The Dead Are More Visible (9 page)

There was a breeze off the lake, Ben. Pleasant weather. You’ll be a lot happier when you come back. Wait, where do you think you’re going, we’re not finished here!

I’m heading on to the next cache.

You’re in no condition.

Actually I’m in great condition for the first time in my life, and I can do it. You, on the other hand, are going to start feeling the heat and the terrain and you’ll fall behind.

Even if I’m just figmentary, Ben? (Out come those terrifying teeth.)

You heft your daypack and turn and walk off through the little screen of firs and emerge on a ridge that gives a wide-angle view down into another, shallower valley. Another range of bare hills on the far side. The vast mural of the sky is cloudless, blue as the marrow of a paraffin flame. The Fisher can’t be real and if the Fisher
is
real he will soon collapse; he leads a pimp-slash-pusher’s pampered life, while you—you’ve survived on the street for years, only rarely shuffling the three klicks home to the wartime bungalow of your mother. She is shattered, sick with fear, the true victim of the piece. Your own victim, partly. You’re out here to change everything, to return whole and help her. Just loving her again will help her. True addicts can’t love. The addiction conscripts all the love in them and degrades it, shits it out as something used and useless.

This valley looks barren, devoid of vineyards and the other postcard features of the main valley behind you—long lakes, clusters of condos, sun-white wineries like prosperous haciendas. But a shimmering thread runs along the valley floor and you think: stream.

The Fisher’s footfalls crunch behind you.

I’d like you to stop, Ben. You know I can detain you if necessary. I’m being restrained so far in not doing so.

Maybe if you walk far enough, drain yourself utterly, your brain will no longer be able to project these fantasies; like a director and film crew whose budget is exhausted. You say, We’re continuing north through this valley, onto that far ridge. Then west along the ridgeline. Maybe an hour.

I’m happy to hear you including me now, Ben. But you should reconsider this trek. You’re not walking normally.

Blisters.

Remember, when the pain gets too much, I’m there—I can help! Slow down, Ben, it’s steep here, you’ll twist an ankle. Were you aware that climbers get seriously injured more often on
downhill
stretches? Radical strains in the femoral ligaments. Benjamin? Slow down!

The voice is losing ground. You’re outrunning your delirium.
Just get yourself down into that valley
. The shade deepening there, that glimmering seam of water.

All right, Ben, I see you’re determined to get down there. Fair enough. I’ll go with you. I concur the view is spectacular on this side.

You’re panting the dry air, sauna-hot in your nostrils and throat. Your lungs, parched as the rest of you, have lost the ability to moisturize air. Your insides are desertifying. Your legs wobble as if you’ve just had casts removed and the muscles are wasted. Preliminary chills now, nausea—those early symptoms of heatstroke they
warned you about in camp. And now a terrible thought rears up: what if the Fisher is following you to drive you on to exhaustion and death? What makes the thought so awful is that if the Fisher is a chimera—and he must be: he can’t be real—then really it’s just
you
goading yourself toward death. This wouldn’t be the first time in your life you’ve tried to die, but over the last few weeks you feel you have surmounted such desperation, finally and fully. You glance back. The Fisher has almost caught up. He nods genially. If he were wearing a hat, he’d be tipping the brim. The thing about aviator shades, you realize, is the lenses are shaped like the eye sockets of a skull.

His left hand on your shoulder: that gold band like a wedding ring, though it’s on the middle finger.

How could you let the authorities
catch
you, Ben? He pauses for breath. I thought you’d developed some proficiency. They say if you succeed in stealing a hundred times, you’ll go on forever without apprehension.

You know how it happened. You know everything I know.

I’d appreciate hearing your personal recount. His hand tightens on your shoulder. In fact, Ben, I insist.

You wrench your shoulder free, run staggeringly downhill. There is no trail. A trail isn’t needed. The ground is bare but for thatches of dry, tough scrub that you deke around in a clumsy, desperate slalom, your quads hammered and weakening. Your ears pop with the descent and your daypack jounces against your
sunburned shoulders. You’re descending so quickly, you fast-track the sun’s setting behind the deep valley’s far side, that ripsaw ridgeline. The valley bottom is out of focus but surging up toward you, a trickle of cool creek, the oasis shade of trees.

You can no longer hear the Fisher’s footsteps.

The valley floor
is
shaded, cool—the sun occluded by that far ridge—but it’s parched. You stand in a white streambed of chalk or limestone cracked and sinkholed here and there, weeds sprouting, like the remains of an ancient road in the Holy Land. You travelled there with your father and mother about a year before he left; everywhere you went, he had his bifocalled nose in a guidebook or a map or his Bible, raging at you or your mother if you interrupted him.… When you looked down from the ridge a quarter-hour ago, this streambed must have reflected the sun like water. To either side of it, sagebrush and a few small, knurled thorn trees languish. You sag onto the polished stone that still holds the sun’s warmth, lick the sweat off your biceps and forearms, then tug off your T-shirt and chew on the fabric, trying to suck in the moisture. You look back up the valley’s side. Nothing. You’ve shaken up or deprived your brain enough that the lucid delirium has passed. Now think. You need to rest in the shade, unmoving, till the temperature drops and you can climb the far ridge and follow it to the next cache. Saint-Exupéry, after crashing his small plane, walked for days—no, nights—in the Sahara without water.

A sound from upstream and your eyes startle toward it. A scuttling in that thicket of greasewood a hundred metres off—something under the lower twigs. A tail like a puff of smoke seems to plume and vanish.

Another mirage.

You’re base-jumping down through space into star-fields and vast nebular clusters—you waken to vertigo, which eases, leaving you splayed in the streambed staring up at the sky. To the Syilx peoples of this high desert, the Milky Way was the Road of Souls. From beyond the ridge that you staggered down—a black, brooding absence of stars and planets on one side of your planetarium—the moon’s light is crowning. You’re shivering with cold and your open mouth is utterly dry as if, while you slept, one of those dental spit siphons has been functioning. In jail you saw a dentist for the first time in years. He said you were lucky to have any teeth left in your mouth, and
good
teeth, too. He must have assumed it was crystal meth that drove you to crime, though you were never drawn to meth, which would only have accelerated your hyperactive left hemisphere.

You sit up and again there’s motion upstream. A faint sound, too, a trickling, as if you’re in a motel and someone in the next room has left a tap running. From your daypack you take the thermal hoodie the Program supplied (penitentiary orange, not merely to discourage clients from fleeing the Program, but also to encourage
local ranchers and townsfolk to report escapees and even rustle them back to camp, for a two-hundred-dollar reward). You pull on the hoodie and crawl up the streambed toward the sound. The Road of Souls so densely radiant, your head casts a weak shadow. You totter to your feet, grope onward. A horn of the moon jabs over the ridgeline. The sound from ahead grows clearer. Water. A delusion, it must be, but there’s no way you can stop. The moon is suddenly up over the ridgeline, glazing the valley in feeble light—a muted, lunar fax of the sun’s light, but enough to bring out two eyes beading in the thicket of greasewood ahead. Your heart thumps its way up your gullet into your mouth. The eyes are gone. The Program does not allow flashlights. The Program’s purpose is to drop you near naked into the wilderness so you’ll find out what’s left of you when every accessory is stripped away. An infant, unaccommodated, with the chance to start over. Born again and all that. There is something of the religious cult in the Program. Still, for the most part it works—though you gather there have been a few deaths and suicides over the years.

There’s a deeper darkness beyond the greasewood, and the trickling sound is coming from there. Your brain, animating all this (you’re certain that’s what’s happening), seems determined to frighten you to death. You can’t go in there without a flashlight and yet you have to, you have to find out if there really is water dripping deliciously in that cave—it must be a
cave. It’s not a cave, you see as you approach, it’s the mouth of an old mine. You reach up to touch the punky, hammocked lintel over the opening. A rank smell wafts out, as if foxes have denned inside. Bats, maybe. Along with the stink there’s a cool, humid quality to the air. You duck your head and enter, groping at the dark, inching your feet along the floor that slopes downward slightly, could fall away steeply, a mineshaft. You shuffle on toward the liquid sound. You’re beyond the penumbral light of the threshold, maybe thirty steps in: dense darkness. You glance back for the anchoring assurance of moonlight and starlight framed in the mine’s mouth and a silhouette slips across it, leaving the mine or entering. You stand rigid, water audible on one side of you, the glowing square of the mine’s mouth on the other.

Who is it? you call.

From somewhere in the mine, a deep thoracic rumbling, like a big creature’s warning growl. The roots of the hair on your nape prickle and freeze.

Fuck off! you say. I don’t fucking
believe
in you!

The flick of a match sharp as a gunshot. You spin around, toward the trickling. The Fisher—his face lamped by the flame he holds near his chin—sits by a greenish patch of polished rock where water drips out of a hole and flows down the wall, vanishing into a crevice between wall and floor. He holds the shrinking match until its flame seems to transfer to the tips of his thumb and index finger, which he then shakes,
plunging the mine into a darkness deeper than before.

What do you suppose they mined here? he asks.

You’re the one who thinks he knows everything, you whisper; a whisper is all you have left.

I’m surmising coal, he says. Anthracite. Though I suppose it could have been something more valuable. Even gold. Either way, a hell of a lot of effort for what it must have paid.

You’ve found a better way.

Correct, Ben. But don’t be so quick to judge.

Who better than me?

Do you believe in God, Ben? Do you believe in anything beyond this, um …

You’re going to tell me to leave judgment to God, right? That’s what my father used to say. (You’re torn, desperate for that water but afraid to approach.)

Ben, a superior being can perceive things that you can’t. That’s his
avocation
. If you could see with such a being’s—

What I see is that if He exists, He’s on the side of the strong.

Ah, the spiritually strong! The Gandhis and the Dalai Lamas, right, Ben?

The opposite. The despots and the sharks. The Ponzis and the chairmen, the pontiffs, colonels, the white-collar crooks. And ones like you—God’s on your side, Fisher. That’s why the ones like you thrive and the softer ones end up in slums or asylums or cancer wards. The meek—the meek inherit the halfway house, or—

Benjamin—

Or the detox ward.

Benjamin, sit down and rest, have a drink, have a little sniff, you sound
awful
.

I’m not one of those anymore.

That’s excellent, Ben—that’s very, very good! Do you understand why? Because if you’re not one of them, then before long—not yet, but soon—you’ll be one of
us
.

Forget it.

But you’re
smart
, Ben, so you understand that you have to be one or the other. The nice ones, they think they’re harmless, herbivorous, injuring no one. The honest ones know it’s all about finding a place on the food chain and acknowledging your niche. (He pronounces it
nitch
.) You can’t live and thrive without hurting others, Ben. Me, if I do hurt anyone, I hurt the weak-willed and—present company exclusive—the
stupid
, which is much preferred to harming the intelligent and the strong, the way some persons do. I fit into the Darwinian diorama, Ben. I’m simply culling the flock.

You move toward the water, squat down, reach out. You hear the Fisher’s breathing pause and change as he rises to his feet so that your positions are reversed: he now stands over you.

Ben … I can’t let you share this good water until I have your word.

I’m through with you. Leave me alone.

As you reach toward the wall, as you smell and feel your way toward that luscious, humid coolness, his hand grips your wrist. A painfully tight clasp.

I cull the flock, Benjamin, but I also provide a
service
. The termination of all pain, Ben. Pain like this! I make it all go away. And Ben, you
are
weak. You know it. You still need me and you know it.

Let go of me! You try to grab his hand but now he clutches the wrist of your free hand and he’s pushing both wrists downward, forcing you toward the floor of the mine. You whiplash your lowered head backward to wrench free and hear the stony thunk before you feel it—the top of your skull has clouted some hard thing and it can’t be the roof of the mine, you’re too low, and now the Fisher’s guttural moan sirens into a howl of pain and you know you’ve butted him in the chin or nose. His grip loosens on both wrists. You twist free and scramble toward the mine’s glowing mouth. In your panic to get away you’re actually fleeing the precious water. You hear him, his flat steps heavy, implacable as pursuing feet in a nightmare, which is what this is, you tell yourself again, and the telling flits like an urgent news update along the base of a screen, impossible to hold in mind. You emerge into the night and the deep valley seems brilliant as morning, somehow the moon now straight overhead and the stars reeling in counterintuitive constellations, and again you see darting motion behind the scrub to your left: three creatures, coywolves, their eyes glowing redly as
in a botched photo, teeth bared, and they too must be apparitions, but by the time they’ve sprung and brought down the Fisher as he emerges, you’ve forgotten you’re dreaming, if you are, and the Fisher’s cries
—help me, fuck, help me, Ben, please!
—resonate through the valley, each syllable in its slow dying as sweet as the trickle of water from a deep, sulphurless, cave-cool spring. Drink now and be revived.