Moon Palace (22 page)

“The night before we left, Byrne and I sat up talking. He showed me his surveying equipment, and I remember being in one of those excited moods when everything suddenly seems to fit together in a new way. Byrne told me that you can’t fix your exact position on the earth without referring to some point in the sky. Something to do with triangulation, the technique of measurement, I forget the details. The crux was compelling to me, though, it’s never left me since. A man can’t know where he is on the earth except in relation to the moon or a star. Astronomy
comes first; land maps follow because of it. Just the opposite of what you’d expect. If you think about it long enough, it will turn your brain inside-out. A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There’s this only because there’s that; if we don’t look up, we’ll never know what’s down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not. You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.

“I did some good work in the beginning. We headed due west from the city, camped out by the lake for a day or two, and then moved on into the Great Salt Desert. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. The flattest, most desolate spot on the planet, a boneyard of oblivion. You travel along day after day, and you don’t see a goddamned thing. Not a tree, not a shrub, not a single blade of grass. Nothing but whiteness, cracked earth stretching into the distance on all sides. The ground tastes of salt, and way out at the edge, the horizon is ringed with mountains, a huge ring of mountains oscillating in the light. It makes you think you’re nearing water, surrounded by all that shimmer and glare, but it’s only an illusion. It’s a dead world, and the only thing you ever get closer to is more of the same nothing. God knows how many pioneers bogged down and gave up the ghost in that desert, you’d see their white bones jutting straight out of the ground. That’s what did in the Donner party, everyone knows about them. They got stuck in the salt, and by the time they reached the Sierra Mountains in California, the winter snows blocked their way, and they fell to eating each other to stay alive. Everyone knows that, it’s American folklore, but a true fact nevertheless, a true and unimpeachable fact. Wagon wheels, skullbones, empty bullet shells—I saw all those things out there, even as late as 1916. A giant cemetery was what it was, a blank page of death.

“For the first couple of weeks, I drew like a fiend. Odd stuff, I’d never done work like that before. I hadn’t thought the scale would make a difference, but it did, there was no other way to wrestle with the size of things. The marks on the page became smaller and smaller, small to the point of vanishing. It was as if
my hand had a life of its own. Just get it down, I kept saying to myself, just get it down, and don’t worry, you can think about it later. We stopped off in Wendover for a little while and got cleaned up, then crossed into Nevada and went south, traveling along the edge of the Confusion Range. Again, it all jumped out at me in ways I wasn’t prepared for. The mountains, the snow on top of the mountains, the clouds hovering around the snow. After a while, they began to merge together and I couldn’t tell them apart. Whiteness, and then more whiteness. How can you draw something if you don’t know it’s there? You see what I’m talking about, don’t you? It didn’t feel human anymore. The wind would blow so hard that you couldn’t hear yourself think, and then it would suddenly stop, and the air would be so still, you’d stand there wondering if you hadn’t gone deaf. Unearthly silence, Fogg. The only thing you could hear was your heart beating in your chest, the sound of blood rushing through your brain.

“Scoresby didn’t make life any easier. He did his job, I suppose, leading us along, building fires, hunting for food, but his scorn for us never let up, bad will poured out of him and tainted the atmosphere. He sulked and spat, muttered under his breath, mocked us with his sullenness. After a while, Byrne got so wary of him that he wouldn’t talk when Scoresby was around. Scoresby would go off hunting while we did our work—young Teddy scrambling among the rocks and taking his measurements, I parked on some ledge or other with my paints and charcoals—but in the evenings the three of us would cook our dinner together in front of the campfire. Once, hoping to turn things around a little, I offered to play cards with Scoresby. He seemed to like the idea, but like most stupid men, he had an inflated notion of his own intelligence. He figured he was going to beat me and win a lot of money. Not only beat me at cards, but beat me in every way, really show me who was boss. We played blackjack, and all the cards came to me, he lost six or seven hands in a row. It shook his confidence, and then he started playing badly, making outrageous bets, trying to bluff me, doing everything wrong. I must have won
fifty or sixty dollars from him that night, a fortune to a simpleton like that. When I saw how upset he was, I tried to undo the damage and called off the debt. What did I care about the money? Don’t worry about it, I said to him, I just got lucky, I’m willing to forget it, no hard feelings, something along those lines. It was probably the worst thing I could have said. Scoresby thought I was patronizing him, he thought I was trying to humiliate him, and his pride was hurt, hurt twice over. From then on, there was bad blood between us, and it was beyond me to set it copy. I was a stubborn son of a bitch myself, you’ve probably noticed that. I gave up trying to appease him. If he wanted to act like an ass, let him bray till kingdom come. There we were out in that enormous country, with nothing around us, nothing but empty space for miles around, and for all that it was like being locked in prison—like sharing a cell with a man who won’t stop looking at you, who just sits there waiting for you to turn around so he can stick a knife in your back.

“That was the trouble. The land is too big out there, and after a while it starts to swallow you up. I reached a point when I couldn’t take it in anymore. All that bloody silence and emptiness. You try to find your bearings in it, but it’s too big, the dimensions are too monstrous, and eventually, I don’t know how else to put it, eventually it just stops being there. There’s no world, no land, no nothing. It comes down to that, Fogg, in the end it’s all a figment. The only place you exist is in your head.

“We worked our way across the center of the state, then angled down into the canyon country in the southeast, what they call the Four Corners, where Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico come together. That was the strangest place of all, a dream world, all red earth and contorted rocks, tremendous structures rising out of the ground, they stood there like the ruins of some lost city built by giants. Obelisks, minarets, palaces: everything was at once recognizable and alien, you couldn’t help seeing familiar shapes when you looked at them, even though you knew it was all chance, the petrified sputum of glaciers and erosion, a million years of wind and weather. Thumbs, eye sockets, penises,
mushrooms, human beings, hats. It was like making pictures out of clouds. Everyone knows what those places look like now, you’ve seen them a hundred times yourself. Glen Canyon, Monument Valley, the Valley of the Gods. That’s where they shoot all those cowboy-and-Indian movies, the goddamned Marlboro man gallops through there on television every night. But pictures don’t tell you anything about it, Fogg. It’s all too massive to be painted or drawn; even photographs can’t get the feel of it. Everything is so distorted, it’s like trying to reproduce the distances in outer space: the more you see, the less your pencil can do. To see it is to make it vanish.

“We wandered around in those canyons for several weeks. Sometimes we spent the night in ancient Indian ruins, the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi. Those were the tribes who disappeared a thousand years ago, no one knows what happened to them. They left behind their stone cities, their pictographs, their shards of pottery, but the people themselves just melted away. It was late July or early August by then, and Scoresby’s hostility had grown, it was only a matter of time before something snapped, you could feel it in the air. The country was barren and dry, sagebrush everywhere, not a tree to be seen. The temperatures were atrociously hot, and we had to ration our water supply, which put everyone in a foul temper. One day we had to destroy a donkey, which put an extra burden on the two others. The horses were beginning to wilt. We were five or six days from the town of Bluff, and I thought we should try to get ourselves there as quickly as possible to regroup. Scoresby mentioned a shortcut that would knock off a day or two from the journey, and so we set out in that direction, traveling over rugged ground with the sun in our faces. It was difficult going, rougher than anything we had tried before, and after a while it dawned on me that Scoresby was leading us into a trap. Byrne and I weren’t the riders he was, and we could barely negotiate the terrain. Scoresby was in front, Byrne was second, and I was in the rear. We inched up several steep cliffs, then started riding along a ridge at the top. It was very
narrow, all strewn with rocks and pebbles, and the light was bouncing off the rocks as if to blind us. We couldn’t turn back at that point, but I didn’t see how we could go on much further. All of a sudden, Byrne’s horse lost its footing. He wasn’t more than ten feet in front of me, and I remember the frantic clattering of stones, the whinnying of the horse as it scrambled to gain a purchase with its hooves. But the ground kept giving way, and before I had a chance to react, Byrne let out a scream, and then he was tumbling over the edge, horse and all, the two of them crashing down the side of the cliff. It was a long fucking way, it must have been two or three hundred feet, and nothing but jagged rocks from top to bottom. I jumped off the horse and fetched the medical box, then rushed down the escarpment to see what I could do. At first I thought Byrne was dead, but then I managed to find his pulse. Other than that, there was precious little to feel encouraged about. His face was covered with blood, and his left leg and left arm were both fractured, I could see that just by looking at them. Then I rolled him onto his back and saw a large gash just below his ribs—an ugly, pulsing wound at least six or seven inches across. It was awful, the boy was all torn to pieces. I was about to open the medicine box when I heard a shot ring out behind me. I turned around and saw Scoresby standing over Byrne’s fallen horse, a smoking pistol in his copy hand. Broken leg, he said curtly, nothing else to be done. I told him that Byrne was in a bad way and needed our immediate attention, but when Scoresby came over for a look, he sneered and said, We shouldn’t waste our time on this one. The only cure for him is a dose of the same medicine I just gave the horse. Scoresby raised his pistol and pointed it at Byrne’s head, but I knocked his arm to the side. I don’t know if he was planning to pull the trigger, but I couldn’t take the risk. Scoresby gave me an evil look when I hit his arm and warned me to keep my hands to myself. I’ll do that when you stop pointing guns at helpless people, I said. Then Scoresby turned and pointed the gun at me. I’ll point it at anyone I like, he said, and suddenly he broke out into a smile, a huge idiot’s grin, relishing the power
he held over me. Helpless, he repeated. That’s just what you are, Mr. Painter, a helpless bag of bones. I thought he was going to shoot me then. As I stood there waiting for him to pull the trigger, I wondered how long it would take me to die after the bullet entered my heart. I thought: this is the last thought I will ever have. It seemed to go on forever, the two of us staring into each other’s eyes, waiting for him to go ahead with it. Then Scoresby started to laugh. He was utterly pleased with himself, as if he had just won an enormous victory. He put the gun back in his holster and spat on the ground. It was as though he had already killed me, as though I was already dead.

“He walked back over to the horse and started removing the saddle and saddlebags. I was still shaken by the gun business, but I crouched down beside Byrne and went to work, doing what I could to wash and bandage his wounds. A couple of minutes later, Scoresby returned and announced that he was ready to leave. Leave? I said, what are you talking about? We can’t take the boy with us, he’s in no condition to be moved. Leave him behind, then, Scoresby said. He’s finished anyway, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit around this asshole of a canyon waiting for God knows how long just for him to stop breathing. It’s not worth it. Do what you like, I said, but I’m not going to leave Byrne while he’s still alive. Scoresby grunted. You talk like a hero in a goddamned book, he said. You could be stuck down here for a week before he finally croaks, and what’s the point of that? He’s my responsibility, I said. That’s all there is to it. He’s my responsibility, and I’m not going to leave him.

“Before Scoresby left, I tore out a page from my sketch pad and wrote a letter to my wife. I don’t remember what I said. Something melodramatic, I’m fairly sure of it. This will probably be the last time you ever hear from me, I think I actually wrote that. The idea was that Scoresby would post the letter when he got to town. That was our agreement, in any case, but I knew that he had no intention of keeping his promise. It would implicate him in my disappearance, and why should he want to run the
risk of being questioned by anyone? Much better for him just to ride off and forget the whole thing. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened. At least I assume it was. Much later, when I read the articles and obituaries, there was never any mention of Scoresby—even though I made a point of putting his name in the letter.

“He also talked about organizing a search party if I didn’t show up within a week, but I knew he wasn’t going to do that either. I told him so to his face, but instead of denying it, he gave me another one of his insolent smirks. Last chance, Mr. Painter, he said, are you coming with me or not? I just shook my head, too angry to speak anymore. Scoresby tipped his hat to me in farewell, and then he started climbing back up the cliff to retrieve his horse and be on his way. Just like that, without another word. It took him a few minutes to get to the top, and I kept my eyes on him the whole time. I didn’t want to take any chances. I figured he would try to kill me before he left, it seemed almost inevitable. Eliminate the evidence, make sure that I couldn’t tell anyone what he’d done—leaving a young boy to die like that in the middle of nowhere. But Scoresby never turned around. It wasn’t out of kindness, I assure you. The only possible explanation was that he felt it wasn’t necessary. He didn’t have to kill me, because he didn’t think I could make it back on my own.