Free The Dead Are More Visible by Steven Heighton

as a superior being, a polymath, and in fact he knows a great deal about many things, but his information is all a few degrees off, as if his brain makes slight data-entry errors with the info he probably gleans from dicey blogs and websites. It’s the same with his extensive but wonky diction.)
    I’m not running, you say, holding your voice in place as it tries to slip up the register, thin out and vanish.
    You don’t look like you can even walk now, Ben.
    Are you going to sit? I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything. I have to hike from meal to meal here. Drink to drink.
    Sure, I grasp completely how the Program operates.
    Of course you do! you insist, as if to convince yourself: the Fisher cannot be here in front of you, even if all the details are right, including the voice that he always slows down and gruffens, like Donald Rumsfeld. You’re just me! This isn’t for real—I’m dreaming you.
    He takes another step toward you and nimbly folds downward, without the aid of his arms, assuming aloose lotus position. He always moves with this easy aplomb—a Zen abbot’s serene poise crossed with a pimp’s air of dignity. A self-pampered, theatrical dignity. But he does feel the heat: perspiration glazes his tanned, lined face, sequins of sweat dot his auburn chest curls. There are stains around his armpits and you smell deodorant—his usual perfumy brand, incongruously feminine. Over his shoulder the far valley of vineyards wavers in convected heat as the sun sears these arid slopes like the surface of Mercury. The rocks are about to crack, like clay in a kiln.
    Your father, a Baptist minister, left your mother and you in Kingston ten years ago and started a second family out west while founding his own church, or cult, as the Saskatchewan RCMP now call it. He’s rich, his acolytes give him everything they have, and he’s paying for your stay out here. He has not seen you or your mother since he left. The money he sends—not a lot—is conditional on this continuing estrangement. His commune is based in the Palliser Triangle, a near-desert about a thousand kilometres due east of here. You could walk there in a month of nights.
    You hear yourself ask, Got any water?
    I thought you concluded I was some kind of … figment.
    Where’s Vladimir, then? you ask, knowing the Fisher goes nowhere without him. Vladimir is a stately but stunned-looking borzoi that some folks assume the Fisher must sedate, for reasons of his own. All of theFisher’s reasons are his own. You suppose that’s one definition of freedom.
    Oh, come on, Ben, you know what it’s like flying long-haul with a dog. They have to travel caged up in the fuselage.
    Hold, you mumble.
    What’s that? Ah—correct. It is cold in there. And dark . No food or water. It’s sickening to think of the atrocities people afflict on animals. And now you know how it feels to need water.
    No, I meant “hold” as opposed to “fuselage.”
    What?
    Nothing.
    You owe me a fuck of a wad, Benjamin.
    I have nothing to do with you anymore. You’re not even here! I’m asleep, or delirious, or something. Fuck, maybe I’m dying …
    Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Ben.
    Do you have any … you don’t have any water?
    Correct and incorrect.
    You actually lean toward him, though for the last few minutes you’ve been edging away—edging away without feeling yourself move, your spine now clamped against the trunk of a fir. Its bark pricks and itches through your damp T-shirt, which you would remove if you had the energy. You say, What do you mean, “ correct and incorrect ”? If you have any …
    (There it is again—that stretchy grin unscabbarding those teeth.)
    I have just enough water so you can mix up what I brought you.
    What? You brought me oxy?
    You have the vague sense—the opposite of déjà vu—that you know in advance what he’s going to say. As if he’s a speaker in your own lucid dream. This whole scene is a kind of neurological confidence