Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

T. thought how comfortable he was in the company of Delonn, who was easy to be silent with. The guide spread his presence over them both, as much an umbrella as the tarpaulin. Falling asleep in his tent, stomach full of soup and bread and whiskey, he was glad to be where he was-in the midst of a thick field of sound with a thin, taut barrier between himself and the falling water.

He woke and realized the rain had stopped. He knelt and unzipped the door flap and got out; the guide's door was still zipped. He did not want to wake him so he scrawled a note and set off for a short walk up the trail.

Everywhere there were dripping leaves in a uniform shade of bright green. His shoulders and arms brushed wet branches and soaked his shirt instantly. He walked on, liking the feeling of being wet. He was wet all the time since he came to the tropics; he was never dry. He was steeping. The soil of the trail was so slick that he slipped and fell and soon his knees were pads of drying mud. Toes splayed on a tree was a bright orange frog; he almost stepped on a slug that was as long as his foot. He heard the sharp cries of something overhead and wondered if it was a bird or a monkey.

On his own he was barely equipped. To know that an animal was a last animal he needed other people, foresight and planning, research. He could not know it alone. He relied on data gathered by others; without the guide along he had none. For all he knew the frog was a last frog: but all he knew was nothing. When you knew the name of something that meant it was part of your life already. But here there were things he had never known. It was a new place and frightening, but it made him younger. The lightness was a boon, partly.

One frog-a golden frog was what he remembered, or maybe a golden toad-had lived in a misty cloud forest not too far from here. It had vanished only last year, or maybe the year before.

After an hour he turned back toward the small camp. The guide was still in his tent. T. consulted his watch: nine o'clock. He ate a granola bar and coughed loudly. Finally he walked up to the tent and spoke.

"Delonn? I think you might want to get started in there."

No reply.

"Delonn?"

He knelt and unzipped the flap. Delonn lay on his side, a sheet wrapped around his legs. T. reached out and touched a leg through the sheet; no movement, so finally he grabbed the sheet away. On the kneecap he noticed deep old scars, shining.

"Delonn! Delonn! You there?"

But Delonn was inert.

He climbed through the tent opening, up over the guide's prone body. He put his fingers against his neck, where he thought the pulse should be, but found none. Chest pains, he thought. Delonn had felt chest pains. He checked and rechecked, but still no pulse. He felt wired and nervy with alarm; his unfitness nagged at him. He was unqualified.

"Delonn. Come on. Don't be…"

He was playing a joke, possibly. At the expense of the rookie.

"Really. Not funny."

He shook Delonn's leg, then his arm, then rolled him onto his back and squatted beside him, looking down. The eyes were closed; the guide could still be sleeping. It was when the eyes were wide open and dull that you knew they were dead. His fear for himself warred with disbelief… he had never been by himself. Not like this. With Beth at least there had been others there, the steady hand of the institutions.

He was lost. Nothing else had ever happened to him.

This was it.

For a time he lay in his tent, staring up at the orange and blue of the roof; several times, in a half-hearted gesture, he called out the guide's name. The silence confirmed him, but it was still not enough. Then he was suffocating; the tent oppressed. He went out.

He could not carry Delonn on his back, he knew that much for certain. It was at least five miles back down to the riverbank, five miles in slick mud, in dense foliage.

He would have to drag him.

He checked again and then again for signs of breath: could Delonn be in a coma? But the lips were drying. There was a dryness on the lips. He tried to pull Delonn into a sitting position; lamely, he tried CPR, vaguely recalling kneeling over his mother. He tried to press the feel of the dead lips away from him. He should have done this when he first found him. Now it was too late; it was sickening.

After several false starts he collapsed Delonn's yellow tent around the body and bundled it up. This tent, he noticed, was older and cheaper than his own, patched and taped at the seams. Delonn had let his client sleep in the good tent… he couldn't cover the face, for what if Delonn was not dead after all? What if the tent material blocked his month?

He cut a hole for the face.

He would pay them for the tent, he thought. Who was them? He saw Marlo's family. He would pay them for everything. He would cover them in money.

On Delonn's stomach he set down the second pack. He would need it, he thought. His own pack contained water and food, maps in a plastic casing, a flashlight and a mosquito net. He found a bungee cord, which he attached to the package; then he tried pulling it over the ground. It was slow going, and the tent ripped and had to be retied and jeny-rigged frequently. Delonn must weigh more than two hundred pounds. The ground was slick in places, wet in others, then dry and crumbly. Wet was too wet: the package sank and got mired. Dry was too dry: the package snagged and bumped. Slick was good.

By his watch it was only eleven when he left the camp pulling Delonn, back down the narrow path the way they had come.

Once or twice, exhausted, he found himself weeping, though he did not feel grief. It was more like fear, fear and confusion. He had liked the guide but had no time to get attached; yet there was a shock to it unlike any he knew. Even with Beth it had not been like this: she had been contained by an institution, both of them had. Walls around them, walls humming with energy. In this he was abandoned. His limbs and nerves jangled with it, chaos under the skin.

He had never steered a boat before, never even pulled the cord on an outboard motor. He had watched it done but he had never done it. He did not know boats and he did not know rivers. He did not know corpses.

It took him a long time. He stopped for Minch, a chocolate bar he ate sitting on the ground, turned away from the guide's body. The afternoon wore on and his progress was painstaking; his palms were blistered from dragging and his fingers burned. His feet ached. The package was mud-splattered and torn. But he soldiered on with a lasting sense of incredulousness. It kept him separate from real things.

By night he would still be able to walk, he thought, but the flashlight batteries might not last. He recognized a stand of bamboo, the angle of a broken branch behind a black stump. A brown and blue butterfly flitted at the periphery of his sight. He was almost there. He thought of the skin of Delonn's back and the back of his head and shudderedthey must be ripped open, gaping. If the guide had not been dead when they started, by now he had murdered him. Maybe he should have left the body, spared him the brutal abrasion; maybe he should have run down to the boat alone, sped down the river and brought rescuers back with him. But there were carnivores in the forest.

Then he saw the boat through the trees, floating in the water. He was pacified; he was rewarded.

By the time he had taken the tarp off, erected the shelter and drunk fresh water it was getting dark. The boat had no spotlights. It had no light at all, only an electrical lantern Delonn had hung off the shelter to read by. In any case he was chilled at the thought of heading downriver by night. He would wait. With some difficulty he propped the package against the hull and then heaved it over the side onto one of the cushioned benches. He thought it was balanced but under his feet the boat rocked and it rolled off and fell heavily. He pulled it to the back of the boat and left it there.