The clouds assembled. These were not mere cumulus but great bossed and flexing cumulonimbus, nearly black in their centers, livid with electrical charges. They crawled slowly toward one another, sealing the gaps, each impossibly tall, all shoulders and necks, seeming to mount from their dark platforms to the limits of the sky. Before them trundled intermittent explosions of thunder.
Winkler shook in his poncho. All night not a single drop fell, but jags of superheated air rained from the sky and charged back up from the ground as though a similar army rode beneath the surface of the earth, firing back. With each stroke the mountains were summoned out of the darkness and sucked back up again and the ozone smelled of iron being forged.
A dry wind came up and pressed the electricity forward and the bottoms of the clouds seemed to glass over, as if liquefying. It sounded to Winkler like the fabric of the sky was tearing over and over again, as if what lay past it, blue and wild beyond his worst imaginings, was now leaking through. Thunder sent rocks skittering from the ridgelines. Tiny charges of static electricity roamed between the hairs on his head.
He zipped his duffel. His poncho billowed and snapped. Hares started from the sage and went wheeling in crazed runs and froze mid-stride and ran on again. The wind had taken up all manner of things—pinecones and pebbles, even a thrush—and drove them up the floor of the valley below him. He fought his way up a steep ridge and started down the other side. The wind threw grit up the slope and he could hear it striking the lenses of his glasses. Far below he glimpsed what might have been a river. His shoes were fumbling in scree and the slope was steep and he descended in a crab walk with both arms dragging behind him. As he drew closer, he could see broken sheets of water rise and whorling devils of tumbleweed and dust and sleeves of sparks burning out, and rekindling, and turning with the wind. Still no rain fell, just consistent grumbles of thunder and innumerable frayed wires of lightning and small blue fires hanging in the branches of the sage. Already he could smell smoke.
I’m going to die, he thought. I’m going to burn out here and no one will ever find me and no one will even know to look.
He made the bottom of the scree and found the river and lowered his entire face into the water. As if the storm existed only in his eyes. Above him he could feel the reverberating thrill of the air as it electrified, curtains of air fluxing and bending up and down the river’s canyon. Water pooled in his stomach—already he could feel his joints easing, his skin stretching.
He bent, and drank, and drank again. Lightning touched a tree not a half mile from him, and it made a profound popping like the sound of water being poured into a deep-fryer. When he finally pulled back from the river, kneeling on the bank, he realized his glasses had been taken from his face.
For what might have been an hour, he fumbled in the shallows but found only gravel. Before dawn the storm was miles to the east and the clouds relented and unveiled a limitless matrix of stars, which appeared only as a huge and terrible ceiling, pocked with light. His duffel bag was to his right. His glasses were nowhere. His clothes were soaked.
Trees became pillars of shadow, the sky a swirling luster, the shapes of his own hands immaterial shadows in front of his face. He crossed the river on an old wire bridge and passed through an empty campground and foundered among rocks. If I keep descending, he thought, I will stay by the river, and if I can follow the river, I will reach a road.
But by daybreak things were hardly better: the forest was a blur, the sky a mess of roiled silver. He made for a dark, cubic structure he thought might be a house but somehow missed it and within a matter of a half hour had climbed two steep ridges and could no longer find the river.
He reached for trees only to lurch into air. At the corners of his vision white spots tumbled like the spalls of meteorites plummeting to earth. By late afternoon he was half-starved and sun-blinded and his vision was nearly useless. He had still not come upon a road. And now he was climbing—should he turn back, and descend again?
All the things he did not see: he walked within thirty feet of a black bear and never knew she was there; Winkler feeling his way along a game trail, the bear raised on her haunches, sniffing for a long moment before settling back down and swinging away into the trees. Two hawks, displaced by the storm, sat on a branch over the trail, preening parasites from their wings and watching him go. And horsemen, harrying sheep far below him, tan ewes like specks circling against a fence, and the faint puffs of dust they kicked up blowing south toward a road, a pickup, a horse trailer. And the next morning: a trio of summer cabins far below him, on the shores of the Deadwood Reservoir, all occupied, all happy enough to feed and water a lost stranger. He saw none of it.
Six mornings out of Boise found him shivering, out of crackers, nearly out of soup, with very little idea where he was. He had unwittingly crossed two broken but traveled roads and now was farther north than he ever would have guessed, with the enormous tracts of the Salmon River Valley ahead of him, and beyond that Marble Creek, and the River of No Return, none of it populated. His feet had blistered in his shoes, and his right ankle had swollen grotesquely: the yellows and purples of contusion had climbed halfway up his shin.
He stumped through the high forests, steadying himself against trunks. The air smelled of pine and sage, sweet and sickly in his nose and at the back of his mouth. Above him giant grasshoppers screamed like panthers in the branches. Occasionally one fell and writhed in his hair or down the back of his collar and he would spasm trying to reach it, his duffel falling from his shoulders, his fingers tearing at his shirt.
This was the darkness he had been dreaming for years. This was the place where events occurred around him heard but unseen, the deep and private blindness his dreams had predicted so many years before. The deep, marine pressure on his brain. The flood of light. At the terminals of circles extremes met: darkness was no different from illumination; an inundation of either was blinding. When he slept now he dreamed of naked, frozen branches: frost growing on windows, snowflakes alighting on sleeves.
The little nerite shells—the three or four he had left—were tiny lumps in the seam of his pocket. His trousers had lost their knees; his socks were little more than anklets, spats of cotton over the insteps of his shoes.
In his farthest moments he sensed, again and again, presences in the shadows: Soma and Felix; Naaliyah and Nanton; Grace and Sandy. He’d be resting on a rock, or in a bed of pine needles, eyes closed, sleep closing in, when he’d hear a rustle in the brush, a pause in the wind. In his ribs, at the tips of his hairs: a slight magnetic draw, the barely perceptible gravitational pull one human body exerts on another.
He’d open his eyes; he’d sit up. There’d be nothing, only the smeary, endless forest, spots dragging across his vision, that pressure in his skull.
He pressed the pad of his finger to a molar and wiggled it back and forth. There was the metallic taste of blood on his tongue. You will see fire and you will die. Your journey will never be done.
“Hello?” he called. “Hello?”
On his ninth night since leaving the Datsun, he reached a land of rocks on a ridgeline cold and smoking in the wind where dwarf trees had grown stunted and hooked and ferns of ice meshed and feathered in clefts between rocks. A cusp of moon floated in the western sky. He tried to start a fire but the wind prevented it. He rummaged in the duffel for a can of soup—his last—and cut it open and drank the thick, salty concentrate cold.
In the night, wrapped in his poncho, the moon seemed to move closer, filling his whole frame of vision, seeping around the edges of his eyelids, abrading him, his skin and skeleton, until he felt he would become nothing but membrane, a rippling film of soul, until he was lying on the outermost ridge toward heaven, the stars at his feet, the very core of the universe within reach.
The next afternoon he descended maybe a thousand feet into a dense, dusty wood. The muscles in his ankles felt stripped and ragged and the sun was pale but zealous and forced him into the shade. Each time he tried to stand, his eyesight fled in slow, nauseating streaks.
He lay on his back and watched the sky, the only cloud a single, smeary stripe, which after a while he realized was a slowly lengthening contrail at the head of which must have been a jet. An image came to him of the pilots in the cockpit, a panorama of instruments before them, a hundred round glass faces, steady needles and switches, the frozen reaches of atmosphere unrolling in front of them. How strange to be miles below, lying in thorns, while they hurtled through space, a cabin behind them packed with passengers asleep or eating or reading magazines. He raised a hand, squinted, pinched them from the sky.
Not thirty yards from there, through a brace of ferns and across a ditch, came a rising sound, something like an extended sigh. It had crescendoed and faded into silence before Winkler realized a car had passed.