Galen walked into the kitchen and went for a glass of water, gulped it down, and then gulped another. And still he felt thirsty.

He didn’t know what to eat. Always a problem. He held the refrigerator open and stared blankly at too many items that made no sense. Pickle relish. Not easy to make a meal out of pickle relish. Sauerkraut. He could maybe eat that. In a dish covered with Saran Wrap. He brought it to the kitchen table, took a fork from a drawer. Real silver, unpolished.

It seemed that sauerkraut should go with something. He looked in the pantry, in the canned goods, and found French-cut string beans, took them to the counter, the electric can opener.

He sat and forked the green beans from the can, cold and salty and without other taste. He chewed and swallowed and it felt like the inside of his stomach had collapsed and the food was having to push the folds back open. He forked sauerkraut and liked the vinegar. Vinegar was right.

The house dimmed as he ate. The sky outside turning a darker blue. He finished the green beans and most of the sauerkraut, then drank another glass of water and went to the sink, where his mother usually stood, looked out at the shed and orchard and sky. Everything farther away as the light dimmed, all distance increased.

He thought he might stay at the sink for a while, but found himself rising up the stairs to his mother’s bedroom, stood in the doorway and swayed in place, thinking nothing, then went to her bed. The house not hot like outside, the high ceilings and drapes a sanctuary.

He lay on her bed and closed his eyes and could feel the inside of him spinning and tilting, everything caving. The dirt on his skin his blanket, his hand throbbing in a dull and reassuring way, and all was so peaceful. His mother resting now, too, in that place of her memories, in her own sanctuary. The land all around them breathing easily, the orchard at rest, the hedges, the fig tree, the oak. All resting, finally, and the heat fading away. She had wanted to keep him here, and here he was.

Chapter 27

Black rock. Volcanic. Rock that had boiled, shot through with air. Broken now, severed and sheared and sharp as glass. Pores and hollows. The walnut trees growing from the rock, roots worked into vents and cauldrons, snaking along fissures. Soft flesh of wood encased.

From the surface, no way of telling how far they reached. The roots and trunks white against the black.

Miles between every tree, the orchard grown. And Galen carrying a small sack of water, a sack made of flesh, and he had to let a few drops fall on the roots of each tree. Rare that he saw a tree at all. Mostly wandering, looking for the next, and the land growing as he walked, cracking and stretching, opening great chasms that filled with melt and hardened and he continued on.

His feet torn, unshod, and clicking on the rock. His joints clicking also, each movement of knee or hip or ankle, even the movement of his eyes. The sack thick with fat held very little water, and it had to be held carefully. He must not drop it. If he dropped it, all would be lost. And so he stared at the rock, careful in placing each step and click.

Galen knew that years were passing, that he had no hope of reaching every tree in time. He might not reach even the next tree. The water disappearing as he walked, becoming only a sheen on the walls of fat.

The surface of the planet was bending. But the other problem was the melt. The melt delayed him, because he couldn’t help gazing. A deep red, rock transformed, all patterns round and edged with black, a slow boil and upwelling, and then the fade as the rock cooled and lost its color.

He continued walking even as he woke, held on to the dream, tried to extend and understand. Walking toward the next tree. Strange dream. He tried not to think, tried not to let his waking mind take over, tried to fall back again into the larger mind. But the small mind refused. Galen had to pee, and the small mind was very focused on that.

Fine, he said, and he rose and peed in his mother’s toilet and nothing felt real. Standing here in his mother’s bathroom, covered in dirt. Sleeping in his mother’s bed. His mother out there still. None of this could make any sense, and he didn’t want to participate in it anymore. He wanted to fall back asleep and dream.

So Galen lay down and refused to wake. He felt exhausted still, enormously tired, and was able to fall back out of mind until he woke again this time without dreams and his mouth dry and stomach demanding food.

He rose and peed again and bent down to drink out of the sink faucet, gulp after gulp, so dry. His mother’s toothbrush, purple and white, something from another life, a life already difficult to remember or even believe. Who we are now, he said.

He walked downstairs to the kitchen, legs sore and tight, his joints clicking just like in the dream, bone ends catching as they worked. His hips no longer arranged correctly.

The problem again of what to eat. A constant reminder that incarnation was enslavement. He wanted to just be done with eating, wanted to rip his stomach out and move on to other things. But it would not be ignored. Demanding and desperate, and until he gave it what it wanted, he would have no peace.

What would your highness like? he asked. The pantry a jumble of colors, but the most colorful of all a large can of fruit cocktail. The bright red cherries, yellows and whites and greens, the grapes. All in syrup too sweet.

The can heavy. He held it up to the opener as it circled. Fruit cocktail sandwiches, he said.

Galen heaped the fruit into a hammock of bread and had a bite, the bread gone doughy from the wet. He ate a cherry on its own, could taste the dye. Other than the cherries, all the other fruit had become the same, all one taste. It was simply “fruit,” not peach or pear or grape or whatever else. And this was the same for people’s lives, going to work at the same jobs, living in the same houses, those houses over the high fence. But not Galen’s life. Galen’s life was not like theirs. He was wearing dirt, and that was the big difference. You knew a man by how he dressed.

Galen was watering trees today. He would need to carry his sack of flesh with its small bit of water and bring a few drops to each tree across a landscape of black rock and melt. Except that the orchard was dirt, not rock, and there were not miles between each trunk, opening and increasing. How the dream world fit into the waking world was never clear.

Galen gave up on the bread, forked the fruit in great mouthfuls and chewed quickly. He knew that what he was afraid to think of was his mother. Food always a substitute, never itself. He tied his shoes and stepped out into the oven.

Afternoon already, a kiln for baking bricks, dry and stinging his lungs. Each day seemed hotter than any other, but they were all the same inferno. The shed bleached in glare, heat waves in the orchard, actual heat waves like melted glass a few feet from the ground, distorting the shapes of the trunks and weeds and furrows. The orchard looked like it might be only ten feet deep, something you could cross in one long step. Or it could be miles deep. Distance impossible to tell.

He didn’t want to go near the shed. Its rough belt of wood, a partial furrow on the orchard wall, his mother somewhere inside. That his life had funneled down to this wasn’t fair.

He stepped out of the shade into the full blast of the sun. The stream of light at impossible speed and pulsing as it hit, tearing away all. Any shelter was temporary. In the end, the sun would take everything.

Galen nearly blind as he walked. This body with the landscape shifting around it but the light constant. He could not stay out here long.

Everything shrank in the glare. The roof of the shed maybe a foot or two lower, the boards thinner by half an inch. The fig tree more squat to the ground, not as tall as before. The furrows shallow. Galen didn’t know what that meant, that everything grew as the light faded and shrank again in the day. This was true of presence, also, that shadow and night seemed inhabited and the bright day did not. All life was emptied at midday, and yet Galen had to roam around in it for countless hours, always roaming a desert.