Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

Rather than answer, she leaned in and stole a fillet from his plate and took a bite of it. “I’m hungry,” she said around a mouthful.

He smiled and watched her eat.

She doesn’t want to feel this way, her mind fizzy with attraction.

She tries to remind herself to feel jealous. In some fashion betrayed. That’s how she felt traveling all this way to retrieve the man who would share Burr’s attention. She has tried not to get close. She has tried. She kept her mouth shut as long as she could, kept her distance even when riding alongside someone. But her loneliness — an emptiness that aches like a pulled tooth — is a lifelong disability. And when the bat nearly took York, she felt like it was taking him from her.

They hoist their saddlebags. They sling rifles over their shoulders. Pans clank from their packs and ammunition chimes in their pockets. Gawea eyes up the campsite one last time, a place that felt briefly like home to all of them, before hiking away, following the river, feeling a barb of guilt as she once more leads them closer and closer to a destination they may regret. Lewis, she knows, will be protected by Burr. But what will become of the others?

* * *

Many things have changed since Lewis brought Clark back from the brink. Including the connection between the two of them. Their eyes often meet, and when they do, he feels a rippling in the air between them, like some electrical charge. When she departs the camp to hunt, he worries for her in a way he never did before, his chest constricting. It is almost as if, with so much of him inside her, she has become an extension of him, a third arm, a second head, her heart beating in time with his, so that they seem allied on a cellular level. “What’s happening to you?” she asks him one night, and he says, “I’m trying to understand the same.”

By the end of each day Lewis’s body feels languid but buzzy. He thinks often of his tin, aches for it, but no longer needs a dose of powder to quicken a connection, speed his tongue and hand. His mind, once walled in, is now free to chase paths never considered.

He packed the journal — mottled calfskin cover, yellowed onionskin pages — to document. He has spent so much of his life clapped away in the museum, reading other people’s words, studying and pinning and labeling the world as if it were a still life. By agreeing to leave, he agreed to activity. He left behind stillness for movement, engagement. If this is a new world, then who better to serve as its chronicler than he, the custodian of the old?

In the beginning, every entry seemed some variation of this: Woke before dawn, rode hard through the day, made it to X location, small argument broke out over lost provisions, no water, everything dead. At first he felt a failure and the world a failure too, everything a skeleton of what once was.

Then things changed. Now that there is water, now that he has risen from near death, now that he has sweated and shivered off his need for the tin, his mind hastens, faster and faster every day, a progression, like an avalanche of sand. He feels he is expanding, along with the world, both of them surprisingly, gloriously alive. Their purpose in exploring the country grows more and more wrapped up in his self-discovery, as if he were America, the next America, their geographies twinned. He scribbles down thoughts like these, along with a short record of their days and entries about whatever plants, animals, and insects he can observe.

“What are you writing?” York says.

“Nothing.”

He leans closer. “The corpse of discovery? What’s that?”

“The corps of discovery, you idiot. That’s us.” Lewis hunches protectively over the book until York shrugs and leaves him.

He writes, too, about what is happening to him, about how Gawea is helping him.

For most of his life he has been able to contain or ignore it . What his father called vile and freakish, what the rest of them call magic. He refuses the word. Magic, to him, is illusion and fancifulness. Magic is the unexplained. He knows himself as a man of precise habits and logical thinking — and he knows the world as a realm to be sampled and studied and categorized. What is happening to him must be explainable. He asks Gawea to help him, please.

She wouldn’t before. At first she allowed him only brief and cryptic responses sketched in the sand. Now she talks, at first with reluctance and then more and more willingly, the words tumbling from her, as if learning to talk is learning to trust. In part this is thanks to York, who walks on his hands and springs a flower from her ear and makes her smile, even laugh. And in part this is thanks to Lewis, who opened up his wrist and risked death and in doing so gained Gawea’s trust and proved himself worthy of the journey. Every day, she strikes him as more human, whereas before she came across as a wooden carving that only resembled a young woman. He wonders if she sees a similar change in him.

This is what she tells him. If they have left behind a world where a plastic tablet could store a thousand novels, where high-speed elevators could shoot someone seventy stories high in a matter of seconds, where warheads could lay waste to whole cities, then that means there is room in the world for other kinds of technology, more elemental.

One morning, by the fire, Gawea tells him to watch. She reaches out and draws back her hand and opens her fingers to show a ball of light spinning in her palm. She asks him to do the same. When he leans in, when he snatches at the flames, when he feels the heat still in his hand, he can’t help but gasp and swat his palm, the fire falling to the ground. The grass catches and he stamps out the blaze and looks around to make sure no one has seen. She tells him to try it once more. He sits there long enough to take ten deep breaths before grabbing again at the fire. Another ball sizzles to life in his hand, and this time he holds it for many minutes, until it blinks out with a twist of smoke. “Good,” she tells him.

His dreams are as vivid as life. In one, Aran Burr holds out his hand. Its palm cups a stone. He drops it. It thunks to the ground. Then he looks at Lewis and winks, and the stone returns to his hand, as if drawn there by an invisible string. He drops the stone, and it falls. It falls because of gravity, a force. A force most people associate with the earth, but it is more than that, a force that every object has for every other object. A tree has gravity. A chair has gravity. He has gravity.

He asks Gawea what it means and she tells him what Burr told her. If two people stand on opposite ends of a field, they both emit a small charge of gravity that will draw them toward one another. Something that is supposedly too small to be felt. But we have all known people who turn every head, who catch every eye. People are pulled to them. They emit some force. Yet they are not bigger than anyone else, at least on the outside.

If a rock falls, it falls down, not up. Because a force, the force of gravity, draws it down. It is this same force that keeps an arrow from sizzling through the air for a thousand miles, keeps a horse’s hooves on the ground instead of pounding the animal upward in the air. To make a rock fall up instead of down requires another force, a force stronger than gravity.

He thinks of the rockets they used to blast into space. An engine could do it. An engine made by man, metal and plastic, conceived by the mind, constructed by hand. Gawea tells him, “There are forces — there is energy — all around. Not only in gravity, but in air and earth and water and fire.” Energy that makes things slow and speed up, cool and burn, grow and shrink, and she is helping him discover this, like a child who finds his shadow and begins to cast his hands into doves, dragons.