Beyond the Horizon (5 page)

He opened his eyes. Where his fingers had pressed against the brick, flakes of adobe broke
off.

The man took the low pass through the mountains. He stopped an hour into the foothills once his path merged with a trickle of a stream. Both he and the mule drank readily. Using his bare hands, he clawed at the soil and uncovered some small white tubers. He washed them in the stream, smelled them and ate them. It might hurt in his gut if they were bad fruit, but he did not eat enough to cause sickness. That much he
knew.

On the ship they had thrown their bad food overboard. As part of his quartermasterly duties, the responsibility of disposing of the rotten goods fell on the boy's father. In good times, it was only a few fruits, a crate of flour squirming with mites. The captain would come to the father's room—a cubby beneath the deck stairs with a sheet hung up for privacy.

‘Got a couple more need taken care of,' the captain
said.

The boy lay on the top, shorter bunk. Without a word his father nodded. Theyd wait a piece and his father would take a taper from the footlocker and together theyd go to the cargo
hold.

The captain marked the crates with Xs. Tonight there were five in total—big crates
too.

‘All the foods nearly gone,' the boy
said.

His father hefted a crate, said to grab the other smaller one with plantains in it. The boy did like he was told. Tiny flies flocked out of the slats of the box. The plantains themselves smelled overly sweet. It made him hungry.

‘Doin this'll save someone from dyin from the shits,' his father said. They carried the goods up the stairs to the deck. Men were still up; the boy could hear them muttering to each other, to themselves perhaps.

‘Cmon,' his father snapped. They lugged the cargo to the rail of the ship. ‘On three.' He counted one and two and they shoved the boxes overboard. First a protracted silence, then a splash. With the boat in the doldrums, every sound could be heard.

‘You there!' The nightwatchman scampered out of the shadows. ‘What'd you throw?'

‘Bad food,' the boy's father said. ‘Rotted all the way through.'

‘Better than no food.'

Another man came up from below deck. It was the first mate. ‘Whats this?' he asked. He looked the father over, then the boy. He licked his lips in thirst.

‘These two throwin food overboard again,' the nightwatchman
said.

‘Capn's orders?'

The father nodded, said in fact it was; there were still a few more boxes under
deck.

A few more men gathered around to watch the confrontation. ‘You an capn seem awful friendly like,' the first mate said. ‘He givin it to you or you puttin it in
him?'

‘Theyd be the only ones getting their pricks wet,' one of the deckhands
said.

‘Rotten food,' another simply
said.

From the stern of the boat, the captain's voice rang out. ‘Should stop drinkin the salt water,' he said. All turned to look at him. In his hand he held a taper, the wax smelling of flowers. ‘Salt water makes the mind go crazy.'

‘But we aint got any fresh water,' the nightwatchman hissed. ‘No rain since we got here.'

By now all who dwelled on the ship had come above deck. The Portuguese man clung to the rail, ignoring the exchange. The rigger sided with the nightwatchman, stating that salt water quenched better than no water at
all.

‘We're all sailors here,' the boy's father said. ‘In right times you know you cant stuff yourself with rot food and salt water.'

‘These aint right times.'

‘That food probably aint even turned.'

‘You and capn are tryin to kill
us.'

‘How in hell we end up in this place?'

‘Sargasso,' the Portuguese man said under his breath. The boy heard when he said it, for there was no wind, no weather, no movement to speak
of.

The stranger toured the rectangular towers of the Anasazi village, ducking through doorways, padding up the crumbling steps carved into the sloped rock, making use of a rickety ladder left in place for a thousand years. He climbed through the tunnels. Most of the tunnels were little larger than the breadth of his shoulders. Inside he heard only his own breathing, the shuffling of his hands and knees on the stone, could see nothing more than the light at the end burning white hot. He emerged and there were more ruins. He muttered to himself. These structures had brick at their core—he could see it where the adobe mud fell off in slabs. The ancient homes rose from the landscape like alien things, gaping doorways, postholes where the wooden beams once rested. He crawled into the porthole doorway of one. Shards of a clay pot littered the floor. Scent of rotting flesh ruminated in the small space. In his desperation, he went to crawl through a hole connecting this apartment to the one behind it. He heard the squeak of a mouse as he crawled and before he could avoid it, his knee crushed the rodent.

When he came out the world was again a different place. He looked around the earth, little more than rubble from a tower fallen and scorched land. Touched by nothing except the sun. He cursed under his breath, to himself. Then he began running in circles, his head shaking back and forth, trying to survey the ground.

He cursed again and ran back to where he began. But there was nothing there. The tower—he said it out loud. He ran to the fallen tower and with a renewed fervor, began slinging bricks aside. A small opening showed black and amorphous underneath. What light penetrated through the abyss glimmered at the bottom of the well. He moved some more bricks. Once the aperture augured wide enough, he raised his hands over his head, ready to dive headlong into the darkness.

There he stood, rigid and arms upraised, holding his breath, eyes closed. He released his breath and opened his eyes. This wouldnt be enough. The ancient formula of progress—men plunging headlong into darkness—needed casualties. The ties of the New York subway were the ribs of migrants. The chambers of the Hoover Dam a mausoleum for a score of men. The locks of the Erie Canal little more than a deathbed. Death is progress.

First the stranger just stood by the opening, looking around for anything moving, anything milling about. But there was nothing. Far off, barely even visible, he could see birds, buzzards with their long necks circling. The stranger smiled at the irony: these were beasts in search of the dead. He lay down in the dust, next to the opening, shutting his eyes, pretending to be dead himself.

A time passed, neither long, nor short, when he heard the flapping and rustling of feathers. He held his breath and kept his eyes shut. The buzzard reared its wings open again, danced its sideways waltz to the stranger.

Then the stranger inhaled slowly through his nose. In his mind he visualized the vulture perched on a small stone, its clawed feet wrapped gnarly around it. He rolled and grabbed in one motion. The bird cried out. And they both fell headlong into the aperture.

The stranger climbed through the darkness—darkness so thick he had to scoop it out of the way one handful at a time. His mouth filled with the darkness and he had no choice but to ingest it. Mealy, muddy and rank, he gulped it down, wormed his body through the space. Swallowing the space, it pushed through his throat, plopped foul and full in his gut and continued on slogging its way through his bowels and eventually was expelled behind
him.

Then—light. A faint glow of light and he reached toward it, found it to be bleeding through the slatted cracks of the wooden trap door of his dugout home. With a single shove, he pulled himself out of the hole and looked around the interior room. This place was nearly complete, a handsome shelter. He stood and walked out the door to the plains.

He continued on, past the flat rock where he would eventually slaughter the woman and drag her body into the depths of the caves. He walked on, his path intersecting the man's eventual trifle to a fool's errand. In spite of himself, he whistled, long and low, an unnatural action for him to take, but a spirit of some type moved
him.

‘Fancy seein your likes out this way,' a voice
said.

Before he turned around, the stranger smiled.

The stranger looked back at himself. ‘Cant be more than one of us, you know,' he
said.

‘You know better.'

‘So do
you.'

And they knew each other completely; it was true. The one knew what would unfold, the other keeping the knowledge of his thoughts on seeing himself inside his head. But they shared the humor of violating the laws of existence.

‘Only so much material in the universe.'

‘We'll solve it all soon enough,' he said. ‘Feel the earth spin a little slower once I showed
up?'

‘Saw everything get a little dimmer, knew someone must be sucking the energy right out of creation. Didnt know it'd be
me.'

‘You will realize it, only too late.'

Without needing any further cues, the strangers sat, studied each other.

Finally the stranger from the time before asked if he had to be killed.

‘Has to happen that way,' the stranger
said.

‘Cant be rewritten.'

‘Afraid not,' he said. He leaned back on his hands, looked at the sky, the clouds passing by. Distant things. ‘You'll understand soon enough.'

Together the stranger and his reflection walked a new path out toward the stream. They walked quietly and the stranger told him how he'd kill the woman and her baby and make short work of the troupe. He described the ruins in the mountains and gulched foothills with the open grave. ‘Goddamn,' he sighed. ‘It's a beautiful place, this world.'

Food became more plentiful in the mountain pass. Pine nuts were easily plucked from the low-hanging boughs of the trees while he rode on the mule. Come time to stop in the midmorning, the man might set up a snare for some ground squirrel using a length of twine and a sharpened stick. If he chose to ride through until the afternoon—which he did more often now—he would make a game out of baiting the squirrels with his gathered pine nuts. Then he sat on a boulder, crouched, stone in hand. He chose the stones carefully, preferring the rounded ones as big around as his thumb.

When a squirrel came close enough to the pile of nuts, he slung the rock, sidearmed at the creature. More often than not, he killed the animal on the first throw. Eating squirrel wore on his gut, especially when he sliced the flesh too thick and it didnt dry by morning. But he had to eat what he
had.

Thats what the first mate had said to his father.

‘Got to eat what we got,' he said. The captain tried to speak, but the men interjected with nonsense vulgarity.

‘Ever night you an quartermaster come up here, dump food overboard, tell us it's no good.'

Just as the men had nights before, they congregated on the deck. Staring up at the slivered moon, Scorpio and Draco chasing each other in endless fight. They chanted like byzantines, demanding rain. But none came. Only a gentle lapping of the mossed sea rocked the boat in the doldrums.

The captain held the candle up to the first mate and examined his face. ‘You drank from the
sea.'

The first mate drew back into shadow, said he did; it was the only thing to
do.

‘Não há nada mais aqui. Isto é o Sargaço,' the Portuguese said. He limped to the first mate's side. The other hands grumbled, some asking what the old coot who lived in the hold just
said.

‘Sargasso,' he said again. Then he reached his fingers out and pinched the flame of the candle between his thumb and forefinger. A hiss sliced through the quieted darkness and a small festoon of smoke snaked in the air. No one moved, all bewitched by the old Portuguese. The boy watched as the Portuguese took from the captain's hand the candle. He watched as the man ate the candle and said in another tongue that all was satisfied.

The stranger watched the husband leave his woman at the hovel, watched his double converse with him in the moonlight, wishing him godspeed. For a time, he stood there watching this form—fully him in the flesh and blood, yet something completely outside of his own existence—just stand in the grass. The silhouetted figure began walking away in pursuit of the
man.

The stranger waited until morning to come for the woman. Fear washed across her face when she woke. She reached for the man's body, but he was not there. Saying no several times, she crab-walked backward into the tarpaulin-and-board side of the hovel. But the stranger had not moved. She pulled her skirt tight down between her
legs.

‘Usted consume la luz,' she said. ‘Vaya ahora.'

‘Hemos hecho esto antes, mi amor,' the stranger replied. He smiled, complacent and toothy. ‘Usted no puede cambiar lo que ya ha pasado.'

Then she began to cry. ‘Usted es loco.'

Still the stranger knew the path of the man. He followed the man through the night, walking in the tracks the man left behind. What traces the man left behind from his camps—a scrap of cloth, a matchstick or some flecks of grain meal—the stranger gathered and
ate.

And though the man stopped for the night, the stranger had no such luxury, for he had no mule, no horse, no train or bus or car. He walked. Sometimes he closed his eyes and imagined what the man saw, what the world looked like at that place at that moment. How simple it must
be.

He thought of the man's story, how much the man must have forgotten and how much of it was now a thing of fiction. He laughed out loud while he walked. He thought it comical how certain people are when they create their stories. Foolish things. You cannot know what has already been written until you read it. And at that moment, it's supposed to be
new.

As the man recalled it, the captain was killed that night on the boat. He called the Portuguese by a name not familiar to any of the men. And the old man walked away without incident.

Later that same night the first mate crushed the captain's skull with an eight-pound mortar. When he told the crew of this, he said the captain was chanting in his sleep. They carved the flesh from the captain's bones and drank his blood after it had been boiled.

The father and son stayed in their quarters. ‘Stranded at sea can cause men to go crazy,' his father
said.

The boy nodded. Above them men whooped and sang, stomped across the deck. Below them the sea slapped the boat rhythmically. ‘If we stay out of sight, stay quiet, they'll leave us
be.'

And for a time, the crew did leave them alone. The men stayed on deck, cursing at the sky, drinking from the sea. When the rigger died, they ate him too. Blood seeped through the deckboards and dripped on the boy's bunk. He touched the spot of blood. It was cool and wet. His father didnt notice when he licked it off his fingertip.

At that moment the stranger understood the man. He had to see him as a boy, know what happened, what could never be undone. He had to see the memories of the man and how they were different from what the story was really about. If he bothered to ask the man what happened, it was this. But the stranger knew better—he knew what shaped the man was kept in the darkest wells of his mind, a place where terrifying dreams wake us into being.

At first he tried to take the woman by the hand as a gentleman from another time might. She spat on the stranger, cursed him. He knew then how it had to be. With one hand he seized both of her wrists. With the other hand he grabbed her hair. She screamed. He pulled her from the hovel and out into the grasses. She jerked her head to the side and left him holding a tuft of hair. Stumbling only a few more feet, before the stranger grabbed her by the ankle, she resigned into sobs. Without the crying she might have been a pretty thing. But now her face contorted, tears dragging dark streaks of dirt to her chin. Her breasts swollen with pregnancy heaved with each inhalation.

The stranger sat next to her, his mind far away. Finally, when her tears subsided and she sniffled, she asked if it could be quick.

‘Usted pudiera aprovecharse de mí y irse,' she
said.

He shook his head. ‘No puedo perdonar la vida,' he said. ‘Tengo que acabarlo. Su tiempo aquí se ha acabado.'

The news did not surprise her, she figured this to be the case. Again she asked for it to be quick. ‘Sí,' the stranger said. He stood and extended his hand. This time, the woman took it and they walked out to a flat rock, to where a wagon broke down years before, splintering its wheel on the stone.

The woman sat on the stone and watched while the stranger pulled the steel band off the outer edge of the wheel. The band held to the wood with tack nails; one of them sliced his fingertip open. He put the finger to his mouth before going back to work. The strip of metal wavered awkwardly as he held it up, gauging its usefulness.

The woman turned her attention elsewhere; she looked out across the plains. The skies were clear, not a chicken hawk or buzzard in sight. The thwap of the rock against the metal pulled her attention back to the stranger. He raised a stone above his head and brought it down against the band again. Where the stone impacted, the metal edge of the band became spiny and dented, forming a jagged blade.

‘¿Será rápido?' she asked.

And it
was.

Pitiful how she whimpered before he swung the blade, how she raised her hand as if this would deflect the blow, how her other hand cradled around her womb as if she could save the unborn from this
fate.

The man crossed the plains as he would in the lifetime before, encountering the solitary trees left from antediluvian times and spared being scorched into salt. He saw the occasional being, the troupe of scalpers and a man riding distant on a beast. At night he watched the stars, tried to reach out and touch them while he lay on his
back.

The stranger followed. He followed where highways and billboards would eventually slice the land and blot the sky. The horizon remained unbroken, not a guy wire to a radio tower or the vapor trail of a jumbo jet marring the expanse. He walked over a sop of grass still quelling with dew from the night before. In time this place would be quarried, chunks of stone pulled and pulverized and ground down into pea gravel, used to set sidewalks and level commercial housing. While men in hard hats and diesel construction vehicles toted the stone away, bones from dinosaurs would be discovered, discarded and tossed into the tumbler with the gravel.

At night, while the man placed his trust in the long-burned-out stars of a universe bent on crushing itself, the stranger guided himself by the street lamps, casino lights and reflective stripes of the freeway. The stranger would lay down to sleep at dawn, his head resting on a scrap of driftwood or a stone. The sun glowered up from the crags of mountains and baked all that splayed out on the altar of midland America.

Each man had visions—one of the world as it had been, the other inventing the story of destiny as he came upon it. Both of them envisioned the time in the Sargasso. A month, maybe more, had passed since there was any breeze to speak of. Several of the crew committed suicide by weighting themselves down with chains and throwing themselves overboard.

‘Keeps them from being eaten,' the boy's father
said.

The crew of the ship roamed the deck like sleepwalkers. They burned their clothes and trolled for food naked and despairing, letting the sun take its toll on their bodies. The men's skin boiled and dripped, ran with blisters and puss. In the night they sodomized each other, taking the boy and his father up to the deck and holding them
down.

Up in the crow's nest the Portuguese sat as a silent sentinel to the events unfolding below. The men called up to him as they beat one another and groped at the unwilling participants, but he ignored them, staring off into the ocean as if there was a place beyond
here.

Taking the body of the woman into the hatch proved more difficult for the stranger than he imagined. He stopped from time to time as he tunneled farther downward to scrabble for his baggage. He located the abdomen of the woman and placed his hand across the expanse of her belly. The baby inside stirred; less so than a few moments ago when he last checked, but still alive nonetheless.

He went deeper into the total absence of light to where the soil hardened into stone and the caverns ran slick with moisture. Drips from stalactites echoed. There was still deeper to go. He crawled frantically, following a path from a memory he had yet to form. The palm of his hand slid on the rock and he tumbled forward, the sack and body falling with him. He landed in a shallow pool of water, the bell of the skirt undone and the body in pieces around
him.

The water rippled, but instead of coming to a calm around him, the liquid continued to swirl and torrent. The walls of the cavern shook and stones crumbled in on either side. The stranger closed his eyes and did his best to imagine the world he had told himself about.

The man woke in the midafternoon. Some vision—a dream—had been circulating in his head. Something called from the outside world and filtered through his memories and formed into a new experience all together. He sat up. Nearby the mule grazed, lazily swooped his tail at some flies. The man had sweated in his sleep, sweated right through his shirt. No more than a few hours passed since he let slumber overtake
him.

He took a canteen from the saddlebag, drank from it. He swore, shook his head. Out on the horizon whence he came there was nothing. Even as he rode away, he cast a glance over his shoulder. A feeling of being watched welled in his gut and propelled him forward.

At the end of the tunnel the sky showed as a spot of blue. The stranger scrambled through, toward the source of light. He heaved stones aside and freed himself from underneath the rubble. He looked around the landscape at the fallen adobe brick tower, at the vultures circling above. If there was a way out of here, he had already taken it. Now was where he needed to
stay.

Ruins from the Indians folded limply in the rumpled hills. Little stood as it had decades, centuries before. The bricks, once dried and blocked with sharp edges, had eroded into egg-shaped curiosities, things unable to be stacked. Walls spilled over, the mortar turned to grit and cake. Occasional storms as they blew in this part of the country had taken their toll on the place.

The stranger rested his hands on his hips and gauged the sun. He figured it to be midafternoon, figured it to be a time when America was still a geographical location. Somewhere hundreds of miles, several time zones away, Johnny Appleseed was littering the Midwest with fruit trees, a stove pan on his head. In the south Pecos Bill wrangled tornados, shot holes in the sky. Hiawatha trolled the rivers of Iroquois territories, trying to bring his people together.

‘Well, then,' the stranger said aloud. ‘I suppose I have some work to
do.'