WHEN CLARK ROUSES them from sleep, when she calls them up the hill, when they look to the sky and see the clouds piled up like tangled gray scarves, the others cry out with delight—at the promise of shade, of moisture—but Lewis goes silent because he sees something else. He sees the man. The man in white. Aran Burr. He takes up half the sky. His hair is wild, windblown. His eyes and mouth are lit with balls of lightning. His hands—with torn gray fingers—reach for him, beckoning.
He haunts Lewis. Whether he is asleep or awake, Burr is there, at every turn, summoning him. His skin is so pale Lewis can see the veins marbling greenly beneath it. His knuckles are cubed with arthritis. His mouth is a hole that holds a shadow when he whispers his name, “Lewis.” Isn’t that what he should expect, with his brain drying like a nut from lack of water, with the heat warping the air and the sun heliographing off broken nests of glass? A mirage? But he doesn’t see water and he doesn’t see his office, the two things he longs for most. He sees Burr.
Lewis was, in his previous capacity, not a teacher but an educator. A curator of stories meant to help people better understand their lives. The museum might make them feel a little richer or entertained or wistful. Or it might make them feel like an irrelevant bit of debris caught up in the cyclonic rotation of history. He didn’t particularly care. He just wanted to be sure they knew this wasn’t it—the Sanctuary was not the world and human history was a long gauntlet of troubles and triumphs they might learn from, aspire to.
But that life is far behind him now. He no longer frames his thoughts around nurturing others, but on feeding himself, gobbling up everything he encounters. There is nothing in this new America not worth learning. He is the student. A disciple. He bothers Gawea whenever he can, but even if she wasn’t temporarily mute from her injury, he suspects she would give him only so much. There is a notable reluctance whenever someone approaches her with a question.
“If you can make birds come to your rescue, why can’t you ward off a snake or lure in a rabbit?”
Her stick sketches the sand. ASK. NOT MAKE.
“You ask. So you’re saying not everything answers, not everything wants to listen?”
Y is her shorthand for yes.
“Did Burr teach you how to ask?”
Y, she writes, & N.
“He said we’re the same. Do you think we’re the same?”
She looks at him with those depthless eyes, then circles what she has already written, Y & N.
And then, when he asks if she can teach him, she makes a circle within the circle, around the letter N.
She is the messenger. Burr is the educator. And Lewis is impatient for an education. He felt the same way as a child, pulling down books in the library and asking his father to talk to him about them. I’m too busy might have been the phrase his father said to him most often, next to Quiet. When he remembers his father, he remembers him from a distance—studying documents at a desk or meeting with advisers in a boardroom or giving speeches on a stage—only occasionally looking up to find Lewis, staring back at his son not with pride or affection but with disappointment.
This man, Aran Burr, who lavishes Lewis with attention, who summons him in dreams and in life, who promises him guidance, appears the same age as his father, his hair and beard wilder, but his appearance otherwise similar, so that they are beginning to merge in his mind. Burr wants him—his father wants him—and he feels as excited by this as he does frightened.
They hurry to gather their belongings, to feed and water and saddle their horses, who seem infected by their energy when they set off, no longer stumbling or ignoring their reins, but riding hard and straight toward the clouds, despite their bloodied hooves, toward the man whose vaporous shape Lewis can still see.
He longs for a sniff from his silver tin but knows he must ration it better. It spikes his mind and numbs his senses. Sometimes his thoughts feel so alive and singular that he could shed his body altogether, peel it off like a wet jacket. And sometimes he imagines the sand as powder, imagines diving off his horse, headfirst into a pillowy pile of it, and he would breathe, breathe, breathe, until he is overcome with pleasure.
They slow to a canter when noon comes and the clouds burn away. By then there are birds—not just the crows and vultures they are accustomed to seeing—but a red-winged blackbird, a yellow tanager, even an owl that hoots at them from a high branch. At one point a murmuration of starlings darkens the sky, like a net cast over them.
They drop down into the Missouri River, their constant guide, leaning back on their horses as they slide and stutter down the sandy banks, and then follow its wide-walled passage. Its bed is clay cracking beneath their hooves. They startle three deer bedded down in the shade of a root-twisted overhang and fire three bullets and two arrows uselessly after them.
The water they don’t find for two more days.
Lewis senses something different. The air takes on a greater texture, less thin and dry, more palpable, and so does it ripen with a fecund smell, like the breath of an unwashed mouth. Then he notices the riverbed softening. The sound of the clay shattering, once echoing all around them, hushes and then vanishes as the ground grows spongy and then sticky with muck.
Reed is the one who points it out—shouting, “There!”—a great gray tongue of mud twisting its way down the middle of the riverbed. For a quarter mile they follow it. It grows wider, eventually reaching from bank to bank, before giving way to a brackish puddle with salt formations like small cauliflower growing around it.