All the Land to Hold Us

by Rick Bass

  A hundred yards farther out, two hundred yards, the skeleton sentinels seemed to pivot, watching them. It might have seemed that they too were out on some vast floor, though without partners.

  The salt kept oozing up from beneath the lake, a slow upwelling fountain of it; and under the cool stars, Clarissa and Richard were safe from the scalding sun of the next day, as well as the gone-by sear of the previous day’s sun; and in the morning, after a night of such revelry, and such an intermingling of spirits—theirs, certainly, but also theirs and the landscape’s, and the two of them tucked in so safely, if precariously, between the past and the future—they would crawl out of the tent in the first light of daybreak, to void in the dunes, crouching like animals, and would feel the rising, drying winds of the day already stirring around them.

  It seemed odd to be able to smell so much salt, so deeply, and yet not to hear the stretch and thunder of breaking waves.

  Sometimes Richard would imagine having a child, and taking her to the ocean, to hear such sounds.

  They would burn their toilet paper when they were finished, setting the scraps of paper afire like the pages from some diary of adolescence, pages that had both nothing and everything to do with the adults they had become, and then after burying their spoor in the sand, they would return to the tent to nap, and read, and to wait for the coming spectacle of light.

  Passing by the shoreline salt flat where they had danced the night before, they would always be astounded by the evidence of the previous night’s activity. They would bend down and try to parse individual elegant arcs and sweeps of their movements—and sometimes, across short distances, they could read the sign of such passage—but for the most part the tracks they left behind were scrambled together, laid atop and beneath each other in what appeared to be an impenetrable and indecipherable scuffling.

  The night’s passage of two appeared as might the evidence of two hundred, or two thousand. The footprints would soon be scoured by the wind or buried beneath the next day’s shining rime of wind-thrown salt; but there in day’s first light, they were still visible, the proof of the previous night’s evening of love, or the thing that had wandered right up to the edge of the country of love.

  It was always surprising to Clarissa and Richard that the crude overlay of the tracks did not match or represent in any way their recollection of how graceful the evening’s movements had been the night before.

  For a few moments, they would stand and stare out at the width of lake. The sentinels would still be waiting for them, arms outstretched—as if those stark forms could hear different music; as if longing had not perished with the decay of their mortal flesh but existed still within them—as if perhaps that were the thunderous force that drove the world, exceeding even the powers of gravity; as if longing were destiny, as if longing were sacred and sacrament, as if longing were holy, as if longing were as elemental a force of the world as magma or stone, or water or fire or spirit—and as if, were this the case, great mother lodes of it might exist in vast reserves, buried deep within the earth’s recesses like ore or oil, or deep within the hearts of certain men and women such as all those who still remained standing out in the lake, up to their knees and hocks in oozing salt, arms outflung, reaching for the living even from across the thin and barely discernible gulf of the other side.

  Clarissa and Richard would retreat to the tent, to wait for the light. And as the day traveled on, the tent grew warmer and stuffier, acting as a greenhouse, and they would fan each other, and read, and wait, with only that thin fabric of canvas separating them from a quantity of sun, and an excess of ultraviolet radiation, that none of their kind had ever been requested to live with, in all the millennia before them.

  They read poetry. They listened to the quiet ballads of folk music. They waited as if time itself were an elemental, finite resource, but one of which they had an excess, a full or overflowing reservoir.

  Others, they knew, did not, but they were different, they were blessed, and time for them would behave in a different manner.

  Richard could feel the light approaching before he could see it. Or perhaps it was visible to him in the distance, or even audible: certain compressions and refractions altering and repositioning themselves in the atmosphere, and driven by the rising heat of the day, like the composition of notes by some distant orchestra.

  The coming arrival of the light seemed to him to be as noticeable as might be the slate-purple anvil of a towering thunderhead to the north, with the cloudbank spitting jagged lightning, and a cooler, damper breeze on one’s face: though there was nothing visible at first, only an imagined or sensed difference.

  Nonetheless, he would rouse Clarissa, would inform her that the change was coming; and the two of them would put on their wide-brimmed sun hats, and Clarissa would pull on her long baggy cotton pants and long-sleeve linen shirt, buttoning it at the neck (her body underneath still protected with zinc); and she would wrap a light sheet around her for extra protection. And sweating as if in a sauna, she would join him out in front of the tent, sitting on an old quilt, Clarissa in dark glasses, gripping a parasol, trembling at her audacity.

  They would share a cold beer, and watch; and now Clarissa could see the change, noticeable at first in the increased stirring of the heat vapors rising from the salt lake.

  As if some current had been turned off, or as if the approach of some living thing had frightened the vapors into hiding, the shimmering haze suddenly ceased, and disappeared.

  A clarity appeared over the lake, swelling like a lens. It seemed to Clarissa and Richard that there was some magnification involved as well, for now they could see clearly certain distant details and features on the skeletons that they had previously been unable to: sutures in a skull, and stray tufts of grass, like the remnants of hair, protruding from the birds’ nests; even the pearl buttons remaining on some of the tattered shirts, which now hung motionless on the upright spars in the total absence of breeze, the total stillness (how Herbert Mix would have loved to get to those distant buttons!); and then, like a gas lamp being lit, certain veins and ribbons within the lake’s surface would begin to glow, as the spectral bands of color began to flow through them like blood.

  The colors swarmed within their halite trap, surging and pulsing, as the sun inched higher. Richard felt that if he tossed a crumpled-up piece of paper out onto the salt flat, it would ignite, pierced by a shaft of fierce white light.

  The lake was now a bowl of living color, aflame with sparks and flames of pigment. Richard and Clarissa kept watching, sipping their beer, Clarissa’s lips lustrous with lip balm. They kept sweating, and marveled at the thing that had come right up to them.

  They could have stood and waded out into it. They could have smeared the crusty sludge of halite onto their arms and faces, and tasted it; could have waded out farther into it, into that corona of wild color, in the midst of which the other sentinels stood motionless.

  Instead, they watched. They watched and listened—expecting some noise, even a faint staticky crackle, to accompany such a feast of light. But nothing: only an excitement. The lake had pulled both of them farther and farther out, had beckoned; calling for them both, and whether individually or together, no real matter: calling for them both to come farther out, at a time in their lives when most people their age, and older, were already beginning to turn back and build, not just in their hearts but in all the physical ways of their lives, safe-bunkers and corrals and hen-coops and root cellars and vaults and crypts and other fences and walls and trunks and boxes for the safekeeping and hiding and huddling-down of things.

  Clarissa and Richard would stare out at the beckoning; and even as they understood that they were neither special nor chosen, that it was all instead merely random, the lake taking those who would come to it and discarding or rejecting those who would not—but the lake surely as adazzle each day whether they or anyone else stood there or not—they could not help but feel tempted to try to live bigger, larger, more dr
amatic lives, and to step away from those little huts of safekeeping, and out into the devastating, alluring, wondrous light.

  Watching her watch the lake, Richard could not believe his good fortune, that he had gotten her to come this far. He would watch the shivery heat vapors rising from all around her ghostly turban, and he would spray her with water from a squirt bottle, trying to keep her cool.

  From time to time she would go back into the tent to hide, her heart hammering; but there, too, she would become frightened, feeling incredibly alone, and would venture back out to the old faded quilt, where Richard would soak her again, as if bathing or tending to her; and as the heat and sun sucked all that moisture away almost immediately, it was a feeling like being squeezed or gripped by the evaporative action, the release and extraction of moisture from cloth; a feeling like being kissed, or a feeling like being buried alive, she wasn’t sure—and she wanted to go back, and yet she wanted to go forward; wanted, even, sometimes, to have the courage to try to wander out onto the lake, picking the right steppingstone places of firmer salt, even as all the evidence that lay before her indicated to her that this could not be done.

  She would come close to him, and then she would pull away from him. Through it all there remained, however, her skittish indecision, and her desire for some other, backwards, unseen land.

  Richard’s steady and constant hunger was always present, always pushing or pursuing, she knew, even when he pretended to be patient so that even the patience came to be like a kind of pressure and a hunger, until it began to seem to her, as the summer progressed, that she might be losing her mind.

  Was she becoming the shadow of his desire, or was he the shadow of her fear? Or was there any difference?

  Perhaps it was but simple and frugal mathematics. Having so little to cede in the first place, if she gambled and gave it over but came away with nothing larger in return, then she would be an even emptier vessel than before—perhaps unbearably so.

  3

  THE GLORY OF A YOUNG MAN is both his strength and his foolhardiness. As Richard slipped further into love—entering it as if wading out into the shallows, and a bit farther, then, to his knees, and a bit farther still—he found himself showing off for her, challenged by her heart’s timidity.

  To show her that no harm would come from her fears, he would sometimes, during the apogee of the day’s heat and light, roll up the sleeves of his shirt from one forearm, then hold that bare arm before the sun like an offering; and the two of them would watch as the unprotected arm darkened over the course of only several minutes—browning like a piece of meat placed on a grill, and then blackening to charcoal: a streak of burnt skin as black as if smudged with cold coals from the campfire.

  And not until the odor of it began to overwhelm them—the same scent as when meat burns on a grill—would he lower his sleeve back over the newly wounded area. And strangely, there was no pain; if anything, only a pleasant warmth.

  And again, she would know two things, two responses: the horror of seeing her fear of the sun made manifest; and, later in the night, the warmth of that arm’s embrace. And she would see, each time, how the black skin always peeled away and healed, every time, back to smoothness and strength. In the night, once the arm had healed, her mouth upon that supple arm, the arm tasting like an arm again rather than charcoal.

  Each time he put his arm bare beneath the fire of the sun, and then came back away from such fire, minutes later—and not only survived such a burn, but seemed to flourish—she took another half step closer, and another, as Richard lured her closer with his own burning limbs. A slash of black across his calf; the intricate paper cutout silhouette of a mermaid burned, for a few days, onto his bicep.

  His own sin? Chasing her, luring her, falling in love with her, first and foremost for the thrill of the chase, and in the loneliness of the landscape; falling in love with her because she was beautiful, falling in love with her because she was frightened, and because the summer and his job and the landscape were desolate.

  It wasn’t love. It was some masked thing. And what hunter could not pursue her beauty?

  His strength was considerable. He could go days and nights without sleep. Out on the drilling rigs, for exercise, between short bit trips, he would perform arm curls with the thirty-foot lengths of two-and-seven-eighths-inch tubing, and clean and jerks, hack squats, and military presses with the seven-and-seven-eighths-inch steel casing, while the sun-scoured salt-wasted roughnecks and roustabouts lounged in the doghouse sucking down beer like water and stared at him through the day’s heat vapors with bleary eyes. They watched his antics as if witnessing some mild hallucination, and invested no real emotion in it; only watched, and waited.

  They knew he was the geologist from the city. They knew he could be walking down what they perceived to be Easy Street—working in an air-conditioned office in Houston, and hiring someone else to come out and babysit each well as it was drilled. So there was a part of him that they respected, or half-respected, even above the simmering background of socioeconomic class resentment; and there was some similar begrudging admiration for the company he kept, in Clarissa—although, as with Clarissa, they would often find themselves wrought with ambivalence—respecting him for his ceaseless and superior labor, yet hating him for his good fortune.

  None of it mattered to Richard. He would never see them again. To each, the other was but like the dust of salt, swirling on each day’s winds, with each staring at the other across the distance of that bright divide: the company geologist, hale and hearty, out in the sun like a madman, doing difficult exercises simply for the joy of being alive, while the laborers stared out at him in mute and sun-tempered baleful disbelief. He would be gone in another month, or two months. He was but an apparition.

  Out at the lake, he continued to hunt her with both a tenderness and a lust; all passions leaving their restraining corrals now, like horses once wild but now domesticated, which notice one evening that the corral gate is swinging open, that they can return to wildness, and with thunderclouds booming all around and a wind stirring, so that it is almost as if they are sleepwalking, they slip one by one out of the gate, one after the other, until the corral is empty.

  Beneath the soupy surface of the lake, the salt got thicker, dense as cheesecake. In the old days salt cutters had made a brutal living sawing it into blocks and stacking it like bales of hay onto sledges before traveling back out into the world to pawn that crudest of commodities—and Richard had discovered that with a simple shovel he could dig vertical shafts as deep as he wished, hauling the salt up in buckets and spooning foot- and handholds into the shaft’s walls, the shaft no wider than the flue of a large chimney.

  At first, with the buckets of residue from his excavations, he built low walls and salt igloos, as one would sculpt sand castles at the beach; but tiring of that, and digging deeper, exhuming more and more salt, he began to construct ornate and magnificent castles, glittering museums and cathedrals whose crystals at high noon caught and refracted that same phenomenon of light, so that after digging a few such holes, he had assembled enough bricks of salt to build what appeared to be a small civilization bejeweled with unimaginable wealth.

  Out on the broad plains, with little vertical relief, the perception of scale was deceiving; sometimes, while Richard was down in the shaft, Clarissa could, by squinting her eyes, look at the small-scale models of grandeur and imagine that instead of viewing the structures across any near distance, she was seeing them from afar: beholding the outskirts of an immense and supreme civilization, one toward which she had been traveling and searching for all her life, and had only on that day first come within sight of it; and that although she was now closer to it than she had ever been, the journey that lay ahead would still be long and arduous—but worth it, surely worth it.

  It was cooler down in the salt hole, though only slightly; and the salt and windless air trapped both Richard’s body heat and the earth’s, with no evaporative transfer, so that a
s he worked he was soon glistening with sweat, and it was hard to breathe the stale and stagnant air.

  It felt at times that he was breathing salt, as might an ocean creature; and about forty feet down, he was surprised to find water that, while not exactly pure or fresh, was drinkable. Livestock would have been able to prosper on it, and even humans could have survived on it.

  There was an old tin-and-wood shanty at the far end of the lake—in all of the lake’s history, there was rumored to have been only one family ever to have lived there; surely this place, more than any other on earth, was representative of the farthest reaches in which an individual could survive—and crouching there in the darkness of the salt flue (the portal of sky above appearing no larger than the pearl button of a coat sleeve), Richard would imagine that the homesteaders must have dug such a well and then laid each day’s drinking water out in shallow pans, waiting all day for enough of the salt to precipitate out for the rest of the water to become palatable: the residual, evaporated salt remaining in a crust around the rim of the shallow pan.

  Or perhaps such evaporation made the water saltier. Perhaps they simply filtered it, like beggars, through tattered, faded cheesecloth, hoping to strain out enough of the larger, coarser crystals as to render it somewhat drinkable.

  How would a person survive, he wondered, without pure water, without sweet water?

  He crouched in the bottom of the hole and cupped his hands into the puddle and sipped. It was barely tolerable. Sometimes in the heat, the walls of his shaft would begin to ooze, dripping spatters of salt onto his bare back—when passing through soft spots in the salt’s profile, he would attempt to shore them up with scraps of wood, gnarled branches of mesquite and bitterbrush—and for this reason of shifting instability (often it seemed to him he could feel the shaft swaying, leaning like a skyscraper in a high wind, and pulsing, too, tightening around him as if the shaft were some living organ), he never attempted any horizontal adits; and there were times when the shaft, warmed by the simple trapped coal-like heat of his presence, would begin to slump gobs of salt, a bucket’s worth at a time.