I slept so deeply I dreamed. In my dream the devil was chasing me. I was not sure how I knew it was the devil. There was something about his very ordinariness I found terrifying because no one but me knew who he was, his face both familiar and unplaceable.
In the dream he stood on the shores of the Wind River and he called to me again and again. In the waking world, I didn’t believe in the devil or Hell, but in the dream it was some freaky shit. In the dream I knew that Hell was real and it was here on earth and in our brains and in our DNA. Even animals like those ravens knew Hell. I knew there was a great spiritual evil hovering over the world, clouds of wings occluding the sun.
A stranger in the kingdom, the devil looked lost, a stray piece of dark, unloved. This, too, seemed so ordinary, his longing tucked inside so much rage and violence. He wanted to be loved for his power. I sensed this power as well. He would give me some if I let him.
I was not alone in the dream. I had something precious. He cried out not only for me, but for a baby I held in my arms as I stood in the knee-deep rushing current of the river, my teeth chattering. I was covered in blood like I’d just come from the accident. It spilled out of my shattered skull.
“Bring it to me,” the devil said, “and I will let you live. A life for a life.”
The baby squalled in his loose bundle of cloth, a sound that filled me up. I knew exactly who this baby was. The child Maura and I were meant to have together. Our baby. It was ours and now the devil had come to claim the fruit of our sin. I knew that if I obeyed the devil both the baby and I would be lost forever.
Farther out in the river the waters deepened, but there was no way to make it to the other side. Downriver, the rapids ripped along. I walked along the shallows as the devil shadowed me on shore until we reached a bend in the river and he stepped into the water. I could walk over to meet him or give myself to the river.
(I could choose death. I would choose death rather than give the baby to the devil or learn the Name he had for me. I would choose to be split open once more. Let the hurt come.)
I went deeper into the current, the bundled baby wrapped tightly in my arms, and the surging water swept me from my feet. We raced along between boulders that were sure to crush us, the devil screaming after us. “The baby is mine! Mine! Mine!” He screamed a name over the rapids, claiming me. I heard it in the roar. Jagged rocks loomed in the torrent as I spun out of control, heading right for a collision that would wreck me and the child I could not save.
The next thing I knew, I was standing up in the middle of Professor Rhone’s lecture, my ears still ringing from the shock of impact with the boulders. I must have cried out in my sleep. I barely knew why I was standing up, my pen gripped in my fist, sweat soaking my shirt. The same heat in my throat as when the preacher beckoned me closer. I was shaking and my mouth tasted of blood. I must have bitten the inside of my cheek during the nightmare.
“Yes?” Professor Rhone said. He had shaggy eyebrows, a permanent five-o’clock shadow darkening his jawline. Students whispered about his three tours in Vietnam, what he’d seen over there. Before class, Rhone stood outside chain-smoking cigarettes and tossing the burning butts into a snowbank. Known for his temper and for sprinkling his lectures with unexpected profanities, Rhone didn’t like interruptions. He didn’t look pleased to see I’d returned to class.
My mind felt full of noise, the icy rain falling inside me. I swallowed and tried to get my bearings. I was not dead. The river had not broken and drowned me. The devil had only been a dream. The baby. The rest of the class turned to look at me. I could see Naomi now, up near the front, scrunching down in her seat.
I had to say something, so what came to me is what I had been wondering about all semester when Rhone talked about evolution, but hadn’t dared speak aloud. I cleared my throat. “There are something like six million species on the planet,” I said, my voice cracking. “And I was wondering how it’s possible for so many variations to have evolved from single-celled bacteria. Or whatever?”
My question trailed off. Professor Rhone’s jaw worked while he massaged a stick of chalk in his fist. “Well,” he said, “given enough time, anything is possible.” He gestured for me to sit down; clearly he felt he’d answered the question definitively. Time. Like millions and billions of years. Eons. Time. Gobs of it. Time was the solution to everything! His frown deepened when I remained standing.
“But how is it possible when the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that all things decay and break down. Entropy. This is one of the central principles of energy that governs the universe. How does life evolve faced with chaos and decay? How does anything?” I was losing the thread of my question. The other students in the lecture hall shifted uncomfortably in their seats. They must have all thought I was some kind of religious nutcase.
“What are you asking exactly?” The chalk in his fist had been ground to a nub, a white snow coating his loafers. I bet this guy killed a lot of people in the Nam.
Why life? is what I thought. How does life go on when the world itself seems so hostile? “It’s just . . . I’ve been thinking, why not God?”
“Why not God?” he repeated, and he shook his big, shaggy head slowly and sadly from side to side. “I believe you’re in the wrong fucking class.”
I went home and didn’t go back to Northern for a few days. I didn’t think I’d go back to school ever again. When I got home, the first thing I did was check on the rescued raven.
I hadn’t expected it to live through the night and left without checking in on it earlier that morning, not wanting to deal with a corpse then. So when I returned from my failed trip to Northern State and opened the garage door that afternoon, I was sure I would find the body stiff with rigor mortis. Instead, the box was empty. I went down the steps and checked all around it. Not a single feather nestled amid the shredded papers, not a trace of blood. This worried me even more than a dead body.
I half-wondered if I had dreamed the moment, the great battle in the snow, the lone survivor. My grasp on reality so tenuous I moved in a waking dream. Then I heard it squawk from up in the garage rafters. Ten feet away, half-obscured by shadows my eyes couldn’t penetrate, it called to me in its harsh language.
“You’re alive,” I said, a sense of relief flooding through me.
In answer the raven fluttered deeper into a loft area amid the rafters, hiding from me. I didn’t want to frighten it further so I left it alone and carefully shut the garage door. I was going to have to figure out what to feed it.
I ended up feeding it Kaiser’s dog food, pounding the nuggets into smaller pieces and placing them in a trail leading up to the stairs. When I returned a few hours later, the food was gone, the bird back in his hiding place.
The next couple of days I settled into my habits, caring for the raven, walking the dog in the snow, visiting the koi pond, which looked frozen over completely now, and digging into old man Kroll’s impressive collection of movies on Betamax. So far I had made little progress on the programming I had left to do for The Land, but I had all winter ahead of me. An insomniac with access to enough pharmaceuticals to rewire my brain—I stayed up most nights watching the classics. Chinatown. The Godfather. The Bridge on the River Kwai.