Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

As the years passed, she tried to be better. She tried to help more, mother more. She wanted people to turn a needy face toward her in a bad time. She had no one but her patients. That is how she knows Clark, as a patient, treated for alcohol poisoning. She pumped her stomach and brought the cups of sugar water to her lips and held her hair as she vomited into a bucket and monitored her for twenty-four hours. She checked up on her weeks later, finding her at the stables, asking if she needed anything.

“What makes you think I need anything?”

“I’m just checking. That’s all. Just seeing if you’re all right. Healthy.”

“I’m fine.” Clark looked at her curiously. “Hey, you want to get a drink?”

A patient treated for alcohol poisoning asking her out for a drink. The doctor almost laughed, but she could tell Clark asked the question without irony. To her drinking was like breathing, like talking, and the doctor decided she would like to share that with her. She wasn’t one to visit bars, but she visited one that night. Clark had a way of rallying people, convincing them of what they never realized they wanted. It wasn’t one drink or two. It wasn’t two weeks or three. It was a long seduction, a slow, secret sharing, before Clark revealed their plans and asked if the doctor might join them. They needed someone like her. To care for them.

To be needed. How good that felt.

The doctor realized then she couldn’t remember the last dream she dreamed. She couldn’t remember the last patient she saw or the last meal she ate or the last book she read. Those things happened, but they happened in the haze that had become her life. Nothing was worth committing to memory any longer. So she said, “Yes.” She would go. She would go anywhere Clark asked.

Clark might be reckless, given to wild mood swings, occasionally crippled by her indulgences, but there was something about her — the way she punched the air to punctuate a sentence, the way she never stopped moving except right before she was about to give an order, the way she threw back her head when she laughed, as if her laughter were a swallowed sword. Her heart was too big. It owned her. And when she was angry or happy or sad, you knew about it, because her heart couldn’t be hidden, slamming everyone within fifty yards with its drumbeat. It was hard to doubt someone like that, someone who lived so fully.

The doctor is taken. They all are. They are all there because of Clark. She is their rallying force. Which is why, when the doctor leaned over her cold, pale body, when she dug through her bag and searched for anything that might restore the life to this beautiful, precious person, she felt wounded in a way she never had before. She understood at last what it meant to be the weeping patient.

It was not her care that brought Clark back. It was not anything the doctor pretended to understand, a force beyond any education. But none of that mattered. All that did was Clark’s survival. About this the doctor feels, with no other comparison available in her life, joy.

The doctor dotes on her. Tidying her blanket. Cleaning the dressing on her wounds. Telling her to rest, rest, please. Pushing back her hair and kissing her on the forehead. Whatever she needs, the doctor will take care of.

She tells Reed to leave Clark be. “She doesn’t need you .”

And she doesn’t. The doctor has never liked him. He is the kind of man women love — with his predatory smile, his stalking walk, his way of standing too close — but he has always struck her as a rank dog eager to hump a leg.

She does not care for Lewis either. For other reasons entirely. She has a grandnephew, a boy of seven who can play the fiddle brilliantly but avoids eye contact and makes strange conversation with himself. There is something similarly unsettling about Lewis, who has always seemed to occupy a different room even when in the company of others and who has abilities beyond any of their understanding. A magician, a miracle worker, an aberration — she’s not sure what word best suits him.

The doctor thought he would die. After the transfusion — if that’s the right word for it — he remained still for two days. His breathing so shallow his chest barely moved. His pulse so weak she gave up trying to read it, sensing only one impossible heartbeat a minute. The doctor stayed away, but Gawea sat by him.

She could talk now — the doctor suspects she has been able to talk for some time — but rarely speaks, as if rationing her words. If the doctor asks how he is doing, she says, “The same,” and if she asks if Gawea has brought a damp rag to his lips, she says, “Yes.” Gradually his color flushed. And his eyes began to shudder beneath their lids. And he began to speak in his sleep, uttering words that were clearly enunciated but in no recognizable language.

Gawea is gone, foraging in the woods, when the doctor approaches him tonight with a rag and a bowl of water. She strips him, bathes his thin, wasted body by roughing the rag across his skin. The campfire crackles nearby. The stars are like a fistful of salt flung across a black blanket. His ribs are too visible, pressing painfully against his skin. His black hair, once so short, is now a messy corona. He smells strangely metallic. “What’s going on inside of you?” she asks, not expecting an answer, but when she dips the rag in the bowl and wrings it out and brings it to his face, his eyes spring open.

Before she can cry out, he has seized her by the wrist and shot straight up. “Where is my tin?” he says.

She tries to pull away from him. “Clark threw it in the river.”

He blinks a few times, swallows hard. “She what ?”

“She was right to do it.” She explains that there is no better time than now to wean himself, when his body is restive, healing. “She gave up the hooch. Now it’s your turn to be strong enough to do the same.”

“That bitch.” At this point the others have gathered around them. “You bitch!” he screams at Clark.

He blinks hard, as if he remains unsure of his whereabouts. The doctor knows his mind and body must feel gripped by an arthritic fist. He releases her then. His face tightens and he brings a hand to his chest.

“What’s wrong?” the doctor says, and he says his heart. It feels like one big wound, like nails have been pumped through his veins and clustered there. He lets his head fall back and struggles to breathe and struggles to keep his eyes open.

He obviously wants to say something more — to curse them, wish them dead — but can’t find the breath. Sleep pulls him away like a current. His mouth is moving, but they don’t hear what he says, the words seeming filtered through water so that he might as well be sinking past the reaches of moonlight to the stony bottom of the nearby river.

SOMETIMES, WHEN no one else is looking, Reed takes out the box. The one Danica gave him. The wood is black and slick, as long as his hand and as wide as his wrist, and heavy, the weight of a book with many words inside it. He runs a finger along its edges, smears a thumb across its lid.

He imagines tossing it in the fire. He imagines digging a deep hole and burying it and rolling a boulder over the top of the disturbed earth so that no one would ever find it. But he also dreams darkly about turning the knob, flipping the latch, leaning forward to see what springs out.

It would be so much easier to give up, to stop plodding forward, to put an end to the heat and the hunger and the thirst and the fear and the suffering. The others see so much promise in the river, but he knows that the lushness does not extend beyond the green vein of it, the desert still reaching on all sides of them like a sea of yellow ash and the sun so blinding it seems to take up the entire sky. There must have been a time when he believed. Why else would he have come if he had not dreamed of a better life? But that time has passed.