In the Distance

6.

A fire warming his face. The stars above the flames. A damp cloth on his lips. The sun filtering through a canvas canopy. The taste of fever. The dreaded sound of carriage wheels. Dusk or dawn. Voices. The taste of honey. Eyeglasses. Linus smiling. A horse neighing. The smell of porridge and coffee. His own screams. Hemp rope around wrists and ankles. Linus telling him a story. A fire warming his face. Voices. A damp cloth on his lips. Eyeglasses. The taste of honey.

The blisters on his wrists woke him up, but he welcomed the burn underneath the rope as confirmation that he and his body finally had reconciled. He was lying in a covered wagon. The sun was a hot stain on the canvas. Two silhouettes on the driver’s bench talked quietly. He could hear other men on horses or burros. Time flowed gently through him. Shapes, sounds, and textures were once again part of one single reality.

As his perception of his surroundings grew clearer, he realized that from the sides of the wagon came a wide array of chimes—quick shrill dings and slow low dongs. He turned his head and saw a crowded collection of jars hanging from every bow and bolt and fastened to the bed of the wagon. In them, suspended in a yellowish liquid, were lizards, rats, squirrels, cats, spiders, foxes, serpents, and other creatures. Some jars contained unborn animals, viscera, limbs, and heads. He stirred around but found himself firmly tied down. Lifting his head, he saw cages flapping with birds, baskets crawling with insects, and wicker trunks hissing with snakes. Håkan thought that his recovery had been just an illusion and that he was still trapped in one of his nightmares. He made a sound, and one of the men in the front turned around. Håkan could see only his outline against the bright sky. The man climbed into the back of the wagon and leaned over Håkan, revealing the bespectacled face that had hovered over him during his agony. The man smiled.

“You’re back,” he said.

Håkan tried to sit up, but the ropes kept him in place.

“I’m sorry,” said the man, horrified as he remembered Håkan’s bonds, and swiftly proceeded to untie him.

As he worked on the ropes, he talked to Håkan in a soothing voice. By the time he was done with his ankles, his speech had come to an end. Håkan stared at him. The man asked him something. Silence. He removed his eyeglasses and tried another question. Håkan looked into his gray eyes—they were curious without being intrusive, compassionate without being condescending. Like all the men Håkan had seen in the wilderness, he was unshaven, but unlike all of them, he truly owned the rich reddish beard that reached the uppermost button of his shirt. His hair had been flattened and tamed by dirt, and it was easy to imagine that it would look wilder the cleaner it got. Here was a man who had been improved by the plains. As his right eye started wandering off to the side, he put his glasses back on.

“You don’t speak English?” he asked.

“Little,” replied Håkan.

The man asked him another question. It did not sound like English. He tried again in a guttural, harsh language. Håkan looked at him, rubbing his raw wrists. Noticing this, the man apologized once more, and mimicked a delirious, raving man, kicking and punching the air. Then he pointed at Håkan, and touched his biceps with his index finger and quickly withdrew it, as if the muscle had been white-hot.

“You’re strong!” he said and laughed.

They were silent as the man inspected Håkan’s blisters.

“Where are you from?” he asked, rearranging his glasses when he was done.

“Sweden.”

The man was both gratified and troubled by this answer. Gently tugging at his beard and squinting, he seemed to reach into the past and finally said something that sounded very much like “My name is John Lorimer” in Swedish. Håkan lit up. Lorimer kept talking in a dream version of Håkan’s mother tongue—a language that was and was not Swedish, that sometimes felt familiar but suddenly would become incomprehensible, that evoked home only to stress, immediately after, how remote its foreign sounds were. Later, Lorimer would explain that it was a hodgepodge of German and Dutch, patched together with English.

Laboriously, in his jargon of mixed tongues, Lorimer told Håkan that when they had spotted him walking stiffly with his arms outstretched in front of him, some thought that he was a devil. As they approached him and saw his dark skin, others believed he was an Indian. When they were close enough to see he was in fact covered in congealed blood, they were all convinced he was fatally wounded. Håkan did not seem to notice them, but when they tried to take him to the wagon to dress his injuries, he fought them fiercely, and it took three men to subdue him. Soon after that, he passed out and remained in a delirious haze for six days. Lorimer was baffled to find no significant wounds after washing away the dried blood.

In Swedish marbled with English, Håkan gave a brief account of his ordeals, beginning with the Clangston woman. He urged Lorimer to stay clear of her men and told him he would leave the convoy in the morning since his pursuers would not hesitate to murder everyone in the party to get him. All he needed was food and water, if they could spare some. Lorimer would have none of it. Håkan was to remain under their protection until he had fully recovered and they had made sure that he was beyond the woman’s reach. Their convoy was headed east anyway, at least until reaching its next destination, the great salt lake of Saladillo, after which Lorimer and his men would turn south. In the meantime, Lorimer said, he would like to be taught Swedish. And anyway, he could also use an assistant. Håkan looked at the heads in the jars with apparent concern. Lorimer laughed, told him not to be alarmed, and explained that he had caught those creatures for the benefit of man.

With proper food, drink, and rest, Håkan made a swift recovery. Soon he was out with the five men who assisted Lorimer in his labors and escorted him for his protection. Håkan, in charge of their spare horses and burros, rode next to Lorimer as often as he could, and they taught each other their languages. Lorimer was a fast learner, and his eagerness to practice Swedish came to the detriment of Håkan’s English, but after such a long time sloshing in the slippery sludge of foreign sounds, Håkan welcomed the solid words of his mother tongue.

Originally from southeast Scotland, John Lorimer had traveled to America with his family at the age of eleven. They had started a farm in an unsettled land whose name Håkan could not retain. Mr. Lorimer had wanted John to become a priest and had him recite entire books of the Bible from memory and prepare biographical sermons delivered to the family each Sunday before dawn. John, however, with his love for all things wild, preferred terrestrial to celestial matters. By a nearby thicket, the boy built a city of sorts (moats, ramparts, streets, stalls) and populated it with beetles, frogs, and lizards. He covered the walled structure every night and inspected it every morning, noting which creatures had vanished or died, which had moved from one compartment to another, which were feared by the rest, and so on. He worked tirelessly on his animal city until his father, suspicious of his long absences, followed him to the thicket, kicked the structure to the ground, stamped its inhabitants flat, and flogged him with a switch made from the branch of a nearby tree. It had been—he remembered the branch clearly and later had learned its name—a yellow birch. While whipping him, his father whispered that he would have to atone for his blasphemous pride—God, and God only, had the power to create a world; any other attempt was an arrogant insult to His work. A few years later, John was sent to university to study theology, but soon botany and zoology (disciplines Håkan at first found perplexing) had displaced divinity. Shortly after that, he traveled to Holland to study under one of Europe’s leading botanists, Carl Ludwig Blume, whose name Håkan would afterwards remember for being amusingly fitting for his profession. Having completed his studies, John returned to America with the intention of classifying species of the West that had never been described or named. In the course of his investigations, Lorimer had come up with a theory for which, he said, his father, now long dead, would not have lashed him with a birch switch but crushed him under an oak beam. Over the course of the following weeks, in broken Swedish, and with the aid of his jarred specimens, new animals they caught along the way, and the ancient creatures they found crystallized in rocks, Lorimer would patiently explain his theory to his mostly silent but quite obviously baffled new friend. His purpose, he said, was to go back in time and reveal the origin of man.

Knowing that Håkan had experience with sage hens, Lorimer suggested that they start there. He asked Håkan to kill one by wringing its neck and then pluck it. Sitting in the narrow shade of the wagon, Lorimer cut into the bird with a small sharp blade and opened it up like a book. He showed Håkan its broken spine and explained why that fracture (as opposed to a broken wing or leg) had killed it. They followed the vertebral column to the brain, and Lorimer told his friend that everything we do, from breathing to walking, from thinking to defecating, is governed by that cord traversing our upper body. Håkan was profoundly moved by this revelation and knew it to be true without requiring further evidence. He could not say why this utterly new notion regarding organs he had never heard named before was correct, but watching the open bird on the ground, he had no doubt. Håkan had never looked at an animal that way. It seemed so clean, simple, and orderly—that he happened to be ignorant of the laws governing that harmonious system was unimportant. He asked Lorimer a great number of questions and ventured a few theories of his own.

Lorimer appreciated his new student’s ardor, and as the weeks passed, that first lesson was followed by many others—conducted mostly in English since neither of them knew the anatomical terms in Swedish. Soon Håkan was dissecting all sorts of animals by himself. In his big, gentle hands, the scalpel delicately skated over the small gem-like organs, and he proved to have an extremely refined intuition concerning their function and their relationship to one another. After a few dozen dissections, he had mastered the rudiments of the mechanics of bones, understood the workings of muscular filaments and springs, had a basic grasp of the architecture of the heart, had mapped the main blood vessels, and was able to identify the ducts and sacks of the digestive tract. His infallible confidence with surgical instruments and the clarity with which he perceived, in one single glance, the internal organization of a body led him to discover (discreetly guided by Lorimer) an astounding fact—all animal life was, in essence, the same. And once and again, Lorimer concluded his demonstrations of this truth by drawing Håkan’s attention to the spine and the brain.

Their small caravan moved on, leaving a trail of slashed birds, dogs, reptiles, and rodents.

During their lessons, Lorimer often reminded his student that his remarkable talent with the scalpel would amount to nothing if the knife was not held by a loving hand guided by a truth-seeking eye. The study of nature is a barren enterprise if stones, plants, and animals become frozen under the magnifying glass, Lorimer said. A naturalist should look at the world with warm affection, if not ardent love. The life the scalpel has ended ought to be honored by a caring, devoted appreciation for that creature’s unrepeatable individuality, and for the fact that, at the same time, strange as this may seem, this life stands for the entire natural kingdom. Examined with attention, the dissected hare illuminates the parts and properties of all other animals and, by extension, their environment. The hare, like a blade of grass or a piece of coal, is not simply a small fraction of the whole but contains the whole within itself. This makes us all one. If anything, because we are all made of the same stuff. Our flesh is the debris of dead stars, and this is also true of the apple and its tree, of each hair on the spider’s legs, and of the rock rusting on planet Mars. Each minuscule being has spokes radiating out to all of creation. Some of the raindrops falling on the potato plants in your farm back in Sweden were once in a tiger’s bladder. From one living thing, the properties of any other may be predicted. Looking at any particle with sufficient care, and following the chain that links all things together, we can arrive at the universe—the correspondences are there, if the eye is skillful enough to detect them. The guts of the anatomized hare faithfully render the picture of the entire world. And because that hare is everything, it is also us. Having understood and experienced this marvelous congruity, man can no longer examine his surroundings merely as a surface scattered with alien objects and creatures related to him only by their usefulness. The carpenter who can only devise tabletops while walking through the forest, the poet who can only remember his own private sorrows while looking at the falling snow, the naturalist who can only attach a label to every leaf and a pin to every insect—all of them are debasing nature by turning it into a storehouse, a symbol, or a fact. Knowing nature, Lorimer would often say, means learning how to be. And to achieve this, we must listen to the constant sermon of things. Our highest task is to make out the words to better partake in the ecstasy of existence.

Håkan had been converted.

The landscape that had seemed so featureless to Håkan was now an expanding enigma he was eager to decipher, but there was little time left after tending to the business of staying alive. When they were not replenishing their supplies of water and firewood, hunting for food, or scouting for potential threats, Lorimer collected and organized his specimens. In the evenings, he would sit around the fire with the men and write in his notebook while they smoked and told stories (and on these occasions he always wore a tenuous, kind grin—whether his smile was brought out by the men’s talk or by his own writing, Håkan could never figure out). In the few spare moments their busy life on the plains afforded them, Lorimer tried to teach his friend how to read, but Håkan found it almost impossible to recognize which letters faced forward and which back, and the characters in the words often seemed to move of their own accord. His practical knowledge, however, grew at an astounding rate, and soon Lorimer deemed him ready to hear the full extent of his theory. This required, Lorimer said, a basic knowledge of anatomy, but also an unprejudiced mind. He believed Håkan to have acquired both.

“You have seen for yourself how all life is connected, how everything is in everything, and how each single thing radiates to the whole,” Lorimer told Håkan. “All present beings are tied to one another. But this is also true through time. Every natural event flows forth from something else, which flows forth from something else, and so on—a net of tributary veins, rivulets, and torrents rushing away from the headwaters. It follows that each living thing logs within itself the traces and records of all its ancestors. In the course of time, however, minor modifications are introduced, small adjustments and improvements. Where and how this process will end, nobody will ever know, since nothing in nature is ever final—all ends are ephemeral because they are pregnant with new beginnings. But one question we may be able to answer: What was the first source? What was the principle of life? Whence do we come?”

Lorimer left Håkan with the question unanswered for a few days, giving his young student room to think of these matters on his own.

Saladillo was not far away. The desert had become even drier. All plants and visible animal life had disappeared. The dirt was rock-hard, and the lack of dust gave the landscape a final stillness. There was something angular and sharp in that flatness.

They always bivouacked immediately before sundown to make the most of the daylight. Any place was as good as any other. They simply dismounted and sat down. Their tracker was careful to leave his saddle pointing forward to have some immediate reference when he woke up in the blank expanse. Food, water, and fuel were consumed sparingly. They wrapped themselves in homespuns and hides to make up for the small fire they let die out once dinner was cooked. It was during one of these fireless nights, as they were lying in their furs looking up at the stars, that Lorimer revealed his discovery to Håkan.

God did not create man. He created something that became man. If we could only go back in time far enough, millions of ages, our ancestors would start to lose their human features. Little by little, they would look less like men and more like beasts. And if we went all the way back to the dawn of days, we would discover that the creature that fathered us all did not even resemble any animal we have ever seen. We would find Adam, our forefathers’ forefather, to be a passive, translucent gelatin, a blob of marrow bobbing in the otherwise barren ocean.

The history of the transformation from viscous sponge to man, Lorimer said, could be read in the spine. Reminding Håkan of some of his fossils carved into yellow stone, Lorimer explained that in remote times, the spine was a flexible duct made of cartilage. It was only after centuries upon centuries that this rubbery tube wrapping the marrow would ossify, hardening into the dorsal spine, as we know it today. But this cartilage was not just a conduit or a sheath for the marrow. It was, itself, fossilized marrow. And the marrow, in turn, was a projection of the brain. Brain, marrow, and spine were the same substance at different stages. And if all our limbs stemmed from and were subordinated to the spine, it followed that our entire body was a projection of the brain. The brain came first. And, quoting a South American naturalist whose name Håkan could not retain, Lorimer inferred that this principle could be applied to natural history as well. All species, in their inexhaustible varieties, sprung from one single source—a simple cerebral ganglion. All beings are simply dilations of this organ, of this primeval intelligent matter that contained in itself all the possibilities of future life forms. The qualities of each species are determined by how long they have been in the making or at what point, down the stream of time, they deviated from the original source. We had progressed from a shapeless intelligent being that was our remote but direct ancestor. A bodiless brain. Over the course of many millions of years, this thinking ganglion forged for itself the material structures that would become its frame and its instruments—in other words, the brain generated its own body. It was almost as if the cerebrum had thought and willed the rest of its anatomy into existence. At this point, Lorimer reminded Håkan of how, from the embryos in different stages he had shown him, it could be deduced that the skull itself goes through the progressive stages that define the development of the human species—from membrane to cartilage to bone. The skull, then, is the most primitive rigid formation. It developed as a box encasing the brain to shield it from a hostile environment. The spine resulted from the skull (whose structure is roughly replicated in each vertebra), and from this central column, particular appendages would stem out, members that later would become limbs, necessary to ensure the brain’s survival. From this, a most significant revelation followed. Because he is the supreme intellectual creature, man has to be, necessarily, the very first form of life to have appeared and developed from that original thinking substance—the oldest being on the planet, still growing, through all the anteceding ages, from that earliest of all seeds. The inescapable and stunning conclusion of this was that human intelligence, in some form, must have preceded all organic matter on Earth.

This was the great discovery Lorimer had made traveling the plains and collecting his specimens, and now he was determined to find the final piece of evidence necessary to support it. All signs suggested that the intelligent proto-organism of which men are the most direct descendants first came to life in water (more specifically in salt water), where it would have vegetated like a thinking shell-less mollusk. Exploring the bottom of the ocean for proof of its existence was, of course, not a possibility. But luckily enough, there were some seabeds one could walk on. One such sea floor was the great salt lake of Saladillo. Formerly a landlocked sea, Saladillo had dried out millions of years ago, and given the inaccessible location and the extreme conditions of this salt flat, Lorimer expected it to be untouched by man. If confirmation of the existence of this first creature, this disembodied brain, could be found anywhere, it would be in Saladillo.

Silence followed Lorimer’s discourse. What Håkan had just been told seemed to him as remote as the stars above—so distant from any idea ever taught to him, so removed from any thought that he could have come up with himself, that it would have defied even his brother’s imagination. Linus’s wildest tales were tame compared to Lorimer’s narrative, and everything in Håkan’s mind compelled him to dismiss what he had just heard. His limited knowledge of the Bible, his common sense, and, above all, his own humanity made it impossible for him to believe that his seniors, no matter how removed, had been animals. Had he understood Lorimer’s rudimentary Swedish correctly? Even more outrageous and insulting was the notion of that primordial snot. Had he not been created in god’s image? What, then, was god? And if this process was, as Lorimer claimed, still in motion, what would men become in the distant future? Would those faraway descendants regard his own bones as the carcass of some primitive beast?

And yet, despite his profound misgivings, Håkan felt his own past (with all that he thought he knew, with his father’s few firm words, with the minister’s unquestioned doctrine, and even with his brother’s lovely stories) dissolve into the night and fade in the presence of the impressive and awful history he had just heard.