Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

It would have been safer than this.

He ate dry oatmeal from a plastic bag. The texture made him thirsty, parched his throat, but he took a single gulp from his small bottle of clean water and decided he had to save the dregs; he could not bring himself to glug from the flask of yellow-brown liquid he had filtered from the swamp. He studied it briefly with the flashlight, whose bulb was dimming rapidly. He believed he could see protozoans swimming, the whirring of their cilia.

Delonn was still on the boat, in his yellow wrap. The boat might be loose by now, loose but still tethered. He thought of it rocking lightly on the surface, Delonn bundled inside, and felt a pang of regret, almost fondness. Without Delonn's death he would never have known this fondness, the odd gratification of having, for a short while, guarded what was left of Delonn, the protector of his honor.

Of course he would also not have known the resentment, the disgust or the repulsion. Those were part of knowing. Taking care of the deceased he had established a certain intimacy: they were not opponents after all but only companions.

He listened to the night; he curled in. Take stock, he thought, take stock. He would be fortunate if he got home at all. There were hazards beyond being lost, being hungry. Delonn had told him about a certain local tree species that grew near the stream bank and exuded a toxic sap. You could brush against the trunk or the branches unknowing and if the sap touched your skin it caused third-degree burns, raising welts up to six inches long. Delonn had been able to identify the trees; of course he himself had no idea what they looked like. For all he knew he was surrounded.

He had had a strong faith once that the world was, at its best, its warmest and most glowing, a network of cities. He recalled a map of the continent at night-a map or a time-lapse satellite photograph-anyway the North American continent seen from the sky, with lights winking on all over, the clusters of population like beacons in the blackness of space. This had seemed to him once to be the epitome of the real, of the hopeful and the farseeing. A night starred with fires, with the fires of habitation. The world had been buildings, he had always believed, and the invisible structures that imbued these buildings with roles, keeping some persons outside them and others within. The whole world had been the systems of men, and he recalled faintly what a comfort it had been to admire it.

And it was not-as he considered now, huddled and wretched and further from cities than he had ever beenthat these systems and the rules that bound people to them were not close to the core of life: but the life they described was a narrow life, a fast life. It was a small life, the life of certainty and straight paths, that life of crowds and buildings.

And look. Look!

It had passed.

More than anything he wished he could just glance up at the sky and see an airplane or a helicopter, the sun reflecting off its silver skin, solid and ready to descend.

But all he got looking up was eyeshock.

By the time he had ringed the marsh and returned to the riverside he had tired his throat with tuneless singing; he had kept himself steady by impersonating a soldier, tramping forward step after step, slogging. There was another marsh, then another. There were nights and mornings. How many miles was it now? He wished he knew; he wished he had an accounting of them, a tally. Then at least he could be sure of an accomplishment. He was weary of the sweaty air, the low gray skies, the crowding of brown and green: he moved as quickly as he could and let the wet air fall to the sides. He had rubbed insect repellent through his hair, stared at the label and then poured it down the back of his neck, N,N-diethyl-meta- toluamide 100 %.

These were the only written words he had seen in a while, he reflected-although how long had it been? Only a few days: but already it was a lost country. Aside from the tags in his clothing they were the last proof he had of English… certainly he was nearing the mouth of the river now. Certainly he would be there in a matter of minutes, see a sedate tourist boat motor up the channel, old ladies seated pleasantly on the shaded benches. He imagined their pastelcolored visors and wraparound sunglasses, how they would smile blindingly and point in amazement when they caught sight of him. He would strike them as a woodsman or a hermit; they would be able to tell he was a person undergoing a hardship far from their experience, undergoing a trial by fire and a transformation. Once recovered from their initial exuberance-a man who came out of nowhere! A Tarzan, a Doctor Livingstone! — they might well be frightened.

This at least was something to find pride in, obscurely, a secret sense of himself as a man made rugged by adversity, a rough primitive.

He found a trail, finally, following the river, and at first he was encouraged, thinking he must be nearing the town. But the trail was narrow and often seemed to fade and then reappear: it was not, he realized presently, maintained by humans. It was an animal trail. There were piles of scat here and there; there were gnawed tree trunks and broken twigs; there were the husks of fruit thrown down from the trees and once, in the scat, a pile of bones.

He retreated into the trees around lunchtime, seeking a place with fewer insects. Sitting on a log where a stream of sun filtered down he ate more of the dry oatmeal and drank the warm river water: it left silt in his throat but he did not think it would make him sick. When he came to the delta, he knew, he would meet a crisis of questions: they would clamor at him. People there might have been close to Delonn, there might be children and grandchildren, a sister or a wife.

He peed in a bush and was tying his bungee-cord belt when he heard a scratch and looked up: there was an animal perched on a branch. It was small and brown with large eyes and round ears, a thick coat of fur and a long thick tail; it sprang away chattering. He watched it jump and climb until it was too far from him to see.

He had no idea what it was. This pleased him: maybe there was hope yet. How was it that his own ignorance was a comfort? But it was.

Expecting to reach the coast, expecting to reach the town, he became indignant as he failed and kept on failing. Anger rose fiercely in his chest and subsided again. At least to see someone, someone who could help him, but no one came. No one appeared. He had always been on the bank of this sluggish river; he had always been walking here, always been this person. The rest had been a mirage.

He started walking at six in the morning and by four in the afternoon his feet hurt too much to persevere. Blisters bubbled and ripped on his heels and his toes; they bled through his socks, forced him to whistle sharply to forget the pain.

He began talking to himself. He wandered, he was bored, but he had no other diversion and after a while he was forced to invent a companion.

"So are we going to die?" he asked him.

"Unlikely," said the friend, and paused. "Possible," he admitted.

"This is ridiculous," he told him. "Could it be we went off along a tributary? Or another fork of the river as it braids at the delta, a fork that takes longer to reach the coast? But we're still headed east. I know that from the sun. So sooner or later we have to come to the ocean."

"Too bad you got kicked out of the Scouts before Orienteering."

"East is all we have to know," he insisted stubbornly.

Together they recalled moments from youth-kids he knew, things that happened. Who was in the closet with Kate Bonney, in sixth grade? French-kissing? The story circulated for weeks… Eric K., that was it. It was the first-ever kiss for both of them and Eric K. was determined to make it a French one; he had read up on technique. But he was overeager and had put his tongue so far down Kate Bonney's throat that it touched her stomach. That was the story and they had circulated it without mercy. He himself had had a tendency to bribe the girls at that age, bribe them for the favor of a feel or a kiss: Blow-Pops in watermelon, cherry, or grape. The pink flavors were the favorites… small tokens, nothing extravagant: they were gifts, not payment. He had a soft touch even then. He stopped walking as he recalled this, could almost taste the sharp tang of the globes of sugar.