call it. He’s rich, his acolytes give him everything they have, and he’s paying for your stay out here. He has not seen you or your mother since he left. The money he sends—not a lot—is conditional on this continuing estrangement. His commune is based in the Palliser Triangle, a near-desert about a thousand kilometres due east of here. You could walk there in a month of nights.

You hear yourself ask, Got any water?

I thought you concluded I was some kind of … figment.

Where’s Vladimir, then? you ask, knowing the Fisher goes nowhere without him. Vladimir is a stately but stunned-looking borzoi that some folks assume the Fisher must sedate, for reasons of his own. All of the
Fisher’s reasons are his own. You suppose that’s one definition of freedom.

Oh, come on, Ben, you know what it’s like flying long-haul with a dog. They have to travel caged up in the fuselage.

Hold, you mumble.

What’s that? Ah—correct. It is cold in there. And
dark
. No food or water. It’s sickening to think of the atrocities people afflict on animals. And now you know how it feels to need water.

No, I meant “hold” as opposed to “fuselage.”

What?

Nothing.

You owe me a fuck of a wad, Benjamin.

I have nothing to
do
with you anymore. You’re not even here! I’m asleep, or delirious, or something. Fuck, maybe I’m dying …

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Ben.

Do you have any … you don’t have any water?

Correct and incorrect.

You actually lean toward him, though for the last few minutes you’ve been edging away—edging away without feeling yourself move, your spine now clamped against the trunk of a fir. Its bark pricks and itches through your damp T-shirt, which you would remove if you had the energy. You say, What do you mean, “
correct and incorrect
”? If you have any …

(There it is again—that stretchy grin unscabbarding those teeth.)

I have just enough water so you can mix up what I brought you.

What? You brought me oxy?

You have the vague sense—the opposite of déjà vu—that you know in advance what he’s going to say. As if he’s a speaker in your own lucid dream. This whole scene is a kind of neurological confidence trick, your own brain the trickster. Still, you can’t restrain a terrified, credulous excitement.

I’ve even pre-powdered them, the Fisher says. They keep making that harder to do. I don’t let that stop me, though. I don’t want anything to stand between me and a customer, Ben—even one who no longer has a triple-A debit rating.

Credit rating
, you think. I don’t owe you anything, you say in your dried-up voice. You took everything! Three years, maybe a hundred thousand bucks, my fucking freedom, my peace of mind. I owe all sorts of people money, but you I owe nothing.

Ah, Ben. You’re like everyone else. You believe that due to my not assuming an official business, I don’t retain scrupulous accounts.

No, I’m sure you do.

And your attitude, Ben—frankly it’s a disappointment, not to mention a forcible kick in the balls. You think I usually jet across the country to resupply clients like this?

The thermals rising off the rocks and sand of the gully floor behind the Fisher now seem to rise
out
of
him, like steam above an angry cartoon figure. Figure, figment, phantom. You scrunch your eyes closed and feel the dryness in the corners and between the eyeball and lid, an itching, gritty distress like a corneal abrasion. The body is a machine that, like any other, breaks down if the lubricants run out. You open your eyes: he’s still there, looking down at the sunglasses he now holds in his hand. The reason his glasses sit a bit crookedly on his face is that a chunk is missing from the top of his right ear—deducted by a switchblade or a bullet, according to rumour.

His black eyes swivel upward and meet yours. Your breathing stalls. The whites of his eyes are very white, healthy-looking, though the skin below is puffy and discoloured. It’s a rare view. Seeing at intimate range those contused pouches, it hits you that he constantly wears the sunglasses not so much for purposes of intimidation as out of vanity.

What do you want from me? I’ve got nothing here. We
carry
nothing out here—no money, nothing. I don’t even have a watch. And it’s not like I have hundreds of bucks back at the camp, either.

Hundreds wouldn’t begin to cover it, Ben. Aren’t you a little old for a juvie boot camp?

There are a bunch of guys in their twenties. It was a condition of my sentence.

I told you, I’m fully cognizant of all that.

Of course you are. You’re in my mind.

Ben, I’m losing patience—though I have to say this
is an original gambit. No client has ever tried to infer I was a vision, or a demon. Brilliant, Ben. Of course I know you have no money on you. But your debt, honestly, your debt is only one aspect of the issue. You see, in a way I’m
sentimental
about my customers, Ben. They’re like … extended family. I don’t have a family to speak of, you see. Besides Vlad.

You? Sentimental?

A weakness, I know.

He glances down and slips the red sunglasses back on.

I liked having you as a customer, Ben. I valued that special relationship we had and to tell you the truth I still do, even though you’ve abused my credibility. I can forgive that. I committed mistakes when I was your age. I can even forgive that you referenced me to the authorities, Ben—the fucking
authorities
. Men with no
class
. But I expect our special relationship to continue after you come home.

I’m clean now. Just leave me alone.

Honestly, Ben, it’s more about … about principle than money.

Why aren’t you locked up? you croak. Why am
I
the one who ends up hallucinating in the desert and on fucking probation?

It’s not like I haven’t done time, Ben. But it was the making of me. I grew very focused in there. I read expansively and learned to meditate. I quit smoking and I had to quit drinking and I started to keep fit—maybe
a bit like this boot camp of yours. I now eat a Neolithic diet: no refined flour or sugar, minimal meat, lots of nuts, seeds and beans. And lentils, Ben—lentils are an excellent food.

If you’re not just me dreaming, then prove it. Tell me something I don’t know.

Ah, but Ben, you know plenty of stuff you don’t
know
you know, so what kind of proof would that be?

I don’t know what the temperature was yesterday in Kingston. Cool, I bet, down by the boatyards. God—cool and with a lake breeze! Tell me what the temperature was.

I can do better, Ben. He proffers his clenched hand as if for a fist bump. I dislike when people touch me, Ben—honestly, I
hate
it, hate it with a serious aversion—but if it would help you to believe, go ahead.

On the back of the hand, a pelt of carrot-coloured hair.

Ben?

No, you say, I’m good.

Delirium, psychosis, either is preferable to being trapped out here with the real Fisher, hours from help, in the remote northern spur of a desert that goes on forever, a hundred days’ hike south across the U.S. border and the western states, deep into Mexico. The Greater Sonoran Desert. Till now, it’s been your new favourite place in the world and these OutTrips your favourite activity. For the first time in years, something other than substance abuse has rallied your full
attention, subdued the pathological patter in your brain—your exceptional brain, according to certain tests that “experts” at the university gave you a year after your father deserted his family and small Kingston flock. Not something you’ve ever felt proud of, this IQ. More like burdened, ashamed—something to conceal if you live in the Heights. Your brain’s babble, the second-guessing, self-accusing, the standing outside your life, watching and thinking, thinking, always
thinking
, never eased, not until the opiates, especially oxycodone. That neural noise was just your big fat brain trying to fill the silence of the badlands inside you, the way a lost man might yell and mutter to himself because the quiet of the wilderness—the sound of his coming demise—is too awful.

Being out here has changed everything. Your inner badlands have found their match and now inner and outer worlds conform, void to void—a strangely consoling balance. You’re no freak after all. Your inner state (now wonderfully quiet!) reflects the world’s quantum vacancy. The Buddha’s vision of formlessness and freedom was right, your father wrong (his sect is based on the notion that
everyone
is possessed, either by Christ or the Antichrist).