Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

Not even Simon can help. This morning, when she wouldn’t get out of bed, he nudged her and she said, “Leave me alone.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes, leave me alone.”

He did, though she isn’t sure she wanted him to.

So many hours later, her stomach feels flattened with hunger and her mind warped with loneliness. She ought to feel excited by the knock at her bedroom door, but it’s an anxious excitement, wanting and not wanting to be bothered.

In response to the first knock, and the second, she says nothing. Simon cracks the door and light falls across her face and makes her flinch. He is carrying something toward her, setting it on the night table, food maybe. An offering. Without even knowing what it is, she feels both flattered and compelled to reject it.

Then he yanks the curtains and lets in the painful sunlight. She props herself up on an elbow and squints at him. He remains a bit breathless from his climb up the stairs. His thin chest flutters beneath his shirt. He is smiling idiotically. “I brought you something.”

“You mean you stole me something.”

“Same difference.”

She looks at the thing — a dented metal box with a handle and clasp — and says, “What is it?”

“Oh, right.” He fumbles with the clasp and swings open the top to reveal a dial and a turntable and an arm with a needle on it. “A portable record player!”

She plops her head back on her pillow and Simon’s smile falls with her. “I thought it might cheer you up.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because it’s a record player.” His mouth gapes and quivers a moment before he finds more words to fill it. “For your record.”

She puzzles up her forehead.

“The one you showed me. From your treasure box.”

“Dream box.”

“That’s it.” He darts to the closet and digs around and retrieves the vinyl record in a brittle paper sleeve with Françoise Hardy scribbled across it. “I told you, my father used to have one of these.” He works the hand crank, grinding it in circles for a good thirty seconds. “That ought to do it.” Then he unsleeves the record and sets it two-handed on the turntable and drops the needle, and a rubbery scratch precedes the pop and syrup of the song. “This is called…” He studies the sleeve and shrugs and hands it to her.

Tous les garçons et les filles , it reads. She does her best to pronounce it.

“What does that mean anyway?”

“I don’t know, but it’s nice.”

“It is nice.” He bobs his head dreamily along with the music. “Do you want to dance?”

“No.” She says it so quickly she must mean it.

“Come on. Can’t lie in bed all day. We’ve got work to do, remember?”

“Then we don’t have time to dance.”

“Just a quick one. Then we’ll knock together our plan. Come on.”

“I don’t know.”

“Won’t take no for an answer.”

“I mean I don’t know how.”

“It’s easy. You just move your feet.” He holds out the hand with the cast still coating it — the very thing that brought him to her, that brought them together. “Here. I’ll show you.”

Her hand is tucked under the pillow. She withdraws it now and hesitantly allows him to take it. He tugs her to her feet and they stand opposite each other with the husky, hurried voice of Françoise Hardy filling the silence between them.

Then Simon says, “What Slade said to you — he’s wrong.”

She feels a jolt of pain and her tongue goes automatically to the wound. They haven’t spoken of what happened. She wouldn’t allow it. She knew he felt angry and disgusted and fearful — just as she did — but impotent, too. He had wanted to do something — she had seen him in the doorway with his pocketknife out and waved him away with a “No!” His knife, no bigger than a finger, would have pricked a man like Slade no more than a bee sting.

Now Simon puts one hand on her waist and holds out the other like an invitation she accepts. He pulls her one way, then another, and she allows him. Her feet feel clumsy, dragging a beat behind, but eventually they fall into a rocking rhythm.

“He was wrong about love, I mean. Love is stronger. Love is why we don’t give up. Love is the reason we’re alive at all.”

“We?”

“People, I mean.”

She wants to tell him to quit it already — she wants to drop her hands and plop back on the bed — but she doesn’t.

He chatters on, saying, “There’s a lot of love out there. There’s the love a mother feels for her son, which is different than the love a son feels for a mother. There’s the love for a dog. There’s the love for a painting. There’s the love for a warm rain. There’s the love for a song like this one.”

She doesn’t realize she’s going to talk until she does. “There’s love as infatuation and love that lasts into old age. There’s angry love and pitying love.”

He nods and shuffles his footing before finding his way again.

She says, “What do you think is the best kind of love?”

He thinks for a time and then says, when he was a child, he woke in the night and came out of his room to see his parents dancing with their eyes closed, turning in small circles. They looked like one person. “That seems like the best kind, I guess.”

He clears his throat and she smiles and they continue to twirl around the room until the needle scratches off the record.

LEWIS DREAMS ABOUT the ocean. The waves roll over black and foam red and rattle with bones. The seaweed is made of scalps and the hermit crabs have embedded themselves in skulls that scuttle across dunes. Burr’s voice beckons him — but to what? To this? Is this the end that awaits him?

He wakes to the smell of woodsmoke. His eyes snap open, but they might as well remain closed, as it takes him a moment to make sense of what he sees, the ceiling of stone, veined with shadow and firelight, not so different from the underlids of his eyes. His head still pounds with fever. Every thought burns. Then he understands — he is in a cave. He can feel at once the coldness of the air and the heat of the fire beside him, but for the moment, he remains where he lies, dazed and studying the orange light playing across stone.

The cave wall is crowded with faces. Sketched with charcoal and painted with pigment. There are faces that smile and faces that frown. Faces with their mouths rounded in fear or surprise. They seem to move in the firelight. They are crude enough to be anyone and for a few minutes he imagines them as the faces left behind. His mother. Thomas. Clark. His world keeps shrinking, the company he keeps ever fewer. And where would his own face fit on this wall?

It is then he notices another face, bigger than the rest, with horns and pointed ears and forked beard and swirling eyes and a snake’s tongue. A face the other faces feared or worshipped, a stranger or a monster to all.

He escapes his fever daze and recalls his circumstances, his last memory of collapsing in the snow, and rolls over.

Colter and Gawea sit huddled beside the fire. She is watching him. He feels unsettled by her gaze, owned by it. The darkness of it darker than he remembers, as if her eyes were black holes, matter with such force, such powerful gravity, not even light can escape them.

“You saved us?” he says.

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“What’s the other?”

She shrugs.

Colter leans into the fire, his prosthetic arm extended. Its claw grips a cut of meat that cooks near the flames, the fat dripping into the coals with a sizzle.

Lewis feels a sudden hunger and wonders aloud how long he has been asleep.

“Can’t say,” Colter says. “Been in and out myself.”