In the Distance

20.

How many years had passed since he had left the cañons, he did not know. A few winters back, he had found the first gray strands in his hair. Some of the logs and boulders he used to lift effortlessly now made him grunt. At some point, his voice, which he heard only when he coughed (or on the rare occasions when he hummed or said a few words to himself), had started to sound to him like that of an old man. Maybe older than his father.

He seldom left his dwelling. A long time before, when first settling in those parts, he had decided to dig and build down. He thought it would make his refuge less visible. It took him a few months to dig the main trench that dead-ended at a roughly square cell. Even so, he moved into the hole as soon as it was large enough to fit him and had lived there ever since, while expanding and improving on his shelter. As the trench got longer, so did the pitched roof that covered it. Although it barely stuck out from the ground, in the early days, it made him uneasy to have that protruding structure, but those four feet or so, he soon discovered, were necessary for proper drainage away from the tunnel. During the first rainy season, he was forced to pave the floors and tile the walls with stones and logs to keep them from swamping and crumbling down. He proved to be particularly skilled at tiling and even found some pleasure in coming up with different designs—and perhaps this was one of the reasons why he kept enlarging his refuge throughout the years. Regardless of the season, he had several fires burning at the same time, at least for a while, to keep the walls and the floor dry. This took up a considerable portion of every day, but he did not mind. It gave him something to do. The inlays, together with the daily fires, made the tunnels and the chamber habitable and the air in them less foul. He even devised a leather funnel connected to a flue, and several of these chimneys were installed throughout the burrow.

For as long as he lived there, he kept digging. Even though he knew that a larger dwelling would be more noticeable, the inexplicable sense of safety he derived from multiplying its forking trenches outdid common sense. After the main passageway and the square cell were finished and furnished (flooring, walls, smokestacks, a rustic bed, some stumps and boulders as tables and chairs), he started on a new channel that would connect with another of the chamber’s sides. He worked piecemeal, beginning at the farthest part of the new trench, and, in the end, connecting it with the finished structure, so that his living quarters remained clean during construction.

He had chosen that spot after discovering that underneath a tough superficial crust, the ground was made of malleable clay. To break through the top layer, he had made a battering ram of sorts with a long branch and a heavy pointed rock. With a few blows, he broke down the clusters of pebbles, roots, and dry dirt, and then used different kinds of hollowed-out tree trunks to shovel the soil out. Once he got through to the muddy layer, he was often able to use a big, flat triangular stone to slice through the clay and remove massive slabs at once, instead of having to scoop the mud out. He would shove the sharpest tip of the triangle—a large, smooth arrowhead—in at a slight angle, and then, with the help of two staffs, stand on top of it and jump on the edge until it was completely buried, at which point a big block of mud would come off. He toiled ceaselessly, losing his sense of time and of himself as he dug and logged. Night would come, unnoticed, while he kept excavating in the dark. Once in bed, he often discovered wounds he had failed to notice during the day.

His compulsion had him start on different passageways at the same time, and in a few months, he had a complex network of tunnels. Certain trenches were interconnected; others were completely isolated; a few were linked to the square cell. Many tunnels were narrow gutters, mere sketches of more ambitious undertakings. However, there was no way to keep such a vast maze from collapsing. There were not enough boulders and beams to prevent avalanches, and it was impossible to keep all the fires needed to dry out the mud. The elements prevailed. Remoter tunnels fell into disrepair and caved in after floods and slides, a fate that many of the outer sections of the burrow shared in time. In the end, he retreated to the original square and kept only a few subsidiary tunnels. He spent months filling up the abandoned trenches.

After Asa’s death, Håkan had remained in the dome until winter. He barely ate and left the chamber only a handful of times to fetch water. The world was reduced to the orange figures in the vault. Each instant was a prison, barred away from both past and future. Now-here, nowhere, his heart pounded in his ears. His indifference toward himself and his fate was complete. His pain, intense and deafening as it was, came to him as a remote echo of someone else’s scream.

Later, looking back at those months, he pictured himself as one of the fossils encrusted in the rock face.

One night, he almost died of cold. The orange dome had long been overtaken by blackness. Instead of the whimsical images swimming in and out of the swirls in the stone, he saw people he knew. His parents, the estate manager, neighboring farmers. He also saw animals. The colt his father had sold to the miller. A motionless buzzard staining the desert sky. The lady who had held him captive, her guards, the fat man. Jarvis Pickett and the short-haired Indian. A white pig. The woman churning butter next to the schoolchildren. The schoolchildren. The horse he had taken from the brethren. Lorimer, Antim, the sailor who had told him that the brown city on the coast was not New York, the tracker, the Brennan family, the sheriff, Linus, the Chinese seamen having lunch in Portsmouth. At that exact moment, as Håkan was staring into the dark, most of them were probably alive. At that exact moment, most of them were doing something—the schoolchildren, now young men, plowing and milking; the sailors securing mooring lines; the horses staring into space; Linus walking down a busy street; women and men sleeping; some aching; all of them with some picture in their brains; a few talking; someone having a draft of cold water. But Asa was dead. Håkan’s stiff and shivering frame suddenly relaxed, and he felt his consciousness sink, like a dull red ember disappearing into the ashes. Why he fought this pleasant release, he did not know. But the next morning, he was on his way.

Asa’s killers had taken the horses, so Håkan had to travel light. With a series of leather straps and canvas, he managed to load blankets, provisions, guns, and tools on his back, over his fur coat. He walked out of the cañon and headed northwest, where, according to Asa, there were trees and rivers. Like before, he stayed clear of trails and every sign of human presence, but this time it was exhaustion, rather than fear, that moved him. Questions, accusations, threats, verdicts. Talk. He wanted no talk. Without a clear destination and having no purpose other than solitude, it was easier to elude everyone. Being on foot allowed him to travel through wild, otherwise inaccessible tracts.

He crossed deserts and forded rivers, climbed mountains and traversed plains. He ate fish and prairie dogs, slept on moss and sand, skinned caribou and iguanas. His face became wrinkled by many summers and furrowed by many winters. His hands, burned and frost bitten year after year, were crossed and recrossed with lines and creases. Once, he saw the ocean but turned around immediately, thinking there would be settlements along the coastline. Whenever he stopped, it was at an inhospitable location—never in a meadow, by a water source, or in a plentiful spot—barely pitching camp and seldom making fires. It was dead quiet in his mind. He rarely thought of anything that was not at hand. Years vanished under a weightless present.

Through countless frosts and thaws, he walked in circles wider than nations.

And then he stopped.

Years of marching almost barefoot had turned his feet into dark knotty things. Blisters, splinters, and wounds had affected his gait, and now he walked by resting mostly on the outer edges of his soles. This bowlegged stance had damaged his knees, as a result of which, his legs were not as agile as they used to be. Even if, in time, he had learned to get by with almost nothing, he had always packed a few essentials on his back, and now he suffered from permanent discomfort in his spine and neck. Still, battered and exhausted as he was, these were not the reasons why he stopped. He stopped because it was time to stop. He had not arrived anywhere. There simply were no more steps to take. So he put his things down and started digging.

Aside from the malleable properties of the soil, there was nothing remarkable about the spot—and that was why he chose it. A few knolls assured him that travelers would not pick that particular course when the surrounding grounds were flat. There was a water source nearby but not close enough for him to run into thirsty wanderers. Game, berries, nuts, and mushrooms were not hard to come by, although they were not so abundant as to make anyone go out of his way. Without being hostile, the weather was not attractive. Springs fleeted by, yielding to sweltering summers that burned the green out of every plant in a matter of days. During the cold season, the hills, weeds, and few surrounding trees turned into rust-stained steel. For a few weeks a year, the soil became one big unbreakable rock.

Silence and solitude had clouded his perception of time. A year and an instant are equivalent in a monotonous life. Seasons went by and returned, and Håkan’s occupations never changed. An abandoned ditch had to be filled. More glue had to be boiled down. A trench had fallen into disrepair. An extension to an old passageway was necessary. Traps had to be set. A gutter overflowed. Tiles had slid out of place. Drinking water was needed. The coat had to be mended. A roof could leak less. Some meat had to be jerked before it spoiled. A leather flue was too decayed. Firewood had to be gathered. A new tool had to be made. Cobblestones had come loose. Before one of these tasks had been completed, the next one demanded his attention, so that at all times he was engaged in one of these chores, which, together, over time, formed a circle or, rather, some sort of pattern that, though invisible to him, repeated itself, he was sure, at regular intervals. These recurrent duties made every day resemble the last, and within each day, from sunup to sundown, there were few markers to divide time. He did not even eat at regular hours. In fact, his diet had been reduced to the absolute, life-sustaining minimum. Since Asa’s death, he had become averse to food. He had his quick, small repasts—charqui, whatever the soil yielded, some bird or rodent barely roasted on a spit—only when he got light-headed and inexplicably angry. Asa’s quail abounded around the burrow, which confirmed their penchant for mockery. At first, the birds, their mere presence, infuriated him. In time, he came to ignore them. Not once did he try to catch them. He did, however, trap other creatures. Fearing a shortage of game that would take him far from the burrow, he was always smoking meat and drying it in the sun. Here and there, by the edges of some tunnels and next to a few distant fires, strips of browning flesh and entire carcasses hung on crosses and racks. The dried meats were stored carefully. But he never felt hungry—only that dizziness and irritation that signaled his body’s imminent collapse. Sometimes he was surprised that his health was so robust. He had not lost a single tooth—and he had never met an adult with a full set of teeth. This could only be explained by another fact that he found equally puzzling: even though he did not know how old he was, it was clear to him that he had reached the age at which the human body has matured and starts its decline. Still, he had never stopped growing. Tight shoes were the first sign of a new spurt. They were hard to make, and he constantly had to cobble them or put together a new pair from scratch. Since he had started to spend most of his time in the burrow, he could manage by wrapping his feet up in leather, canvas, and furs. But whenever he went on one of his rare excursions beyond the creek, he needed more protection, and the shoes he wore on those occasions fit him only a few times before they had to be enlarged or replaced. His clothes, a confusion of rags and pelts, were too loose to be outgrown, but he had lengthened his fur coat’s sleeves several times. The burrow itself, however, provided the best standard to measure his growth. It was not that he became too large to fit any of the chambers or trenches, but rather that, at some point, certain spaces that used to be comfortable started to become oppressive and eventually felt so tight that he was compelled to dig down for more headroom or sideways to widen a given cell or tunnel. Some of the additional passageways he had excavated had been borne out of this feeling of confinement. Something similar happened with his few pieces of furniture. One evening, a stone stool would make him bend his knees too high. One morning, he would find that his heels touched the end of the bed. Since he had not seen another human being in years, he had no sense of how tall he would feel next to someone else, but he did know he would be conspicuous—an added reason for staying out of sight. But these were only fleeting thoughts. He seldom considered his body or his circumstances—or anything else, for that matter. The business of being took up all of his time.

Every thought of ever finding Linus, of traveling to New York, had long abandoned him. Practical impediments—he was a wanted man who would never fail to be noticed; he had no money or means to obtain it; he did not have a horse—had nothing to do with it. There were simply no goals or destinations anymore. Not even the desire to die that he had experienced after the most crushing tragedies in his life. He was just something that kept going. Not because it wanted to, but because that was the way it had been built. To keep going with the bare minimum was the line of least resistance. It was natural and therefore involuntary. Anything else would have required a decision. And the last decision he had ever made had been to dig his burrow. If he kept going at it endlessly, it was simply because he could not muster up the strength to decide to stop.

During the long years spent there, not a soul passed by. At first, he was on the lookout for riders and even built a small platform to make his stays on top of a tree that commanded a view of the surrounding area more comfortable. He barely lit fires and spent the larger part of the day listening against the wind for hooves and wagons and scanning the horizon for smoke and cattle. As the seasons went by, it became apparent that his plot was far removed from every route and trail and that nobody would ever expressly come to that rather sterile gray land with the intention of claiming it.

Little by little, his fears dissipated, and he withdrew into the maze, which he seldom left. When he did, his world did not reach far beyond the creek. He always took a different route there to avoid creating a trail. Aside from fetching water, he roamed about, setting traps and exploring the surroundings to erase any trace he might have left. But for the most part, he avoided leaving the burrow. After having spent most of his life outdoors, walking, he liked being inside. It was not that he feared vast expanses. Rather, he felt about open space the way he did about rain—something he would prefer to get out of. Staying in the dugout, however, did not mean a motionless life. All day long, Håkan walked up and down the covered trenches, repairing tiles, digging, and fueling fires, always smelling the resinous scent coming from the pine-tree ceilings. Perhaps, without knowing it at the time, he later thought, he had opted for that particular kind of dwelling so that he could keep walking without leaving his home. Night used to catch him working, and although his body throbbed with exhaustion, sleep came only after going into long trances, staring at the neglected flames, which sank to embers, which sank under the ashes, which sank into darkness. His mind was empty, but somehow that void demanded all his attention. Emptiness, he discovered, wants everything for itself—it takes the fraction of an atom (or the flicker of a thought) to put an end to a universal void. Exhausted by the vacuum, he would often get up, build a new fire somewhere in the burrow, and work on the tiling, adding pebbles around the boulders and slabs on the walls. This was of modest help in keeping the clay in place, but it gave him some pleasure. There were no predetermined designs. He just liked to insert the small stones as close to each other as possible and then step back to see what patterns chance had created. Finding, sorting, and inserting the stones was a slow process, and because there usually were more urgent chores to tend to, only a few segments in some tunnels and parts of the main cell had been completed.

A year and an instant are equivalent in a monotonous life. Seasons went by and returned, and Håkan’s occupations never changed. A gutter overflowed. Tiles had slid out of place. Some meat had to be jerked before it spoiled. An abandoned ditch had to be filled. Drinking water was needed. A trench had fallen into disrepair. Cobblestones had come loose. An extension to an old passageway was necessary. More glue had to be boiled down. A roof could leak less. Traps had to be set. A new tool had to be made. The coat had to be mended. A leather flue was too decayed. Firewood had to be gathered. Before one of these tasks had been completed, the next one demanded his attention, so that at all times he was engaged in one of these chores, which, together, over time, formed a circle or, rather, some sort of pattern that, though invisible to him, repeated itself, he was sure, at regular intervals. These recurrent duties made every day resemble the last, and within each day, from sunup to sundown, there were few markers to divide time. He did not even eat at regular hours. In fact, his diet had been reduced to the absolute, life-sustaining minimum. Since Asa’s death, he had become averse to food. At first, when he was still traveling, he used to look at Asa’s spoon, and the almost acoustic intensity of its presence would make him weep. The scrap of paper on which Helen had written his name was still in his tin box of medical supplies. It was appropriate that he could not read those signs, he thought, since neither the person who had traced them nor the one they referred to existed anymore. In time, he stopped conjuring up Helen’s and Asa’s faces, and they withdrew further into the blackness that had claimed them, although now and then they returned in flashes that Håkan always welcomed. These visits were brief but so vivid that they challenged the surrounding reality. Other figures occasionally haunted him. The men he had killed stared at him in his dreams. Sometimes, Lorimer’s features took shape around his spectacles—the spectacles came first, then the beard around his smile, followed by the rest of his gentle, savage figure—but this apparition was not like the echoes that the dead leave behind, which resonate with a lifelike ring when the surrounding space and things vibrate in conjunction with them. The naturalist returned, rather, as a question. Håkan was certain Lorimer was alive—he just wondered where he was. As time went by, these visits became more sporadic, and now, for the most part, his memories seemed to have dissolved in his mind. The past seldom came back to him. Gradually, the present took over, and each moment became absolute and indivisible.

Since the cobblestones set into the dirt evened and dried out the more they were trodden on, the original part of the burrow was also the most comfortable one. The clay on those walls had been baked hard by countless fires and acquired the texture of earthenware. Sounds down there felt like solid little objects. Nothing echoed. Life existed only as a murmur. Loud noises were muted, yielding to the whooshing of canvas and the creaking of leather. Sometimes, the hairs on his forearms rose with pleasure at the clack of wood on wood and the clink of stone on stone. Every aspect of fire was audible—crunching kindling, rustling leaves, snapping sparks, hissing sap, popping pinecones, crumbling logs, exhaling coals. Whenever Håkan coughed or said a word out loud, his own voice sounded monstrous, like that of an ungainly giant, an invader in his own home. It was a relief that the clay walls sucked in these awkward growls immediately, without leaving a trace. In this subterranean quiet, his movements became more deliberate and softer. Everything took more time, and there was a full awareness of each action as it was being performed—as if to expand the present to which he was confined. The tin cup was not merely put on the table, but placed there with the utmost care, so that when the tin and the wood touched, the moment was prolonged enough to give a slightly miraculous feel and create the impression of a gentle yet momentous meeting of alien worlds. He was reluctant to split firewood indoors, feeling there was something irreverent and even tasteless in the loud snaps. When he made a stew or glue, he was careful to stir the liquid without clanging against the pot’s walls. Without being fully aware of it at first, he often found himself scratching his beard just because he enjoyed the sound.

If the clay walls, threatening to slide, crumble, or even collapse in extended avalanches, demanded constant attention (tiling, retiling, buttressing, propping), the pitched roofs required, perhaps, even more work. They were mostly made out of pine branches that he had learned to entwine while they were green and supple, interlacing them with leather where needed. The result was a tight enough thatch to keep the floors in the passageways more or less dry—but seldom sufficiently waterproof. In whichever trench or cell Håkan took residence, he reinforced the roof with some waxed tarpaulins and oilcloths. He also made rectangular frames out of sticks tied together with tripe, which he then fitted with skins, creating movable panels, some of which could be opened and shut with leather hinges. In varying combinations, branches, cloth, and leather panels were mounted on beams buried obliquely on either side of the trench and joined, at the cusp, to a ridgepole with rope made of braided leather straps. His glue, perfected over the years, sealed the cracks between the disparate parts. These were rather precarious structures, and some of the rare events that interrupted the sameness of his existence over the years resulted from problems with the roofing. Sometimes, under the weight of rain or snow, or merely because the wood had decayed, a section of the roof came crashing down. Once, the whole construction, beams, joists, and all, collapsed on him while he was sleeping. A big bough stabbed him in the leg. Through the yellow fat, he could see his femur. At first, it did not heal properly. He feared for his leg and considered different devices to amputate it himself. Then, he feared for his life. Despite the fever and the stupefying pain, he managed to drain the wound, keep it clean, suture it, bind it, and, eventually, cure himself. Since then, all his beds were covered by a sturdy canopy.

A few years later, however, there was another incident, from which no canopy could have saved him. The roof of one of the lateral passageways was hit by lightning. To prevent the fire from spreading, he tore down all connecting sections. Isolated, the straight line of fire kept burning after the short storm had blown over, and, for a moment, as dusk set in and the flames died down, it looked as if there were two horizons, each glowing with its own twilight.

Less grand but more profound was another phenomenon, involving a different part of the ceiling, that lasted for some time. He was working on a distant tunnel, making a deep cellar for his tanned skins, which demanded watertight roofing. After securing a few pieces of leather and tarpaulin to the protruding structure, he climbed down into the hole to inspect the results. To his complete bewilderment, on one of the walls he saw an image of the sun setting among the treetops—upside down. A perfect picture of the world outside of the hole. In lifelike colors. And it moved. The trees swayed; birds flew by; the sun continued its descending course. Upward. It felt like someone else’s hallucination; as if someone, far away, were dreaming up that place (wrong side up), and Håkan, for some reason, were able to look into that dream. Overcoming his bewilderment, he dislodged one of the leather panels to see if there was something abnormal outside. As light streamed in, the image on the wall vanished. He looked out of the hole. The same ashen landscape as always. Nothing out of the ordinary. He ducked back in and fitted the panel back into place. The hole darkened, and the image reappeared. As he leaned across it, his own shadow revealed that there was a hole in the tarp through which a beam of light came filtering in and, it seemed, became that inverted moving picture as it hit the wall. There was no room in his mind for superstition or magic. Astounding as this image was, he knew it must be a natural occurrence. But he failed to understand what was behind this prodigy. For a few days, the picture appeared on the wall as the sun started to set and vanished before it had fully sunken. Even if he knew every last detail of that patch of land, Håkan never tired of looking at its slightly watery inversion on the wall. Then, one evening, it was gone. He tried everything, but never managed to bring the picture back.

These events provided him with a vague calendar—before and after the accident or the lightning or the moving picture. And there were a few more incidents that loosely divided his monotonous life into different eras. The bear that kept him distant company for one fall. A shower of stars. The fox that gave birth in one of his tunnels. Those times the moon turned red. The birds whose feet froze into the ground. Some bad storms. In time, however, the order of these events got confused in his head. Looking back, his life in the maze seemed a completely uniform period. The few extraordinary moments were lumped together in a cluster of their own, unrelated to the sameness that ruled those years. Seasons went by and returned, and Håkan’s occupations never changed. A roof could leak less. Traps had to be set. A gutter overflowed. Tiles had slid out of place. An abandoned ditch had to be filled. The coat had to be mended. A trench had fallen into disrepair. Firewood had to be gathered. An extension to an old passageway was necessary. Drinking water was needed. A new tool had to be made. Some meat had to be jerked before it spoiled. Cobblestones had come loose. A leather flue was too decayed. More glue had to be boiled down. Before one of these tasks had been completed, the next one demanded his attention, so that at all times he was engaged in one of these chores, which, together, over time, formed a circle or, rather, some sort of pattern that, though invisible to him, repeated itself, he was sure, at regular intervals. These recurrent duties made every day resemble the last, and within each day, from sunup to sundown, there were few markers to divide time. He did not even eat at regular hours. In fact, his diet had been reduced to the absolute, life-sustaining minimum. Sometimes he was surprised that his health was so robust. He had not lost a single tooth—and he had never met an adult with a full set of teeth. This could only be explained by another fact that he found equally puzzling: even though he did not know how old he was, it was clear to him that he had reached the age at which the human body has matured and starts its decline. Still, he had never stopped growing. Since he had not seen another human being in years, he had no sense of how tall he would feel next to someone else, but he did know he would be conspicuous—an added reason for staying out of sight. But these were only fleeting thoughts. He seldom considered his body or his circumstances—or anything else, for that matter. The business of being took up all of his time.