All the Land to Hold Us by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Men came to visit her in her dreams, in the new country. They moved close to her, and she to them, easily. In the dreams, she and he leaned their heads in against one another, rested upon each other shoulder to shoulder; and in the dreams, she was astonished to be the recipient of tenderness and affection: and not merely the crude pawings that masqueraded as caresses in the brief preliminary to sex, but tenderness and kindness of its own accord, existing for its own sake.

In the dreams, among these strange men (though sometimes there might be a boy she had known from grade school, grown up now—hardened, and of her age, and understanding too well her weariness), she felt surprised at first but then quickly confident that she was deserving of such gentleness and attention—that indeed, the cup of his hand seemed made for the fit against the side of her face, and that, as with a violin, perhaps, the point of that chin fit perfectly, was made for the calm and worn-out cleft just above her collarbone, halfway between her shoulder and neck.

The best ones were the men who came to her quietly and simply took her head against their shoulder, and leaned theirs against hers, and the two of them would just stand there, each leaning into the other like sentinels; and she enjoyed their company, listened intently to whatever it was they had to say, whether trivial or significant.

She grew more and more accustomed to the strange intimacy of these encounters, the freshness of possibility, so that she began going to bed earlier each night, and stayed in bed longer in the mornings. And even once she was up and about, she moved more sluggishly: and on the days in which there had been no dream at all, no visitor the previous night, she would be moody and irritable, so much so that even Max Omo noticed it, and though he assumed it was simply a part of the aging process, contentment or happiness disintegrating gradually, he was nonetheless concerned, as he would be were any of his machines to begin emitting a faltering sound, a skipped beat, a waning in output.

A strange land summons strange inhabitants, and shapes them all to its own desires. As if setting up a stone wall, Marie was able for the most part to keep dreams of Mufti and the elephant from pouring in, though the welcome strangers continued to drift in; and she had other dreams, too.

Though she knew nothing of the circumstances, had heard no tales or rumors of their existence, she dreamed frequently of camels. Caravans of them had been used in her country only several decades earlier, during Army Brevet Captain John T. Pope’s staggering searches for water, in his years spent scouting possible routes for a transcontinental railroad. And although Pope had found very little fresh water, the camels had succeeded hugely, for a while. (Pope’s failure was colossal, even by the standards of the landscape’s harshness.

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