Hernán Díaz - In the Distance

“I must go,” he said.

She looked up from his hands with an expression that briefly acknowledged an event that, although extraordinary, did not surprise her. She smiled at him.

“I can’t,” she responded. “I can’t let you go.”

She put out the light and did something she had never done before—she kneeled down and placed her head on Håkan’s lap, just like Håkan used to be asked to kneel and put his head on her lap, and then took one of his limp groomed hands and stroked her own hair with it, as if playing with a rag doll.

After those events, life sank back into its unaltered routine. Although unused to violence, Håkan started to hatch an escape plan that vaguely involved the blunt knife he used for his meals. He was encouraged by his own size, which an increasing number of his captors found intimidating. However, what happened a few nights later relieved Håkan from carrying out his half-formed designs.

It was during the quiet hour between the time the bar closed and the two guards came to take him to the woman that Håkan heard someone stealthily sliding the bolt of his door open. The cautious slowness of this operation was unusual, and even more remarkable was the fact that he had not heard, as he always did, two pairs of boots coming up the stairs. A whistling wind had whirled around Clangston all night, and now windows and walls rattled and creaked under its growing force. The bolt slowed down as it slid through the guides, clearly to prevent the click at the end of its trajectory. Silence. Håkan picked up a book, just to hold something solid.

The door opened, and there, badly scarred, scabbed, and still naked, stood the fat man. His left cheekbone had swollen to meet his inflamed eyebrow, submerging his eye in a mass of lustrous purple flesh. There were cuts, burns, and bruises all over his body, and his feet had been disfigured by the hot desert. He looked at Håkan with his single eye and smiled, revealing some newly broken teeth. Then, crossing his index finger over his cracked lips while softly shushing Håkan, he stood away from the door and pointed to the staircase.

“Go,” he whispered.

Håkan looked at him, perplexed.

“Go,” he repeated. “Go now. Go. Fast.”

Håkan picked up his shoes, walked by the fat man, whose malicious grin had become a grotesque silent laugh, tiptoed down the stairs, across the bar, and through the door, briefly paused on the threshold, and, as soon as he set foot on the plain, ran.

Dawn was an intuition, certain yet unseen, and Håkan ran toward it, his eyes fixed on the distant spot that, he was sure, would soon redden, showing him the straight line to his brother. The intense wind on his back was a good omen—an encouraging hand pushing him forward while also sweeping away his tracks.

With some luck, the lady would not call him that night, and his absence would not be noticed until late morning, perhaps even noon. But if the woman wanted him, the guards would soon be walking up the stairs to his room. After running for some time, Håkan looked back toward the town’s feeble lights. To his surprise, Clangston had vanished. Now that it hit his face, Håkan realized that the wind was thick with sand. His vision first was limited to the nocturnal aura of boulders and shrubs perceivable only when these obstacles were a step or two away, and then it was reduced to nothing. Soon night itself was obliterated by the whirlpool of sand. The gale’s force, together with the stinging dust it carried, made up a new element—something that, despite its roughness and dryness, was closer to water than earth and air. Håkan had to turn around to breathe. He kept on running, feeling safely cloaked by the storm, which plugged his ears with a roar. His face was shut up like a fist—even if the pelleted wind had allowed it, there was no point in keeping his eyes open in that double darkness. He took a tumble at almost every other step but welcomed each fall for the respite lying flat on the ground gave him from the harsh stream. Nevertheless, he would quickly get back on his feet and resume his blind race, panting through tight lips.

Morning never broke. The blackness just paled.

Tossed around by the wind, Håkan could no longer tell in which direction he was going. He only hoped that he had not been taken, in an extended circle, back to Clangston.

When the storm blew over, the midday sun shone right over Håkan’s head, revealing a landscape identical to the stretch of desert he saw from his window. He kept his uncertain course. Soon, however, his own shadow started to stretch out ahead of him, and he made sure he was at all times preceded by it, firmly convinced that it would guide him east. No tracker could ever have been able to trace his steps after such a storm, but Håkan was still worried. How much progress had he made? Was he far enough from Clangston? Had he actually been walking away from his captors rather than back to them? He had no doubt that the woman would want him back at all costs and that she had sent out search parties as soon as the weather had allowed for it. How such parties were organized, he did not know, but even if she spread them out in every direction, he thought, the woman did not have enough men to comb the plains very closely. Håkan’s hope was that his trajectory would fall in between two of the lines radiating from the hitching posts outside the bar. He wondered, however, how far he could make it without food or water. And should he be fortunate enough to find help, would not every settlement within walking distance from Clangston be under the woman’s influence?

Night fell, and, unable to navigate in the dark, Håkan stopped. He lay down on the warm dirt, between two clusters of sagebrush. The desert, so quiet during the day, was now bustling with activity—animals growling, mating, eating, being eaten. Håkan was not concerned. Rodents, reptiles, and little dogs were all he had ever seen, and he assumed his size would intimidate these small creatures. He had not yet learned to fear snakes.

He woke up well before dawn, partly out of habit (he always got up in the middle of the night to be ready for his guards), but also because the ground had grown cold. The night sky had shifted. Håkan marveled at the concerted movement of the stars and now regretted never having asked his brother how those bright dots could travel across the heavens together, always keeping the distance that initially separated them from one another. Linus had explained other natural wonders to him. For instance, the fact that each day had its own sun. During its journey across the sky, the bright disc would burn out, sink, and melt on the horizon, pouring down the precipice at the end of the earth like wax. And just like a candle maker, god would reuse these drippings to make a new sun overnight. Night went on for as long as it took god to work on the new sun, which he lit up and released each morning. But the stars and their motion, Linus had neglected to explain.

As soon as the foregleam on the horizon showed him which way to go, he set out east.

Had it not been for the sage hens, he would have died in a matter of days. He clubbed or stoned a couple of birds every day and drank their blood. It made him even thirstier but kept him strong. The first few times, he would vomit as soon as he squeezed the warm syrup into his mouth, but he soon learned to control this reflex. His chin and his clothes, torn to rags during the sandstorm, were caked with coagulated spillovers. Eventually, Håkan realized that the brown hardened blood offered protection from the sun, so he started smearing it generously all over his arms, chest, neck, and face. The coating would become a runny paste with his sweat, and he constantly had to stop to daub and rearrange it. After a few days, however, there were enough layers, sunbaked and stuccoed by dust, to render further applications almost unnecessary. By then, Håkan had stopped smelling the mad odor of his coating.