He cried himself to sleep.
Lorimer did not really wake up. By dawn, when mumbles started to seep out from his dreams, fever had turned him into its languid puppet. Håkan did not oppose the tracker’s order to put him in the wagon and leave.
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.