In the Distance

8.

A new layer of desolation came over that already destitute land. The lifeless flatland, with its ever-multiplying cells, stayed the same. The sun remained, as always, piercing and pervasive, sharp and blunt. There was only one change in that unyielding monotony—Håkan’s loneliness, the only thing with depth in that flat and flattening world. With Lorimer fading among his crates and jars, Håkan felt a void almost as profound as the emptiness that overtook him during the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. He missed Lorimer in the same way (if not with the same intensity) that he missed Linus. Both had protected him, deemed him deserving of their attention, and even seen in him qualities worth fostering. But the main virtue his brother and the naturalist shared was their ability to endow the world with meaning. The stars, the seasons, the forest—Linus had stories about them all, and through these stories life was contained, becoming something that could be examined and understood. Just as the ocean had swelled when Linus was not there to dam its immensity with his words, now, since Lorimer’s illness, the desert had violently expanded to an endless blank. Without his friend’s theories, Håkan’s smallness was as vast as the expanse ahead.

The tracker was taking them back the way they had come. He suspected there was a cutoff, but they were nearly out of food and could not afford to get lost. Their rations had been cut to half a cup of cornmeal porridge and a biscuit for both breakfast and dinner. A few days into the trip, one of the men came into the wagon where Håkan was nursing Lorimer. He went straight for the wicker cages with the birds, picked two of them up, and turned around to leave. Håkan grabbed him by the wrist and ordered him, with a gesture, to put the cages down. The man complied, but with his freed hand produced a single-barrel pistol and put the barrel to Håkan’s chest. Håkan’s reaction (which later, upon reflection, amazed him) was to tighten his grip on the man’s wrist rather than to let go of it. The man cocked his gun. Håkan released him. That night, the men roasted the birds. Håkan had cornmeal. As they moved along, they stewed Lorimer’s snakes and broiled his cats. The dogs were spared.

Illness had so reduced Lorimer that the movement of his sleeping chest was almost imperceptible. His withered cheeks had sunken into the hollow of his jaws, and his shriveled lips had withdrawn from his teeth, already suggesting a skull. Following the treatment he himself had received when rescued, Håkan fortified Lorimer’s water with honey. He tried to feed him mashed cornmeal, but the gruel only lay on his tongue and dripped down his chin. The same day the salt field first became dotted with dirt, Lorimer looked at Håkan, not with that delirious gaze that seemed to go through him, but with eyes that, despite being unnaturally dilated, were full of intention.

“Did we leave?” he barely managed to ask.

“I am sorry,” responded Håkan.

Lorimer shut his eyes and, after gathering some strength, opened them and tried to smile. Håkan gave him water to drink from a soaked-up rag. His friend nodded with gratitude and slipped back into sleep.

During one of his occasional spells of consciousness, Lorimer was able to give Håkan some basic instructions regarding his own cure. He urged him to give him water at all times and even force it into him when unconscious. Under his direction, Håkan prepared an unguent with vinegar, agave, desiccated Spanish flies, and lavender oil, and applied it to his blisters and pustules. He also asked him to add some salt and a few drops of a particular tonic to his honey water. Should he get delirious and restless, Håkan was to give him three drops of a tincture containing opium and other sedatives—under no circumstances should Lorimer get agitated and sweat.

As veins of red dust started to run across the white ground, Håkan found walking increasingly difficult. He had outgrown the shoes he had taken from Clangston, and the pain was crippling. With one of Lorimer’s scalpels, he cut off the toe caps. His toes, dissociated from the rest of his feet, stuck out and protruded over the soles like blind albino worms. Gradually, the salt flats were reduced to crystal ripples on the dirt. Some scorched bushes started dotting the skyline. The abstract territory became a landscape once again. The first sage grouse they spotted seemed to Håkan as fabulous as a flying toy.

Although still weak, under his own treatment administered by Håkan, Lorimer’s moments of awareness became more frequent, until he fully regained consciousness. Håkan’s first concern was Lorimer’s animals. He wanted to tell his friend he had been unable to protect them before Lorimer noticed that they were all gone. Stammering and held back by fear, Håkan told the naturalist what had happened. Lorimer laughed feebly through his nostrils.

“Eaten. Good. Good.” He laughed again. “A much more dignified end than the fate they would have met with me.”

Lorimer conferred with the tracker, who, together with the other men, asked to be relieved of his obligations after delivering him safely to Fort Squibb, a week or two north and slightly east of there. This stronghold had become a thriving trading post for trappers and emigrants, and there Lorimer would find rest, supplies, fresh horses, and maybe even a whole new party, should he want one. They shook hands on it.

Slowly, the plains regained their brown, red, and purple features. Håkan would not have been surprised if suddenly they had found themselves by James Brennan’s gold mine or back in Clangston. Little by little, Lorimer started venturing out of the wagon and eventually got back on his horse for part of the day. After one of those rides, Håkan helped him dismount, and they ended up standing face-to-face. The naturalist looked at his friend, bewildered.

“Have you outgrown me?” he asked. “Could you possibly have grown taller than I over the last few weeks? Come here.”

He measured Håkan, shaking his head in disbelief.

“How old are you again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Roughly.”

“I don’t know.”

Lorimer proceeded to write down the dimensions of his skull, the extension of his spine, and the length and girth of his limbs, while shaking his head. After his disappointment in Saladillo and his illness, Lorimer’s disposition to be astonished and delighted at every turn had become somewhat dulled, and he no longer rose with an impassioned tone to the highest flights of eloquence. But some of his former fervor resurfaced as he looked up at his young friend. After studying his notes and making a few calculations, he told Håkan he had never seen or even read anything like it. Håkan’s growth rate was without precedent. He reminded Håkan that life is a struggle against the downward pull of gravity—life is an ascending force that moves every plant and beast away from the dirt (and the same can be said about a creature’s moral evolution, by which it moves away from its primordial instincts toward a higher awareness). Every worm, crawling out of the opaque puddle of nonexistence and up the millennial coil of mutations, is an upright, cognizant species in the making. Was Håkan, reaching up beyond the rest of us, an example of what humans might become?

The convoy traveled on over the uneventful plains. After having nursed Lorimer and handled his tonics, Håkan could now detect a faint medicinal scent in the verdigris sagebrush. Otherwise, the desert, as unchanging as ever, seemed to defy the very idea that they once had left it. Lorimer spent most of the day writing, often leaning his notebook against the pommel of his saddle. The tracker and the rest of the men escorted him with cold formality, from afar.

One afternoon, they sighted a plume of smoke sketched on the sky. Two men, most likely moved by boredom rather than by bravery, volunteered to ride ahead and make a reconnaissance. Those who stayed behind inspected their powder horns and loaded their rifles. Nobody spoke, but it was apparent—from the way they fondled their guns, stirred in their saddles, and wore the arrogant look of untested courage—that they longed for some sort of confrontation. When the two scouts, who had left galloping, returned at a leisurely trot, the tracker and his men did not hide their disappointment.

“Just Indians,” one of the scouts said and had some water.

“Dying,” the other one added, reaching for his companion’s canteen.

Håkan understood that the Indians had some hides and old horses they could easily take and trade at Fort Squibb. The rest of the men approved. A kind of worried severity took over Lorimer’s face, and though he never said a word, he plainly disagreed with the party’s intentions. The naturalist made sure to ride at the front of the convoy and seemed eager to be the first to reach the Indians. As they approached the camp, they found that the few lodges that had withstood the flames had been burned down to black bones. Hanging from these shapeless structures and a few broken poles stuck in the dirt, torn skins, hides, and patches of leather sagged in the breezeless air. Not a soul in sight. Strewn amid the ruins, chunks of dried meat, gourds, painted hides, tools of different sorts, and other objects broken beyond recognition. Some sickly ponies stared at the ground. A few dogs, ears angular with attention, looked at the strangers. The fire that had almost entirely consumed the largest tent and the shelters around it was dying under the weight of its own smoke. That bubbling black stream covered the back half of the camp and then rose in a concave wave whose crest dissolved into the sky. The dogs came out to meet the riders, some growling, others with welcoming yelps, most with cool curiosity.

“They were here,” said one of the scouts, puzzled.

The tracker and the others stopped at the edge of the decimated camp and readied their weapons while pointlessly scanning for hideouts in the naked wasteland. Lorimer rode into the smoke. Håkan followed him. They covered their faces with their shirts as the smoke got thicker. The sun was reduced to a prickly twilight. In a whisper, Lorimer told his friend to stop and held up his hand for silence. They were wrapped and rewrapped by a thick, grainy whirlpool. They could have almost grabbed fistfuls of ashes from the air. The world ended right after their horses’ ears. They dismounted, and Håkan followed the naturalist into the heart of the smoke cloud. Muffled coughs came from below. They both stared at the ground, but their feet were hardly visible. Lorimer stopped, bent over, and picked up a bundle. It was a small child, its face completely wrapped in a damp cloth, like a little mummy. Håkan squatted and discovered that the smoke hovered a foot or two above ground. Lying in the dirt, almost crushed by this low black ceiling, there were over a dozen bodies. The smoke seemed to rest on their backs. All faces were covered in rags. A hand feebly clutched Håkan’s ankle, giving him a jolt.

“Get the children first,” said Lorimer.

One by one, they pulled everyone out into the fresh air. They were badly wounded and barely conscious. One of the men produced a knife but was too weak to use it. As Lorimer started to inspect their wounds, the tracker and two other men rode over after having made it around the smoke cloud.

“Sneaky bastards,” he said. “Crawled and hid under the smoke. I thought they had worked some Indian magic and vanished.”

Lorimer did not bother to look up. He was busy tending to the wounded.

“We’re loading the wagon with the hides. We’ll split the ponies,” added the tracker.

“The wagon and the ponies stay. Take the rest and leave.”

The tracker was astounded. Was Lorimer staying? A heated discussion over the ponies ensued. Soon they were both screaming. Håkan could not make out the words, but the argument ended with Lorimer getting some gold coins from his saddle satchel and sending the men off. Fuming, the tracker took the money, turned around, and told the men to pack up their loot and leave the ponies. Before going back to the wounded, Lorimer faced Håkan.

“Most of these people will die without my help,” he said. “I will stay. Fort Squibb is only a few days from here. Go with them.”

“I will stay.”

“Go.”

“I will help.”

Lorimer nodded and asked him to tie off a tourniquet on a man’s leg. How all those badly wounded people had managed to hide under the smoke was a mystery. Fractured skulls, splintered bones, chests and limbs crushed by gunshots, entrails barely held in place by shaking hands. Curiously, most of the children were conscious and more or less untroubled by the smoke. As the sooty cloud dissipated, a few relatively unscathed adults started looking around, as if they had suddenly woken up in a new, unknown land.

They were all lean. There was nothing consistent about their attire—leather robes, ponchos, trousers, loincloths, blouses, sandals, boots, bare feet, headbands, hats, kerchiefs. Underneath the gore, they were all extremely clean, unlike all the white men and women Håkan had seen since arriving in California. Up to that moment, all the faces Håkan had encountered in the desert had been vandalized by the elements—shredded skin under which the flesh glistened like a disgustingly opulent fruit that, in time, inevitably acquired the texture and color of rotten wood. But these faces revealed no struggle with their surroundings. Håkan thought that Lorimer’s face aspired to become one of those faces.

Håkan realized now that he had always thought that these vast territories were empty—that he had believed they were inhabited only during the short period of time during which travelers were passing through them, and that, like the ocean in the wake of a ship, solitude closed up after the riders. He further understood that all those travelers, himself included, were, in fact, intruders.

The man who had wielded his knife tried to attack Lorimer again but was struck down by pain. His left foot was backwards—his heel where the toes should have been, the skin twisted into a black spiral, torn at the ankle, revealing bone and tendon. There was room for awe and curiosity in Håkan’s horror. Lorimer held the furious man’s head and wiped his beaded brow.

“We are friends,” Lorimer said.

The man stared up, still enraged. Lorimer took his gun out of the holster, showed it to the man, holding it by the barrel with his thumb and index finger, like a filthy animal, and tossed it aside.

“Friends,” Lorimer repeated.

His fury yielded to confusion, but the man seemed to understand that they meant no harm. Lorimer asked Håkan to fetch his instruments, drugs, and salves from the wagon. As a first measure, they administered the sedative tincture to those who were in excruciating pain or needed to be operated on. Among those who made a quick recovery was an old man with short, very precisely trimmed white hair—an exception among his long-haired companions. Lorimer’s work would have proved impossible without his help. Nobody dared to oppose his advice or his commands. If not the leader of the community, the short-haired man was an uncontested authority, and the more drastic treatments, such as amputations, could never have been carried out without his endorsement. This man also turned out to be an excellent physician with a subtle understanding of the human frame, and he had saved invaluable resources from the plunder—a local anesthetic made with crushed herbs and mushrooms, some ashes with miraculous healing properties, and other soothing unguents and poultices. He and Lorimer discussed each case through gestures. Håkan watched and learned.

In addition to his salves and his medical talent, the short-haired man made two contributions that altered Lorimer’s understanding of surgical procedures and greatly influenced Håkan’s future. When the naturalist was about to perform his first operation, the short-haired man grabbed his hand before the scalpel broke the skin. Gently, he led Lorimer to a pot of water boiling over a fire. In it were the man’s own instruments. Through signs, he asked Lorimer to submerge his scalpel in the boiling water. Lorimer was confused but in the end did as he was told. The short-haired man hummed a melody while the instruments boiled away. After a while, he took them out with a pair of wooden tongs, making sure they never touched the parts that would be in contact with the patient. The second thing he did was wash his hands. For this, he used a strong alcoholic beverage he had salvaged from the raid. In some cases, he used the same liquid to clean the wounds. Before each operation, these two procedures—instrument boiling and hand washing—were repeated. In time, an amazed Lorimer had to conclude that the incredibly low number of infections must have been related to the man’s rituals.

“Our learned scholars in our marbled academies have failed to understand what this wise man has gathered from his observation of nature—that the putrefaction that flowers in a wound and the diseases that bloom in an open injury can be nipped in the bud. The very seed of these maladies can be boiled and wiped away before it takes root in the flesh.”

Håkan’s memory of what followed that first operation was obscured by thick smudges of blood, but behind the crimson-black swirls, his recollections had the surgical precision of a picture painted with a single-hair brush. Until sunset, they extracted pellets buried in the deepest fibers of the flesh, fitted the serrated edges of broken bones into one another, reset viscera and stitched abdomens shut, cauterized wounds with white-hot irons, sawed off arms and feet, and sewed flaps of skin around muscle and fat and bone into rounded stumps. As he became absorbed by the work, Håkan discovered a form of impassive care completely new to him. His detachment, he felt, was the only proper approach to tending to the wounded. Anything else, beginning with compassion and commiseration, could only degrade the sufferers’ pain by likening it to a merely imaginary agony. And he had learned that pity was insatiable—a false virtue that always craved more suffering to show how limitless and magnificent it could be. This sense of responsibility exposed a fundamental disagreement with Lorimer’s doctrines. The naturalist claimed that all life was the same and, ultimately, one. We come from other bodies and are destined to become other bodies. In a universe made of universes, he would often say, rank becomes meaningless. But Håkan now sensed the sanctity of the human body and considered every glimpse underneath the skin a profanation. These were not prairie hens.

When it got too dark to continue operating and ministering to the wounded, Lorimer walked up to one of the burros with his rifle, composedly took aim at its head, and shot it dead. Two men with minor injuries helped him butcher the animal. The weak were given warm blood to drink. The healthier ones chose their own cuts—once the tongue, liver, and pancreas had been carved out and eaten, they broke the thighbones and sucked out the marrow. After grilling some ribs and salting the remaining edible pieces, Lorimer boiled the burro’s head and later fed the broth to the feeblest. Two women baked a serpentine kind of bread. They rolled a long cylinder of dough and then twisted it in a spiral around a stick, which was placed at an angle on an X made of two other sticks over some embers. The dough spiral was turned at regular intervals, and finally the stick was removed from the center. The coiled bread was passed around, and each person broke off a ring of the spiral, charred on the outside and doughy on the inside.

That night, once their sedated patients had drifted away, the short-haired man and Lorimer shared a calumet. Compelled by the naturalist, who did not want to offend their host, Håkan also took a few puffs. Raspberries, urine, and wet down. He coughed discreetly through his nose and felt his stomach squeeze up against his uvula.

Lorimer wanted to know if the attackers had been white men. He tried to communicate through pantomime and by drawing scenes with coal. The short-haired man, concentrated on rearranging the contents of the pipe bowl, barely paid attention. Lorimer tried to stage a reenactment using Håkan and the impassive old man as actors. After a series of increasingly intense and abstract attempts, the short-haired man got up, put his fingertips on Lorimer’s cheek, and said, “Wooste.” Then he walked over to Håkan and, with a gesture that encompassed the Swede’s whole body, repeated that same word—“Wooste.” He pointed at both of them and said, one more time, “Wooste.” Finally, he took Lorimer’s arm, held it like a rifle, pointed it at the wounded lying in shadows, and fired. “Wooste.”

As the days went by, the few men and women who had sustained minor injuries started cleaning up and rebuilding the camp. With the help of bone needles and catgut, they turned rags into quilts and quilts into tents. The children were also hard at work at their own camp, a smaller reproduction of the real one, made of leather scraps and fabric shreds. Perhaps because the miniature emphasized the vastness of the surroundings, it seemed denser, heavier with actuality than the real thing. Several times a day, the children asked Håkan to walk around the toy tents, and everyone, including the adults, was endlessly amused to see the massive man further amplified as he strolled through the scale models.

Eventually, it became clear that about a third of the wounded would die. Their lacerations were iridescent with gangrene, and their brains had been utterly consumed by infection and fever. The short-haired man readied them for their departure by meticulously washing them, brushing their hair, and anointing them with lilac-scented oil. Whenever their wounds allowed for it, he dressed and bedecked them with the few valuables their plunderers had dismissed—painted pebbles, feathers, and carved bones (that these spoils had been left behind confirmed that the pillagers had been white men—wooste). Those strong enough to stand on their feet prayed for the dying in shifts. In an almost inaudible hum, they sang what sounded like a lullaby. It was a remarkable song, not only for its great beauty (its softness had to do with touch—a tingling air—more than with hearing) but mainly because of its length and composition. It had no refrain. No part of the melody (or, as far as Håkan could tell, the lyrics) was ever repeated. It flowed forward in an ever-changing rivulet. And they sang it all day in groups of three or four, in perfect unison, never missing a note, a beat, or a word. When one shift concluded, another group would take over without the slightest interruption or transition. Each and every time, regardless of the group, they sang with astonishing precision without any visible signal to mark the changes, as if their mouths were governed by a single mind (Håkan thought of flocks or schools where hundreds of birds or fish abruptly change direction, eddying to and fro at the exact same time without any forewarning). If the song was circular, the curve was long and subtle enough to make repetitions impossible to perceive. Whether it was a never-ending song or a melody made up by immeasurably long choruses, Håkan could barely conceive how such a feat of memory could be possible. It occurred to him that the singers made the song up as they went along and that they shared some sort of code—for instance, a certain sound of a certain length could only be followed by one specific note of a specific duration (a similar procedure would apply to words), so that the melody and the poem were entirely condensed in the kernel of the first note and word. But this system could hardly account for the richness and complexity of the lullaby, and if it did, the set of rules would be as hard to memorize as an endless song.

Their first patient died. Increasingly disfigured by infection, an acute inflammation of his neck and head had strangled him to death. After closing the man’s eyes, the naturalist looked around the camp and then at his disciple with visible concern.

“I hope they understand we did our best,” he muttered.

The reaction to the young man’s death was surprising, but not because his friends and family were angered by the outcome of the treatment. There was no rage; there were no plaintive cries; there were not even tears. Håkan was astounded to see that their response was remarkably similar to how people mourned in Sweden. He recalled his youngest brother’s death clearly. His parents and the few distant neighbors attending the funeral had displayed the same austere grief as the people now walking around this dead young man, pretending not to see him. Their stern faces seemed to imply that their sorrow transcended the realm of known feelings and, therefore, that familiar expressions of pain were no longer of any use. Rather than being clouded with tears, their eyes were hardened in defiance, and their quiet anger kept them from looking at each other. The short-haired man undressed the corpse. Those who happened to be around shared whatever suited them. The body was put on a canvas stretcher and carried out into the sunset. No funeral procession—only the short-haired man and his companion carrying the stretcher. Those who stayed behind seemed to have forgotten the dead man as soon as he was taken away. They returned to their chores, chatting casually. Their eyes had softened.

After making sure his patients could be left unsupervised for a few moments, Lorimer set out to follow the stretcher-bearers, keeping a respectful distance. Håkan joined him. They walked for about three miles through the stubborn desert. Dust. Sagebrush. Sky. Every now and again, the rumor of the stretcher-bearers’ conversation. The sun set without pomp—it just got dark. The pewter moonlight was little more than a scent in the night. Suddenly, in a spot that resembled any other, the stretcher-bearers stopped, unloaded the body, rolled up the stretcher, and, without ceremony of any kind, turned around and walked away. They stopped when they reached Lorimer and Håkan and offered them some charqui and glazed cactus pulp, the first sweet the travelers had tasted in months. After the long process of chewing their rubbery victuals, they stared at each other, as if hoping someone would start a conversation. The short-haired man looked up at the waning moon. Håkan and Lorimer looked up as well. The man with the rolled-up stretcher did not. The short-haired man said something that Håkan would have translated as “all right, then,” and started walking back to the encampment, followed by his companion. Lorimer gave Håkan a nod, and they walked over to the corpse. Håkan had never seen anything as dead as that mutilated body abandoned between the night and the desert. Corrupting, there, forsaken, becoming, already, nothing.

“And thy corpse shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth, and no man shall frighten them away—to think that this is one of God’s most terrible curses. But consider it carefully. No sepulchre. No cremation. No obsequies. Becoming meat for someone else’s teeth,” said Lorimer with some of his past passion. “Can you imagine? Can you imagine what a relief? Will we ever dare to look at a body without the shroud of superstition, naked, like it truly is? Matter, and nothing more. Preoccupied with the perpetuity of our departed souls, we have forgotten that, on the contrary, it is our carcasses and our flesh that make us immortal. I am fairly confident they didn’t bury him so that his transmigration into bird and beast would be swifter. Never mind memorials, relics, mausoleums, and other vain preservations from corruption and oblivion. What greater tribute than to be feasted upon by one’s fellow creatures? What monument could be nobler than the breathing tomb of a coyote or the soaring urn of a vulture? What preservation more dependable? What resurrection more literal? This is true religion—knowing there is a bond among all living things. Having understood this, there is nothing to mourn, because even though nothing can ever be retained, nothing is ever lost. Can you imagine?” Lorimer asked again. “The relief. The freedom.”

Four more people died over the next few days, and each of them was ferried out into the desert at dusk.

The survivors healed. The never-ending lullaby stopped. Even if mangled and mutilated, all of the convalescents were conscious, and if they were in great pain, they were strong enough to conceal it. Among the maimed was the man who had tried to knife Lorimer. From his ankle, that vortex of bone and tendons and flesh, the infection had crept up his calf, and his leg had been amputated at the knee. As soon as he regained some of his vigor, he called Lorimer to his side. With great difficulty and a sour grimace of pain, he sat up. After catching his breath, he delivered a grave speech, brief but heartfelt. When he had finished, he took a leather tote bag and poured out its contents. On his palms were about two dozen teeth, perfectly extracted from the root, some grayed, some yellowed, all dull and gigantic. One of them was as long as the entire palm of his hand.

“Terrible lizards,” said Lorimer with abstracted fascination. “Extinct reptiles. Dragon-like creatures blotted out of existence, vanished from the surface of the earth shortly after the dawn of time.”

Some of the teeth were broken or jagged, but the man made sure to point out that there were a few large ones in perfect condition. He looked at Lorimer and with a solemn word offered him his treasure. Lorimer declined. The man insisted with great vehemence. The scene was repeated a few times until the naturalist understood that rejecting the gift was not only a great offense but also detrimental to his patient’s health—the argument had consumed most of his strength. He took the teeth, and the man lay back down, physically and morally relieved. A woman next to him requested Lorimer’s attention and produced a pouch of her own. She had fewer teeth and only one, displayed with great pride, was unmarred. Once again, Lorimer, who had cured a bullet wound to her abdomen, was asked to accept the treasure. One by one, each of the patients called Lorimer and, with a short ceremonial speech, gave him a handful of dragon teeth. Nobody was as rich (in either quantity or quality) as the first man with the amputated leg. As he made his way down the improvised ward, Lorimer had to start putting the offerings into the bowl of his hat. That heap of ivory shards no longer looked like teeth but rather like some unrecorded mollusk or ammunition for a weapon yet to be invented.

“What better form of currency?” Lorimer thought out loud as they walked back to the wagon. “Because they can’t be manufactured (these long-gone creatures can’t be bred), and because their stock is extremely limited, these teeth will never lose their value. Same principle behind gold or diamonds. But these are so much worthier. And they remind us of how all living beings, quite like goods, are valuable, precisely because they are interchangeable.” He looked through the dagger-like bones. “The perfect standard.”

Life at the camp gradually went back to normal. The wounded were out of danger, and all tents and huts were in good repair. The reverence everyone had shown Lorimer and Håkan dissipated, and eventually the foreigners were simply ignored. The only exception to the general indifference was Antim, the amputee warrior—who had made an extraordinary recovery and become strong enough to ride his horse. He was fanatically devoted to Lorimer and assisted him in every possible way. They spent a great deal of time together, and the naturalist, with his accustomed ease, quickly learned the rudiments of Antim’s language.

Håkan’s days were consumed, for the most part, by his eagerness to set out east. With each day, he felt the distance separating him from Linus increase. Additionally, since he had helped Lorimer with the wounded, he had developed a feeling of urgency entirely new to him. Up to that moment, his longing for his brother was intertwined and often confused with fear—he missed Linus, yes, but he also missed his protection. Now, however, Håkan did not fear for himself, but for his brother. He had the pressing sense that it was Linus who needed him; that he was the one who had to come to his older brother’s rescue (this concern, Håkan realized, had developed together with his medical skills). But Håkan knew the desert well enough to understand that he could not venture out without provisions and animals. He could only hope that his friend would decide to leave soon—and that he would be headed east. Finally, one afternoon, Lorimer told Håkan that it was time to move on.

“I am going back to Saladillo. Antim has offered to help.”

Håkan felt his blood thinning. He breathed in and looked around the plains for something to hold on to. Lorimer put a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t worry, my dear friend,” he said. “You will be on your way to New York on a horse with all the necessary supplies. Antim, who feels indebted to you as well, will give you one of his ponies, and I will furnish you with all you need for your journey.”

“Please don’t go back to the flats.”

“I must. I know you understand that.”

Håkan could only look down.

“When we left Saladillo, I thought the chance to find the primeval being had been forever lost. How would I ever be able to return to that desolate land? And now Antim tells me that he can take me back there, that he will help me get to the alkali ponds. How can I refuse? I need to find the creature—the only living thing that deserves the name of creature, because it was the only organism ever truly created. The rest of us are only increasingly distorted reproductions of that foundational organism. You understand what such discovery would mean. How can I refuse?”

Håkan was given a pony and one of Lorimer’s burros supplied with necessaries. The naturalist advised him to make a detour before proceeding east. Heading north for about a fortnight, Håkan would eventually come to a river (which would be badly needed by then), and a few days later, a major emigrant trail—even if he strayed off course, it would be impossible to miss that line stretching from coast to coast. Then, all he had to do was travel against the current of settlers, and in a few months’ time, he would reach the Atlantic. Even if his provisions ran out and his animals fell ill, the emigrants would resupply him, and should he run out of money, he could work for a spell (although that would take him west for a while, those caravans were slow) and then resume his journey. The constant flow of pioneers made this the safest route. And, Lorimer added, smiling, the thick stream of emigrants going the opposite way with their wagons and oxen and furniture and horses and goods and women and livestock would even create the illusion that it was the world that moved while Håkan remained in place.

The morning they parted, the naturalist gave his friend some gold, a wad of bills of different denominations, and a polished tin case.

“The tools of your trade,” Lorimer said as Håkan opened the case. It contained vials, bottles, scalpels, needles, suture, clamps, saws, scissors, and other surgical instruments. “Oh, I almost forgot,” Lorimer added while searching his pockets. “You are a hopeless navigator. Do you have other talents? Unquestionably. But never mind telling left from right—I am shocked you know up from down! So here you are,” he said, presenting Håkan with a silver compass. “Blume, my teacher, gave it to me, and now it’s yours.”

Their last moments together were spent over the dial, with Lorimer explaining to his friend how to find north.