Hernán Díaz - In the Distance

“Go,” he concluded with surprising curtness. “Now.”

James attempted a response.

“Now,” he repeated.

James looked at the mine with quivering lips. He had the expression of an obsequious dog ordered to follow a command it did not understand. He glanced toward the secret hole where he hid his gold. Eileen put the children on one of the burros and went to get her stunned husband. Håkan started to pack whatever supplies were at hand.

“No. Not you,” said the dragoon, nodding in Håkan’s direction. His voice was surprisingly pleasant, “What’s your name?”

“Håkan.”

“What?”

“Håkan.”

“Hawk?”

“Håkan.”

“Hawk can what?”

“Håkan.”

“Can what?”

Håkan remained silent.

“Get in the coach, Hawk.”

Håkan looked around, confused. The Brennans were too busy and dumbstruck to mind him. He walked hesitantly to the coach and opened the door. Blinded by the midday sun, the interior seemed to him as vast as the night sky. It smelled of incense and burned sugar. He sat awkwardly on a mangy velvet seat, and, as shadows became visible in the dark, across from him, gradually, the tenuous yet gleaming outline of the woman with thick lips and amber hair took shape.

“You don’t speak English. You don’t understand. That’s fine.” The words spilled out of her full lips. That was all the woman said during their four-day journey to Clangston.

Håkan ate and slept with the men but rode with the woman in her dark, suffocating carriage. Toward the middle of the trip, she requested, both through gestures and by firmly guiding his body, that he recline his head on her lap. She caressed his hair and stroked the back of his neck for the next two days.

Two men escorted Håkan through the empty barroom and led him upstairs to a room adjacent to the woman’s. A bed, a barred window, a bucket of pine-smelling water. He was ordered to strip and wash. When his efforts were deemed too timid, one of the men grabbed a brush and scrubbed him down vigorously. The other man left the room, returned with two bundles, and threw a new suit of clothes on the bed and some rags to wipe up the soapy water on the floor. Then they both left, bolting the door behind them.

Håkan got into bed, his skin burning from the cold, the bristles, and the pine oil. Underneath the pain, he sensed the vastness of the plains weighing on his heart. But further down, in a part of himself new to him, he was, to his surprise, content and at peace. It felt good to be in bed, hurting, alone. And it felt good to slide into the deepest sadness he had experienced since losing Linus. His grief was indistinguishable from his ease—both had the same texture and temperature. Comfort and gloom, he realized, came from the combination of cold water and the scent of pine resin. He had not felt that tingling since his ice baths in the lake back in Sweden. And that smell. Håkan and Linus, following their father’s lead, would crack a hole open on a safe spot (the ice had to be thin enough for the ax but thick enough to bear them), plunge into the lead-colored water, stay afloat with calm semicircular kicks, holding their breath for as long as possible to keep buoyant, and then climb out of the hole, imitating their father’s relaxed indifference to the cold and suppressing their impulse to run to the shore, whose knuckle-shaped pebbles forced them to proceed swinging their arms like wire walkers, until they reached the pine tree under which they found their clothes safe from the snow that was netted in the intricate, angular weave of perennial needles.

The coarse sheets rubbed pleasantly against his skin. He wondered whether his brother had also spent months without sleeping in a bed. He tried to conceive the distance separating him from New York, where he knew Linus was waiting for him, but could think only of that infinite extension in terms of time—the countless days, the many seasons it would take him to cross the continent. For the first time, Håkan was almost glad to have been forced to go on this journey: after his long trip and all the unimaginable adventures that lay ahead, he would arrive a grown man, and, for once, surprise his brother with tales of his own.

A clinking of glasses and cutlery came from below, together with the voices of three or four men talking calmly. Håkan got up and inspected his new clothes. Because he had worn mended hand-me-downs all his life (clothes received from Linus, who had inherited them from their father, who, in turn, had got them from some unknown source), he unfolded the crisp trousers and shirt with reverence. Despite its stiffness, the fabric was soft and downy. He put the collarless shirt to his nose. It had a scent he had never smelled before, a scent he could describe only as new. He got dressed. The navy trousers did not quite reach his ankles, and the white sleeves ended about two inches before his wrists, but otherwise the clothes fit him perfectly. In his new outfit, he felt, with an intensity that not even the perpetual plains had yet managed to convey, that he was in America.

He placed his hand on the window. The sun-blasted desert vibrated on the glass. More clatter came from below. It was getting crowded. Individual voices were no longer discernible in the constant masculine rumble punctuated now and again by a burst of laughter or a fist hitting a table. The sun was setting discreetly, and it was impossible to tell at what point its last dull echoes were replaced by the moon’s insufficient efforts. Downstairs, two men seemed to be having a mock argument—the entire room cheered and booed in turns, and the debate ended in general laughter. Håkan went back to bed. Someone started playing an instrument he had never heard before—the tickling legs of a happy insect. The patrons stomped along, and had they not been all men, Håkan would have sworn he heard the shuffling feet of twirling couples. The shadows in his room slowly shifted with the moon. He dozed off.

A scream beneath his window woke him up. A drunkard was flogging his horse, and with every lash, the man gave a woeful cry, as if he, rather than the mare, were the one getting whipped. The horse, snorting briefly with each blow, shone with blood and was visibly in pain, but took the beating with poignant dignity. Finally, the man collapsed, sobbing, and his friends took him and the beast away.

Only a few people remained in the bar. They talked quietly and sporadically. Perhaps they were playing a game of cards. The moon had rolled over to the other side of Clangston’s single street and was now out of sight. Håkan urinated soundlessly into the pail with the pine-scented water. Four or five men left, and with that, the muted conversation downstairs ceased. Someone started sweeping, and glasses were put away. Then, a man coughed, and that was the last sound to come up from the bar. Håkan sat quietly on the bed, afraid of the rustling sound of his new clothes.

Nothing interrupted the mineral silence of the desert. In its complete stillness, the world seemed solid, as if made of one single dry block.

The sound of footsteps came up the stairs and toward Håkan’s room. He stood up, more out of politeness than fear. The door opened. He recognized two of the men from the convoy. They told him to follow them down the corridor, to the threshold of a dark room. The men showed Håkan in and gently shut the door behind him.

The drowsy smell of incense, wilted flowers, and bubbling sugar saturated the air. The thick-lipped woman sat by the window. She turned the knob of a faint lamp, and her face and the room lit up with a trembling glow. She wet her glossy lips, slowly rubbed them together, and rearranged herself on a small skirted chair. Her makeup was heavier than usual, and there was more glitter on her cheekbones and her bosom. Coiling around her smooth neck, her amber hair poured down her chest and pooled on the finely embroidered corset. Still looking at Håkan, she cocked her head, and her left eye disappeared under a wave of hair.