The Dead Lands

The window above him, he knows, will deposit him directly into a hallway nook with a wingback chair and a round-topped pedestal on which rests a vase of dried flowers. He must climb to get there, nearly ten feet, and the stone is impossibly sleek, with no place to grip a toe or finger. While he balances on the ledge—his toes on, his heels off, his knees pinched around a bar—he removes his backpack and slips out a telescoping antenna that he salvaged from an electronics store. Once extended, it locks in place. He has welded to its tip a V of metal that serves as a kind of claw. At the bottom of his backpack he has stored a coil of climbing rope, each end of it threaded into a hook. He fits one of these hooks into the claw at the antenna’s tip.

 

The bottom windows are divided by three vertical bars and two horizontal. He steps onto the first and then the second bar and stretches until his calves bunch painfully and his vertebrae feel like they might pop, finally reaching the rope to the sill above, the hook gripping one of the pigeon spikes on the sill. To climb, he uses his feet as much as his hands. The rope is knotted every twelve inches or so to accommodate his grip. He dangles beneath the second sill, shrugging off his backpack and tossing it over the spikes, shielding his belly when he drags himself over.

 

He allows himself only a moment’s rest before retrieving the rope and coiling it neatly into the bottom of the backpack. He is tempted to leave the pack here, hidden behind the chair in the hallway, but he has learned not to trust the way in as the way out, depending on what trouble he might encounter—maybe nothing but maybe something.

 

The hallway is socked with darkness broken by blue beams of moonlight. He keeps his feet flat and brings them down softly, so that he makes no more noise than a cat gliding across a rug, when he sneaks his way three doors down, Danica’s.

 

The knob is made from decorative brass. Maybe a minute passes before he turns it completely, and maybe a minute more before he opens enough of a crack to slip through. Her room smells spicy with perfumes. The bed is hers alone; her husband sleeps down the hall.

 

She is so thin, he cannot make out her body beneath the sheets, but her hair gives her away, as white-blond as thistledown, whiter even than her bed linens. He tries to detect her breathing but cannot, with the window open and the thrum of the city in the room. She has not drawn her curtains and the air is silvered with moonlight. He takes in his surroundings—its desk and dresser, its paintings of wildflower meadows, of lily-padded ponds, of women in white lace twirling sun umbrellas at garden parties—before starting forward.

 

His hand reaches first for the top left drawer of her dresser and he finds there the skins of stockings and many slips as thin as paper. In the next drawer he finds her panties, so many of them the drawer catches when he slides it out. He digs around, but every pair seems fresh off the sewing table—not a filthy, holey pair of panties in sight. He can’t wait to tell Ella.

 

He has the letter folded in his pocket. He slips it now into the topmost pair of panties. His fingers tease the fabric. Heat spikes inside him. He felt calm until now, his heartbeat fluttering up to the burning tips of his ears.

 

There is something about stealing he misses. With Ella, his life has grown comfortable, and the other side of comfort is boredom. He feels more alive now than he has in weeks. When you have no home, you find pleasure in taking from others who do. It is about the money, the value, yes, but it is also about energy. Harvesting from them some object that might be worthless—a photo, a trinket—that must matter to them: that seems somehow electrical, and making it his own, energizing himself.

 

That is how the panties feel to him. Charged. He cannot help himself. He slips a pair from the drawer and bunches it into his pocket—just as he feels a dagger at his spine and breath on his neck.

 

“Those are mine,” the voice says.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 31

 

 

 

GAWEA SHARES A blanket with Lewis, the two of them bundled together for warmth. She watches him scribble in his journal. The rest of them stare at the campfire and at each other. They gather at the leeward base of a hill as tall as four men stacked upon each other’s shoulders. It appears to have been cut by a great knife, its side is so steep. The sky is black, with the moon and stars forever bundled in clouds. Everyone huddles close to the fire. A column of heat and smoke twists upward and the snow vanishes into it, extinguished in little wisps of steam.

 

Lewis brought the journal with him to chronicle, author the new world. Map the landscape. Sketch whatever flora and fauna he observed. Such as this plant, with its thin-jointed, odd-angled stalks topped by purple flowers in the summer, now wilted to a bony brown and bristling with frost. He lifts his pen and the ink freezes and he blows on the tip to warm it.

 

Every day, he has another set of questions for Gawea, and though she once found him pestering, she now feels a kinship in their secret sharing. He tells her he has come to understand that knowledge is not enough. Observation is not enough. He no longer wishes to be a scholar, a gatherer, a chronicler, but a creator, too. The same impulse that drove him to tinker with inventions now compels him to tinker with the world.

 

“What are you writing?” Clark says.

 

“Nothing,” he says. “Just playing around with some theories.” Then he notices all their eyes on him. They want to know. They want something from him in the same way he wants something from Gawea. He looks to her, as if for permission, and she says, “Go ahead. You’re the teacher now.”

 

The wood pops and the wind hushes and Lewis licks his lips several times before he finds the words he wants. “Did you know that humans used to bite like other primates? Their incisors clipped, edge to edge, the bottom and the top coming together to tear and gnash. Then, somewhere around the late eighteenth century, two things happened. People began to braise and pound and cook their meat. And to slice up their food to pop into their mouths with forks. Almost immediately the European population developed an overbite, their incisors now coming together like scissor blades.”

 

Clark says, “What does that have to do with anything?”

 

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