Free The Dead Are More Visible by Steven Heighton Page B

you’re not just me dreaming, then prove it. Tell me something I don’t know.
    Ah, but Ben, you know plenty of stuff you don’t know you know, so what kind of proof would that be?
    I don’t know what the temperature was yesterday in Kingston. Cool, I bet, down by the boatyards. God—cool and with a lake breeze! Tell me what the temperature was.
    I can do better, Ben. He proffers his clenched hand as if for a fist bump. I dislike when people touch me, Ben—honestly, I hate it, hate it with a serious aversion—but if it would help you to believe, go ahead.
    On the back of the hand, a pelt of carrot-coloured hair.
    Ben?
    No, you say, I’m good.
    Delirium, psychosis, either is preferable to being trapped out here with the real Fisher, hours from help, in the remote northern spur of a desert that goes on forever, a hundred days’ hike south across the U.S. border and the western states, deep into Mexico. The Greater Sonoran Desert. Till now, it’s been your new favourite place in the world and these OutTrips your favourite activity. For the first time in years, something other than substance abuse has rallied your fullattention, subdued the pathological patter in your brain—your exceptional brain, according to certain tests that “experts” at the university gave you a year after your father deserted his family and small Kingston flock. Not something you’ve ever felt proud of, this IQ. More like burdened, ashamed—something to conceal if you live in the Heights. Your brain’s babble, the second-guessing, self-accusing, the standing outside your life, watching and thinking, thinking, always thinking , never eased, not until the opiates, especially oxycodone. That neural noise was just your big fat brain trying to fill the silence of the badlands inside you, the way a lost man might yell and mutter to himself because the quiet of the wilderness—the sound of his coming demise—is too awful.
    Being out here has changed everything. Your inner badlands have found their match and now inner and outer worlds conform, void to void—a strangely consoling balance. You’re no freak after all. Your inner state (now wonderfully quiet!) reflects the world’s quantum vacancy. The Buddha’s vision of formlessness and freedom was right, your father wrong (his sect is based on the notion that everyone is possessed, either by Christ or the Antichrist).
    There was a breeze off the lake, Ben. Pleasant weather. You’ll be a lot happier when you come back. Wait, where do you think you’re going, we’re not finished here!
    I’m heading on to the next cache.
    You’re in no condition.
    Actually I’m in great condition for the first time in my life, and I can do it. You, on the other hand, are going to start feeling the heat and the terrain and you’ll fall behind.
    Even if I’m just figmentary, Ben? (Out come those terrifying teeth.)
    You heft your daypack and turn and walk off through the little screen of firs and emerge on a ridge that gives a wide-angle view down into another, shallower valley. Another range of bare hills on the far side. The vast mural of the sky is cloudless, blue as the marrow of a paraffin flame. The Fisher can’t be real and if the Fisher is real he will soon collapse; he leads a pimp-slash-pusher’s pampered life, while you—you’ve survived on the street for years, only rarely shuffling the three klicks home to the wartime bungalow of your mother. She is shattered, sick with fear, the true victim of the piece. Your own victim, partly. You’re out here to change everything, to return whole and help her. Just loving her again will help her. True addicts can’t love. The addiction conscripts all the love in them and degrades it, shits it out as something used and useless.
    This valley looks barren, devoid of vineyards and the other postcard features of the main valley behind you—long lakes, clusters of condos, sun-white wineries like prosperous haciendas. But a shimmering thread runs along the